My house, 2024. (Credit: Nour Awada)
- Could you give me more details? In French, please.
- Imminent bombing on the building across from Teta's house in Chiyah.
- Deghre bwej al-beit!” (Right in front of the house).
- This is it.
- Uff ... our building was destroyed.
- It's awful!
- But it's still standing!
- Yes, thank God, it’s not too damaged.
- Akh, there's nothing left.
- Yes, there is. The foundations are still there.
This building was a frail two-story structure nestled in an alley in the Chiyah neighborhood of Beirut's southern suburbs. When I was a little girl on vacation in Lebanon, I used to go on its roof to see the chicks my grandfather was raising. It was also on its windy stairs that I lacerated my knee on an old rusty barrel.
After moving permanently from France to Lebanon, I lived in this building for the entire summer of 1995. The neighborhood was gray, sad and still ravaged. My mother went every morning to polish the floor of the other apartment we would later move into. While I waited for her, I stood on the balcony, gazing down at the street. I didn't quite grasp how, in just a few days, I'd moved from a little town in Poitou-Charente to this street where buildings were scarred by bullet holes and shrapnel. When people asked me why my eyes were red, I would reply that it was because soap had gotten in them.
Shortly afterward, I decided that I wouldn't speak Arabic. I wanted to punish my father for his lies that he had told us about Beirut with stars in his eyes: He would talk about organizing fishing trips with my older brother and going on hikes in the mountains and would always mention the lemons and oranges of southern Lebanon. But today, I understand that like all those who have survived several wars, he was already anticipating reconstruction. He dreamed that his children would love his country, its history, its chaos, its light and even its melancholy as much as he did.
I was born in Beirut’s southern suburbs in 1985. That same year, we fled to France and returned to Lebanon 10 years later. I loathed the suburb’s narrow, dirty streets, its hustle and bustle, and the dust from the exhaust pipes that blackened the tiles in our apartment despite the endless amounts of water we used to clean them week after week. As a teenager, I always preferred to drive around at night rather than during the day, as the lack of lighting hid the ugliness of its wild urbanism.
My father, too, had to move from his village to the city and had to adapt to concrete, demarcation lines and dust. He quickly grew attached to this neighborhood, where he could meet uprooted Southerners like himself daily.
My French mother, madly in love, followed him to Lebanon under the bombs. When she was pregnant, she converted to Islam after “reciting three magic spells,” then married for a dowry worth no more than two chewing gums, all to make sure that her baby would be recognized by the state. It was in the southern suburbs that she gave birth twice. There, she learned Arabic and refused to associate with the French in Lebanon, whom she considered snobbish and “too right-wing.”
I come from a family of communists and was taught from an early age that God didn't exist and that children weren't born in cabbages. As a little girl, I remember singing Vian, Brassens and Boby Lapointe with my mother. I saw my father throw his head back at the sound of Umm Kulthum's voice and Marcel Khalifeh's lyrics.
They never spoke to us of the southern suburbs as an ideological stronghold, and it wasn't until we went to secondary school in the neighboring Christian neighborhood that my brothers and I learned that we were Shiites.
It was also in those years that I understood why my father would furtively inquire about the surnames of the friends we introduced him to, for each of us carried the weight of the Civil War, of our religion and, therefore, of the potential political allegiances of our elders.
One day, when I was invited to a classmate's birthday party, I remember stopping in front of a large black-and-white photograph. It showed a powerful, proud man holding a weapon and resting his foot on a dead body. “That’s my father,” she said. I wondered later if this image had been taken near my home.
When I was 19, after an evening reunion with some high-school friends, they suddenly stormed off, citing a last-minute emergency, and left me alone on the sidewalk at 2 a.m. That night, I had to walk from Achrafieh to Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Much later, one of them sheepishly confessed that they'd lied to me because they were afraid to take me home, afraid to enter, even by car, the fantasy world of Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Since I was 11 years old, I've witnessed my neighborhood being bombed in 1996, 2006 and 2024. In the meantime, I was able to experience the liberation of southern Lebanon and my father's return to Khiam after 20 years of Israeli occupation. I finally tasted the lemons and oranges he always mentioned and discovered his childhood school, where a large olive tree stood at the center.
We built a small house facing the plains, facing the border. This house, as opposed to the southern suburbs’ multistory concrete buildings, had only one floor and was surrounded by overgrown grass. One day, we found a watermelon growing peacefully amid a large bed of lavender. We'd have our morning coffee under the roses and walk around the rock-strewn garden with difficulty.
- I bought the satellite photo and identified the houses.
- But what's that white spot?
- This is your house.
- What?
- Yes, the house is gone.
The house is gone.
Today, I apologize to the fruit and olive trees.
Today, I want to engrave my sadness in the stones that remain.
Today, perhaps more than ever, those who have lost the most are being asked to keep quiet.
Except that when you’ve lost your house, all that’s left are your stories.
So, for pity's sake, let's cultivate them.
Nour Awada is a French-Lebanese artist and author.
