Skins of Passage: A photo essay

On the Greek island of Lesbos, we’ve let a man-made hell carve itself a place among the olive groves. We sent our cameras, our journalists, our humanitarians all in an effort to dispel our collective guilt for the horror that has risen: this haggard camp, the station of thousands fleeing other man-made hells. We saw the body of Aylan Kurdi photographed on the shores of Turkey. We held our protests, we shouted, we promised, and we let it happen again, this time with the evidence tucked well underneath the folds of the seas through which they dared seek that delicate possibility of refuge.

We made sure to document the wilting tents of makeshift camps, followed thousands of refugees walking on the side of highways lacing through Europe, then we gated and barbed the borders. We made a short-term station of refuge permanent, a living situation that can be borne only temporarily permanent. We made a few days a few years, a waiting place for the longer journey ahead the end of it all. We could once say that grievous violations of the most basic human rights took place because we didn’t know enough. Then we sent our journalists, and suddenly we knew too much. In both cases, it went on, the wars, the unguarded perilous passages, the uninhabitable camps.

Still, I harbor a deep conviction that it remains our duty to find other avenues to document the barbaric circumstances they have fled from, and, the one they continue to live through today in the camps. It is our responsibility to summon an audience to look once more to a crisis that hasn’t gone away but which, instead, has become too familiar as to be easily overlooked. In other words, our efforts to seek change relies, in part, on our departure from the conventional methods of reporting.

In this case, I couldn’t photograph the mud-stained tarps, the mocking gates, the streams of raw sewage. I sought the story elsewhere, and found it, accidentally, in the skin of those residing in the camps. There were tattoos that harbored precious memories, or, the strains of past nightmares. Some were endearing records of loved ones, inked against the body and held forever in the near gaze of the separated one. For some, they were a way to preserve the memory of an aching loss, and for others, they were inked protests against what has been done to them. And like tattoos in their permanency, there were haunting scars of the past tucked beneath layers of clothing, irrevocable marks that have been inflicted onto them and which often bare the moment their lives departed forever from the comforting realm of an ordinary civilian to the deeply uncertain position of a refugee.

I believe we have a tendency to look for the story in the question, in the past, in the harrowing present we’ve found them in, but there are vast narratives, untold and often hidden on the bodies of many refugees. They are journalists of their own lives, carving their sorrows and heartbreaks, past and current names and faces of lovers onto their skins. Their bodies bare the most candid stories, raw and uncensored, for those seeking to understand the severity of the horrors they’ve borne.

یخ زدم از تنهائى

“I have frozen from loneliness.”

Thaer Moneer 48 (Kamshi, Syria)

“I worship the ground she walks on. I just want to hug her for 2 hours and die…love is so exhausting.” When Thaer had finished his time in the army, he fell deeply in love with a woman in his town. Her parents, however, hated him for his family’s bad reputation, and although he would go on to marry her and have kids, her parent’s hatred, he says, always found its way to him. Some years after their marriage, his wife returned to live with her parents. One day, he went to visit her, and when he arrived, her parents told him that she and the kids had left to Turkey.

Thaer started taking drugs to deal with his sorrow. He was using heroin and marijuana, and then soon found himself sleeping on the streets. “I hated my life,” Thaer confesses. But soon afterwards, he was able to end his addiction with the help of some friends. With his body restored and his mind sober, he decided to look for his family in Turkey. The first two times he tried to cross the border, he was caught by the Turkish police and sent back. The third time, he tried alone at 2 in the afternoon. The border patrol fired a warning shot, but instead of turning back, Thaer told him to go ahead and kill him. “I was dead already,” he recalls, but the border patrol waved him on and let him through the border this time.

He found his family in Izmir, but the joy was short-lived. Soon afterwards his wife’s parents arrived after hearing that Thaer had reached their daughter. “They came to destroy my life,” he says. Still, Thaer decided to send his family on to Europe. He shakes his head and looks away before he goes on. “I sent her to death with my own hands.” Since they’ve separated, his children “have become ink on paper,” and before he sleeps, he lays copies of their passports on his head and imagines them there in the room beside him. A few months ago, Thaer made the journey across the sea himself, with 40 others on the raft. He now waits in Moria where, he says “a person enters with reason and leaves without his mind.”

Basil Muhammad 25 (Aleppo, Syria)

In 2007, Basil got his first tattoo at the end of a relationship at 15. Shortly afterwards, he was taken into prison and forced to confess through torture for a crime he did not commit. While in prison, Basil was electrocuted, which is a common method of torture in Syrian prisons, and, in certain cases, it can go on for years. While he was in prison, he had gone to the bathroom and started cutting himself. He was thinking of ending his life when his friends discovered him there and rescued him. But another man was not so fortunate. Basil tells me that another prisoner had drunk a whole bottle of a creamy white substance, “similar to the one we give out for scabies patients.” He died soon afterwards. Basil also remembers an eight-year-old boy who was taken in for stealing cookies from a local dikkaneh. Almost ten years later, it is this boy that Basil recalls from his time in prison most vividly. It still baffles him that someone so young who had done something so insignificant could be taken into prison for a week.

(Con’t) While Basil was in prison, he had gone to the bathroom and started cutting himself. He was thinking of ending his life when his friends discovered him there and rescued him. But another man was not so fortunate. Basil tells me that another prisoner had drunk a whole bottle of a creamy white substance, “similar to the one we give out for scabies patients.” He died soon afterwards. Basil also remembers an eight-year-old boy who was taken in for stealing cookies from a local dikkaneh. Almost ten years later, it is this boy that Basil recalls from his time in prison most vividly. It still baffles him that someone so young who had done something so insignificant could be taken into prison for a week.

Qazim 26 (Iraq)

Her mouth was pried open, and you couldn’t tell if it was pain or fear that seized her in that moment. She stared at an image somewhere before her, seeing, as we suppose the dying do, something we, with life still in our bodies, could never see. Her last breath seemed to enter, or leave her. Someone close to Qazim had taken her photo as she lay at the curb of her death. This was all he had left of the woman he had loved for four years. That day, she departed from life and entered his body through the blue ink of her image. Qazim held a permanent look of loss and confusion that you often see in those who have suffered beyond their capacity. A man who has lost everything, how can we begin to understand?

Gardi Kardo, 24 (Kurdistan, Iraq)

Kardo’s story is as simple as it is heart-wrenching. He had fallen in love with a woman. That was all, and perhaps, had she not had an uncle who worked in the government and who held strong opinions about their love, it might have ended differently. In the Middle East, a disapproving figure of high-ranking can, with a short string of words and commands, turn your life into a living hell. In Kardo’s case, he had to hide in the house of a relative before fleeing the country. But life here has taken its toll on him. He’s been residing in the camp for a 1 year and 6 months, and he tells me, “I don’t sleep. I go crazy.”

Each day, he tries to find out any information about his asylum status, and each time, he is turned away. His application for asylum has already been rejected once. If it’s rejected for the second time, he can face up to 3 months in jail, and to make matters worse, he’d have to begin “like new,” meaning he may have to wait another year for the processing of his newly submitted application. “Last year,” he tells me, “too many people came from Kurdistan, [and] too many people go back after few months,” due to the despairing conditions of the camp. However, Kardo says, “I can’t go back… If I go back, directly I die.”

Kardo goes on to describe the horrendous conditions of the camp. He shows me a video on his phone taken in the aftermath of an attempted suicide. A noose sways from the pole, and there’s a large, raucous gathering beneath it. He shows me videos of large rats scrummaging in the toilets and around the tents. There are 4 toilets for every 2000 people, he tells me. “I miss the life,” he says between these videos. “The island is very nice, but not for refugees.” He tells me he hasn’t spoken with his mother since he first arrived. He takes pictures of himself besides cars and sends it to her in an effort to shroud the true horror of his circumstances, and to reassure her that all is well.

Kardo is my age, but he looks much older. The lack of sleep and constant stress has affected him tremendously. He doesn’t look like a 24-year-old, but more like a man in his 40s who has suffered unspeakable horrors. I say this in an effort to render, as accurately as possible, the taxing toll of seeking asylum, the way it bends these men and women, and even the children, into figures that bear hardly any resemblance to the individual that first arrived on the island. It’s a disorienting experience, a needlessly complicated and drawn out process. But the one subject that brings a smile to Kardo’s face is when he speaks of England. “I like everything about England,” he says. “If I see t-shirt with flag for England, I buy it, I don’t know why.”

Shuran 30 (Kamishli, Syria)

Shuran has had 18 surgeries since he was injured in the war. He lost his hearing in one ear after a bombing exploded closeby. There are still pieces of shrapnel in his thighs. Despite it all, he tells me, “If I knew I was coming to a prison, I would have stayed in Syria.” Shuran is no stranger to prisons. He spent many years of his life in and out of them, with only few months of respite in between before he’d be taken again by the Syrian government. Shuran is Kurdi, and the Kurds in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey have historically been discriminated against and unjustly treated. In Syria, the Kurds were classified as “a Syrian foreigners” despite being born and raised within the country. Shuran himself was imprisoned because he was part of a group of Kurds who dared “request their rights.” Shuran grew in prison.

He recalls how his pants no longer reached his ankles after he was held there for a year in 2004. In 2007, he attempted to enter Europe illegally to seek asylum, but he was caught by the Turkish police and sent to prison for a year and a half, after which he was sent back to Syria and imprisoned again for his attempt to seek asylum. He was released in 2011, just as the uprising began. The Kurdish people, he says, were given their full rights by the Syrian government when the protests began so that they wouldn’t have an excuse to seek asylum or to join the uprising. They were given the Syrian ID card in place of the IDs they were previously issued. The government, he explained, could now claim to the international community that they gave the Kurds their human rights.

But soon afterwards, ISIS appeared and declared the Kurds as “infidels.” One day in 2016, Shuran and his brother were walking to work when ISIS bombed their town. That day, he says, 150 died, 30 of which were children. Shuran’s arm was severely injured, and his brother lost his hand. Not long afterwards, Shuran was on his way to visit his fiance when ISIS pulled him over and saw that he had cigarettes with him, which was an illegal possession under their regime. They took him in and tortured him. They lit cigarettes and extinguished it along his body, so that he would “remember ISIS each time [he] smoked.”

One day, a few ISIS prison guards were joking around with him and playing with the lighter when Shuran’s cast caught on fire. By the time the fire was extinguished, it had already burned through the cotton and reached his skin. He saw others die in torture. A woman’s hands were cut off because she was accused of stealing. Shuran says there are many Kurdish women who went missing under ISIS and were never heard from again.

Shuran was finally released in a prisoner exchange between ISIS and the Kurds. Soon afterwards, he began his journey to Europe with hopes of seeking treatment for his arm. But after seeing the way refugees are handled in Europe, he says it is better to return to Syria. “I still feel like I am in prison,” he says, “the refugees are treated like sheep here.To die in Syria would have been better.”

“Ameer” 27 (Iran)

When he was a child, his house was burned down by men he believes were sent by the government. His mother died that night in the fire, and his arm was severely burned. His family is Sunni (Sunni being the minority in a largely Shia state), and his father’s involvement in politics was unaccepted by the government. In the end, his father had to run away, and Hassan was raised by his uncles. In the 12 years that followed, he was taken into interrogation numerous times by secret agents demanding to know the whereabouts of his father, though he doesn’t have the slightest idea of where his father had escaped to. And now, more than a decade later, he too is escaping.

Ahmad 18 (Afghanistan)

“This shows how women have two faces,” Ahmad says. His brother turns to me and whispers, “He’s had his heart broken.”

Ahmad “baby” Khaled, 20 (Iraq)

Despite the harrowing circumstances of the camps, and the agonizing process of seeking asylum, many men, and women, hold on to deeply passionate, and often faraway relationships in the form of remarkable, permanent illustrations along their bodies. In the case of Ahmad, who goes by the name “baby,” he’s since had to remove a name he once had inked below the crown. In Arabic, there’s a well-known expression of endearment that calls the loved one, “the crown over my head.” But the woman whose name once laid against his chest, pulsing beneath the crown, has since married another man, and he too, has fallen in love with another woman in Lebanon.

Omar 26 (Syria)

حياتي عذاب

“My life is torment.”

Omar’s wife died in the war. He has the first letter of her name inked against his arm. He was part of the Syrian Free Army, which led the opposition against the Syrian government in the early years of the war. Later, the opposition would weaken as different factions arose, creating internal conflict among people who ultimately desired the same thing: to displace the current Syrian President and his government. With the rise of ISIS in Syria, men from the Syrian Free Army, among many others, such as Kurds and other groups fighting against the government, were prime targets. It appeared that ISIS was assisting the efforts of the presiding government by debilitating the opposition and redirecting the focus of the international community.

Omar was one of many Syrians imprisoned under ISIS. He was held there for a year before he and two others escaped, but shortly afterwards, the two men he had escaped with died beside him in an rbg explosion. The grenade had landed next to a gas tank, killing the two men and burning Omar’s arm. But he continued his escape, and as he did, he dragged the bodies of the two men with him so that ISIS wouldn’t have them.

Mahdi 20 (Afghanistan)

Throughout this project, many men have showed me various faces of women tattooed across their body, and I always ask, “Who is she?” Sometimes, they will take me aside and tell me their stories. Other times, I sense my mistake as I watch their woken sorrows swell in their eyes. Others simply walk away and leave us to wonder.

Isa Khaled, 21 (Nasreyeh, Iraq)

خيط الامل

thread of hope

Isa’s legs were burned in a camp accident, when a nearby gas tank exploded and set his tent on fire. He was able to to emerge in time, but he suffered severe burns on his legs. The camp, for years, has been far above its capacity. There is hardly any space between the tents, and what takes place in one area of the camp, be it a fire, a fight, or an illness, can spread with tremendous speed. For this reason, the conditions remain constantly uncertain and volatile.

Muhammad (Afghanistan)

Tattooed across his neck is the date in which the country of Afghanistan was founded.

On the other side of his arm written in Farsi, it says:

مردي مردانگی آخرش آواره گي

“The man who has left his country makes it nowhere in the end.”

Ahmad Mendeel, 26 (Iraq)

Ahmad stood alone. He was smoking by the entrance, and he seemed to be waiting for someone, or something. When I passed him, I caught sight of the woman on his arms, and I sensed, from the way she was drawn, that I was looking at the face of someone who was no longer on this earth. It was a portrait of farewell, a haunting memory, a noble albeit persistent desire to remember, to hold on. And when I asked, he looked down at her face, and told me she was his “habibti.” Then he lifted his face and said, “but she’s dead.”

I’d hear those words the next day from somebody else, and I wondered just how the agony could be borne, all of it — the war, the fleeing from home, the perilous passage, their detainment on the island, the degrading living conditions — when the loss of someone dear to one’s heart on its own is enough to bring a grown man down on his knees and make the strongest of us surrender to a boundless grief, a sorrow that is overwhelming without any of the other elements mentioned.

But Ahmad has suffered still more, vastly more. He’s lost his entire family to the war. His only surviving sibling had to stay behind in Turkey because she was too frightened to attempt to journey across the sea with him. After all he had said, I couldn’t respond. Nothing seemed sensible or sensitive enough. Some tragedies surpass an undefined boundary that lies between language and the sentiments for which there are no forms of expression.

We were on the other side, and there was only silence as we stared at the face receding into the forest, her features taking on the shape of those innocuous creatures of the wild, her lips slightly parted as if to speak, as if to offer a form for the pain that lies beyond the confines of language.