Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from Incé Husain’s story, “From the river to the sea, from the cedar to the olive tree”: Stories of Lebanon and Palestine,” published by Antler River Media Co-op on October 14, 2024.
“I can’t remember how many times it was just me and the sea,” says Lebanese artist Rana Abbout of visits to south Lebanon. “I used to go and just sit – and you’re connected to everything around you. It is your home, your land, your sea, your tree…the smell of all the citrus trees that you start smelling as soon as you enter.”
Her grandparents told stories about the ages of their lemon and orange trees, planted in synchrony with the births of their children. They planted myriads of fruits and vegetables; Abbout says the south is known for oranges, lemons, and watermelons – “real watermelons” with black seeds.
The Fredericton-based artist vividly remembers a fig tree in front of her grandmother’s house.
In front of my grandmother’s house, there was a fig tree, and I used to love eating figs from that tree. They would get me figs from somewhere else – but I would say ‘no, no, I’ll get it from the tree’,” says Abbout. “And I always thought that it tasted different when you pick it from the tree. I used to always love to pick it. Even here (in Canada) when I see figs, in my mind, it takes me directly there. It’s the smell – when you pick it, it’s different. I miss that.
Abbout was born and raised in Lebanon. Her mother is from the south of Lebanon and her father is from the Beqaa Valley; her parents live in Dahiya, a southern suburb of Beirut. She moved out of her parents’ house to central Beirut – where she attended school and university – and lived there both on her own and after marriage. Two years ago, she immigrated to Canada with her husband and two kids.
“I grew up in different parts (of Lebanon), seeing the culture from different parts. But I’m a city girl – I grew up in the city. We would just visit the Beqaa and the south to visit family.”
Abbout describes the way Lebanese people “love life.”
“We are people who love life, and we enjoy every second of it. And we live it as if it was the last moment because we know that we can just go any minute, we know what death is,” says Abbout. “We love life, we love family, we love food, we love music. We’re happy for each other, we’re sad with each other. We live in communities – we support each other, especially in times of need, even if we have differences. Especially in death, we do support each other. The majority of people – we are raised on good ethics and good morals.”
Abbout has memories of Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, when Israeli forces went on a 33-day rampage that killed 1,191 Lebanese, wounded thousands, displaced half a million people – nearly one eight of the population – while claiming to eradicate Lebanese armed resistance group Hezbollah. Three billion dollars worth of civilian infrastructure were destroyed.
In Dahiya, Israel destroyed entire neighbourhoods, flattening homes, schools, businesses, and cafés. This level of violence was formalized by the Israeli military as the “Dahiya Doctrine,” which blatantly promotes disproportionate destruction and the killing of civilians.
“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on,” said Israeli army general Gadi Eisenkot in 2008. “We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”
“I remember the war,” says Abbout. “It’s different what you remember from the war as a child and as you grow up. As children, we remember our parents being afraid, we remember them with their little radios glued to their ears so that they know what’s going on, with their worried faces, with their chain smoking – because they’re so worried.”
She shares a memory of a striped yellow and dark blue box that “looked like a little bee”, filled with licorice and all her favourite candies. When the bombings would start, her parents would grab the box, her favourite toy, and drag her by the hand to windowless hallways safe from the impending violence of shattering glass.
“But we also used to have fun as children,” says Abbout of the children in her neighbourhood. “I remember that we had fun. Like, we were scared to death with the sounds and all, but we also had fun and laughed (as we ran). It’s the culture. You know that you can die any minute, and so you just live in the moment, I guess.”
In Lebanon, resilience is engraved in the psyche since birth. The culture flares with resistance songs, like “Lebnan Rah Yerjaa” (Lebanon will return), “Ghabet Shams el-Hak” (The sun of justice has gone down), and “Ana Betnaffas Horriye” (I breathe freedom).
Abbout attests that resilience is important, but also feels that its emphasis can become “toxic.” It can lead to inadvertently normalizing injustice, suppressing grief, and accumulating exhaustion.
“We grew up to this word “resilience.” This is part of our culture – you are resilient, you are Lebanese, you are resilient, you have a thick skin. We get up, we keep going, we build, we build, we build, and if they destroy, we build again,” says Abbout.
“But then you don’t have time to talk about what you’re feeling. And then, if you do, there’s no time to collapse, because it’s one problem after the other, one attack after the other. And so, you get tired, you realize that it’s not fair – it’s like you keep putting band-aids on top of one other. And it’s good to be resilient, but it’s not okay to keep falling and saying, ‘it’s okay, I’m resilient.’ I don’t want to fall in the first place. And it’s kind of a denial that you feel. We don’t want to talk about injustice because then we get weak,” adds Abbout.
At the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, Abbout says that use of the Arabic word “qaher” began to rise. It crudely translates in English to “anger”, but its meaning is far more nuanced. It is a full-bodied anger built from generations of victimization; it is intense, quiet, hyperaware, back-breaking, intergenerationally identity-defining. Abbout shares a quote from writer Khadijah Muhaisen Dajani describing “qaher”:
There is no English equivalent to the Arabic word “qaher.” The dictionary says “anger” but it’s not. It is when you take anger, place it on a low fire, add injustice, oppression, racism, dehumanization to it, and leave it to cook slowly for a century. And then you try to say it but no one hears you. So, it sits in your heart. And settles in your cells. And it becomes your genetic imprint. And then moves through generations. And one day, you find yourself unable to breathe. It washes over you and demands to break out of you. You weep. And the cycle repeats.
“My friends here would ask ‘how are you feeling’ and I would say ‘angry, but not angry.’ I didn’t know how to translate it,” says Abbout. “And then I saw people were sharing ‘qaher,’ and I thought ‘yes, they know exactly what I’m going through because there are people who come from where I come from.’”
Abbout shares a quote from the poem ‘Jenin’ by Lebanese writer Etel Adnan: “Our eyes have exhausted the vocabulary of darkness.”
She had read the poem before, but this line marked her differently when she reread it a few days ago. Its gravity is amplified by the simultaneous Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Palestine – enabled by military aid from Canada and the United States.
On just the fifth day of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, the United States granted Israel 8.7 billion dollars in military aid.
“History is repeating itself in Lebanon and in my part of the world,” says Abbout.
In 1948, Israeli forces violently destroyed seven Lebanese villages and massacred all the civilians in the Lebanese village of Houla. In 1978 and 1982, Israeli forces invaded Lebanon and killed and displaced thousands under the guise of eradicating Palestinian political movements like the PLO. These invasions contributed to the rise of armed resistance group Hezbollah, officialized in 1985. In the 1970s and 1980s, the United States used its veto power ten times at the UN Security Council to nullify resolutions working towards restoring peace in Lebanon.
Israel’s 1978 invasion extended to the 22-year occupation of south Lebanon, a control marked by indiscriminate civilian killings and destruction of civilian infrastructure, including the bombing of a United Nations bunker sheltering 800 civilians. Displaced people in occupied villages were denied the right to return and forced to facilitate the occupation.
Israel’s 1982 invasion killed 20,000 people while inflicting a three-month siege on West Beirut that blocked electricity, water, and food. The United States orchestrated the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon to other Arab countries, diminishing the Palestinian presence in Lebanon.
“It’s dejà-vu. We’ve been here before,” says Abbout. “But this time it’s even more because of what’s happening in Palestine. (The quote) just hit. It was very close to my heart. I could feel it.”
On October 13, Abbout’s friend Issam Abdallah, Reuters photojournalist, was targeted and killed by Israeli forces. Currently, the south Lebanon and Beqaa Valley of her memories are being bombed. Her mother has moved from the south to the north of Lebanon; the rest of her family is scattered around the city of Beirut. Her father passed away last year.
“We don’t know how things will escalate. I’m glad my dad isn’t around to witness what’s going on because he would have been heartbroken.”
Since Abbout was young, she heard stories about Palestine from her grandparents. Her grandfather traveled frequently to Palestine to visit friends; then, there were no borders between the lands. Haifa, a port city in now-occupied Palestine, fueled economic life for Lebanon and Palestine; in south Lebanon, Palestinian currency was more familiar than Lebanese currency. When her grandfather passed away, Abbout asked for his keffiyeh from Palestine – red, old, authentic, its weave differing from the modern stitching.

Abbout remembers her grandmother, in deep sickness, locking eyes with her and uttering the last words “I’m so sad I’m going to die before visiting Palestine.”
A Palestinian friend brought Abbout “a piece of the land” as a gift – some sand and rocks from Nablus.
“I inherited the cause since I was a little kid. I grew up being taught that the Palestinians are our brothers and sisters and we are one nation and we have to stand up and defend them,” says Abbout. “And so I never thought of it. It was something just like how I eat and drink water and breathe. It was part of who I was.”
At university, many of Abbout’s friends were Palestinian. She would join them at protests, learn about them and their lands. Her Arabic began to shift, Palestinian words subsumed into her speech. Her father was a “huge resistance fan”; he loved Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah since 1992, who never wavered in his fight for a free Palestine.
In Nasrallah’s final speech before his assassination by Israeli forces on September 28, he said:
In the name of the martyrs, in the name of the families of the martyrs, in the name of the wounded in hospitals, in the name of those who lost their eyes and hands; in the name of all the patient, steadfast, and loyal people; in the name of all those who have taken on the responsibility of performing this moral, humanitarian, and religious duty in supporting Gaza, which is being subjected to genocide, mass killing, hunger, thirst, disease, and siege, we say to Netanyahu… we say to the enemy’s government, to the enemy’s army, to the enemy’s society: The Lebanon front will not stop before stopping the aggression on Gaza. Whatever the sacrifices, whatever the consequences, whatever the possibilities, whatever the horizon the region goes towards, the resistance in Lebanon will not stop supporting and standing by the people of Gaza, the people of the West Bank, and the oppressed in that sacred land.
When Nasrallah was assassinated, Abbout felt as if she had lost her father all over again. She saw this exact sentiment echoed across social media. Despite political differences with Nasrallah on internal issues within Lebanon, Abbout says many people saw him as a protector.
“I had the same feeling I felt as when my dad died. We grew up with Nasrallah. He was the leader, he was the father of everybody, we felt safe with him and protected from Israel. A lot of us had problems with him during the revolution, we did have problems internally. But, just like you have a relationship with a father – you argue about things, you’re both stubborn – there’s a layer of ‘I love you’,” says Abbout. “We all feel that we were defeated. We feel like he was the protector and now we don’t know. I don’t know if I’m ever going to see my family and loved ones again, if I’m ever going to visit my home again. It’s just so evil.”
Abbout made the difficult decision to move her family to Canada so that her kids wouldn’t have to experience the same PTSD she does. She says that she “jumps at every loud sound”; awareness of the ongoing war has ingrained a mental soundtrack of warplanes and bombings that lurks behind sleep and daily routines.
“I would be sitting or sleeping or whatever, and I would hear the bombing. I would wake up jumping, and I would ask my family ‘did you hear something?’ and they would say ‘no’. It’s all in my head. And I didn’t want that for my kids,” says Abbout. “But there’s a curse for people like us – that we love home, our countries, but we can’t live there. We just have a curse that we’ll always be immigrants and travelers.”
Incé Husain is a neuroscience student and journalist who writes for the NB Media Co-op. She pursues local stories independently at The Unprecedented Times. She is based in London, Ontario.
A version of this article was first published by the Antler River Media Co-op on October 14, 2024.