Lebanon, My Lebanon

MARJAYOUN, Lebanon

There are not too many addresses in Lebanon, in the precise, ZIP Code sense of the United States; they tend to be anecdotal, albeit spoken with authority. Such were the directions to Jdeidet, Marjayoun, a small Christian village tucked in a rugged corner of Lebanon, nestled between the improbable borders of Syria and Israel.

Go right at the larger-than-life portrait of Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of the Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah, I was told by my friend Hikmat Farha. At the picture of Musa Sadr, an iconic Shiite leader, turn left, he said. Then pass the posters -- and there are many -- of Shiite militiamen killed while fighting Israel. A checkpoint, Hikmat said, and from there you enter the stretch of Lebanon once occupied by Israel.

The Israeli occupation that ended here in 2000 cost lives. It forged myths that propelled the fight and created divisions that linger in its wake. In this part of the country, locking the region in the past, isolating it, the occupation preserved the spectacular vistas that elsewhere in Lebanon suffer from relentless quarrying and the scourge of cheap concrete.

There is nothing masculine about the beauty here. It neither shouts nor declares. It is graceful and gentle -- hills rounded by age and terraces crumbling with time. Olive trees unfurl like a carpet through the wadis, and the Litani River waters sheer valleys. No peak is higher than the other; none is too proud or imposing.

Jdeidet, Marjayoun sits at the end of one of those wadis, its stone houses, roofed with red tile, climbing a hillside.

"Marjayoun is beautiful," resident Nabil Samara told me after I arrived that winter day, "but it needs people."

He could have been more blunt. Picturesque as it is, Marjayoun is dying.

In this forgotten corner of Lebanon, that wouldn't matter much. Not that many people have even heard of the town. It probably wouldn't matter to me, either, except it was once the home of my grandparents, and I suspect my grandchildren will never see it.

As Marjayoun withers, so does a part of the Middle East. In a way, the village no longer makes sense, succumbing to the inevitability of urbanization and, more worrisome in the Arab world, the fading of its diversity as identity becomes defined by sect and ethnicity. Once brash, Marjayoun is now lonely; once confident, the village now contemplates its demise.

The House of Shadid

A green folder sits in my file cabinet. "Family records," it reads. There are citizenship and marriage certificates; discharge orders; the story of my grandmother's arrival in Oklahoma, written by one of her daughters; and an account of my grandfather's journey from Beirut to Boston aboard a ship called the Latso. They are the tangible records of a century-long wave of migration that has left millions more Lebanese as emigrants than residents of their homeland, populating the world from the Americas to Australia.