Cassette #8: Grandfather Labib 

His voice is recorded on a cassette tape plastered with a white sticker stuck over a pile of white stickers, with a message written in Arabic “For Ghada,” my mother. This is the same tape we had sent to Beirut and that is returning to us in Montreal brought by a Lebanese traveler coming from Beirut. This was how we communicated with family back home. Phone lines in Beirut were constantly bombed, and this was long before the internet existed. The tape begins with a message recorded over the message we had recorded. It begins with: “Beirut is divided, chaos in every way…but don’t worry about us, we are together, and we are keeping each other safe. We loved hearing the kids sing on the previous message. My God, we love them so much. Keep sending us their voices. We miss you.”

…

As I am writing these words, at the end of 2023, genocide is occurring in Gaza and war looms over Lebanon. Living in a perpetual climate of uncertainty has imprinted my worldview, my life, and the decisions I have made in both my career and personal life. We grew up being wary of whatever consensus the mainstream media adopted and how we were portrayed. From a young age I understood the value of being surrounded by a trustworthy community, especially in the midst of tragedy. I also learned to gain as much perspective and context as possible in order to comprehend a given situation. I favored a mosaic of perspectives and stories and embraced plurality and nuances, which is what was constantly omitted from stories told by mainstream media. 

My earliest memories as well as most of my life’s defining moments have been punctuated by war. Wars, or what Western media likes to call “conflicts” or “crises in the Middle East,” are designed to decimate my people, “wipe them off the face of the earth,” as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeated on television multiple times. War has been a constant in my life—a form of certitude—like rain; war will come, and it will change everything. Every single war has annihilated every aspect of normalcy and projected us (me, my family, my people) into a perpetual state of panic and survival. So much so that panic and survival have become the default state of my bruised nervous system. 

Every time bombs began raining down on me and my family, if we were safe enough we would gather around the television. Few had access to electricity, this means that community-led solutions such as sharing generators (or moteur as they are called in French but pronounced with a heavy Lebanese accent rolling the r’s) were absolutely necessary. Each neighborhood has designated families who have taken the responsibility of fronting the cost of a generator to provide electricity locally to their neighbors, collectively then sharing cost and energy. Watching the news was an essential activity that meant watching multiple channels simultaneously while piecing together the truth from various points of view and narratives. That was the closest we could get to “objectivity”—embracing plurality and the notion of perspectives and subjectivity. Debating, sharing stories, and contradicting the news anchors was a test of our rhetorical ability and fluency in geopolitics. It was important to witness the fabricated storytelling that was labeling our people as “terrorists,” a term used to justify those who would murder our people with impunity. Family members and neighbors would become voice-over commentators denouncing false narratives. This often resulted in everybody yelling at the screen and then eventually at each other. We passionately argued for our points of view and theories of change. The fact that my community could contradict the news anchors with firsthand information that was never shown on television helped me understand that the media wasn’t an objective authority, people were. If my community disagreed with the anchor on television, it meant that the truth was being manipulated.

This opened my mind to the possibility of changing people’s perspectives and the necessity of fostering a global community that was empowered to share their messages and truths. Citizen journalism wasn’t a combination of words I knew until my twenties when this concept became a core part of my reality, especially in the wake of the Arab Spring of 2011, when we collectively took back our stories. A significant number of us returned to Lebanon with the desire to follow the famous folk song of post-war Lebanon: “Lebanon will be Rebuilt” [“Raje3 Yet3amar Lebnan” | راجع†يتعمر†لبنان†]. Our hope was to bring to our country, and therefore the region, innovation, technological access, and new life. 

Before the internet existed, we had access to multiple sources of information on television by way of a pirated Dish satellite, which allowed my community to become the local commentators they needed. They wove stories and facts together in a way that gave a more truthful and sophisticated perspective on our history. For instance, during the 1975–95 Lebanese war, “They are all the same! Each side sounds the same!” would often be shouted at the television, highlighting the turbulent state we were in, where kin were set to murder one another and where instability and violence constituted the fabric of our reality. This was the ultimate expression of the “divide and conquer” framework of oppression largely adopted by the subjugated peoples of the former European colonies. It was a form of internalized colonialism that served the Global North. By hating on ourselves to pass as “modern,” we weaponized our differences and murdered one another. 

War is not the greatest equalizer; it accentuates the differences that already exist. For instance, there are people who lose their entire families, and then there are people who are surrounded and protected by their own personal militia. There are people who become houseless, and ones who own the entire block; those who have to flee by boat, risking their lives and often drowning in the Mediterranean Sea, and ones with foreign passports who can leave by plane with a first-class ticket. Stories we tell ourselves or that others tell about us tend to shape our reality and our circumstances. American and mainstream European media make sense of the war by dehumanizing our people to justify atrocities inflicted upon us, centering their own safety and comfort at our expense. We witness this time and time again, with the countless wars in the occupied Palestinian territories.

I was born in a war that shook me from the womb of my mother, and altered the lives of my parents who lived in terror and constant anticipation of another apocalypse. The war attempted to erase their dreams, and the dreams of their families and community, crushing them under the weight of pain and suffering. War has attempted to silence us for decades, trapping us in a time capsule of pain, dust, blood, decay, and smoke. We were wrapped in the garbage of nearby countries who disposed of their filth on our land with total impunity, a practice commonly known as waste colonialism. European countries took part in this desecration while our people starved. Instead of receiving food, we received their garbage.

The erasure and dehumanization of Arab people and culture serves a fabricated “peace” at the expense of millions of people. Palestinians suffer under an inhumane siege, subjected to what is really ethnic cleansing; Syrians suffer a never-ending war; and Lebanese live without water or electricity in a broken country waiting to be bombed as part of the Israeli collective punishment strategy, an extension of the US war machine. In 2001, when Arabs were compared to animals to justify murder after 9/11, the Iraqis paid the price. Over a million human beings were slaughtered by the US military.

I witnessed the Iraq war on the new television my father gave me as a housewarming present when I relocated to Montreal to study. I recorded the broadcast as a way to dissect it once again and to allow my family to comment on it while recording our sporadic conversations over the phone. I felt completely helpless as I watched the American military use state-of-the-art artillery to murder, from a safe distance, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis—men, women and children alike—as if they were playing a video game. CNN and other channels would broadcast Americans and foreigners stealing Iraqi cultural treasures with impunity, looting archeological sites and illegally—according to the Geneva Accord—pillaging UNESCO heritage sites.

My heart sank as I watched the atrocities being committed. I missed my community of commentators, my citizen journalists. I needed them to give me their perspective on the situation. Sobbing and watching alone, I felt a deep sense of betrayal. During that time, I was attending university and gathering as much perspective as I could, and thus reluctantly shutting the television off while leaving a VHS tape in to record the news while I was away from home. The feeling of being alienated and othered was both familiar and a condition I was working to shake off. 

Most of my classmates were oblivious to the Iraq war. They were living in comfort and ease and were able to calmly focus on their classes. Fascinating to me, who lived with a war inside. I was trying to focus on lectures given in large, dark auditoriums filled with people who couldn’t care less about what was happening in the world, let alone that an unjust war, a military occupation and theft of historical artifacts, a genocide, was happening in the Middle East. During our breaks I would engage with my classmates outside while everyone smoked cigarettes. I asked if anyone was aware that a war was raging and received only nonchalant looks. These looks were then sometimes followed by an interrogation to see if I were on the side of the terrorists that caused 9/11.

     “It’s a war against terrorism,” someone would say.

      “You want the terrorists to come here?” someone else would ask. 

I had no words to respond to these abject incongruities and racist remarks. I would absorb all that was said and marinate in it.

When people ask us if we support terrorism when discussing illegal and unjustified military invasions in our lands, we know too well the racism behind these interrogations. The colonial playbook knows who to dehumanize and how to create a hierarchy of oppression designed to silence anyone who dares to speak out against injustices. Arabs will be sacrificed for the oil machine that pollutes and destroys our planet. While we pray for those who have lost their lives at the hands of violence and apartheid, we know the only way out is by radically imagining new systems that center our humanity and nature, and by building them in a regenerative way. Our collective liberation from this paradigm of violent hierarchization, segregation, and utter misunderstanding of life and creation resides in our ability to radically unlearn it—thus unlearning the doctrine of domination itself. Until then we breathe and pray.

I have only ever felt safe in the arms of my father. My gorgeous father whose teenage years were abruptly interrupted by the war in Lebanon. At eighteen, his mandatory military service was cut short, his cohort advised to take whatever weapons and equipment they could get their hands on and run back to their neighborhoods to protect their families. Shortly after arriving at his family home, he found out that his uncle had been kidnapped. Later, his dead body was discovered and it was obvious that he had been subjected to torture. His uncle’s crime was his religion. The war had turned brothers against one another. One’s religion could be enough of an incentive to murder, rape, and erase the entire bloodline related to that person. My father’s life has also been punctuated by wars and by the act of fleeing to find safety. A constant refugee, always living in temporary housing from his teenage years all the way into his seventies. When your home seems to turn against you, that is an ongoing betrayal that remains ingrained within you. When I close my eyes and look for shelter, I see an image of my father carrying all three of us on his shoulders and in his arms—my sister, myself, and my little brother—carrying us to safety. 

As I write this, Israel’s attack on Palestine is spilling over into Lebanon. I know my father is spiritually holding my sister’s three children on his back and in his arms, carrying them to safety far from the bombardment. He is holding my sister’s and mother’s hands in each of his. To me, Arab men like my father are the archetype of the divine masculine. A man who cried in front of us while watching the news and when he was given a pair of sneakers for Christmas after he’d braved death during open-heart surgery. He has risen from the rubble time and time again, the rubble of our destroyed home, the rubble of his career paths.

His handsome face is imprinted on mine, we have the same eyes, nose, and hair. Men in our culture are soft inside. They carry both the divine masculine and the divine feminine. I have been so lucky to witness true masculine energy in my father and the men of my culture. The stereotypes fabricated about us in the West are wrong. Our men nurture us, hold us, and carry us as children. And when we become adults, they are the first to hold space for us, even as our mothers may object. Fathers open new roads for their daughters and allow us to go beyond our collective imagination. They teach us about money, about drinking, and confide in us as if they were recording their stories on a human tape recorder. I hold their stories. I hear their stories while sharing space in total silence, we can hear their thoughts, and they allow us to hear them.

During times of war, money becomes practically obsolete; people turn to each other to provide and share resources: Bread, water, electricity, fuel, shelter. Money, designed to uphold individualism, tends to encourage a separation between the ones who are fortunate and the ones who aren’t. In times of war, however, this separation becomes a matter of life or death. And as much as we witness indescribable horrors, there are divine masculine and divine feminine energies at play as we protect, hold, heal, nurture, and save one another. 

My parents were in their twenties when they fell in love at first sight—three months later they married during a short ceasefire. On December 25, 1981, they had a Christmas wedding following a humanitarian pause to allow for aid to enter the country. There is an iconic picture of my father carrying my mother, who wore a simple yet gorgeous white lace gown her friend had lent her for the occasion. She had very ’80s Lebanese-style makeup with perfect eyeliner tracing her big almond eyes and mascara over her long lashes finished with a tiny silver star near the corner of her eye. The picture is one of the only memories we managed to salvage from our destroyed home. Both are smiling and seem to be held by the sacredness of the centuries-old stone church they were married in.

I was born in the fall of 1982, and although the Israeli invasion of Beirut had ended earlier that year, political tensions had begun to escalate in Lebanon at that time with the murder of Bachir Gemayel and the Sabra and Shatila massacres. General unrest among the population led to military attacks and the bombing of all neighborhoods regardless of religion. My mother was in my grandmother’s kitchen eating a persimmon when her water broke. She was rushed to the hospital with my father who, despite the rules at the time, insisted on being by her side. Birthing without anesthesia while bombs are falling, making do with limited resources, no water or electricity, is sadly the reality of women birthing newborns in times of war—back when I was born, and now in many countries around the world including Occupied Palestine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan. 

She gave birth with the sounds of the bombs raining down on us both. I do not consciously remember this moment, but it is a memory stored in my body. While bodies were being dismembered by the weight of the bombs falling on their homes, my mother was pushing with her own young body opening to make way for me. She was sewn back together without the necessary medication to numb the pain. She had only a few days to recover before she and my father and I had to flee from the bombs. Making sure her daughter would be born in Beirut was a form of assurance that one day we’d be back. She chose a foreign (French) name for me because she also knew that the war wasn’t going to end soon, and that we’d have to live in the West. The name is a passport, a way to blend in and be accepted in the global north. No matter how far we ran, and how much effort my parents put into hiding our collective wounds behind the mountain of shame, those wounds would be almost impossible to shake. 

In the same year that I was born our president and his daughter were murdered in a car explosion. Five years later we fled to Montreal. We lived there as refugees for nine years, and in the mid-1990s, returned to the apocalyptic postwar hell that Beirut had become. I experienced the loss of our home along with the artifacts in it: Photographs, letters, art, clothing, jewelry, and cameras. And with every move out of a home and into a new one, across the ocean and back again, personal artifacts would be left behind, lost in a box somewhere unknown. Where would these memories go? I stopped holding onto them and accepted the generous absurdity that life presented to me. What comes will eventually go. And for that we have only the moment we are conscious of—the present.

But collective trauma outlives war and becomes practically impossible to release. Unlearning war is an ongoing process that requires a long period of safety before the wounds can open up and begin healing. Healing is a painful process. In unlearning the wars I lived through and have continued to experience, I initially found myself called to prayer through the religion I grew up with. Concepts such as post-traumatic stress disorder require a “post” era, which for many of us is only a short break before more violence erupts. Dr. Zainab Asad has explained this concept from the Palestinian experience, where the “post” in post-traumatic stress disorder never happens.

There is an ongoing uninterrupted war that precedes the fall of 2023 by a hundred years, and the escalation into an indisputable genocide has killed tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, half of whom have been children. There might not be a Gaza by the time this book comes out, or a Beirut, as the Western-backed Israeli occupation is claiming it as theirs under the ideology of the “Promised Land.” The war never leaves the body alone; it takes generations to shake off and release the harm wars cause infants, children, teenagers, adults, and elders. It is a vicious poison that penetrates every aspect of the mind, muscles, organs, and spirit. Diseases develop from having experienced war and from being exposed to the pollution it generates.

War forced me to grow up quickly and my body still contracts like a fist at every loud sound. The number of casualties is hard to calculate. Many died under the rubble in Lebanon after the Israeli invasion in 1982, the year my mother gave birth to me. Fifteen thousand people were killed by the invading Israeli forces. Under the siege, no water or food was allowed in as civilians were brutally murdered. Four hundred thousand people were displaced, rendering them houseless and leaving their families and descendants to struggle with intergenerational poverty. The numbers were often refuted by the Israeli government. That, paired with the racist claim that Arabs are animals and that “they exaggerate,” discredited any and all real numbers coming from the Lebanese Red Cross, foreign surgeons who were on the ground, or any foreign groups, including UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency), who were immediately labeled as “terrorist sympathizers.”

“Not that many of you died, and if you did die, you deserved it because you dared to rebel against the colonial power”—so goes the settler-invader narrative. Lebanese and Palestinians are accustomed to that form of gaslighting and shaming. The way we healed and unlearned from the wars, over and over again, was through music and storytelling. And although the history books may be written by the occupying forces who dominated the region, the songs and stories carry the truth. The songs and stories recall the tales from our perspective and honor the deaths of the many who perished anonymously and, in their death, were erased and denied the basic human dignity to count, to matter. This form of erasure delays the unlearning of the war that is recorded in our collective memory—not being able to properly mourn the dead and build new infrastructures over the bodies of the ones buried under the rubble. 

The ghost town that was Beirut post-1982 remained a haunted ground for years until the first contractors came and decided to remove the rubble and rebuild Lebanon. Songs were made about rebuilding Lebanon, greener and greener, and the defiant spirits of many were revived. Yet in our collective memory, much of our realities were buried under the Mountain of Trauma and would remain there until the next generation, curious and bright-eyed, would begin to ask questions. 

           “How many people died in Lebanon during the war?” To which, “We don’t want to talk about the people who died, let’s talk about those who lived,” would be the answer. 

The war, whether talked about or not, remains in the bodies of the next generation, and the one after that. I have observed in my own children how their bodies contract like a fist at the sound of a loud plane. They have nightmares of war though they have never lived through a war. One of my own recurring nightmares is of a helicopter with Israeli soldiers hovering in front of my window in my home, blasting the glass off and entering the house with their automatic weapons, hunting me and my family down and brutally killing every one of us. The sound of the helicopter is felt through heavy vibrations in my body while asleep. Waking up covered in sweat, I tell myself, “I am not afraid, I am not afraid,” a mantra I repeat over and over until I am, indeed, not afraid. Not afraid of death. Not afraid of terror. But expecting it.

From our early childhood, we were politicized and knew that we were under occupation, that the military in our streets were not there to protect us. In fact, they were there to hurt us, separate us from our families, and kill us. We were aware that our neighbor who had lost her son, kidnapped by the occupation, would probably never see him return. We knew that if we were to be kidnapped, our bodies would not survive the violence we would have to endure. We saw blood, and some of our friends lost limbs. We witnessed the neighbor’s daughter’s hair turn completely white due to the shock of her home exploding. We experienced the shelters, hunger, and thirst, and the sadness of our elders. We knew how to understand the big difficult words and the simplicity of it all: The occupation wanted the land, the land had precious resources. We didn’t know to call them resources, but we knew what they were. We knew that our own hurt was nothing in comparison with the hurt of all the martyrs who died horrible deaths. We believed that if one was hurting, we were all hurting. That our own pain was nothing in comparison with the pain of the families broken by the war. That our discomfort was nothing in comparison with the discomfort of the young siblings who lived under the highway without their mother or father who were martyred in the war. That what we had was a blessing to share. We knew that foreign powers, not knowing how to name them, didn’t have our best interest in mind. 

We saw blood and empty shelves in every store. We knew money was nothing but paper, and if nothing was left to buy, money didn’t have any value. It couldn’t buy your dignity or bring your friend back from the dead. We understood geopolitics from the tears our parents held back, and from the rage that followed in which our bodies paid the price. We knew their impatience had deeper roots in injustice, where they had to grow faster than their age, just like us, and that we somehow became their parents at times. Nurturing our own parents. Making sure they did not despair. Holding their hands as they mourned. And not putting any of our own sadness on them, but instead trying to appease their suffering. The selflessness of becoming nothing. Unlearning the war meant not attaching ourselves to anything, not religion or identity, not home or belongings, not even community. All would disappear. And what is left of you when you lose everything? 

 

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Note from the author: 

Censorship isn’t new to authors of the Levant, South West Asia, and North Africa; authors who specialize in narrating stories related to politics and culture face regular scrutiny and censorship from the West. In 2022, I signed my first book deal, and I delivered my completed manuscript in early 2023 just before the genocide in Gaza began, only to be told my work wouldn’t be published for another two to three years. Shelving my work until the world would be less scandalized by Arab stories felt like silencing me in a time when our stories were needed more than ever. I consulted my team, advisors and peers and realized that I was fortunate enough to have built a platform countering censorship and misinformation—Slow Factory—and that we had the ability to start our own imprint and publish A Woman is a School on our own terms. Books for Collective Liberation was born out of necessity and we are in the process of bringing to life this first book, part memoir part cultural theory.