It was not war.
Not exile.
Not a long political speech.
Just an ordinary queue in front of a government window, a school office, or some administrative building. People stood quietly, each carrying their papers, their names, and their clear identities.
And you stood among them… until a cold voice emerged from behind the glass:
“If you are not a citizen… stand outside the queue.”
That is when confusion truly begins.
Should I leave?
But I was born here.
I studied here.
I memorized the names of these streets.
I laughed here for the first time.
My friends are here.
All my memories are here.
How can someone suddenly be asked to stand outside the very place that shaped their entire memory?
So you remain standing inside the queue — not as an act of protest, but simply because you do not yet understand the difference.
You do not fully understand words like:
“Citizen.”
“Resident.”
“Refugee.”
“Foreigner.”
All you know is that you look like the people standing around you. But unfortunately, the world does not always build belonging through resemblance.
And if you insist on staying inside the queue, you slowly learn that you may become a “courtesy citizen.” A diluted version of belonging. Perhaps a second-class citizen… living inside the homeland, but never entirely within it.
You return home carrying that strange feeling — something that is neither complete sadness nor complete anger.
Your mother opens the door.
And before embracing her, you suddenly ask:
“Where are we from?”
She answers with a short sentence capable of reshaping your relationship with life itself:
“We are not from here.”
And from that moment… everything changes.
You realize that a person may spend their entire life inside a country without ever being fully allowed to feel they belong to it.
A feeling captured perfectly in the phrase:
“We belong… to where we do not belong.”
You are born here, raised here, dream here, speak the language of the place, love its people… only to discover too late that none of this is enough to truly become “from here.”
Perhaps that is why exile feels so cruel. Because it does not merely take away your place — it takes away your simple certainty about yourself.
Who am I?
Where do I belong?
And is love alone enough to make a place become home?
In psychology, belonging is considered one of humanity’s fundamental needs. American psychologist Abraham Maslow placed the need for belonging immediately after physiological needs and safety, considering it a psychological necessity no less important than food or shelter.
Human beings do not only need to survive. They need to feel accepted, recognized, and visible within the community they live in.
And when people are deprived of this feeling for long periods, what social psychology calls “psychological alienation” begins to emerge — a chronic feeling that you exist within society… but are never fully part of it.
Modern psychological research shows that people who live in environments where their identity is constantly questioned become more vulnerable to social anxiety, identity disturbances, and emotional detachment from place.
A Harvard University study on identity and belonging among immigrants and diaspora communities found that the persistent feeling of “non-recognition” creates long-term internal tension, even for people who spent their entire lives in the same country.
That is why the question:
“Where are you from?”
is not always innocent.
Sometimes, it is simply a subtle reminder that no matter how integrated you become… you are still “from somewhere else.”
What makes diaspora painful is that people do not experience one exile… but two.
In the country where they live, they are constantly reminded that their roots belong elsewhere. And in their original homeland, they are sometimes treated as though they do not truly know the country anymore.
Their accent sounds slightly different.
Their details are different.
Their memories feel incomplete.
And their image of home is often more romantic than reality itself.
So a person becomes suspended between two places… and foreign to both.
Sociologists call this condition:
“Third Culture Kids.”
People raised between two cultures, whose identity was never fully formed here nor there, forcing them to build a third identity hanging somewhere between both worlds.
American writer Ruth Van Reken describes them as:
“People who carry the ability to belong almost everywhere… without feeling that anywhere fully belongs to them.”
Perhaps this is why nostalgia feels different for children of diaspora.
They do not only long for a place… but for a lost feeling of wholeness.
They long for a homeland they never fully lived in, or only experienced through their mothers’ stories, the smell of coffee, photographs of grandmothers, Fairuz reviving the memory of mornings, Sabah Fakhri filling evenings with the grandeur of traditional songs, and those sentences that always began with:
“Back home in Syria…”
A child grows up carrying a homeland inside language… long before carrying it on a map.
Perhaps that is why Mahmoud Darwish once wrote:
“My homeland is not a suitcase… and I am not a traveler.”
Because a real homeland cannot be reduced to a passport, a residency permit, or a category on an official document.
A real homeland is the place where you do not need to prove every day that you deserve to stand inside the queue.
Adonis once wrote:
“Exile is not a place… but a troubled relationship with the world.”
And that is exactly what prolonged alienation does.
It does not only change your relationship with places… it changes your relationship with yourself.
You become more cautious.
Less spontaneous.
Because the phrase:
“As a stranger, behave carefully.”
echoes through your spirit whenever you begin to feel comfortable somewhere.
You become more sensitive to rejection, constantly trying to be “good enough” to be allowed to stay.
And that is why children of exile often spend their lives trying to prove something invisible… something they cannot fully name.
A permanent ache in the throat.
Perhaps it is the desire to deserve love.
Or place.
Or full recognition that they belong to the land where they planted their dreams.
The real tragedy is not that a person lives outside their homeland…
But that they spend their entire life trying to understand:
Which homeland are they truly allowed to belong to completely?
Perhaps that is why some of us remain standing inside the queue for our entire lives.
Not because we failed to understand the rules…
But because, until this very moment, we are still trying to understand:
“How can someone be the child of a place… and still be asked to stand outside it?”