The winner of our college essay contest explores how for her Syrian family, scattered by war, a WhatsApp group chat — rife with silly videos and often regrettable photos — is everything.
By Layla Kinjawi Faraj
Published May 6, 2022
Updated May 14, 2022
According to writer Gary Chapman, there are five love languages: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, physical touch and acts of service.
I would like to add a sixth — let’s call it “WhatsApp intimacy” — for people like my extended family and me who love each other desperately but, because of war, can’t be together.
We are from Syria. As a young child, I spent summers in Damascus — bouncing between my parents’ childhood homes and the apartment they bought when my brother and I were born — and winters in the U.S., where they had immigrated.
But that ended abruptly when war broke out. I was only 8, watching my parents struggle to talk on the phone with relatives who remained in Syria. Their calls were short, terse, at risk of being swallowed whole by anxiety and the unspeakable.
The first thing I did after this reality sank in was retrieve the photo album my mother and I had made of what would turn out to be our last summer there. For me, Syria had existed less as a country than as a series of homes belonging to people like my aunt, my uncle, and my mother’s third cousin, who didn’t like when you sat on the couches in your outside clothes.
When my mother and I turned to the last picture in the album, of my father, brother and me at the Damascus airport amid our pile of suitcases, waving goodbye at the camera, she started to cry. We couldn’t have known then how haunting our playful goodbye waves would be.
As time passed and war settled into the bones of the country, our families needed a less serious, more constant way of keeping in touch that overcame the limitations (and tense silences) of phone calls. And so began our WhatsApp family group chat.
I didn’t participate at first; I wasn’t old enough to have my own phone. But I got updates from my parents, who showed me the pictures and videos that family members would share.
On our end, my mother and father would search for slivers of our lives in America worth sharing — everything ordinary suddenly becoming extraordinary. Our road trip from New Jersey to Massachusetts. The hole in my brother’s sock that left a single circle of his foot brown with dirt.
There was joy in taking these pictures; the details of our lives assumed a greater sense of importance. The fact that I had mashed up a perfectly ripe avocado or drawn a face on our Kleenex box was worth documenting. Going to the supermarket became a highly chronicled quest as we took videos of the ingredients for that night’s dinner.
“We wish you were here with us!” my mother said in Arabic, the common language of our group chat. “Yallah, come over so you can eat some of this. We have salsa!”
When I turned 14, I got my own phone and was able to join the WhatsApp group chat, a true coming-of-age moment for children of the diaspora. There I was able to bask in my family’s presence whenever I pleased, sharing my day as much as I wanted and clicking off my phone when I’d had enough.
At first I thought that having a way to connect with my family would be fun, but it quickly turned into another chore on my daily to-do list: wash the dishes, fold the laundry, send a new and exciting sticker to the chat to communicate the fact that I have not, in fact, forgotten them.
If you have family but no one can see them, do they really exist?
This was the question that lurked behind our constant responses, whispered beneath the never-ending buzz of our phones. There was a fear of oblivion that tucked itself into the cataloging of our days and inner thoughts — to not answer the group was to be frozen in time. And although there were moments when I grew bored of the ordinary conversations we had, I also understood that boredom was part of the point; it meant that we were lucky enough to have the safety of routine.
Sometimes my aunts and uncles would take the constant communication a little too far, sending pictures of their bruised legs (from bumping into tables) or bloody noses (from the dry heat), positioning their wounds in perfect lighting. Other times I would check my messages in the morning to find a picture of spilled juice with the caption: “just spilled my juice : (”
Yet even in these moments of pain or clumsiness, my family would spin it into a wish of togetherness by saying: “May God bring us together again so that I can help you clean up your spills.” Or “I hope that one day we’ll all be together so we can make sure none of us ever gets hurt again.” Slip-ups and mistakes occurred, according to them, from lack of familiar warmth. We were missing its spell, its protection, its remedial powers.
When more family members were able to escape Syria, settling in Turkey, Canada and Saudi Arabia, our group chat transformed into a venue for hosting weddings, baby showers and funerals. When my cousin got married in the U.S., she and her husband took turns “dancing” with her mother in Syria, twirling onscreen to the beat of the music, which crackled and fizzed through the iPad speaker and into her childhood home.
When another cousin had her first child, she watched as her daughter came to know her grandparents as people who could be conjured up and placed on tables, dropped and disconnected. When my uncle died, he was left frozen for days as his last message, a picture of his cat napping in clean laundry, before the flood of new conversation pushed him from view.
When the pandemic hit, forcing everyone into their homes, much of the world turned to FaceTime, iMessage, Zoom and WhatsApp to play online games, watch a movie together, try new things and document their experiences.
In the early months of isolation, amid questions of “What are you doing to stay connected?” that were continuously posed in my high school Zoom sessions, I was reminded of all the times over the past eleven years I had to learn what it meant to make a home out of the internet. As when my cousin and I were 12 and wanted to play a board game over Skype — in desperate search of the game-nights we had once held routinely in Syria.
Each with a board, we moved and killed off each other’s players, creating two sets of the same game. When we got halfway through, my mother popped into the frame and said that Skype had inverted the screen. “You aren’t really playing the same game,” she said with a laugh, and my cousin and I both folded up our boards and ended the call.
While others were trying to find a substitute for their hugs and kisses, or nights spent cooking dinner for one another during quarantine, we were continuing what we spent years learning how to do — chronicling our lives at home on WhatsApp, finding familial love in the most mundane aspects of our days.
We knew that staying connected was less about itching to find something to say to others than it was about carrying them with you as you lived your life, searching for them in your spilled juice and spider veins.
If loving is a human need, then I have fulfilled that need in my disconnected world through pictures of book excerpts and bloody noses, texts of births and deaths, questions of what television show to watch and why one pressure cooker is better than another.
And I have fulfilled others’ needs, far distant, by thinking of them as I go about my days — in what I experience and feel and create. In documenting my life for them. In carrying them along.
If loving is a human need, then my experience of love will forever sound like putting on headphones during a bus ride and listening to my aunt’s voice messages, knowing she was sound asleep on her side of the world. It will forever taste like the school lunches I photograph and share, no matter how unappealing they were as I ate them. And it will forever smell like the worn-out shoes I text about, whose soles fell apart halfway through my walk, or the Arabic coffee my uncle sends me stickers of, wishing me good morning at 1 a.m. my time.
If loving is a human need — and I know that it is — then it reliably looks like my WhatsApp family group chat: unfiltered, generous, chaotic, boring and, in many ways, an act of faith.
Layla Kinjawi Faraj, the winner of this year’s Modern Love college essay contest, is a first-year student at Barnard College.