What It Means to End: Through the Eyes of Tyre’s Fishermen"

As their world comes undone, they have chosen not to pass this form of life on to their children, directing them instead toward alternative livelihoods, thereby severing a lineage. As several of them told me, “I objected to my kids inheriting the family’s fishermen  tradition; they entered the army.” Projecting themselves—or their world—into the future has become nearly impossible within Lebanon’s current conditions. They expressed the difficulty,  almost the impossibility, of continuation, but also the tragedy of coming to terms with such immense loss. 

This brings me to a notion of “ending” that goes beyond physical death. It is not simply the cessation of an activity or a livelihood, but a transformation in what it means to exist in the world. What is coming to an end is a particular way of being human and of relating to the world: a  constellation of relationships, materialities, and meanings—social, ecological, and spiritual— through which life was once lived. The end of their form of life, then, is the erosion of the material  and immaterial relations that once held their world together. This reconfiguration of being is not confined to the fishermen alone, but extends across a wide range of human and non-human lives. 

I’ve been reflecting deeply over the past few years, with everything that has happened in Lebanon, on the forms of life that have come to an end—those that have willingly or unwillingly  ceased to extend themselves into the future. We often take for granted the ways we practice and  inhabit the world, unaware of how drastically they can be transformed. In recent years, crisis and war have disfigured and extinguished so many forms of life. Most of us have experienced a relentless accumulation of loss, one that has radically altered our relation to the world at large,  leaving us with the experience of no longer being anchored within it. Living here, I witnessed, almost daily, forms of life that could no longer be extended into the future. No need to go very far—just around the corner, the local bakery, once part of the neighborhood’s daily life, quite  literally our daily bread, closed when its owner could no longer sustain it and was forced into other forms of livelihood. We never again tasted his specialty mankouche, a flavor only he knew  how to make. It should have been recorded, archived—if only we had known. I watched my  family, friends, and partner leave brutally. My parents’ life savings vanished in the banks; my  loved ones’ homes were destroyed in the explosions, and the entire foundation of my own life was dismantled. 

I, too, had a form of life, shaped by particular physical and metaphysical relations. I remember moving into a new room in Beirut to escape a landlord who was making sexual advances toward me, only for the building I had just entered to catch fire because of Lebanon’s electrical failures. I could not bear how unsafe I felt in the world and the degree to which that feeling seemed unchanging. I found myself living in a new paradigm, one I had never known so  sharply before, a world that was inherently unsafe. I experienced the collapse of the way I had once inhabited the world, but also the future I had imagined within it. 

How does one continue after such endings? In Lebanon, this question is constantly being  negotiated through our daily lives. In the absence of structures that could hold our collective grief and healing, continuing has often become an individual endeavor. The socio-economic and  political collapse has made it difficult to build and sustain communities, while the ongoing  emigration of the youth has further fractured the possibility of collective life. There are countless  theories, therapeutic practices, and spiritual frameworks that address loss, yet from what I have  lived, and what my loved ones have lived, moving forward remains a personal and ongoing exploration. We ought not claim to know how one should live through, with, or despite so much  loss. It is important not to deny ourselves our individual explorations. 

What I have found, for instance, is that loss creates new relations; it develops a new kind of  sensibility toward those who have lost alongside us, and toward our environment. For me, this  meant confronting the necessity of letting go and becoming attuned to what surrounds me— people, animals, nature, and space—all of which have been simultaneously altered. During a time  of collective crisis and loss, I began filling the space left by absent loved ones with a daily walk  along the corniche, noticing things I had not paid attention to before: the streets, the mountains  behind the sea, the snow on their peaks, the man who is always singing Umm Kulthum with his  radio on. I noticed him and he sang to me. Continuing, then, meant noticing how we linger  differently in spaces, and how absence itself becomes something we move with. It also meant exploring how new forms of relation and materiality might emerge from this attunement.  Perhaps this sensibility toward others is needed in times of crisis. It invites us to cultivate relations of care, to recognize the other as a fellow inhabitant of both our shared space and our shared loss.

Revisiting this reflection today, in the midst of ongoing war, these questions feel even more urgent. What once felt like loss has deepened into a pervasive violence. I find myself thinking of the fishermen, and of what they must be enduring now, as not only their sea but their city is  subjected to destruction. Even the bleakness of my ethnography now appears, in retrospect, almost bearable.