As I reflected on Habtat Zerezghi’s prayer after crossing the sea, I found myself thinking about the songs that have quietly guided this journey so far. At first glance, they appear to be songs from different communities, sung in different languages, carrying different histories. Yet beneath their differences, a pattern begins to emerge. Each song appears to address a different dimension of exile. Not exile as a political condition. Exile as a human condition. The grave. The house. The shield. The sea.
These are not merely images. They are archetypes. The grave asks: What do we owe the past? The house asks: What do we owe ourselves? The shield asks: What do we owe one another? The sea asks: What does change ask of us? Taken together, they form a conversation that stretches across languages, generations, and landscapes. They reveal that displacement is not simply the loss of territory. It is an encounter with memory, identity, belonging, and transformation.
The migrant carries all four questions. The past remains present. The self continues evolving. Community must be sustained across distance. And change arrives whether welcomed or not. This is why songs endure. They preserve questions long after circumstances change. They carry emotional truths that survive the passage of time. The answers may differ from one generation to the next, but the questions remain remarkably constant.
Habtat Zerezghi’s song enters this conversation through the image of the sea. Unlike the grave, the house, or the shield, the sea cannot be possessed. It cannot be inherited. It cannot be inhabited. The sea is neither a destination nor a dwelling. It is a passage. Movement itself. Transition itself. The sea occupies a unique place in the imagination of migrants because it represents a threshold between worlds. A sea crossing changes more than geography. One sea shore, one river bank disappears behind the traveler. The other bank emerges ahead.
Yet the most profound transformation may occur neither in the place left behind nor in the place reached, but in the person standing between them. The singer’s prayer captures this liminal moment. He has crossed. The dangers of the old shore are behind him. The uncertainties of the new shore lie ahead. The sea that separates them remains present. Not merely as water. As memory. As threshold. As witness. As possibility. As loss. As survival.
For some, the sea becomes a grave. For others, a passage. For all who cross it, a dividing line between one life and another. What is striking is that the singer’s first encounter on the far shore is not with the new society, but with God. Before speaking to institutions. Before learning a new language. Before finding work. Before building a new life. He pauses. He prays. Almost as if he recognizes that the person who departed and the person who arrived are no longer entirely the same. The crossing has produced another layer. Another self. The child who left. The traveler who crossed. The refugee who arrived. The migrant who adapted. The parent who raised children in another language. The elder who remembers. The singer who prays. All coexist.
Donate
The sea, therefore, is more than a geographical boundary. It is a creator of selves. The migrant does not simply move from one place to another. The migrant accumulates lives. The old language remains. The new language arrives. The old memories remain. The new memories accumulate. The old home remains. The new home emerges. Neither entirely replaces the other. Both coexist.
Life does not replace one self with another. Life sediments. Layer upon layer. Like geological strata. Like rings within a tree. Like songs carried across decades. This is essentially why exile so often generates music. Music gives voice to selves that cannot fully speak to one another in ordinary life. A melody can summon a forgotten layer. A phrase can awaken an earlier world. A familiar rhythm can return the listener, however briefly, to a version of themselves they feared had vanished. The listener does not merely remember. The listener becomes. For a moment, the village returns. The language returns. The loved ones return. The self once thought lost returns. Not permanently. But long enough to remind us that identity is never singular. Human beings are accumulations. Layers. Crossings. Memories. Stories.
This must be why nostalgia can feel simultaneously painful and beautiful. The longing is not directed only toward a place. It is directed toward an earlier version of oneself. The child who once occupied that place. The family that once inhabited that world. The assumptions that once made life appear stable and comprehensible. The longing, therefore, is not merely geographical. It is temporal. Existential. Human.
The singer asks whether reunion is possible. The question extends beyond people and places. Can one ever fully reunite with a former self? Can one return not only to a homeland but to the person who once called it home? The song does not provide an answer. Instead, it offers a prayer, because some questions are too large for answers. They require accompaniment. A melody. A memory. A voice. Something that can travel beside us as we continue crossing.
The sea may separate lands. It cannot entirely separate the selves that continue traveling within us. And that, indeed, must be the reason why the prayer at the center of the song is not only a plea for safe arrival; it could also be the moment one self recognizes the birth of another. If so, then the song is doing more than expressing nostalgia. It is documenting transformation. The crossing changes the landscape. The crossing changes the migrant. And the song becomes the bridge between who the singer was and who the singer is becoming. Inevitably, that had to be the deepest gift these songs offer. They remind us that exile is not merely about losing a place. It is also about becoming someone new while carrying every earlier version of oneself forward.
The grave. The house. The shield. The sea. Different images. Different languages. Different communities. Yet all are asking the same enduring question: How do we remain ourselves while life keeps changing us?
Link to the song: https://share.google/o3V8J5qDwkxMx4LKy
Comments