The call was to ask after the health of one of his relatives. He is an old friend, one of the notables of his area, a social figure of good reputation and great standing. He has also been displaced since the first "war of support," having lost everything he owned like the other inhabitants of the border villages, and he fears a third "war of support" that might extinguish southerners' hopes of returning, not only alive but even dead.
As he described his situation, his social position obliges him to concern himself with the affairs and sorrows of displacement and the hardships that pursue the displaced people of south Lebanon, the latest of which is securing graves for those among them who die. What my friend proposed, or asked for, was an initiative to obtain a plot from the Lebanese state's public lands and turn it into a cemetery for the people of southern towns that have suffered total urban annihilation and lie within what is known as the yellow line, where return looks unlikely in the near or medium term. The matter is no longer one of an alternative cemetery only, but of the need to find a place worthy of the dead of displacement, now that their return to their own soil has become impossible.
In the southern exodus, the living displaced struggle to adapt to their temporary places. The displaced dead have become bodies buried as deposits in temporary cemeteries, awaiting their return to their first earth. Death seems harsher and more estranged, for if a displaced man dies, in what soil will they lay him?
It is as if southerners are replicating the Palestinian exodus in all its chapters, since the continuing Israeli wars of extermination against both: from temporary displacement to permanent refuge, from armed struggle to the "wars of support," from tents to prefabricated houses, from martyrs' burial grounds to strangers' cemeteries, from the search for shelter to the conditions of burial. What the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon face most is the question of burial grounds and obtaining a plot of land, and that is what the displaced southerners are now suffering in every detail.
In the Palestinian-Lebanese succession, or simultaneity, through Israel's prolonged wars of ethnic cleansing, the late, great Mahmoud Darwish saw the grave as a mirror of identity and history. In his poem "I Saw the Last Farewell," he asks a question of great harshness: "But I do not see the grave yet. Is there no grave for me after this weariness?" It is the Palestinian-Lebanese weariness, and it is the question of the people of the south that Darwish asked decades ago: have we become deposits in temporary graves after this weariness? What those who gamble with the living and the dead of the south have not grasped is that the most dangerous thing about displacement is not that a person is uprooted from his home, but that he is cut off from the place that binds his life to the lives of his ancestors and gives his death the meaning of belonging.
The cemetery here is no longer merely a space to hold the body, or a headstone placed over a grave. It is the moment when belonging to a patch of earth is completed, from cradle to grave. In it lies the connection between the family's collective memory and its successive generations, between the lives of the living and the stories of those who came before them. A person does not inherit his land from the living alone, but from the dead who lie in it, and he in turn leaves it in trust to those who will come after him.
And so, for us, the living on the edge of war, or the displaced on the edge of death, the grave becomes the last link in the chain of lineage, memory, and belonging to place.
