Hiraeth
August 23rd 2023
I held Teta tightly against my chest. I breathed in the rich scent of parsley and onion that clung to her from the arduous hours she had spent laboring over our favorite dishes all summer. She was much shorter than me now. She had gotten a little older since the last time I’d seen her. I wondered how many more wrinkles would flow down her rounded face, gradually trickling off her chin, expanding beyond the skin's means to reconnect with the earth from whence it came. Tears threatening to fall from my stiff-faced grandfather’s eyes only served to confirm the reality setting in.
When will we come back?
This was not a new postulation, rather a ritualistic question amongst Lebanese families. It no longer reflects an answer of times and dates appointed by the Roman calendar, but hopes and aspirations. Hopes that these daughters, sons, grandchildren, uncles, will someday resettle their roots in grandpa’s garden.
This garden that our grandfather spent years cultivating houses a unique environment of fig trees and spiky pears, chicken pens and bee hives, jasmine flowers and grapes, unwelcome snakes and offensive stray cats. The garden is where he inflated a kiddie pool, solely for a little girl's playtime. The garden is where he placed the marjuha (couch swing). This marjuha was not meant for selfish pleasure, for relishing in the summer sun, but for poking fun at my sister. He annoyed her endlessly by calling her out into the garden to push him around as he opened the most recent newspaper. The garden is full of bee hives he cultivated so we could add another small enjoyable treat for my grandma's morning breakfast feasts. This is the garden he bought new lights for so we could host our late-night family gatherings, even though it ate up our power generator.
Memories adorned the green haven, as a final effort from our kin, hoping to bargain with us to never look back at the costly Middle Eastern Airlines flight to New York. Life separates the existence of the diaspora into two minds. One part residing in their childhood home hundreds of miles away, and the other longing for the return flight back.
When will we come back?
It’s a question we have used for generations, ever since despair and suffering began to appear across our fertile lands. Words no longer hold their meaning in this case. The language we use to express finitude is now interlaced with constant abstraction and absurdism. When we come back is verbalized poetry. It means nothing to the world, but everything to us.
Artists like Fairuz embody the suppressed emotions that linger in the air. Like dew as the sun rises, her melancholic voice coaxing us into another morning of solemn longing as taxi drivers begin their day. Her voice is a constant companion – through drives, while cooking brunch, during a stroll in the park, and in your darkest, most troubled moments.
Fairuz reminds us that returning physically is an impossibility.
The past is beyond reach, its relevance fading with time. She sings of a love for a place that runs deep, yet she acknowledges the pain of staying that balances the scales, bringing a bittersweet neutrality. Decades later, she still sings on the radio, allowing us to relive a golden past we were never bound to experience.
A greeting from my heart to Beirut
kisses to the sea and to the houses
to a rock, which is like an old sailor’s face
She is made from the people’s soul..from wine
She is from his sweat…a bread and Jasmins
So how does her taste become? A taste of fire and smoke
"Li Beirut," one of Fairuz’s most cherished songs, mourns a city untouched by the scars of war and division. She envisions a specific past—a time many in the younger generation have never known yet feel in the depths of our being, a longing passed down from mothers to daughters, etched into the very marrow of our existence. Fairuz longs for a place she once knew. We ache for a place we will never be, a yearning so profound that it remains unaltered, flowing silently through our veins, a transparent thread woven into our DNA.
L’Orient, a Lebanese journal, endlessly chronicles the lives of the Lebanese ‘expats,’ a term that softens the reality of immigrants working abroad, who are expected to return home each summer. The ‘expat’ lives in solitude in foreign lands, only to be embraced by the love and warmth of their homeland, where they stand in the long, winding lines at Passport control, awaiting entry into the country.
Videos circulate, capturing young girls hurling themselves into the arms of waiting parents or friends, leaving all else forgotten. Families gather at the gates, clutching balloons and flowers, their anticipation palpable. I know this scene well, for I have lived it for the past twenty summers. Each summer blurs into the next, indistinguishable in its repetition. The faces in the lines are a distant haze, obscured by time and sameness, yet hauntingly familiar. I see their eyes, even through my reluctance to wear my glasses. All the same. Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Syrian, Lebanese, or Druze. They are in this line with the same anticipating eyes that all scream:
When will you come back?
It is hard to say. When we were young, my sister and I lived within the worlds of our parents and their parents and their parents' parents. We had no purpose or goals. No responsibilities. We did not have a life separate from them. Wherever they went, we went.
Sure, it came with some opposition occasionally. We whined about the long travels and the hot summer months spanning out within the cage of my mother’s childhood home spent pushing our grandpa around on the marjuha. Yet that was all we lived for at the time - school, travels home, running away from bees, feeding stray cats, playing tennis with our cousins, swimming in a pool with dragonflies attacking us, and visiting various family members to show them that the Shamouns’ little girls were taller, prettier, and on their path to success abroad. Alive and well.
Now, I no longer know how to answer that question that my cousin typed into our “Trisonomie” Instagram groupchat. When will you guys come back? “It's hard to say with all the tension these days,” I respond. And “I have my internship this summer and the next, it’s just too much money spent on so little time.”
Now knowing that I will not be going back this summer, I should have held my grandma longer. I should have gone to Lebanon the Summer of 2022 before going to NYU. I should have allowed my parents to go while I was away in my senior year. I should have known that it would be the last time my dad would get to see his dad. I should have known.
I still hold onto this regret. I remember exactly that day, sitting in Wendy Lotterman’s “Letters of the Law” class with Marisa at 11 a.m. in the desolate lower levels of Bobst library. I had found out about my grandfather's death from an in memoriam on Instagram from my cousin Zainab during the 15-minute class break. I took a step out of class to call my mother to confirm what I had seen, since my dad was not picking up the phone. I recall the conventional tone my mother was using – concerning to say the least – as she announced my father’s quick departure to the airport for the funeral, all happening within a span of an hour.
Did my dad resent me for this? All the experiences with friends we force down their throats to fit into their schedule now, to plan their plans around ours. All our fun, laughter, and innocence prevented him from a heartfelt goodbye – a sight of his father’s face, clouded eyes long gone from Alzheimer's years ago, before he hit the mosque's town grave. The same town grave we see on our way down the hill from the Assaad home.
When will it be our last visit?
We said goodbye to four souls these last 10 years over the phone: my great-aunt's son who was active in the Lebanese military, who, one day when I was 10, decided to direct a bullet to his head; my cousin in his 50s who passed away from diabetes and a number of health issues; my paternal grandfather who passed away of old age; and my paternal grandmother who passed away in 2014. Each of these passings was dealt with more isolation than the last.
The phone call is an unnatural bridge for bearing grief. Voices carry words, but not the tremble of lips, the glistening tears in the eye, or the flushed, splotchy patches of skin where anguish blooms. When death announces itself through a phone call, it strips away the human connection needed to share such sorrow. A click of a button, and the finality of death can be momentarily erased, replaced by the mundane rhythm of daily life.
Death at a distance feels unreal, almost hollow. I was young when I first understood this strange dissonance — how loss could be reduced to the cold ring of a phone. To my young heart, death was just a distant echo, a brief interruption in the lives of my parents, who felt these losses deeply because they had known those who passed. They were the people of their memories, their dreams, their laughter, and their tears. Death became significant because it broke something in them. But it remained impersonal to me, just a phone call, just a moment.
One day, the hope of returning to our ancestral land will fade, like the last breath whispered across the telephone line. As anticlimactic as the calls before it, I will receive the final message: the last living relative is gone. With those words, my connection to that land will be severed.
The place that once held the roots of my lineage will be barren, its ties to me undone with the passing of those who made it home. All of this will come to me not in the warmth of a farewell embrace but through the cold, distant click of a phone.