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| Artwork by Tarek Chemaly based on "Riwayat Abir" (2016) |
Unless you are Marcel Proust (or Karl Ove Knausgard whose novels I still have not read) then please, chill. One of the most reassuring elements of the past? Is that it happened. Sure, we can always reinvent it, reinterpret it, rearrange it, dramatize it, beautify it, and eventually twist it so that it won't be what it actually was, but one cannot do that with the future. Which is why the past has this snuggly feel to it - like a labubu? Is that even a thing in 2026? But I digress.
Sometime in 2022 I was talking to a fellow teacher who for some odd reason was showing me photos from his past in a European country. "1981 was an excellent year, on all fronts, career-wise and this is Heleine she came from Corsica" he pointed to a woman he was obviously in a relation with. Not to be mean, but I pitied him. I was thinking, this was a man with a family, earning a very good salary comparatively in Lebanon, his son about to get married, and he still speaks of 1981.
As Lebanese, we have the experience of how unkind life can be. Every day is an adventure, and I still hear people say "rizkallah 3ala eyem el 7arb" (my God bring back the war years - speaking about the 1975-1990 one). Well, I am not sure if this is delusion or what, but I do remember the "eyem el 7arb" and I honestly do not want them back - perhaps as the people who survived the said war, we can have the "privilege" or looking back, but those who died are not that fortunate for wanting the said days back.
Which brings us back to the current trend of 2016. No, 2016 was no special year in any way, shape or form. It was just a year, nothing exceptional happened in it - I kept on publishing books, I went to Amsterdam, I blogged, had clients, this, that. Would I want to have 2016 back? Honestly, no.
I have had my fair share of immense struggles since, but this does not want me want to live in the past. Or to be clear, a reconstructed past which never was.