-Essay-
BEIRUT — While we were traveling to the village of Bchamoun, my friend told me: “Displacement is a slow death.”
But when we arrived at our temporary home, a different idea came to my mind: displacement is like a birth by C-section. This difficult birth is better than the idea of death, I told my friend. Displacement is nothing but an escape from death and struggle for life: Being displaced is better than being missing.
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Now I am living my alternative life and seeking my lost life, even with great challenges, difficulties and memories. I used to think that I was stingy with memories of my village and my life there. I did not like its noise or its chaos, which have always been behind my withdrawal from its neighborhoods, streets, and even its public park. They were also motivations for self-isolation, which intensified in places whose intimacy formed a required balance.
Chaqra, my hometown in southern Lebanon, is the great womb from which I came into life.
Leaving Chaqra
It was around 5 p.m. on September 23, 2024, when I was forced to leave. Everything that morning had indicated that the 10-month status quo of a “boring war” would end; news of more intense air raids broke the routine of that war.
That afternoon, the air raids were very close and loud, like a death call. I could not see the rubble, but it felt closer to me than my jugular vein.
The road I took out of Chaqra was the same road that was full of teenagers the day before. I was never accustomed to their noise. I did not care about my village as I had last seen it — and perhaps it cared about me, and the pain of being forced to leave it was coupled with a more severe pain.
On my right, I saw the rubble of the Badr al-Din family home, the village’s last home to the west. The rubble of the house gave the departure an intensity of sadness and pain. Under it, the lives of two women and four children were ended.
My neighbor Safad al-Battikh seemed to have a greater share of rubble. The road I take in the morning, listening to Fairuz, has been visited by death. Its face has been erased by more rubble. The rubble of Abu Mahdi’s Hangar reminded me of my friend Hussein saying “Let’s drink coffee in the hangar.”
Bodies under rubble
Rubble with death beneath it. Rubble with memories beneath it.
Both are openings to the book of this great displacement. Suddenly, the voice of prominent Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish comes to mind: “In the great displacement, I love you more.” Love is no longer, in those moments, a mere emotional preoccupation. All the memories have become a love that extends from Chaqra and its noise to the south — all of the south.
For an hour or more, my head was crowded with memories. It is crowded with an inevitable question, a question that adds another displacement to the displacement. How long will this displacement last?
No answer
There is absolutely no answer. I am now facing a fate that is not in my hands, and a destiny that I did not expect.
At the entrance to Tyre, the congestion of displaced people’s cars roused me from my daydreaming over that sterile question. I watched the Lebanese army soldiers standing at the entrance to the Benou Barakat barracks, watching the thousands of motionless cars crowded together, honking their horns.
This scene of security men was an indication of what awaited the southerners on their journey to escape death. These “security men” represented the Lebanese state at the moment of total collapse.
Bchamoun was the seat of the government of independence in 1943. Generation after generation, war after war, we southerners are remembered in history as bodies torn apart under the rubble of our homes, or as nomads.
Longing for the remains
On September 23, I became a displaced person. From a house high up in the village, it is clear how the scene is overflowing with romance. But it is a daily drama for someone like me, a displaced person.
Here I am, spelling out the sea from among the many trees. The sea is a psychological test of the unknown, its nature and its fate. I think about about tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or about a displacement in which time has no limits.
A return to her. She is the subject and the predicate. Chaqra occupies all the senses. The eye is the mistress of the senses and their laboratory. I will see her with her people, her houses and her trees. Even the things that I could not get used to, will find a place for themselves, and a belated promise of love.
Perhaps it is the fear that I will not see her again — wars have accustomed us to such hateful prices — or at best that her absence will be prolonged. In my estrangement from her, I sharpen what I condensed from her at the moment of farewell.
It’s a farewell that I remember with the shadow of our house and the chinaberry tree, and longing for the remains of the pine trees destroyed in Chaqra.
