As entire villages, neighborhoods, and homes were flattened amidst the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the war on Lebanon, each fallen building erased the memories and stories of those who once lived there, their lives reduced to statistics and fragments of shattered bodies. Over and over, histories are silenced, communities reduced to labels of terrorism, and their humanity erased under the pretext of self-defense.
In such times, family memories and people’s histories become an important means for resistance, as they challenge the dehumanizing global rhetoric which reduces our regions to zones of conflict. Passed down through generations, they fill the gaps left by national and dominant narratives and reveal how “ordinary people” have shaped history in ways often forgotten.
As a historian, I have always been captivated by the ability of family memories to create counter-narratives. A few years ago, I published an essay about my family’s history in Arabic, where I reflected on their experiences between Beirut and Jabal Amel (southern Lebanon), and their connection to Lebanon’s collective identity. To revisit these memories today and translate them into English is like an act of witnessing—to stitch and preserve fragments of a fading past. It is also a way to counter discourses that reduce people in Lebanon, Palestine, and other places to political labels, collateral damage, or statistics. By restoring our humanity and the complexity of our histories, these stories transform the personal into the political and offer a more intimate and human perspective.
Today, I return to my family’s memories from Jabal Amel, which is a name I prefer over “southern Lebanon,” as it reflects the region’s deeper history and identity. Jabal Amel has long been a frontline of resistance and a site of struggles over power and identity, but it now faces a profound sense of defeat and isolation, both locally and globally.
Through narrating my grandfather’s biography and my father’s recollections, I follow the intimate connections between Beirut and its rural peripheries. I explore the forced migration of people from rural areas to the city, the exploitation they endured, and the illusions upon which the city was built—legacies that continue to haunt Beirut. The history of Shia migration from the south of Lebanon and the Beqaa to Beirut, often framed around “belts of misery” and marginalization, overlooks the lived experiences of individuals whose stories transcend sect and class, representing the most exploited sectors of society.
Recovering these forgotten narratives challenges colonial erasure, dominant histories, and the local political manipulation of these narratives. It allows us to bear witness to their lives and suffering, while reclaiming the histories of religious communities who have long been (and still are) instrumentalized or dismissed as backward, terrorist, or vulgar.
Reflecting on the lives of my grandfather, grandmother, and father, my aim is to see how the stories of ordinary people have shaped Lebanon’s past and continue to shape its present. By resisting dehumanization and erasure, these memories honor lives that the world too often tends to forget. Through the act of remembering and retelling, we keep these histories alive and reimagine our collective identity from below.
Between the End of the Ottoman Empire and the Birth of Greater Lebanon
My grandfather, Sheikh Ali, was born in the early 20th century, in 1907 according to his identification papers, in Jabal Amel, which was part of the Ottoman Empire at the time. He was born in a small village called “al-Yehudiyeh” (meaning “the Jewish” or “the Jews”), which the locals renamed “as-Sultaniyeh” in the 1960s, after the main village road, known as “Al-Sultani.”
My grandfather wasn’t born blind; he lost his sight in 1914 during World War I, when a trachoma epidemic swept through the region, affecting many people’s eyes. Many of those infected lost their vision due to a lack of treatment, and my grandfather was among them. His father, Sheikh Khalil Abbani, was a farmer and one of the sheikhs of al-Yehudiyeh.
When my grandfather lost his sight at the age of seven, he could no longer participate in the family’s agricultural work. His family sent him to Beirut with others who went to the city to beg, hoping that due to his blindness, people might offer him charity. At that time, many villagers were escaping poverty in rural areas. Seeking better job opportunities, they were forced to go to Beirut, especially after the Ottoman state integrated tobacco farming into the global capitalist network at the end of the 19th century. The state granted a French company, the Regie, the monopoly to purchase and control tobacco production, as the Ottoman government lacked the capital to develop tobacco fields. This affected farmers in Jabal Amel, who were forced to sell their crops to Regie at low prices. Due to their lack of literacy and skilled trades, many rural newcomers ended up doing menial jobs in Beirut, such as shining shoes, carrying loads, selling kaak (sesame bread), or begging on the streets of a city that didn’t always know how to welcome its many newcomers.
My grandfather likely arrived in Beirut after World War I, though my father doesn’t know the details of those early years. My grandfather never spoke of it, and my father never asked. I can only imagine what my grandfather must have felt being sent to the city to beg after losing his sight and being abandoned by his family. How did a blind child from a rural village cope in a city undergoing profound changes in urbanization, architecture, politics, and culture? A city gradually abandoning its local knowledge and skills under the pressures of colonial expansion and global openness. Was he captivated by the sounds of the modern city and its rhythmic speed, or did he long for the quiet and familiarity of village life? Did he cry over his fate, exhausted from begging in the streets, and yearn to return home, knowing it was impossible?
Years later, my grandfather met a Christian association for the blind, with whom he stayed involved for several years. Through this association, he was enrolled in the British Syrian Mission Blind School, known at the time as the “English School,” located in Beirut’s Zuqaq al-Blat neighborhood (now the site of the old French Lycée Abdel Kader building). Founded in 1868, the school offered free education to blind students, teaching them various skills and trades. It provided elementary classes where students learned Arabic and English Braille, along with subjects such as arithmetic, history, geography, and religion. Older students, those over the age of twelve, attended afternoon workshops where they were taught trades like chair caning and basket weaving. Younger students participated in workshops once a week, with the rest of their time spent in the recreation room, which featured puzzles, dominoes, a radio, and instruments like the piano and violin for music training.
Despite the limited career opportunities this school offered blind students, preparing them only for low-paying jobs, it shaped my grandfather’s character and nurtured his talents. It provided him with an opportunity to build a life that he couldn’t have found within his family or community. He learned Braille, though he didn’t practice it much, and became skilled in chair caning, a craft he continued throughout his life. Perhaps the most significant influence from his time at the school was his exposure to Evangelical Christian teachings, which had such a profound impact on him that he converted to Christianity. He was around nineteen or twenty years old at the time. His family and the villagers were outraged—how could Sheikh Khalil’s Shia son become a Protestant Christian?
They pressured him to “return” to his original faith. My family would joke half a century later about how different our lives in the southern suburbs of Beirut might have been if my grandfather had remained Protestant. However, what interests me most today is understanding what drew him to Protestantism in the first place, why he chose to embrace a different religion, and why he ultimately decided to return to his original faith. Did he find what he was looking for there? What attracted him to that faith that he didn’t find in his own environment? And when he returned to being Shia, did he truly believe in it, or was it simply a matter of social pressure? Did he practice either religion at all?
As for his official identity, my grandfather was recorded as a Muslim Sunni. During the 1932 census, a key part of the establishment of the modern Lebanese state and the process of registering citizens under the French Mandate, the census committee visited my grandfather’s house in Beirut and asked, “What is your confession?” He simply replied, “I’m a Muslim,” and they registered him as Muslim, which at that time meant Sunni, not Shia. My grandfather wasn’t aware of this distinction, and apparently the census officials didn’t bother to clarify this or verify the information—especially given the many bureaucratic errors and the highly politicized nature of the census results.
My father discovered this during an election year, possibly in 1968. He couldn’t find their names on the Shia electoral roll and searched until he found them listed among the Sunnis. At the time, my father didn’t care much, as he considered himself a “leftist who didn’t care about sects”! However, when he wanted to marry my mother years later, her parents objected when they discovered that he was Sunni on paper, even though they were from the same village. They insisted that he change his sect. My father complied and went to the Jaafari Court to correct the error.
But the sheikh there refused, accusing my father, a civil servant employee, of wanting to take a Shia position to increase the number of Sunni employees. My father insisted that he was Shia by blood, so the sheikh asked him to bring his Shia father, who had at the time already passed away. My father then suggested bringing his mother and uncle, and the sheikh accepted. My father’s Shia identity was officially restored, though to this day, our family’s official record remains among Sunni records! My grandfather’s decisions and slips continue to amuse me, lingering more than half a century after his death in this surreal city and society. It also strikes me how modern states can shape your identity with a piece of paper, not just through lived experience.
The Day My Grandfather Became an Urban Man
My grandfather was in his forties when my father was born a few years after independence in 1947, the youngest of three siblings with two older sisters. Despite his poverty, my grandfather insisted on educating my father and his sisters, both of whom earned the certificate of primary education, which was considered quite an accomplishment for people of their social standing. At that time, my grandfather worked as a chair caner. During this period, the Shia feudal lord Ahmad Abdel Latif Al-Assad likely helped arrange for him to get a job at the Regie Company in Beirut. Regie employed blind workers to sort tobacco leaves, alongside many rural farmers whom the company had originally impoverished and driven to the city. My grandfather worked there for the remainder of his life.
I don’t know much about his working conditions, but it’s clear that work at Regie wasn’t easy. Workers faced exploitation and vulnerability in the industrial sector, along with poor working conditions, lacking basic services and equipment. My father tells me that one day my grandfather resigned, though he doesn’t recall the exact reason, and took his severance pay, which wouldn’t last more than a month. The family was upset and appealed to Ahmad Al-Assad to have him reinstated. My grandfather returned to work, and he gave back the severance pay.
Though my grandfather abandoned his Evangelical faith, he maintained his involvement with the Christian Association for the Blind, which was based in a church near Saint Joseph University in Ashrafieh, on Monot Street, where they held regular meetings. During the association’s presidential elections, they would elect my grandfather as president for two or three hours, just until the elections were over, as he was the only Muslim member. Then, he would return to being Sheikh Ali.
My father sometimes accompanied him to these meetings, but in reality, it was my grandfather who led the way. From the Msaytbeh neighborhood in West Beirut to the Jesuit University in East Beirut, he directed my father: “Go through here, turn there,” he would say. My grandfather “saw” the streets of the city with perfect clarity, confidently navigating them with his wooden cane. When he went to the Regie factory in Mar Mikhael, he would take the tram from Basta to Dora, and my father would sometimes wait for him at the tram stop if he wasn’t in school. But my grandfather didn’t really need him—he was sharp and had a strong sense of direction, fully aware of how to move through Beirut, which had by then become his city.
The city had pulled him from his rural roots and was harsh on him, but like all cities, it opened doors to new worlds. It was in this environment that his political ideas began to take shape. He befriended Khalil Naous (1935–1986), a journalist and leader in the Lebanese Communist Party, who lived nearby and greatly influenced him. My grandfather was a natural revolutionary, having suffered from the combined hardships of his blindness and his difficult social conditions—first at his family’s home, then in Beirut, and later at Regie. Although he never officially joined the Communist Party, his views were shaped by the city’s social and labor movements. He witnessed these firsthand, as much of the political activity at that time occurred in the Regie and Ghandour confectioneries’ factories, where workers often gathered.
According to my father, my grandfather held leftist and socialist views that were “quite advanced” for someone of his background and circumstances. While he never openly discussed his ideas with my father, he accepted and supported my father’s leftist leanings. When my father became politically active as he grew older, my grandfather didn’t object. My father would talk to him about the state, socialism, and Lenin, and my grandfather would listen and accept these ideas. He also got to know most of my father’s friends, as he enjoyed sitting with them and involving himself in their conversations.
I never met my grandfather. He passed away many years before I was born, while he was still working at the Regie. All the men in the family—my uncles and my grandfather—died of heart disease, and my grandfather suffered for some time before he passed. In 1964, when my father was in his Brevet (Intermediate) year, my grandfather had his first heart attack and was taken to Makassed Hospital, where he was treated and released. He became a heart patient after that. He often worried about his health and would frequently tell my grandmother, “My heart hurts; make me a cup of mint tea.”
In 1971, on a Friday, my father had just been appointed as a secondary school teacher while still attending the Faculty of Pedagogy. On his way back from the university cafeteria, he found my grandfather at home, feeling tired. My grandfather asked to take him to the hospital. As soon as they arrived, he was taken into the emergency room. Minutes later, the doctor came out and told my father, “I’m sorry, it was a severe heart attack.” To this day, my father blames himself for not calling an ambulance. He didn’t have a car, so they had to take a taxi to the hospital, where they walked inside. My father didn’t have the experience or knowledge of how to handle the situation, nor did he know whom to contact. My grandfather was 63 years old when he died, one year before his retirement.
My Grandfather, Music, and the Radio
One of the things that fascinates me most is my grandfather’s cultural interaction with the city and how it influenced his musical tastes and choices. He became a true urban man, moving to the city’s rhythm and engaging with its culture. My grandfather adored the famous Egyptian singer Mohammed Abdel Wahab—he was one of his “devoted fans,” constantly playing his music at home, while disliking the famous Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. His favorite songs included “Ana wal-Azab wa Hawah” (“Me, the Torment, and His Love”) and “Ya Wabour, Quli Rayih Ala Fein” (“O Ship, Tell Me Where You’re Heading”), as well as many songs by the Egyptian singer Asmahan. However, like many of his generation, he was particularly fond of popular Lebanese baladi music, especially songs by Elia Baida and Odette Kaddo. “He would wait for the baladi songs program at around 4 or 5 PM,” my father once told me.
Curious, I rushed to the radio archive I work on to search for the program, and I ended up correcting my father’s information—it turns out that the baladi songs were likely broadcast between 6 and 7 PM. This connection between my work and my grandfather brings me closer to him, making my work feel more personal. I asked my father more about the radio and music, and I was pleased to learn that my grandfather not only listened to music but also played and was deeply moved by it, which explained a lot about his personality. He had always seemed distant in my memory, mostly connected to a single black-and-white photograph of an elderly man with dimmed eyes.
My father told me that my grandfather learned to play the violin through the Blind Association and had even bought one to play at home. But one day, in a moment of anger after an argument with my grandmother, he smashed the violin on the table. My father doesn’t recall what the argument was about—perhaps it was over a meal or something else. After breaking the violin, my grandfather never bought another or played music again.
My father remembers their home from when he was a child, and despite their modest means, they had a radio. My grandfather would listen to BBC Arabic or Sawt al-Arab (Voice of the Arabs) radio. He greatly admired the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and always had the radio close to his head on the nightstand. He would listen to music and smoke; he was a heavy smoker. He would sit on the bed with his head resting against the wall, or he would cane chairs while listening to the radio. He taught my grandmother how to cane chairs as well, while my father only learned how to attach the back and seat of the chair when it was done.
That same old radio eventually found its way to my father’s house, where I came to know it. My mother, however, despised it. She disliked anything that “cluttered the house” and never missed a chance to complain about it or attempt to get rid of it. For years, she managed to hide it in the attic, until it was “lost along with many things” after the destruction of our house in Beirut’s southern suburbs during the Israeli war against Lebanon in July 2006.
I used to mourn the loss of that radio, along with the many personal items, books, and photographs we lost during that time. But now, as I move from city to city, from one home to another, I realize I no longer cling to those feelings. The loss continues, but with it comes a strange relief—an ease that comes from letting go. Letting go has made it easier to move on. I don’t carry photos or personal belongings with me; only a few essentials and my daughters, who stay with me wherever I go. I move from one house to the next, always closing the door behind me, although today, I feel the accumulation of estrangement and alienation from this constant movement.
Unlike my parents, who—despite being displaced many times during the civil war and various Israeli aggressions in Lebanon, or perhaps because of it—found it impossible to abandon the idea of a permanent home. For them, having a fixed home was an essential part of life.
My grandfather didn’t move much after leaving his village either. He never lived in the south again. He didn’t inherit any land from his family in as-Sultaniyeh, so my father’s family became more connected to my grandmother’s village until 1964. That year, one of my grandfather’s cousins, out of pity, gave him a small piece of land in as-Sultaniyeh that wasn’t good for much, telling him, “If you can build a house on it, go ahead.” My grandfather built a small room there, which allowed him to return to his village for brief visits during holidays and enabled my father to become a regular visitor, thus restoring the family’s connection to the village.
My father later inherited that house and added a floor to it, turning it into the family home where we spent all our holidays and summer vacations. We grew tired of its small size, its strange shape, and its inconvenient location in the middle of the road, yet every time war broke out in the south, the fear of losing that small, cherished connection to our village would haunt us all.
As for Beirut, like many Shia who migrated to the city in the 1920s, my grandfather settled in the Msaytbeh area, on the outskirts of the old city, while later generations moved to the farther suburbs. He first lived in a house in Hayy al-Munassafa in Msaytbeh, before moving to a house in Hayy al-Lija neighborhood, near my father’s aunts, who helped raise him and his two sisters, as my grandmother (sitti) was also blind.
Sitti Maria Shuayb and the Silence of Women in Family Memory
Sitti Maria was also from Jabal Amel, from the village of Charqiyeh. Like my grandfather, she wasn’t born blind, but at the age of ten, while working in the fields behind an ox, she was kicked in the eyes by the animal and lost her sight. Since both my grandparents had been blind from a young age, it was difficult for them to marry in the traditional way, so their families sought to find blind partners for them, and they were married. Back then, no one questioned how they would manage their affairs or raise children.
Despite her blindness—or perhaps because of it—sitti took full charge of running the household and caring for the family. She would climb up to the exposed, unprotected roof using a wooden ladder to reach the attic, and then another to reach the roof, where she would hang laundry on the clotheslines without anyone’s help. She was a skilled cook, showering her children with love and care. She moved freely around the neighborhood, visiting her two half-sisters, the local shop, and some relatives, though she never ventured far.
That’s how my father described her to me. Unlike my grandfather, there aren’t many stories about her, just recollections of her kindness, simplicity, and strong faith. She spent much of her time praying, yet she was accepting of my father’s departure from religious practices. It saddens me that there are so few memories of her, with no specific details lodged in my father’s mind. Like many women, the details of her daily life and her personal struggles in a city that was new to her are missing. A city she didn’t know and couldn’t see, but perhaps she could feel the pulse of the neighborhoods she roamed and hear some of the noise around her. Kindness, cooking, and faith—these three words sum up my grandmother. Even when I asked my mother about her, she simply said, “She was a traditional southern woman, hard-working and humble.”
I never knew my grandmother either; she passed away in 1976. At the time, she was with my father in as-Sultaniyeh, having fled Beirut after the civil war broke out in 1975. She suffered from severe pain but, like most women, endured it in silence until my father finally took her to a nearby hospital in Tebnin village. There, the doctor informed him that she had cirrhosis of the liver. My father didn’t know what cirrhosis meant and recalls how the doctor explained it as liver cancer. There was no medication for her condition at the time, only painkillers to ease her suffering.
As the pain became unbearable, my father took her to her village, Charqiyeh, to be examined by a doctor trained in France, but by then, she was already dying. She knew it, and she tried to hide it from my father. She didn’t last long and passed away quietly. Her family wanted her buried in Charqiyeh, but my father insisted on burying her next to my grandfather in as-Sultaniyeh. To this day, he regrets that decision, of burying her far from her family and the village she belonged to.
I try to dig deep into my father’s memory, searching for more stories about her, or details of what she looked like, but very little of her memory remains. All the stories are either about my grandfather or my father. My father tells me how once my grandfather had a fight with her and sulked, bringing home a bottle of wine, which he drank along with some of his favorite foods. My grandmother remained silent, saying nothing to him. Or he tells me how she generously gave him her small share of my grandfather’s inheritance, out of sheer kindness and compassion.
Sitti, too, came from a poor ‘Amili family. Her father was taken by the Ottomans for safar barlik (forced conscription) and never returned, leaving her mother alone to raise her and her brother. Her mother eventually remarried and moved to Beirut with her new family, while my father’s uncle remained in Charqiyeh. Like my grandfather, her extended family treated them unfairly in matters of inheritance. I don’t know much about her family, only faint memories of the times my father took us to Charqiyeh to visit his uncle and cousins. My father’s uncle was a farmer who ensured all his children were educated, and they worked together in tobacco farming. My father even helped during school vacations, spending long periods with them.
My father’s uncle is the third link in my father’s memory of sitti. Whenever he mentioned her, he would also talk about her family in Charqiyeh, especially his uncle’s house, where he was raised. My father’s uncle was the father of Ali Shuaib, a martyr who led the 1973 operation to seize the Bank of America located in Downtown Beirut, in protest against American banks funding Israel’s war on Syria and Egypt.
Ali and three other militants occupied the building before he was killed by Lebanese Internal Security Forces at the Americans’ request. My father always spoke with pride and a sense of romanticism about his cousin, Ali Shuaib. As the poet Abbas Beydoun wrote in his poem “Ya Ali,” which he dedicated to Ali after his death and was sung by Marcel Khalife, my father continued to “recount the story” of his cousin the poet, who was educated in the village and later attended the Faculty of Pedagogy at the Lebanese University in Beirut.
My father tells me how he would meet with Ali and two other friends in the village of Charqiyeh to discuss politics. To my father, Ali’s views grew more radical over time, surpassing the Communist Action Organization and Socialist Lebanon, as he co-founded the Lebanese Socialist Revolutionary Movement with two other young men, aiming to fight against capitalism and religious and political feudalism. My father recalls how Ali gradually distanced himself ideologically from him and his friends, coming to believe that revolutionary violence was the only solution—and practicing it. He became, for the family, the martyr of the labor movement and the martyr of the Palestinian revolution.
It saddens me how every conversation about sitti ends with a discussion of the men in the family. How I wish I could have known her and spoken with her. I would have asked her about her life back then, hoping she could share her own stories, about the challenges she faced in the village and in Beirut, about the difficulty of living in such harsh environments, and about the stories only women recount about their lives and the men in the family. But all I have are my father’s memories, my only link to her and to my grandfather. He recounts them to me over Zoom, with my mother sitting beside him, listening quietly. Occasionally, she adds a few stories of her own, while I sit in another city, trying to grasp whatever small moments I can from their fading memories.
The Second Generation and “Arab Leftist” Ideas
My father never felt different because his parents were blind, thanks to my grandfather’s strong personality and my grandmother’s resourcefulness. What bothered him most were the comments from people who would say, “Look at this smart boy, even though his parents are blind,” or ask whether he could see. My father had deep respect for his father and appreciated his awareness. For him, his father was part of the “generation of hardship,” as he called it, who worked hard to build a family and refused to let my father drop out of school. Many from my father’s generation sold bread, as people from as-Sultaniyeh were known for selling bread in Beirut, but my father never did that—my grandfather insisted on sending him to a private school.
My father began his education at the school of Sheikh Ali Humani. There were no public schools nearby in the Shia neighborhoods, and the nearest one, the Military School, wasn’t great. Sheikh Ali Humani’s school wasn’t much better, and he charged them one franc a day. In 1957, when my father was ten years old, he found out that a new public school had opened in Msaytbeh, called al-Ghoul School. He went on his own, enrolled in the fifth grade, and only then told his father. That same year, the 1958 war broke out, suspending classes for three months and forcing them to take their Certificat exams late, in December.
Later, my father attended the newly opened Raml al-Zarif Public School, but it was terrible—there were no chairs, desks, or even chalk. Each student had to bring their own chair! My father barely learned anything that year and spent his time playing outside. My grandfather then turned to a relative who worked for the Baydoun family, who had founded the Amlieh School (named after Jabal Amel) in Ras al-Nabeh, the first school aimed at educating the Shia in Beirut, and asked him to enroll my father there.
In 1960, my father joined al-Amlieh School, and his life completely changed. From being a disinterested student, he became a serious one. Like many Shia who studied at Amlieh, his political awareness began to grow there. He and his classmates met the Marxist intellectual Waddah Sharara, their French teacher, who introduced them to the Marxist group Socialist Lebanon, where they got to know Ahmad Beydoun, Fawwaz Traboulsi, and Hassan Kobeissi—key thinkers of Socialist Lebanon and later, the Communist Action Organization.
It wasn’t unusual for my father to be part of these circles. The rapid industrial growth and rise of Beirut’s urban working class, especially after the closure of the Suez Canal in 1967, fueled demands for reforms. Many Shia, like my father, were drawn to socialist and left-wing ideologies, particularly as rural Shia regions faced neglect and Israeli hostilities triggered waves of migration to the capital between 1943 and the mid-1970s. In Beirut, most Shia found themselves living in poverty belts and working low-wage jobs, but their urban exposure further exposed them to left-wing and Palestinian movements. This period was pivotal in shaping Shia political identity, with many joining secular parties, such as the Lebanese Communist Party and Palestinian groups. The Israeli invasions of southern Lebanon in the 1970s intensified their political consciousness. As Israeli forces threatened their villages and homes, their commitment to liberation deepened—not only from internal inequalities but also from external aggression.
After school graduation, my father enrolled in the Faculty of Pedagogy at the Lebanese University in 1967, specializing in mathematics. The faculty had been established just a year earlier. It was during his time there that my father’s political involvement deepened. The faculties of law, sciences, and pedagogy became strongholds of leftist political activity among students, particularly the Faculty of Pedagogy, which attracted many poor students like my father, who had scholarships (of 200 lira, close to my grandfather’s laborer salary of 300 lira). My father fondly recalls what he calls the “golden era” of the Faculty of Pedagogy, where, during its first ten years, it “produced the most important secondary school teachers.” He smiles sadly, adding, “Most of them are retired or gone today.”
Like many leftists of that time, my father embraced slogans like freedom, equality, class struggle, resistance, and Arab nationalism. However, these ideas often remained political rhetoric rather than practices in their daily or personal lives. My father participated in labor cells aimed at organizing the growing labor force and educating workers, like his father, about their rights and methods of organizing. This was part of their broader revolutionary project for a radical transformation of Lebanese society.
But despite their search for new intellectual and organizational frameworks and their influence by Marxist thought, they never fully broke away from the values of traditional nationalist parties, which glorified leaders, the military, and the family, while upholding stereotypical roles for each individual. They prioritized political reforms over social and economic ones and never seriously addressed women’s political, economic, or social liberation. They clashed with the entrenched patriarchal political structure, which was built on the organic relationship between the state, employers, capital, and traditional unions. This led to repressive campaigns against labor, student, and teacher protests and strikes in the early 1970s.
In any case, my father’s political involvement didn’t last long. He left the organization soon after the war began in 1975, as the party took on sectarian tendencies, and as his family responsibilities grew. Not much remains of that past today. The city has changed once again, and many of its residents have become preoccupied with the daily struggles of war and, later, the illusion of rebuilding it. Yet, the weight of their experiences remains a heavy burden on them and on us.
Searching for Meaning
My father spent his life teaching in public and private schools, retiring just a few years ago. He lived and built a family in Bir al-Abd, in Dahieh (Beirut’s southern suburbs), distancing himself from the gradual changes there as Hezbollah rose, with its resistance and the social changes it engendered, paralleling the broader neoliberal shift in the city and its society. We, the grandchildren of my grandparents, grew up there, caught between different worlds: between Beirut and Dahieh, between Jabal Amel and Beirut, between the remnants of the left and tradition, between the resistance and the rejection of Hezbollah’s growing dominance, between the middle class and the obscenely wealthy. Here and there… but never truly here or there.
My father always believed that education and employment were the keys that enabled him and my grandfather to achieve upward mobility and escape poverty. However, as the years passed, we were swept up by neoliberalism, nationalist rhetoric, the fading aura of the resistance, and its current defeat. My father’s public job and its promise of social mobility no longer held any meaning since the financial collapse. The narratives that once shaped the city, nationalist or sectarian, also lost their resonance.
Many places, like Hayy al-Lija, Dahieh, and Jabal Amel, remain largely stereotyped in dominant discourses, from the “belts of misery” in the past to “Hezbollah’s stronghold” today, dehumanizing, over and over, the people inhabiting these places and flattening their complex and rich histories.
I’m not sure if my father fully grasps this. But here I am, today, like so many others, I find myself dreaming of a place that breaks the ghosts of the past and reconciles with their history. A place untouched by the dominance of capital, its various political and sectarian parties, and their long history of accumulated looting. Yet here we are, crushed again, and fleeing to different refuges and exiles. We inherited the dust of their past and failed to create a better world—a world that was never truly ours, nor theirs. Yet, despite—or perhaps because of—the weight of this legacy, we have found ways to free ourselves from it. But even as we try to break away, the destruction of the places we once called home threatens to erase our narratives. We are left searching for meaning in a shattered present and a past that might restore our collective memory and shared humanity. In the face of dehumanization, global silence, and media indifference, we hold onto our histories to preserve, rehumanize, and assert our existence and dignity.
