1)Every family has a story of 1920. In mine the story is we (personified by my grandpa) were against "grand liban" & burned mandate id cards & fought against in Syria. As #Lebanon "commemorates" its centennial don't forget there were people who fought imperialism then & still do

2)Every birth of a nation is also a memory of mourning for those whom never wanted the national framework being imposed on them. Over time nations & states come to seem inevitable, the nation state is framed as destiny & as natural containers of political imagination. In #Lebanon

3/we don't learn history & certainly not our HISTORIES (plural). For example, while my grandpa was ideologically opposed to what he called "partition" from #Syria, he was also worried about his family business which thrived on a lack of borders between what became Syria &Lebanon

4/& was predicated on the fact that the family itself lived in both Beirut & Damascus (mikdashi/bikdash). The story is that there was no family "buy in" until 1958 (again, this is a narrative personified by the men in my family, who are the "actors" in this family history-that is

5/ why it is one narrative among many we will never know - the history of sectarianism and of Lebanon as usually told is gendered male, and we-all of us-are told to see ourselves in the exceptionalism of wealthy & powerful men making decisions (including decisions about war) &

6/ thinking deep thoughts. So, 100 years of #Lebanon , 100 years of fighting over what that means & 100 years of stories & narratives that we must collect & share & mark. This occasion also marks the need for some analytic humility. These are stories I grew up hearing about

7/Grande Liban, French colonization and imperialism & the "betrayal" of people who wanted & were not allowed to opt out-precisely bc Lebanon was not the result of a popular referendum, it was an imperial IMPOSITION & resistance carried a price. But the stories that informed me

8/ are not the stories other grew up with & were informed by. This includes the passing of generations & everything in between that makes 100 years ago seem impossibly far away from the critical "NOW." Humility is the ability to know this is one history, one narrative among many