Far Away in Another Land: One Immigrant’s Story of Incest,Trauma,and Healing

This article is a collection of performance poetry pieces that provide insight into my experiences of childhood abuse. I took refuge in Canada to escape the “patriarchal and misogynistic” sickness that imprisoned girls/women in my family for generations. Recent scholarship is just beginning to address the broader issue of trauma among immigrants and refugees as a result of preimmigration stress resulting from war, natural disasters, religious persecution, and other such horrors. However, very little is known about the violence in their family life—a private domain—pre- and postimmigration. As a child I was forbidden to “write”. So, I wrote on sand and let the waves carry my secrets to the shore. I wrote on imaginary walls. I wrote in the sky. Writing these pieces is/was an expression of my resistance against the disciplinary rules of incest. The sand, walls, and sky became a site of healing and hope.