Searching for Perseus

It is early January 2026 and my first visit to Lebanon in a little over three years. From my window seat on the plane, I lose myself in the forest of high rises kissing the shore, reaching as high as they can for the sun. The sea shimmers with a jubilance I’m tempted to believe. I like my country from up here. Postcard-ready. Making promises it knows it can’t keep.

The pilot announces that we have started our descent into the airport, and with my gaze fixed on the sharpening skyline, I see Pigeon Rock. Two large limestone formations that have stood off the coast for ten million years. In the last five years I lived here, they were barely a twenty-minute stroll from the house, a landmark I’d greet daily with the nonchalance of a local.

Known by some as Lover’s Rock, the site has long been a gathering space for couples around sunset. During the civil war, it was said that many a lover, left bereft by a beloved’s death or departure, had ended their life by diving into the sea from its heights.

After moving to the U.S., I’d return to them over the years like a pilgrim slouching towards a covenant, drawn to the only constant I’ve found in a country where the world has ended multiple times and is always promising to end again. A landmark I’d always taken for granted appears majestic in my eyes. A monument sculpted by nature and time offers a rare third space in a city that lacks them. They have witnessed every tragedy that has befallen the city for thousands of years, dutiful record keepers of apocalypses past and present. With time, the rocks became my patience stone, a place that could hold my griefs and secrets.

There are urban legends that claim Pigeon Rock as the remnants of Cetus, the sea monster slain by Perseus to rescue Andromeda. The battle is said to have taken place on the Eastern Mediterranean, and many cities on the coast, from Greece to Palestine, have tried to claim themselves as that ancient battleground.

**

In the three years since I’d been gone, the country’s economy had collapsed and the lira severely devalued. The litany of its many disasters now also includes an ongoing war with Israel that has — since October 2023 — left its south scorched and occupied, with many southerners either unable to return or having nothing to return to. Their present lives and memories are buried under a pile of rubble, the land torched with white phosphorus designed to turn it barren, while the occupation army’s air force extinguishes life one strike after another.

Could this be a place to live and die? Maybe in another life. In this one, these futile questions have already been answered on our behalf.

I roam from friend’s house to old university campus, hungry for touchstones, trying to return to a feeling I can’t name, a “thereness” always just out of reach. All around me, the simplest tasks turn into a series of obstacle courses. What time should I turn on the hot water if I want to shower before the power cuts? Should I leave the house forty-five minutes early, or give myself a full hour to reach a destination that, in theory, takes no more than twenty minutes to get to? The mundane demands a perpetual settling for the mediocre, a resignation to endless frustrations. Daily, I drive by what is left of the silos at the port of Beirut. When they blew up on that August day in 2020, the sea had absorbed enough of the shockwaves that it spared the city even more devastation. As with so many of the country’s tragedies — beginning with the civil war — the culprits remain unpunished.

One early afternoon, the sea is having a good day. Turquoise hemmed by bright white spume; the water stretches alongside me as I walk with S, who has also made a life elsewhere many years ago. Yet even under the bright sun, the air feels dense, heavy with grief both suspended and anticipated. We muse about what return might look like. Could we build a life here? Could this be a place to live and die? Maybe in another life. In this one, these futile questions have already been answered on our behalf.

On July 12, 2006, the Israelis announced the beginning of the war with an airstrike on Beirut’s airport. Within hours, they had imposed a total blockade of the country by air, land, and sea. The chorus was ever the same: they claimed the war’s main objective was to destroy Hezbollah, a thorn that had plagued their expansionist ambitions since 1982. They threatened, as they would again in 2024 and 2026, to send troops all the way to the Litani, with talks of establishing a “long-term” presence there — read: occupation — merely six years after their withdrawal in the year 2000.

Their naval ship, the INS Hanit 503, expanded the theater of operations into the sea — a twenty-first century Cetus. The sea monster roared with fire, claiming the entire country as its Andromeda.

By July 14, the war was everywhere, a flood that had risen to our chests. Sayyed Nasrallah appeared on television to give one of his many live addresses that summer. Looking straight into the camera, he raised his right hand to the side and proclaimed: “Now… in the middle of the sea… look at the warship that has attacked Beirut, while it burns and sinks before your very eyes.” Not even a minute later, Hezbollah fired a rocket that sank the ship. There, from a bunker in Dahieh, emerged Perseus, and with a simple hand gesture, Cetus was no more.

After the INS Hanit 503’s sinking, the war would carry on for another thirty days, by the end of which the occupation army had to renounce its ambitions of extended occupation, with UN resolution 1701 mandating the deployment of peacekeeping troops along border villages.

Throughout these thirty-three days, the sea was reduced to a horizon line, and every afternoon, I’d go on long walks in the mountains eager to see it from different vantage points. I’d imagine myself running until I hit the shore. I wished for the ability to walk into the water and keep walking until I reached Cyprus.

A high schooler on the cusp of senior year, I spent that summer contending with mortality, one veto’ed ceasefire resolution after another. I watched John Bolton raise his hand in objection, a cutting gesture that sanctioned murder as the death tally rose like a tidal wave sweeping the land. I learned all the euphemisms crafted to make our deaths permissible. Finance jargon — like “collateral damage” — excused our slaughter as a necessary evil in service of a hegemonic power. Our flesh, blood, bones, and souls aggregated into liabilities. Though my English was still fledgling, I could already identify what Isabella Hammad would later refer to as “acts of language.”

Years later, I’d discover June Jordan’s “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” in which the lines There was the Mediterranean: You / could walk into the water and stay / there would awaken memories of that time.

Since 2006, I’ve had recurring dreams in which I live in a house by the sea that would always flood. At times, the house is by the Mediterranean; at others, off the Atlantic. In each dream, the house takes on different structures. A triple arch, high ceilings, and stained-glass windows like those that lined Beirut’s coast decades ago. Other times, the house is a standard American house with wooden structures, modern kitchen appliances, and an attic with a skylight. When the house floods, the water pools all the way to my knees, and I don’t fight it; I know no one is coming to my rescue. I let the tide carry me before I wake up in my apartment.

The years have taught me that no matter how may thousands of miles I put between us, Cetus is never at bay, and the water always finds me.

**

I’ve learned to embody many selves in America. I affect an accent in the presence of strangers. Slacken it when around trusted company. When tragedy strikes in Lebanon or in Palestine, I tuck my grief in pristine email English where I circle back on deliverables, piggy-back off whatever inane point is being made on a call with people who’ve never had to wonder if a loved one survived the latest annihilation attempt. All these years, and I still cannot spell annihilation without the help of auto-correct.

Outside my Brooklyn apartment, a few days after the April 8 bombing, I am stopped in my tracks by a stranger who notices the word “Lebanon” on my tote bag. Her face contorts with shame and pity. “Is your family there? Are they okay?” I don’t answer. But it doesn’t matter. She keeps going. Something something beautiful place. Something something what a shame, something something how crazy is all this? “This,” a nebulous unnamable, the byproduct of western headlines that name no culprit, trickling into everyday conversation.

In between a hundred “I’m sorry’s” peppering an otherwise useless rant in which she centers her feelings, she waits for my reassurance, my consolation, anything to placate her guilt and absolve her from its overwhelm, but I stay quiet.

Then, like now, I never cared for apologies from liberal western citizens. I would much rather see their alleged sorrow channeled into rage, into civil disobedience, into direct action.

**

Andromeda’s fate was sealed when her mother, Cassiopeia, queen of Aethiopia, boasted that her daughter was more beautiful than the nereids. The display of human hubris angered Poseidon, who flooded the kingdom. When the oracle claimed that the god’s wrath could only be appeased if Andromeda was offered up as sacrifice, she was tied to a rock and awaited her death at the hands of Cetus, the sea monster. But before she could be devoured, Andromeda was rescued by Perseus who, having just decapitated Medusa, used her severed head to turn the sea monster into stone.

For decades, Lebanon built itself a reputation for being sexy despite being battered. Sexy because it is battered. Almost like its suffering enhances its allure. We’re lauded for our resilience, our insistence on partying in the middle of war. How we make devastation fun. As if the prerequisite for calling us beautiful is the sight of our ruin. How our dilapidated buildings are “charming,” “hauntingly beautiful,” sights to lust after. Which is to say, that in the western gaze, for the othered to be beautiful, they must first be broken.

**

About a decade ago, after a difficult spring, I decided to quit my day job and travel across the Mediterranean. I roamed Sicily and different parts of Greece in search of a thread that bound the people of that basin. I looked for remnants of the sea monster and found limestone formations all around, dutifully photographing each one. I decided that I wouldn’t stop until every shoreline had been accounted for. The search would stagger with covid and immigration matters, restricting my already crippled freedom of movement.

In 2024, I arrived in Malta, where I found myself walking through a strange mirror. The archipelago was for centuries traded from one empire to the next, shaping a language that bears many parallels to Levantine Arabic. In Saint Lucian and Slima, I found analogues to the northern Lebanese coastal towns of Jbeil and Kaslik, the inroads mirroring Karm El Zaytoun. Off the coast of Gozo, I hiked till I reached Fungus Rock, another limestone formation that echoed Pigeon Rock. On its surface grows a parasitic plant that was believed to possess the ability to cure many diseases.

In WWII, Malta too had known a naval siege. The archipelago reeled under a Nazi naval blockade meant to coerce it into joining the forces of the Axis. The siege resulted in a two-year long famine similar to the 1915 blockade of Lebanon in which Allied Forces sought to weaken the Ottoman empire. In that moment, though, I am catapulted to 2006, and the INS Hanit choking our shores, likely with the same aim, until it was struck.

I wondered whether Fungus Rock was another piece of one of the sea dragons defeated by Perseus, and whether it belonged to the same creature off Beirut’s shoreline. What if each part of the sea monster held different threads to the same truth? What if each of these rock formations were antidotes to our pain, evidence that monsters no matter how mighty can be defeated, that no reign of terror is eternal?

**

For a while, on my yearly visits to Lebanon, M and I had a habit of getting breakfast together. I’d climb on to the back of his motorcycle, and we’d weave through gridlocked streets making our way to either our usual spot in Cola or another place in Basta. It was the same order every time: a plate of fatteh, a plate of foul, and a basket of pita. We gave each other a summary of our personal year in between mouthfuls, the city buzzing around us. Then we’d ride down to Ain el Mreisseh, wind hitting our faces, and as he sped down the avenue, I’d sink my teeth into the thrill of being alive.

Once by the sea, we’d load up on Uncle Deek coffee and spend an hour walking on the corniche with the tender soundtrack of waves lapping against rocks.

M has long since moved away, and my visits have thinned. All that remains are traces of memories like a diluted dream that keeps rewriting itself with every retelling.

On April 8, 2026, I was scrolling through a cascade of footage on my phone just moments after the Black Wednesday strikes. I recognized landmarks, places that were integral to my personal psychogeography. I thought I recognized the café where M and I had gotten breakfast. Is it? Could it be? I searched through lists of targeted areas and found the neighborhood in question. Unable to stomach the possibility that this place could be gone, I pushed away compelling evidence. Told myself the images were inconclusive. Perhaps because I didn’t want to contend with that loss. By leaving the matter a question mark, I fooled myself through the diasporic privilege of distance.

A life lived in translation is one where massacres seven thousand miles away arrive by way of palm-sized screens. Every video helps me map a cartography of disasters. I dream of the sea swallowing me whole at night. I dream of Fungus Rock blooming carnations that carry magical powers.

**

Absence is harder to accept than death, writes Etel Adnan in Sea and Fog.

In my mind, the city has now become a mausoleum of flashbacks, where different landmarks mark different stages of my life. Collective grief disintegrates into fragmented pain. The enemy no longer lurks only at the southern border; it has slipped inside our cities, our heads. It wears our skin, speaks our language, hallucinates kinship with the assailant while staring down the barrel of his cocked gun.

On the outskirts of Beirut, billboards with AI-generated images tell us, “No to war.” Nadim Gemayel, the heir of a far-right Christian militia, whose legacy is the Sabra and Chatila massacre, revives the Phalangist slogan “10,452 km2” as a cry for sovereignty against Iranian influence — which funds and supplies the armed resistance — while Cetus cordons off border villages and rebrands the area as a “buffer zone.” And in Washington, D.C., conversations between the sword and the neck are held over the mangled bodies — many still awaiting DNA identification — of the April 8 bombing campaign.

For a long time, I believed in clarity. That there was a Perseus at the gate, and a Cetus kept at bay. That the lines, however bloodied, still held. But they no longer do.

Ghassan Kanafani tells us to be future-oriented, because the work of liberation demands we fall in love with our sovereignty and bring it into being, even if it arrives on its own timeline, one we may not live long enough to witness.

Colonizers also love the future, but in their iteration, they are the vanquishers, while the colonized succumb to the belief that the future lies behind a firmament of a world that has moved on without them. They wither in the past, locked in the chokehold of yellowing photographs, deeds, and keys to homes that may or may no longer exist. I catch myself enacting this defeat when I browse through old photographs I’ve taken of the south, lingering in wounds that seem permanent. From within this wreckage, I am still searching for Perseus.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the south of Lebanon, Cetus devours everything in sight. He appears on my screen as a woman dressed in zionist military fatigues. She stands in a Lebanese kitchen, cutting into the produce left behind by owners who were forced to flee. She moves through the space with the ease of someone who does not need to ask who it belongs to.