I met UM Adnan for the first time in 2006 in the South-Lebanese village of Chehabiyeh, which is not far from the border with Israel and suffers regularly accordingly. I was traveling to Lebanon shortly after the end of the 34 -day Israeli assault, which had killed some 1,200 people and strewn with the country’s sides with unplodced ammunition.
UM Adnan was born in 1939, nine years before the violent self-invention of Israel on Palestinian lands. She had married a Palestinian refugee around Nazareth, who had fled to Lebanon in 1948 when he was a child, separated from her family along the way. Her husband had already died when we met, but her son Hassan told me with a nostalgic little laugh that the first meeting of the pair had been “as magic”.
UM Adnan had eight children, two boys and six girls, three of whom died – one in a car accident and one during the Lebanese civil war from 1975-90. The third was accidentally shot down by a cousin.
A robust veil woman, UM Adnan already had trouble walking in 2006 when my friend Amelia and I presented at home – which, unlike many other residences in the Lebanese, had managed to avoid irreparable damage during the attack of summer. Amelia and I had done hitchhiking in the devastated landscape, and Hassan had been one of the countless motorists to pick us up on the side of the road and transport us to the house to be drunk with food and set up for the night.
I returned to Lebanon alone in 2008 after taking the Turkiye bus in Syria, where Hassan volunteered to recover me. I would then spend the best part of two months to sleep on the floor of the UM Adnan lounge under a colorful portrait of his late husband. Hassan was sleeping on a mattress next to me, an arrangement that caused not as long as a hit of Um Adnan’s eye.
At that time, UM Adnan had even more difficulty in maneuvering, and yet it could rarely be made to sit, devoting itself to an endless rotation of tasks, gardening and cooking. A tank of green beans was always at hand for me – as well as a range of other treats – and the fact that we had to cross the kitchen to reach the only toilets of the house meant that UM Adnan had many occasions to intercept and dive at the table for another compulsory food session.
Um Adnan had a smile for everyone, his stoic grace all the more notable given the trajectory of his life, which included survivor of mass episodes like the Israeli invasion of 1982 which killed tens of thousands of people in Lebanon. The acute losses that she had endured over the years – all on a context of persistent torment by the state which had made her husband a refugee – made the simple fact of getting up every morning fierce resilience.
Whether cooking, cleaning, singing or begging for a little child or another to hasten a race, UM Adnan embodies a daily heroism which is refused in orientalist discourse, which reduces the Arab / Muslim woman to a weak and oppressed figure. It does not matter that, in Lebanon and in Palestine, it is quite the opposite of the weak to maintain families together while facing the omnipresent existential Israeli threat.
During the brutal Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon, which lasted from 1978-2000, Hassan had fought with the Lebanese resistance – which means that UM Adnan has never known when she could lose a fourth child. Now that she had it at home, she was holding it near.
Although imperturbable by the sleep arrangement in his living room, UM Adnan welcomed Hassan’s announcement that he and I were married – part of a program that we had designed under the influence of too many wine. According to our vision induced by wine, Hassan’s marriage to me – a citizen of the United States – would ultimately allow him to obtain an American passport and go to the village of his father in current Israel.
With my less than maximum manners and my general uselessness in the kitchen, I was undoubtedly not the daughter-in-law that Um Adnan had considered for herself, but she took everything in noble.
We were married by a sheikh in the village of Tibnine, and I was inserted as a number one wife on the Hassan identity document for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, a category to which he had been attributed by the law of Lebanon which prohibits Lebanese women like UM Adnan from transmitting their citizenship to their deposit.
Needless to say, the passport scheme did not take place, but UM Adnan showed us good wishes when we returned from the sheikh and promised an appropriate party in the future.
Later, I would later lose contact with Hassan for many years – and I feared the worst – until December 2022, he materialized in my WhatsApp messages with a series of emojis and a “Belennnnnnn”. He was alive, but Um Adnan was not, having died during the coronavirus pandemic. Her voice cracked by saying to me: “She broke my heart.”
Um Adnan’s house has since been converted into rubble with a large part of the rest of Chehabiyeh – the work, of course, of the Israeli army, which launched its last invasion of Lebanon in the fall last year. His family was able to save anything from the ruins, leaving only memories of the place where Um Adnan had loved and lost and emanated from force in the face of adversity, day after day.
Today, March 8 is International Women’s Day. And as Israel continues to do its best to make terrestrial existence hell for countless international women, I think a lot about UM Adnan.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
