I recalled the weeks following our arrival in Lebanon. Our containers were scheduled to arrive two weeks after our return however something went wrong and we were left to start our lives back ‘home’ without our survival gear. With each passing day, my brother and I grew restless, longing for the contents of the lost container. The shipping company handling the transportation had gone bankrupt and our container was stuck in New York Harbor. We now had to secure alternative shipping arrangements with another company that charged twice as much. Even today, my mother still maintains this should have been the indicator for us to return to Canada: it was an omen of our failed return home. Years later, I have come to realise that my fascination with home and inhabitation first started – at least partially – with the list of our possessions. Drawing and analysing them made me realise they can store not just memories, but cultural practices and ideas.
Eager to put to rest the upheavals of displacement and migration, I conceived my own memorial, a cemetery of empty containers that carried the Lebanese diaspora. I began to look for a place where the thousands of containers of beaten up and beaten down families such as ours could be assembled. Only one place would do: Place des Martyrs. Founded as a place of national unity, Place des Martyrs held the collective memory of the first martyrs who fought for a sovereign Lebanon. In many regards, we were also martyrs, martyrs of a certain kind. The empty containers could be filled, I believe, with the accumulated possessions and papers of the Lebanese diaspora like the papers that had allowed me to reconnect with the contents of my family’s container in 1992: a monument to a failed return home. /
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