Samir Kassir: Those Absences That Haunt Us

Every year, when the second of June comes around, Samir Kassir rises back into memory as though he had never truly left. The years go by, faces change, circumstances and events follow one upon another, yet there are certain people the passing of time cannot reduce to mere remembrance. They remain present in the details of our lives, in the words we write, in the ideas we defend, in the dreams that never had time to be fulfilled.

Twenty-one years have passed since the assassination of Samir Kassir, and I still have the feeling that that ill-fated morning has not really ended. Samir was not, for me, a journalist or a writer or a thinker whose articles and ideas I followed from a distance. He was a friend, an exceptional human being who possessed that rare ability to reconcile profound culture with human simplicity, intellectual boldness with personal warmth.

He believed in Lebanon the way a believer believes in his great cause. Lebanon was not for him a political slogan or a media discourse, but a space for freedom, for life, for plurality. He saw beyond the present moment and read the future at a time when many were unable to see even the present.

I knew him close to people, despite his intellectual stature. He listened more than he spoke, he engaged in dialogue more than he attacked, and he persuaded through the force of an idea rather than the raising of a voice. Little wonder, then, that he left a deep imprint on everyone who knew him or came near him.

When Samir was assassinated, I did not feel only the loss of a great journalist. I had the sense that a part of the Lebanese dream had just been subjected to an attempt on its life. That day, the grief was not only personal but national as well. It was the awareness that the free word had become a target, that men and women of conviction were paying for their courage with their lives.

But fate willed that Samir’s flame remain alight through the one who had shared his life, Giselle Khoury.

Giselle was far more than Samir’s wife. She was the companion of his intellectual and human journey, the witness to his dreams, his struggles, his victories and his disappointments. After his assassination, she could have withdrawn into her private grief and contented herself with tending to memories. She chose a far more difficult path.

She chose to continue what Samir had begun.

She carried his name, his cause and his memory with a rare love and an exceptional faithfulness. She did not allow time to fold away his page, she did not allow the assassins to triumph over the idea by killing the one who carried it. She went on speaking of him as though he stood at her side, and went on defending freedom, justice and truth as he himself had done.

In Giselle I saw something of Samir, and in her continuity I saw a prolongation of him. She knew that the person departs, but that the message endures. And so she did not commemorate Samir’s memory each year as a simple occasion for sorrow, but transformed it into an act of fidelity and a stubborn affirmation that the word must remain stronger than fear.

When Giselle in turn departed, the grief seemed to redouble. As though a beautiful page of Lebanon’s cultural and media history had just been closed. Both were gone, but the story remained. The story of a love that had united two people, each of whom believed in the other as they believed in Lebanon. And the story of a struggle for freedom that does not stop at the limits of a single life.

On this twenty-first anniversary of the assassination of Samir Kassir, it is not only the portrait of the great writer and the brilliant thinker that I find within myself. I find the friend, the human being, the face that always carried a deep faith in the ability of the Lebanese to build a better future.

And I find Giselle Khoury as well, who proved that faithfulness is not a word one speaks but a path one walks. She kept the trust until the last day of her life and carried the flame that had fallen from Samir’s hands, to pass it on in turn to a new generation that believes in freedom, in sovereignty and in the state.

The assassins may have succeeded, on that June morning in 2005, in silencing Samir’s voice. They failed to silence the idea. Great ideas do not die, and the men who sow freedom in the minds of others never truly disappear.

Today, twenty-one years on, Samir Kassir remains present among us. In every free word, in every journalist who refuses to yield, in every citizen who dreams of a just state, in every Lebanese person who still believes that this country deserves a better future.

The long absence has not extinguished the memory, it has made it more present still. Certain people, whatever distance time places between them and us, remain closer to us than many of those who live at our side.

Such was Samir Kassir.

Such remained Giselle Khoury.

And such will endure the story of freedom and fidelity that united them, alive in the memory of Lebanon for as long as there is anyone left to believe in the free word and in the right of people to dream.

Their names will stand as testimony that memory is not a simple return to the past but a resistance to forgetting, and that the freedom they defended draws its strength from those who refuse to relinquish it.

Between Samir and Giselle extends the story of a country that is forever searching for itself, and that finds in people like them one more reason to hold fast to hope.

People pass, but the true imprint endures, lighting the way for generations to come and bearing witness that Lebanon is built only through freedom, and preserved only through memory.