My mother fled Lebanon in 1975; the trauma of leaving our homeland still shadows our family today
War is never just flickers of light, sounds of thunder and destructive explosions. It never ends with a ceasefire, either. It lingers – in the communities who suffered it, in their households, in their families, writes Antoun Issa.
What’s another war in Lebanon, in Palestine, in West Asia? It’s all become a blur, trying to decipher when the last war in our region ended and the new one began. February 28. June 14. October 7. 2021. 2014. 2012. 2011. 2008. 2006. 2003. 1996. 1990. 1982. 1978. 1975. 1973. 1967. 1958. 1956. 1948. 1914.
Those years represent more than episodes of war. It’s a timeline, stretching back to 1914 – the all-important year when western imperialism arrived to the Arab Near East, and left a century of ruin.
War is never just flickers of light, sounds of thunder and destructive explosions. It never ends with a ceasefire, either. It lingers – in the communities who suffered it, in their households, in their families. In a way, those years listed are irrelevant. War is not an event confined within strict dates. It’s a continuum, tainting generations. I should know.
I’m a child of the Lebanese Civil War – the 1975 on the list. Were it not for the suffering my mother endured – her tragic loss, the ravaging of her hometown and the world she knew, her internal displacement – she would never have met my father. She would never have migrated to Australia in 1977 or had me or my siblings.
The lifeline that Australia presented offered her renewal – the chance to forget, the chance to continue. But there was no forgetting. Instead, trauma festered and the pain of war shadowed my childhood. It shadows us still, more than 50 years later. And that was 1975 – count how many years of war separate then and now. Now imagine the millions of families that have endured, and still endure, the turmoil that war brings.
There are no headlines, there are barely any words to describe the silent torment, the gnawing unease that’s ever-present. Trauma is imprinted in DNA, they say, passed through generations. How do you shake something that is coded into your very fibres?
The last three years have laid those fibres bare, beneath a naked skin stripped of all pretences – the pretence of assimilation into a white-passing expectation, of conformity to a false normality, of distraction with consumerism. All the pretences gone, leaving our truth – that we’re lost, without a sense of home, without a sense of being.
For many of us first and second-generation Australians (and Americans and Canadians and Europeans) from the Levant, it is just that – wandering in search of our place. But the other haunting truth is that our place in the world has been taken and destroyed.
That is what those years listed truly represent – the century-long degradation of our ancient societies, the tearing of our souls from the lands whose soil is filled with the remains and spirits of our ancestors. Separating an indigenous person from their land is like removing a hilltop from its natural landscape – the very bones of our forebears lie in the ground that gives birth to our olive trees. First Nations in Australia know this intrinsic connection to land well – a connection that settler colonies do not.
Colonialism is not a single event; it’s a process. A long process that withers, batters and grinds until all that is left of a civilisation is mere dust. This is the intent of Israel. To continuously subject our societies, our lands to war upon war, crisis upon crisis, effectively dismembering our indigenous way of life and rendering our homes uninhabitable. It might not achieve immediate objectives (conquering south Lebanon or Gaza today), but it is working toward its underlying goal – to drive us from our homeland.
And, to a degree, it’s working. Count those years again from 1948 to today. All those wars as a consequence of Israel’s existence – imposed by the UK and sustained by the US and its western allies – have resulted in the majority of Lebanese and Palestinians living outside their native lands. Throw the massive Syrian and Iraqi diaspora on top of that too.
I watch Israel demolish historic villages and shrines in south Lebanon and weep, as I did as they destroyed the ancient cities in the Gaza Strip over the past three years.
I weep for Beirut, a city ravaged and remade over and over, after every calamity, to the point where Mum cannot even recognise her home and refuses to return. “Return to what?” she says repeatedly when I nudge her to visit, acceding to defeat. “My Beirut is gone – Allah yerhamak ya Lebnan.”
I imagine her Beirut. An ancient Mediterranean city of orchards that hum to singing birds, of secret steps snaking between neighbourhoods, of lush gardens coating a river gushing with water from the mountain snow, of laughter and song with family and friends.
Writing her story was in part a personal endeavour – to uncover our trauma, to understand it, to explain it. But I was unprepared for the raw truth it unveiled: our separation from our way of life, from our homeland, is the trauma. It’s a pain we must endure for the remainder of our days, passed down to the next generation. For we will never see Lebanon or Palestine or Syria or Iraq truly at peace in our lifetime.
We will never access the Beirut, the Gaza, the Jaffa, the Haifa, the Jerusalem, the Aleppo, the Baghdad we read in our poetry, we listen to in our songs, we imagine in the tales of our parents and grandparents.
We are lost in this world. This is our curse. This is our time.
Antoun’s new book, Rebirth: A Love Story from the Depths of War, is out now. Tickets are available for his book launch in Melbourne on April 28 – a conversation with Tarang Chawla at the Sun Theatre – and in Sydney on April 29 – a conversation with Jan Fran at Better Read Than Dead.
About the author
Antoun Issa
Antoun is a Lebanese-Australian journalist and co-founder of Deepcut News. After completing his Master of International Relations at the Australian National University, he moved to Lebanon in 2011 where he worked as news editor for Al-Monitor during the heights of the Arab Spring. Issa relocated to Washington DC in 2015 where he spent two years at the Middle East Institute, a US thinktank, before joining The Atlantic as an editorial strategist. He returned to Australia in 2020 and worked for the Guardian Australia until his departure in 2024.
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