17. Lebanon Lives Inside Me

There are places we leave.

And there are places that leave with us.

Lebanon is one of the latter.

I have tried, sometimes, to imagine who I would be if I had been born somewhere else.

Would I carry silence differently?

Would my relationship with fear be different?

Would I have learned another language for grief?

I do not know.

Perhaps that is the problem with asking questions about the life we did not live.

There are no answers waiting there.

Only imagination.

What I do know is that Lebanon lives inside me.

Not as a postcard.

Not as a beautiful photograph of mountains, sea, and old streets.

Those things are real.

But they are not the whole truth.

A country is more than the images it shows the world.

It is also the noise.

The uncertainty.

The contradictions.

The conversations people have quietly because speaking too loudly can be dangerous.

It is the way people learn to adapt before they learn to dream.

It is the extraordinary kindness of ordinary people existing beside an exhaustion no one knows how to name.

I carry all of that.

The beauty.

The frustration.

The tenderness.

The anger.

The grief.

I have never been able to separate myself from the place that raised me.

Even when I wanted to.

Perhaps especially then.

There is a complicated kind of love in belonging to a place that has made you tired.

People often speak about love as though it must be uncomplicated.

As though loving something means defending it from every criticism.

I do not believe that.

I think sometimes the people who love a place most deeply are the ones who can no longer pretend it is perfect.

I have no interest in pretending.

Lebanon has given me memories I would not trade.

It has also given me experiences I still do not know how to carry.

Both truths can exist.

I think we underestimate how deeply countries enter our bodies.

They live in our accents.

In the way we greet people.

In the food we miss when we are away.

In the particular humour we develop to survive difficult conversations.

In the way we understand hospitality.

In the way we learn to expect the unexpected.

A country becomes part of the nervous system.

Perhaps that is why leaving a place does not always feel like leaving.

You can cross borders.

Change addresses.

Learn new streets.

And still find yourself carrying the old ones.

I carry Lebanon in my writing.

Sometimes intentionally.

Sometimes without realizing it.

It appears in the silences.

In the rooms.

In the tension between wanting to escape and wanting to be understood.

Perhaps it appears in my contradictions, too.

I have wanted distance from this place.

And I have wanted someone to look at it carefully and understand why it still matters to me.

That is the strange thing about belonging.

It does not always feel like pride.

Sometimes it feels like an ache.

A country can be the place you want to leave and the place you still search for inside yourself.

I think many people understand this.

They speak about home with a complicated expression.

Not entirely happy.

Not entirely angry.

Just... full.

Full of memories that contradict each other.

Full of people they love.

Full of things they wish had been different.

Full of a past that refuses to become simple.

I do not know whether Lebanon will always live inside me.

I suspect it will.

Perhaps one day I will understand that this is not necessarily a burden.

Perhaps carrying a place does not mean carrying everything that happened there.

Perhaps I am allowed to carry the songs without carrying every wound.

The language.

The tenderness.

The stubbornness of people who continue building lives in circumstances that should have exhausted them long ago.

There is a kind of resilience in Lebanon that I do not romanticize.

Resilience should never become an excuse for people to be abandoned.

But I cannot deny what I have witnessed.

People continue.

They open shops.

They raise children.

They make jokes.

They fall in love.

They create beauty in places where beauty often feels like an act of rebellion.

Maybe that is why Lebanon lives inside me.

Not because I have resolved my relationship with it.

I haven't.

But because some places become part of the questions we spend our entire lives asking.

Who would I have been elsewhere?

What do I owe the place that made me?

Can I love something and still be honest about the ways it has hurt me?

I do not have answers.

I only have the country I carry.

The country that appears in my memories.

In my silences.

In the language of my fears.

In the strange tenderness I still feel when I think of home.

Lebanon lives inside me.

Not perfectly.

Not peacefully.

But honestly.

And perhaps that is the only way I know how to carry it.

— Jean T. Hatoum

Author of I Wrote So I Would Not Fade and J’ai Écrit Pour Ne Pas M’effacer

Thank you for giving my silence a place to land.

 If these words felt like home, the rest of the map is in the book.

And if you are able to, supporting my journey helps me afford the medication that keeps my own fractured ember burning.

http://linktr.ee/Jean.Hatoum

I’m not finished surviving out loud. 🕊️



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