I grew up and spent most of my life in Beirut before migrating to Australia just over a decade ago. I had to leave and I cannot go back. I have come to terms with the reality that I am a forced migrant.
Forced migrants and refugees flee to seek safety. I watch photographs and videos of as many as a million Lebanese people internally displaced since September, living on streets, in schools and even in a nightclub. It appears to me that safety is a moving scale, and evidently not everyone is owed safety. That my people, and I, cannot access the safety promised in the refugee convention. Or that the safety we are owed looks very different.
I am a lawyer and an international law scholar researching refugee cultural heritage protection. If people are forced to migrate or flee as refugees, I want to find a way for them to take their cultural objects along. I was drawn to international law because of its values. That we are all born with equal rights to life and freedom. Until I realised, we are not.
Nestled between the anniversaries of an invasion, an explosion, a war and an independence, comes an assault on Lebanon. To me the Australian media coverage of the attacks often feels inadequate. Is our news not worth reporting and our injuries not worth describing and our deaths not worth counting? The deaths are qualified to signal relevance, and the qualification is who is counting. And who is taking note of the count.
If I manage to sleep in the night I scramble to the phone the second I open my eyes to check my Lebanese social media feeds and WhatsApp messages for all that happened while I was sleeping in the AEDT zone. News as I care to hear it: “Salon Beyrouth’s Issam was killed today”; “Jiddo and teta’s cemetery was desecrated”; “The main street in Noueiri where we used to do our shopping was bombed”; “A residence in the northern village where we went with khalo for the annual family reunion one time was shelled.”
Every bit of news of every attack trivialises everything else here. Dreams, plans, “achievements”. We ritualise resilience as cultural heritage and consume our broken hearts by the mundane. Treated as trivial, our lives everywhere become so. I see my children in every mourned child. And wonder whether I have saved my children.
Grief and rage correspond to the attacking, the justifying and the ignoring. The ignoring is a privilege that someone like me with a heart in Lebanon does not possess. Like the right to safety. Impunity trickles up and down. Helplessness, too.
And so the pain sinks thrice. First with the news. Then with the reporting of the news. Then with commentaries and reactions to the news. I ritualise the resilience to dissociate from the pain and go on about my day. Which then makes me feel guilty, for abandoning the pain and my family and friends who are breathing it in Lebanon and who do not have the choice to abandon it and dissociate from it. And guilty because I am dissociating from my family and friends and home. So that I dream of going back to Lebanon and being together, with myself.
It seems that I, or we, are not really part of the Australian nation after all, and that the political debate is about how we protest and not what we are protesting. It feels as though I am living in a country that is not only hostile to my pain but, by extension, also to me. And how much am I part of the state? I work and pay taxes and raise my children. I am complicit in my pain. I am complicit in the destruction of my home.
And I am expected to feel protected by an Australia that hardly seems to care about the names and lives of the deaths of my people and my children and my city and my country. And explain to my Australian children why that is so. That they are seen. That they are valued. That their lives matter. That they are not only numbers. That we will visit Baalbek’s temples again. That we will get to spend a weekend with the sea turtles at Orange House. That those deaths were ours. That all the deaths are all of ours.
• Sherine Al Shallah is a University of New South Wales doctoral researcher, Kaldor Centre affiliate, Australian Human Rights Institute associate and Justice Inclusion Access project coordinator with over 20 years’ experience in senior policy roles
