The Europe Challenge

I was born in Africa. A few years later, a civil war broke out and my mother, my siblings, and I fled. My father joined us later in Europe. My parents thought the war would last for a long time, and they were right because peace came decades later.

Life as a war refugee in Europe was both difficult and easy. There was peace, food, education, health services and so on, but we all had to adapt to life away from our beloved country, relatives, friends, landscapes, food, smells, and so much more.

As a child I didn’t know about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but the effects of the war were quite persistent and difficult to overcome. Most nights I had quite vivid nightmares, usually of someone being tortured and/or killed in front of me. I became very wary of falling asleep and would delay it as much as possible.

As war refugees, we didn’t have much, apart from what was in the suitcase that each of us had brought when we fled. Almost all my toys and books were left behind. There was no money to spare, and books were quite expensive. Although I was already a fluent reader, I read books extremely slowly so that they would last longer. But, one day, I discovered the local library.

I became a regular and the staff, a couple of very maternal middle-aged women, called me ‘the girl with the smiling eyes’. After they taught me, and I understood, that a book stored out of order was a lost book, I was allowed to browse the shelves, which was once forbidden. I tried to get some advice on what to read, but there were no librarians, so I read everything: from Enid Blyton to Anna Karenina.

Eventually I made new friends, one of whom was a neighbour who lived two doors down, but we first met in the library. She too had lived away from her native country because her parents had been political refugees in northern Europe. They were able to return home after Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, when fascism was defeated and there was freedom once again.

We started going to the library together and the rules were, once again, bent. My friend and I persuaded our siblings to get reader’s cards. Each of the cards would allow us to borrow three books for 10 days. With our cards and theirs, we could get 12 books at a time, which we then read in two weeks.

Books were my therapy. I would read as much as I could, into the night, and, eventually, the nightmares stopped as I settled into my new life in Europe.

Many years later, as a middle-aged woman, I again struggled with mental health issues. The war and being a refugee had left their scars and the pandemic brought it all back, and more. This time I was lucky enough to get access to therapy and rebuild my life again. One of the first hobbies I wanted to return to was reading. Once more, as when I was a child, I went back to the Public Library in the city where I now live. This time there are librarians who not only choose the books on display, but also advise me on what to read based on my previous preferences, and that makes all the difference.

This was not the only change in the way the libraries worked. Now I could browse the shelves freely, use the online catalogue instead of the paper card system, borrow five books (instead of the previous three) for 30 days (three times more than before), reserve books, read newspapers and magazines, browse the internet, and more.

This time there were also books about other refugees like me, who had had similar experiences. One book in particular, The Return by Dulce Maria Cardoso, touched me deeply. One day I was reading it while waiting for a bus and I had to stop because tears were streaming down my cheeks. The protagonist was also waiting for his father to be reunited with the rest of the family in Europe, and I still remembered being six years old and looking at every plane that crossed the sky, wishing that my father was on that one.

I contacted the author via social media, to tell her about this episode, and she was kind enough to reply, thanking me for the reaction to her work. I’ve just reread her message again, in which she said she hoped she had helped me, in some way, to feel less alone with the memories of a terrible time. She believed that thinking we are alone is what hurts us most. Then I understood why this book had such a strong resonance with me, and a simultaneous effect of release and healing.

One of my daily tasks recommended for recovery is to take long walks. I made a list of places I wanted to visit, or revisit, and my childhood library was naturally one of them. I had never been back, and as I stood on its first step, I understood why.

I remembered a poem that has marked my life ever since I read it: ‘Là-bas, je ne sais où’ (‘Out there, I do not know where’) by Álvaro de Campos, one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms. The poet says that he will never go back because you never go back: ‘The place you return to is always different,//The station you return to is different.//There are no longer the same people, nor the same light, nor the same philosophy.’

Faced with this, I turned around, descended that one step, and went home. Knowing that what I missed most about that library were two motherly staff members, who allowed the rules to be bent, and who would have retired by now.

I am still recovering, and going through menopause, which makes it harder, with insomnia aggravated by both issues. Whenever I cannot sleep, I have five books from the Public Library to keep me company, as I recover and get through this challenging time. And I will!

Once again, reading has saved my life, literary and literally.

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About the Author

Cristina Cabral was born in Africa in 1968 and now lives in Europe. She holds a Master’s in Landscape Architecture, has always loved reading and recently has started writing. In the future, she plans to write more often and volunteer as a children’s book reader in local libraries to share her passion for books.