I was raised on Lebanon-Samer Asfahani

I was raised on Lebanon

Samer Asfahani

I was raised on stories of a paradise city in a pleasant and fertile land

Where the mountains, rivers and seas played as backdrop to life

I heard of a city so beautiful, so true that it could only be compared as the Paris of the Middle East

It’s a peculiar thing to love a country that does not raise you, a love formed from the nostalgia of your parents’ generation

To be raised in one home, but pine for another

It is a not a unique situation, the plight of the Lebanese diaspora to have more of us outside the country than in

An entire generation raised on a Lebanon that no longer exists, trying to understand their part in a Lebanon that does

Witnessing a domestic generation fight corruption and strife on an unfathomable scale while we fight adopted injustices in adopted nations

To witness death and destruction on a city you love but don’t understand

And how to respond; a Lebanese Brit living in America

Through donations, through social media, through prayer?

An apt reaction to pick up a pen to write about my father’s country, one for which he has used an ocean of ink on a forest of paper

This tragedy is the crescendo in the suffering our country has faced in recent months, and recent years

While it is unclear how, or to what end; our distant generation is coming of age and must have a role to play

Why so would such events pain us, why so would we feel so much for a home that was never our hearth

To go beyond memories and nostalgia, beyond thoughts and prayers

And back to the Lebanon we were raised on