Afrasianet - Zahi Wehbe - The southerner masters the act of return. Bodies are forcibly migrated, but the souls remain as guardians of the unseen on the promised land. The transients leave with the first thread of dawn, while their people remain in the genes of the place.
The south is not a direction drawn by a compass, nor is it a space bounded by geographical maps. It is an idea that renews like seasons in an eternal cycle, a land whose soil is reduced to the paradoxes of existence in its entirety: layers of the ashes of wars and ears of wheat grow side by side in a single field, as memory and prophecy, tragedy and resurrection, departure and eternal return are juxtaposed in the conscience of its children.
It is a space that masters the chemistry of transformation, where the groans of the wounded turn into sweet feedstocks, and the gaps of absence become springs from which stories, poems, and prayers burst.
To understand this living mythology, we have to start with the secret relationship that binds man to his soil there. The southerner does not own the land with documents and records, but he owns the land with roots that extend in his arteries. It is an existential relationship, not a dogma; the mountains are not deaf hills, but silent ancestors who have witnessed the vicissitudes of the ages.
In those undulating plateaus that embrace the villages like mothers who care for their babies, the first memory is formed. There, the fragrance of rain is embodied when it touches thirsty dust, the vine chains hanging like frozen tears of joy, and the springs flowing from deafening rocks as if they were an old promise that has not been left behind. These small details are not fleeting decorations in the mirror of childhood, but the fabric of the soul itself, folded deep into the depths of the being like a tree folds the secret of its age in the hidden rings of its trunk.
This land is in a perpetual fertile relationship with the letter and the word. Just as its plains give birth to tobacco, olives, and wheat, it gives birth to minds and hearts that carve meaning from the rock of pain. Craft there is not only taught in books, but it creeps into souls like the breeze creeping into poplar branches. Just as roots are watered by the hidden spring water, souls are watered by wisdom transmitted by tongues. From the cracks of the rocks and the springs of the water, tales burst:
Tales of love that penetrate the walls of the impossible and are immortalized by poems, tales of heroism and legends told by grandmothers at dusk, so that they become a shield that protects the existence of a people from erosion and oblivion. In the poems of the southern poets and in the colors of his painters, the villages leveled by cannons do not die, but are never reduced to a spectrum that is present, nourishing the imagination and refining the vision.
However, this land pays the price for its breathtaking beauty and strategic location with successive wars and accumulated calamities: an occupation that extends and obliterates landmarks, displacement that uproots bodies from its soil, and destruction that affects stone, human beings and memory.
An entire childhood is snatched from its playgrounds on those slopes, the first steps of the children that have stamped the soil of the village are blown away by the cold winds of exile, and the voice of the mother who used to call in the evening is lost in the noise of the cities of the diaspora.
Entire villages were wiped out by the occupation, whose homes, mosques and squares were teeming with life, and the martyrs rose to their doorstep defending an idea that was bigger than just walls. However, this is the essence of the southern myth, tragedy does not stop at the borders of tragedy, but transcends it into a renewed ritual of revival, to a never-ending cycle of life, death and revival.
Here, the peculiarity of this experience is evident if we compare it with other great human epics. As in Palestine, where the rusty key became a universal icon of the right of return, and as in Greek tragedies, where the viewers are purified by identification with suffering, in the south the mythical is mixed with the historical and the real.
But the difference lies in the nature of this revival: the south returns to itself as the river returns to its course after a flood, with the calmness of the wise man who has told the ages and not with the noise of the one who is ecstatic about his victory.
It is like the legend of the phoenix rising from its ashes, but its ashes here are not poetic metaphors, they are real, they stain the hands and stick to the clothes, but instead of fading, they turn into a seed of stubbornness that does not know death.
The southerner masters the act of returning. Bodies are forcibly emigrating, but the spirits remain as guardians of the unseen on the promised land. The transients leave with the first thread of dawn, but his people remain in the genes of the place. Every time the invaders think that the roots have been cut off completely, the ears return to fill the fields, and the tobacco blooms from among the furrows trampled by the tanks.
This repeated cycle of death and resurrection has produced a special existential wisdom: that place is not synonymous with walls, stones, and walls, but rather what is engraved in the heart and stored in memory.
This is why the southern villages remain indelible because they transform from a mere point on a map into an idea, into a pulse in the hand of the poet as he writes, in the eye of the artist as he meditates, and in the heart of everyone who utters their name as if he were reciting the prayer of life.
This total identification with place creates a different perception of time, a perception that is free from the tyranny of the clock and the calendar. In the consciousness of the southerner, the child who witnessed the displacement stands next to the man who plows the land, and the laughter of the new children rises in the same square where yesterday's cries were raised.
The past is not a shadow behind the appearance, but a lamp that is carried in the hands to anticipate tomorrow. It is a circular, carnival time, in which the times are mixed and mixed as they are mixed in a folk tale that is told every night, renewing and not dying, and each new novel adds a layer of meaning above the previous ones.
Thus, the approach to Southern mythology is to decipher this strange equation: how does a repeated setback transform man from a victim to a witness to life? How is memory impossible as it bleeds painfully into a fountain of poems, paintings, and songs?
How does loss become an immense, inexhaustible narrative energy, creating a parallel world to the lost? It is the place that teaches us that absence can give things new dimensions that are not seen by the eye, but are felt by the heart like a blind man reading the face of the wind.
The place where the tears of the springs meet the gaze The lovers and the last glances of the martyrs, to tell one eternal tale: that life, despite the smell of gunpowder and the sound of explosions, triumphs.
In the depths of this mythological realization of existence lies the most striking truth: the southerner does not leave his land even when he is forced to leave by the sword and fire.
He clings to its soil like the mountains hold on to their bases in the face of the strong winds, defending it with all his soul, blood and nerve, no matter how great the sacrifices and the enormity of the losses. In his forced exile, he continues to carry it in his pupil like a beak of light that never goes out, and returns to it like water returns to its original roots in the earth, bypassing all the dams And barriers, because returning is not an option for him, but rather an existential destiny and an internal law that governs the rhythm of his soul.
What is most astonishing of all is that there is no alternative to it, even if the alternative is Paradise itself, with all that the sacred texts promise, such as rivers of honey, milk, and shade.
In his view, Paradise is not a place deferred in the absence of heaven, but rather this very land, this land that has become a blessed paradise, not with water and pasture, but with the blood of the martyrs who shed their souls contentedly, with the tears of the mothers who poured them into the waiting niches, and with the sweat of the peasants, farmers and workers who carved the lines of their lives on the forehead of the rock and the plain.
Perhaps the essence of this covenant is embodied in a will made by the southern farmer (Ibn al-Sarfand), the martyr Muhammad Harbi, who was assassinated by the hand of the invasion while he was going to take care of his orchard: "You must take care of your land as you take care of your children."
He did not say "defend it", but he said "take care of it", because care is an act of eternal life, and defense is just one of its moments. This is how the southerner transforms the act of resistance from an exceptional ritual into a hidden daily rhythm, into unceasing parental care, turning every drop of sweat and martyrdom into an eternal testimony That this land deserves more than Paradise, it deserves to be the meaningless after it.
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Here,
Where the breath of the earth mixes with the ink of the earth
The clamor penetrates the prayers of the forgotten.
The clouds shed tears of Frata.
We carry it in our wounds towards a death that does not betray life.
We make our ribs into columns that raise the ceiling of the sky
We teach silence the alphabet of rejection
We tell our legends with the water of fresh eyes
Every stone here is a buried melody
And every ash sings: Fire will not be our last travels.
We are the ones who mix dust with star dust
To pave the way for a time to come on the basis of the anthem
We bake our shadows on the stoves of patience
And we pour into the cup the past that waters our awaited tomorrow
On a land that resembles our abyssal faces
Let's reinvent dawn
And decorate our days with new suns.
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