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July 19, 2006: Today was a particularly strange day for me because I was granted an opportunity to leave tomorrow morning. I hold a Canadian passport as I was born in Toronto when my parents were students there. I left at age two. I have never gone back, for lack of opportunity and occasion, no other reason. I have the choice to sign up for the evacuation, but the European and North American governments have been so despicable, so racist that I don’t want to subject myself to a discrimination of that sort … For days I have been itching to leave because I want to pursue my professional commitments, meet deadlines and continue with my life … And yet when the phone call came informing me that I had to be ready at 7:00 am the next morning, I asked for a pause to think. I was torn. The landscape of the human and physical ravages of Israel’s genial strategy at implementing United Nations Resolution 1559, the depth of destruction, the toll of nearly 250 deaths, more than 800 injured, and 400,000 displaced, had bound me to a sense of duty. It was not even patriotism, it was actually the will to defy Israel. They cannot do this and drive me away. They will not drive me away.

Home Works III was organized by Christine Tohme, founder of Ashkal Alwan, the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, and by film curator Rasha Salti. Initially, it was to take place in the spring. But then came the assassination of Hariri on February 14, 2005. The program was postponed. The danger seemingly waited out. After all, tourists were still returning and in March there was the unprecedented public demonstration against Syria, the so-called “Beirut Spring,” in which a multitude of ethnic, religious, and political factions were unified by their opposition to Hariri’s murder. Today his death reads less like a nasty bump in the road and more like the thud of things to come.

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This is all bringing back echoes of 1982, the Israeli siege of Beirut. My living nightmare, well one of my living nightmares. It was summer then as well. The Israeli army marched through the south and besieged Beirut. For three months, the U.S. administration kept dispatching urges for the Israeli military to act with restraint. And the Israelis assured them they were acting appropriately. We had the PLO command in West Beirut then. I felt safe with the handsome fighters. How I miss them. Between Hezbollah and the Lebanese army I don’t feel safe. We are exposed, defenseless, pathetic. And I am older, more aware of danger. I am thirty-seven years old and actually scared … I am furthermore pissed off because no one knows how hard the postwar reconstruction was for all of us. Hariri did not make miracles. People worked hard and sacrificed a lot and things got done. No one knows except us how expensive, how arduous, that reconstruction was. Every single bridge and tunnel and highway, the runways of that airport, all of these things were built from our sweat at three times the real cost of their construction because every member of government, because every character in the ruling Syrian junta, because the big players in the Hariri administration and beyond, were all thieves. We accepted the thievery and banditry just to get things done and get it over with.

The majority of those presenting at Home Works III either lived in Lebanon, or in nearby Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Syria, or the Palestinian territories, or had been born in the region and now lived abroad. Its primary focus was on the contemporary culture and politics of the Near East and Northern Africa. Yet insofar as the forum presented the myriad of ways in which art survives, sometimes richly, other times sparingly, within a perpetually unhinged geo-political landscape, the program became far more global in reach. From November seventeenth to the twenty-fourth, our evenings were packed with short videos and films, performance works, and critical lectures. Some half-dozen exhibitions by the Arab Image Foundation, among others, were on view at different locations around the city. Still, something more was at stake than just another forum on contemporary culture and politics. Those gathered in Beirut late last year were there to bear witness to the convalescence of a badly scarred nation that had slowly, painfully, begun to reanimate after years of civil war and foreign occupation. Clearly this observation was part of our mission.