‘Come to Lebanon’: How Habib Jalib’s verses still urge us to not ignore the country

‘Adeebo, shaero, danishvaro, sukhandaano

Karo hikayat-e-Beirut khoon-e-dil se raqam

Shikast jahal ko ho gi shaoor jeete ga

Kare ga jahal kahan tak sar shaoor qalam’

(Writers, poets, intellectuals, connoisseurs

Write the tale of Beirut with the blood of martyrs

Consciousness will win, ignorance will face defeat

Till when will the beheading of consciousness by ignorance repeat)

– Habib Jalib

Lebanon is a part of the Arab world which is usually trivialised and exoticised in the mainstream Western media as a state crucial to the West – read the United States – in the ‘War on Terror’. Therefore whenever a bomb blast occurs in Beirut – or like the very latest explosion that occurred there last week on the night of August 4 – the West and its compliant media take notice, only to disappear until other more ‘exotic’ occurrences offer an opportunity.

Lebanon – which was artificially and opportunistically carved out of Syria by the French colonisers to exert future leverage – is routinely exoticised in the Western media as a European outpost of civilisation surrounded by savage Arab nations, with the former perpetually at war with the latter to salvage its Christian, European values. Throughout its torturous history, whenever Israel attacked and demolished half of Lebanon to achieve its strategic objectives, the Western media applauded the carnage sympathetically as necessary to rescue Lebanon’s supposedly pro-Western trajectory. Meanwhile, the emergence of Hezbollah in Lebanon as a national resistance movement and its subsequent parliamentary success there was ignored or greeted with traditional hostility and contempt.

A more nuanced understanding of Lebanon, and by extension, its capital, Beirut, is thus needed in these troubling times. Not surprisingly, poets have come to the rescue, where security analysts and commentators have been scratching their heads to make sense of just the latest round of violence to strike Beirut. In the immediate aftermath of the aforementioned Beirut blasts, many friends and comrades shared the poem “Ek Naghma Karbala-e-Beirut ke Liye” (A Song for the Karbala of Beirut) on social media which Faiz Ahmed Faiz had written on that city in the context of the destruction of that city in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Bloodletting continued in Beirut even after the Israeli invasion, culminating in the infamous Sabra and Shatila Massacre in the city in September that year, as well as the bombings of the US Embassy, and US and French barracks in Beirut in April and October of 1983, respectively; leading to a complete withdrawal of US Marines from Lebanon a year later.

Unlike Faiz’s aforementioned poem about Beirut, it is a little-known and under-appreciated fact that his great contemporary, the people’s poet Habib Jalib, has written numerous poems on Palestine and the Lebanese Civil War. In fact, Jalib wrote so many poems on these two topics that one can compile a whole book to document these seminal albeit tragic events of 20^th century Middle Eastern history. In order to give the reader just a glimpse of Jalib’s oeuvre on Lebanon, I will limit myself to an original translation of perhaps his best and most representative poem on Lebanon, titled “Labnan Chalo, Labnan Chalo” (Come to Lebanon, Come to Lebanon) which was also written in the perspective of the Lebanese Civil War in the 1980s; in fact two of the protagonists on opposing sides of the War are actually named in the poem, namely US President Ronald Reagan who decided to send Marines to intervene in Lebanon (‘Reagan ko bhagaane maidaan se’) and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (‘Yasir ke bahadur jiyalon par’).

Re-reading Jalib’s poem today beckons us to adopt the same spirit of internationalism, in light of the destruction of Beirut, and to show solidarity with Lebanon today, which was a hallmark of Jalib’s generation for political reasons. Indeed, Jalib had said elsewhere with noticeable irony,

‘Ijaazat mangte hen hum bhi jab Beirut jaane ki

Toa ahl-al-hukum farmaate hen tum zindaan men jao’

(To go to Beirut, whenever we too seek permission

The rulers order us to go to the dungeon)

Unlike the dictatorial times when these verses were penned in the 1980s, one hopes it is now easier to ‘go to Beirut’, or to even express solidarity with it in Naya Pakistan!

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Come to Lebanon, Come to Lebanon by Habib Jalib

‘Where the lightening of Satan is scattering

Where Man is mourning

Where the peace of the world is floundering

Faith beckons us anon

Come to Lebanon, come to Lebanon.

 

To save the boat from the storm

To free Man from Satan

To clear the field of Reagan

The heart says every second anon

Come to Lebanon, come to Lebanon.

 

O Arab, o foreigner

We have to bend the head of hauteur

We will not rest till the end of the usurper

My beloved, proceed with one life anon

Come to Lebanon, come to Lebanon.

 

There is no let-up from the murderer

Every heart has been torn asunder

The bloodthirsty enemy seeks to plunder

Wherever there is children’s laughter

Come to Lebanon, come to Lebanon.

 

For Yasir’s brave men

Who will remove darkness from its den

For the light of the dawning sun

Let us sacrifice ourselves anon

Come to Lebanon, come to Lebanon.

 

To stir the people of frenzy

To offer life for honesty

To die in the path of fidelity

Proceed with your head in the field anon

Come to Lebanon, come to Lebanon.

 

This is the battle for world peace

This is the battle for all the people of grief

This is the battle for the human specie

Proceed for enhancing the dignity of Man anon.

Come to Lebanon, come to Lebanon.’