[The Cedars of Lebanon, steel engraving by J. D. Harding after C. Barry, 1835]
Lebanon is laid waste.
I need no bible-toting prophet to remind me
that someone’s long silent God gave the order
to saw through the last cedars.
The litany of woes crosses the Litani
but no bridge is left behind to burn,
just the kindling of ersatz-born leaflets that first say “Fleeâ€
then demand “Stop,â€
but really mean “Do not breathe, we own the air.†Continue reading Lebanon is Laid Waste
The Land and the Book by William Thomson revels in the open countryside, where the author would have the pilgrim join in under the stars, especially when the bed is stretched out in a grove of cedars on Mt. Lebanon. Here is the missionary’s description of the magic of the cedars over 150 years ago.
Have you ever visited these cedars?
Many times. They are situated high up on the western slope of Lebanon, ten hours south-east from Tripoli. Besherrah is directly west, in the romantic gorge of the Khadusha, two thousand feet below them, and Ehden is three hours distant on the road to Tripoli. In no other part of Syria are the mountains so Alpine, the proportions so gigantic, the ravines so profound and awful. You must not leave the country without visiting the cedars. Continue reading The Land and the Book #3: Under the Cedars of Lebanon
Water Pipes, left; coffee set, right; from Thomson’s “The Land and the Bookâ€
The rustic American style pilgrim’s progress of Rev. William M. Thomson in the 1830s through the 1850s in Palestine was not just about places where the locals swore that Abraham bought a cave or Jesus preached. There were real people along the way and Thomson takes the reader inside a diwan from time to time. In one of his accounts he would be in good company with legislators who ban smoking in public places. Although cigarettes were just taking off in popularity, the traditional approach to tobacco in Syria and Palestine was smoke on the water to be followed by Turkish coffee. Let’s return a century and a half to this precursor of the modern sheesha bar. Continue reading The Land and the Book #2: Smoke on the Water
Jaffa from Thomson’s “The Land and the Bookâ€
Almost 150 years ago one of the most popular travel accounts of the Holy Land was penned by an American missionary named William M. Thomson. Born in Ohio, my own home state, the 28-year old Thomson and his young bride arrived in Lebanon in 1834 as Protestant missionaries. This was a mere 15 or so years after the first American missionaries had made the Holy Land a mission field. At once an entertaining travel account and Sunday School commentary on the places and people of the Bible, this may have been one the most widely read books ever written by a Protestant missionary.
Reading Thomson is like reading one of the early English novels. The language is less familiar, although still thoroughly Yankee and the devotional tone has long since disappeared for a readership buying out The Da Vinci Code as soon as it hit the bookstores. The biblical exegesis, literalist yet frankly pragmatic at times, is intertwined with astute and at times humorous accounts of the people Thomson met along the way. But the style is not at all dry or discouragingly didactic. From the start Thomson engages in a dialogue with the reader, making the text (which stretches over 700 pages in the 1901 version) a rhetorical trip in itself.
Here is one of the forgotten books of a couple generations back. Easily dismissed as an Orientalist book, in the sense propounded and confounded by Edward Said, it is nevertheless a very good read. With this post I begin a series to sample the anecdotes and local color presented by Rev. Thomson. The times have indeed changed, but such textual forays into the night reading of a previous generation of Americans are well worth the effort. Let’s begin with the author’s own invitation. Continue reading The Land and the Book #1: Looking for an Omnibus?
by George El-Hage
[Note: This is a translation from the Arabic, which is available in pdf by clicking here.]
Stand up! Get up!
Carry your bed and follow me.
Let’s leave this ungrateful land
This land…
That savors the decaying cadavers of its sons
A land satiated by the blood of its children.
Let’s leave these poor people
Defeated, fragmented
Knowing nothing but selfishness,
Servicing foreigners,
And worshipping the hollow love of prestige. Continue reading Letter to a Country with No Frontier
Illustration: “Red Anemone,” by Diana Cornelissen
By George N. El-Hage
Columbia University
As the leaves of October,
I scatter myself over your blazing inferno;
Your divine and succulent body
From its forbidden summits
Down to its ravenous depth and fertile valleys.
As a summer cloud bearing spring,
I shower gentle kisses upon your flushed lips
Whose color gives the rose its crimson
Whose benevolent banks are a bed of red anemones. Continue reading You, Beirut and the Children
By George N. El-Hage
1-
Thirty years of prosperity, patriotism, harmony and florescence, ruined in one year, it is true that destroying is easier than building, but it is also true that a year in which the masks fell and the buffoons stepped from their disguises into the shadows, was more real to them and to us than the thirty years they masked themselves in falsehood, hypocrisy and exploitation.
2 –
There were those who sold Lebanon and lost their families, their children and their villages. Then the strangers spit in their faces and cursed them. Their shekels were plundered, the price of treason. Do not ask those of their honor and patriotism. How can they give you what they do not possess?
3 –
The youth of Lebanon who abandoned their books and embraced rifles, know that they will triumph, because those who know how to live life, know how to live death and resurrection. Continue reading Lebanese Hymns of Love and War
by Ameen al-Rihani (1876-1940)
1 – Oh Freedom: When would you direct your face towards the East? When would your light merge with the light of this bright moon so it would rotate with it around the earth and enlighten the darkness of every oppressed people?
2 – When would the religious chasms be obliterated and sectarianism be trampled under the boots of civilization? When would we form the organization of tolerance and build the church of forebearance?. When would we raise and establish the school and journal of tolerance?
3 – I am the flower that bloomed out of the despair of the Prophets. A flower that flourished and then withered and finally its buds were scattered until the seeds of life gushed out of her heart and the winds carried it to the four corners of the earth. Continue reading Selections from al-Rihaniyyat