fami ly diaspora narrative memorials containment
identity things by farid noufaily
يليفنلا فيزوج ديرف
…there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for the collector . . . ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. —Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library coming home
At the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1991, my family, the Noufailys, left Canada and returned to our ancestral home in Rabiegh, a neighbourhood 17km north of Beirut. This wasn’t the first time we had migrated to a completely different continent. In 1978 during a severe period of fighting during the Lebanese civil war we fled Lebanon for Lome, Togo in Africa. A few years later in
1985, spurred by a better quality of life, education and economic prosperity, we emigrated to Canada. With each move we put all our goods in a suitcase and a shipping container. During this extended peripatetic period, the act of packing – our lives stripped down and contained in an anonymous box – always left me disoriented.
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