Writing about the place that came to be a non-place; writing about the confines of memory, about the call to transmit, to convey… that kind of writing is in its essence a form of healing.
To break taboos that declare the purposelessness of places when they disappear; the agony of separation, of rupture, of estrangement…
To give a name to that agonizing sense of being in a place other than home, both immediate and raw…
To give a name to an emotion: “Laila”, a mother, my mother; a caress, an embrace; the insistence of a smell of a home lost.
“Laila”, or the beginning of it all, the hand that molds, the “shelter”. Yet, shelters in our aching memory convene scent of fear, gunpowder in the conforming colors of darkness.
But “Laila” is not one. She is many. The bitter cut in a sea of transfigured nostalgia; a space in denial; totally out of consciousness; an entire past annihilated.
In her there is salvation, beauty, love, and life. And in the non-place there is noise, chaos, and a lust for nothingness.
The unknown is not confined to a specific place. It expands into collapsing nations or is itself an ongoing national collapse.
How does investing in a place make sense when, at any point, it can become none?
Most of us, I fear, hang torn between one home to be and another, that is us.
In the fields of circling doubts, no Supreme Court may triumph over infinite sorrow.
Lamia Moubayed, author and analyst, December 2023