To Anthony Shadid, to Our Houses of Stone,
As you were rebuilding your family home after the 2006 war, my uncle Ahmad was building his. I admit, I was envious of your restoration project, of there being something to restore, bones to fill in, traces of tile to follow, family trees to be populated. All Ahmad had was the spot he chose. As close as he could get to the border, as close to the land on the other side that belonged to my grandfather until 1948. So close that we would eventually hear Israeli soldiers calling to my cousin’s dog. So close that they knew his name.
Like you, Ahmad chased every merchant and looter of home leftovers in Beirut: oak doors, ironwork from balconies, old tile, antiques, and anything else he could carry in steel, wood, or stone. But without a blueprint to work from and for, the house came to be a projection of what he imagined an old village home should look like. Family members, whether out of envy or ennui, snidely warned he was being ripped off with Chinese fakes. I took solace in the fact that whatever the result, this house would at least stand apart from the gaudy mansions surrounding it, built by decades of extractivism in Africa. In its incoherence and anachronism, this house of remains might yet resemble our family. Plus, Ahmad had been to China—on an import trip for the car glass business he started when he was 12 years old—and liked the country, which dulled the intended sting of the warnings. Eventually, the house was done, or as done as it was ever going to be. Like your wife did with you, we came to tease Ahmad that his love for the house was greater than his love for anyone and anything else.
When the new war started, I found myself returning often to your House of Stone. Through your meditation on returning to South Lebanon two generations after your ancestors left, I could poke at the wounds from a safer distance. Your stones of Marjayoun felt colder than ours of Mays al Jabal, just enough to singe, not scorch. I took shelter in not knowing whether your house could still stand, when I have since come to know that ours cannot; what you would write about your stones now, when I know what I cannot write about ours.
*
It is only stone.
In the footage of Southerners returning to their villages after every war, we hear variations on this phrase, usually uttered by the returnee as they stare into the ruins of their home, or straight into the camera as their ruins frame the shot.
بس حجر
The jagged contrast between “only” and the multitudes contained in these ruins always takes my breath away. Just two words, bas hajar, for ruins to become the site of a shift: “from the melancholic frames of destruction to creative practices of resistance,” as southern Lebanese scholar, and my childhood friend, Yasmine Khayyat puts it. Ruin, as she reveals in her own meditation on wuquf ‘ala al-atlal (standing before the ruins) moments, becomes “both a site of protest and a trope for reflexive rebellion.”
What would you be rebelling against now? Would you still be writing at The New York Times? How can the US occupation of Iraq, which you wrote about with such aching beauty, feel so far and so close? Would you be able to tell us why the US is building a megafortress embassy in Lebanon, the second largest in the world after its existing fortress in Baghdad? Would you be writing a break up letter with the West? What metaphorical ruins would be occupying you now?
But what I really want to know, and to return to material ruins: How soon would you start relaying your stone? And would you build grief a room of its own?
*
I think often about the world you left in 2012, right at the cusp of Arab exhilaration crashing into revamped oppression, imperialism, and new forever wars. You wrote of “a lost Middle East” then; it is in the subtitle of what would be your final book. You were referring to the Middle East of your ancestors, those who emigrated in an early wave of migration and exile, of so many more to come.
As we lose another Middle East now, which parts should we grieve and let go, and which parts should we rebel for? Which parts to rebuild, to build anew?
I remember that you were 43 when you died, the age I will turn later this year. I celebrate that in the last years of your life you were able to return, and to write about returning. May we all be so lucky.
Julia Choucair Vizoso
Julia Choucair Vizoso is an independent scholar and seasonal translator. She hopes these words move you to refuse and resist the Israel-US genocide of the Palestinian people and destruction of Lebanon, wherever and however you can.