Ahmad saw me looking at the cedars and said: "I added a few cedars because� you know", "they're great" I replied. You see Ahmad knew that we were Christians, and because of that, things couldn't add up. He was confronted with a paradox. Why would a Christian want to 'belong' to a Shiite tradition? And the cedars were added to play the role of a bumper, to point to that paradoxical situation by creating a pictorial illogicality (the Cedars are the emblem of the First Republic, the republic of Christian hegemony in Lebanon).

My only way out was compliance. An absolute compliance to an overwhelming omnipotent discourse that preceded me, that is always one step in front of me. So I decided to go to the source, and if my father was a martyr then I�m going to treat him as one. I went to Hizballah, with an old black and white photograph, and I met one of their 2 official painters (Ahmad Abdallah), gave him the photo, and asked him to draw my father as he does martyrs, because I want to honor him.

So my father became a martyr, in spite of him. In spite of me. And even the tender and tragic: "4 cotton underwear for Tony from Qassem's" written by him in his notebook before he died couldn't save him from that horrid fate. This was like a second death for him. This time he died again, for good, with no possibility of resurrection.

I was standing in the present looking towards the past, but between me and that past there was a prism that deformed my view, what I saw, and rendered all attempts to reconstitute a lost loved one, and hence to reconcile with the past, futile. I also presume that this is not simply my case. This is not about "my" father, but a general symptom of a society that is said to live in a perpetual present, never coming to terms with its yesterday, let alone its troubled distant past.