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POLITICS OF CITIZENSHIP AND MIGRATION
Migration,
Culture
and Identity
Making Home Away
Edited by
Yasmine Shamma · Suzan Ilcan
Vicki Squire · Helen Underhill
Politics of Citizenship and Migration
Series Editor
Leila Simona Talani
Department of European and International Studies
King’s College London
London, UK
The Politics of Citizenship and Migration series publishes exciting new
research in all areas of migration and citizenship studies. Open to multiple
approaches, the series considers interdisciplinary as well political, eco-
nomic, legal, comparative, empirical, historical, methodological, and the-
oretical works. Broad in its coverage, the series promotes research on the
politics and economics of migration, globalization and migration, citizen-
ship and migration laws and policies, voluntary and forced migration,
rights and obligations, demographic change, diasporas, political member-
ship or behavior, public policy, minorities, border and security studies,
statelessness, naturalization, integration and citizen-making, and subna-
tional, supranational, global, corporate, or multilevel citizenship. Versatile,
the series publishes single and multi-authored monographs, short-form
Pivot books, and edited volumes.
For an informal discussion for a book in the series, please contact the
series editor Leila Simona Talani (leila.talani@kcl.ac.uk), or Palgrave editor
Anne Birchley-Brun (anne-kathrin.birchley-brun@palgrave.com).
This series is indexed in Scopus.
Yasmine Shamma • Suzan Ilcan
Vicki Squire • Helen Underhill
Editors
Migration, Culture
and Identity
Making Home Away
Editors
Yasmine Shamma Suzan Ilcan
Department of English Literature Department of Sociology and
University of Reading Legal Studies
Reading, UK University of Waterloo
Waterloo, ON, Canada
Vicki Squire
Department of Politics and Helen Underhill
International Studies School of Architecture, Planning and
University of Warwick Landscape
Coventry, UK Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
ISSN 2520-8896 ISSN 2520-890X (electronic)

Politics of Citizenship and Migration
ISBN 978-3-031-12084-8 ISBN 978-3-031-12085-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12085-5
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover credit: © Yasmine Shamma, 2019. The image shows a caravan in Zaatari Refugee Camp.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For the displaced who so generously shared their stories with us.
Acknowledgements
This publication stems from the ‘Lost and Found: Testimonies of Migration,
Resettlement, and Displacement’ project funded by the British Academy’s
‘Tackling the UKs International Challenges’ grant scheme.
The editors wish to thank Mauricio Palma Gutierrez for his able help
with editing, references and formatting.
We mostly wish to thank the many Syrian refugees we spoke to through-
out our time conducting fieldwork associated with this project. They
shared their stories with generosity, humility and warmth which made this
book’s completion feel increasingly vital. This book is dedicated to them,
and their pursuits of making their homes away feel necessarily full.
vii
Contents
1 Making
Home Away: Introduction to the Collection 1
Helen Underhill, Vicki Squire, Yasmine Shamma, and
Suzan Ilcan
2 Watfa’ Speaks 11
Dawn Chatty
3 Refugee-Refugee
Hosting as Home in Protracted Urban
Displacement: Sudanese Refugee Men in Amman, Jordan 31
Zoë Jordan
4 Archiving
Displacement and Identities: Recording
Struggles of the Displaced Re/making Home in Britain 55
Rumana Hashem, Paul Vernon Dudman, and Thomas Shaw
5 Archival
Home Making: Reference, Remixing and
Reverence in Palestinian Visual Art 79
Helen Underhill
6 Collecting:
The Migrant’s Method for Home-Making101
Genevieve Guetemme
ix
x Contents
7
Syrian Experiences of Remaking Home: Migratory
Journeys, State Refugee Policies, and Negotiated
Belonging123
Suzan Ilcan and Vicki Squire
8 Making
Home in the Earth: Ecoglobalism in the Camps147
Yasmine Shamma
9 Home
Is Like Water: Nigerians in the Migration Pathway
to the UK169
Marissa Quie and Titi Solarin
Index193
Notes on Contributors
Dawn Chatty is Emeritus Professor in Anthropology and Forced Migration

and former Director of the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford,
UK. She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2015. Her research
interests include refugee youth in protracted refugee crises, conservation
and development, pastoral society and forced settlement She is the author of
Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (2010), From
Camel to Truck (2013) and Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge
State (2018).
Paul Vernon Dudman has been the Archivist at the University of East
London, UK, Archives for 20 years, whose archives include the Refugee
Council Archive. Paul curates the Living Refugee Archive and edits
Displaced Voices: A Journal of Archives, Migration and Cultural Heritage.
He is Secretary for the International Association for the Study of Forced
Migration Executive Committee, a co-convenor of the Working Group on
the History of Forced Migration and Refugee, and Convenor for the Oral
History Society Special Interest Group on Migration.
Genevieve Guetemme is a senior lecturer at the University of Orleans,
France. Her research focuses on collecting and studying cultural and artis-
tic images of displacement. These representations stand at the interfaces
between drawing, photography and text, and investigate the ability of
images to initiate an inclusive and hospitable process. The aim is to pro-
duce efficient instruments to understand recent political contexts or, to
say it differently, to reveal the transformative power of art as a way to
adjust to new communal spaces.
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Rumana Hashem is a political sociologist and a lecturer in Sociology at

the Nottingham Trent University. She is an immigrant researcher and a
coordinator of the Working Group for History of Forced Migration and
Refugees. She is also a visiting fellow at the Centre for Migration, Refugees
and Belonging at the University of East London. Her research cross cuts
gender, development, conflict, displacement and border struggles of
women and young people from the global South. She mostly works pro
bono in the UK, and taught and researched in five British universities.
Suzan Ilcan is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology
and Legal Studies, University of Waterloo, Canada. Her research focuses
on migration and borders, humanitarianism, and citizenship and social
justice. She is the co-author of The Precarious Lives of Syrians: Migration,
Citizenship, and Temporary Protection in Turkey.
Zoë Jordan is a senior lecturer at the Centre for Development and
Emergency Practice (CENDEP), Oxford Brookes University, UK. Her
recent research has been in Jordan and Lebanon, paying attention to how
displaced populations respond to and manage their displacement in pro-
tracted and urban contexts.
Marissa Quie is a Fellow and Director of Studies in HSPS and History
and Politics at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, UK. She is also
College Lecturer in Politics and Director of Studies in HSPS at Magdalene
College Cambridge. Her current research focuses on the challenges and
opportunities linked with migration and displacement as a consequence of
war and conflict, political, socioeconomic and environmental crises. She is
interested in the motifs of participation and protection that characterise
debates about people on the move, including refugees, internally displaced
people, women and marginalised groups. Her work engages with the con-
nections between migration, peace and security.
Yasmine Shamma is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary
English Literature at the University of Reading, UK, specialising in twen-
tieth–twenty-first century literatures. Her research attends to the poetry of
place, and ranges across regions in its focus—from New York City to refu-
gee camps. She is the author of Spatial Poetics, the editor of Joe Brainard’s
Art, and the author of further works attending to contemporary litera-
ture’s registration of the dimensions of displacement.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Thomas Shaw is Associate Director for Digital Innovation & Open

Research at Lancaster University Library, UK. During the research
described here, he was Head of Collections & Digital Library at the
University of East London. This included responsibility for overseeing the
library’s archives and special collections and promoting their role in wider
civic engagement. His wide-ranging professional and research interests
include the transformational impact and value of digital for libraries and
archives, and the role for libraries and archives to achieve positive impact
for society through innovative engagement with partners.
Titi Solarin is the Founder and Managing Director of Rerouting
Initiative CIC. Rerouting Initiative is a multidimensional project focused
on social justice, offering support services to ‘irregular’ and detained
migrant women. It also works to support those who are deported to
Nigeria. As a Nigeria-born British citizen, Titi and her family have exten-
sive lived experiences of ‘irregular’ migration to the UK. These experi-
ences coupled with her educational journey which earned her a master’s
degree in criminology gave birth to the Rerouting Initiative.
Vicki Squire is Professor of International Politics at the Department of
Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, UK. Her
research cuts across the fields of migration, citizenship and border studies,
and she has published widely on the themes of asylum, sanctuary, migra-
tion, displacement, humanitarianism, border struggles and solidarity
activism.
Helen Underhill is a Researcher in the School of Architecture, Planning
& Landscape at Newcastle University, UK, where she works within the
GCRF Water Security and Sustainable Development Hub. From a back-
ground in Anthropology and Fine Art practice, her research engages cre-
ative methods for understanding the socio-cultural values of water and
associated dwelling practices.
List of Figures
Fig. 5.1 The catalogue for the YAYA 2014 exhibition in Ramallah,
published by the A. M. Qattan Foundation. (Author photo) 91
Fig. 6.1 Diala Brisly, Child Labour © Brisly (Zayton and Zaytonah
magazine)104
Fig. 6.2 Children painting the school tent at Yahya, Bekaa, north
Lebanon, Oct 2016 © Brisly 105
Fig. 6.3 Diala Brisly at home, Valence (France), 2019 © Laure
Delhomme107
Fig. 6.4 Diala Brisly, Dream catcher copic marker and ink © Brisly
(Zayton and Zaytonah magazine) 201 117
xv
CHAPTER 1
Making Home Away: Introduction

to the Collection
Helen Underhill, Vicki Squire, Yasmine Shamma,

and Suzan Ilcan
This is a book about homemaking in situations of migration and displace-

ment. It explores how homes are made, remade, lost, revived, expanded
and contracted through experiences of migration, to ask what it means to
make a home away from home. We draw together a wide range of perspec-
tives from across multiple disciplines and contexts, which explore how old
H. Underhill (*)
School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University,
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
e-mail: helen.underhill@newcastle.ac.uk
V. Squire
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick,
Coventry, UK
e-mail: V.J.Squire@warwick.ac.uk
Y. Shamma
Department of English Literature, University of Reading, Reading, UK
e-mail: yasmine.shamma@reading.ac.uk
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
Y. Shamma et al. (eds.), Migration, Culture and Identity, Politics of
Citizenship and Migration,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12085-5_1
2 H. UNDERHILL ET AL.
homes, lost homes, and new homes connect and disconnect through pro-
cesses of homemaking. The volume asks: how do spaces of resettlement or
rehoming reflect both the continuation of old homes and distinct new
experiences?
This collection examines the complex negotiations implicit in the pur-
suit of home, as these are enacted by people moving across regions, state
borders and different repertoires of belonging, which often include affec-
tive, social, political and economic dimensions. While refugee resettlement
has been examined within the context of migration management on a
global scale, this volume shifts the focus toward migrant perspectives and
experiences of rehoming. This is not to overlook the significance of ‘hos-
tile environments’ that shape processes of reception. Rather, it is to pay
attention to the ways in which these conditions intersect with the life tran-
sitions of people experiencing both the loss of home (see for e.g. Arvanitis
& Yelland, 2019; Murrani et al., 2022) and its remaking.
Migration, Culture and Identity: Making Home Away generates critical
perspectives on these issues from across the broad fields of the social sci-
ences and humanities. Collectively, the authors explore the ways in which
remaking home involves multiple negotiations of rights (e.g. to housing
and employment), while providing important insights into the ways in
which practices of homemaking generate diverse forms of activism. Far
from engaging a static conception of home, where home is largely a fixed
place with which one has a straightforward sense of identification and
belonging, the book explores “home as an experiential dimension of the
migrant’s everyday life” (Boccagni, 2016: XXII). As an interdisciplinary
team of editors, we are especially interested in developing multi-
dimensional appreciation of this ‘experiential dimension’. This is informed
by, and understood through, various discourses, artforms, genres and
practices, which facilitates a multiplicity of perspectives on what home
means and how it takes shape.
S. Ilcan
Department of Sociology and Legal Studies, University of Waterloo,
Waterloo, ON, Canada
e-mail: suzan.ilcan@uwaterloo.ca
1 MAKING HOME AWAY: INTRODUCTION TO THE COLLECTION 3
Remaking Home Through Displacement

We have come together as editors here on the basis of our previous partici-
pation in the research project, Lost and Found?: A Digital Archive of
Testimonies of Migration, Displacement and Resettlement. The project,
funded by the British Academy “Tackling the UK’s International
Challenges” scheme, centred on the curation and creation of a digital
archive that showcases testimonies from Syrian refugees living in displace-
ment (www.makinghomeaway.com). This archive offers a sample of Syrian
refugee testimonies, which are pinned to various resettlement locations. It
includes a wealth of original field interviews conducted with Syrian refu-
gees resettled in Jordan, Cyprus, Canada and the UK, along with diverse
images of refugee homes, which are curated as part of an accessible online
archive. The archive offers insight into the various social practices, rela-
tions, losses, aspirations and forms of belonging that shape the lives and
struggles of Syrians. For example, we learn about their escape from the
war, movements across borders, separation from household members,
paths of arrival and experiences of homemaking. It also enhances interna-
tional understanding of the contemporary Syrian refugee crisis while high-
lighting the need for changed policies, both within the UK and beyond.
As we discussed our research, the variations as well as the intersections
between our disciplinary perspectives began to surface. Yasmine Shamma’s
background is in Literary Studies, while Helen Underhill’s background is
in Anthropology. Suzan Ilcan and Vicki Squire undertake interdisciplinary
work across the fields of Politics, IR, Geography and Sociology. Despite
these differences, we found our mutual concerns coalesced around several
shared terms and stakes: homemaking as a process, as a site of contestation
and resistance, and as a site of alternative ways of being in the world.
Viewing these as fruitful areas to further pursue, we found they also
demanded further space for growth. This book is precisely an attempt to
open up such a space. As editors and contributors, we have a shared invest-
ment in the pursuit of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to
the analysis of lived experiences of migration. We would like to express our
appreciation to, and admiration of, the many authors who have joined us
in this endeavour by contributing to this book.
While the Lost and Found project focused on Syrian experiences of
resettlement, this book does much more. It extends the analysis of experi-
ences of remaking home to Palestinians displaced (often multiple times)
across the Middle East, as well as to groups such as Sudanese men in
Jordan and Nigerians in (and out of) the UK. The collection is by no
means exhaustive in its coverage, yet nevertheless retains multiplicity of
perspective at its core. We pursue a definition of home as hybrid and fluid,
moving beyond static conceptions associated with the nation and the state
to highlight the ways in which homemaking remains in flux (see also: Kim
& Smets, 2020; Wilkinson & Ortega-Alcazar, 2017). Drawing together
established and emerging scholars from across the humanities and social
sciences has been critical to this endeavour, including those from the dis-
ciplines of Anthropology, Geography, History, International Relations,
Literature, Politics and Sociology. Building collaborations with various
migrants, refugees, practitioners and artists has also been crucial.
The purposes we pursue in this volume are threefold. Firstly, we seek to
present a diversity of contemporary works on processes of homemaking in
contexts of migration and displacement. Currently such research is under-
taken by disparate projects and scholars. We seek to bring these together
to cross-fertilise a range of informed perspectives on experiences of remak-
ing home through displacement. Such perspectives bring to the forefront
not only the nuanced, multifaceted and contextual dimensions of remak-
ing home through displacement but also the ways in which displaced peo-
ples live through processes of attachment such as nostalgia, memories,
kinship, friendship, loss and hope. Secondly, we seek to advance method-
ological imaginations in scholarship surrounding homemaking. We do so
by drawing together work of various genres and forms that centre the
lived experiences, testimonies and negotiations of those who are displaced.
Thirdly, we seek to explore the dynamics between policy framings and
lived experiences of homemaking. This enables appreciation of the ten-
sions that emerge in contexts of migration and displacement (see also:
Brun & Fabos, 2015; Perez Murcia, 2019), as well as of the ways in which
racial categories and colonial legacies continue to shape fields of lived
experience. Our hope is that the chapters within this book will be drawn
upon and further developed by the still emerging interdisciplinary field of
scholarship on homemaking in displacement.
Thematic Resonances
The chapters in this collection connect in various ways, holding together
and pulling apart in ways that we find productive and stimulating. There
are a range of thematic resonances that might be highlighted here; we will
map just a few. The first relates to issues of temporality and historicity,
which are present across all the chapters in the sense that homemaking is
a process that is ongoing, marked by continuities and discontinuities and
cannot be reduced to any simple linearity. Several chapters speak with par-
ticular poignance to this theme. For example, the piece by Dawn Chatty
with Jihad and Watfa’ Darwaza provides both a sense of time passed in
lived experiences, as well as in the framing of hospitality over time. It pro-
vides a powerful reminder that bureaucratic and policy structures, and the
forms of violence they enact, are not inevitable or immutable. Helen
Underhill also draws our attention to temporality and historicity in her
analysis of contemporary Palestinian art, showing how intergenerational
differences point to continuities and discontinuities of lived experiences
and emphasising the importance of archival work to the work of
homemaking.
Rumana Hashem, Paul Vernon Dudman and Thomas Shaw similarly
engage the archive in their analysis of the differentiated experiences of
those resettling in the UK. This addresses a second theme to which many
of the chapters speak: testimony, archive and voice. Engaging in detail
with the testimonies of those with lived experiences of migration, the
chapter provides an alternative archive of voices that generate rich reflec-
tions on the challenges of remaking home in situations of displacement.
The centring of migrant and refugee voices is also a key dimension of the
chapter by Suzan Ilcan and Vicki Squire, who point to the ways in which
displaced Syrians negotiate and contest challenging conditions to remake
home not only at sites of ‘resettlement’ but also at various locations along
the way.
Hostility, hospitality and care also arise as recurrent themes in this
book. Marissa Quie and Titi Solarin provide rich insight into the UK’s
‘hostile environment’, highlighting the importance of stories to the
migrant experience while providing a rich sea metaphor in their descrip-
tion of home as ‘like water’. While water reflects fragilities—not only of
persons but also of territorialities—it also provides sustenance, and in this
respect might be understood in terms of hospitality and care. These are
themes that Zoë Jordan tackles directly in her analysis of refugee-refugee
hosting. While providing safety and security, Jordan’s chapter shows how
care and mutual homemaking involve the sharing of finances, information,
intimacy and emotional support. Within contexts of hostility and violence,
we thus find life-sustaining dynamics of homemaking built on connections
that are in a continued state of flux.
The materiality as well as the symbolism of homemaking is something

which also resonates across multiple chapters in this book, which collec-
tively engage poetry, art, metaphor and voice as a means to reveal these
complexities. For example, Yasmine Shamma’s focus on refugee gardening
highlights the ecological dimensions of homemaking in the camp environ-
ment. Drawing on poetry and traditions of literary ecocritism, the chapter
draws attention to the ways in which homemaking in displacement can
involve a forging of relations with the earth at large. From another angle,
Genevieve Guetemme draws attention to the material connections that are
drawn across time and space in the continued work of homemaking. By
exploring the interrelation of homemaking and artmaking, the chapter
weaves cultural artefacts and memories into the analysis. Without doubt,
there are many more themes and resonances that can be found across the
chapters in this book. We will now turn to a summary of each contribution
as an invitation to the reader to explore these resonances for themselves.
Chapter Contributions
In the opening chapter, Dawn Chatty with Jihad and Watfa’ Darwaza
historicises the process of making home in new spaces. Specifically, the
chapter draws on interviews conducted with a member of the oldest sur-
viving generation of Palestinians who came to Syria in the 1930s. This
group made new places to call home for themselves, without losing sight
of their roots in Palestine. Jihad and Watfa’ arrived in Damascus as ‘exiles’
after being expelled from British mandated Palestine. They were later
joined by family members after the 1947–48 war, who were then classified
as refugees. For these Palestinians, the process of finding comfort and
ease, and of making new places to live in exile, was a significant contribu-
tion to the social fabric of the city throughout the mid-twentieth century.
The analysis situates Watfa’s narrative in a rich history of exile and hospi-
tality in the region. It highlights processes of belonging and making home
in the former Ottoman region of Bilad al Sham that were based on accep-
tance of the ‘other’, a local conviviality that tolerated differences among
social groups. In doing so, it provides an important historical context and
counterpoint for discussions of more recent Syrian experiences of exile in
the neighbouring states of Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.
Zoë Jordan’s chapter analyses the role of household-level refugee-
refugee hosting relationships. The analysis focuses on hosting as a rela-
tionship of care and as an essential site for understanding refugees’
experiences of home and displacement. Based on qualitative research with

Sudanese men living in urban Amman, it explores the alternative levels or
arenas of belonging generated through care networks, which allow dis-
placed individuals to survive in hostile contexts. Though they are unable
to achieve full belonging, Jordan argues that hosting relationships hold
potential for both ‘place-belongingness’ and, to a more limited extent, a
‘politics of belonging’ through everyday practices of dwelling and care-
taking. Despite household-level hosting being an overlooked practice in
humanitarian and forced migration studies, such acts are crucial in under-
standing urban displacement. In attending to the everyday ways in which
these men created and experienced such relations of care, Jordan re-
focuses our attention on how refugees inhabit and negotiate protracted
urban displacement and, in doing so, present claims to home.
Rumana Hashem, Paul Vernon Dudman and Thomas Shaw of the
Living Refugee Archive project investigate identity and memories of home
and loss through engaging the testimonies of those remaking home in
England and Scotland following experiences of displacement. The chapter
presents extracts from life histories of displaced men and women who
migrated from countries in the Global South before 2016, which was a
watershed year due to the Brexit vote. The authors highlight the chal-
lenges people faced in remaking home under restrictive immigration poli-
cies presented within the framework of the ‘hostile environment’.
Recognising the different meanings of home involves an effort to decolo-
nise knowledge in the archive. The chapter develops a non-essentialist
intersectional approach to identity, migration and diaspora in order to
comprehend the paradoxical, relational, multiple and complex meanings
of home. In so doing, the authors argue that home to the displaced is not
solely about materiality or spatiality; home and identity are influenced by
the politics of belonging and the policies of the host country.
Continuing the archival theme, Helen Underhill addresses recent
invocations of the archive within contemporary visual art from Palestine.
Using ethnographic detail from the 2014 iteration of the Ramallah-based
Young Artist of the Year Award, the chapter presents the work of archival
artmaking as homemaking work, exploring how artists collect together
what has been scattered or displaced, preserving both the material and
the ephemeral in face of dispersal and destruction. Through processes of
reflection and reference, this artwork draws together different concepts
of home and homeland, and by reinterpretation it remakes these in refer-
ence to the changing circumstances of new generations. These references
seed discussions around reverence, and what the past and its material,
cultural and personal echoes mean for making home in the present, both
on an individual basis, and collectively as a nation subject to ongoing dis-
placement. The artworks discussed within the chapter foreground home-
making as a long-term project with intergenerational dimensions and
implications for the significant Palestinian cultural value of Sumud (trans:
‘steadfastness’).
Genevieve Guetemme also engages with practices of homemaking by
artists and with the theme of collected artefacts and visual ways of docu-
menting and responding to displacement. The chapter provides analysis of
the emotional and material elements of home making, via engagement
with the work and home environment of Syrian artist and activist Diala
Brisly. While Syrian homes are largely invisible and undocumented, they
remain an essential base, even if transient, for those granted refugee status.
As Brisly says: “We don’t have a country; we don’t have a room”. The
chapter nevertheless shows how Brisly curates her home-room as a narra-
tive with many intertwined stories, in so doing exposing the continuity of
a life built on losses and adaptation. The analysis of Brisly’s images, and
the process of collecting and curating material objects as part of her art
and homemaking practices, highlight the physical and mental topoï that
make a home for refugees, showing how a place becomes ‘habitable’.
Suzan Ilcan and Vicki Squire explore the recollections of refugees who
have survived the current Syrian war and who are confronted with the
challenges of forced displacement, relocation, loss and belonging. The
chapter draws on in-depth qualitative interviews with refugees from Syria
who have relocated to London, Canada and Coventry, UK to chart expe-
riences of displacement and rehoming as these emerge across the migra-
tory journey. Exploring the diverse temporalities and means by which
Syrians create home ‘away’ from home, the analysis highlights how pro-
cesses of homemaking involve struggles in the face of state policies and
social conditions that create barriers and exacerbate the labour required to
negotiate everyday experiences of loss and belonging. The authors suggest
that resettled refugee experiences of homemaking expose the problematic
framing of home in conventional and static terms, which works against
various aspects of belonging, and generates mixed experiences of
resettlement.
Yasmine Shamma dwells on the notion of building in homemaking, by
drawing attention to the periphery of the refugee tent and caravan, and
the way refugee gardening within camps is at once transgressive, regressive
and progressive. The chapter focuses on the experience of Syrian refugees

living within camps in Jordan, to highlight the tendency to root the act of
homemaking in gardening practices and metaphors. It shows how Syrian
refugees temporarily or impermanently displaced throughout the camps of
Jordan’s deserts exhibit, in their gardening practices and pursuits, an envi-
ronmentalism whereby something transgressive is at play. Drawing on
interview material with the refugees, the chapter works to foreground
refugee voices in understanding the complexities of displacement. It
reflects on the progressive yet regressive implications of the transgressions
of gardening and the tendency of stateless subjects to become entangled
in the timeless practices of planting trees, flowers and fruits in the here
and now.
In the collection’s concluding chapter, Marissa Quie and Titi Solarin
engage the experiences of those migrating between Nigeria and the UK. It
explores experiences of life under conditions of a ‘hostile environment’,
while also probing the experiences of Nigerians who have been placed in
detention in the UK and those experiencing conditions post-deportation.
This enables the authors to explore the multiple perceptions and experi-
ences that generate the meaning of home. Developing a sea metaphor of
home as ‘like water’, the authors draw attention to the flux and liquidity
of home; to the overspilling of spatial and temporal boundaries. This
chapter asks what happens when a person falls—legally and politically—
into the ‘fissures’ that open up between nation states, and explores, via
rich testimony, how these individuals attempt to reconstitute a sense of
belonging, how they make home (and how their homemaking is thwarted)
within complex migration pathways.
Making Home Away builds on a nascent body of scholarship that exam-
ines lived experiences of migration, displacement and homemaking. It
advances a nuanced analysis of the ways in which memories, identities and
negotiations of displacement are integral to the pursuit of home. In this
regard, the collection considers how static notions of home are unsettled
by homemaking processes that cut across past, present and future, and
that enact a diversity of places and scales. The chapters in this collection
document the ways in which the spatial and temporal dimensions of home-
making are expanded through displacement, generating non-static, unsta-
ble and fluid conceptions of home. By considering the lifetime works of
those who lose, pursue, and ultimately make and remake homes through
displacement, the volume goes beyond assumptions regarding the loss of
homes as being occasional and tragic, to explore the ongoing project of
their re/making. Collectively we therefore point to the importance of a

longer-term approach to the analysis of homemaking and displacement—
not only in relation to displacement but also in relation to movement and
arrival.
References
Arvanitis, E., & Yelland, N. (2019). ‘Home means everything to me…’: A study
of young Syrian refugees’ narratives constructing home in Greece. Journal of
Refugee Studies, 34(1), 535–554.
Boccagni, P. (2016). Migration and the search for home: Mapping domestic space in
migrants’ everyday lives. Palgrave.
Brun, C., & Fabos, A. (2015). Making homes in limbo? A conceptual framework.
Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 31(1), 5–17.
Kim, K., & Smets, P. (2020). Home experiences and homemaking practices of
single Syrian refugees in an innovative housing project in Amsterdam. Current
Sociology, 68(5), 607–627.
Murrani, S., Lloyd, H., & Popovici, I.-C. (2022). Mapping home, memory and
spatial recovery in forced displacement. Social & Cultural Geography. https://
doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2022.2055777
Perez Murcia, L. (2019). Where the heart is and where it hurts: Conceptions of
home for people fleeing conflict. Refugee Survey Quarterly, 38, 139–158.
Wilkinson, E., & Ortega-Alcazar, I. (2017). A home of one’s own? Housing wel-
fare for ‘Young Adults’ in times of austerity. Critical Social Policy, 37(3), 329–347.
CHAPTER 2
Watfa’ Speaks
Dawn Chatty
With contrib. by Jihad Darwaza
With contrib. by Watfa’ Darwaza
Making home is both an architectural notion and a social one. Homes are
constructed out of physical spaces and then ‘populated’ by people who are
generally biologically related to some degree. Thus, the concepts of space
are largely physical but can also be constructed so as to have special social
meanings such as memorials, graveyards, or spaces with other embodied
meanings. Physical spaces can also take on numerous and overlapping
meanings when they are socially constructed; buildings can become
socially constructed places for those who occupy them, with places some-
times overlapping in physical spaces (Gupta & Ferguson, 1992). An archi-
tectural space can be made ‘home’ by the actions and social ties of those
who take up residence in it. A city, or urban neighbourhood or quarter is
a defined physical space but can become a socially constructed home-like
place for those who live and interact in it. So not only the buildings, but
the streets, the parks, the schools, the places of worship, the orchards, the
D. Chatty (*)
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
e-mail: dawn.chatty@qeh.ox.ac.uk

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12085-5_2
12 D. CHATTY
markets, the retail shops all take on a special sense of familiarity that makes
individuals feel at home.
In exile, and forced migration, homemaking goes through several
stages. There is the initial, sometimes emergency phase, where individuals
or family groups first find sanctuary. This may be a church, or a school
providing temporary shelter, or a rented accommodation, generally too
small for those who are housed in it (Katz, 2020). This initial stage of
arrival often has an air of adventure and temporariness for children who
are not aware of the nature of their migration, if physical conflict was not
experienced by them. Then comes a transitional phase, where the unit
moves to new spaces generally closer to the desires of the group in size and
aspect. And finally, though some forced migrants never reach this last
phase, there is the permanent homemaking in a physical space that feels
familiar and is populated by the extended social and kin group network.
Here, home becomes an idea and a practice: home as day-to-day practices;
home as representing values, traditions, memories, and home as an affect,
the feeling of home (Brun & Fábos, 2015).
Exiles and forced migrants from Israel/Palestine have made home away
from Palestine for decades. For many, making home away meant turning
the refugee camp originally set up as an emergency shelter into something
familiar and perhaps transitional, but not permanent. For others, the
camps set up for them by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency
(UNRWA) were regarded as permanently temporary. And efforts are
made to make sure nothing permanent, like trees or plants, burst through
the cement walkways of their camps so as to maintain the notion of its
temporariness despite its long durée (Chatty & Lewando Hundt, 2005).
Not all displaced Palestinians regarded themselves as refugees; nor did
they always enter refugee camps. Many who came to Syria as exiles or
forced migrants fleeing the British colonial powers that had taken over
southern Syria (Palestine) after World War I felt they were taking sanctu-
ary in a familiar place. By the mid-1930s as the Arab Uprising in the British
Mandate of Palestine erupted, many Palestinian political leaders escaped
incarceration by moving to Amman. But even there, the King of
Transjordan, King Abdullah I, was under pressure to give up those to
whom he was providing sanctuary. Rather than give up his ‘guests’, he
advised them to leave for Damascus where they would come under French
Mandatory rule. It is here that this chapter is placed, following the memo-
ries of a woman well into her 80s reflecting back on how home was
2 WATFA’ SPEAKS 13
gradually created in exile in Damascus, and situating this narrative in a

historical appreciation of processes of homemaking in the region.
Contextualizing a Shared History

The notion of belonging, of making home has attracted significant research
interest in recent years, especially as displaced Syrians have sought refuge
and asylum and struggled to develop a sense of belonging, of social inclu-
sion, in neighbouring states as well as in far-flung places in Europe and
Australia and North America (Dona, 2015; Korac, 2009; Mallett, 2004).
There are many tropes regarding home and homemaking in many lan-
guages. In English we have ‘home is where the heart is’ or ‘home is carried
on our backs’ as clichés that govern our conceptions of home. The argu-
ment I make in this chapter is that making home and creating a sense of
belonging in the neighbouring states of Syria is contextually and histori-
cally linked to the common heritage of Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria) dur-
ing the 400 years of Ottoman rule. Belonging, in this sense, was deeply
embedded in two institutions and norms that were developed and encour-
aged by the Ottoman state. The first was the self-governing religious mil-
let system formally legislated in the nineteenth century, but in effect for
many years before and which created a kind of imagined community
(Anderson, 1991). The Ottoman millets were three: Muslim, Christian,
and Jewish. The religious hierarchy of each millet established laws which
governed family life; matters regarding births, marriages, divorce, death,
and inheritance were all in the hands of the religious clergy. The second
was the mobility of families and groups, sometimes legislated by the state
to maintain its multicultural empire. This freedom of movement eventu-
ally resulted in the emergence of a local cosmopolitanism with various
ethno-religious groups living side by side. Each recognized the other as
different but tolerated.
With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the close of World War I,
these norms and practices were tolerated, if not actually encouraged, by
the successor colonial rule of France and Great Britain. Palestinians who
fled from the British colonial administration of Palestine starting in the
1930s to find sanctuary in Damascus felt largely at home upon arrival as
attested in the narrative of Watfa’, the niece of a well-off, prominent
Palestinian intellectual and activist for Arab independence. Being
Palestinian was little different from being Syrian and, as her testimony
reveals, childish games did differentiate Palestinians from Syrians, but not
14 D. CHATTY
for long. Eventually being Syrian meant being part of a multi-cultural,

cosmopolitan entity that encompassed Palestinians, Circassians, Armenians
and many other forced migrant groups who had sought sanctuary in
Greater Syria (Rabo, 2008). Their integration was assured by Ottoman
legacies of mobility and dispersal, making assimilation into a hegemonic
notion of ‘Syrian-ness’ not only unlikely but impossible as no such unitary
notion existed. Thus making ‘home’—creating a deterritorialized and
imagined community of belonging, constructing biological and fictive kin
relations and networks, and reshaping physical spaces into ‘remembered’
places—had many similar features throughout the former Ottoman region
of ‘Greater Syria’. These particular elements of ‘home making’ help to
explain the relative ease with which Syrians who were displaced post-2011
were initially able to make ‘home’ in the neighbouring states of Lebanon,
Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey.
Mass Influx and Asylum in the Ottoman Empire

Contrary to much popular thinking, the organized response to mass influx
of forced migrants was not a twentieth century invention, but rather
emerged much earlier. The nineteenth century Ottoman empire, in the
course of its six wars with Tsarist Russia between 1790s and 1880s wit-
nessed wave after wave of mass influx of Muslim forced migrants entering
its territory from its border lands. In most cases these forced migrants had
travelled with little more than the clothes on their backs and whatever they
could pile onto their oxcarts. Their survival on the road depended on the
kindness of local people and municipal authorities as they made their way
south. Many died on the road from starvation or disease. Over time, these
expulsions were accompanied by local Ottoman civil society organizations
set up to assist and resettle these forced migrants. Local towns and cities
opened up their mosques and churches to shelter and feed these exiles.
But as the sheer scale of the mass influx became clear, the needs for a cen-
tralized organization became necessary.
At the close of the Crimean War of 1856, more than 500,000 Muslim
Tatars were expelled from the Crimea and entered the Ottoman Empire.
The following year, 1857, the Ottoman Sublime Porte promulgated a
Refugee Code with guidelines as to how to respond to the urgent need to
provide shelter and food for those expelled initially from the Crimea but
also from other borderland regions with Russia. Its primary directive was
to swiftly disperse and integrate its forced migrants. Those families and
groups with only a minimum amount of capital were provided with plots
of state land to start life anew in the Ottoman empire in agricultural activ-
ity. Families who applied for land in Anatolia and Greater Syria were
exempted from taxation and military conscription for 12 years. Ottoman
reformers were eager to see the largely depopulated Syrian provinces be
revived by these new migrants after several centuries of misadministration,
war, famine, and several pandemics of the plague (Shaw & Shaw,
1977:115).
In 1860 as rising requests for plots of state land came in from forced
migrants and potential immigrants, the Ottoman authorities transformed
the Code into a Refugee Commission (the Ottoman Commission for the
General Administration of Immigration) under the Ministry of Trade
(Shaw & Shaw, 1977:115). The Commission was charged with integrat-
ing not only the Tatars and Circassians fleeing from lands conquered by
the Russians north and west of the Black Sea but also the thousands of
non-Muslim immigrant farmers and political leaders from Hungary,
Bohemia, and Poland, Cossacks from Russia and Bulgarians from the
Balkans seeking refuge (Shaw & Shaw, 1977:116). The Ottoman approach
to these forced migrants was both instrumental—reviving agriculture and
taxing farming—and politically astute, as it sought to manage local politi-
cal conflicts along border regions and frontiers where Circassian and
Chechnyan settlements were being promoted. Nowhere did it permit
more than 10% of an incoming group to settle in one place. Particularly
noticeable in urban centres, this policy created a local cosmopolitanism
where the babble of different languages, assorted foods, and dress gave
the notion of ‘otherness’ new meaning (Hannerz, 1996).
Deterritorialized Belonging and Social Duty

of Hospitality
What was remarkable about the Ottoman Empire was the way that its
organizing ethos was not based on territorial rootedness but rather on
religious affiliation; belonging was tied to social places rather than physical
spaces. In other words, belonging in this region of the Eastern
Mediterranean, until the end of World War I, was based on recognition of
the superiority of Islam in the Empire, alongside a tolerance of the Ahl-il-
Kitab—its Jewish and Christian communities. The latter was not just
derived from religious tenets but emerged also from economic and
16 D. CHATTY
political realism. European nineteenth century economic and political

interests in the Christian and Jewish communities in the Middle East as
well as Ottoman principles of self-governance for these ethno-religious
groups resulted in the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman reforms which
formally legislated the establishment of protected community, ‘millets’,
whose religious and social affairs were organized from within the structure
of the church or synagogue. Within the Ottoman millet system, Muslims,
for example, might be ethnically and linguistically, Turks, Arabs, Kurds,
Albanians, Bosnians, Circassians and others. Jews might be Sephardic, the
descendants of those who had been expelled from Spain in the late 14th
century and given refuge, European (Ashkenazi), or ‘native’ Mizrahi, or
Oriental Jews. The Christians were mainly Orthodox and might identify as
Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians (in the Balkans) and Arabs (in Palestine and
Syria). The individual millet community self-governed its internal affairs.
Intercommunity relations gave rise to a broad range of social networks far
beyond the specific geographical territory of the immediate community,
especially among the professional and commercial classes. It was the legacy
of these ‘millets’ that shaped the way in which the migrants (forced and
voluntary), exiles, and other dispossessed peoples of Bilad al-Sham
(Greater Syria) would be successfully integrated without being assimilated
into the fabric of the modern societies and cultures of the Levant; where
social norms and concepts of duty were prioritized in providing refuge to
those in need (Chatty, 2013).
With the end of World War I, this largely successful multicultural and
religiously plural Empire was rapidly dismantled. However, despite the
forced migrations of millions of ethno-religious minorities (as well as
Muslim majorities from the Balkans), which saw an entire empire on the
move, the legacy of the deterritorialized aspects of belonging tied to the
Ottoman ethno-religious millets laid the foundations for later elaborations
of integration based on notions of social and religious duty. These were
mainly circular and back and forth movements between relations, co-
religionists, colleagues, customers, and creditors in the modern Arab suc-
cessor states carved out of Greater Syria. The making of home became less
tied to territory as it was to family and community dispersed throughout
the region. With identity and security based on family, lineage, and ethno-
religious millets, movement did not represent a decoupling, or deracina-
tion, but rather a widening of horizontal networks of support and solidarity
that stretched throughout the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman
empire. Relatives, close and distant, had already been spread over a wide
region far beyond the confines of the modern Syrian nation-state and
could be called on for support, shelter, and security when needed. Home
and homemaking was, thus, simplified as the elements required to feel at
ease, to feel at home, to share traditions, and memories were spread over
broad horizontal spaces.
Notions of hospitality, generosity, and the worthiness of the guest in
augmenting individual and family honour are fundamental to an under-
standing of many societies and cultures. They are particularly redolent of
the Arab world, where notions of modernity are mixed with those of cus-
tom and customary principles of behaviour and action. Hospitality and
generosity encompass notions of dignity, respect, protection as well as
security. The family, the lineage, the social group, and the nation’s reputa-
tion is in many ways hostage to correct behaviour with a guest/stranger;
inappropriate behaviour might lead to disrespect, danger, and insecurity.
Thus, in Syria, Palestinian, Kurds, Armenians, Iraqis, and other displaced
peoples were welcomed—initially—as temporary guests, and as long as
they behaved as was required of a guest, they were treated as nationals and
allowed to go about their business of settling in, setting up a business, or
engaging in circular migrations in and out of the country.
Contrary to the dominant discourse on hospitality in the West and in
humanitarian aid settings, where asylum seekers are placed in the middle
ground between mere biological life and full social existence in detention
centres and refugee camps (Agamben, 1998), the notions of hospitality
and generosity in Syria and the neighbouring Arab states have made it
nearly impossible for regional governments to adopt the ‘bureaucratic
indifference’ to human needs and suffering’ so common in the interna-
tional humanitarian aid regime. Syria, as with most countries of the Middle
East, has no explicit domestic asylum laws largely because asylum is deeply
rooted in implicit notions of individual, family, and group reputation. The
nation is regarded as the home and the head of the family is sovereign of
the state. The nation becomes a house in which hospitality can be offered
and received. The collective memory of a number of forced displacements
of the past few centuries means that yesterday’s guest is readily acknowl-
edged as today’s neighbour (Zaman, 2016:131). In this sense the host is
thus someone who has the power to give to the stranger [generosity] but
remains in control (Derrida, 2000). Providing hospitality (or asylum) in
this region is seen as increasing the individual, the family and the nation’s
reputation for generosity (Chatty, 2017). Thus, customary law, social
norms, and a moral positioning to treat the stranger as guest does not
18 D. CHATTY
require national legislation to be implemented; the stranger is accepted

without being separated out and placed in an internment camp. The
acceptance of these ‘others’ creates a local conviviality that makes belong-
ing and the making of home easier (Rabo, 2011).
Interviewing Watfa’
The narrative which follows was created from a series of interviews, not
unlike the method used by Jason de Leon in the early 2000s (De Leon,
2015). Whereas De Leon used numerous interviews with a number of
informants to create a ‘composite’ of the migrant experience. Here we
have used a number of interviews—some semi-informal, unstructured,
other natural (sitting together sharing a coffee and allowing Watfa’ to
muse about the past) to put together this narrative. The ordering of her
thoughts is not always consecutive; later interviews often filled in blanks
from earlier ones. My questions and some deep probing by Jihad, her
younger sister and my long-term research associate in Syria, were removed
so as to allow for a smooth flow of her recollections. The words are all her
own, but sometimes the order has been changed to smooth the narra-
tive out.
In an effort to test the reliability and validity of her earlier statements,
my research associate, Jihad, adopted the methodological tool of cognitive
interviewing (Beatty & Willis, 2007). Engaging with Watfa’ in 2021, she
revisited the earlier interviews and gently probed the same subjects of her
earliest memories of Damascus as a young girl of ten to see if the questions
and prompts were providing the same responses to the questions asked a
decade or so before. The first set of interviews were conducted when
Watfa’ was in her early 80s. These more recent cognitive interviews indi-
cated that her long-term memory was embedded—the stories she first told
were now, somehow, made permanent or frozen in her recall of the past.
Watfa’, now in her early 90s, was finding it difficult to recall new memo-
ries. Her recollections of the past were clear, but once tapped, were hard
to get beyond. A few new details of her early life in Damascus did emerge
with cognitive interviewing, but these were fragments of events, like play-
ing hopscotch at school, or recalling the shock of seeing her father after
many months of absence. By and large the cognitive interviews confirmed
and refreshed her earlier narratives.
Watfa’ Remembers Damascus

We came to Damascus from Palestine in the 1930s. My father and my
uncle had already been here. They had come a year earlier following the
1936 Arab Revolt in Palestine; the British did not allow them to return to
Palestine, and they had to stay in Damascus. They came in 1936, and we
arrived in 1937. I was the eldest child, about ten years old. In fact, I can’t
give you a true picture of the social life in the Sha’laan Quarter of Damascus
at the time for what I recall is limited to what might attract a girl at my
age. For example, one of the most fascinating scenes that magnetized me
was the sight of loaded camels as they approached, with their ringing bells,
the large oval shaped entrance of the Sha’laan House where some people
were busy unloading the camels while others rushed to pay respect to and
take care of an elderly man who seemed to enjoy a certain status. I would
never miss that scene for anything in the world. That is why I can’t tell you
much about the social life. What interested me was what might interest a
ten-year-old naughty Palestinian girl. A Shami (Damascene) girl could
perhaps tell you much more because a Shami girl of ten is almost a
young lady.
The quarter of Sha’laan was quite big. It branched off—forked into
many lanes. Actually, the same ones you see today on the right and left
starting from the Franciscan school. Through the lane where the Maysoon
elementary school was (today [2008] it is the Women’s Union
Headquarters), we could get to the famous Arch (a characterizing land-
mark of Shuhada quarter), where a famous and handsome pharmacist had
his pharmacy. The guy was so handsome that many girls had a crush on
him. Whenever they did not do well in the exam, they pretended to faint
in order to be taken care of by the handsome pharmacist from the
Qanqwati family.
When we first arrived, my father and uncle were staying in a house
located in the first lane on the right as you approach from the Franciscan
School. The lane led to the present Ministry of Health. It [the house] was
not new, but it was not of traditional Arabic style. It was a two-floor build-
ing. The Mashnouq family lived on the first floor. We lived up on the
second floor. The apartment had a large hall surrounded by five or six
rooms—the then typical style of floor plan. No L shapes. No corridor, just
a spacious hall surrounded by rooms. In addition to the kitchen and the
bathroom, there was a toilet close to the front door. That was also
20 D. CHATTY
common in all houses at the time. They thought it was convenient in case
a passer-by guest needed to use the toilet.
My father, my uncle, my eldest cousin, who had come earlier with
them, my mother, my two sisters, my two brothers, my grandmother, my
aunt, and a cousin of my father whose parents were dead. We were 14
people altogether. There was a room for my parents, a room for my uncle
and his wife (she fell sick, was taken to hospital and died the same year we
arrived in Damascus), a room for my grandmother and aunt, a room for
me and my sisters, a room for my brothers and one room for my girl cous-
ins. I was told by my uncle that they were all under threat of arrest for
being deeply involved in protests against the British occupation of Palestine
that was supporting the Zionist movement. My father had already taken
refuge in Damascus organizing supportive activities for the uprising in
Palestine, and my activist uncle was forced by the British Trans-Jordanian
authorities to leave Amman. King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan had bluntly
told my uncle that he could no longer protect him from the British.
On the first floor below were the Mashnouqs—a decent family from
Hama. They were amazingly hospitable and friendly. As I have just men-
tioned, my uncle’s wife died soon after we arrived in Damascus. The
Mashnouqs rushed to help out and offered their house to receive the men
who came to pay condolences on the occasion. This tells a lot about the
social relations at the time. The father, Abdul-Hamid, had three girls and
six boys. The youngest was our age. The oldest outlived his brothers.
Some of the families who chose to live in Shalaan were those who fled
British oppression in Jordan or Palestine, such as the Abul-Labans, the
Nabulsis, and the Kamala. Those families were forced to leave Palestine for
political reasons. The narrow lanes in Sha’laan were occupied by such fam-
ilies or by French families. The houses were small with a small front garden
and a rivulet/brooklet. You know, you would knock at the door and then
be led through a corridor to a small courtyard with one or two rooms. The
stairs took you up into an open square balcony, (the mashraka), which
received the morning sun rays, a small hall, and two or more rooms. I’m
not sure of the number of rooms because we didn’t live in any of those
houses. All the houses had rivulets from the Barada River but not inside
the house. Water of rivulets streamed with such strength that later on they
had to be covered lest a child should fall and be carried away beneath the
house to the next house. The house of Um Aida is typical of those houses,
and we can go there to have an idea about the style. Our house was quite
different. It had a spacious hall surrounded by many rooms. On the
opposite side of our house lived a Russian girl called Nadia. She was tall
with a red spot on her face. Her father was a huge man. Young boys used
to fancy the girl, and there were rumours that French officers were enter-
tained by Nadia and her mother. They were foreigners and would nor-
mally receive foreign visitors, which was misinterpreted by the local people.
For us, we were Palestinians. We belonged to Bilad al-Sham, so coming
to Damascus was not such a shock. We weren’t really different from
Syrians. But I remember when we first were put into school, the Syrian
girls used to stand aside and stare at us as though we were somehow not
belonging. Then I decided to teach them a lesson. I drew a hopscotch on
the ground with chalk, the way we used to play it in Palestine. I also was
very aggressive in explaining the rules, the Palestinian rules. And so we
would play like this during school breaks and after school. After a while
the Syrian girls got curious and wanted to watch us. Finally, they asked if
they could play with us. Of course, we said yes, they could. After that they
stopped making fun of our Palestinian accents.
I’m not sure about the Armenians. Many of them came to Damascus
10 or 20 years before. They probably lived mostly in Qassaa’ quarter in
West Damascus. The Armenians who lived in Sha’laan were mainly in the
narrow lanes that extended between Sha’laan and Salhiyyeh. At the south-
ern end of Sha’laan there was a large square where horse-driven carriages
were parked. When my mother or aunt needed to go somewhere, they
would send me out to fetch a carriage back to the house. If a carriage hap-
pened to be going in the direction of the parking lot, I would secretly
climb up the rod at the back of the carriage taking the risk of receiving a
few hits of the driver’s whip. When I got to the square and picked a car-
riage properly, I would then enter the caleche and sit back inside and look
proudly around. I still remember the restless horses at the parking square
with feed bags hanging down their necks. They couldn’t have actually
parked the carriages in Sha’laan at that time because there wasn’t a spa-
cious square for that purpose. So, they waited for customers at Arnous
Square, today’s March Eighth Square, enjoyed a very strategic central
location for all people coming from nearby areas: Sha’laan, Ra’iees,
Takreeti (where Adnan al-Malki lived) and Rawda.
There were two markets at that time. One of them was run by a one-
eyed man called Hasan. His shop was just next to the mosque. You know
the often-smelly mosque in the middle of Sha’laan. There was another
mosque. That was the Shanawani Mosque, which was built much later
than the Sha’laan mosque after we arrived in Sha’laan. Actually, the house
22 D. CHATTY
we lived in was owned by the Shanawanis. Let me show you something.

This here was an old notebook where my father kept a journal. It says that
Homam (my brother) was born in January 1939 in Damascus in the
Shanawani house across from the Franciscan School. Jihad, my sister, was
born on March 6, 1940 in Halbouni in the Tarabishi House. Waddah was
born.… That brother died. Mujahed was born in 1936 in Amman, Hakam
was born in 1933, Shafaq was born in 1930 in Nablus as was I [Watfa’] in
1926, and Laila in 1928. So, all of my siblings and I were born in different
places. Four of us were born in Palestine, one in Jordan, and the rest
in Syria.
The first house we lived in Damascus was too small for us—we were 14
people altogether. We lived there for a couple of months only. A new
building was recently built across the road from the Franciscan school.
The famous political figure and leader, Abdurrahman al-Shah Bandar,
lived there. On the first floor there were two apartments. We pulled down
the dividing walls to have one large apartment with ten bedrooms, two
bathrooms and two kitchens. In those days we often had to accommodate
political refugees, revolutionary men, coming from Palestine to give or
receive arms. I will never forget the day when I opened the front door and
got scared at the sight of the beggar standing there. I slammed the door
and rushed inside telling my family that there was a frightening beggar at
the door. My uncle jumped up, opened the door and, to my great surprise,
took the beggar into his arms and started kissing him with tears running
down his cheek. The beggar turned out to be my father whom my uncle
had sent a few months earlier with others to Iraq to get arms. They were
lost somewhere in the desert and there was no news of them. His beard
was long, his dirty clothes were worn out, his heels were badly slit, and he
had a rough dirty overcoat—‘abaayeh’—on. My mom, of course, recog-
nized him. A barber was called for, and while giving him a bath, it was
found that there were strange skin insects that had dug deep in the skin.
He later told us that they had really suffered in the desert and had had to
drink their own urine for lack of water.
I attended the Dawhat al Adab School. It was recognized as the best
non-French school in Syria. The director, Madam Loris Qandalfat, a
Christian, well-educated and knowledgeable Syrian woman was a friend of
my father’s friend—Akram Z’eiter [a leading Palestinian political figure].
My cousin, Salma, having first gone to an English school in Jerusalem, was
sent to the American school in Saida, in what is now Lebanon. The rest of
us went to Dawhet al-Adab. Jihad and Homam [youngest sister and
brother] were not yet born. I was put into grade four and had a letter of
reference from my previous school in Jerusalem saying that I was a good
and well-disciplined student. I walked to school. It was very close to our
house at that time. It was located just at the near end of Salhiyyeh Street
along which the tram coming from Muhajireen passed on its way to
al-Marjeh.
In Damascus at that time there were cars, but not many. When you
looked out on the street you might see a car or two. We, ourselves, came
to Damascus through Safad Palestine in two luxurious Oldsmobile cars.
So, there were cars about, but they were used only for long distance trips.
My aunt used to take a car to Himmeh or to Jiser al-Shughour near Aleppo
to bathe in the mineral water. As for short distances or picnics, horse
drawn carriages or caleches were exclusively used.
I never felt alone or ‘out of place’; we were a big family. We were many.
We played together, we went to school together, we ate together. Even
then, when you move to a new place, you are looked upon as strangers. I
remember that there were always two men at our door. They did the shop-
ping. Coming to think of it now, they were probably there for security
reasons. I rarely did any shopping. However, I still remember the grand-
father of the owners of a present shop in the middle of Sha’laan. He was
called Halfoun, and he used to sit at the door of Dawhat al-Adab to sell
fresh almonds and green prunes piled on a huge round tray. Actually,
Halfoun who died only a few years ago was a landmark in Sha’laan. There
was also Nayeeni, the well-known Jewish man who ran a textile shop
nearby in Shuhada and the Jewish Madam Shalhoob who sold exclusive
women’s shoes in Shuhada as well. We knew all the merchants in the
Sha’laan Quarter. It was like a big home to us.
There were many important Syrian families who sent their children to
Dawhat al-Adab School. The children of Shukri al-Quwatli, the Diabs, the
Malkis, the Halbounis, the Hajjars, the Azems, the Abeds…. They were
the children of the notable families in Damascus. It is worth mentioning
now that most of the women whose children or grandchildren attended
the school were active members in various societies and charitable associa-
tions. One of these women even started a project to create embroidered
tablecloths for poor women to sell. This was called aghabani and since has
become an important cultural feature of the country. Every middle class
and upper middle-class family has numerous sets of aghabani tablecloths.
It is also widely exported.
24 D. CHATTY
After school we had to go straight back home. We were not allowed to

fool around in the streets. However, we were encouraged to have Syrian
and Palestinian friends coming after school for a visit which often ended
by having an afternoon meal of roasted white goat cheese before going
home. Walking home with friends was allowed when we were a bit older
and had moved to Arnous—at the other end from Arnous square. That
house was not 100% of traditional Arabic style. It had a big courtyard and
a roof attic. However, unlike the traditional Arabic style houses, the sec-
ond floor had a spacious hall—almost as big as Arnous Square with eight
bedrooms around it. Except for the room where the house helper and her
daughter slept, all rooms were quite large. In addition, the middle floor
had a kind of balcony and a square open space ‘mashraka’ that received
morning sun rays and was shadowed by vine leaves. Corridors with
coloured glass walls led to the ‘mashraka’ on one side and the balcony on
the other. I liked the corridor that led to the balcony very much, and
being the eldest child, I took the liberty of keeping it for myself for privacy
purposes. I closed the door to the corridor and kept only the one that
opened to the balcony open. It was my favourite game to leave the lights
of my room on all night to give the neighbouring boys the illusion of
being awake and so they might see me appear in the balcony anytime,
while I was in fact sound asleep in my comfortable bed.
We spent time in the summer with Syrian and Palestinian friends, went
on picnics with the family or, when older, went to one of the movie the-
atres in Damascus, the Roxy on Fardos St. or Ampere at the upper end of
Salhiyyeh. Close to Hijaz train station, there was a modest movie theatre
that used to show very good films about historical figures such as Chopin
or George Sand.
We had a large library at that house [but not all books were on display],
as my father and uncle had had to flee from French mandatory authorities
to Turkey. There was probably some sort of deal with the British colonial
authority in Palestine to capture them. So, some of the books in the house
were banned; these books were not displayed on shelves but stuffed into
wall cabinets. That was where I stole the book of One Thousand Nights.
It was not considered proper reading for my age, so I had to read it
secretly. I still remember the frequent phrase “He fell unconscious”. It was
used whenever a young man met his beloved. He was dazzled by her
beauty and fell unconscious. I often use the phrase today when asked after
a long day, “What did you do in the evening?” I answer: “I just fell
unconscious”.
Our house in Arnous was very big. It had a huge dining area with a
door that led to the courtyard. On the right, there was a big room for my
grandmother—as she couldn’t climb upstairs—and a reception hall. A cor-
ridor led to the courtyard which had a fountain fed by a rivulet. There was
a huge kitchen with a small fountain used for all cleaning purposes. The
kitchen floor had no tiles, just a smooth cement floor where washing water
could be swept easily into the drains. No mopping was ever needed.
There was a church close to Sha’laan. I just remembered. We could see
it on our way to a park near the Parliament called the ‘Family Park’. I still
remember us—all my siblings—holding hands and walking to the park.
We were given a ‘franc’ or two each. There, we would buy sweets or
lupines from the street sellers who used to wait outside the entrance of the
park for they were not allowed in. We were not supposed to step on the
grass. However, once we heard the whistle announcing the closing time of
the park, we often took the chance and took three or four circuits on the
grass and ran away before the park guard could catch us. Yes, God bless
those days. We could buy a handful of sweets, lupines, or roasted chick-
peas for a ‘Nickel [five cents]’—half a piaster. Kids from all neighbouring
quarters used to come to that park: from Sibki, Muhajireen, or Mazra’a.
They were Syrian, Palestinian, Circassian. Some were Christian, some were
Muslim, Druze. It was a very mixed group. Much of the present Mazra’a
quarter was still agricultural fields which the family of Mustafa (Watfa’s
husband) owned. But they had to sell off a good part of it to pay for the
mortgage of Watfa’s and Mustafa’s house. So, you see, people from all
neighbouring areas that lacked entertainment facilities near their home
used to come to the ‘Family Park’ (Jneinet al-Aa’ilaat).
The end of the line, the final tram final stop—in Muhajireen was another
area that attracted a lot of people especially in Ramadan (the fasting
month), the Feasts, and on the Prophet Day, when young horsemen,
mainly from the family of Abu Abdo Al-Gawerdi, came to Muhajireen and
Arnous squares to give dazzling horse dancing performances and do sword
and shield shows. Accompanied by one of the two family security guards
who used to be always around to help out whenever needed, we went to
Muhajireen, Arnous, or the Family Park to watch those beautiful shows.
(One of those attendants, Fadel, was later killed while fighting in Palestine.)
Throughout the feasts, large swings were set up for children in Sha’laan
near the Sha’laan House. Halfoun, the owner of the small shop on the
corner across from the Sha’laan House used to set up a long table where
he sold cooked beans and pickled turnip served with a kind of toast called
26 D. CHATTY
‘Sharak’—favourite treats for kids in those days—we dipped the toast in

the pickle sauce, ate a piece of pickle with toast and then followed the
beans with cumin. Once my father caught us sitting there and got mad at
me. He held me by the ear and asked how I could be so thoughtless to
take my sisters and brothers to have that dirty food that might cause
typhoid. That was Halfoun the father. Halfoun, the son, was my age. I
remember the father coming to our school al-Dawha carrying two large
trays: one full with violets picked from the Sibki field and the other full of
green plum and green almond. We loved to buy a small bunch of violets
to give to our favourite teachers and, of course, we loved the green plums
and almonds. Once he came when the school door was closed. The girls
were desperate to get some of the green plums. I was often the one who
came up with solutions. I asked them to take off the cloth belts of our
school uniforms and we tied them together to make a rope that ended
with a small basket. We lowered it to Halfoun who filled it with green
plums. As we were pulling it up, the headmistress saw it from a window on
the second floor and got hold of it. I thought it was a student and started
swearing at her, calling her names, and asking her to immediately let go.
Suddenly we saw Madam Hababo, the director, approaching us with the
basket in her hand. Halfoon, the father was a fat man who wore the tradi-
tional wide trousers—the ‘sirwal’. He watched as we were scolded, but we
were allowed to keep the almonds and green plums. So, it was worth it.
We knew that in Sha’laan there were Bedouin princes who stayed and
received the Sha’laan House whenever they came to Damascus from the
desert. They wore ‘abaayeh’, (traditional Arabic overcoat), with golden
rims over a long mostly solid gray ‘qumbaz’ (traditional men’s long dress).
How fine the abaayeh was depended on the status of the person. I have
only a very vague picture of the women. We didn’t see much of them.
There was always a group of 10 to 12 people at the door which was always
kept open when they were in residence. And there was always some hay
outside the house where the camels used to wait while being unloaded. I
am not sure where they were kept after that.
It seems that most newcomers to Damascus preferred the Sha’laan
quarter and neighbouring areas to Muhajireen or the Old Damascus.
There was the Asri Club at the back of Sha’laan. It was more of a gathering
place where Syrian and Palestinian politically oriented people used to
meet, discuss political issues, exchange opinions, and play cards. There,
my father and uncle used to meet with Adel al Azmeh, Nabih al-Azmeh,
and Rashad Jabri. It was similar to the more recent ‘Havana Café’, where
intellectuals continued to meet to discuss political and literary issues.
By the time I got married in 1947, I no longer thought about whether
I was Palestinian or Syrian. We were all from Bilad al Sham. It was one
large society. We all spoke the same language. Although there were differ-
ent dialects. We had similar foods too, although Palestinians generally kept
the secret mixes of spices from their region for their own za’atar. By now
the 1948 Nakba had happened and Palestinian identity became politi-
cized. I was no longer interested. I was a Syrian citizen. Syria had just
become a modern nation-state after kicking out the French in 1946. I was
proud to be Syrian then.
Conclusion: Pursuing Home

Watfa’s testimony brings to light the deeply contextualized, historically
grounded, significance of homemaking. The expression ‘we carry our
homes on our backs’ does indeed apply in the case of social groups making
home in Syria, where a multicultural understanding of place and space has
long held prominence. Watfa’ arrives in Damascus knowing it is a place
where her parents, relatives, and neighbours from ‘back home’ in Jerusalem
and Nablus are already emplaced. It is as though she has moved in a large
bubble with 14 members of her well-off family rehoused in the newly
emerging modern quarter of Sha’laan. Two guards stand at duty at their
front door, protecting her father and uncle and giving the family unit a
sense of security in this French colonial city. The family, politically active
in Palestine, had fled the British colonial powers in Palestine under the
threat of imprisonment or execution. Crossing the recently imposed bor-
der between the French mandated territory and the British mandated ter-
ritory was not enough to make home secure without added security.
In Watfa’s exploration of this new ‘home-like’ place, she identifies dif-
ferent regions around Sha’laan, such as Muhajireen, Shuhada, Arnoos,
Salhiyyeh, Mazra’a. These are just blocks away from the building in which
her family has made home, but they are important to Watfa’ as they define
the contours of her world, her sense of belonging to it, and her identity as
a young girl in this modern locally cosmopolitan quarter. The multicul-
tural nature of this quarter and its surrounding neighbourhoods, with its
Armenian and Jewish merchants, its Christian, Druze, French, and Russian
residents, does not disturb her equanimity of belonging, but rather con-
tributes to it. It is as though she is telling us ‘we are all strangers, others,
28 D. CHATTY
living side by side’. Her sense of being Palestinian is pronounced at first,

as she recognizes she is being bullied and teased at school for her accent
and the way she plays outdoor street games. But within a matter of months,
she wins over the Syrian girls, and they become best friends. It is possible
to be Palestinian in Syria. She has made her home in Damascus as an idea
and as a practice, and she knows she belongs.
By the time Watfa’ marries a Syrian from the Kurdish community in
1947 while the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) is brewing, she no longer
considers herself just Palestinian, but also Syrian. So many other Syrians
from diverse ethno-religious traditions were to do the same. Belonging
and making home in the former Ottoman region of Bilad al Sham were
based less on rootedness to territory, than on acceptance of the ‘other’, a
local conviviality that tolerated, if not celebrated, difference among social
groups. These social attitudes and norms were found throughout Greater
Syria, but began to be challenged after the breakup of the Ottoman
Empire at the close of World War I. That challenge has grown with the
post-World War II establishment of the modern nation-states in the
Levant. However the prolongation of the Syrian armed conflict has seen
temporary guesthood and homemaking in exile in the neighbouring states
of Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey seriously undermined.
Grants from the Leverhulme Foundation (2005–2007), the British
Academy (2006–2007) and from the Council for British Research in the
Levant (2008–2009) supported the research project from which Watfa’s
narratives are drawn.
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CHAPTER 3
Refugee-Refugee Hosting as Home

in Protracted Urban Displacement: Sudanese
Refugee Men in Amman, Jordan
Zoë Jordan
Introduction
Zoë: Is there a place in the city where you feel at home, or like where you
feel comfortable? More than other places, you know?
Samir: Here. Jabal Hussein. This last one.
The lingering presence of home pervades many discussions of forced

migration, from being forced from home, to making new homes, and
returning home (Black, 2002; Brun & Fabos, 2015; Doná, 2015; Grabska,
2014; Long, 2010; Malkki, 1992; Taylor, 2013). However, as yet little
work has considered men’s practices of giving and receiving care in the
context of home in displacement (Grabska, 2014; Locke, 2017; Serra
Mingot, 2019). In this chapter, I focus on the extent to which
Z. Jordan (*)
Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
e-mail: zjordan@brookes.ac.uk

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12085-5_3
32 Z. JORDAN
refugee-refugee hosting, as a relation of care, provides for the possibility

of home for Sudanese refugee men living in protracted displacement in
Amman, Jordan. For the men I spoke to, home was an ambiguous concept
and their lives in Jordan, characterised by hostility and exclusion, bore
little resemblance to their idealised homes. Yet, in hosting, the men also
recounted finding a place of safety, care, and community.
This chapter draws on doctoral research conducted in Amman between
2017 and 2018 seeking to understand refugee-refugee hosting in interac-
tion with humanitarianism. In the first stage of the research, I spoke with
37 individuals from a wide cross-section of the refugee population1 in
Amman to produce a ‘snapshot’ of the diversity of hosting practices exist-
ing in the city at that time. These individuals were contacted through the
networks of two research assistants with existing ties to different refugee
communities in Amman, and subsequent snowballing. In the second
phase of the research, from March–May 2018 and September 2018, I
worked with a smaller group of nine Sudanese men living in group hosting
arrangements, conducting multiple iterative semi-structured interviews
with each man, as well as observation and spending time together. With
the exception of one man, all participants preferred to communicate in
English, rather than through a translator. I have chosen to focus on Samir’s
story, as it shares common features with the experiences of the other men
who participated in my research. However, Samir also most explicitly dis-
cussed his ambivalence towards the exchange of care within hosting. As
such, his narrative allows me to better interrogate the dynamics of care
and home among the men. The points of similarity and difference between
Samir and the other men in their accounts of their hosting experiences are
highlighted throughout the text.
As a white British female academic working with black Sudanese men,
our different positions cannot be overlooked. The men emphasised the
salience of their gender and race in their accounts and analysis of their lives
in Amman, contrasting the assumed greater economic and physical secu-
rity often associated with men in humanitarian contexts with the pervasive
racial discrimination and violence that they frequently experienced (Davis
1
Semi-structured interviews were conducted with Syrian, Somali, Sudanese, and Iraqi
refugees. Alongside nationality, the non-representative sample took into consideration gen-
der, age, marital status, presence of children, and physical disability.
3 REFUGEE-REFUGEE HOSTING AS HOME IN PROTRACTED URBAN… 33
et al., 2016; Johnston et al., 2019; MMP, 2017).2 In my work, I only had
limited access to observe the men’s daily domestic practices, in part due to
my gender. In this chapter I therefore draw on our discussions of their
experiences of participating in hosting relationships, rather than extensive
observation. This has also guided my focus on the outwards-facing ‘poli-
tics’ of home, inhabitation, and presence, rather than the intimate prac-
tices of domestic home-making.
I first briefly conceptualise hosting as an act of care, before describing
the situation of Sudanese refugee men living in Amman. I elaborate a
framework for understanding the relationship between care and home in
displacement, drawing on Antonsich’s (2010) notions of ‘place-belonging’
and ‘politics of belonging’. I then analyse the different forms of care
received and provided in hosting, followed by an assessment of the extent
to which the relation of care inherent in hosting enabled the creation of
home. In concluding, I argue that acts of care enacted through hosting can
hold some potential for home, yet the limitations of belonging in displace-
ment and the uncertain and difficult realities of many refugees’ lives persist.
Refugee Hosting as an Act of Care

Refugee-refugee hosting, the interdependent sharing of accommodation
between refugees, is a widespread and common practice in displacement
and humanitarian contexts around the globe (Caron, 2019; Davies, 2012;
Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2016a). Such arrangements are not necessarily unique
to refugees, and can be seen elsewhere (Kathiravelu, 2012; Landau, 2018).
However, thus far such practices have largely been overlooked among
refugees (Boano & Astolfo, 2020; Caron, 2019; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh,
2016b; Leer & Van Komter, 2012; Yassine et al., 2019). Where consid-
ered by humanitarian actors, hosting is often presented as a short-term
and dependent arrangement between distant family members that pro-
vides for shelter and basic needs. However, depictions fail to account for
the diversity of hosting practices that exist and their potential longevity
(Caron, 2019; Jordan, 2020).
Hosting is often conceptualised through the notion of hospitality
(Darling, 2020; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2016b), but it can also be understood
through an ethics of care (Yassine et al., 2019). Hosting relationships
2
For further discussion of race and gender in the Jordanian humanitarian context, see
Turner (2018)
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the streets to observe his dignified figure as he passed; and strangers
who went to hear him preach were struck no less by the beauty of his
appearance in the pulpit, the graceful fall of the silver locks round his
fine head and sensitive face, than by the Pauline earnestness of his
doctrine. At that time, the phrase “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh,” if
used in any part of Scotland away from the metropolis, would have
been taken as designating this venerable Calvinistic clergyman, and
not his son.
The son, meanwhile, it is true, was becoming well enough known
within Edinburgh on his own account. Having been educated at the
High School and the University, and having chosen the medical
profession, and been apprenticed for some time to the famous
surgeon, Syme, he had taken his degree of M.D. in 1833, and had
then,—with no other previous medical experience out of Edinburgh
than a short probation among the sailors at Chatham,—settled down
permanently in Edinburgh for medical practice. From that date,
therefore, on to the time when I can draw upon my own first
recollections of him,—say about 1846,—there had been two Dr. John
Browns in Edinburgh, the father and the son, the theological doctor
and the medical doctor. It was the senior or theological doctor, as I
have said, that was then still the “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh” par
excellence, and the name had not transferred itself to the younger
with its new signification. He was then about thirty-six years of age,
with some little practice as a physician; and my remembrance of him
at that time is of a darkish-haired man, of shorter stature than his
father, with fine soft eyes, spirited movement, and very benignant
manner, the husband of a singularly beautiful young wife, and
greatly liked and sought after in the Edinburgh social circles in which
he and she appeared. This was partly from the charm of his vivid
temperament and conversation, and partly because of a reputation
for literary ability that had been recently gathering round him on
account of occasional semi-anonymous articles of his in newspapers
and periodicals, chiefly art-criticisms. For the hereditary genius of
“The Browns of Haddington” had, in this fourth generation of them,
turned itself out of the strictly theological direction, to work in new
ways. While Dr. Samuel Brown, a younger cousin of our Dr. John,
had been astonishing Edinburgh by his brilliant speculations in
Chemistry, Dr. John himself, in the midst of what medical practice
came in his way, had been toying with Literature. Toying only it had
been at first, and continued to be for a while; but, by degrees,—and
especially after 1847, when the editorship of the North British
Review, which had been founded in 1844, passed into the hands of
his friend Dr. Hanna,—his contributions to periodical literature
became more various and frequent. At length, in 1858, when he was
forty-eight years of age, and had contributed pretty largely to the
periodical named and to others, he came forth openly as an author,
by publishing a volume of what he called his Horæ Subsecivæ,
consisting mainly of medical biographies and other medico-literary
papers collected from the said periodicals, but including also his
immortal little Scottish idyll called “Rab and His Friends.” His father
had died in that year, so that thenceforward, if people chose, the
designation “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh” could descend to the son
without ambiguity.
And it did so descend. For eleven years before that appearance
of the first collection of his Horæ Subsecivæ, with “Rab and His
Friends” included in it, I had been resident in London, and I
remained there for seven years more. During all those eighteen
years, therefore, my direct opportunities of cultivating his
acquaintance had ceased; and, while I could take note through the
press of the growth of his literary reputation, it was only by hearsay
at a distance, or by a letter or two that passed between us, or by a
glimpse of him now and then when I came north on a visit, that I was
kept aware of his Edinburgh doings and circumstances. Not till the
end of 1865, when I resumed residence in Edinburgh, were we
brought again into close neighbourhood and intercourse. Then,
certainly, I found him, at the age of five-and-fifty, as completely and
popularly our “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh” in the new sense as
ever his father had been in the old one. His pen had been still busy in
newspapers and periodicals, the subjects ranging away more and
more from the medical; another volume of his Horæ Subsecivæ, or
collected articles, had been published; and some of his papers,
selected from that volume or its predecessor, or taken more directly
from the manuscript, had been brought out separately, in various
forms, under the discerning care of his friend and publisher, Mr.
David Douglas, and had been in circulation almost with the rapidity
of one of the serial parts of a novel by Dickens. Of both his
Minchmoor and his Jeems the Doorkeeper more than 10,000 copies
had been sold; his Pet Marjorie had passed the sale of 15,000 copies;
and Rab and His Friends was already in its 50th thousand.
With all this applause beating in upon him from the reading
public, in Scotland, in England, and in America, there he still was in
his old Edinburgh surroundings: a widower now for some years,
domesticated with his two children, and more solitary in his habits
than he had been; but to be seen walking along Princes Street of a
forenoon, or sometimes at some hospitable dinner-table of an
evening, always the same simple, wise, benevolent, lovable, and
much-loved Dr. John. And so for sixteen years more, and to the very
end. The sixties crept upon him after the fifties, and the white touch
of the first seventies followed, and the vivid darkish-haired Dr. John
of my first memory had changed into the bald-headed and spectacled
veteran you may see in the later photographs,—the spectacles before
his fine eyes if he were looking to the front, but raised over the placid
forehead if he were looking downwards at a print or a book. But
these changes had come softly, and with a mellowing rather than
withering effect; and, as late as last winter, what veteran was there in
our community whose face and presence in any company was more
desired or gave greater pleasure? If a stranger of literary tastes
visited Edinburgh, about whom did he inquire more curiously, or
whom was he more anxious to see, if possible, than Dr. John Brown?
We knew, most of us, that his calm face concealed sorrows; we
remembered his long widowerhood; we were aware too of the
occasional glooms and depressions that withdrew him from common
society; but, when he did appear among us, whether in any public
gathering or in more private fashion, how uniformly cheerful he was,
how bright and sunny! It has been stated, in one obituary notice of
him, that his medical practice declined as his literary reputation
increased. I doubt the truth of the statement, and imagine that the
reverse might be nearer the truth. To the end he loved his profession;
to the end he practised it; to the end there were not a few families, in
and about Edinburgh, who would have no other medical attendant, if
they could help it, than their dear and trusted Dr. John. My
impression rather is that he was wrapt up in his profession more and
more in his later days, using his pen only for a new trifle now and
then as the whim struck him, and content in the main with the
continued circulation of his former writings or their reissue in new
shapes. It was on the 12th of April in the present year, or only a
month before his death, that he put the last prefatory touch to the
first volume of that new edition of his Horæ Subsecivæ in three
volumes in which his complete literary remains are now accessible.
The title Horæ Subsecivæ, borrowed by Dr. John from the title-
pages of some old volumes of the minor English literature of the
seventeenth century, indicates, and was intended to indicate, the
nature of his writings. They are all “Leisure Hours,” little things done
at times snatched from business. There are between forty and fifty of
them in all, none of them long, and most of them very short. It is vain
in his case to repeat the regret, so common in similar cases, that the
author did not throw his whole strength into some one or two
suitable subjects, and produce one or two important works. By
constitution, I believe, no less than by circumstances, Dr. John
Brown was unfitted for large and continuous works, and was at home
only in short occasional papers. One compensation is the spontaneity
of his writings, the sense of immediate throb and impulse in each.
Every paper he wrote was, as it were, a moment of himself, and we
can read his own character in the collected series.
A considerable proportion of his papers, represented most
directly by his Plain Lectures on Health addressed to Working
People, his little essay entitled Art and Science, and his other little
essays called Excursus Ethicus and Education through the Senses,
but also by his Locke and Sydenham and others of his sketches of
eminent physicians, are in a didactic vein. Moreover, they are all
mainly didactic on one string. When these papers are read, it is
found that they all propound and illustrate one idea, which had taken
such strong hold of the author that it may be called one of his
characteristics. It is the idea of the distinction or contrast between
the speculative, theoretical, or scientific habit of mind, and the
practical or active habit. In medical practice and medical education,
more particularly, Dr. John Brown thought there had come to be too
much attention to mere science, too much faith in mere increase of
knowledge and in exquisiteness of research and apparatus, and too
little regard for that solid breadth of mind, that soundness of
practical observation and power of decision in emergencies, that
instinctive or acquired sagacity, which had been conspicuous among
the best of the older physicians. As usual, he has put this idea into
the form of humorous apologue:—
A DIALOGUE.
Scene.—Clinical wards of Royal Infirmary. The Physician and his Clerk
loquuntur.
John Murdoch, in the clinical ward with thoracic aneurism of the aorta, had at
his bedside a liniment of aconite, etc. Under the stress of a paroxysm of pain, he
drank it off, and was soon dead.
Physician.—Well, Sir, what about Murdoch? Did you see him alive?
Clerk.—Yes, Sir.
Physician.—Did you feel his pulse?
Clerk.—No, Sir.
Physician.—Did you examine his eyes?
Clerk.—No, Sir.
Physician.—Did you observe any frothing at the mouth and nose?
Clerk.—No, Sir.
Physician.—Did you count his respirations?
Clerk.—No, Sir.
Physician.—Then, Sir, what the d——l did you do?
Clerk.—I ran for the stomach-pump.
Dr. John was never tired of inculcating this distinction; it is the
backbone of almost all those papers of his that have been just
mentioned, and it reappears in others. In his special little essay
called Art and Science he formulates it thus:—
IN MEDICINE
Science
Looks to essence and cause.

Is diagnostic.
Has a system.
Is post-mortem.
Looks to structure more than function.
Studies the phenomena of poisoning.
Submits to be ignorant of nothing.
Speaks.
Art
Looks to symptoms and occasions.

Is therapeutic and prognostic.
Has a method.
Is ante-mortem.
Looks to function more than structure.
Runs for the stomach-pump.
Submits to be ignorant of much.
Acts.
Now, in the particular matter in question, so far as it is here

represented, we should, doubtless, all agree with our friend. We
should all, for ourselves, in serious illness, infinitely prefer the
attendance of any tolerable physician of the therapeutic and
prognostic type to that of the ablest of the merely diagnostic type,
especially if we thought that the genius of the latter inclined him to a
post-mortem examination. Hence we may be disposed to think that
Dr. John did good service in protesting against the run upon science,
ever new science, in the medicine of his day, and trying to hark back
the profession to the good old virtues of vigorous rule of thumb.
What I detect, however, underneath all his expositions of this
possibly salutary idea, and prompting to his reiterations of it, is
something deeper. It is a dislike in his own nature to the abstract or
theoretical in all matters whatsoever. Dr. John Brown’s mind, I
should say, was essentially anti-speculative. His writings abound, of
course, with tributes of respect to science and philosophy, and
expressions of astonishment and gratitude for their achievements;
but it may be observed that the thinkers and philosophers to whom
he refers most fondly are chiefly those older magnates, including
Bacon, Newton, Locke, and Bishop Butler among the English, whose
struggle was over long ago, whose results are an accepted
inheritance, and who are now standards of orthodoxy. All later drifts
of speculative thought, and especially the latest drifts of his own day,
seem to have made him uncomfortable. He actually warns against
them as products of what he calls “the lust of innovation.” This is a
matter of so much consequence in the study of Dr. John Brown’s
character that it ought not to be passed over lightly.
There can be no doubt that his dislike of the purely speculative
spirit, and especially of recent speculation of certain kinds, was
rooted in some degree in the fine devoutness of his nature, his
unswerving fidelity to his inherited religion. The system of beliefs
which had been consecrated for him so dearly and powerfully by the
lives and example of his immediate progenitors was still
substantially that with which he went through the world himself,
though it had been softened in the course of transmission, stripped
of its more angular and sectarian features, and converted into a
contemplative Religio Medici, not unlike that of his old English
namesake, the philosopher and physician of Norwich. Like that
philosopher, for whom he had all the regard of a felt affinity, he
delighted in an O altitudo!, craved the refuge of an O altitudo! in all
the difficulties of mere reason, and held that in that craving itself
there is the sure gleam for the human spirit of the one golden key
that unlocks those difficulties. A difference, however, between him
and old Browne of Norwich is that he had much less of clear and
definite thought, of logical grasp of prior propositions and
reasonings, with which to prepare for an altitudo, justify it, and prop
it up. Take as a specimen a passage relating to that very distinction
between Art and Science which he valued so much:—
“It may be thought that I have shown myself, in this parallel and contrast, too
much of a partisan of Art as against Science, and the same may be not unfairly said
of much of the rest of this volume. It was in a measure on purpose,—the general
tendency being counteractive of the purely scientific and positive, or merely
informative, current of our day. We need to remind ourselves constantly that this
kind of knowledge puffeth up, and that it is something quite else that buildeth up.
It has been finely said that Nature is the Art of God, and we may as truly say that
all Art,—in the widest sense, as practical and productive,—is His Science. He knows
all that goes to the making of everything; for He is Himself, in the strictest sense,
the only maker. He knows what made Shakespeare and Newton, Julius Cæsar and
Plato, what we know them to have been; and they are His by the same right as the
sea is His, and the strength of the hills, for He made them and His hands formed
them, as well as the dry land. This making the circle for ever meet, this bringing
Omega eternally round to Alpha, is, I think, more and more revealing itself as a
great central, personal, regulative truth, and is being carried down more than ever
into the recesses of physical research, where Nature is fast telling her long-kept
secrets: all her tribes speaking, each in their own tongue, the wonderful works of
God,—the sea saying ‘It is not in me,’ everything giving up any title to anything like
substance, beyond being the result of one Supreme Will. The more chemistry, and
electrology, and life, are searched into by the keenest and most remorseless
experiment, the more do we find ourselves admitting that motive power and force,
as manifested to us, is derived, is in its essence immaterial, is direct from Him in
whom we live and move, and to whom, in a sense quite peculiar, belongeth power.”
This is fine, it is eloquent, it is likeable; but one cannot call it
lucid. Indeed, if interpreted literally, it is incoherent, for the end
contradicts the beginning. “Abstain from excess of theory or
speculation,” it substantially says, “for theory and speculation, when
prosecuted to the very utmost, lead to a profound religiousness.”
This is the only verbal construction of the passage; but it is the very
opposite of what was meant.
It is much the same with Dr. John Brown in smaller matters. If
he wants a definition or a distinction on any subject, he generally
protests first against the desire for definitions and distinctions,
maintaining the superiority of healthy practical sense and feeling
over mere theory; then he produces, in his own words, some “middle
axiom,” or passable first-hand notion on the subject, as sufficient for
the purpose if anything theoretical is wanted; and then he proceeds
to back this up by interesting quotations from favourite and
accredited authors. In short, Dr. John Brown lived in an element of
the “middle propositions,” the accredited axioms, on all subjects, and
was impatient of reasoning, novelty of theory, or search for ultimate
principles. It is but the same thing in another form,—though it
deserves separate statement,—to say that he disliked controversy. He
shrank from controversy in all matters, social as well as intellectual;
was irritated when it came near him; and kept rather on the
conservative side in any new “cause” or “movement” that was
exciting his neighbourhood. Perhaps the most marked exception in
his writings to this disposition to rest in existing social
arrangements, and also to his prevailing dislike of speculation, was
his assertion of his unhesitating assent to that extreme development
of Adam Smith’s doctrines which would abolish the system of state-
licensing for particular professions, or at all events for the profession
of Medicine. He advocates this principle more than once in his
papers, and he signifies his adherence to it in almost the last words
he wrote. “I am more convinced than ever,” he says in the prefatory
note to the collected edition of his Horæ Subsecivæ, “of the futility
and worse of the Licensing System, and think, with Adam Smith, that
a mediciner should be as free to exercise his gifts as an architect or a
mole-catcher. The public has its own shrewd way of knowing who
should build its house or catch its moles, and it may quite safely be
left to take the same line in choosing its doctor.” This is bold enough,
and speculative enough; but the fact is that this acceptance of the
principle of absolute laissez-faire, or non-interference of the state, or
any other authority, in Medicine, or in any analogous art or craft, was
facilitated for him by his hereditary Voluntaryism in Church matters,
and indeed came to him ready-made in that form. What is
surprising, and what corroborates our view of the essentially non-
theoretical character of his intellect, is the unsystematic manner in
which he was content to hold his principle, his failure to carry it out
consistently, his apparent inability to perceive the full sweep of its
logical consequences. Thus, to the words just quoted he appends
these,—“Lawyers, of course, are different, as they have to do with the
state, with the law of the land.” Was there ever a more innocent non
sequitur? If any one may set up as a curer of diseases and make a
living in that craft by charging fees from those who choose to employ
him, why may not any one set up as a lawyer, and why may not I
select and employ any one I please to plead my cause in court,
instead of being bound to employ one of a limited number of wigged
and gowned gentlemen?
If, then, it was not in theory or speculation that Dr. John Brown
excelled,—and that there was no deficiency of hereditary speculative
faculty in his family, but much the reverse, is proved not only by the
theological distinction of his predecessors in the family, and by the
brilliant career of his cousin, Dr. Samuel Brown, but also by the
reputation among us at this moment of his still nearer relative, the
eminent Philosophical Chemist of Edinburgh University,—in what
was it that he did excel? It was in what I may call an unusual
appreciativeness of all that did recommend itself to him as good and
admirable. In few men has there been such a fulfilment of the
memorable apostolic injunction: “Whatsoever things are true,
whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are just,
whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever
things are of good report,—if there be any virtue, and if there be any
praise,—think on these things.” The context of that passage shows
that what was enjoined on the Philippians was a habit of meditative
and ruminative appreciation of all that was noteworthy, of every
variety, within accredited and prescribed limits. Dr. John Brown was
a model in this respect. Within the limits of his preference for the
concrete and practical over the abstract and theoretical, he was a
man of peculiarly keen relish for anything excellent, and of peculiar
assiduity in imparting his likings to others.
His habit of appreciativeness is seen, on the small scale, even in
such a matter as his appropriation and use of pithy phrases and
anecdotes picked up miscellaneously. “‘Pray, Mr. Opie, may I ask
what you mix your colours with?’ said a brisk dilettante student to
the great painter. ‘With brains, sir,’ was the gruff reply.” Having met
this story in some Life of the painter Opie, Dr. John Brown had
fastened on it, or it had adhered to him; and not only did he hang
one whole paper on it, entitled With Brains, Sir, but he made it do
duty again and again in other papers. At times when Dr. Chalmers
happened to be talked to about some person not already known to
him, and was told that the person was a man of ability, “Yes, but has
he wecht, Sir, has he wecht?” was his common question in reply;
and, as Dr. John Brown had also perceived that it is not mere
cleverness that is effective in the world, and that weight is the main
thing, he was never tired of bringing in Dr. Chalmers’s phrase to
enforce that meaning. When Dr. John wanted to praise anything of
the literary kind as being of the most robust intellectual quality, not
food for babes but very “strong meat” indeed, he would say “This is
lions’ marrow.” As he was not a man to conceal his obligations, even
for a phrase, we learn from him incidentally that he had taken the
metaphor originally from this passage in one of the pieces of the
English poet Prior:—
“That great Achilles might employ
The strength designed to ruin Troy,
He dined on lions’ marrow, spread
On toasts of ammunition bread.”
Dr. John had a repertory of such individual phrases and aphorisms,

picked up from books or conversation, which he liked to use as
flavouring particles for his own text. He dealt largely also in extracts
and quotations of greater length. Any bit that struck him as fine in a
new book of verses, any scrap of old Scottish ballad not generally
known, any interesting little poem by a friend of his own that he had
seen in manuscript, or any similar thing communicated to him as not
having seen the light before, was apt to be pounced upon, stamped
with his imprimatur, and turned into service in his own papers, as
motto, relevant illustration, or pleasant addition. His fondness for
quotation from his favourite prose authors has already been
mentioned. In fact, some of his papers are little more than patches of
quotations connected by admiring comments. In such cases it is as if
he said to his readers, “How nice this is, how capital! don’t you agree
with me?” Sometimes you may not quite agree with him, or you may
wish that he had thrown fewer quotations at you, and had said more
on the subject out of his own head; but you always recognise his
appreciativeness.
On the larger scale of the papers themselves the same
appreciativeness is discernible. Take first the papers which are most
in the nature of criticisms. Such are those entitled Henry Vaughan,
Arthur H. Hallam, Thackeray’s Death, Notes on Art, John Leech,
Halle’s Recital, and Sir Henry Raeburn. Whether in the literary
papers of this group, or in the art papers, you can see how readily
and strongly Dr. John Brown could admire, and what a propagandist
he was of his admirations. If Henry Vaughan the Silurist, the quaint
and thoughtful English poet of the seventeenth century, is now a
better known figure in English literary history than he was a
generation ago, it is owing, I believe, in some measure, to Dr. John
Brown’s resuscitation of him. So, when Tennyson’s In Memoriam
appeared in 1850, and all the world was moved by that extraordinary
poem, who but Dr. John Brown could not rest till he had ascertained
all that was possible about young Arthur Hallam, by obtaining a copy
of his “Remains in Verse and Prose,” privately printed in 1834, with a
memoir by the author’s father, Hallam the historian, and till he had
been permitted to give to the public, in liberal extracts from the
memoir, and by quotation from the pieces themselves, such an
authentic account of Tennyson’s dead friend as all were desiring?
The paper called Thackeray’s Death, though the only paper on
Thackeray now to be found among Dr. John Brown’s collected
writings, is by no means, I believe, the only paper he wrote on
Thackeray. If there was a Thackeray-worshipper within the British
Islands, it was Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh. Thackeray was his
greatest man by far, after Scott, or hardly after Scott, among our
British novelists,—his idol, almost his demigod; he had signified this,
if I mistake not, in an article on Thackeray while Thackeray’s fame
was still only in the making; and the particular paper now left us is
but a re-expression of this high regard for Thackeray as an author,
blended with reminiscences of his own meetings with Thackeray in
Edinburgh, and testimonies of his warm affection for the man.
Another of his chief admirations was Ruskin. I can remember how,
when the first volume of the Modern Painters appeared, the rumour
of it ran at once through Edinburgh, causing a most unusual stir of
interest in the new book, and in the extraordinary “Oxford Graduate”
who was its author; and I am pretty sure now that it was Dr. John
Brown that had first imported the book among us, and had
enlightened Dr. Chalmers and others as to its merits. There is no
article on Ruskin among the collected papers; but there are frequent
references to him, and his influence can be discerned in all the Art-
criticisms. These Art-criticisms of Dr. John Brown, however, are
hardly criticisms in the ordinary sense. No canons of Art are
expounded or applied in them. All that the critic does is to stand, as
it were, before the particular picture he is criticising,—a Wilkie, a
Raeburn, a Turner, a Landseer, a Delaroche, a Holman Hunt, or, as it
might happen, some new performance by one of his Edinburgh
artist-friends, Duncan, Sir George Harvey, or Sir Noel Paton,—
exclaiming “How good this is, how true, how powerful, how
pathetic!” while he attends to the direct human interest of the
subject, interprets the story of the picture in his own way, and throws
in kindly anecdotes about the painter. It is the same, mutatis
mutandis, for music, in his notices of pieces by Beethoven and
others, as heard at Halle’s concerts. His most elaborate paper of Art-
criticism is that entitled John Leech. It is throughout a glowing
eulogium on the celebrated caricaturist, with notices of some of his
best cartoons, but passing into an affectionate memoir of the man,
on his own account and as the friend of Thackeray, and indeed
incorporating reminiscences of Leech and Thackeray that had been
supplied him by a friend of both as material for a projected Memoir
of Leech on a larger scale. If not in this particular paper, at least here
and there in some of the others, the query may suggest itself whether
the laudation is not excessive. One asks sometimes whether the good
Dr. John was not carried away by the amiable fault of supposing that
what happens to be present before one of a decidedly likeable kind at
any moment, especially if it be recommended by private friendship,
must be the very nonsuch of its kind in the whole world. Another
query forced on one is whether there did not sometimes lurk under
Dr. John’s superlative admiration of a chief favourite in any walk an
antipathy to some other in the same walk. It is told of Sir Philip
Francis, the reputed author of Junius, that, when he was an old man,
he gave this counsel to a promising young member of the House of
Commons whom he had heard deliver a speech distinguished by the
generosity of its praises of some of his fellow-members,—“Young
man, take my advice; never praise anybody unless it be in odium
tertii,” i.e. “unless it be to the discredit of some third party.” No man
ever acted less in the spirit of this detestable, this truly diabolic,
advice than Dr. John Brown; and one’s question rather is whether he
did not actually reverse it by never attacking or finding fault with any
one unless it were in laudem tertii, to the increased credit of some
third party. Whether he was so actuated, consciously or
unconsciously, in his declaration of irreconcilable dislike to Maclise,
and his exceptionally severe treatment of that artist, I will not
venture to say; but I can find no other sufficient explanation of his
habitual depreciation of Dickens. His antipathy to Dickens, his
resentment of any attempted comparison between Dickens and
Thackeray, was proverbial among his friends, and amounted almost
to a monomania.
While, as will have been seen, Dr. John was by no means
insensible to impressions from anything excellent coming from
besouth the Tweed, it was naturally in his own Scotland, and among
the things and persons immediately round about him there, that his
faculty of appreciation revelled most constantly. With the majority of
his literary fellow-countrymen that have attained popularity in
Scotland during the last fifty years, he derived many of his literary
instincts from the immense influence of “Scotticism” which had been
infused into the preceding generation, and is seen, in his choice of
themes, following reverently in the wake of the great Sir Walter. He
reminds one somewhat of Aytoun in this respect, though with a
marked Presbyterian difference. Most of his papers are on Scottish
subjects; and in some of them, such as his Queen Mary’s Child-
Garden, his Minchmoor, the paper called The Enterkin, that entitled
A Jacobite Family, and that entitled Biggar and the House of
Fleming, we have descriptions of Scottish scenes and places very
much in the spirit of Sir Walter, though by no means slavishly so,
with notes of their historical associations, and recovery of local
legends, romances, and humours. In a more original vein, though
also principally Scottish, are those papers which may be described as
memoirs and character-sketches in a more express sense than the
three or four already referred to as combining memoir with criticism.
By far the most important of these is his Memoir of his own Father,
in supplement to the Life of his Father by the Rev. Dr. John Cairns,
and published under the too vague title of Letter to John Cairns,
D.D. It is a really beautiful piece of writing, not only full of filial
affection, and painting for us his father’s life and character with vivid
fidelity, but also interesting for its reminiscences of the author’s own
early years, and its sketches of several eminent ministers of the
Scottish Secession communion whom he had known as friends of his
father. The paper entitled Dr. Chalmers, though not particularly
good, attests the strength of the impression made by that great man
on Dr. John Brown, as on every one else that knew Dr. Chalmers.
Better, and indeed fine, though slight, are Edward Forbes, Dr.
George Wilson, The Duke of Athole, Struan, and Miss Stirling
Graham of Duntrune. On the whole, however, the most
characteristic papers of the Memoir class are those of Medical
Biography, including Locke and Sydenham, Dr. Andrew Combe, Dr.
Henry Marshall and Military Hygiene, Our Gideon Grays, Dr.
Andrew Brown and Sydenham, Dr. Adams of Banchory, Dr. John
Scott and His Son, Mr. Syme, and Sir Robert Christison. Sydenham
was Dr. John Brown’s ideal of a physician, and his account of that
English physician and of his place in the history of medicine is of
much value. The medical profession is indebted to him also for his
warm-hearted vindication of those whom he calls, after Scott, “Our
Gideon Grays,”—the hard-working and often poorly paid medical
practitioners of our Scottish country villages and parishes,—and for
the justice he has done to such a scholarly representative of that class
as the late Dr. Adams of Banchory, and to such recent medical
reformers as Dr. Andrew Combe and Dr. Henry Marshall. Especially
interesting to us here ought to be the obituary sketches of Syme and
Christison, so recently the ornaments of the Medical School of
Edinburgh University. He threw his whole heart into his sketch of
Syme, his admiration of whom, dating from the days when he had
been Syme’s pupil and apprentice in surgery, had been increased by
life-long intimacy. I may therefore dwell a little on this sketch, the
rather because it reminds me of perhaps the only occasion on which I
was for some hours in the society of Syme and Dr. John Brown
together.
In the autumn of 1868, Carlyle, then Lord Rector of our
University, and in the seventy-third year of his age, was persuaded,
on account of some little ailment of his, to come to Edinburgh and
put himself under the care of Professor Syme for surgical treatment.
Syme, proud of such a patient, and resolved that he should have his
best skill, would hear of no other arrangement than that Carlyle
should be his guest for the necessary time. For a fortnight or more,
accordingly, Carlyle resided with Syme in his beautiful house of
Millbank in the southern suburb of our city. Pains were taken to
prevent the fact from becoming known, that Carlyle might not be
troubled by visitors. But one day, when Carlyle was convalescent,
there was a quiet little dinner party at Millbank to meet him. Besides
Syme and Carlyle, and one or two of the members of Syme’s family,
there were present only Dr. John Carlyle, Dr. John Brown, and
myself. It was very pleasant, at the dinner table, to observe the
attention paid by the manly, energetic, and generally peremptory and
pugnacious, little surgeon to his important guest, his satisfaction in
having him there, and his half-amused, half-wondering glances at
him as a being of another genus than his own, but whom he had
found as lovable in private as he was publicly tremendous. There was
no “tossing and goring of several persons” by Carlyle, in that dining-
room at all events, but only genial and cheerful talk about this and
that. After dinner, we five went upstairs to a smaller room, where the
talk was continued, still more miscellaneously, Syme and Carlyle
having most of it. That very day there had been sent to Carlyle, by his
old friend David Laing, a copy of the new edition which Laing had
just privately printed of the rare Gude and Godly Ballates by the
brothers Wedderburn, originally published in 1578; and Carlyle,
taking up the volume from the table, would dip into it here and there,
and read some passages aloud for his own amusement and ours. One
piece of fourteen stanzas he read entire, with much gusto, and with
excellent chaunt and pronunciation of the old Scotch. Here are three
of the stanzas:—
“Thocht thow be Paip or Cardinall,
Sa heich in thy Pontificall,
Resist thow God that creat all,
Than downe thou sall cum, downe.
“Thocht thow be Archebischop or Deane,

Chantour, Chanslar, or Chaplane,
Resist thow God, thy gloir is gane,
And downe thow sall cum, downe.
“Thocht thow flow in Philosophie,

Or graduate in Theologie,
Yit, and thow fyle the veritie,
Than downe thow sall cum, downe.”
Most pleasant of all it was when, later in the evening, we moved to

the low trellised verandah on the south side of the house, opening on
the beautiful garden of flowers and evergreens in which Syme took
such delight. It was a fine, still evening; and, as the talk went on in
the open air, with the garden stretching in front of us and the views
of the hills beyond, only with the accompaniment now of wreaths of
tobacco-smoke, Syme, who disliked tobacco, was smilingly tolerant
even of that accompaniment, in honour of the chief smoker.
For more than twelve years after that evening, which I
remember now like a dream, Carlyle was still in the land of the living,
advancing from his seventy-third year to his eighty-sixth; but hardly
a year of the twelve had elapsed when the great surgeon who had
entertained him, and who was so much his junior, was struck by the
paralysis which carried him off. It is from Dr. John Brown that we
have this touching record of Syme’s last days:—
“I was the first to see him when struck down by hemiplegia. It was in
Shandwick Place, where he had his chambers,—sleeping and enjoying his evenings
in his beautiful Millbank, with its flowers, its matchless orchids and heaths and
azaleas, its bananas and grapes and peaches: with Blackford Hill,—where Marmion
saw the Scottish host mustering for Flodden,—in front, and the Pentlands, with
Cairketton Hill, their advanced guard, cutting the sky, its ruddy porphyry scaur
holding the slanting shadows in its bosom. He was, as before said, in his room in
Shandwick Place, sitting in his chair, having been set up by his faithful Blackbell.
His face was distorted. He said—‘John, this is the conclusion’; and so it was, to his,
and our, and the world’s sad cost. He submitted to his fate with manly fortitude,
but he felt it to the uttermost,—struck down in his prime, full of rich power, abler
than ever to do good to men, his soul surviving his brain, and looking on at its
steady ruin during many sad months. He became softer, gentler,—more easily
moved, even to tears; but the judging power, the perspicacity, the piercing to the
core, remained untouched. Henceforward, of course, life was maimed. How he
bore up against this, resigning his delights of teaching, of doing good to men, of
seeing and cherishing his students, of living in the front of the world,—how he
accepted all this only those nearest him can know. I have never seen anything more
pathetic than when, near his death, he lay speechless, but full of feeling and mind,
and made known in some inscrutable way to his old gardener and friend that he
wished to see a certain orchid which he knew should be then in bloom. The big,
clumsy, knowing Paterson, glum and victorious (he was for ever getting prizes at
the Horticultural), brought it,—the Stanhopea Tigrina,—in without a word. It was
the very one,—radiant in beauty, white, with a brown freckle, like Imogen’s mole,
and, like it, ‘right proud of that most delicate lodging.’ He gazed at it, and, bursting
into a passion of tears, motioned it away as insufferable.”
To have been such a chronicler of the excellent as Dr. John
Brown was required more than endowment, however extraordinary,
in any mere passive quality of appreciativeness. It required the poetic
eye, the imaginative faculty in its active form, the power of infusing
himself into his subject, the discernment and subtlety of a real artist.
Visible to some extent in his criticisms of books and pictures, and
also in his memoirs and character-sketches, and in a still higher
degree in those papers of local Scottish description, legend, and
reminiscence to which I have already referred,—Queen Mary’s Child
Garden, Minchmoor, The Enterkin, A Jacobite Family, and Biggar
and the House of Fleming,—this rising of sympathetic appreciation
into poetic art and phantasy appears most conspicuously of all in
those papers or parts of papers in which the matter is whimsical or
out of the common track. Perhaps it is his affection for out-of-the-
way subjects, evident even in the titles of some of his papers, that has
led to the comparison of Dr. John Brown with Charles Lamb. Like
that English humourist, he did go into odd corners for his themes,—
still, however, keeping within Scottish ground, and finding his
oddities, whether of humour or of pathos, in native Scottish life and
tradition. Or rather, by his very appreciativeness, he was a kind of
magnet to which stray and hitherto unpublished curiosities, whether
humorous or pathetic, floating in Scottish society, attached
themselves naturally, as if seeking an editor. In addition to the
illustrations of this furnished by the already-mentioned papers of
Scottish legend, or by parts of them, one may mention now his paper
entitled The Black Dwarf’s Bones, that entitled Mystifications, his
Marjorie Fleming or Pet Marjorie, his Jeems the Doorkeeper, and
the quaint little trifle entitled Oh! I’m wat, wat. In the first three of
these Dr. John Brown is seen distinctly as the editor of previously
unpublished curiosities. There were relics of information respecting
that strange being, David Ritchie, the deformed misanthropist of
Peeblesshire, who had been the original of one of Scott’s shorter
novels. These came to Dr. John Brown, and he strung them together,
extracts and quotations, on a thread of connecting narrative. Again,
having had the privilege of knowing intimately that venerable Miss
Stirling Graham of Duntrune who is the subject of one of his
memorial sketches, and who used to reside in Edinburgh every
winter till within a few years of her death in 1877 at the age of ninety-
five, who but Dr. John Brown first persuaded the venerable lady to
give to the world her recollections of her marvellous dramatic feats in
her earlier days, when she used to mystify Scott, and Jeffrey, and
Lord Gillies, and John Clerk of Eldin, and Count Flahault, and whole
companies of their contemporaries in Edinburgh drawing-rooms, by
her disguised appearances in the dress and character of an eccentric
old Scottish gentlewoman; and who but Dr. John immortalised the
tradition by telling her story over again, and re-imagining for us the
whole of that Edinburgh society of 1820–21 in which Miss Stirling
Graham had moved so bewitchingly? Ten years before that, or in
December 1811, there had died in Edinburgh a little girl of a family
with whom Scott was particularly intimate, and who lived near him.
She was but in her ninth year; but for several years she had been the
pet and wonder of her friends, for her childish humours and abilities,
her knowledge of books and poetry, the signs of a quaint genius in
her behaviour, and in her own little exercises in prose and in verse.
Many a heart was sore, Scott’s for one, we are told, when poor little
“Pet Marjorie” died; and no one that knew her ever forgot her. One
sister of hers, who survived her for seventy years, cherished her
memory to the last like a religion, and had preserved all her childish
and queerly spelt letters and journals, with other scraps of writing,
tied up with a lock of her light-brown hair. To these faded letters and
papers Dr. John Brown had access; and the result was his exquisitely
tender Pet Marjorie or Marjorie Fleming,—the gem in its kind
among all his papers, and perhaps the most touching illustration in
our language of Shakespeare’s text, “How quick bright things come to
confusion!” Here, as in some other cases, it may be said that Dr.
John Brown only edited material that came ready to his hand. Even
in that view of the matter, one could at least wish that there were
more such editing; but it is an insufficient view. He had recovered
the long-dead little Marjorie Fleming for himself; and the paper,
though consisting largely of quotations and extracts, is as properly
his own as any of the rest. But, should there be a disposition still with
some to distinguish between editing and invention, and to regard
Mystifications and Marjorie Fleming as merely well-edited
curiosities of a fascinating kind, no such distinction will trouble one
who passes to Jeems the Doorkeeper. A real person, as the writer
tells us, sat for that sketch too, and we have a portrait of the actual
Jeems who officiated as his father’s beadle in Broughton Place
Church; but with what originality and friskiness of humour is the
portrait drawn, and how fantastically the paper breaks in the end
into streaks of a skyward sermon! There is the same quaint
originality, or Lamb-like oddity of conglomerate, in the little
fragment called “Oh, I’m wat, wat,” and in one or two other trifles,
with similarly fantastic titles, which I have not named.
There is no better test of imaginative or poetic faculty in a man
than susceptibility to anything verging on the preternaturally solemn
or ghastly. Of the strength of this susceptibility in Dr. John Brown’s
nature there are evidences, here and there, in not a few of his
writings. Take for example the following reminiscence, in his paper
entitled Thackeray’s Death, of a walk with Thackeray in one of the
suburbs of Edinburgh:—
“We cannot resist here recalling one Sunday evening in December when he
was walking with two friends along the Dean Road, to the west of Edinburgh,—one
of the noblest outlets to any city. It was a lovely evening,—such a sunset as one
never forgets: a rich dark bar of cloud hovered over the sun, going down behind the
Highland hills, lying bathed in amethystine bloom; between this cloud and the hills
there was a narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender cowslip colour, lucid, and as it
were the very body of heaven in its clearness; every object standing out as if etched
upon the sky. The north-west end of Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay
in the heart of this pure radiance; and there a wooden crane, used in the quarry
below, was so placed as to assume the figure of a cross: there it was, unmistakable,
lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three gazed at it silently. As they gazed, he
gave utterance, in a tremulous, gentle, and rapid voice, to what we all were feeling,
in the word ‘Calvary!’ The friends walked on in silence, and then turned to other
things.”
Even a more remarkable example is that furnished by the paper
entitled “In Clear Dream and Solemn Vision.” The paper purports to
be the record of a singular dream, dreamt by a man whom Dr. John
Brown counted among his friends, and of whose great abilities,
powers of jest and whimsical humour, and powers of a still higher
kind, there are yet recollections in the lawyer-world of Edinburgh,—
the late A. S. Logan, Sheriff of Forfarshire. I prefer here to tell the
dream in my own words, as it has remained in my memory since I
first heard it described many years ago. This I do because, while the
version of it I have so retained came to me originally from Dr. John
Brown himself, it seems to me better than the version subsequently
given by him in his own paper, attenuated as it is there by
explanations and comments, and by the insertion of a weak metrical
expansion of it by Logan himself.
The Dream may be entitled The Death of Judas, and was as
follows:—The dreamer seemed to be in a lonely, dreary landscape
somewhere, the nearer vicinity of which consisted of a low piece of
marshy ground, with dull, stagnant pools, overgrown with reeds. The
air was heavy and thick: not a sound of life, or sight of anything
indicating human presence or habitation, save that on the other side
of the marshy ground from the dreamer, and near the margin of the
pools and reeds, was what seemed to be a deserted wooden hut, the
door half-broken, and the side-timbers and rafters also ragged, so
that through the rifts there was a dim perception of the dark interior.
But lo! as the dreamer gazed, it appeared as if there were a motion of
something or other within the hut, signs of some living thing in it
moving uneasily and haggardly to and fro. Hardly has one taken
notice of this when one is aware of a new sight outside the hut,—a
beautiful dove, or dove-like bird, of spotless white, that has somehow
stationed itself close to the door, and is brooding there, intent and
motionless, in a guardian-like attitude. For a while the ugly, ragged
hut, with the mysterious signs of motion inside of it, and this white
dove-like creature outside at its door, are the only things in the
marshy tract of ground that hold the eye. But, suddenly, what is this
third thing? Round from the gable of the hut it emerges slowly
towards the marshy front, another bird-like figure, but dark and
horrible-looking, with long and lean legs and neck, like a crane. Past
the hut it stalks and still forward, slowly and with loathsome gait, its
long neck undulating as it moves, till it has reached the pools and
their beds of reeds. There, standing for a moment, it dips down its
head among the reeds into the ooze of one of the pools; and, when it
raises its head again, there is seen wriggling in its mouth something
like a small, black, slimy snake, or worm. With this in its mouth, it
stalks slowly back, making straight for the white dove that is still
brooding at the door of the hut. When it has reached the door, there
seems to be a struggle of life and death between the two creatures,—
the obscene, hideous, crane-like bird, and the pure, white innocent,—
till, at last, by force, the dove is compelled to open its throat, into
which its enemy drops the worm or snake. Immediately the dove
drops dead; and at that same instant the mysterious motion within
the hut increases and becomes more violent,—no mere motion now,

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Migration, Culture and Identity: Making

Home Away Yasmine Shamma

ISSN 2520-8896 ISSN 2520-890X (electronic)

Dawn Chatty is Emeritus Professor in Anthropology and Forced Migration

Rumana Hashem is a political sociologist and a lecturer in Sociology at

Thomas Shaw is Associate Director for Digital Innovation & Open

Making Home Away: Introduction

Helen Underhill, Vicki Squire, Yasmine Shamma,

This is a book about homemaking in situations of migration and displace-

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Remaking Home Through Displacement

The materiality as well as the symbolism of homemaking is something

experiences of home and displacement. Based on qualitative research with

and progressive. The chapter focuses on the experience of Syrian refugees

their re/making. Collectively we therefore point to the importance of a

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 11

gradually created in exile in Damascus, and situating this narrative in a

Contextualizing a Shared History

for long. Eventually being Syrian meant being part of a multi-cultural,

Mass Influx and Asylum in the Ottoman Empire

Deterritorialized Belonging and Social Duty

political realism. European nineteenth century economic and political

require national legislation to be implemented; the stranger is accepted

Watfa’ Remembers Damascus

we lived in was owned by the Shanawanis. Let me show you something.

After school we had to go straight back home. We were not allowed to

‘Sharak’—favourite treats for kids in those days—we dipped the toast in

Conclusion: Pursuing Home

living side by side’. Her sense of being Palestinian is pronounced at first,

Refugee-Refugee Hosting as Home

The lingering presence of home pervades many discussions of forced

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 31

refugee-­refugee hosting, as a relation of care, provides for the possibility

Refugee Hosting as an Act of Care

Looks to essence and cause.

Looks to symptoms and occasions.

Now, in the particular matter in question, so far as it is here

Dr. John had a repertory of such individual phrases and aphorisms,

“Thocht thow be Archebischop or Deane,

“Thocht thow flow in Philosophie,

Most pleasant of all it was when, later in the evening, we moved to

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refugee-refugee hosting, as a relation of care, provides for the possibility