I first met Um Adnan in 2006 in the south Lebanese village of Chehabiyeh, which lies not far from the border with Israel and regularly suffers accordingly. I was travelling in Lebanon shortly after the end of that summer’s 34-day Israeli assault, which had killed some 1, 200 people and littered swaths of the country with unexploded ordnance.
Um Adnan was born in 1939, nine years prior to Israel’s violent self-invention on Palestinian land. She had married a Palestinian refugee from the vicinity of Nazareth, who had fled to Lebanon in 1948 as a child, separated from his family along the way. Her husband was already deceased by the time we met, but her son Hassan told me with a nostalgic chuckle that the pair’s first encounter had been “like magic”.
Um Adnan bore eight children, two boys and six girls, three of whom died – one in a car accident and one during the Lebanese civil war of 1975-90. The third was accidentally shot by a cousin.
A robustو veiled woman, Um Adnan already had difficulty walking in 2006 when my friend Amelia and I turned up at her house – which unlike many other south Lebanese residences had managed to avoid irreparable damage during the summer’s assault. Amelia and I had been hitchhiking our way through the devastated landscape, and Hassan had been one of countless motorists to pick us up on the side of the road and cart us home to be stuffed with food and put up for the night.
I returned to Lebanon alone in 2008 after taking the bus from Turkiye to Syria, where Hassan volunteered to retrieve me. I would then spend the better part of two months sleeping on Um Adnan’s living room floor beneath a colourful portrait of her late husband. Hassan slept on a mattress beside me, an arrangement that occasioned not so much as a batting of the eye from Um Adnan.
By this time, Um Adnan had even greater difficulty manoeuvring, and yet she could rarely be made to sit still, dedicating herself to an endless rotation of chores, gardening, and cooking. A vat of green beans was always on hand for me – as well as an array of other treats – and the fact that one had to pass through the kitchen to reach the only toilet in the house meant that Um Adnan had plenty of opportunities to intercept me and plunk me down at the table for yet another obligatory feeding session.
Um Adnan had a smile for everyone, her stoic grace all the more notable given her life’s trajectory, which included surviving such episodes of mass slaughter as the Israeli invasion of 1982 that killed tens of thousands in Lebanon. The acute losses she had endured over the years – all against a backdrop of persistent torment by the state that had made her husband a refugee – made the mere act of getting up every morning one of fierce resilience.
Whether cooking, cleaning, singing or bellowing for one grandchild or another to make haste on an errand, Um Adnan embodied an everyday heroism that is denied in Orientalist discourse, which reduces the Arab/Muslim woman to a weak and oppressed figure. Never mind that, in Lebanon and Palestine, it is quite the opposite of weak to hold families together while contending with the ever-present existential Israeli threat.
During the brutal Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which lasted from 1978-2000, Hassan had fought with the Lebanese resistance – meaning that Um Adnan never knew at what moment she might lose a fourth child. Now that she had him at home, she held him close.
Though unfazed by the sleeping arrangement in her living room, Um Adnan welcomed Hassan’s announcement that he and I were getting married – part of a scheme we had devised while under the influence of too much wine. As per our wine-induced vision, Hassan’s marriage to me – a United States citizen – would eventually enable him to procure a US passport and travel to his father’s village in present-day Israel.
With my less-than-tidy ways and general uselessness in the kitchen, I was no doubt not the daughter-in-law Um Adnan had envisioned for herself, but she took it all in noble stride.
We were wed by a sheikh in the village of Tibnine, and I was inserted as wife number one on Hassan’s identity document for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, a category to which he had been assigned by Lebanon’s law that barred Lebanese women like Um Adnan from passing their citizenship on to their offspring.
Needless to say, the passport scheme did not pan out, but Um Adnan showered us with good wishes upon our return from the sheikh and promised a proper party in the future.
I would later lose contact with Hassan for many years – and feared the worst – until one day in December 2022 he materialised in my WhatsApp messages with a series of emojis and a “Belennnnnnnnnn”. He was alive, but Um Adnan was not, having passed away during the coronavirus pandemic. His voice cracked as he told me: “She broke my heart”.
Um Adnan’s house has since been converted to rubble along with much of the rest of Chehabiyeh – the handiwork, of course, of the Israeli military, which launched its latest invasion of Lebanon in the autumn of last year. Her family was able to salvage nothing from the ruins, leaving only memories of the place where Um Adnan had loved and lost and emanated strength in the face of adversity, day in and day out.
Today, March 8, is International Women’s Day. And as Israel continues to do its best to make earthly existence hell for countless international women, I’m thinking a lot about Um Adnan.
