Throughout the last ten or twelve years, I’ve traveled extensively for work. Much of it throughout Europe and Asia. On average, I would travel twice a month for about a week at a time. Just long enough to get a taste of a new place but not long enough that it became onerous. It was the best part of my job. Of course, as anyone who travels extensively will tell you, it’s impossible to travel that much without it affecting your perspective on life and what might be possible.

Fortunately, as an executive for a large, multinational firm, I knew that making the leap to another country would be a bit easier than going it alone given that the company I work for has an office in almost every major city in the world. So, about five or six years ago, my wife and I decided to look into moving to Amsterdam. We both loved the city and it was a city that made sense for my career and for my role at the firm. So we initiated the process.

After a couple months of gathering approvals, we received a “net pay analysis” of what my new income would be in the Netherlands. It was a 50% cut from my US salary. Yes, it would keep us at the same “standard of living” but it was still a decrease that was tough to swallow. We backed off and scrapped our plans.

Then October 2023 happened. For context, my wife is an incredibly talented Palestinian photojournalist from Gaza. My daughters were also born there. October marked the latest and most brutal stage of a genocide that has been happening for over seventy years. I, too, had some of my own connections to Palestine. I had traveled to Palestine (West Bank) multiple times over the last twenty years as an international humanitarian volunteer and aspiring photojournalist (see below). That is actually how I met my wife for the first time about sixteen years ago. As a result, I was already very well-informed and active in the Palestinian cause since at least 2005. The bloodshed of October, however, was the initial crack in what would become a major break.

As the fibers of the life we had built continued to splinter and tear in the following days and weeks, we knew something had to change. Unfortunately, we had no real control over the things that really needed to change. But we could change how we live. Obviously, we had talked about leaving the US for a while. But at this point, we knew we were done. Something else was pulling us beyond typical “wanderlust”. We decided to make the leap, regardless of the financial outcome of that decision. After all, the calculus of our decision to move abroad had changed from just a couple years before. By late November 2023, I contacted HR at my company and requested to relocate again. This time to Ireland.

Why Ireland?

Ireland made no sense from a professional standpoint. Sure, my company had offices there but it is a tiny market. There wasn’t really any more room for a person at my level to be there. Additionally, there are virtually no people from my “division” in Ireland. But, again, our criteria had shifted. I was no longer interested in career advancement or income. I wanted to be somewhere else. Somewhere I loved. Somewhere that would be safe for my family. Somewhere we would be welcomed as a Palestinian Muslim family. Somewhere we could breathe a little easier. Ireland was the obvious choice.

As an Irish-American in the US (I’m also half-Italian, thanks Mom!), I had learned Irish rebel and drinking songs as early as eight years old, singing them at family gatherings. My first taste of alcohol was two shots of Jameson administered by an uncle when I was around 17 or 18; something I regretted less than an hour later. I had traveled to Ireland at least ten times in the last fifteen years; family vacations, adventure races, and probably hundreds of pints of Guinness. Just the year before, in fact, I had taken my family to Ireland for spring break where we spent an amazing week in Dingle on the west coast.

Finally, and most importantly, Ireland is, by far, the most hospitable and friendly nation in Europe for Palestinians and the Palestinian cause. Just a casual drive through Dublin or any small town would reveal almost as many Palestinian flags as Irish ones.

So, once again, after a few months of gathering approvals and a couple solo trips to secure the favor of key executives, our relocation was approved and my work visa was issued. On the evening of August 15, 2024, the four of us left Washington, DC on a one-way United ticket to Dublin. On August 16, around 8am, our passports were stamped and we were officially residents of Ireland.

About a week after we arrived, our girls began school. Our youngest was going to be in her sixth year at a small Catholic primary school in Dun Laoghaire. On the first day of school, the principal was greeting new students and asking where they were from. When he asked our daughter where she was from, she explained that she was coming from the US but was from Gaza. He leaned in and whispered, “You’re especially welcome here.” Upon entering the school there was already a Palestinian flag flying amidst the flags of other nations, something we had to fight their American schools for two months to accomplish. At that moment, we knew we were home.

So, there you have it. The elephant in the room. It’s hard for me to write about “exile” and a shifting sense of identity without first addressing the catalyst for those changes. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we chose “exile” over “home” and, going forward, that’s why we’ll be working on turning “exile” into “home”. We’re happier and more comfortable than we ever imagined, even though there certainly have been challenges. I’ll share some of them on this journey for sure. But this is where we are and this is where we will remain.

Truth be told, when I would imagine moving to Ireland over the last twenty years, I knew that I’d likely have to live in or around Dublin. I’m not retired (yet) so I’d still need to work and, most likely, the jobs for me would be in Dublin. I fantasized about moving to Ireland. Moving to Dublin, though? Not so much. Is there anything wrong with Dublin? Of course not. But I still maintain that Dublin is still probably my least favorite part of Ireland. Let’s be honest. As a tourist, Dublin isn’t at the top of the list of European capitals. It’s not Rome or Paris or London. There is no Eiffel Tower or Coliseum or Big Ben. There is, however, a large aluminum pole in the city center called “The Spire” that seems to baffle even most Dubliners. Pubs? Of course! People? Absolutely! Some of the best in the world on both accounts. But it’s not a city that is drowning in beautiful sights or typical tourist attractions.

But it’s precisely that unassuming nature that has helped to make Dublin feel much more like home than I imagined it could ever be. There’s a smallness, an almost neighborhood-like quality to the city that is refreshing and welcoming. For the last twenty five years, I’ve lived in Washington, DC, though I am originally from Pittsburgh. Washington, DC, for sure, has more attractions than Pittsburgh. But what makes Dublin feel like a “hometown” is exactly what made Pittsburgh more of a “hometown” than Washington. Ask anyone living in DC. They probably aren’t from there and likely won’t remain forever. In twenty-five years of living in DC, I met one person “from” there. It’s a great city but it’s a transient city, almost by definition.

So what does it mean to be “at home”? Is it just a place where your family and all your stuff is? Does it mean walking into local shops and pubs where everyone knows your name (cue Cheers theme song)? Is it a place where memories inhabit places on a map? Does it mean having regular coffee with neighbors? Or is it, like love, something that you can’t put into words but know when you feel it?

Conversely, what does it mean to be “in exile”? The word conjures up images of medieval criminals being banished to distant lands never to return. Or more recently, the word may make us think of refugees carrying everything on their backs to move somewhere they’ve never seen, never intended to go, and did not choose to go in order to save the one thing that might be more precious than “home” - their lives. The great Palestinian writer, Edward Said, said this about exile:

“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind for ever.” [1]

Am I at home? Or am I in exile? In reality, I am neither. Ireland feels more like home every day and I am positive it will continue to be so. I am also not in true exile. Yes, there is a sorrow in the estrangement I feel toward my home country. But I moved by choice and conviction, not necessity. Some of the closest people in my life are genuinely exiled from their native land, so I certainly do not intend to draw parallels between my voluntary escape and their survival.

In the same essay, though, Said goes on to describe the most famous Irish exile, James Joyce. One cannot Google “Irish and exile” without coming across his writing. (It also helps that I have been a rabid fan of Joyce’s writing since my second trip to Ireland in 2013, when I finally finished Ulysses for the first time after many abandoned efforts.) He says:

“James Joyce chose to be in exile: to give force to his artistic vocation. In an uncannily effective way – as Richard Ellmann has shown in his biography – Joyce picked a quarrel with Ireland and kept it alive so as to sustain the strictest opposition to what was familiar. Ellmann says that ‘whenever his relations with his native land were in danger of improving, [Joyce] was to find a new incident to solidify his intransigence and to reaffirm the Tightness of his voluntary absence.’ Joyce’s fiction concerns what in a letter he once described as the state of being ‘alone and friendless’. And although it is rare to pick banishment as a way of life, Joyce perfectly understood its trials.” [1]

This certainly resonates with me. I’ve had no trouble “solidifying my intransigence” or “reaffirming the tightness of my voluntary absence” in the short two years since I arrived here. Just watch the news. Joyce escaped Ireland to focus on his art outside of the “oppressive” atmosphere of Catholic (and British-occupied) Ireland. On the other hand, I’ve come to Ireland to focus on my own life and that of my family. To turn the page, so to speak, on many simultaneous journeys. Distance sometimes clarifies who we are.

That is where I am. Somewhere between home and exile, running further from the latter and constantly searching for the former. I’ll be writing about it along the way.

(The well-read reader might also have noticed the allusion to Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground in the title of this site, as well. That is, perhaps, the subject of another essay.)

References:

[1]: https://granta.com/reflections-on-exile/

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