Funerals and Returns - Lux Magazine

The history of southern Lebanon is deeply connected to the Palestinian struggle for liberation. Before the Zionist occupation of Palestine, farmers and merchants from the highlands of Jabal Amel would sell their goods throughout the Galilee, knitting together communities across the borderless region. After the violent displacement of some 750,000 Palestinians from their native land during the 1948 Nakba, many Palestinians took refuge in southern Lebanese villages, some themselves the sites of Zionist massacres.

During the 18-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon between 1982 and 2000, Israeli forces and their partners in the Southern Lebanese Army, a far-right Christian militia, oversaw home demolitions, extrajudicial killings, and the detention and torture of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese in the notorious Khiam Prison. The crushing blows of war came down again in July 2006, when the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah exchanged fire with the Israeli military over a 34-day period, causing widespread destruction across the South.

In October 2024, southern Lebanon became a new front in Israel’s war on Gaza after Hezbollah fired several rockets at Israeli military infrastructure with the stated goal of curbing Zionist aggression. Since then, the Israeli military has annihilated entire villages, destroyed vital water infrastructure, and sown the soil of southern Lebanon with internationally restricted white phosphorus. Israeli warplanes had also carpet-bombed Dahiya, the southern Shiite suburb of Beirut, in September. And yet, Hezbollah’s decision to strike against Israel was largely supported by the majority Shiite community of southern Lebanon.

Fatima Jouma, 25, who grew up in Dahiya and is originally from the southern Lebanese village of Houmin el Fawka, has been documenting the war since its early days. Her images of martyrs’¹ funerals in particular offer a window into a region long marginalized within the country and painted as a terrorist haven abroad. In her photos, Jouma focuses on details — women’s hands as they hold up photos of their sons, the crinkles around their eyes. She has filmed young southern girls in a shelter for displaced people, making beaded bracelets to sell to passersby, and elderly Lebanese women swathed in traditional black funeral attire, flashing the victory sign at the camera. Jouma has also been involved with mutual aid efforts to support southerners, delivering sanitary pads and other forms of aid to shelters around Beirut. Over a WhatsApp call one week before Lebanon’s ceasefire with Israel on November 27, the sounds of distant bombings punctuating our conversation, Jouma and I discussed her photographic practice and the relationship between southern Lebanese people and the struggle against Zionism. This interview has been translated from Arabic, condensed, and edited.

The wall that was built in 2015 separating southern Lebanon from occupied Palestine.

Lylla Younes In Lebanon, being from the South is very different from being from other parts of the country. When did you develop an awareness of those differences?

Fatima Jouma The people of Lebanon don’t have a shared history. They don’t have the same literal contact with Israel as an enemy. Many are not informed at all about the 18 years of Israeli occupation in the South, for example. For me, this became clear after the terrorist bombings in Dahiya during the Syrian War.² Between 2013 and 2015, [Syrian rebel groups] set off around 13 explosions in the suburb, which led to dozens of martyrs. When they bombed the Iranian embassy, glass rained down on our school, and we had to evacuate. A girl in my class was martyred. During that time, the features of Dahiya changed dramatically. Suddenly there were checkpoints. It used to take 10 minutes to drive home from my school; suddenly, the trip became 45 minutes. It was a big turning point in my life, but I realized when I got older that no one in my college or in the artist community had even heard about it.

LY When did you become interested in documenting the South?

FJ I grew up close to my grandmother, a character with many stories to tell. She was like a sister to me. She lived in West Beirut, but when she stayed with us, we would share a room. Teta’s life embodies the story of southern Lebanese people: At age 15, she left the South to work in Beirut to support her family. She returned, only to flee again because of the civil war. She left for a third time during the Israeli occupation, when young southern men were being conscripted into the Lahad Army.³ So this trip back and forth — against her will — this is my grandmother’s story. And in that story is the story of many others — her sons, for example. It is also a typical Lebanese story because it is a tale of displacement and return.

So I was surrounded by this personality and these stories, and then, when I was quite young, I discovered movies. There was a video store that opened near our home. My father bought a camcorder, and I became the person who filmed the family. My experience with the image began with cinema.

Women attend the funeral of Ali Youssef Mahdi, who was killed alongside his first cousin, Hussein, in an Israeli drone strike near Naqura. Ali, who worked in Africa, had recently returned home to Lebanon to visit.

LY Shortly after the war broke out, I started seeing your photographs on friends’ social media and in articles about the South. In particular, I recall your images of martyrs’ funerals. How did you come to photograph the funerals?

FJ There were two phases of displacement during this recent war in Lebanon. Many residents of the border villages left shortly after the war broke out almost a year ago. Eventually, funerals became the only way we were allowed to return to those villages. So we would go, all the people of the village, to check on our homes and our land. That was the beauty of the funeral. This person, whose body was no longer with us, was still doing the job of bringing us back home.

I realized that the moment of burial contains so much honesty. I was photographing these communities in the truest moments of their lives. These were moments of death, yes, but I was seeing beauty. I started to develop personal relationships with the women at these funerals, such that each one I went to took me to another. After a while, some of the women started saying to me, “Where were you? We missed you last time.”

LY Would you only go to funerals in your own village or to those in others as well? How did people receive you?

FJ I went to all the villages of the South, all the border areas — Houla, Aita al Shaab, Zoub al Naqoura, Tyre, Nabatiye. First of all, I’m a woman that looks and dresses like them. That’s the most important thing; there’s this resemblance that alleviated any suspicion toward me. Secondly, because I’m the daughter of a southern village myself, I would [be invited to] stay for breakfast. Sometimes, I would end up at a funeral because my friend was from that village, and she would introduce me to her family, who would introduce me to others. They would ask if I was making TikToks, and I would say no; I’m making a film about the South. The idea that I was photographing for the archive and not for a scoop or for social media put them at ease. So I would spend the whole day in the village, from morning until night, or in the case of the border villages, until we were told to leave.

Um Ali, a woman from Maarke, a village in the South. She
spent the entire two months of the recent war in her home.

LY What kinds of stories would you hear?

FJ I’ll tell you the story of one woman from Houla, a border village and the site of a Zionist massacre in 1948. When I arrived, I was walking aimlessly through the streets, unsure where to go or who to follow. This woman came to me and stayed with me from the beginning of the funeral to the end. She told me about everything in the village. She would say, “This is the mosque they bombed last week; here is the sister of the martyr; here is his mother.” She had memorized the names of the martyrs in every grave. She told me everything, and then she disappeared; I didn’t even get her phone number.

Cut to: I’m walking in Hamra⁴ this summer, and I look across the street, and I see the hajje.⁵ I started rubbing my eyes. Had I lost my mind? I started calling out to her. There was something fateful in our encounter. This woman I might not have found in a million years was suddenly before me. So that’s how I encountered her again and continued telling her story. Every few days, I go drink coffee and have a cigarette with her. I’ve started learning the names of the other displaced people in her building. I’ve started learning their stories. I am making a group of friends in this war, and they are giving me permission to film.

LY Were you consciously trying to intervene in representations of the South that you’ve seen on film or in the media?

“Tell me about your people. Tell me what you have lived through.”

FJ Southern Lebanon is a very complex and rich society, but in dominant Lebanese media and cinema, the character of the southerner is stuck between various stereotypes. Either they’re an uneducated person who doesn’t speak English and deals drugs at night or a girl who takes off her hijab. Or they’re just marching behind Hezbollah and don’t understand a thing. Their only ideology is death and the love of death. Then, of course, you have the opposite extreme [from pro-Hezbollah media] — men who don’t complain and women who don’t cry or ask questions. And that’s also not true. So I could not find a visual representation of this community — not on MTV or on Al Manar.⁶

I don’t think it was a very conscious thing, but once I started amassing an archive of images, I started to see a more realistic picture of this community. I saw what I was doing, and I went back and continued in a more organized way. I started asking myself: What do I want to do with these images? Should I make a Reel with them on Instagram and insert my personality into the work? I don’t want to do that. Should I tell you how Israel is slaughtering us and how we are in a state of despair and defeat? Also no. At the same time, I don’t want to romanticize what we’re going through; to post photos of Dahiya with some background music saying, “We will return.” We will return, and when we do, I’ll see what I’ll photograph. But I don’t want to project my own ideas onto our destruction, our memories, and our relationship with the earth.

In the first month of the war, we were filming in a border town in the South that is no longer reachable. I remember people came up and asked me, “For whom are you photographing?” At that time, there were so many TV stations and influencers coming in that it got to the point where people assumed that anyone with a camera was with a broadcast network. I told them, “I’m not photographing for anyone.” Then, after some months, my answer changed. When someone would ask me who I was photographing for, I would say “I’m photographing for you.” Suddenly, there was a very different relationship between me and the people I was documenting. This machine was offering me a small window through which I could ask someone, “Tell me about your people. Tell me what you have lived through. I want to know the details.”

On the first day of the ceasefire, after 66 days of war, Fatima Jouma visited homes in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

LY How do you see your photographs drawing a connection between the Palestinian cause and the people of southern Lebanon?

FJ Throughout the war, this question kept coming to me: What does it mean to film the funeral of a boy in the face of hunger and massacres and burning in Gaza? For over a year, we have watched a live-streamed genocide, and there hasn’t been a real worthy reaction to it — not a populist one or a national one — anywhere in the world except in southern Lebanon. Some people did little more than cut a watermelon. So when it came to my photos, I asked myself: Am I exposing the enemy? No, this enemy is already exposed. Am I trying to show the people who they are? I’m not a researcher or an anthropologist.

I got married right before the war. For me, marriage had less to do with the institution of marriage and more to do with the person I want to spend my life with. Nowadays, I think about how I will have a son and tell him what happened; how all these photos are a letter to my dear boy. This is what keeps me holding the camera. I am speaking to my son and to his generation, who will someday look back at history. These photos will say to them, “Look what the people of southern Lebanon did for Palestine when no one else in the world did anything.”

LY What did you learn about your people by photographing them?

FJ When you spend time with southern Lebanese people, specifically with the women, history is suddenly translated into human experience, and you realize that this community has suffered a lot. A lot. Everyone knows about the war, but not everyone understands the relationship of the people to the war. Not everyone understands their experience with poverty, with the occupation; their connection to the land, which is their livelihood. So you begin to understand yourself better. With every woman I photographed, I began to understand myself better and what I want to do with this life.

Secondly, there is a strength among these people. I used to read tweets and poems about the South, but when you’re standing before the mother of a martyr, and she tells you, “Fatima, I am relieved. I am relieved that I sacrificed something during this war,” you understand this strength differently. There’s this idea that southern Lebanese people don’t want to be photographed, that they’re a deeply private people. I found just the opposite. We have a great desire to explain ourselves. Now the women tell me, “We want to continue telling the story when we return to our villages. Don’t think that this ends with the war. We will sit on the veranda and drink coffee.” This degree of strength — this was the first time in my life I had touched it.

Lylla Younes is an investigative journalist and writer based in Brooklyn.

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1
In the Arab world, “martyr”’ refers to a person who dies in God’s cause (fi sabilillah). This includes people killed in a struggle for justice. ↩︎
2
During the Syrian War, Hezbollah and Iranian militias fought alongside former president Bashar Al-Assad’s military to expel rebel factions from opposition-held areas. ↩︎
3
The Southern Lebanese Army was an Israeli auxiliary militia headed up by general Antoine Lahad. It administered the Zionist occupation of southern Lebanon from 1982 until 2000. ↩︎
4
A waterfront neighborhood in Beirut where many displaced southerners took shelter during the war. ↩︎
5
A term of respect used to refer to elderly women. ↩︎
6
MTV Lebanon is a Lebanese television station founded in 1991 by Lebanese businessman Gabriel el Murr. The station attracts a bourgeois viewership and has been accused of anti-Palestinian and anti-southern Lebanese bias. Launched in the same year, Al Manar is a television station owned and operated by Hezbollah. ↩︎