The River Has Roots

by Amal El-Mohtar

It is impossible for me to think of my childhood in Lebanon without thinking of the children there now; the children murdered, displaced, orphaned, trapped. It is impossible not to think of the children my parents were when they lived there; the children my grandparents were. It is impossible not to reflect, and to try to make you, dear reader, understand, that every generation of my family in living memory has been shaped or defined by imperial war. As I write this, Israel is carpet-bombing Lebanon in an expansion of its yearlong genocidal campaign in Gaza. Canada and the US are callously failing to evacuate their own citizens from Lebanon, leaving them to endure bombardment perpetrated with weapons they’ve sold to Israel, or whose sale they’ve facilitated. Right-wing talk show hosts are claiming that Israel can’t be invading Lebanon because Lebanon isn’t a country, echoing the decades of Zionist rhetoric that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian”—rhetoric that claims the millions of people indigenous to the region, the thousands slaughtered and the millions displaced, are insubstantial, ephemeral. It’s not wholly unlike seeing people talk about Faerie. I wrote and revised this book under the mental duress of seeing horrific war crimes against my people denied, excused, laundered, in the same language I use to tell stories. I couldn’t have borne this without the support of true friends and the grace of new fellowships emerging from a shared urgency in confronting that...