Every March 14, I celebrated the anniversary date with a pause, with an article, with an intention. The Cedar revolution had marked me and inspired me so much. But the celebration, the heritage are no more if they are not translated at a given moment, into acts, into legacies. What the legacy of the Cedar Revolution invites us to do is undoubtedly to rebel, to unite, to raise our voices, to continue, to march and to conclude. The tenors of March 14 left, many of them murdered; they must be saddened by our lukewarmness or torpor, where they are. There remains – without the label – a cluster, for some magnificent, which their companions of the past must certainly miss, with their grip. Would Samir Frangié have imagined that the Journey to the End of Violence reach these degrees in the land of the Cedars: impoverishment, corruption, failure of the rule of law, of the health system, of education; bankruptcy of dignity?
And yet, when I arrive at Place des Martyrs early in the morning on March 14, this same call for freedom, flight takes me as every time I arrive on the square. The Nahar building, white covered in blue like a saint, with the determined profile of Gebran Tuéni, arouses all my tenderness; and the view of the port in the distance, my desire for projects or departure. However, it takes more than nostalgia, more than tenderness to set off, to undertake. This Square suggests to me the impulse… before I remember how much our freedom of movement is restricted; if only by the rip-off of the banks, the price of gasoline, the crazy dollarization and the dark streets. Even in one of the banks called ” civilized“, people are shouting, the employees are overwhelmed; “ the system is off we are told. Same scenario at the Palais de Justice, multiplied by a hundred: a Kafkaesque crowd, one on top of the other, five hours on foot to make a formality. The Palais de Justice resembles a farm or a chicken coop, more than the lair of a noble cause. Indeed, justice is off She has also been in Lebanon for a long time.
For how many years will we have to enumerate their names Gebran Tueni, Samir Kassir, Rafic Hariri, Walid Eido, Georges Hawi, and all the others, like those of all the victims of August 4 and the Lebanese mismanagement before justice is done done ? ” Peace is the work of justice and the truth. Soon those who remain will not have known all these murdered figures and their names will no longer mean anything. Just for that, it would have been necessary to maintain the memory in a certain way and in particular in writing. Because writing anchors. Most of the media have almost ignored the memory of March 14, no doubt overwhelmed by current events or for some other consideration; but a medium is a medium, a mediator, not just a mirror. And ultimately, for once the politicians found themselves more loyal than the citizens; they gathered at the tomb of their friend, of their companion, even eighteen years later.
Silences are accomplices, absence; and short memory is not a builder. Maintaining memory not for nostalgia, not for weight but for anchoring, continuity, impulse. The more we are anchored, the more we can launch ourselves, basic physical principle.
I got up at dawn that day, 5:30. Perhaps the memory of the body, the memory of a revolution. I went back to the sea. I walked, to exercise my injured foot; and with the wound, I wanted to run to wash myself… from all the defilement of the country. On the ledge, the only remaining base of attachment to my city, I met many comrades whom I had not seen for a long time. Would they also have been unconsciously stung by the virus of the memory date? I continued to the pigeon cave, I contemplated the wild reeds, the rocks and the concrete blocks that I took for stelae. Which I wanted to take for stelae. Then, I breathed in the rock, the elevation, the limestone, the organic anchorage. On the ledge, to give me energy, I invoked the image and words of my father, carried away by Lebanese carelessness. He frequented the promenade assiduously and always hummed a song of his juice that invites you to get up. Neglect at the very heart of the hospital got the better of her song, like that of many others these days.
I ended the journey, cross-legged on the wooden planks of Zaytoune Bay, to integrate, in silence, in front of the water and the boats, the fullness of this morning. The coffee seller at Bar Tartine did not accept that I pay the price of the cardboard cup and hot water as many are doing now with the crisis. That I even offered it to him shocked him. I am always surrounded by the generosity of the men of my country. I think that’s what attracts foreigners there. Remember to extend the gesture of this man, and the pastel mauve flowers everywhere on the rocks on the climb to Raouché, to continue. They grow there freely, in clusters, even on the side of the road. I find myself dreaming that we are like them, that we grow when the season wants it, even in this unfavorable environment, in clusters, and that we still flower and even radiate our color gently, sweetly.
« God can create new things », as the poet Tagore writes, even if he would perhaps not have « himself the power to recreate what has been destroyed ».