Ramsey Khalifeh
On the 6th of April, in 2018, my grandfather died. A few hours later, his daughter would wake up her son from his sleep to tell him that her father was gone. Exactly a month after this, while his daughter’s energy was concentrated on the fallouts of this event, there had been, in Lebanon, another fraudulent election. Before my grandfather’s funeral, while he lay in state in the funeral hearse, his daughter had fallen down a steep set of stairs. She would immediately get back up. On the afternoon of the 7th of April, we carried my grandfather to the graveyard through the impoverished village roads of Nabatieh. The day of my grandfather’s funeral had also been four days before my seventeenth birthday. As we carried him to the graveyard, the spoils of poverty, corruption, resentment, anger, and blind faith were all around us. It seems to me that God himself had devised, to mark my grandfather’s end, the most dramatic and polarizing of endings. And it seemed to me, too, that the internal family tensions had been devised as a corrective for the pride of his daughter’s only son.
We flew to Beirut from Abu Dhabi for the funeral. The body had to be buried by the next sunset from the time of death, so there was no time to be sad enough not to want to do anything. I did, however, have to take an SAT practice test before the flight. It was scheduled a week prior.
The pain my mother felt was preceded by years of turbulence. Her relationship with my jido was scattered and complicated, but, like many children who were beside their parents before they died, she felt secure knowing that he was her father and she his daughter. They ate manoushe together on the balcony of the Beirut apartment just a week before he died, and jido would laugh at every one of her jokes like he was her child. She took him on joy rides around the city, and he would tilt his head towards the window and smile profusely at the sight of the same sights he had seen for years before.
My mother rejected tradition, and she became angry with the pain she felt from losing her father after a true rekindling. My mother experienced anger a lot throughout her life. She was only seven years old when the civil war began. Her childhood involved bullet-dodging, house-fleeing, and constant rebellion. In the earlier years of the war, my mother recalled a time when a neighbor barged at their door in the city, urging them to leave as soon as they could. They were informed that a group of militiamen of the Druze and Sunnis would be raiding every apartment block the next day, raping all the women and killing all the men. When she described these stories to me, it sounded in her tone that this was normal. That was just the beginning of the horror stories she endured.
While her father was still growing his trade business during this tumultuous time, my mother’s subversion in every aspect of her life grew as well. She started smoking cigarettes in the bathrooms of the Beirut home, staying out late, and carousing at disco clubs on the weekends. Yet, she says she doesn’t remember much from her childhood and teen years.
The procession began when jido’s body was first transported to our family village home in Nabatieh, where the grievers awaited his arrival. By tradition, the women mourn and say goodbye to the deceased before they’re sent to the mosque for prayer and cemetery for burial. The women stay and say their final goodbye at home. My mother detested the idea. She needed more time with her father. She made it clear to everyone that she was coming with the men and burying her father with them. Her brothers said, “Ya Ghada, leish?” Oh, Ghada, why? But she would not listen. She was stubborn, like I was stubborn.
The same year jido died was the 2018 Lebanese general election. It was the first parliamentary election since 2009 since it was postponed on three different occasions. Initially scheduled for 2013, it was then postponed once that year, then to 2014, another time to 2017, and lastly, 2018. It honestly seemed like nobody knew what the hell to do. There were too many reasons for these postponements. Still, some include issues of security, failure for the parliament to elect a new president (the Taif Agreement, known formally as the National Reconciliation Accord which was written to end the civil war, stated that the president must come from the Lebanese Maronite community), and other technical requirements. The structure of political confessionalism that the country amended after the civil war allowed it so different religious groups had proportional representation. There are Shias, Sunnis, Druze, Alawites, Maronite Christians, Greek Orthodox Christians, Greek Catholics, Armenian Orthodox, and Armenian Catholics. Not to mention the minority groups of the Syriac Orthodox Christians, Syriac Catholics, Latin Catholics, Chaldeans, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Coptic Orthodox Church, and the Jewish. I’m sure there are more. I truly had not realized that Lebanon had so many different groups until the 2018 parliamentary elections; the first time the word corruption ever entered my mind in relation to Lebanon was when I saw the aftermath of the results scattered across the news. The three main parliament leaders re-elected were Gebran Bassil (of the Free Patriotic Movement party), Saad Hariri (the Future Movement party), and Nabih Berri (the Amal Movement party). Bassil is known as the most hated man in Lebanon, often called corrupt, a racist, and the product of nepotism. Hariri’s father, Rafic, was rumored to have participated in the destruction of downtown Beirut during the war only to profit from its rebuild. And Berri may be the worst of them all. His wife made an appearance at jido’s funeral (I was quite uncomfortable knowing what I know now about her — money hungry and abusive of her power, not to mention her known affection for young boys like me). During the war, Berri was the head of the Amal militia, virtually making him a warlord. The results of the 2018 election continued to keep most of the ex-warlords — who pardoned themselves when peace was established — in power. And still, the same groups of Shias, our neighbors of Nabatieh, followed the words of Berri and other Shia leaders who have profited from their positions while leaving small villages like ours poor, unnoticed, and left behind.
I heard jido arrive at the Nabatieh home — a house on the main village street that protruded inwards with a large courtyard — before I even saw him. In front of the courtyard was a long, slightly curved staircase building like a young girl’s spine with scoliosis, and at the top stood my mother and I, alongside others, hearing the call to prayer projected from the approaching hearse. With tears in her eyes, my mother said, “he’s coming.” And indeed, he was. And as the tip of the black vehicle appeared at the gate of the front courtyard, my mother jolted down the stairs and her entire body flipped forward. She lost control. She later told me this is where she admitted defeat, where she realized her fight against the prescribed rituals had to end. My father ran to her to help her up. She got up and continued going down the stairs to see jido, maybe for the last time.
I remembered one of the few times in all our life together when jido and I had really spoken to each other. That is not to say that we never spoke, but it was mostly in family gatherings with everyone together. It was on a spring day, the first season of the calendar year, when I got to visit my family and Lebanon. We were sitting on the living room couch at the Beirut home. This was in the last few years of his life, when many of his health complications were catching up to him, and many of his words came out confused. He spoke on the influx of Palestinian and Syrian refugees coming into Lebanon. I wanted to please him, so I agreed with everything he said. Jido’s political frustrations grew as his business struggled, and he blamed external factors that were easy to attribute. He went on to talk about other things and told me he loved me. He also gave me some money.
When jido’s body finally arrived at the Nabatieh home, what followed felt like a series of cutscenes. The coffin at the base of the stairs, the coffin at the house’s main entrance, the body being unwrapped on my childhood dinner table, my jido's face, my mother weeping. When it was time for the body to leave, my mother came to me and said, “go Ramsey, it’s time to go,” and said she would be staying; it hurt too much. My mother was against tradition, but when faced with the pressure she felt in having to say goodbye to her father, she adhered to it, like an anti-capitalist enthralled by consumption. Maybe sometimes we exist in our ways rather than making them, and to break the mold can be a contested feat. I said goodbye and left her there. Jido was buried an hour later, just the men in attendance.
Jido had lived and died in an ebb and flow of anger, and at times it frightened my mother, as she said her final goodbyes through those wire-filled, run-down streets of Nabatieh, to see how powerful and overflowing this anger could be and to realize that his anger could now be hers, and through her, mine as well. On the following day of jido’s funeral, my mother and I sat at the terrace of the Nabatieh home, speaking of the past, looking up at the trees of Judas and Syrian maple, and wondering what to do in the approaching days of mourning. As we spoke — in what was a conversation closed off to the rest of the world — a flash of brilliant emerald and delicate azure appeared in our view, manifesting what we soon registered to be a hummingbird. I had never in my life seen one before. As it hovered so closely in front of us for what seemed like a millennium, I was in disbelief that this tiny creature had pulled me in with its infant charm, tilting its head every few seconds before eventually buzzing away. “That’s jido,” my mother said. The way she said it with such determination made me know for certain that she was right. I had hoped for him that in this current form, he was new. And perhaps he let go of his anger, and his frustrations too, fluttering away, on to the next life.