“Hezbollah” is struggling to impose a single narrative on the southern massacre, or a single interpretation of it, and views any dissenting opinion as “treason” or a “stabbing in the back of the sacrifices.” Its goal is to prevent its own community, which carried it for years, from saying what it truly feels. But the people of the South have another narrative.
The life of southern farmer Fadia al-Hanawi was harsh, like the hardship of growing tobacco in her village of Aitaroun. The village was leveled to the ground, along with her home, which she built stone by stone, season after season, through planting the seedlings, harvesting them, and threading them together, as those seedlings traced the contours of southern life in all its sweetness and bitterness.
Fadia is me, him, her, you, and us. Those standing at the threshold of displacement, or fleeing from one displacement to another. She is the southern woman whom they want silenced so as not to “weaken” the resolve of the group. She is the accused, like so many brave men and women who decided to break from the sacred script of the collective and instead sanctify their own small things: their homes, their photographs, their memories, and to speak openly of their grief.
She is Zainab Saad, surrounded by the tongues of ordinary people enlisted in a partisan theology, threatened with isolation or expulsion as punishment for what she said publicly.
And she is like the late Abu Ali Faqih, who died atop the rubble of his home from grief and anguish, defying the group’s slogan that death must be a source of happiness, and that anyone who dies without such happiness is accused of deviation, abandonment, and sometimes treason.
For in the totalitarian mind, whether Stalinist or doctrinaire, the individual is stripped of his particularity, his memory, and his future. His grief, joy, life, death, home, and labor become the property of the collective, the organization, or the regime. Grief ceases to be a right, and individual survival ceases to be a natural right as well. What is demanded is that a person feel as the group wants him to feel, remain silent when it decides he must remain silent, and narrate his tragedy only in the language permitted by the authority, the “party,” or the sect, because they alone monopolize the narrative.
The narrative that the “Party” seeks to monopolize is this: forcing people to see death, war, and destruction as it sees them; besieging the truth and preventing it from being told; killing it within the individual, the community, and the environment; stripping human beings of their capacity to defend themselves before the theology of politics and the “Party,” where the individual is completely reduced and transformed into a wholly directed and controlled being. This is the apex of systematic repression, overt ideology, domination of consciousness, and the theft of identity and freedom.
In monopolizing “the final narrative,” “Hezbollah” seeks to silence voices that criticize its deadly adventures. It diminishes the value of what people lose in exchange for slogans of victory, pride, and dignity, and it does not hesitate to punish those who diverge from its narrative. The punishment here is not merely a reaction; it is a means of redefining those who oppose the “Party,” the group, or the sect, portraying them as a burden that must be isolated because they have fallen outside the “consensus,” and depicting them as a transient aberration.
It is a social, political, and security siege that pressures dissenters to the point where expression itself becomes so costly that enforced silence takes hold, and individuals come to realize that defending themselves changes nothing within a system that has already predetermined their place. It is the moment of “post-justice,” when oppression no longer even requires justification.
As for the other narrative, it is difficult to monopolize, because it is impossible to confiscate death, grief, loss, and pain, or to impose a single narrative upon them. Here Mahmoud Darwish captures the condition of publicly proclaimed southern death when he writes:
“Death, give me time to arrange my funeral
Give me time in this fleeting new spring
I was born in spring to keep the orators from endlessly speaking
about this heartbreaking country, about the immortality
of fig and olive trees in the face of time and its armies.”
