Lara Habboub

A River in Between

Since 1948, many Palestinians have become exiles in Lebanon and Syria. In the 1970s, when the Lebanese civil war broke out, some first generation born refugees in Lebanon had to flee and were scattered around neighboring Arab countries. Three decades after that, the war in Syria made many second and third generation Palestinian refugees from Lebanon who were born in Syria to become exiles, again. – A tragic trilogy of a silenced and forgotten group of Palestinians who have been living in a permanent state of temporality and instability.

Beirut has always been a temporary refuge; a long, dizzying transit. Generous yet angry, the city embraced my family and me throughout a ten year journey of multiple attempts to find a safe home in Stockholm, Toronto, Kuala Lumpur, and Berlin. Some were more successful than others, with one missing member joining the family dinner from behind a screen.

This piece revolves around a poem my mother wrote one early morning that encapsulates my family’s experience with bureaucracy, extended waiting, and longing. The poem captures a shared sense of dislocation and displacement and reconceptualizes time and space as abstract concepts, creating a somatic experience in relation to forced migration and borders.

In Sufism, the whirling dance is said to open a gate between the performer and God; A channel for transitioning that transcends all human-made borders. In this piece, a river runs through between Berlin and Beirut where distance and time become irrelevant, and we create a home in between.

Video, 2023