When I first arrived in Australia, the question seemed simple: “Where are you from?”

But I hesitated because I carried too many answers. “I’m Palestinian,” I’d begin, though

that was only part of the story. “I’m Jordanian,” I’d add, still incomplete. Sometimes, I’d

say, “I’m part Syrian,” a truth written in my grandmother’s hands and steeped in the

cinnamon tea she brews from memory.

My identity isn’t a country. It’s a wound and a prayer. It’s a longing passed down like an

heirloom. I grew up in Jordan, a land that holds the grief of those who were never meant

to stay but had nowhere else to go. Jordan is where the Levant came to grieve and

begin again. The Kingdom welcomed Palestinians fleeing the Nakba and Naksa,

Syrians escaping civil war, Iraqis displaced by foreign invasion, Egyptians seeking work,

Lebanese escaping unrest, alongside Armenians, Chechens, and Circassians, each

carrying broken maps in their hearts. Local Jordanian tribes, despite their own

struggles, said “Ahlan wa sahlan”… you are among your people, you are in an easy and

welcome place.

Grief in Jordan doesn’t leak out in tears. It seeps through walls, through the silence

between conversations, through the eyes of generations who carry too many memories.

It does not scream. It teaches. In Amman, Jordan’s capital, your neighbor might speak

with a Damascus accent. Your barber might hum a tune from Haifa. Your baker might

stretch dough with fingers that once picked olives in Beit Jala. Your cab driver may

never return to the house his father built in Basra. This is the Kingdom of grandparents

who carried keys from homes they never thought they’d leave, and children raised on

stories of cities they may never touch. Our roots lie across fractured borders, but our

branches intertwine.

We live in the aftermath of lines drawn by foreign hands. Colonization didn’t just redraw

borders, it fragmented belonging. The Balfour Declaration, the Sykes-Picot Agreement,

the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and British rule turned entire nations into transit

zones. Families became statistics. Homeland became a theory. We speak in the tense

of what was taken: land, life, dignity. Yet we endure not in spite of this history, but

because of it.

There’s an old saying: Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, Baghdad reads. But what of

Amman? Amman listens. Amman shelters. Amman remembers. It is a city built on

shared sorrow, but also shared bread. It doesn’t know how to walk into a world that

excludes it, so it built a world of its own.

Much of that world is held together by language. We remember through Arabic: fierce,

romantic, poetic, a language that holds grief the way a mother holds her child. We call

those we love ya roohi (my soul يا روحي), ya eini (my eyes يا عيني). These aren’t

metaphors. They are truths. Perhaps that’s why when we love, we love with our souls.

And when we break, we shatter into verses.

“وَفِي القُلُوبِ بَيْنَ دَمْعٍ وذِكْرَى، تَسْكُنُ المَوطِنُ وَتَبْنِي الوِصْلَ قَدْرًا” And in hearts, between tears and

memory, dwells the homeland, and builds the ties of destiny. - Mahmoud Darwish

Even our sacred texts echo this rhythm: “فَإِنَّ مَعَ ٱلْعُسْرِ يُسْرًا”- Indeed, with hardship comes

ease (Qur’an 94:6). This verse isn’t just recited. It’s lived. It’s stitched into the fabric of

Jordan, whispered by every tongue when hardship knocks, when the news darkens,

when the price of bread rises. And five times a day, as the call to prayer floats above

the hills, the city exhales. The honking slows. The markets pause. Even tired shoulders

seem to lift. This is not just faith. It is rhythm. It is breath. It is the heartbeat of a city that

survives not by forgetting its pain, but by praying through it.

This spiritual rhythm makes space for many voices. Churches stand beside mosques.

Sometimes, their bells ring in harmony with the adhan. My Syrian grandmother’s

Christian neighbor hangs Qur’anic verses on her wall, saying it protects her. My

Christian friend fasts with me during Ramadan so we can eat qatayef together, golden

crescents filled with nuts and cream that soften even the hardest fast. During Ramadan,

Jordan’s cities glow with borrowed light, lanterns from Cairo, songs from Damascus,

night markets like Jerusalem.

But Jordan doesn’t breathe through language and prayer alone, it breathes through art,

memory, and the rituals of everyday life. In Madaba, ancient mosaics still whisper. In

Jabal Amman, murals bloom with the colors of those who refuse to forget. Artists blend

sorrow into brushwork; jewelers reimagine heritage as defiance. On Rainbow Street, the

hum of oud and darbuka merges with indie beats, the rhythm of a generation raised

between nostalgia and necessity.

Our memories are oral archives, and our streets are layered with exile. Downtown

Amman smells of cardamom and rain on stone. There’s the falafel stand tucked

between worn limestone walls, the hidden spice shop in Weibdeh where cumin and rose

mingle like old stories, the painted stairs near Paris Circle, the textiles in nearby Al-Salt

stitched with ancestral maps. Even the bookstores leave their volumes unguarded,

because, as the Iraqi saying goes, “readers don’t steal, and thieves don’t read”.

Joy, too, is an act of resistance. We dance dabke at weddings, stamping the ground like

it owes us a homeland. We play football in Hashmi, smear Dead Sea mud on our

cheeks and call it beauty. We lean out of car windows eating knafeh with sticky fingers,

laughing like the world hasn’t tried to silence us. And the Jordanian diaspora who return

from abroad don’t come back for landmarks, they come for the streets where their

laughter once outran their grief, to remember that even pain can belong somewhere.

At home, every child grew up with Al Jazeera humming in the background. We ran

barefoot through homes as the news flashed with bombings and blockades. Our

laughter echoed through rooms that smelled of thyme, even as our parents sat in

silence. We didn’t yet understand what it meant to watch the world burn and still cook

dinner.

And always… always, came that moment on every family road trip, when an uncle

would point across the valley past the Dead Sea and say, “Those mountains are

Palestine” As if we hadn’t heard it a hundred times before. As if we didn’t already dream

of it nightly.

This is not a romantic portrait of Jordan. Jobs are scarce. The land is dry. The future is

unwritten. And yet, there is beauty, not because we imagined it, but because we built it.

Because in a region scarred by exile and silence, Jordan became a refuge where

sorrow could breathe, where strangers became neighbors, where grief folded itself into

rituals, language, and love. This is the truth we live… not soft, not easy, but deeply

human.

To those who know this life, this is a mirror. To those who don’t, it is an invitation: to see

a people not just through the lens of war or scarcity, but through their quiet endurance.

Through the mother whispering ya roohi to her child. Through the boy dancing dabke in

borrowed shoes. Through the mosaic of voices that, even after everything, still call this

kingdom between our hearts… home.