I speak in my name and dare I speak in the name of millions of Lebanese who were forcibly made part of an imagined diaspora community. Today, as I watch our country being barbarically attacked by Israel from a painful physical distance, I smell the blend of toxic smells of fumes and obliterated bodies. My relationship to my homeland has yet been sown by threads of metal and old silk. The silk is reminiscent of a time when Lebanon was part of the silk route that connected the Western world to China. Metal symbolizes strength that has turned into weakness over time while carrying inexplicable beauty in its rust.
An ironsmith by inheritance and an artist by nature since a young age, my cousin Charles describes the rust on metal sculptures created from war remains as raw, organic, and ever evolving. Born in the 70s, a decade where children and the Lebanese youth have grown more acquainted to the sound of bombs and snipers than that of lullabies and ice-cream trucks, Charles and his family were later forcibly displaced from our village in Mount Lebanon, Remhala. A refugee at the age of 18, and during 18 years of forced displacement, Charles sheltered in his creativity. He turned war remains into artifacts emanating life, permeating presence, and peace. Charles’ world was imagined and created by an idiosyncratic collection of both natural objects inspired by the places he encountered and ones that met the demands of a simple villager’s life. When he began collecting war remains, he may not have foreseen that the abundance of creativity would be fed by an abundance of violence. “Never again” was what many had hoped to carry from the lessons of the many wars fought in Lebanon from 1975 to 1990.
Charles Nassar pictured besides one of his creations—a cedar tree molded out of war shrapnel—in Remhala, Mount Lebanon. Photo courtesy of Charles Nassar via Facebook.
That was just the beginning. Charles found in his art a refuge away from the refuge that gave his life meaning and purpose. It offered him a haven away from the sirens of death and the screams of deprivation. Inaugurated in 2023, his museum, Shazaya (also the name of his company), was named after the war remains that he collected in the aftermath of several wars including the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), the 2006 War on Lebanon, the War of Nahr Al-Bared (2007) and the Beirut Port bombing of 2020. While these remains have shattered so many lives, places, and dreams, they gave birth to Charles’ haven of peace. With a creativity beyond limits, he later found a special home for his reborn shazaya artifacts. During the Covid19 lockdown, and while Lebanon’s economy was completely collapsing, Charles stationed in Remhala away from the state of paralysis overriding the country. He knew that his ancestors had drawn water to their home through a nearby cave nestled at the foot of the mountains. After months of digging deep into the earth, the water source unveiled itself as a breathtaking cave of masterpieces where the silence of stones and metal can eternally rest and speak. The museum is now a renowned tourist attraction for both locals and foreigners including politicians and diplomats. Charles’ metal works inspired by the original pieces found in his museum are circulating around the world through a wide network of proud and nostalgic diaspora communities. “My work lets me loose (“bfish khilqi”). I turn anger, pain, and revenge into art. I want to remember the wars we lived through my art.”
“Shazaya Family by the Lake,” a piece by Charles Nassar, made from discarded artillery shells, pictured in Charles’ garden in Remhala, Mount Lebanon. Photo courtesy of Charles Nassar via Facebook.
For other family members who were forcibly displaced from my village when harb al Jabal— ‘the War of the Mountain’— began, the war animated in them another sense of belonging, one in constant conflict with life, away from destructive battlefields. The loud voices of men who shared their experiences of war overshadowed those of Remhala’s women, who silently and gracefully hid the weight and pain of forced displacement and dispossession. One of these women recounts:
“I was in Beirut when the situation in the village was worsening. I took a taxi to return to the village. I wanted to visit my aunt. The village was then evacuated. I became a refugee in Deir el Qamar. We suffered so much. I became like a thread. Do you know the thread? I was as thin as a thread. We did not care about not having any food. What we cared about was to remain alive. I could not have children because of the war. Stress. I was 25 years old.”
While this woman could not have kids, others have had to bury their own.
For other family members in my village, war meant exile. Exile still carries a heavy weight that is stuck in time and place.
For my immediate family, forced displacement meant the destruction of our ancestral home and the forbidden mourning of bodies gone missing. Six months into the war that started in 1982, after Remhala was occupied, my grandfather’s graveyard and body were desecrated. My father was told he will never find his father’s body. He was forever forbidden from grieving.
Jessy’s family home in Remhala destroyed during the War of the Mountain. Photo courtesy of Jessy Nassar’s family archives.
Until this day, my family and so many others across Lebanon whose members have gone missing during the war have not come to terms with a present past. They cannot perform the ritual of visiting the graveyards of their lost ones. The right to live, die, and final rest on one’s ancestral land has been looted. The thousands of Lebanese who have been killed by Israel in this current war and the previous ones have also lost that right. In some villages, Israel prevented mourners from burying their dead, going as far as striking the cemetery during burial. In others, entire cemeteries were bulldozed. Many are being prevented from burying their dead in their land, forcing them to resort to temporary graveyards. Israel’s occupation of the South may turn the temporary into permanence.
“Wataniyya,” a piece by Charles Nassar using discarded war shrapnel in the cave in Remhala, which is now a tourist attraction. Photo by Jessy Nassar.
It has been 26 years since Remhala’s villagers returned to their land. After over 18 years of forced displacement and dispossession, its people still carry the wounds and scars of a war that left their community shattered. Leaving many with the forced option of exile, the ones who remained have had to relearn life in and away from it. There is something that eternally breaks when uprooted—and for so long. The body adapts and ages while the memory is conflicted in its ongoing fights between past, present, and future. The devastating impact of the political and socio-economic turmoil caused by the civil war that started in 1975 has also meant that the younger generations who were born after ‘taslim al mafatih’ (the handing of the keys) – marking the ‘return’ to Remhala – have grown physically and bodily disconnected.
Some of them held onto ancestral stories of Remhala’s golden and dark ages like mantras or chants while others have only met it on their ID cards. Most of Remhala’s new generation – who were either not born or too young when it was evacuated and occupied – could not rebuild their destroyed homes after the war, nor could they reimagine village life as their ancestors once knew it.
Today, a small majority of the people of Remhala have sown a new relationship with their village. For most, the relationship they have nurtured with it is merely confined to the occasional attendance of funerals, saints’ festivals, and church masses.
On weekends, middle-aged men gather over argileh and card games. Some of them garden the small plots they have spent years renourishing after decades of land dispossession while women engage in social activities and soft politics. They converse about their children – most of whom are now part of the diaspora community, their planned visits, and the disruption of those visits due Israel’s ongoing war on the country. All these groups of people unconsciously engage in acts of communal loss and grief. They grieve the village as their ancestors knew it and the life they knew in it. They grieve the absence of the young souls who gave the village its life and sparkle. They also grieve the loss of what could have been.
Thinking of Remhala also means thinking about every village in South Lebanon that has been evacuated, destroyed, and erased countless times. This time though, the fear is of a permanent erasure. Israel has bombed all the bridges connecting the South to the rest of Lebanon. Death is so permeating that it even infiltrates through the South’s mountains, rivers, sea caves, wind currents, olive trees, wildflowers, banana trees, citrus fruits, and animals.
Jessy’s father, pictured with his orange trees on the family plot in Remhala, Mount Lebanon. Photo by Jessy Nassar.
The stories of the people of Remhala and its rich landscape are also the stories of the people of the South and its splendid ecosystem.
The land, the tree, the soil, the farmer, the creator, the builder, the artist, the mother, the father, the grandparent, the children, the church, the mosque, the school. The place.
More than one million and three hundred thousand people have been uprooted by Israel since the beginning of March 2026. Most families in the South have spent more of their time displaced, displacing, replacing, and rebuilding than living life as told in story tales.
1982-2000.
2024-2026.
More than twenty years after Remhala re-became, the devastation, loss, and grief still live in it. They live in the concrete walls that replaced its old, stoned houses and markets. They live in the soil that burned with artillery and bombs. They live in both those who are alive and those who passed.
Thinking of the South and its uncertain future brings pain and grief beyond what a village’s story can carry. A lot has been lost without it being visible just yet. The farmers who may die before they get the chance to return and regrow – if they will. The shepherds whose displaced goats and sheep have nothing left to graze. The beekeepers who have nothing left to keep. The grandmothers who eagerly waited for their grandchildren’s occasional visits to the ‘day’a’ – the village. The children who carelessly ran its streets and alleyways. The streets that have been occupied by children’s laughter, cooked local stew smells, coffee and backgammon on the sidewalks, greeting honks, calls for mosque prayers, church bells, and orange blossom scents.
The wild native flowers that have no water to flourish. The spring waters that are repelling their blend with the toxins of war chemicals.
If the South is reborn, the farmers may not have successors to fill their void and to feed their lunch plates. The food in these plates will not taste the same. The bees may not find the flowers they nourished on. The grandmothers and grandfathers may not be found in their tombs – if they will ever be allowed a burial. The children will have become adults. Their connection to their village will have become a faraway memory. That memory will carry with it the names of the thousands who were killed and maimed, and the thousands who are still mourning them. The suffering of the dead and the alive will travel through and between old ancestors and the new generations who carry their ancestors’ unprocessed grief. Some will recount their stories from the forced exile of the diaspora while others will do so from the concrete walls they will have rebuilt after their return – if they ever return. The soil will carry their wounds and blood, and the concrete walls that will be rebuilt – if rebuilt – will fail to replace the old stones, holding residues of a deliberately destroyed past.
Jessy’s nephew pictured with his grandparents, Jessy’s parents, harvesting some greens from their family garden in Remhala, Mount Lebanon. Photo by Jessy Nassar.
Over twenty years of forced displacement meant over twenty missed seasons of seeding, growing, and harvesting. What it means today for the people of the South, yet again, is years if not decades of lost seasons, lost zaatar, lost olives, lost olive oil, lost citrus, lost figs, lost vegetables, lost watermelon. With an aggressor as barbaric as Israel, four seasons may have merged into one of permanent destruction, permeating death of life in all forms.
In every war, what is lost cannot be found. What is found is loss waiting for regeneration. Will the people of Al-Janub and its new generations witness that loss and turn it into threads of metal and silk? Will they become ironsmiths, writers, fighters, or plain survivors exiled in eternal trauma and forbidden grief?
Jessy Nassar
Jessy is a Lebanese London-based researcher and humanitarian advisor with over fourteen years of experience working across humanitarian operations, policy, research, and academic teaching. She holds a PhD in Anthropology of Development from King’s College London, based on 18 months of fieldwork examining the political economy of forced labour displacement, including participatory research with Syrian agricultural workers in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. She also holds an MSc (Distinction) in Middle East Politics from SOAS and a BA from Sciences Po Paris. She occasionally contributes as a guest lecturer at SOAS, Sciences Po Paris, King’s College London, and the American University of Beirut, and has published on displacement, refugee labour, and migration policy. She currently works at Save the Children International. Views are her own. LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessynassar/
