{"id":18914,"date":"2026-04-29T14:31:32","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T11:31:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/al-rawiya.com\/?p=18914"},"modified":"2026-04-29T14:36:36","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T11:36:36","slug":"what-it-means-to-end-through-the-eyes-of-tyres-fishermen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/al-rawiya.com\/ar\/what-it-means-to-end-through-the-eyes-of-tyres-fishermen\/","title":{"rendered":"What It Means to End: Through the Eyes of Tyre\u2019s Fishermen"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Sitting on the concrete floor of the port, the fishermen each had a big wooden basket in front of them. Hunching over the latter, they untangled tiny sardines from their nets, and skewered them onto metal sticks in a relaxed, steady pace that was very satisfying to watch. I\u00a0 sat amongst them, quietly listening to their reflections. “There used to be 450 fishermen,” one of them sighed, \u201cwhenever we came to the port, we would find a lively community of people, laying\u00a0 their nets, working and laughing together. However, today, there are hardly any fishermen left.\u00a0 Our port has become gloomy and deserted. It\u2019s over, our community is coming to an end.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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This encounter took place a few years ago, when I was conducting an ethnography with the fishermen of Tyre, a coastal city in Lebanon, as part of an anthropology graduate class. <\/span>To\u00a0 this day, I still think about them and about what it means to end. Tyre\u2019s fishermen spoke of the end of their community, claiming that they were now living its last days. They repeatedly\u00a0 complained that the sea was dying, which is reflected in the decline of maritime wealth due to\u00a0 pollution, illegal fishing practices, and climate change. They exclaimed, \u060c\u0633\u0645\u0643 \u0641\u064a \u0645\u0627 \u060c\u0628\u0627\u0626\u0633\u0629 \u0628\u062d\u0627\u0644\u0629 \u0627\u0644\u0628\u062d\u0631”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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“\u0643\u0635\u064a\u0627\u062f\u064a\u0646\u061f \u0646\u0639\u064a\u0634 \u0646\u0643\u0645\u0644 \u0641\u064a\u0646\u0627 \u0643\u064a\u0641 \u060c\u0631\u0632\u0642\u0629 \u0641\u064a \u0645\u0627” The Sea is in a miserable state, there are no fish, no blessings, how can we continue to survive as fishermen?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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Both the fishermen and the sea are subjected to various forms of violence: the fishermen to socio-economic violence caused by neglect from the government, society, and even political parties (who they had hoped would support them), and the sea to multiple forms of abuse. Both types of violence are clearly interconnected, feeding into each other. Listening to their frustration, it would be hard to believe that they haven\u2019t always felt this way. But in the past, and during their fathers\u2019 times, they claimed\u00a0 that they experienced the sea as a \u201cfertile reserve of God\u2019s blessings.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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The gradual impoverishment of the sea, to them, reflected their community\u2019s death, signaling an end to their form of life. The \u201cfisherman\u201d form of life has been passed down through\u00a0 generations, from father to son, crystallizing through shared experiences, relationships, rituals,\u00a0 spaces, and landscapes unique to Tyre\u2019s fishermen. It is not merely an occupation, but a way of\u00a0 inhabiting the world, one that shapes one\u2019s sense of self, relationships with other beings\u2014human and non-human, and one\u2019s connections to nature, God, and the universe. \u201cWe are born and\u00a0 raised in the sea; we have drunk from its waters and bathed in it,\u201d they told me, evoking their intimacy with the sea, which becomes inseparable from the \u201c<\/span>self<\/span>.\u201d\u00a0 <\/b>Yet, as the sea deteriorates,\u00a0 so do the conditions that <\/span>sustain their form of life. <\/span>The fishermen experience the \u201cself\u201d as deeply intertwined with their environment, which sustains them both physically and existentially.\u00a0 As one of them told me, \u201cI was born in the waters. The day when I don\u2019t work in the water, I die.\u00a0 I suffocate.\u201d However, as their world is no longer the way it used to be, they can no longer live\u00a0 fully as fishermen. What collapses, then, is not simply their livelihood, but the very conditions\u00a0 that once allowed them \u201cto extend and anchor\u201d themselves into the world, as explored in<\/span> Perdigon\u2019s<\/span><\/i> work.<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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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 <\/span>lineage. As several of them told me, \u201cI objected to my kids inheriting the family\u2019s fishermen\u00a0 tradition; they entered the army.\u201d Projecting themselves\u2014or their world\u2014into the future has become nearly impossible within Lebanon\u2019s current conditions. They expressed the difficulty,\u00a0 almost the impossibility, of continuation, but also the tragedy of coming to terms with such immense loss.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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This brings me to a notion of \u201cending\u201d 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\u00a0 constellation of relationships, materialities, and meanings\u2014social, ecological, and spiritual\u2014 through which life was once lived. The end of their form of life, then, is the erosion of the material\u00a0 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<\/span> non-human lives.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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I\u2019ve 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\u2014those that have willingly or unwillingly\u00a0 ceased to extend themselves into the future. We often take for granted the ways we practice and\u00a0 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,\u00a0 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 <\/span>far\u2014just around the corner, the local bakery, once part of the neighborhood\u2019s daily life, quite\u00a0 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\u00a0 how to make. It should have been recorded, archived\u2014if only we had known. I watched my\u00a0 family, friends, and partner leave brutally. My parents\u2019 life savings vanished in the banks; my\u00a0 loved ones\u2019 homes were destroyed in the explosions, and the entire foundation of my own life was dismantled.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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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\u2019s 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\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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How does one continue after such endings? In Lebanon, this question is constantly being\u00a0 negotiated through our daily lives. In the absence of structures that could hold our collective grief <\/span>and healing, continuing has often become an individual endeavor. The socio-economic and\u00a0 political collapse has made it difficult to build and sustain communities, while the ongoing\u00a0 emigration of the youth has further fractured the possibility of collective life. There are countless\u00a0 theories, therapeutic practices, and spiritual frameworks that address loss, yet from what I have\u00a0 lived, and what my loved ones have lived, moving forward remains a personal and ongoing <\/span>exploration. We ought not claim to know how one should live through, with, or despite so much\u00a0 loss. It is important not to deny ourselves our individual explorations.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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What I have found, for instance, is that loss creates new relations; it develops a new kind of\u00a0 sensibility toward those who have lost alongside us, and toward our environment. For me, this\u00a0 meant confronting the necessity of letting go and becoming attuned to what surrounds me\u2014 people, animals, nature, and space\u2014all of which have been simultaneously altered. During a time\u00a0 of collective crisis and loss, I began filling the space left by absent loved ones with a daily walk\u00a0 along the corniche, noticing things I had not paid attention to before: the streets, the mountains\u00a0 behind the sea, the snow on their peaks, the man who is always singing Umm Kulthum with his\u00a0 radio on. I noticed him and he sang to me. Continuing, then, meant noticing how we linger\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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\u00a0 subjected to destruction. Even the bleakness of my ethnography now appears, in retrospect, almost bearable.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sitting on the concrete floor of the port, the fishermen each had a big wooden basket in front of them. Hunching over the latter, they untangled tiny sardines from their nets, and skewered them onto metal sticks in a relaxed, steady pace that was very satisfying to watch. I\u00a0 sat amongst them, quietly listening to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18916,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[318],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-silenced-lands-powerful-voices"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/al-rawiya.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20230906_191117.jpg?fit=4608%2C3456&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/al-rawiya.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/al-rawiya.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/al-rawiya.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/al-rawiya.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/al-rawiya.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18914"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/al-rawiya.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18923,"href":"https:\/\/al-rawiya.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18914\/revisions\/18923"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/al-rawiya.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/al-rawiya.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/al-rawiya.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/al-rawiya.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}