Welcome Home

Welcome Home

The classroom was in a converted church hall in London, Ontario. The year was 2012. Najwa Zebian was twenty-two years old, eight months in Canada after growing up in Lebanon, and she had been handed a roster of students who had barely spoken English for more than a year. They were children of refugees, many of them freshly arrived from countries whose names the local parents mispronounced. They did not talk much. They stared at the floor when she called on them. They carried with them a specific kind of silence that Zebian recognized instantly -- not shyness, but the silence of someone who has learned that speaking does not lead anywhere good.

She had felt that silence herself. She had packed it into her luggage at sixteen when she fled Lebanon during the 2006 war with Israel and landed in Ontario, a teenager who did not know a single person in the country and did not feel she was allowed to grieve the life she had left behind. The expectation was gratitude. You survived, so be grateful. You have a chance now, so stop looking backward. The silence was the price of admission.

Standing in that classroom, looking at those children, Zebian did not hand out worksheets. She handed out blank journals and told them to write whatever they wanted. No one would read it. No grades. Just words, in any language, on the page. And slowly, something cracked open in both directions -- in her students and in herself. Poetry began to find its way back out of her. She had been journaling since age thirteen to process things she could not say aloud, and the classroom brought the practice back to life. The words she wrote at night after teaching those students became the material for her first book, "Mind Platter," self-published in 2016. They also became the raw material for a realization that would shape everything she wrote afterward: most people are wandering the world looking for a home, and most of the time they are looking in the wrong place.