Toronto
January 2026
I haven’t dreamt of Issam in a while, although he always comes up in my conversations often.
In presentations about my work.
I imagine him smirking at me every time I mention his name.
I’ve been wanting to see him in a dream, if only to hear his sarcasm as he complains that my listeners/readers must be fed up with stories about him.
“Khalas ya nay! Khalas drama”
If only to tell me maybe this is not how he wants to be remembered.
Toronto
February 2026
62-year old Ahmad Termos did not know that Wednesday February 16 was his last day on this earth. But he was sure his long-awaited encounter with his son was soon approaching.
Ahmad’s son, Hassan, was martyred two years ago. He visited Ahmad in a dream last year, and assured him they will meet in February. When he would narrate the dream to his family, Ahmad would insist that Hassan was specific. “February,” he would repeat. Ahmad’s dream was often talked about in his southern town of Tallousa, circulating through hundreds of WhatsApp messages after a video of him speaking about it, filmed by a neighbor, went viral.
Ahmad Termos did not know that Wednesday, February 16 was his last day on this earth, but he was sure his long-awaited encounter with his son was soon approaching.
On February 16, Ahmad and his wife had barely arrived at her brother’s home for a visit when Ahmad’s phone rang and a calculating voice came through, sharp and cutting: “This is the israeli army, Ahmad. Do you want to die along with all those who are with you now, or on your own?”
“Alone,” Ahmad was quick and adamant.
He hung up. With a quiet assertion that could only be summoned by the few whose fates were sealed like the ending of a novel read a thousand times, he informed his family that they needed to leave the house because the israelis–on the phone just now—delivered his verdict. He will die today. The choice—of dying with the family or alone—was his.
The family refused. If a choice is to be had, let it be for togetherness.
But Ahmad simply asked them to survive until the next phone call. So he asked his loved ones to stay put as he held death’s hand and walked it away from them. He marched to his final face-off with the faceless killing machine.
Ahmad said his goodbyes.
Got into his car.
Drove away from the house.
Parked in a remote spot.
Waited.
Looked up at the drone,
Stared at the two missiles descending into his car.
Exploded.
His burned body flying in ashes.
Nabatieh, South Lebanon. August 2025. Photo by Nay el Rahi
Colombo
February 2026
I see a clip of a friend in an altercation with the Lebanese army. A journalist, with his camera pointing to the ground, walking around a protest against taxes in Beirut.
In the clip, I don’t see faces. Only lower bodies pushing and shoving. The friend yelling at the soldier to
“get your hands off me,
i’m a journalist,
i’m not even filming you,
you have no right to lay a finger on me.
why would you hit me.”
We later learn that the soldier still hit him on the head.
I replay the clip 16 times. Flashes of the last four years of my life in Beirut before moving in 2023 burn my eyes. That 15-second clip seemed to condense my life between 2019 and 2023. The number of times I pushed a policeman (or a bunch of them) running towards me with a baton. Monsters foaming at the mouth. The number of times ungodly sounds came out of me as one (or a bunch) of them cornered someone I love, or broke a friend’s camera, phone, arm or rib.
I think of Issam. A painfully vivid memory of two police-men cornering him during a protest by thakanet el helou. January 16, 2020. I see Issam crossing his arms over his face, his head ducked low, his face turned inward towards his right side, both hands grabbing his camera —lens pointing upward—as the policemen beat him with a fury so intense you can touch it through the still photo, the hand of one of them sneaking up towards his face.
I didn’t need to consult the picture—saved on my phone, laptop, and my frontal lobe—to write these lines.
I don’t sleep well that night. My eyes are shut, my brain is not. I’m watching something. My stomach hurts. Smoke in the distance.
It’s January 16, 2020, and Issam is cornered by two policemen. They break his camera lens—the one he recently bought. They also break his arm. For the next week or so, he will walk around Hamra with his arm tied to his chest, bandaged wrist-to-elbow.
I’m screaming at the policemen, the riot batons in their hands moving rhythmically up and down against Issam’s crossed arms.
I see that Issam can see me. I can also see that he is trying to tell me something. I don’t hear him.
They won’t let me,
they’re in my way.
I shout to him that help is on the way. They won’t let me touch him. Or check on his bruises. I push past. I shove and scream and yell. I don’t get anywhere. I can’t reach Issam.
When I wake up the next day, it takes me a few hours to realize that the long-awaited dream of Issam finally came. Issam did visit my dreams. But we were not allowed to talk. The rage swallows me whole, spits me back with broken arms. No bandages.
–
Issam Abdallah, holding his camera above his head, being attacked by Internal Security Forces at Thakanet al Helou. January 15, 2020. Photo by Nabil Ismail.
I applied to the anthropology PhD program at the University of Toronto with a plan to study the experience of women in Lebanon with gendered violence. The loss of Issam in 2023—one that felt more like a premonition—and my community’s collective mourning triggered the pivot in my subject of study. Pain gnawing at my insides, a mourning of my own dismemberment from my community as I watched my friends burying our friend—scattering roses over his body, now underground – through a screen. The pivot to loss-contingent forms of relatedness grew out of this pain. My mourning took the shape of an obsession with the poignant accounts of loss that my friends and wider community shared online during the 2024 war, and since. My impulse to immortalize these accounts intensified as I watched Lebanon under fire while I basked in dense anthropological literature, oceans and continents away.
For one of the courses I took, I put together a piece of blackout poetry out of the writing of six women—including myself—on grief, loss, and longing to our loved ones and land. Our stories were stitched together, remixed, and re-arranged to make one narrative. Each of the writers grieved an immediate and intimate loss she endured as a result of the 2024 war, creating a common grieving character that all pieces shared. Two of the writers were journalists whose stories came from their documentation of life in genocidal times, which had been published in well-known media platforms (one of which is Al Rawiya). One described grieving her cat (who still hadn’t been recovered at the time of her writing). The other addressed her late grandmother, mourning life as she knew it, and the safety of all three homes she knew— all of which were under Israeli fire at the time of writing. The piece also included a series of posts on social media that a colleague published, mourning her martyred brother, the text messages in which my best friend told me about the martyrdom of seven members of her family; as well as my own reflections—both published and unpublished—mourning Issam.
One feature that emerged from these pieces was a distinct kind of spectral encounter. A form of haunting that pours out of an enduring connection to land that has never wavered, despite generational dispossession and renewed experiences of uprootedness. What came out of this erasure piece resonates with ethnographic observations and conceptual contributions by scholars from Lebanon and Palestine such as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2024), AbdalJawad Omar (2025) and Lamia Moghnieh (2024) following the intensification of the genocide in October 2023; and with my own preliminary fieldwork in the summer of 2025. This constellation of work points to a condition of haunting that emerges under colonial assault, and that gestures to an ever-present: the centrality of land, kin, and wound, and the relationality with and between them. Forms of relatedness and connections with the long-gone, that extends to the beyond, comes back in flashes when land and home are under imminent threat. The condition of haunting that emerges under colonial assault thus produces a spectral intimacy.
Issam Abdallah’s bloodied camera, taken after he and several colleagues were targeted by the occupation on October 13, 2023 as they were carrying out their journalistic duties. Photo by Hassan Ammar.
At multiple instances throughout the blackout piece, the authors highlight their martyred loved ones’ symbiotic relationship with the land—their embodied continuity of it—the martyrs and their land melting into one, their blood re-generating it. Here’s an excerpt:
“Go back to the map of the South, mark with a red dot where a fighter was martyred. The shadow of a red rose.
(…)
Mama told me the windflower’s red color is the blood of martyrs. Our windflower grew this mother’s day. Grieving, steadfast motherhood.
(…)
That hill, your bloodied camera, we know who killed you. Hero, martyr, and the land he loves.”
And in other instances, they liken them to it.
your face, the lines in your forehead… It was our last hug. Your arms, as vast as the land. Surround us. Like the land.
This Shami hauntology, as I call it, gestures toward a literal return to land as the condition of political and existential continuity.
“My mother and I wish we died in Tyre. Our house standing, cold and alone, surrounded by flames. I wish we carried it on our backs,”
Here, haunting—or spectral encounters—sustains bonds among dispossessed kin, martyrs, and ancestors who return to the lost land, in dreams and in soil; bonds between the dispossessed and their land, and among kin, martyrs, and ancestors. It nurtures relationality—with kin, friends in the diaspora, and loved ones who had died long ago.
A screenshot of one of the videos document martyred Issam Abdallah’s funeral proceedings. Photo courtesy of Nay el Rahi.
Hello Teta,
Every time I write, I address you.
These encounters bring loved ones back to each other, and to the land. Haunting, here, is a relational condition in which land and kin persist when land is literally lost, destroyed, or threatened. Consider Lamia Moghnieh’s piece about the spectral return of her late grandfather, coming back to see her in July 2024, appearing in a taxi in Beirut—just two months ahead of the intensification of the Israeli war on Lebanon.
Moghnieh argues that revenants “reappear in/on land as a sign of the israeli violence to come (…) and along with family, olive and fruit trees (…) constitute material and immaterial, supernatural and natural “narrators”, deeply rooted in land and place, telling the history of surviving israeli violence. The long-deceased kin, friends, and loved ones who return in dreams or for brief encounters, enact a politics of return defying exile, occupation, and settler-colonialism. This is a haunting that keeps the world together, just like the everyday acts of togetherness and relatedness —a mode of “living-with” that endures when land, home, and belonging have been violently unsettled.
By pairing a broadened frame of loss with the notion of survival-enabling relatedness allows for the capturing of insufficiently acknowledged forms of sociality that emerge in moments of disorienting catastrophe, and allow for the continuity and survival of societies, beyond the Shami context, in crises. “Resistant relatedness” —as I call it—is a particularly relevant frame for our present moment and world marked by intensified crises, and an alarming descent into fascism; and an expressly useful, or rather urgent, lens for a thorough exploration of social worlds in moments of intense disorientation.
Nay Elrahi
Nay is a feminist writer and researcher, with over a decade of experience working across journalism, research, advocacy and organizing for social justice. Nay has been serving as lead researcher on anti-feminist backlash at the Arab Institute for Women (AIW) at the Lebanese American University (LAU) in Beirut since 2021, and a PhD student in anthropology at the University of Toronto since 2024. Her work focuses on emergent intimacies, loss and grief in Lebanon.
- Nay Elrahi
