They have murdered you, my beloved brother
ELIAS KHOURY* in An-Nahar – Mulhaq of 5 June 2005
The sound of an explosion. A few minutes later, I heard the voice of our old friend Mohamad Dakroub over the phone, quivering with pain as it revealed to me the news of the savage execution of Samir Kassir. I hurried outside, crossing the distance between Sassine Square and the Zahrat al-Ihsan school in a matter of seconds, and froze on the spot in front of the destroyed car. And there I saw you, my very dearest. You were embracing your death. Your face lay upon your lower arm. The blue of your shirt torn by the splinters of a bomb. They have murdered you, my brother, my so very dearest… Your death… How do I describe death to you? Should I say a bloom that flourishes within a grave? Should I write it such as a dream that we did not have the opportunity to dream together? Should I lean over my tears to bathe your death in the arms of love?
My little brother, the monster did murder you after all. They lied in wait for you, they hunted you and persecuted you but you held out against them with your ironic smile and this glimmer in your eyes. You stood firm with your words, you lived with words and love spread out all around you.
You were Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese
We met for the very first time at Farouk Mardam Bey’s in Paris; you were Palestinian then and you worked for the Palestinian Studies Review (Revue d’Etudes Palestiniennes), after having completed your PhD thesis on the Lebanese war.
I subsequently met you in Beirut and you spoke to me about your uncle who had been killed in the Golan during the October 73 war. You were Syrian then.
At the An-Nahar newspaper we always worked together and this is when I discovered that you were also Lebanese. You were the youngest, the best, the most handsome. You were a fusion of the Cham countries: leftist in Lebanon, with Fatah in Palestine and a democrat in Syria. You were above all the wizard of words; suffice it that you should lay your hand upon a sheet of paper for it to be transformed into a blaze of thoughts. You wrote in French and in Arabic, from al-Yom al-Sabe to Le Monde Diplomatique, from L’Orient-Express to the first page of An-Nahar, you also found the time to write the History of Beirut, to teach at University, to travel, to buy elegant clothes, to fall in love, to live.
My dearest little brother, how does one speak to you about yourself when you are the historian who wrote the Lebanese war, the one who recounted the History of Beirut, the one who talked about Palestine? How do I address you in the third person, that of absence, when you are present in the heart of hearts, in the innermost recesses of the soul?
By unloading your words against this machine of repression which crushed down both the Lebanese and Syrian people, you were the symbol of the uprising about to explode. You were not afraid; when threats came your way, you would hold your hand against your cheek, your face broadening into a grin then you would keep on writing. We were afraid for you but we were cheated by your bravery. You made us believe that bravery was stronger than death and that only the word would survive. We started to believe in our own game. But you went much farther towards places where your pen was a clue to the truth, to where your articles were the expression of the truth that very few people dared to express.
Your writings were a part of democratic resistance in Syria, they were one of the signs of the tragic ordeal that Palestinians were living through; they shaped the calling for the rising of Lebanon from the wreckage of war, from repression and from a securitarian regime. When they hunted you down, they accused your belonging to Palestine. When they threatened you, they accused your belonging to Syria. But when they murdered you, it was as a Lebanese patriot, as a symbol of the uprising of independence.
From the lineage of “Nahda’s” great men
Little brother of mine, you belong to the lineage of those great men of the Arab renaissance (the nahda), those who had made Lebanon a fertile land for the democratic and secular Arabic thought, those who had struggled for independence, those who had held out against despotism. And now you have joined the caravan of free martyrs. I see you standing next to Husein Mroueh and Hassan Hamdane, I see you embracing Farajallah Helou, clasping Abu-Jihad Wazir in your arms, relating to Ghassan Kanafani the tale of a man murdered underneath a blazing sun atop the Little Mountain, in order to become the extension of that other man, massacred in Hazmieh, for having written Des Hommes dans le Soleil (Of Men in the Sun).
No, elegy does not suit you. Words are best kept for action. Thus were your words, hurtful and loving, loud and warm, an amalgam of rationalism, modernity and literary magic. The word is a side-taking exercise, so you told us. And here I am, besieged by the words that are unsuccessfully attempting to convey you. To the unidentified and acknowledged assassin, I say that he has succeeded in overcoming the frail body only because he has failed in the face of the spirit.
The assassin, little brother and comrade, the assassin wanted to use your death as a lesson to pen-bearers, but he knows not that bullets and murders cannot break the will of words, that words strike their roots deep into the heart of History, that words… always have the final word.
You have the final word my brother, why should you keep quiet then? You only need to sit behind your desk and look at Beirut to write. Why did you not write last Friday? How are we going to read An-Nahar from now on without finding your name? Your name which so brightened the darkness of ink and removed fright from the soul.
A historian that made History
When we bestowed upon our new movement, born from the hubbub of the preparations for the uprising of independence, the name of “Movement of the Democratic Left”, it was you we were specifically thinking of, leftist and democrat. It is all you: modern and brand new, secular and open-minded, Arabic and Lebanese. By falling, you have baptised this name with your blood and have bequeathed a heavy task to us: that of taking our turn in being the heirs of nahda’s great men, that of being the bearers of the cause of freedom and democracy within Lebanon and throughout the Middle East.
My dearest little brother, you have stepped into the very History that you engraved. You have been a historian who made history with his own blood, a historian who did not position himself on the edges of time as he waited to write, but who wrote as an active participant of this same History and died at the hands of the murderers who believe that they can put a stop to History’s movement and confiscate it eternally.
Words will create their new authors
They murdered you because they wanted to slay the Intifada of independence, but your blood is today writing what your quill penned down yesterday. After the 14th of March and the onset of the Intifada of independence within the maze of politicians’ politics, you talked about the Intifada at the heart of the Intifada. No one listened to your ink. Today, you have rewritten the same article with your blood; will we be able to decipher in your blood what we were unable to read in your ink?
My brother, I would like to let it be known to your assassin that the day is nigh, that he will never succeed in murdering freedom or words. He will have to kill us all and should that ever happen, words will create their own new authors, life will thrive throughout the fields, graveyards will turn into gateways to freedom.
Little brother of mine, head to where you must go, bearing with you your beauty, your love and your pens…but within our hearts you shall remain and within our eyes will you blossom, light and freedom.
