Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the history of war, exile and revolution experienced by a Syrian community displaced in Lebanon through its relationality with nature. Despite its unspeakability, this history is evoked through the senses in the midst of exilic gardens.

Paper long abstract:

In 2013 a Syrian rural community was expelled from its home during a ruthless military campaign led by the al-Assad regime and Hezbollah militants. The expulsion was followed by 'the journey of death', a perilous flight to Lebanon where the community built a small camp and a school. Soon after their construction, both spaces were transformed into gardens embellished with not only plants and flowers but also paintings representing human interaction with the nature and the community's lost home. Based on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork started in 2014, this paper examines the political features of the relationality between the community and nature across the Syrian-Lebanese border. Specifically, it captures how this relationality becomes a site to articulate the political origin of the community's history of war, exile and revolution as well as tasharrud, the affective state of permanent loss generated by this history. As tragic and mundane losses constituting the community's predicament are silenced and unspeakable within the revolutionary political project, I argue that this collective history and tasharrud are imprinted in the exilic gardens. Community's encounters with plants, flowers and paintings animate an amalgam of sensory modalities and communicative channels other than the voice - such as performativity and aesthetics - through which fragments of this collective history can be evoked. The paper reflects on the limit of a voice and the absence of a coherent political discourse characterising the predicament of tasharrud.