Visitation as pedagogy: On going back home

Lessons are not always found in books or classrooms. Sometimes, they are found in the act of returning, in the presence of those we have been separated from, in the spaces we have longed for. Visitation is a pedagogy—a way of knowing, a method of healing, an epistemology of presence. To visit is to learn, to embody connection, to seek repair.

I am writing this from a coffee shop on the other side of the world—far even from my home in Ontario. I am in British Columbia, on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples. The air outside is damp, the hum of espresso machines and murmured conversations fills the space, and yet, my mind is elsewhere. I am not really here. I am still in Iraq, still walking the familiar streets, still tracing the contours of memory and belonging. This is what it means to live in longing—to exist in one place while yearning for another, to be split across geographies, to feel the weight of distance pressing against your chest like an unseen force.

Living so far from home is not just a physical displacement; it is a spiritual and mental one. The isolation takes something from you, drains something vital. The longing is not passive—it is active, a force that gnaws at the edges of your being. It is the exhaustion of constantly translating yourself across cultures, the pain of knowing that no matter how much you hold onto, something will always be slipping through your fingers.

Seven years away. Seven years of absence. Seven years of longing that settled into the rhythm of my life like a second pulse, a silent but insistent beat beneath the surface of my existence in the west. Seven years of imagining what it would be like to return home. And then, finally, I did.

I returned with my children, Sajjad and Zainab, bearing witness to a world I had carried within me but that they had never seen. This journey was not just a visit—it was a lesson, a pedagogy of presence, a reckoning with displacement, and a return to the roots that have held me in ways I did not fully comprehend until I stood on that soil again.

My father’s death was a wound I have carried alone for too long. Returning to his gravesite was the primary purpose of this journey, the axis upon which everything else revolved. The context of the first visit was sunset by the river, the air soft, the weather kind, my sister-in-law playing duaa on her phone. And yet, what rose within me was unbearable, a grief that had been waiting in silence for years, now free to flood my body. I told him everything. My apologies, my regrets, my sorrow for not doing more, my desperate hope that he knew, that he understood.

Time moves differently here. It is flexible, unburdened by the rigid linearity imposed in the west. There is no anxiety about squeezing every moment for its utility. Instead, there is a deep ease, a willingness to surrender to the flow of existence as it unfolds. Time is communal, relational—measured in conversations, in cups of tea that stretch endlessly, in the weight of presence rather than the ticking of a clock.

People are sweeter here. Not in a way that is naive or saccharine, but in a way that feels genuine, uninhibited. Their love is open, their words are direct, their confrontations are immediate and unfiltered. There is no passive aggression here, no careful swallowing of grievances or calculated distance. There is love, and where there is love, there is also truth—sometimes gentle, sometimes sharp, but always clear. I am reminded that confrontation is not always a sign of rupture; sometimes, it is a sign of intimacy, a sign that the relationship can withstand truth.

Returning to Mdayna: The pedagogy of kinship

Seven years is an eternity when measured in the lives of loved ones. Reuniting with my family was not just a reunion; it was a reckoning with grief, a communal process of mourning that I had been absent from. My father’s death was no longer an isolated sorrow—it was a shared wound, and in that sharing, I found a form of healing I did not know I needed.

"When you entered the room, it felt like Mani entered." My cousins’ words lodged themselves in my chest. My uncle’s voice carried the weight of memory and devotion: "Your days and hours were the sunlight of our youth, the passionate tenderness of childhood, and the whisper of a gentle essence that illuminated our souls. You led us to days free from the pain of separation, and your radiance carried the spirit of a woman who walked steadily toward brilliance, achieving the highest degrees with determination. You are our only pride, my dear, until the very last breath."

In their words, I was not just me. I was an extension of my father, a continuation of his presence in the world. My relationship with my uncles deepened in a way that I had never known before. They got to know me not as a distant relative but as the person I had become, as the daughter my father raised. And I, in turn, understood their love in a way that had previously been abstract, theoretical. Before, I had known they loved me; now, I could feel it, inhabit it, make epistemological sense of it in a way that was deeply embodied.

Al nakhal w al Bahar. The palm trees and the river. The site where my father stood a year before his death, captured in a photograph that would later circulate in the wake of his passing, that would be displayed at his funeral. I stood there with my children. I took the same picture. The significance was monumental. A site of past and present colliding, of loss and continuation merging into something that felt like eternity. My father was here. I am here. My children are here. Memory does not die.

The pedagogy of visitation

The second visit time I visited my dad’s grave, it was at sunset again, but this time, the cold bit at my skin. This time, the grief was deeper because I knew it would be so long before I could return. Again, I told him everything. Past, present, future. I asked for his guidance to manifest in my life. I called upon Allah with an urgency that only my father’s gravesite can summon. I prayed for my family, for my friends. I held the weight of his death and, by extension, the weight of death itself—the inevitability, the finiteness. Our conversations echoed in my mind, his words a tether to a past that still breathes in me.

I am facing incredible challenges in my life, and I spoke to him and to God about them, letting my truth spill into the air, unburdened by silence. In the presence of death, I allowed my voice to rise, steady and unwavering. I felt something shift—I felt the power of my own voice, the weight of my own resilience. I felt proud of myself, not just for enduring but for meeting hardship with grace, for refusing to look away from difficulty, for standing tall before the trials of life. I was beginning to hear the teachings of my own blood—lessons whispered across generations, carried in my veins. I told him about my visit to Mdayna, and I knew he was proud of me.

Visiting the holy sites was nothing short of breathtaking. Ethereal. The epistemological significance of closeness to leadership, to presence, to a lineage of sacrifice and justice—this was not just a religious experience; it was a pedagogical one. Visitation, I learned, is the antidote to longing. Visitation is a pedagogy.

To visit is to learn. It is to be in the presence of something greater than oneself and to emerge transformed. To visit family, to stand in person before them, is to resolve grievances, to mend fractures, to partake in a healing that cannot happen at a distance. Visitation is an act of repair, of restoration. It fixes, it soothes, it teaches.

The trip was just as exhausting as it was formative. For me, for my children. Sajjad, with his six-year-old heart wide open, reflected that he wants to live in Iraq. Part of his yearning was that everywhere he looked, Arabic words surrounded him. The streets bore the flags of Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq, a visual testament to resistance and solidarity that he had never seen so openly displayed in the west. He was able to live out his true self without repression—chanting Arabic anasheed and latmiyat without hesitation, without fear, without needing to make himself smaller. Here, his voice belonged.

When we were in Suq Al-Shuyukh, he reflected, “I’m finally home.” And then, in Karbala, standing in between the shrines of Imam Hussain and Imam Abbas, he said: "In this moment, all of my dreams have come true." What is pedagogy if not this? A revelation, an unveiling, a moment in which the deepest truths make themselves known. Visitation as pedagogy. Return as learning. Absence transformed into presence. Longing made whole through touch, through sight, through shared breath.

I left Iraq again. But this time, I left knowing that visitation is not just about arrival. It is about return. And return, when done with open hands and an open heart, is always a lesson.