A Manifesto for the Arts of the Coming South  

How to bring back the dead, instead of counting them? 

What do we say now, and what do we fabricate, while our hands are busy holding the dead? What comes after witnessing, and how not to get blinded by the smoke? This horizon is split open now, how do we go through it? And what do we say before fates take us to the side of the dead? How do we return now, or soon, to places that have left their inhabitants? With what texts and which forms? Perhaps what we will do next should be completely detached from what we are doing now, like the mountains have detached from themselves..

Efforts and arts of documentation, archiving, deconstruction, research, narration, etc. can only show us things. They can bring this present, from its distant places, and put it in front of our eyes. They show us this present covered in ashes. These arts show us the mountains as they are now, closed on the fields. These arts, even after the time needed for contemplation - if the gaze is not returned - (and this might need a thousand years of our days), will only bring the places from their pasts to their present, or vice versa: everything in its allocated time and distances - those of our regular time that we know - but they will not catch the horizon. They will not break open this horizon, they will not go through it, they can only see it burning.

“And that a day of gods days are indeed like a thousand years of your counting”. 
 

1. How do the mountains disappear? And how do they move from their places and what rushes blood to the fields, changing the color of the sky to a horrifying red? 

If we turn our gaze to the direction of the south, knowing that it is there, behind the head, in that place that one cannot see when the neck turns, perhaps we will finally be made aware of this duality of time: our time, that we count day by day, the slow, lethal time like waiting, and the time of the thousand years, flowing down loud like a river. These two times, running on two banks, never meeting - let us call them regular time and the time of the unseen.

Perhaps, if we turn our gaze now, we will realize, finally, that the south has entered the time of the thousand years.

This is how places give away their times, like some faces would give away the death of their owners (when they looked at the face of Al-Hussein, they would see his death, as if his face was an opening of fire in the wreckage of the body, as if his face - beautiful - was an opening in time). When they saw the face of Al-Hussein, young, they would see the image of his death, penetrating time like spears would later penetrate the body, stretched upon a horse while the distant horizon burned.

In much the same way, places and things change their times. They "enter" time, departing from our regular time and entering the time of the thousand years. This is irreversible. Things and places that enter Time, traversing from regular time to the time of the unseen (the south now, the face of Al-Hussein then), never return in the same form. They do not come back, even a day after (a day worth a thousand years), materially unchanged. They must materially change, and often they become unrecognizable from the way we knew them before they entered time. Whatever, or whoever, enters time may return in years when the horizon opens, yet if it returns, it cannot return unchanged. Matter itself must have altered. The South will not come back in the form we know (just as Al-Hussein's face returns from time as a face raised upon a spear).

Perhaps when we look towards the south, we will notice that the horizon has already opened, and that the south that we know, present (as in its present time, holding its time like two who can never be separated), has departed to times which we do not know. It has peeled away, as two transparent images peel away from each other. A giant's hand has split the landscape and stripped the image of the mountains from the mountains themselves, throwing the south into that other time and leaving this south, present now in our time, grey after its colours have been peeled away from it. The colours have departed to the time of the unseen, as have the houses, the dead, and all the beautiful faces. Those who have remained, too, have entered - or are yet to enter - the time of the unseen.

This is how the south is present in our time now, and if one manages to turn their neck, they will see, there, a south that cannot be seen except through veils of smoke. They will see mountains that cannot be seen except with pink blood gushing from them, and they will see a landscape that can only be seen while ash slips out from within it. The farther the south recedes into the time of the unseen, the nearer comes this south that we can see before us, with its smoke shrouding the eyes.

They are, then, mountains that have lost their colors, and a landscape closed on the villages, and villages that are closed on smoke. As we look into the faces of our dead, one at a time, we do not forget any of them. We know who killed them, and we cross into nothing without carrying their many bodies upon our backs. And as we count the houses that a rose-coloured wind has torn apart, we realize that they all - the faces, the bodies, the houses - have crossed into the time of the unseen. We carry them every day (every day a thousand years long), until our ribs fold, or until we follow them into the unseen. And so too with return. It will be a return to a south that will no longer be present in its own time. A south destined to be cast out of its time. ("And when she came, it was said: 'Is your throne like this?' She said: 'It is as though it were the very same.'")

2. But, how do we bring back the dead, instead of counting them? 

What do we make now? And how does that endless absolute (that fugitive thing slipping into times we cannot comprehend) reveal itself in what we make, while our hands are busy carrying the dead? How do we keep the winds from taking us? How does the gaze turn back, reaching toward those things in their own times, to where we ourselves cannot go?

Whatever we make next, even if it succeeds in dismantling, evading, questioning, or moving beyond documentation, records, and archives, as did the arts and theories that emerged after the Lebanese Civil War, whose methods cast such long shadows and bright afterglows across the artistic landscape, and whose old protagonists still hold their grip over the language of art to this day, those practices, which have used history (history that was horrific then, that is horrific now) as a structure, summoning fiction to fill the holes left by bombs and bullets, are still practices that speak to the time we know. They approach things according to the rules of our own time. They recount the past through existing archives (or archives they fabricate, question, reject, dismantle, or replace with fiction where something has been lost). Or they read the present - the after past - through social, economic, or political critique. Or sometimes they imagine its future, or the future that might have been. Past, present, and future: these are the structures of ordinary time, the time whose language and tools we understand, even when it is bent, stretched, made circular, or turned back upon itself.

Most of these arts, the wonderful and the dreadful, are arts that deal with concepts and things that belong to a time that one can hold in the grip of their hands, a time present despite its countless hardships, its endless branches, its forests without number. These arts, like their protagonists, are exhausted, and exhausting. And they will not open the horizon now. It is enough for them to see it, from afar (without wrenching their necks), burning.

Even as the massacres continue, we have no choice but to try to reach forms and arts that wield the times of the unseen. There is no escaping this now. There is no other way now. This moment we are living, and that south which has slipped away into other times (faster than the eye can perceive), are a moment and a south that we must meet within their own time, even if we can grasp only a fragment of it - not within this time we know, as those who came before us did, and for that, we thank them.

If one wishes to bring back the dead, and the places that left their inhabitants, he or she must tear open the breast of the unseen with bare hands. One should not evoke, nor document, nor rely upon, nor reveal, nor imitate, nor extrapolate, nor infer, nor plumb the depths, nor investigate, nor dismantle, nor represent, nor present, nor transform, nor recover, nor Lebanese-ize the theories of the post-war world, nor regurgitate the works of philosophers who know us or know nothing of us (Lighten yourselves, lighten yourselves - the air is heavy enough already, my brothers and sisters), nor repeat and vary according to the logic of trauma, nor become a rights advocate, nor seek the edifice, nor summon symbols, nor retrieve the past in the language of fiction, nor return to the past we know - the past of the villages - nor stand above them and sketch their future.

One must tear open the breast of the unseen with bare hands, and take from there the faces, the things, and the dead as they had become upon entering time, as their materiality had changed. (We cannot deny that this is an unbearable effort, and that the wrenching of necks is painful.) The unseen must be torn open, because the things of times we do not know can only come in languages we do not know.

We must be aware that things are already happening. They are not metaphorical; they are literal things that can be perceived with the senses. We see them there, coming back from those times of theirs, altered, their very matter transformed (The black horses running wild through the south, photographed by Ahmad Ghossein - they were white before they entered time. The poems of Mohammad Ali Chamseddine changed their words and became the colors of mountains that had left their places. The voice of Hasiba Hashem comes across the south's horizon, always, and always from nowhere. If you listen carefully, you may catch it, and hear how it has changed, how it has become the voice of twenty thousand men and women. Listen to it. It comes out through their mouths as they sing. The dead who change their places. The graves that return like the changing of flowers and grass. Those who bring us news of the dead in dreams. Now. The colors of the horizon changing above the blue skies of the villages. The horizon, always burning. Now. Rains and birds falling like blood. Blood erupting through the fields. Now...)

What we make next must sense these things as they emerge from the time of the unseen. It must touch, with its fingertips, that downpour of other times. We must bring back the dead, instead of looking at the images of their past. We must see how they come back, instead of counting them. We must wield the times towards which they have departed, instead of lingering in this time that they left behind.

3. What now?

Things that enter time
Do not remain the same.
Songs change their voices.
Poems change their words.
And the dead come back.
They are the last hues of the day
In the blue skies of the villages.