Think of this text as travel. As moving between two temporal and spatial states/dimensions— between Beirut and Toronto, and their corresponding timezones, a now and its seven hours behind; and between genres—story-telling and ethnographic* observation on the one hand, and a more conceptual/theoretical engagement on the other.
Graffiti reading “ And we now belong to loss”. Hamra, Lebanon. July 2025. Photo by Nay Elrahi.
This text couples experience and encounters both in Lebanon in the summers of 2024 and 2025, and about Lebanon—life in and away from it at a time it underwent flood upon relentless flood of annihilating Israeli fire. The piece spans two years (2024-2026) of devastation, heartbreak, and of grieving personal and collective losses. Much of the observations and the story-telling here, however, tap into encounters that predate this timeframe.
The fall of 2024—my first term of a PhD program in anthropology in Toronto—marked the acceleration of Israeli aggression into Lebanon. My shoulders carried a restless brain, an over-stretched browser, crashing every two hours under the weight of the countless open tabs.
I applied to study anthropology in 2023 to investigate the experience of women in Lebanon with gendered violence, following years of research and organizing around it. However, the unfolding of the live-streamed genocide in Gaza, the spilling of Israeli aggression into Lebanon, and the loss of my friend— Issam Abdallah, a journalist martyred in a direct Israeli strike while covering escalations at Lebanon’s southern border in October 2023, induced a troubleshoot.
As I prepared for my preliminary field trip to Beirut in the summer of 2025, I sat with what it means for field and home to be interchangeable – one; wondered how anything I write would ever measure up against the relentless erasure of my people. That visit cemented the stakes that should inhere in, and be tethered to any work in and/or about Lebanon today.
Much of the writing here unfolded throughout the process of pivoting into my new research focus—crisis- and loss-contingent intimacies in Lebanon. Through this process, I learned that my mourning of Issam’s loss—one that felt like a premonition signaling a series of successive heartbreaks—took the shape of an obsession with documenting the poignant accounts of grief that my friends and wider community shared online during the war, and since. My new focus grew out of my individual mourning, and through my community’s collective grief. It grew out of enduring loss while being away; out of conversations I had with the devastatingly significant number of loved ones who lost homes, family, and friends; out of the unfathomable pain that I watched them endure—from overseas—as they grieved their memories and parts of themselves. Through this process, I learned that distance from community, itself, is a form of mourning.
The personal entries in this text are my attempts to capture my “field” mid-genocide; to make it make sense. An acknowledgment of my own grief; of my own obsession with loss and relatedness; with Beirut and Palestine; with martyrdom and life; and with the centrality of Issam to all of this. These are reminders of my commitment to my people’s pain, to their resistant intimacies, to the corners of their hearts occupied by their loved ones; and to the love that continues to save our lives.
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Toronto
December 3, 2025
I miss tante Nadia (Emm Ramzi).
Tante Nadia was my neighbor in Ras Beirut, where I lived between 2018 and 2023, who ran the neighborhood’s most popular grocery shop, tucked in a barely visible corner by a crossroad at the heart of a densely-populated residential neighborhood. Renowned for filling her Turkish coffee pot up to five times every morning to account for all the neighbors, vendors, customers, and friends dropping by between 8 and 11 am, Nadia, also known as Emm Ramzi, nurtured a space of improbable connections: people who don’t exist in each other’s lives outside their daily overlap at her shop. My endless ‘sobhiet’ at Nadia’s dimly-lit shop turned-neighborhood cat shelter taught me animal rescue first aid: regularly picking up strays for vet visits, administering eye drops, becoming expert at syringe feeding. Emm Ramzi prepared me for adopting my cat Lawze before either of us knew it, and against my better judgement.
Nadia taught me how to make rice bread when we learned of my gluten allergy, only to eventually decide to just give me some of hers, because despite being an adult who had been living on her own for years, I was still “alone here”. Nadia once lent me black clothes for my friend’s father’s funeral the day I locked myself out of my house. A widow who had already grieved two siblings, a brother-in-law murdered during Lebanon’s civil war, and recently, a nephew, Nadia never ran out of grieving attire.
A steady, warm fixture of togetherness, Nadia effortlessly and unknowingly kept our neighborhood together through the years of ever-compounding crises and heartbreak in Beirut. An archive and repository of the neighborhood and its inhabitants’ stories, she knew everybody’s backstory. She knew why the children of the hajj from the building across never visit; she still remembers the floral dresses that Madame Warde*, next door, wore before a car accident took her son’s life and her joie de vivre two decades ago; and she also pretends not to notice the rich diplomat* widow’s new shoplifting habit : “haram, she’s bored.”
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Tante Nadia, whose shop also doubled as the neighborhood cat shelter, embraces a cat. Hamra, Lebanon. July 2025. Photo by Nay Elrahi.
I start with Nadia because this research project is about Nadia; about the multitudes of Nadias that abound in Lebanon. My research—and this piece—is about threads and bonds of relatedness that enabled (and continue to enable) survival, and sustain life in the midst of social and infrastructural rupture, protracted crises, and compounding loss in the last few years in Lebanon.
In this piece, I (try to) make three conceptual moves: I expand how we understand loss and intimacy as they have unfolded in Lebanon over the past six years – and continue to unfold today – and I depart from existing anthropological work on haunting.
I think of my work as being about relatedness—wide and expansive enough to allow the charting of the thick cartography of intimate connections at play in the process of re-imagining a world out of a decaying, disintegrating, disorienting (and disoriented) world. I look at relatedness as an umbrella —a comprehensive category for multiple invisible gestures of care and affection, that refuse alignment with, and operate outside, the categories of identity enforced by the Lebanese state (such as citizenship and sect), and beyond the familiar coordinates that typically organize social worlds in Lebanon – from sect to family and life course trajectories and their gendered and classed modes of belonging.
So this is about relatedness—relations that fall outside the umbrella of family, yet retain family/kin expectations and care, and play the role of familial connections when those shatter or simply don’t exist. In the context of this project, relatedness includes relations, and everyday acts of care and togetherness that sustain life in the midst of social and infrastructural rupture and growing loss—like that experienced in Lebanon in recent years.
Relatedness here is a spectrum of connections built over years of living together, sharing space, resources, and survival tips, in times when nothing could have been taken for granted; connections that evade linguistic frames—that are less, more, and/or other than available categories. It’s an umbrella sheltering ties with neighbors who aren’t exactly friends, but who have copies of your housekeys for all sorts of emergencies; elders in the community with whom commiserating over morning coffee is integral to your daily routine; neighborhood children working as delivery boys over holidays who know not to ring your doorbell to avoid startling your sensitive dog; and migrant janitors and domestic workers who practically run buildings and households having been around for longer than most residents. People who submerge you in everyday acts of care and intimacy—often not articulated as such—and a togetherness that is often taken for granted. A constellation of formless connections—sometimes place-bound, often improbable, certainly insufficiently acknowledged in the broad discussions on Lebanese resilience, solidarity, and survival of catastrophes—that enable survival between and throughout crises, and that’s precisely why these everyday acts of togetherness matter.
In this framing, relatedness (that we could also call intimacies in the broad sense) is the web of connections that share features with kinship, and friendship, but that can’t be contained in either. This is about all the connections and intimacies that evade available linguistic frames—some of which are too western to speak to our contexts anyway; relationalities that are less, more, and/or other than available categories.
How do I conceptually account for, and introduce to readers the neighbor—one that a friendship with might not have developed beyond the everyday logistics of living in proximity, but one who has saved you from major injury or saved your father’s life when he had had a stroke and your mother couldn’t find her phone to call the Red Cross.
How do I account for Ammo Hamzeh, Nabatieh’s beloved photographer, who was martyred in this round of Israeli mass terror? A friend writes in an Instagram story, after receiving news of his martyrdom from her siblings and friends in the Nabatieh governorate. Ammo Hamzeh knew thousands of faces spanning three generations across the governorate; a trip to his studio, children’s favorite activity; a portrait by him, their ultimate Eid treat; his camera forever their intriguing wonder box that nobody else had in all of southern Lebanon in the days of the first occupation (1987-2000). The friend’s story continues, taking us back to Israel’s 2024 war, when Ammo Hamzeh’s studio was shelled. While everyone grieved Ammo Hamzeh’s lifetime work, their portraits in that studio, and their happy memories, the sight of Ammo Hamzeh standing in front of his decimated studio following his return to Nabatieh after the ceasefire agreement took place restored some hope “that the pair of eyes that knows all our faces by heart is still here.”
“Now all our childhood photos are gone,” my friend’s cousins tell her this time.
What’s more soul-crushing than losing the man that witnessed your growth and traced time along your face and in the shape of your eyes when you smile to his camera, year after year? What’s more intimate?
A woman stands atop rubble. Baadarane, Shouf, Lebanon. July 2025. Photo by Nay Elrahi
It’s difficult to miss the centrality of these forms of relatedness when considering the last six years in Lebanon.
Since the 2019 economic collapse, everyday life in Lebanon has resembled an obstacle course. The country, already strained by a “twin crisis” —COVID-19 and government mismanagement, alongside one of the world’s worst economic collapses since the 1850s—faced yet another shock with the 2020 port explosion.
These were unforgettable times, in the darkest of ways, for those of us who lived in the country then. People queued for hours to fill their car tanks, some hospitals ran out of diesel to power their equipment, pharmacies ran out of basic medication, people died in incredibly Kafkaesque scenarios that even Kafka would have thought unrealistic. To create an outlet for our anger and heartbreak in 2021, my partner, illustrator and animator Bahij Jaroudi, and I collaborated on a visual presentation of 20 ways to die in Lebanon. I was obsessed, collecting in a folder on my phone all the short news items about deaths in the country that came up in abundance into a folder on my phone. I was struck by the absurdity of it all, the avoidability, the banality; by all the ways these deaths sounded accidental, when in reality, they were unfolding in a carefully engineered space of slow death, crafted by an oligarchic rule that maintained an attitude of deliberate neglect vis-a-vis the economic collapse and the ensuing disintegration of everything. It all unfolded in a space where all this death and loss was calculated.
The continuous, collective experience of loss, and grappling with the numerous, successive, overlapping, and variegated losses accrued by many over the past seven years specifically, animates and shapes sociality and colors people’s everyday interactions in Lebanon. This is where an expansion of the notion of loss is useful. It enables a careful attending to how its different manifestations show up in the everyday of many in Lebanon, and what it does to the country’s social fabric. Loss of land and loved ones to Israeli wars and occupations, and to episodes of civil strife and political assassinations, are but one category of loss endured in Lebanon. The loss of hard-earned life savings after the 2019 collapse, the loss of the city and beloved neighborhoods after the port explosion, the loss of the promise of an alternative political futurity in the aftermath of the 2019 uprising, and the loss of what could have been for the thousands who left the country after the explosion and since, are some of the articulations of loss experienced by people in Lebanon in the past years.
Pieces of paper showing Arabic poetry and an unripe fig found on the ground. Baadarane, Shouf, Lebanon. July 2025. Photo by Nay Elrahi
The premise of my research remains that despite this unprecedented degree of disorientation, everyday acts of care and togetherness allowed people in Lebanon avenues to weather and endure—moments of respite after each crisis that keep the world together. They repair the world; not in the sense of restoring old exploitative models of life, but in weaving back together shattered parts—remaining in togetherness through the shattering, like fixing broken pottery with gold in the Japanese art of kintsugi: a repair that doesn’t hide imperfections, but draws attention to how that shattering adds to an object’s meaning. Similarly, the premise is that this togetherness in disorientation—what I’m calling repair for now—doesn’t pretend all is good or yearn for a romanticized past, when all of ours were brief moments of breath between cycles of crisis. What relatedness is doing here is forging an emergent meaning, enabling a political and creative potential as a survival strategy through catastrophe—like the thread of gold that visibilizes mending without promising a fresh start, but while adding beauty and meaning to an object thought obsolete.
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.
