D Day

On the day of my brother’s funeral, I heard that my father danced in front of his coffin. I tried to imagine it: the steps, the location of the coffin in the parking lot of the building, the mourners watching my father, the face of my brother, that of my father, what each of them was wearing that day and whether my father’s clothes would have been undone, his shirt coming partly unbuttoned during the performance. I wasn’t allowed to come down to the building’s entrance to see my brother in the coffin. I was told it was better if I stayed there, sitting on the sofa in the foyer of our home, while the rest of the family went down to see him lying down with his eyes closed one last time. I was told that I prefer to have an image of my brother alive in my memory rather than a dead one. I didn’t say anything, but my aunt had decided for me what I would have preferred to see…

The Sofa

That day, I sat still on a big convertible sofa with kitsch floral patterns that my mom decided to preserve by covering it with a sheet that had to be pulled and tucked into place every couple of hours. The sofa didn’t belong to the house’s “entrée,” but it had been there ever since we moved from the Dahieh neighborhood (southern suburb of Beirut) to this new house in Baabda (Mount Lebanon) a few years earlier. The idea was to turn this narrow space into a living room for our family of five kids to spend time there as the salon was reserved for company only.

The Last Dance

And as I was sat still looking at the entrance of our house, I saw them come in – my dad with two of my cousins and my mom with both of her brothers. My uncles held my mother from each side as she lamented: “He was smiling at me, did you see?  He smiled at me”. My father, I don’t remember what he was doing at that moment or how he looked, the image is still hazy in my memory, but maybe his clothes were undone as if having just finished dancing. I imagined him waving two handkerchiefs in the air too, dancing like my aunts used to, in the traditional southern Lebanese style.

My father’s dance in front of my brother’s coffin must have been his way of breaking the sociocultural norms again, like he did for most of his life. It was perhaps his personal interpretation of the Lebanese ritual of the “coffin dance” (making the coffin dance would be a more accurate translation to English). He must’ve wanted more from the role the dance gives to the men, even if the ritual of tor’is el teibout (Lebanese/Arabic for making the coffin dance) is considered to be one of the very few instances in which Arab men get to publicly perform their own ritual of lament, it is still not a fully embraced dance that men can perform. 

The literary nuance of the verb “ra’is” (make it dance) in fact helps in explaining the act. It is not a “ra’sa” (dance) that eastern men would exceptionally allow themselves to practice. It is not a moment where these men, who usually deprive their bodies of moving freely out of shame at being compared to women, would finally give in to this funereal dance. It is not a dance, it is not their dance, but rather a dance that they impose on an inert object, by association of this horizontal mass with a beloved who will not leave this earth until he has celebrated.

But my dad didn’t care much about making this distinction between making the coffin dance or dancing all by himself that day in front of my brother’s coffin. 

Make the Coffin Dance

The coffin dance might be the equivalent of a protest against time, perhaps even an uprising against fate, but one that will never reach the level of a coup d’état. The ritual usually comprises two levels. The first is the spectators’ level in which the ritual is observed from a distance. That level is solely reserved for the expression of deep sorrow and sadness, disbelief, and nostalgia. The second belongs to the angry mourners, those who want to act. This usually comes in the form of protest, a refusal of death and its permanence.

In Lebanon, it was originally dedicated to young people who died before having the chance to get married and who, on the day of their burial, “celebrated” their wedding. In the posthumous ceremony, the coffins are shaken as a way to make them dance, mimicking the same movement that is performed with newlyweds, where the groom is usually carried during the wedding ceremony on the shoulders of his close male friends or family members and shaken and undulated to the rhythm of the music while dancing. This collectivity of the performance would also be the only detectable difference between the two dances of the wedding and the funeral, because the rest of the ritual remains intact: from shaking the young man up and down, to the zaghareed (ululations)accompanying the performance, the rice and flower petals thrown by the women in the direction of unwedded young men or martyrs, and sometimes even a zaffe (festive wedding march). 

Latent Mourning

For twenty years, I chased the idea of attending a funeral and seeing this dance just so I no longer have to imagine it. I was convinced that I could only properly mourn my brother’s death when I saw the dance that I was forbidden to see at fourteen years old. I feel that there’s a type of pain you feel when you miss the chance to mourn in a collective womb. This womb is both a spatial and a temporal one. It starts taking shape when everyone gets to sob together standing side by side, observing the proof of death: the deceased, the coffin, the tomb, or the coffin dance itself. If you miss this event, you risk feeling a type of pain that ends up sleeping deep within you and comes back in flashes. It pops up in some of your dreams, it connects to other moments of mundane sadness and weaves itself into cheap sofa covers that need to be regularly readjusted.

Seeing this dance again would have been my chance to release the aged tears I had been suppressing, in this womb space that was culturally designed for shameless pain sharing, a space where the socio-cultural boundaries that usually dictate the behavior of groups in public, were momentarily suspended. And I knew that in a country like ours losing a loved one at a young age was bound to happen, and I would eventually find myself observing a coffin dance ritual. It could be a car accident, a stray bullet, a suicide bombing, armed clashes, or just random hazards like getting electrocuted while showering because someone forgot to turn off the water heater. 

And there I was, some twenty years later, finally granted the observer’s seat at the mourning dance ritual of a distant relative. That day, I knew that I wasn’t there to mourn young Elias. I felt like my older sister, who drove all the way up to this far away village in the north, also knew, although we never talked about it. It was like we had agreed to be there so that I get some sort of reenactment of a missed ritual. I was familiar with the place, and I was surrounded by people I knew my whole life growing up. The funeral was held in a village North of the country, where my mother’s family house once was and where we spent our childhood summer vacations, when my dad’s village in the South was still under Israeli occupation. 

I stood there in the church backyard and wept. Elias was being shaken in that coffin, but I had finally recuperated some form of the moment that I had missed years ago when I was asked to wait on the couch. I was finally allowed to be with the grownups, to see for myself what death looked like and how we, Lebanese, usually say goodbye.

And for the young, deceased Elias, the zaffe was performed, the men made the coffin dance, the women wept and wailed, and the whole village shared that moment of mourning in the backyard of the communal church…

At different moments during the ritual, I crossed eyes with my sister just to make sure I’m still within the limits, just to make sure it was okay to keep going. And as she drove us back home from the village, our eyes met again in the rear-view mirror and they were all red and swollen, but we had stopped crying. We were done.

Unexpected Visits

Since his passing in 2001, my brother comes to visit my dreams every now and then. His last visit was two days before the pager attacks in Lebanon in September 2024. In this dream, my sisters and probably my younger self were looking for something in the mountainside, and we kept finding dismembered humans between the rocks. The dream smelled like death. Then somehow, I ended up in another scene where I was with my deceased brother in my parents’ bedroom. There was a radio in the room, and I asked if he wanted to listen to some music, as a way for me to keep him for a bit before leaving. In the dream, I knew he was dead and that he only came to visit. Then he chose a song, and it played on the radio…

A couple of days later, Israel escalated its war on Lebanon and heavily bombarded the Dahieh neighborhood. And since my sisters, their kids and my parents were all staying in our family home, which was relatively close to the bombing, I had to tune in to AlJazeera live on my phone in Luxembourg, and with every explosion I saw on the screen, I messaged my sisters to see if they, the kids, and my parents were okay. It turns out they were all hiding in my parents’ bedroom that night, the same one I saw in the dream where my brother was.

 I think my brother was there in spirit that night too, either to protect them or because the neighborhood where he is buried was also bombed. The dream finally made sense…

Places of Memory

Shortly into the war, my friend texted to tell me that the Israeli jets targeted a building in Basta in Beirut. She did not know that I know people who live there. She was simply sharing the news as it was a new area targeted in Beirut. I texted my friend whose family lives there. He was a special kind of friend, someone I’ve known since I was ten maybe, someone who became my first love and boyfriend for some eight years after, and someone who remained my best friend throughout my life. There’s an Arabic word for this kind of relationship but I don’t think it can be translated. He’s my khalili, a loyal friend who just became a place you go to when you’re out of places, one that holds your memories.

I typed his nickname twice in the WhatsApp chat because I didn’t know how to ask if he was still alive. He replied with an eight-second voice note saying: “they’re alive, they’re alive”. His voice shook. I saved that chat, because in this war and while I’m away, I am having trouble accepting the reality and processing the pain of losing places, memories, and belongings. I needed evidence; I needed to hear it. I needed to keep proof of what was lost and proof that it was in fact, no longer there. I tried to archive in his voice note the news that will soon become forgotten. I felt like I owed it to the place that I knew or was I just ashamed that I wasn’t there, and I kept the note to legitimize my pain and prove that I had been related to this place one day.

Maybe I just didn’t want to go back to feeling like my fourteen-year-old self, that sat on the sofa looking at the door that day, while the rest of the world mourns loss…

I am trying to wrap my head around the idea of a war at home while I’m away, observing. I feel like I need to be part of the coffin dance ritual for the country, the neighborhood where I grew up, my former home, my brother’s cemetery, my ex’s house, and everything in between. But I won’t get to have that remotely. It doesn’t work that way. The womb cannot stretch across borders to hold both me and my loved ones to mourn our loss. The closest I found to our coffin dance were the protests in Luxembourg city. But in marching and chanting in these protests, I can only be the carrier of the coffin, the one that’s defying death in a performative collective dance with a group of similarly wounded souls, and I don’t want that, I want to observe the performance and weep. And in Luxembourg city, I can’t see my sisters’ eyes anywhere I look.

Meanwhile the pain of gradually losing your past and seeing it being violently wiped out on screen, unable to be there to process it collectively with your loved ones is settling in, and will sleep deep within me, and come back in flashes. It will arise in some of my dreams, it will connect to other moments of mundane sadness and weave itself into cheap sofa covers…

– Myriam Dalal