Adonis Diaries

We Need you to Walk:  The Walk of the Free

There are millions upon millions of Lebanese in the Diaspora.

Since the civil war in 1975, anyone who could borrow money for a plane ticket immigrated.

In the city of Sao Paolo in Brazil there are more Lebanese descendants than all Lebanese citizens.

Many boldly declared that they have cut the bridges and burned the ships, never to return to their homeland, as if infamy was a badge of honor.

This tiny land that was coveted by dozens of Empires for its milk and honey;

this land that exported to the world olive oil, wine, and dried fruit;

this land that built city-States and created the alphabet;

this land that manufactured and roamed the seas and oceans and transacted with every people is reaching bottom.

This land of water and cool sources has no potable water.

International Zionism never relinquished its zeal to bust our doors and sap our energy and determination, even after being defeated twice in less than a decade.

This land that exported highly cultured and educated people is reduced to graduating sectarian, uncouth and poorly cultured new generations that barely can read or write.

We don’t want you to come and talk the talk of the sectarian.

We don’t want you to behave the pessimist and defeatist.

We need you to come and walk the walk of the free;

to experience the harsh life of the brave, to participate in our miseries, to revolt and to change and reform a tiny Nation that led the world for millennia.

You in the Diaspora, you might have earned individual successes, medals, honors, or riches but you can never erase a tiny dot of the huge and ugly blotch that scars your forehead.

As long as your homeland is humiliated, shrivelled, and under-developed among the nations then this scar will be prominent on your forehead and on your descendants’ because you bare a large part of the responsibility for our degradation and instability.

We need you to bolster the fainthearted who dream harder to inflate the rank of the Diaspora.

We need you to come and prevent those hot air arrogant bourgeois from taking away the arms of the steadfast, brave, and resisting patriots.

“Ye, stiff-necked Levantine; ye the uncircumcised in heart, ears, and tongue.

My curses are upon you and your descendants in the Diaspora to the end of time.

Ye, blasphemous Levantine, wizen up;

never dare take my curse lightly!“