Third Text, Vol.

26, Issue 4, July, 2012, 475– 477

Battlefield Pastoral
Munira Khayyat

S is a hamlet on the top of a hill on the southern border of Lebanon,

inhabited by goats, a bereaved graveyard and a possessed tree. Period-
ically visited by villagers, guerrillas, international peacekeepers, stray
dogs and wild pigs, it is composed of an abandoned bedu campsite, a
smashed mosque with a stopped clock on its wall pointing to a quarter
to eleven, a grapevine, a fig tree, an olive grove, a defunct stone olive
press, a huddle of overgrown eroded stone and cement dwellings and
enclosures and, in summer, brief, bright fields of tobacco. Here in S a con-
stellation of objects inhere in the present and indicate something about
the past. Existing on the margins of human habitation on the edge of
the nation-space in layers of agricultural battlefields old and new, S is a
living ruin, a knot of animate and inanimate devastation and regeneration
that continues to breathe through intertwined cycles of seasons and wars.
Through turning harvests and shifting politics new configurations of
being(s) claim and recycle spaces, materials and forms. Habitation
attends to some of the rubble and vegetation – enlivening it – and
leaves some to decay or run wild. Rhythms of dwelling and seasons of
war have seamlessly constituted this only partially abandoned place.
The trees rising up to the left of the dirt path as one approaches
announce the beginning of habitation. From afar they look as one, but
are soon revealed to be a circular cluster huddled around a hollow.
Forming leafy shelter in open country, they draw the walker towards
them after a steep climb up the dirt path. These trees mark the place of
a former bedu encampment. Before borders and wars, beasts would sea-
sonally live under the trees with the bedu, pastoral nomads native to
Galilee. The bedu would haul water up from the freshwater spring in
the valley and share some of it with their animals and the good spirit
who lives in the ancient gnarled oak standing apart from the tree-
cluster. Nomadism declined in South Lebanon after the establishment
of the militarised border and front between Lebanon and Israel fractured,
fixed and mined traditional pasturelands, divided families and made wan-
dering the borderland a troublesome affair. But the bedu found that their
knowledge of terrain and their familiarity with its nature was an asset to
guerrillas who came to the borderland in the 1960s. Their communion

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476

with the landscape was expressed in their practised movement as they

piloted guerrillas across the border into enemy territory. Soon, the
camp under the trees was overtaken by guerrillas and their bedu shep-
herds. . . and the protective spirit kept watch. In 1967 a bedu guide was
murdered. Some indicate the absent landlord of S land did not want
them (bedu or guerrillas) coming there any more. The slaughtered bedu
is buried at the foot of the spirit-tree: his name, village and date of
death are scrawled in petrified wet cement on the tombstone.
But the tree is still alive and so is its spirit, although not many pour
libations down its trunk these days. This oak is a monumental hol-
lowed-out creature embodying the unkind passage of long time, with a
massive wrinkled body, bushy foliage, swooping limbs and branches
like dainty skeletal fingers. Villagers say that it glitters and glows on
some nights when it communes with another possessed tree on a hilltop
across a shallow valley, smack on the borderline. Trees – even when
they do not house spirits – are wonders in the warscape of South
Lebanon. Targeted in asymmetrical warfare for their guerrilla-sheltering
qualities, trees are solitary rem(a)inders in the thorny wilderness of the
south Lebanon warscape, and possess a kind of magic embodied in the
sheer material fact of their physical continuity. In a warscape time is
fast and movement is shifting. Cycles that follow a slower pace fall by
the wayside as cumbersome and obsolete. So the tree, embodying
rooted vertical continuity, is a testament to a different time and tangi-
ble/tactile temporality when it survives in a landscape of natural destruc-
tion, erasure and abandonment. Consider the olive, the blessed crop of
the profane landscape of the Lebanese South. Producing more heat
than other trees, the olive is the perfect foil for the advanced heat-
seeking technology of the enemy seeking warm-blooded fighters under
its warm-wooded branches. The olive’s natural complicity in guerrilla
tactics attracts the wrath of ruin in war. So olives have largely disap-
peared from seasoned battlefields, surviving in more peaceful terrain
like undisputed villages, nonstrategic geography, sacred/enchanted
spots, like our oak, or church-owned land.
Both like and unlike the charmed life of a tree is the permanence of
stone. Stone perseveres, preserving the imprint of its builders, but dwell-
ings need dwellers to remain hale. The ramshackle stone houses of S speak
the silent poetry of human abandonment. Their last residents keep the
dead bedu company under the magical oak. Date of death according to
gravestones: July 1983. Only the fruitful fig tree outside their front
door knows how the old couple died, but it involved a grenade that
exploded as they sat down to a never-touched dinner. These were the
days of the Occupation, when the enemy had swelled over a border
that sliced the landscape, and dug in for a spell of twenty-two years. So
after the death of its last inhabitants, the hamlet’s homes became
occasional barracks to different armed groups, depending on the ways
the winds of war were blowing. And the stone houses absorbed waves
of destruction, gently melting into the hillside as the forces of nature
and war took over. The small blue-painted mosque remained in
occasional use until it was destroyed in the last war to blow over the
area in 2006, after which it joined the other stone houses in melting;
each smashed wall frames live rural scenes. The stopped clock on
the wall points uncannily to a moment of ruin now past. Its frozen
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hands separate the wheat from the chaff; this is no place for metronomic
time; the trees – the grapevine, fig, olives and oak – proliferate and stea-
dily keep the seasons.
In 2000 the Occupation ended and a new order came to reign over the
borderland and hamlet. Inhabitants of the nearby village who did not
dare to wander the woodland during the time of military rule returned
to wild pastures – with a brief hiatus during the vicious summer of
2006 – walking paths, traversing meadows, picnicking under trees,
tending olives, keeping goats in the tumbledown stone dwellings and
planting tobacco in any accessible flat space with some soil cover. In
counterpoint to the tree is tobacco, the golden child of the South
Lebanon warscape that inexorably accompanies human habitation,
spreading out brightly across any horizontal surface. More than anything
apart from war itself, tobacco unites the southern borderland in its
labour-intensive fourteen-month cycle from seed to weed to commodity.
Needing from nature only the nourishing dew of dawn, tobacco asks
much more from its human cultivators: in the opening days of spring
the powdery seeds are coaxed into seedlings then transplanted by hand
into ploughed fields where the rubbery green plants live for the ninety
days of high summer, during which they offer their tar-filled leaves for
successive pluckings. The leaves are then threaded and hung to dry – any-
where in and around the village home – until they turn deep gold, after
which they are packed in bales ready for sale to the state-owned mon-
opoly, the Régie Libanaise des Tabacs et Tombacs, which does the
rounds distributing lira after Christmas. Tobacco, the crop of summer,
which is also the season of war, visually unites the landscape during the
time of its efflorescence in its bright green ubiquity; its painstaking, poi-
sonous, rhythmic labour unites the poor. Its brief life and flexible storage
is temporally and spatially attuned to the spatio-temporal parameters of
the warscape. Premised on poverty and acclimatised to war, the ‘bitter
weed’ is the sprout of war-i-time success.
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