This article is part of Mafaza Digital Zine that explores the concept of survival. You can read also: The Republic of Wounded Bodies by Nabil Muhammad, The Governance of Hope by Hsain al-Shehabi, Apocalypse in the Body by Kinana Issa, To Fall from Nowhere by Nour Mousa, Identity Survival in The Diaspora by Ola Barqawi, The World is Not a Small Village by Raja Salim, Living Wounds: Violations & Victimhood by Sasha Zack, To Be Understood Without Talking by Shaunt Raffi, and Furnishing Memory by Ali Zaraket.
Read the Arabic Issue here.
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Ali Zaraket
Writer and filmmaker from Lebanon living in Toronto. In addition to his work in print and television journalism, he has published two poetry collections and worked on several documentaries and short films.
Translated from Arabic by Hazem Jamjoum
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When I was invited to contribute some thoughts to the Mafaza Project on the idea of survival, I wondered: “Is it possible for me to talk about survival?” The question mirrored another one inside me: “Do I deserve survival?” We all know that a survivor feels guilt vis-à-vis those who did not survive. My answer was that I do not know if I am entitled to delve into and talk about the question of survival. Being Lebanese compounds the difficulty; when I was asked to compare the tragedies of Lebanon to those of Syria and Palestine, I found the question challenging. My own experience of tragedy–to sidestep any notion of speaking on behalf of all Lebanese–was never easily separable from those experienced by Palestinians and Syrians. It is difficult to delve into your own personal and national tragedy when the person you are speaking to is immersed in their own tragedy. The question arises–possibly prompted by an ignorance of the Lebanese reality though motivated by the ways pain can cloud one’s judgment–“Which is the bigger tragedy? Whose is the greater suffering?” How do you respond to someone who sees little but their pain, and feels nothing but the urgent necessity of their survival? I ask myself: isn’t this precisely the question that drives Lebanese racists to harass and harm Syrian refugees in Lebanon?
An introduction that could have been avoided
I don’t know if I was really in danger or if my life was actually on the line, but I do know that I was born into a war. I also know that in my 41 years of living, I only experienced three without war. I was born into a country under double occupation. The first of these was the Israeli occupation of the South, where my village lay, where my family lived, and where our lands near the Palestine border were. The second was the Syrian occupation of the rest of the country, including its political system and its economy. I lived through eight years of the civil war, and twice I survived bombings of the area around my home. I was five when my neighborhood friend’s father was killed by a missile. We spent years being displaced from home to home, escaping from one village to another. The civil war came to a civil resolution, but the Israeli bombings continued daily until the liberation of the South in 2000. Thousands were killed, civilians and combatants alike, and thousands were imprisoned, including several from my family. The area where I lived was subjected to two full-scale Israeli military assaults, in 1993 and 1996. We were displaced, we escaped, and we sang along with the patriotic songs of Marcel Khalifah and Ahmad Kaabour while the television brought us images of martyrs, the ambulance in Mansouri, and the children of Qana.
Our house was still standing when we returned, but the one across the street was completely destroyed. Those who were inside when it was bombed were killed. The South was liberated in 2000, and what remained for us to do was to liberate the rest of the country from Syrian occupation. Me, my friends and my comrades demonstrated, and many were arrested. I was headstrong and quarrelsome, but I was cautious. The Syrian army withdrew in 2005, so war came in 2006, and the Israeli military bombed our homes, grinding them down to dust. I joined the relief efforts with a group of amazing volunteers, and I saw destruction and death. I wrote this at the time:
Between the fogs left by the missiles, the cinders are born
The city is now in cinders
And atop these cinders we will build in ashen grey
For that is the colour of my country to come in the paintings to come
It is the colour of my sky to come in the places to come
Thirty percent of the country was destroyed in Israel’s war which killed thousands. My house in the village in the South was damaged, and we restored it so it was more beautiful than before. Between 2004 and 2008 we lived through seasons of assassinations and threats. Dozens of politicians and journalists were murdered at the hands of a regime whose criminality is known to all. The wave of more localized wars began in 2007 when the Lebanese army’s assault on combatants in Nahr al-Bared displaced thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese from that refugee camp. In 2008, militias occupied Beirut during the clashes of May 7, with dead bodies piled up in the streets, repression, and arrests. In 2011, we were engrossed along with all the other Arabs in the Spring. The revolutionaries of Lebanon rose up against the police state and paid an exorbitant political price. Those who know, know; so ask them.
Local militias joined the wars in Yemen and Syria. In 2013, the Lebanese army battled Islamist cells in ‘Abra. The civil uprising that erupted in Tripoli in 2011 carried through to 2019 unabated, as did the series of assassinations, local gun battles, and car bombings all across the country. People suffocated under the police state, in a period that was arguably the worst in the country’s history when it came to corruption kleptocracy. Government services deteriorated to the point where the vast majority of the country’s population lived without reliable access to water or electricity, and without social services, all under a government that patronized little other than the deadly environmental pollution that buried all of Lebanon’s urban areas in mountains of garbage in 2015. This continued until the country was set ablaze, plummeting into the deadly financial crisis of 2019.
When Lebanon’s population rose to fight for their freedom and their right to a better country in 2019, many of our Arab brethren found it suitable to make jokes about Lebanese women for showing up to demonstrations in shorts, having done their makeup, and looking good. That year, over 70 percent of Lebanese were below the poverty line with no social safety net, and that was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Lebanese society was–and is–facing. Does this qualify Lebanon as enough of a tragedy? Maybe it would have sufficed for me to say that I have a home in southern Lebanon, with lands rich in olive and pine trees overlooking Palestine, and that one day that land was liberated by my cousins and kin, but has been under regular bombardment by the Israeli military for all of the last months. Well over 400 people have been killed in Lebanon, and thousands injured, tens of thousands of buildings destroyed, over forty-thousand trees burned, over eighty-thousand people internally displaced in these same months. And that isn’t even everything.
Perhaps we have become accustomed to life on the rim of the volcano’s crater, playing and partying at the same time that we fight and die. Not many know that we Lebanese also deserve to survive. Perhaps our tragedy is not as big as that of the Palestinians, so we feel shame in expressing our pain.
The theme of survival
Let me be clear here at the outset: I do not think we survived. I don’t think that those who came out of the killing fields of Palestine and Syria, or the slow and daily deaths of Lebanon, I don’t think they are survivors. Even having made it to the safety of Canadian shores, so long as the killing machine runs amok in our lands, we have not survived. In the shelters of the mind formed by cruel experiences, and in between the folds of dark and difficult memories, we have space to work on our inevitable survival. I will soon turn to “furnishing memory” as the only type of action that can be carried out by those facing the threats and dangers of the survivor’s journey. I take the concept of memory as the condition/space that has influence over the world in which we live and interact.
We live in Canada today, but our minds judge life here with the tools, the consciousness, and the emotions of the past that we brought with us from our countries. Brimming with strong feelings and organic, emotionally loaded connections to other places, this past either compels us to make comparisons and to search the space of memory for the tranquility of a refuge, or it pushes us into isolation and separation. I suggest that we write the story of our survival by retrieving memory, reconstructing it, and mixing it in with what we are experiencing now, not by isolating it or bypassing it. I propose the idea of “furnishing memory,” by which I mean: by understanding how we recall the past and linking it to the place that inhabits the memory, we can reconfigure our memory, arrange it emotionally, and then furnish it with new experiences that link past experiences to current reality and use imagination to create the future.
Building on Gaston Bachelard’s argument that spaces can serve as havens of memory, where we define places by our familiarity with them and the extent to which we experience them,1 I argue that the act of “furnishing” memory with our experiences and their details is a way of creating a stable and secure place in an unstable insecure world. This journey is not only about reexamining memory but also about the intentional act of furnishing and reshaping it to house the continuity of life and culture amid turmoil and displacement. This can be considered a survival mechanism, as we find foundation and continuity in the spaces familiar to memory. We constantly construct and reconstruct our intimate spaces in our minds. This process is not only about preserving the past but also about reimagining and reinterpreting it, allowing individuals to adapt to new circumstances and maintain a sense of continuity and identity. Memory is not necessarily romantic, nor does it work in a unidirectional manner towards the past. Rather, it deals with pain through a dialectic of the past, the present, and the possibilities of the future.
Words and their rapid obsolescence
I’ve erased and rewritten this text three times now. Whenever I look at the words, I see that they are outdated and worn out in the face of the event. The screens on which I watch and read the news precede me and my thoughts. My idea is that we need to reclaim memory as a place of speech. I want to build on this to ask questions about my positionality and the positionality of those like me in today’s world and about the fundamental question: “Have we survived?” But in the face of daily events, and our time being filled with fresh tragedies, how can we remember tragedies to write about the amputated relationship with memory?
I erased the text once because an event preceded it. The killing is still ongoing, and any talk that does not emanate from it is pure nonsense. I erased it again when I caught myself writing in the plural form, about we. When I asked myself: “Who are we?” I didn’t know the answer. I erased it the third time out of anger. Why am I writing and to whom? From my balcony, where the rare sun of dear Toronto shines, I look at a world where people are locked in their noise-canceling headphones, hearing only what the algorithms choose. The voice in this world has become muttered and insipid, and speech has become an echo in a prefabricated design. No matter how important, unique, or out-of-the-box the language you produce is, it is funneled through prefabricated channels of understanding. These channels govern our comprehension of language and meaning, choosing for us the time, place, and context in which we hear or read. Structures of funding choose for us the contexts of what can be written, what can be told, and what can be published. We think we communicate what we want, but what we communicate is what is available and allowed. So why then do we write, and why do we talk? I communicate to restore memory, open ulcerated wounds, and cause pain in myself, or to forget and look away from the cruel event to create solace in laughter or illusion. But I do communicate, and I think here I can use the plural: We often communicate so that we can build memory so that we can remember and be remembered. In wondering “What is the point of communication?” Memory is the only answer.
Furnishing memory
Our lived experiences govern our world, and we cannot view memory only as a gray repository of the past. It is like a panel, or a color-changing LCD screen that is constantly being repainted. Memory is not a fixed archive; it is a living space. It collapses, morphs, changes, and moves as much as we move. Just as we rearrange the furniture in our homes, we can rearrange our memories. The concept of “furnishing memory” appears to me as a metaphor for the idea of retrieving our memories and then intentionally reshaping them, to build a haven of identity and a thread of reason amid chaos.
Some spaces, such as home, homeland, and alternative homeland, are not just physical structures but reservoirs of memories and dreams. These spaces become places where the past is preserved, the only place that allows the imagination to flourish. Imagination can only grow to the extent that it relies on memory, on what has passed and what is known, that is, on previous data that has its own moral and emotional charges. For Bachelard, home is a space that houses our personal history, emotions, and dreams, and plays a crucial role in shaping our identity and sense of self, and creating the meaning of our existence.
Our existence is intricately woven into the fabric of place. The spaces we live in shape our memories and sense of belonging. The place is a sensory experience, a tapestry of smells and sounds. Think of a childhood home where the smell of fresh bread lingers in the kitchen, and where colorful clay floor tiles tell stories of generations past. The place becomes an anchorage or a reference point for our memories. But the place is not fixed. It is evolving with us. The park bench where hands first touched, and the bustling city square where protests echo, are places that have become part of our geography, and of our bodies themselves. The house, according to Gaston Bachelard, “shelters day-dreaming… protects the dreamer… [and] allows one to dream in peace.”2
Memory is the place that lies in the middle between the world of dreams and the world of ghosts haunting our past. Our personal and collective histories shape our identity and provide a context for our existence. When we cut off this context, we encounter a void and a rupture in our narrative. A refugee forced to flee their war-torn homeland lacks not only physical integrity but also continuity in their life story. Likewise, a society that suppresses its historical memory risks losing its cultural resilience. Habits are the threads that weave into our daily lives. They provide stability and the ability to predict events, and predictability of events is the most important feature of stability and the ability to relax.
Memory as shelter
We had a place before we came to countries of asylum or forced migration. This place is not the apartment we inhabited, nor even the city we lived in; it is the accumulation of experiences and our imagination about the life we lived in this place. Part of the memory of a place lies in the ability to leave it, and part of the experience of a place is the events that influenced the course of our lives, in addition to the places we dream about or compare to those places we consider ours. When we lived in Beirut and its suburbs, for example, we were always looking for a garden, a refuge that we imagined in the form of the gardens of European and American cities. This search was part of the reality of the place, and part of our experience of it. It was, therefore, part of our memory of that place. Our imagination about a place, or our wishes for what a place could be, creates our memory of it. Our desire for freedom and democracy in our native countries is part of our memory. For a moment, we remember our joy and celebration at our ability to chant in a demonstration for freedom, and for a moment we remember the brutality of the security forces, the tear gas, the rubber bullets, and the live bullets fired upon the demonstrators. Here we are today standing in a beautiful park in Toronto, but the Canadian park we dreamt of in Beirut or the Levant now ensconced in our memories is different from the actual park in Canada itself. My memory feels that this reality has nothing to do with that dream.
Let me tell you about a scene in the park, and how a civic space designed for leisure can be transformed into an experience capable of changing outlook and orientation. The sky had just cleared its clouds when the march with its flags and banners stopped at Christie Pits Park in Toronto. The crowds listened to an Arab women’s choir, who had imported their keffiyehs from across the ocean to sing together for Palestine. The women sang to repair the ruptured connection between their memory and the place in which they now lived. Restoring the relationship between emotional memory and reality through singing, public space, and the surrounding community is a way to restore memory and restore its ability to make meaning. Memory intervenes here to project meaning onto the place through sound and image, so it is lived as an extension of a life that was. This act is an act of furnishing the memory with new experiences. Through this act, the Beiruti dream of a garden can be filled with the songs of Arab women in Toronto, creating a bridge so that we do not forget, and so that we do not sink into sadness from living too much in the past.
Thus, the spaces we share as a community, or as a group within it, can also be considered repositories of collective memory. Restocking these shared spaces with collective memories can strengthen social bonds and cultural identities, contributing to the collective survival of a group or community. Bachelard’s focus on the home extends to the metaphorical level, where the home represents the core of an individual’s being or identity. In the struggle for survival, especially in times of displacement or crisis, furnishing memory by supplying it with new experiences can enhance a sense of stability and identity.
In the park
In the same park where lovers of Palestine–White, Black, Jewish, and Arab–gathered, there was a woman and a man from the indigenous people of Turtle Island (“Canada”). They lit the sacred fire to commemorate the souls of their people, now dead as a result of colonialism and its brutality. It was not a simple moment for me in front of the indigenous woman who shared the pain of the Palestinians. My memory was preoccupied with the tragedy that had occurred, but in a moment I faced a complex question: How do I accept being a settler on a land whose owners did not allow me to reside? I didn’t ask them. How can I ask for forgiveness from them?
In the garden, I follow the request to approach the sacred fire from the east to enter the circle around it. The indigenous woman teaches me about the tradition of burning “medicines” after making a wish, the medicines being a bit of tobacco and rice paper. You hold it in your left hand, close your fingers over it and wish, or channel your energy, then throw it into the fire. I see it burning, and I smell it. How many times did the woman see the fire burning the cedar branches? How many times had she felt the glow and smelled the scent of tobacco, then looked up and saw the sun setting? How many of the names of her people fall before her eyes in the space occupied by the cold air between her and the fire? Many names occupy the space, names I do not know, names of those killed by colonialism. And here I am, like them, remembering the names of my dead, on a land that is not my land, and in a country that is not my country. How can this country become my country? Do I go around all the indigenous tribes and ask for their permission, one by one, in order to become a son of this land? Or do I content myself with that loving look from the Indigenous man who lit the sacred fire in Christie Pits Park to remember the souls of compatriots? I have felt guilty for the whole year that has passed since I set foot on this continent. But this year of guilt is a year of my own life, feelings mixed in with all of the horrors I have known, horrors I harbor as if they were all my fault. So I apologize. I apologized to this land before throwing the handful of tobacco and a few rice leaves from my hand into the heart of the fire. I apologized to the cold of the air that I didn’t know how to handle. I apologized to each of the dead whose names were called out, and I committed my apologies to my memory, as new furniture, adding to what was already there.
Survival as a continuous form
Last month I was in Beirut, my city, on my first visit after I decided to emigrate to Canada. Beirut, for those who do not know it, is a city that lives, in every sense of the word, on the rim of a volcano’s crater. Beirut’s life is like no other. It is a vitality that you feel all the time, every minute, and every second. You feel alive. This intensity of the feeling of life is caused by the intensity of the sense of danger. The law of normal life is that every day is a new day worth celebrating, or as my friend told me: “Every day is an extra day, a bonus.” The point is that she repeatedly had near-death experiences, not due to illness or a natural accident, but rather due to man-made disasters, occupation, stupidity, negligence, customs, and traditions. Maria Shakhtoura, a Lebanese journalist, told me, commenting on her book about life in Lebanon during the civil war, that we do not live, but rather we stay alive. My question today is: Will we “survive” if we stay alive?
In his book The Moment You Open Your Eyes is the Moment of Tragedy, the writer Bilal Khobayz says: “The day a person lives no longer brings him one day closer to death, as is the case in ordinary life. Rather, the day a person lives has become a day that falls in the time after death.” That is, survival, the effects which a person feels in his bones and flesh every morning, is precisely living an additional day in the time after death.
Survival is not an isolated event; it is a continuous pattern etched into our existence. Like the rhythmic beat of the heart, survival becomes our pulse, the steady rhythm that drives us forward. When the struggle for survival becomes permanent, it reshapes our perception of reality. Increased vigilance, the need to adapt, and constant preparedness all become ingrained habits. Anxiety becomes part of our daily existence, blurring the line between normalcy and crises. Surviving amid adversity often results in an ambivalent emotional state. Joy and comfort coexist with anxiety and alertness. We celebrate every victory, no matter how small, while simultaneously beset by fear of the next challenge… a delicate balance between hope and fear.
The constant fight to survive in the face of disaster keeps us in a constant state of emergency. Our pores remain active and alert for fight or flight, even during moments of apparent calm. This chronic stress affects our physical health, mental well-being, and overall quality of life. We have become adept at dealing with crises, but at what cost? The memory of past survival experiences weighs heavily on the heart. It affects decision-making, relationships, and our sense of identity. We carry the scars of survival, and they shape our interactions with the world.
I remember here when actress Anju Rayhan was wondering on stage if she was the reason. Rayhan was asking if she was guilty of staying alive. “Is it right for me?” the actress asks on stage while narrating the story of a girl whose father was arrested by the Israeli army during its occupation of Lebanon. The little girl thinks that she is the reason her father moved away from home, a sin that the mother did not blame on her, and that the father never mentioned. The girl raises herself on a guilt complex; it is simply her fault because she was born in a country afflicted by occupation, war, terror, kidnapping, and imprisonment. This is how the Israelis took her father, and the wound was born. All the events of the play Shu Mnilbis (“What should we wear?”) by writer Yahya Jaber and actress Anju Rayhan unfold from this complex: illness, death, war, displacement, occupation, and violation. Do we have the right? How can a person know this? How do we find relief from the guilt complex that consumes us? We get confused and drown in the next question that opens the door to remembering. Here lies the danger in dealing with memory. What world do we build from and within memories? Is it a world trying to escape guilt? Or is it a world that dives into this guilt, like the heroine of the play?
Exodus as aspiration
There were 14 students in the class when we graduated, and only five of them are still in Lebanon. Leaving the country has always been an individual ambition of ours. The dream of Europe is one of freedom and democracy, the U.S. is the dream of opportunity and wide open spaces. Canada is the promise of stability and acceptance, while the Gulf is prosperity and financial means. Whatever the destination, leaving was an ambition of an entire generation that began to see its country eroding before its eyes from the end of the 1990s until today. In the introduction to his novel Al-Hijra fi Layl al-Rahil (Migration on the Night of Departure), Abdul Majeed Zaraket (my father) wrote an introduction explaining the difference between migration and departure. While departure is permanent, migration, like the flight of birds, is seasonal or for a reason, holds within it a promise of return. Immigrants and refugees in Toronto are trying to create a homeland out of singing sessions, or locating their favorite shawarma spot that reminds them of what was in their memory, as if in their internal spaces they are all “returnees.”
Our memory of the homeland or country is not rosy. Rather, it carries the shocks of death and pain more than laughter and play. But these memories are our memories and this place in the memory is the cross we will bear. Anju asks Rehan, “What should we wear?” We wear our guilt, Anju, and we carry it with all its details in a memory that we re-furnish with every burning. We wear our guilt and try to survive it.
At the end of World War II, Europe began to understand that the cannon fire had stopped, and Soviet soldiers entered Berlin. At that time, the U.S. was preparing to throw its nuclear bombs on Japan, and “Free” France was preparing to discipline its colonies with fire and gunpowder. The Allies said the war was over, and decided that whoever was still alive had survived. Thus, the remaining European Jews came out into the light, tired and devastated, to tell the story of survival. The story of survival is the story of the Holocaust, the discovery of the killer, and the identification of the victim. Thus, the Jews were victims of the Holocaust that claimed the lives of six million, and destroyed a social fabric, institutions, relationships, and the ability to interact vitally with a geography and history that was no longer available. Therefore, those who lived after that were survivors. In our country, the killing has not ended, so we have not yet survived. The act of leaving the country was not survival.
To survive, war, murder, and assassinations must stop afflicting our minds and memories. We have to re-conceive the victim in light of the actually existing situation, determine our positionality about the executioner, and recast our relationality to one another–“we” who are the outsiders. Moreover, we will not survive individually, and we must understand where we come from. To survive, we must believe that some survived before us, and learn the ways from their survival. We have to reconnect memories and narrate them to build a life upon those memories, a life that is not cut off from the past, but knows how to furnish memories to host new visitors and new experiences.
- Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space (Original La Poetique de l’Espace) P. 5, translated from French by Jolas, Maria with a foreword by John R. Stilgoe, reprinted in 1994, Beacon Press. (Original French Published 1958).
↩︎ - Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space (Original La Poetique de l’Espace) P. 6, translated from French by Jolas, Maria with a foreword by John R. Stilgoe, reprinted in 1994, Beacon Press. (Original French Published 1958).
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