Please, read also the text by Elias Khoury

The elegant dancer upon a minefield

MAHMUD DARWISH* in the "Carnet du 40e de la mort de Samir Kassir" published by An-Nahar, 2005

Every time I come across his name, I hear a little song celebrating the hymen of youth and judgement, of thought and bravery… I am undone, not because the life of roses is too short but because this very rose had not yet completed its dazzling blooming upon the blazing fences. Samir was obsessed with the race that would have to be run on the road to the future in order to stay ahead. He got what he wanted: he who has preceded us in absence will not grow old like us. Over there, around his image of the New Arab, time will become redundant. In the meantime, we, his tearful friends, we, Beirut’s lovers, will hang on to this beautiful dream whichever masks of deceit it decides to don. We will not be lured by the instructions of level-headedness nor will we accuse the martyr of freedom and love of having been a hothead, like those meticulous accountants, spread around the official institutions of emotion and thought will be tempted to do. We would rather put it to the assassin why it was that he did not write an article proving that Samir Kassir was wrong and that he did not deserve to live either in Lebanon or elsewhere? Indeed, there is ample evidence and it begins with the blatant error on the map of Jaffa, with an ancestry that, although legitimate, does not correspond to the deities of the community, of the family or of the tribe… It even goes as far as depriving the foreigner from his right to manual and intellectual work and from his right of expressing his opinion within the new local or international context.

The present becomes the past

We never told him: How handsome you are! He knew it only too well; he even proclaimed it himself as it happens. But absence imposingly calls for a reminder of this Time struck down by schizophrenia. In nothing but a second, in a single explosion, the present becomes the past, monopolises the memory, shrinks down the place and a darkness perceptible by all five senses suddenly prevails… I do not have the heart to tell him: My friend, why did you make us love you so? We used to meet up just to make fun of Narcissus full of wisdom. This child prodigy – as we liked to call him – was happy to grow up as a writer, as an intellectual and as a lover, without for as much having to abandon the title that guaranteed him the place of Joseph amongst his brothers, or the tale of the knight totally dedicated to the defence of an unusual freedom, of a bizarre democracy.

The name of Samir Kassir, the elegant dancer upon a minefield, he who mocked any compromise with inflicted or approved tyranny, has become the equivalent of the overtaking of the shell of identity and of particularism in the same inventory. He was convinced that a Palestinian could also be Lebanese, that a Lebanese could also be a Palestinian Arab, that it was an Arabic person’s duty to take part, if only through his thoughts, in the destinies that are reserved to him by the setting in motion of the upheavals of the contemporary world. He believed just as firmly that a democratic culture did not necessarily deprive him of the holy values of the national patrimony.

An identity open upon the future

In this manner, he had never fallen into the trap of the existential question: Who am I? This multi-faceted, renewed, enlightened and broadminded citizen did not feel the need to prove the legitimacy of his origins; he did not oppose a differing fundamentalism to fundamentalism, or to communitarism another implicit communitarism. His identity was wide open towards tomorrows that would also open up to everyone else, towards a modernity that only acquired its meaning in our historical context by asserting its ties to a complete project of liberation. Starting with the right of the child to ask his father to account, to that of a woman to leave her husband, the right of a citizen to change those in power, the right of the individual and of society to resist despotism and occupation at the same time, the right of the poet to free himself from the yoke of rhyme, the right of dreamers to dream that they are free, the right of the writer to distinguish between the sense of death and that of murder! Are these the reasons for which Samir Kassir deserved to be murdered?

My heart overflows…

My heart overflows with satire for the masters of our era when one does not ponder over the identity of the murderer but over that of the next victim… It would seem that the murderer remains the constant unknown whilst the victim represents the known variable. Thus, the characters of a bloody scene turn into viewers watching their destinies being outlined in advance, while the viewers turn into characters in a play of which they ignore the wording. My heart overflows with elegies for those who have written their dreams with embers, who were not frightened by the officials of darkness and who were not ashamed of the scandalous truth. My heart overflows with bitter tears for this beautiful Lebanon, crammed with praise that is but rhetoric and uselessness, reduced to the point of chocking by the images inspired from pastoral songs and by the natural landscapes in which passers-by only see the colour green enshrined in eternal azure. As for the bloody red, it is only glimpsed by those who have committed themselves to writing about a future in which images overlap with reality. Hesitant and bewildering at the same time, Lebanon has bled profusely in order to forge its multi-faceted identity, to relieve itself from the burden of the communal and clannish culture and to have the freedom of wandering towards vast horizons. Towards which abysses are those who fear his fertile identity and the lure that pushes it forward leading him to? Towards which yesterdays do the engineers of gloom wish to drag him back to?
The figurative prose maintains that the birth will be long and painful, that freedom, as beautiful as it may be, runs the risk of becoming fierce during the nuptials and of growing thirsty for the blood of its lovers… A luxuriant night of henna before turning to household concerns… Samir Kassir was one of her most attractive lovers.