{"id":4067,"date":"2026-06-25T23:59:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T23:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/vice-versa\/?page_id=4067"},"modified":"2026-06-30T18:07:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T18:07:11","slug":"rima-rantisi","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/vice-versa\/rima-rantisi\/","title":{"rendered":"Rima Rantisi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Life <\/strong>Is Here: Lebanon War Diary <\/strong><\/h1>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

October 11, 2024 (Anxiety)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I wake up with the same sticky dread I woke up with a year ago when Gaza started. It manifests in my throat, the previous day\u2019s atrocities stuck there like a mottled ball of news. Every day I feel slightly different. Last night, a residential building in Noueiri toppled into rubble from an Israeli strike. How many children were being tucked into their beds? How many dishes had yet to be washed after dinner? Then without warning, they were all under the rubble. I cannot shake this suddenness, the endless stream of cruelty. Leo hears us talking and asks, \u201cWhy would they hit Beirut?\u201d His eyes are searching our faces. Until recently, the war has been far away \u2013 in Gaza or in the south. He gave up Starbucks a year ago because his sister told him about Palestine\/Israel and that according to TikTok, Starbucks funds Israel. How did the war make it here now? I can see his eight-year-old mind turning. When I put him to sleep, I lay down next to him, we cuddle, talk a bit and say good night. This is our new routine. I can\u2019t stand how much I love him and the soft round features of his face. I pray that my anxiety doesn\u2019t rub off on him.<\/p>\n

The weight of time, the slow passing of another day of war, the sound of war planes, the endlessness, and the increasing cruelty are no less than torture. I had a ticket to go to the US a few days ago and wait out the war, but I canceled it. The simple answer is that my life is here. I don\u2019t feel I have to explain it further. But I long for a normal routine life in a place where the only thing overhead is the sun streaming between trees instead of drones and airplanes scouting their next kill. Yesterday\u2019s hit will be advertised in today\u2019s papers as a \u201ctarget assassination,\u201d where all we see here is more civilians than combatants or Hezbollah members killed. Every bombing feels like a turning point, an escalation. How does anyone know who is in their building? Everyone talks about this while also acknowledging how problematic it is to fear the displaced people who have sought refuge in their buildings or in a nearby school. But: Who could be hiding amongst them?<\/p>\n

The electricity company bill collector slips the bill through the slit in the front door. I open it to make a snide remark about the \u201celectricity.\u201d It hasn\u2019t come in 10 days. I tell him, \u201cWhether it comes or not, we pay.\u201d He chuckles. He says it hasn\u2019t been coming because the wire\/cord\/pipe that supplies this side of the city was destroyed in a bombing in Dahieh. Then he tells us he was displaced from Dahieh and his house is gone. My heart drops. He says it was a family building and that none of them has anything to do with Hezbollah. They have no idea why it was hit. He left with just the clothes on his back. I ask if I can give him some clothes \u2013 or anything. He says, No no, we are not going to beg.<\/p>\n

I go to Achrafieh and volunteer with friends to prepare food for the displaced. I haven\u2019t done any relief work because I\u2019ve been frozen with anxiety. And angry. Since 2019, we have cooked and fundraised and organized and swept shattered glass of an entire city and pinched lira and fought with every institution we trusted. And now even after a year of potential war, the powers that be cannot offer a single lira or bunker? The disaster at hand is so much bigger than us, and I find myself so small in front of it. I see friends and acquaintances on social media fundraising for mattresses and blankets and transporting them and feeding people. I love them for it. But I am exhausted.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I go. We fill plastic containers with pasta for pickup to feed unnamed people who are sitting in schools or streets, their homes far or gone. I keep wondering if they\u2019ll like it. I told Fady to meet me there and he gets stuck frying eggplant. We usually joke around and chat, but we both have little to say. I fall into despair. The faces around me do not look like they did during the past catastrophes, which felt manageable at least; I was always moved by the solidarity and knew that to a certain extent this solidarity is what kept the country alive. If we hadn\u2019t lost a loved one in the Port explosion, I knew we could get through those in one piece, even if changed forever. Unlike this one which threatens to slowly tear us apart. We hear a boom, and everyone pauses, looks around. Then when the second one comes a few seconds later, we know it\u2019s a sonic boom. Still, someone wants confirmation. Someone else checks online and it\u2019s confirmed. Everyone breathes. I feel a cry rising from behind my eyes, my throat.<\/p>\n

I meet another volunteer who is sitting with Samar. We sit in the courtyard when we are done packing the food. She says she sent her kids to school this week, just down the road. I perk up \u2013 normal news. Proof of life. I remember I am small, though I don\u2019t feel like it, and that there are millions of other people here with their kids trying to get through the days too. Leo is just inside very happily soaking up hours of YouTube time as his school hasn\u2019t opened yet. Samar\u2019s kids, who are teenagers, want to drive at night to see their friends, and she is trying to figure out how to settle this. She is strong and resolute all day, but now she lets out a weak cry, \u201cI\u2019m so scared.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Israeli surveillance drone, what is called the MK or \u201cIm Kamel\u201d a name carried from the Civil War days (but surely the technology is no longer the same so is it still Im Kamel?) is buzzing above us. Rayya says something that settles in me like black smoke. \u201cThey\u2019re going to let them do this to us, aren\u2019t they?\u201d<\/p>\n

In between everything, my brain plays the year-long reel of broken and shattered Palestinian and Lebanese bodies. I see people under rubble. I see the woman\u2019s legs I saw yesterday, the ones that fell out of the back of a truck in Gaza. I had looked closer to see if I saw correctly. I did. I did. When I get home, I lay on the carpet, my knees slightly tucked. I let my body sink into the ground and try to forget.<\/p>\n

October 12, 2024 (Denial)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Today, I am with Rami and the kids in the north, where there are no bombs and no Im Kamels. The perceived sense of safety we have in Ras Beirut has been shattered by this last massacre. Rami doesn\u2019t feel the danger \u2013 maybe he\u2019s in denial \u2013 and prefers to stay home but he agrees to go because my anxiety was crushing me. I would prefer to stay home too if anything was normal. <\/em>As we drove out last night, all I thought about was the next bomb that would fall, perhaps on our car. But people are on the streets, sitting outside their shops. There is something of a denial, or just a refusal to stop living.<\/p>\n

We pick up Layla from her mom\u2019s in Achrafieh. The four of us haven\u2019t been together in months. As soon as we were on the Jal el Dib highway, my body relaxes, and my appetite piques. Everyone else says they\u2019re hungry too, so we swerve off into Jal al Dib to Swiss Butter. The restaurant is packed and Rami notices that I am smiling. I ignore that there is a disconnect between here and the foreboding of Beirut. I just want to enjoy dinner with my family.<\/p>\n

My mom\u2019s friend in Peoria has offered her home in Chekka to us, so the idea is to spend as much time there as possible to calm the nerves and be close to the sea. We go to Anfeh, which is five minutes away from the house, and sit on chaise longues and order beers and lemonades. We swim in the sea. The October sun is no longer hot, but the sea is still and clear and sparkling. Leo finds fish, and Layla smoothes on her tanning oil and finds a spot in the sun. We each settle into our comforts. We order calamari and fries and cheese rolls. Then we hear a boom. We wait for the next one, but it doesn\u2019t come. And the jets fly overhead. I am confused. We see a nearby table of women, who had just opened a bottle of prosecco and received a spread of food, scrambling on their phones. They get up and leave. I hadn\u2019t wanted to check the news until later, but now I have to. Deir Billa of the Batroun District, just twenty kilometers from where we are, in the hillside. The first strike on the north since the beginning of the war.<\/p>\n

An unripened voice in my head is reminding me that I cannot be in denial now about the situation. Everything I had read in the past year pointed to the fact that Hezbollah and Israel would avoid an all-out war. Lina was freaking out, and I kept telling her, if it was gonna rain it woulda poured. No one had the desire as it would be too costly on both sides. But it happened. Just like the fall of the \u201cuntouchable\u201d Lebanese lira (I always believed that myth). Now I must look the reality in the face: the growing evidence that this war is going to get worse. I do not want denial to pull me into its gaping mouth. There\u2019s a fine line between denial and optimism, and I don\u2019t think I can distinguish. Then again, maybe optimism is a form of denial and a sort of coping mechanism. Either way, I fear being blindsided due to denial-optimism so I end up being generally down these days.<\/p>\n

For dinner, we go to a popular fish restaurant in Chekka, and it\u2019s completely empty. The owner, a middle-aged woman with soft features and clear eyes, ushers us in and tells us that it\u2019s because of the war and today\u2019s strike, which not only hit the north but hit a building of displaced people in a Christian village, just like a few weekends ago when a building in my grandma\u2019s village, Ain el Delb, was surprisingly hit, massacring 70 civilians. \u201cThis is a sign that they will hit wherever there are displaced people,\u201d she said. \u201cIsrael has always been criminal.\u201d<\/p>\n

At dinner, we talk about the possibility of Layla moving with her mom to Dubai if the war worsens. What about the US? She has a green card now, so her dad tells her she could move there with us and get a passport within a year. \u201cIt\u2019s too far,\u201d she says. It\u2019s the first time Rami suggests we look for jobs in the US. I am not ready. We are talking about breaking up the family and leaving our lives, but we do not reflect on this; it\u2019s just logistical talk.<\/p>\n

October 13, 2024 (Depression)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Everyone I speak to today says, \u201cI\u2019m depressed.\u201d I am depressed too, so I don\u2019t have to ask questions, but it further justifies my spiraling, which is because the war is spiraling including in northern Gaza, where people and tents are being torched today. No one has forgotten Gaza. Our dusty Lebanese politicians are reading from scripts, suddenly making statements ever since Nasrallah\u2019s assassination, realigning themselves and running to accept hundreds of millions in aid.<\/p>\n

We go to the sea again today, this time in Chekka, to a small sandy beach with shallow water. Only one other family is there, a father with his four kids, splashing and giggling. We take turns throwing Leo in the water, and he keeps asking for more. Slowly, slowly the gloom lifts off my head. Leo makes a sandcastle, Layla takes photos from the ledge of a sea-eroded derelict building that hugs the beach, I show Rami yoga moves in the sand to relieve his tendinitis which he has been suffering from for the past few months. His face reveals a sweet pain from the stretching while my muscles are loosening, thanking me for finally paying attention to them.<\/p>\n

Two ladies walk onto the beach. From the way they walk in casually with just flip flops and towels, it\u2019s clear they live nearby and are beach bums. One of them says shoo hilou<\/em> about my orange lipstick and how nicely it goes with my blue swimsuit. I take the compliment with a smile as vanity has been the least of my concerns lately. I can\u2019t be bothered to look good during the war, but today something compelled me to wear lipstick \u2013 maybe it was the sea, maybe boredom. Maybe my pale face. The compliment\u2019s life is short as the other woman says, \u201cDon\u2019t sit under that building, it crumbles from time to time.\u201d The other one nods her head and gives me an intentional look. I finally look at the building. It\u2019s black from seawater erosion. It is crumbling and cracked everywhere. And my family is sitting underneath it.<\/p>\n

Get up get up get up, everyone, move out of the way! <\/em>I have picked up everything I can, and they are still yawning and making sandcastles and taking photos. Yalla! <\/em>Rami tells me, \u201cIt doesn\u2019t just happen like that.\u201d I have no idea how it happens but what I have learned in the past year and the past month is that rubble can happen<\/em> at any time in ways you never imagined<\/em>.<\/p>\n

October 14, 2024 (Time)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

We leave the north, which I have been referring to as lala land. But as soon as we arrive in Beirut, a building full of displaced people in the northern village of Aitou is hit by an Israeli strike. Another family friend had offered her place in Aitou but we had settled on Chekka because it was closer, more accessible. There are about 5,000 Lebanese in Peoria, my hometown, and most descend from there. My Peoria friends and family wake up to the news and circulate videos of the complete destruction, some human parts sticking out of the rubble, gray and red. Israel perversely attempts to manufacture fear and hatred of the displaced wherever they may be.<\/p>\n

Sara\u2019s words keep coming back to me: I feel I\u2019ve wasted my time<\/em>. It was through a text on a group and there was no elaboration, but it was during the height of bombardment on Dahieh every night and the uncertainty of what the days would bring. In the fall of 2019 when I would leave Leo with his grandparents in the mountainside, and Rami and I would head down to Martyr\u2019s Square, there was no sense of wasted time. Being in the street with the mass of bodies was a march toward the future, a moment of stupid optimism, wide eyes. When it ended, and the counterrevolution had its way, I knew that the uprising had changed us all and we had imprinted a moment in history in which everything possible was said and done. Even if it \u201cfailed,\u201d I always felt we gave it our best shot. It was beautiful.<\/p>\n

But later when things fell apart, we did waste time. We spent time writing letters to our institutions and getting very little out of it. Google docs with words and rounds of edits and meetings to discuss the words and the edits. We endured massive electricity cuts and finding electricity, bank lines and finding money, cancer and finding chemo, and so much more losing and searching. And always, the news. In the meantime, our counterparts in other parts of the world were working on their books in quiet places where lights came on twenty-four hours a day and the predictability of their calendars did not produce the seismic interruptions of life that we have weathered these five years. They bought houses and took their kids to travel soccer and drank beer in long green lawns. We pushed past each disaster, with an increasing threshold, until eventually, as Rima said in that same text exchange, we became in need of \u201chigh adrenaline to operate, or we would die of boredom.\u201d<\/p>\n

The shaved pieces of wasted time also brought about a toiling where together we processed these unpredictable days while what we were expected to do \u2013 produce, work, publish \u2013 became secondary. And we learned that\u2019s okay.<\/p>\n

In working on this diary, I realize how much happens in a day of war. Besides the constant news of what, where, and who was bombed and the words of the vile combo of Netanyahu and Gallant and Mikati and Naim Qassim and Joe and Kamala, all taking over the precious space of our minds, in war exist the multiple anecdotes of a day beyond the news as well: The neighbor\u2019s texts about her fear of a Hezbollah member hiding amongst the displaced in all the schools and hotels nearby, and what did I think? An ominous warning from the US embassy: \u201cWe strongly encourage you to leave now.\u201d The multiple messages saying \u201cI\u2019m worried about you\u201d from afar, and you wonder what they read or heard. The fight you have with your husband because the world around you is collapsing, again, and you have to find new ways through together.<\/p>\n

Before I go to sleep: A young man my students\u2019 age is set on fire by Israeli bombing of civilian tents in northern Gaza. A camera catches him being burned alive. His name is Shaaban. Once again, my feelings all go to the dead or dying. In Palestine, in Lebanon, we are watching a slow burn. In Aitou, 22 people were killed, a massacre. We are the last countries fighting Israel. It\u2019s hard to imagine it will end in our favor, but there are days I believe we will see liberation.<\/p>\n

October 15, 2024 (Daily Life)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I\u2019m teaching online now, and my students are scattered across the country and beyond. I try to imagine what it would be like to be twenty and living a war, unable to reach university.\u00a0 The vibe is covid 2.0. Except now no one<\/em> turns on their video, so you\u2019re speaking to squares and overanalyzing your face. I get annoyed when there is scarce participation and express it. In response, a student opens her mic to say, \u201cSorry professor, I can\u2019t hear you because the bombing is so loud.\u201d I shrink. Teaching during these times is dystopian. I\u2019ve built my life around teaching and have been in the university environment for the past 25 years as student and teacher, but now that we know how deep our institutions are in the pockets of Zionists, I fantasize about the dissolution of the university in its present form; maybe it is one of the ways forward past the complexes built with tuition money and endowments. There are so many ways to learn and become educated.<\/p>\n

Usually at this time of the year, we are finalizing the layout and design of our annual issue of Rusted Radishes.<\/em> But our student interns are scattered, we are barely working, and all the dates have been pushed. Zeina and I have been working on the journal for the past five years, through all the catastrophes \u2013 thawra<\/em>, corona, inhiyar, infijar<\/em>, genocide. Now she has moved to the mountainside and has been keeping to herself, but today she is \u201cback,\u201d and her return gives me a dose of normalcy and purpose. Through work and friendship, we can\u2019t but shape the lens through which we see and live the catastrophes. I have included everyone\u2019s names in this diary because I have not lived the past five years alone. This is part of the reason it\u2019s difficult to extricate yourself from the environment \u2013 as shitty as it may be \u2013 because no one can understand except those who lived it with you.<\/p>\n

Some other news items today:<\/p>\n

Beirut is de-escalating. Letter to Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. Embassy sends an email to American citizens in Lebanon offering spots on MEA flights. MEA is a hero now. Israel will hit military sites in Iran, not oil or nuclear. I talk to Lina and Tania via WhatsApp about Huda Beauty eyeshadow because we want to de-Zionize our makeup collection. I smile without straining. Daily life things matter again.<\/em> I go to sleep and hear no bombs. <\/em><\/p>\n

October 16, 2024 (Defenses)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Leo went back to school with the portion of students who could attend in person. The rest are learning online. He was bubbling over in the morning and excited to see his friends. The day the war escalated in Lebanon, three weeks ago, he had woken up resisting getting out of bed because he \u201chates school.\u201d He had been saying it since the first week, and I was getting worried as to why, to the point I had written a note to the teacher. I told him that not everyone gets to go to school and that if he\u2019s not going it means something is wrong. I reminded him of his luck today as half the students of the country cannot attend school.<\/p>\n

Yesterday the news was that the Lebanese government received guarantees from the US government that there would be de-escalation in Beirut. It had been six days since it had been struck. The nightly terrors that the city endured with the constant bombardment on Dahieh, which echoes up into parts of the nearby mountains, came to a halt. But then less than 24 hours after the news of de-escalation, Israel bombed Dahieh this morning. Then when I checked the news (my heart squeezing before having to digest the atrocities), I saw IOF soldiers detonate an entire village in the south, Mhaybib, and bomb the municipal building in Nabatieh, killing the mayor and other municipal workers and volunteers who were feeding people and doing their duties to those who stayed in their homes despite the evacuation orders of the IOF, which appear to be calls for re-occupation of the south and cleansing of the area.<\/p>\n

The news is beyond horrible and Im Kamel is still buzzing over our heads, but my anxiety levels are low today. Maybe it\u2019s because Leo\u2019s in school. Maybe I got used to the situation. Maybe I just want to enjoy the autumn wind in my kitchen and cook. Maybe my defenses have strengthened. I listen to the Maabar podcast while I make fassoulya<\/em> and rice, my favorite this time of year. Journalists recount stories of their experiences during the Lebanese civil war. One of them mentions his PTSD symptoms but how he didn\u2019t have the language at the time to identify them as such. He only knew that nature was his remedy to ease his anxiety. The mountains, the sea. My friend George tells another near-death story. I jump in the middle of the podcast as a boom shakes the house. I walk into the family room and look out the window, waiting for the second boom to indicate it was a sonic boom, and not a bomb. After a long five seconds, it comes.<\/p>\n

Later, at my friend\u2019s house, there are professional massages, manicure-pedicures, fine wine, salmon, and cards. Luxury as war salve. The massage releases all the tensions in my body. Rima\u2019s migraine dissipates.<\/p>\n

Afterwards, there\u2019s\u00a0 a debate about whether Hezbollah should wave the white flag or continue to resist. We are divided. We are still formulating our political language around this war and the future.<\/p>\n

October 17, 2024 (Anniversaries)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Today is the fifth anniversary of the Lebanese uprising. On the night it erupted, I was attending a play called The Belle of Amherst<\/em>, a one-woman show based on the life of Emily Dickinson. I was surrounded by my women colleagues from AUB whose phones flashed breaking news in the dark of the theater, having suddenly found ourselves in between worlds. Our university lives collided with fires and mayhem in the street. A group of us who were at the play hopped in Firas and Nour\u2019s SUV and sped home through paths of burning dumpsters only to watch on television the uprising begin to unfold. We spent the next months on the street, believing we could change everything.<\/p>\n

Anyway, today no one cares. October 17, 2019, is many revelations ago.<\/p>\n

Another anniversary: Today is the one-year anniversary of Al-Ahli Hospital bombing in Gaza.\u00a0 It was ten days after the war on Gaza started, and a huge red Breaking News band splashed across the scene with nearly 500 people dead. It was the first major reckoning with Israel\u2019s \u201climits\u201d and the international community\u2019s \u201cred lines.\u201d Surely, we thought, the bombing of a hospital that was filled with critically injured patients that also sheltered hundreds of displaced people could not be tolerated. Israel quickly lied and said it was a Hamas missile that fired and hit the hospital. The consent to bomb hospitals started there, one year ago, when we saw no consequence to Israel\u2019s actions. Since then, all of Gaza\u2019s hospitals have been destroyed. In Lebanon, today, they have hit more than one, debilitating or closing a few.<\/p>\n

It’s also the one-month anniversary of the pager attacks against Hezbollah operatives. Who will forget that day? I was teaching, and more than one student was staring at their phone. So I started a lecture about the precious time that university offers, their one chance, stop wasting it on the phone\u2026 And then: Professor, people are blowing up<\/em>. After kind of sort of barely understanding what happened, I dismissed them. \u201cI love you!\u201d I called out after them in a moment of despair, then met Lena at Taht el Shajra as ambulances screamed past us for an hour. As I write, I realize that in the caf\u00e9 that day, our futures were already written, blowing up and screaming around us, while we carried on discussing the details of our lives, holding on to one more hour of normalcy.<\/p>\n

By the end of today, one more anniversary was created: Hamas\u2019 leader and mastermind of October 7, Yahya Sinwar, has been confirmed dead.<\/p>\n

These anniversaries remind us of our processing, or lack thereof (I still cannot fathom the pager attack \u2013 how it was dressed in Hollywood regalia, blowing off people\u2019s eyes and fingers as if nuisances). How has time passed (slowly, painfully)? What did or didn\u2019t happen since (our whole belief systems shifted)? How much more cynical I have become (a lot, but I maintain a stupid optimism that defeats my desperation on most days). In the case of the uprising, despite the silence on it this year, I cannot help but wonder if the powers that be are using it now to feed their regional chess game. The very forces waging war in the country, bringing rubble down over people they never knew\u00a0 keep addressing us as the \u201cLebanese people\u201d who should distance ourselves from Hezbollah and \u201ctake our country back.\u201d I say, keep my name out of your filthy mouths. I cringe at the thought of being watched all this time.<\/p>\n

October 18, 2024 (Opposing Sides)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Today the news is all about Sinwar.\u00a0 I go to Rino\u2019s for a haircut. The news is on \u2013 clips of Sinwar and his speech and analysts asking if this indicates the beginning of the end of the war(s) since Netanyahu has been sharpening his fangs all year to sink them into Sinwar. An infinite re-run of Sinwar\u2019s final throw dominates the screen \u2013 a stick at the machine that finds him armless and near death, the machine unlike a soldier who would have been the last to see him. Now half the internet hails him a hero fighting on the front lines; the other half sees him as a pathetic remnant of a terrorist organization.<\/p>\n

I want blond hair, and Rino humors me. His eyes go wide and then he explains the upkeep that will go into it. I am thinking platinum, no less. A wild change that takes me out of myself but also that is closer to the reality \u2013 because under my brown hair is actually a head full of gray. What about silver? Same story. Rino tells me that I actually do not have gray hair in the back of my head, so I end up settling on a few highlights in my bangs to brighten the gloom in my face. It does the trick.<\/p>\n

I wind through the busy streets of Burj Hammoud, one of my favorite places. Leather belts and sujuk and pork and loads of candy wrapped in shiny paper and clothing boutiques are tucked in this alley and that. A riot of electricity wires snakes along the walls of old buildings and above packed streets. Nothing has visibly changed here during the war.<\/p>\n

In my youth, growing up in Illinois, beyond bits and pieces of the Lebanese Civil War that trickled into our comfortable American life, the war was an abstraction. I couldn’t feel or hear the reverberations of the bombs or smell death. I couldn\u2019t sense the loss of home or time when packing a car to go to another part of the country. I was spared the fear of daily life\u2019s uncertainty. It was like an abstract painting where the content was within a frame, stuck in time, up for interpretation.\u00a0 Now there is the constant smell of burning in the air, the sound and pressure from a bomb that fills your body, the eerie normalcy of walking through a neighborhood you long loved, the sea of new people displaced in your neighborhood, the sinking feeling you get when you hear someone is leaving, the heartstopping when someone calls, the uncertainty about everything in the future, even minutes from now. Like on the battlefield, the state of mind in a war is also the battlefield between opposing sides. You bristle at your changed neighborhoods as you empathize with those ripped from their homes. Do you allow yourself to feel joy amidst so much misery? Should you stay or should you go? But unlike the battlefield, your life doesn\u2019t always appear visibly different, even while it shudders under the pressure.<\/p>\n

We have dinner with friends on the mountainside. From the terrace, my eyes absorb the endless outlines of mountains ahead of us, a fiery sunset, and pine trees. The sky changes from fire to pink and blue pastels to dark night with Venus twinkling above. War takes a backseat to the barbecue and cold wine. But it is inevitable, we can only forget for brief spurts. Being with friends during the war lightens the loneliness of war\u2019s pall. Some of us say we are no longer scared. But no one knows why. No one wants to say that it\u2019s because we normalized it, we learned its contours and who and where would be targeted, and those people and places are not us. Late into the night, I talk about how the family group sent a video of my nephews and nieces cheering on the cross country runner who was going to state. He walked down a long hallway where the entire school, from first grade on up, flanked the hallway and clapped and cheered.<\/p>\n

I felt a pang when I saw that video, reminding me of my stable childhood filled with moments like these, where kids mostly cared about what happened at school, not what happened in the warzone their country has become. What if I was depriving my son from the opportunity of knowing stability and its gifts, away from the catastrophes that have dominated his short life. Zeina swears that growing up here shapes you in interesting ways. Lina recently cried as she talked about her childhood during the war, nearly begging me to spare Leo. Rami is angry and irritated; he has seen this too many times. Pisha texts me every day from Vermont, having spent her childhood during the Civil War, the trauma seeping. I don\u2019t know what the right answer is but I will follow Leo\u2019s cues. Right now, he has already begun forming a political sensibility. He takes the limited news he hears from us in stride, asks questions when he is curious. He is eating well and in good moods, unlike his father at his age during the war. The future is wide open\u2013we do not know what day after <\/em>we will see. But for now, we are picking at the life in front of us; it\u2019s not the way we love it, but it\u2019s ours.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>Rima<\/span> Rantisi is a writer and creative writing lecturer at the American University of Beirut. She is the founding editor of Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal,<\/em> which publishes Arab and global south literature and art. Her essays can be found in the New England Review, Literary Hub, Slag Glass City,<\/em> and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and her writing has been supported by literary fellowships from Art Omi, Headlands Center for the Arts, Monson Arts, and Hedgebrook. She is at work on a collection of essays on the writing voice in relation to place and the liminal spaces residing at the junctions of motherhood\/land, fractured histories.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
“Life Is Here” originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of The Markaz.<\/em><\/div>\n
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X: cerevolutions<\/div>\n
IG: rr28<\/div>\n
FB: Rima<\/span> Rantisi<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Life Is Here: Lebanon War Diary \u00a0 October 11, 2024 (Anxiety) I wake up with the same sticky dread I woke up with a year ago when Gaza started. It manifests in my throat, the previous day\u2019s atrocities stuck there like a mottled ball of news. Every day I feel slightly different. Last night, a … <\/p>\n

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