Religion and faith. When the former is diverted for political purposes, it becomes responsible for the painful loss of loved ones. More intimate, the latter allows one to survive and continue a struggle. Lebanese politician, writer, and director of one of the largest Arabic-language dailies in the Near East, Ghassan Tuéni recounts in his latest work “Bury the Hatred and the Revenge,” the episodes of this subtle relationship between the poison and the antidote: a “Lebanese destiny,” a blend of a country’s dramas and the journey of a man whose “dialogue with the living and the dead” has been at the “heart” of his life. A tragedy that accompanies, punctuates but never halts, a commitment to Lebanon’s independence and sovereignty: his father dies suddenly of a stroke when he is to deliver an important speech in Chile to gain support from that country in a UN vote on Palestine. A staunch advocate of independence from Syria, his son Gebran is assassinated on December 12, 2005, a few months after Prime Minister Rafic Hariri. Like armor left on the battlefield, the living, Gebran yesterday, Nayla today, take up the names of glorious deceased.
From his Freemason father, a minister of national education before the independence of 1943 and later ambassador, he seems to have inherited his passion for freedom. A cause he wholly prioritizes over the prestige of ministerial portfolios, not shying away from imprisonment to remain true to his beliefs. This passion also fuels his tireless will to defend and promote his country: a Member of Parliament at 24, he becomes during the Lebanese civil war the “out-of-frame” envoy of the Cedar Country to the UN, from where he launches his famous call of March 17, 1978: “Let my people live!” A call that still deserves to be widely echoed today. From his mother, from whom he derived the discovery and affirmation of the Orthodox faith, he draws a quiet yet obstinate strength, one that spares him from collapse after numerous “shipwrecks”: the death from illness of his very young daughter Nayla, that of his Druze-origin wife – and renowned poetess – Nadia in 1983, the loss of his son Makram in a car accident in 1987, followed by the assassination of Gebran who headed the daily An Nahar whose building is located in… “Martyrs’ Square.”
Through the pages, Ghassan Tuéni recounts his memories, always tied to Lebanon’s political and religious history. His generous reflections on “convivence,” halfway between the naivety of a pious wish and the testimony of unyielding hope, sometimes lead him to forget to question the essential: the ailments afflicting Lebanese society. When he recounts, almost playfully, the district bargains during his first election to Parliament, the author could at least denounce the well-known harms of clanism and political clientelism. Especially when his granddaughter Nayla, a candidate of the Lebanese Forces in the last June elections, joins, once elected, Saad Hariri’s party. At the time of his union with Nadia Hamadé, forced to convert to Orthodox Christianity, he notes that no civil marriage is acceptable in the Cedar Country. He, whose belief matches his devotion to the Orthodox icon of the “Shaghoura,” will he forgive his granddaughter her civil marriage in Cyprus with a Shiite? A union that arouses the anger of Orthodox Bishop Monsignor Audi, despite, as reported, the intervention of Druze Minister Marwan Hamadé, the family’s uncle.
Originating himself from this dynastic system to which he owes his success, he does not consider challenging it and ends up endorsing this flaw of Lebanese political life, which has become, to plagiarize sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, a “cemetery of aristocracies”: a phenomenon vehemently denounced by the country’s youth and civil society. From a man of critical spirit and deep conviction, such as he presents in another book (“A Century for Nothing,” written in collaboration with Jean Lacouture and Gérard D. Khoury, Albin Michel Editions, 2002), one will regret this time the surprisingly smooth nature of his analyses on the future of the Near and Middle East. His take on “Kemalist” Turkey, which completely obscures the creeping Islamization policy pursued by Prime Minister Erdogan’s AKP, his mistake on the fact that “Iranian Shiites do not consider themselves superior to Arabs”—yet a constant Persian cultural aspect—or what he strangely calls the “murmurs” of Hassan Nasrallah’s supporters, Secretary-General of Hezbollah, demanding a new distribution of confessional powers, are enough to leave the reader puzzled.
Entirely devoted to forgiveness, probably addressed to his own descendants, Ghassan Tuéni’s book certainly does not fail to move. Despite the terrible threats weighing on its future, the affective and humanist Lebanon will fully recognize itself therein.
Ghassan Tuéni, “Bury the Hatred and the Revenge, a Lebanese Destiny,” Albin Michel Editions, 2009.
