Fatima Joumaa

 “We take pictures knowing that all we can capture are flashes of time, moments lived, then gone forever. 

 I tell a story from South Lebanon — a story that goes back a long way, and that in recent years has deteriorated dramatically. My story begins when the people of the South refuse to remain spectators. As Gaza came under assault, the South rose in solidarity, and a second front opened along the border. Everything that followed flows from that refusal. For what does it mean to declare support for Gaza? To remain mere witnesses, watching as a genocide unfolds? 

 What followed was war, and it continues still. The southern front held in support of Gaza until it widened into an all-out war. Daily aggressions, bombardments, displacement, and Israeli military occupation. Yet even amid the destruction, people keep returning to their villages, carrying their dead back to the land from which they came. 

 I follow the martyrs — the shuhada — as they are carried back to their villages, and in their return, I return with them. In Arabic the word means witness: one whose death becomes testimony, whose life is carried home as a truth that words alone could not hold. Together, we search for what remains. This is the truth I continue to seek: the funeral, the body’s final return to its land — not only a moment of mourning, but a moment when southerners gather around absence and give it meaning. 

 After documenting these funerals, I return home to hide within the folds of my mother Layla’s novel, where her hidden writings echo the South’s grief, and through her words and my own photographs, From My Mother’s Novel weaves together personal and collective memory.” 

 – Fatima Joumaa