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 19 June, I travelled to southern Lebanon as far as the entrance to the village where my parents are from. This was just a few kilometres from the area occupied and destroyed 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.
