Pierre A. Maroun

During an interview on Sawt Loubnan, the journalist Josephine Abi Ghassan asked me a question that carried more weight than its words suggested: “Why are you so attached to Lebanon? Is it just nostalgia?” I gave a brief answer on air. But the question lingered in my head.

There is a moment many Lebanese in the diaspora know. You are sitting at a dinner table in America — Tampa, Houston, Detroit, wherever life carried you — and someone says something dismissive about Lebanon. “Isn’t it basically a failed state?” Something in you rises. You defend its history, its people, its resilience, its wounds, its depth. You speak with a conviction that surprises even you.

Then, uninvited, another memory surfaces: the last time you were in Beirut. The power cuts. The elevator dead again. The government office where dignity disappears one stamp at a time. The conversation that reminded you exactly why so many left. You don’t stop defending Lebanon. But for one second, you are defending it and grieving it at the same time.

That is the no-man’s land.

When you live in your homeland, identity feels effortless — woven into the language, the rhythm of daily life, the jokes you understand without explanation. At home, identity is like air. But once you leave, you begin to see yourself from the outside. The quiet question becomes unavoidable: Who am I, really?

That question sends you searching through memory, family stories, the mountains that formed you, the language that shaped your earliest thoughts. Lebanon stops being a place on a map. It becomes a flavor, a fragrance, a mood, a memory — and a beautiful wound that never fully heals.

But wounds have causes. Lebanon’s are not mysterious: corruption, sectarianism, war, foreign interference, and a political class that treated the country as personal inheritance. The country has not always been kind to those who loved it most.

Distance can purify memory — but it can also edit it. We defend a homeland that wounded us and carry inside us a Lebanon that is partly real, partly longing. Yet even that imagined Lebanon tells the truth: nostalgia is longing for the first version of yourself.

But that is only half the story.

When you return to Lebanon and sit with old friends — on a rooftop, Beirut’s familiar chaos below, the smell of diesel, grilled corn, and night jasmine thick in the air — the equation flips. In America, you defend Lebanon. In Lebanon, you defend America. Not because your loyalties have changed, but because gratitude has grown for the country that gave you room to breathe, to fail, to succeed, and to become — without reducing you to a sectarian file.

This is the bittersweet truth: I do not love Lebanon and America in the same way, but I love them both deeply. Lebanon gave me origin; America gave me horizon. Lebanon gave me memory; America gave me possibility. Lebanon gave me the first language of my soul; America gave me the space to build a life with dignity and peace.

Between the two, the heart stretches. It aches. It divides — not because it is unfaithful, but because it belongs, in different ways, to both.

Here lies the painful paradox: Abroad, you are Lebanese. In Lebanon, you are “the American.” You become a stranger everywhere — torn between two communities, two rhythms, two versions of yourself. That is the no-man’s land: an inner territory suspended between two homes, two identities, two loyalties, two selves.

In that no-man’s land, the heart learns to live divided without becoming false. Belonging is not always singular. This fracture is not betrayal. It is the natural consequence of two loves living in one heart.

The attachment to Lebanon is a lifelong search for the self — how a person can carry one homeland in the soul while building a life in another. Perhaps this is the destiny of many Lebanese abroad: to love Lebanon with the tenderness of memory, and America with the gratitude of survival. To be claimed by both. To be fully owned by neither. To live with a heart stretched across the sea.

And perhaps this beautiful, painful duality ends only in the final journey — when the question “Where am I from?” dissolves into a simple, quiet answer: From there… from Lebanon… on a final homebound pathway to Heaven.

* From the series: Lebanon, A Short Pathway to Heaven

Share

Comments

Add your comment