South Lebanon (the South of the river, the far South) is steeped in antiquity. For thousands of years, the peoples and tribes who successively settled forged its collective memory, and its written and oral history, leaving their mark on the land and in the collective consciousness itself.
It is there that Jesus performed his first miracle, in Cana of Galilee- where historians find manifestations of his teachings, earning it the name "the land of the Gospel," later "the land of the Annunciation." It is also where the Canaanites settled after arriving from the Arabian Peninsula, laying the foundations of their civilization three thousand years before Christ. From the port of Tyre the king’s daughter Elissar sailed to Carthage, while her sister Europa gave her name to the continent. The Yemeni tribe of Amela went there after the flood of Marib, giving it the name of Jabal Amel.
Jabal Amel, whose hills rest against the shoulder of Galilee, has long been a gateway for travel to and from Jerusalem taken by conquerors and pilgrims alike. In our own time, it is the region of Lebanon that has most deeply shaped the collective memory of the Shiite communities, who have lived there for over a thousand years. It is where their narratives took shape as the ages passed and sultans came and went, armies passed through and moved on, and occupations were resisted. Its people belong to it as place, heritage, memory, and identity. They carved it out of rock to build it and gave their lives to preserve it, leaving it time and again against their will, always in the hope of returning.
It is not merely a place, but a cultural identity and a vessel for individual and collective memories alike. This memory has the power to transform grief and pain into joy, catastrophe into renewed hope and a path through which to rise again from death and war. However, war does not wipe out stones alone; it erases the stories, narratives, and memories bound to it. It becomes difficult to maintain the past and memories of a people without it. Displacement and exile sever the bond between people and place; over time, the place becomes an imagined memory whose images fade. Here, one must ask: if the people of the South return and rebuild their villages, their towns, their homes; would they be able to fill the holes in their memory?
War generates divergent narratives and stories. Fragments collective memory are scattered into disjointed accounts, until each individual possesses their own distinct version. This produces not a diversity of memories but a conflict within: from a perforated memory, the sense of collective identity seeps away, replaced by a severed and isolating "I."
The people of the South may be able to rebuild what has been destroyed—but is it as easy to rescue a memory thousands of years old? Can it be pulled living from beneath the rubble? The destroyed villages—bearing human heritage in their values and customs, their songs and chants, their squares, places of worship, cemeteries, and gravestones—are themselves witnesses to both memory and history.
What the people of the South will face is not only the burden of return or reconstruction, but the fear of losing a memory rich in its details, its influences, its presence and continuity. This is a knowledge that literature, poetry, and culture strive to capture. The great southern poet Shawqi Bazee put it thus: "It is the natural outcome of a convergence between individual talents and objective conditions—history forming one part, geography another—alongside various civilizational and cultural factors. Perhaps it is the meeting of these elements at a single focal point that has enabled southern Lebanon to become fertile ground for all those poetic expressions that have flourished upon its soil from ancient times to the present day."
The South- our places, our presences, and our thoughts been destroyed; our souls that have been lost- is a difficult memory to forget and perhaps even more difficult to protect.
