Lebanese diaspora filled with grief over explosion
of the 15-year civil war to the sectarian neoliberalism of the ’90s, to the Israel-lebanon war of 2006 and to this year’s financial collapse. They tell me my cousin is injured, that the houses of uncles and aunts in Mar Mikhael, where the port is located, have been decimated. They send pictures of broken balcony doors, shards of glass everywhere.
Traumatic memories of the war are too powerful to be suppressed. They haunt them. They haunt me.
My world is severed in two: part of me goes about my quotidian life in Columbus. I call my dentist, tend to my garden and make dinner. The other part is gutted by the scenes of utter devastation and despair. I call fellow immigrants to ask about their families. Desperate for updates, I glue myself to social media, refreshing my feed in a frenzy. Was it an attack or an explosion? Who is responsible for all this carnage?
The diaspora ritualizes its grief. Ghassan Hage, a Lebanese-australian anthropologist, makes his favorite Lebanese soup, Addas Bi-hamod, and calls it “a strategy of diasporic intensification: when a sensory-affective practice works to make one ‘intensely’ present in a physically distant reality.” Others play the songs of famous Lebanese diva Fayrouz, particularly her wartime eulogy to the Lebanese capital: “Li Beirut” or “To Beirut.” The song ends with a desire to reclaim the ruined city:
“You, Beirut, are mine
You are mine
Oh, embrace me.”
I, too, want to idealize Beirut. I, too, take part in a ritual of remembering. The aroma of Turkish coffee with cardamom infuses my house. I hold my little finjan. I summon the saltwater of the Mediterranean and the perfume of incense and cedar trees. The memory of these scents are a balm for my broken heart. I grieve, I revere and I remember.
How do Lebanese living abroad carry our pain in a society that cannot comprehend the collective traumas we’ve endured? How do we shake off the melancholy, the yearning, the heartache? To be perpetually weighed down by grief coming from elsewhere is akin to a state of double consciousness, riffing W.E.B. DuBois, of having one's heart and values in two places.
The first is a consciousness that strives to adhere to the protocols of whiteness; the second is an indigenous consciousness charged by an emotional intensity or a longing for the homeland. As a Lebanese-american living and working in central Ohio, I am always anticipating the next tragedy from home, always nostalgic to the communities I left behind. But I also live and breathe the air of the Scioto River and I thrive in the Black King-lincoln District’s communities of care and support. Columbus is my home.
Picking up my children from day care, I tell them that Lebanon, where teta and jeddo live, is hurting. My eldest asks: Can I fix it? Not this time, I say. Lebanon will need much more than the well wishes of a 4-year-old.
Mira Assaf Kafantaris, PH.D., is a senior lecturer in the English Department at Ohio State University.