Voices Untamed

BeMA & TAP’s Residency - May 2017

Jezzine, South Lebanon

On the roofs, guardians of dust and roses

[...] What I almost missed, had I not been stopped, was the special garden Kareem and Antoinette were happily watching. It was their neighbor’s garden. It sat on a roof that was sandwiched between the walls of two houses but overlooked the town and the other hills of the South. I later met Helena who told me about the different flowers and plants she grew and the birds and cats she raised, but most importantly about the basement under her roof garden. The basement had been a dump for years, a dump for people’s unwanted things. She had cleaned the basement and grown the garden on its top. I was charmed by the idea of a constructed space made up of only a basement and a roof, with nothing in between; and the idea of a garden that had grown straight out of a basement. And I was delighted when she offered me red roses, they must have been no ordinary roses. [...]

[ ...] when I was rehearsing the path to Helena’s garden I chanced on the construction work on the house just next to Kareem and Antoinette’s. The façade was already down but I couldn’t see the workers as they were on the floor upstairs. They were pounding on the floor creating a big crater. And I was there when the light shone just right to illuminate a fine film of dust falling through the ceiling. Suspended from the crater, that body of light and dust seemed to be annihilating the habitat and draining the walls from the long lost voices. Antoinette explained to me that their son was finally moving back to town with his family and that it was his house they were rebuilding. I tried to pass by again later in the day and in the following days in the hopes of better catching the occurrence. But the right conditions - of light, dust, crater, and pounding- never realigned […]

Perched on a hill, an unfinished dream

[...] For Open Day, I decided to dispense the water voices in stories I had collected. The first I chose was the story of a no ordinary man who in the 1960s had destroyed his house and wine cellars and had started building in their place, on the south-east hill of Jezzine, a grand palace that he had hoped would house the whole world in all its intricacies. But he had died in 1996 before he could finish his colossal plan. That man had been a surgeon, whose obsessiveness and meticulousness shouted out from the details of his partially realized dream. He had collected artifacts and verses across all civilizations, religions and geographies and had started piecing them together in a collage that had followed no known order but his own fantasy and vision. Behind the palace’s closed gates, a car remained waiting for her master to take her on her next ride, the stonemasons’ tools for a cue for the next stroke, and the complex fountains for a drop of water. The last passionate breath of its genius creator could be felt relentlessly ruminating in the big arched halls, swelling and shrinking in the wooden body of his fine pianos, stretching and releasing their strings slowly losing pitch, unexpressed. [...]