I cannot remember my father embracing and kissing me in the twenty-five years I lived with him in our house in Yohmor al-Chaqif. Like most villagers, my father did not express his love and longing to his children except when they were seriously ill or returned after a long absence. I had that feeling when I left Beirut to visit the people of my village holding a sit-in at the Red Cross in Nabatiyeh. I longed and needed to be close to my village at that moment.
When I arrived, one of the protesters was saying loudly, “We have no demand other than this,” pointing to the banner hanging at the front of the room: “Our sole demand is the liberation of Yohmor al-Chaqif from the Zionist enemy.”
After I had greeted everyone individually, someone called from outside: “MP So-and-so has arrived.” He entered as if offering condolences for a death. Once seated, he spoke: “You are the water to the fish.” The throats of those gathered to lift the siege and supply the village with the water it lacked ran dry. He concluded: “Stand firm. The whole nation is with you, government and people, and at this moment I too am from Yohmor al-Chaqif.” Then he got into his tinted-window Mercedes and returned to Beirut.
Then came the announcement of another MP. Once seated, he said: “I have not come to stand with you as an MP. I have come because I am one of you, because what befalls you befalls us, and what happens to you happens to us.” Then he got into his car, just like the first one, and left for Beirut. It was as though the same person had given them these cars, together with the same speech with which to console others.
I thought: “Brothers, perhaps—but what have they got to do with Yohmor al-Chaqif? It is my village and these people’s village.” The demands the two new MPs wrote on a sheet and took away were the very ones an MP had taken during his election tour in 1972. Lies, then, as usual. Yohmor had no need of speeches; no one had ever visited it or rendered it the smallest service.
The people of Yohmor al-Chaqif bought their village from the feudal landlord; they bought it with their sweat and blood. They cut a road with their picks, and the state gave them nothing but asphalt. They built their school with their own hands and money, broke its rock into soil, collected winter rain in wells, and bought water from neighboring springs by tanker. They shared it with their faithful, generous land, turning Yohmor’s plots into a green paradise all year round. This provoked the Jews, who called it “the Green One.” One Israeli went so far in his insolence as to say: “You people of Yohmor work and toil like the Jews; Arabs are idle and lazy.”
I, the coward, thought: “I will go to my village to spite these MPs, to prove their lies and the sincerity of my love for this place.” My brother-in-law, Hajj Fayez, volunteered to take me to the pit Israel had made, and “Professor Mohsen” insisted on accompanying me. He was the very man who inspired “Professor Khalil” in my play The Bell. I said: “My cousin, on the first day of the siege they carried you across this pit on a ladder after your attack of renal colic.” I tried to dissuade him, but failed. We reached the pit.
As far as I knew, they raised earth barriers when cutting a road. Why had they dug a pit today at this exact spot? Looking at it, my wrist hurt; I felt as if the arteries in my hand had been severed. I clutched my hand. They had wounded the earth in the very place where Salam had bled as she was going to hospital to give birth. The Israeli checkpoint stopped her there and held her for hours; she bled until she died.
Her name was Salam, a daughter of Yohmor al-Chaqif—not Zeinab or Fatima. That was her name, the wife of my cousin Mohsen Jaber. Ask about her. Here they wounded my village’s artery. I saw it bleeding. Who hears the cries of the bleeding earth? I heard it scream and clutched my wrist. The Israeli bulldozer stood a hundred meters from the bleeding wound, its wide-toothed blade like a mechanical beast after pouncing on prey. Israeli soldiers stood before it as though holding it back from devouring more. I saw traces of blood still on its teeth: Yohmor al-Chaqif’s earth is red, the color of blood.
At that moment I wanted to hold Yohmor al-Chaqif against my chest, kiss its neck, and rest my head on its shoulder.
The neighbors were astonished. I, the coward—outside the days of siege, my visits had been few.
“Hajja Naima” asked: “Isn’t your mother staying with you in Beirut?” I said: “Yes. I’ve just come to look in on the village…”
I longed and needed to kiss my village. My sister Fatima came from the neighbors’ house; Fatima resembles the village in her love, tenderness, protective care, and patience. She embraced me tightly, and I felt as if all Yohmor were embracing me. Fatima raised me and my siblings. In her I smelled Yohmor, and I grew calm.
O Yohmor al-Chaqif, queen of villages, dearest of people: may your patience bring you peace and your thirst its reward. Forgotten and punished, you were punished because you gave no martyr to the internal battles; your martyrs died on your own land, embracing your tobacco plants and watering your crops with their blood.
Yohmor al-Chaqif, my village and my love, my father’s house, my dream of having a home and trees within you…
Forgive them, and forgive me. I have not been absent from you. You are the water and I am the fish; I am the storyteller and you are the story. I carried your bell, my uncle’s bell, whose sound the deep valleys of the Litani longed for, where its ringing mingled with the church bells of Deir Mimas, Mazraat al-Hamra, and Qlayaa.
Those sounds still ring through the summer mornings when, as a child, I set traps for partridges alone on the slope of al-Chaqif Castle. There I could almost touch the sun, so close it seemed as it rose behind Mount Hermon, looking toward Marjayoun and the Hula Plain, cooling my gaze in the sea’s waters.
Forgive me, uncle: I forgot the tales of Antar and al-Zir through which I first learned theater in your home, and began telling your stories and the village’s stories. I carried them in my heart and being, telling them to those near and far, until the story of Yohmor al-Chaqif became the story of the homeland.
When I left the village, my sister Fatima loaded me with grapes from besieged Yohmor, a braid of white onions, two kilos of freekeh, pomegranates, and several eggs. I said: “Sister, keep them—aren’t you under siege?”
She said: “Everything is fine. There is plenty of goodness in the village—just that little bit of water, and our longing for you.”
O my village, Yohmor al-Chaqif, a share in your land is worth far more than a share in Solidere. Until the latter’s price settles, the Americans look kindly upon us, and they implement Resolution “four and a quarter,” only then will the homeland return to you and toss you the sheet listing your demands and needs. From me, my love and my greetings…