War Times from Homes: Between Losses and Survival for Suezi Forced Migrants Post-1967

Vortrag von Nayera Soliman Abdelrahman (Freie Universität Berlin)

Senin al-mor ya benty (Years of bitterness, my daughter). This is how Amina, resident of one of the villages North Suez, described the years in the aftermath of the 1967 war and her displacement from home to a camp for migrants in the desert of Minya, South of Egypt. Through listening to the memories of those who were displaced from Suez in the aftermath of the 1967 defeat from the position of homes, I will present the losses they accumulated during these senin al-mor, and their survival techniques during this period. The 1967 forced displacement is a limited internal displacement, which means that the displaced people managed and were allowed to return to their homes in the aftermath of the 1973 war. Despite that fact, the ghosts of this displacement are still haunting them by its losses and scars that are still lingering on the emotional and material levels. The 1967 forced displacement shows on one side the gravity of losses caused by wars and conflicts, and on the other side the strategies that people develop to survive these difficult times and the signs of what we can call somoud (steadfiness) especially in the context of a colonial conflict. War times from homes do not only show the major losses caused by wars but the micro-dynamics and the everyday details of witnessing, living and surviving wars.

Nayera Soliman is currently a postdoc researcher at Freie Universitat Berlin as part of the Einstein funded research project “Socio-Cultural Life of Sociological Concepts: Arab Contributions to Global Theory”. She got her PhD in Political Sciences from Freie Universitat Berlin in 2025 and has several publications on social history, memory studies, oral history and education in Egypt and Middle East.