Our places never leave us. At times, we think we have left them behind, laid down in some ancient stratum of life, among interrupted habits, roads we rarely take anymore, houses to which we return only in thought.
And yet, they remain. They dwell silently within us, until a certain light, the smell of rain, a piece of music heard upon waking, or an unexpected conversation suddenly brings them back to life, with their sounds, their warmth, their landmarks, but also their wounds. There are times, however, when war tears these returns away from the intimate realm of memory and turns them into a physical necessity. One no longer wishes merely to remember. One has to go and see. To take measure of what still stands, of what has disappeared, of what words, images, and other people’s accounts can never quite restore.
On Friday, June 19, I went to southern Lebanon, as far as the entrance of the village from which I come, a few kilometres from the area occupied and blown up by the Israelis. That same day, they had carried out around a hundred air raids, killing fifty people in the neighbouring region of Nabatiyyeh. From Sour, Tyre, I found a driver. In fifteen minutes, at full speed, we crossed several villages without encountering a single human being. I had never known such a silence: not calm, but the brutal erasure of every visible presence.
At the
entrance to our village, the familiar signs had vanished. I no longer
recognized the place. Destruction had undone the once-legible order of space,
blurred distances, displaced forms. The road leading to the family house was
impassable, blocked by rubble and fallen trees. Drones were flying very low. I
continued on foot, hesitantly, but did not enter the small field that separated
me from the entrance: the tall grass might have concealed unexploded ordnance.
And so I saw
the house from afar. It was still standing, but damaged. Around it, several
houses had been struck, almost erased from the landscape. In ours, I had left
behind part of my Beiruti life: books, furniture, objects, the traces of entire
years, everything that, little by little, gives a house the depth of a
presence.
I took a few
photographs, then we drove back toward Sour, Tyre, to meet two friends. Later,
I walked through the port and its quarter, as though searching for a fragment
of continuity, for a place still inhabited, open to the sea, to possible
movement, to a day a little less closed in.
I still do
not know what to do with what I saw. And yet, I had to go.
Some of our
places inhabit us. Others, when war makes them inaccessible, begin to haunt us.
To see them again, even from afar, neither consoles nor repairs anything. But
it tears memory away from abstraction, gives loss a more precise form, a
contour, or a distance. And perhaps it allows us to go on carrying these places
within us, while awaiting the day when we may “find” them again.
Ziad Majed
My article
on ruins, published in May in Orient XXI in French, English, and
Italian.
The Qassmiyyeh bridge, destroyed and partly repaired,
and the Litani.
The road to the village.
Back to Sour, Tyre, and to life.
