This is the moment we visited my father’s grave. It was the first thing we did, the day after I landed in Beirut. Among these images, some frames I remembered him occupying the last time we were all here together, when he could still walk with difficulty, and could point out the ancestral landmarks to me and Christine. I didn’t look back at those photos I’d taken of him back then. I just felt them in the moment.
“If I were you, I’d constantly be going around like: do you know my small Lebanese hometown is basically a cult run by the Syrian nazbol party? What an opening line.”
When you put it that way…
Of course, it isn’t quite like that, but there is a particular way of thinking around here, with its unique vocabularies. When partisans offered their well wishes, their condolences gave ultimate glory to the nation. We are dust and to dust we shall return, but Syria remains. And when we raised our arak to his memory, I toasted to Syria and to victory with a wry smile on my face. Bin nasr! Ta7ya Sourya.
I don’t take it seriously, but for many youths of this town and around the country, it was deadly serious. Sana’a Mehaidli gave her life for it at the age of 16, a year before I was born. Many others did and still would. I can’t but respect their faith; I also can’t but feel saddened by it too.
Talking about my hometown has made me realize that thinking about my hometown makes me wistful and morose. It’s a beautiful place with brilliant people that’s also deeply embedded in strange histories and dysfunctional politics. It’s like every town in Lebanon, but it’s the only one that’s actually shaped my destiny.
I wonder how much of my father’s personality was forged here; he travelled abroad at a relatively young age, but as the youngest of four, he didn’t have to be around to be within its orbit.
I wonder how much of his brother’s paranoia traces its roots to the political climate here; my dad often lamented how he’d lost all his books and magazines because his brother threw them out one day because some army or other was approaching, thinking there’d be partisan material in them, which sounds rational, until you notice how his whole life’s trajectory has been shaped by distrusting others. He wouldn’t even talk to a genealogy buff related to us who reached out to me trying to trace our family tree. I don’t know where nature ends and nurture begins with men like that. This so-called brother didn’t come to the funeral. He didn’t even offer his condolences.
Anyway. Happy Valentine’s Day to all the haters; yours is a deeper love than you know.