Zeina Ziadeh

“Why Did You Stop Writing?” I’ve been asked that question several times lately. I picked up my phone and asked Michel: “How do you write when you’re numb?” “One letter at a time,” he replied. And so the letters began to scatter across my imagination. I watched them come into being, only to refuse to become words. They gathered before me, never quite finding their place. Do you know how many words are born, one letter at a time? These very words are being written and read at this very moment. You and I bring the same words into existence. Time alone separates us. They are born and they die within the same breath. Between the one who writes and the one who reads, there may be nothing except that fleeting moment when they meet in a single word.

Between Furn al-Chebbak and Monot, I managed to see two theatrical performances in the space of a single week. I will not analyze here, nor discuss what I watched. I am not a critic, and what I lived through during those performances is far too personal. But something awoke inside me. A fierce desire to speak, not to judge, but to bear witness. Theater. Light. The direct encounter with the other. The other who reveals himself before me in his body and his voice, in his sweat and his living breath. And I, I go alone, as if between me and the theater there is a romantic appointment. I ready myself for that encounter,

On the seventh day, do we rest? No. We wait. We live forever on the threshold of anticipation. We scroll through the minutes of the twenty-four hours, an article here, a statement or a tweet there, trying to sketch our day from the debris. There is no roadmap here, save for the one charted by those who do not speak our tongue. And we simply... endure. We endure... and we dismantle. We read the void between the lines more than the lines themselves. We dissect the silence, and we distrust everything that seems natural. For the natural is natural no longer. And the quiet, in our lands, is not peace... but the breathing space of those who did not choose to fight.

Nothing new in the phrase. But this time its weight is different — the speed of its rhythm tears through me. We all call each other to make sure. The replies come in like a daily ritual: We're fine, you? Fine! As if the word were a spell we shelter behind. My mother. Fine. My older brother and his family. Fine. My younger brother, at his Gulf posting. Fine. My sister and her family, here. Fine. Those my heart holds and those I love. Fine. Fine! We write it, we repeat it until it goes numb. My relatives who came from France to spend a week in the land of Cedars — among them some we were meeting for the first time, the children especially — are going back in a few hours.

I stepped into Nejmeh Square as a daughter returned to trace the features of a face long hidden behind rusted locks, barbed wire, and decisions that weighed upon the hearts of the people. I visit it for the second time since it had been closed in my face — closed in our faces, for years, those of us who once believed that squares were created to belong to us, and that cities only lock themselves in old books when historians write of sieges and wars. For long years, Nejmeh Square remained a name we pronounced with caution, gesturing toward it the way one gestures toward a wound that has not healed. It was shut by those who believed they possessed its keys, and the keys of those within it; our steps were confiscated, and our reunion with its corners — which know the sound of our footsteps better than the "guards" ever could — was indefinitely postponed.