Two Easts (WIP)

These photos were taken over two periods this year– over the summer with my father’s family around Lebanon (primarily in the country's capital, Beirut, and in the Baa'bdat hills north of the city), and over the winter with my mother’s family in Longview, Texas. They have only met a handful of times, and now that my parents live separate lives, do not communicate often (if at all). East Texas and the Middle East are not usually associated with each other – where one is marked by stability, the other is marked by turbulence. I have spent a lifetime comparing them, placing my two roots next to each other, and trying to make sense of their opposing nature. They clash in many places, but tie back to each other in many more. The parallels found in the image pairs were not intentional, but were discovered while sorting through my files at the end of this year. While the struggles of these two places that have made me are different on a macro level, they share so much when it comes to the day to day – an intense care for the land and the home, deep ties to the communities that help maintain them, unbreakable loyalty when it comes to family and loved ones.

Loss is ever present in both. In Lebanon, there is a loss of innocence as a product of external factors. Family members have had to move out of homes, fix shattered windows, have had to change routes, yet there is a strong internal stability amidst the outer chaos. In some ways, they are uneasy in times of quiet. The outside world uses the word “resilient”, but it is not as much resilience as it is violent familiarity with living in a tinderbox. In Texas, everything external stays the same – my grandparents have been in the same house for over 40 years, they have gone to the same church for decades and met with the same bible study group for just as long, walked the same paths and driven the same roads for years as well. Longview does not change quickly. It does so gradually, at a pace that feels almost intentional, considerate. But so much feels unfamiliar as we grapple with my grandfather’s dementia. I become my mother, he is no longer able (or allowed) to access rooms in his own house that were once familiar to him, we are stuck in the past. Loss persists here as well, just internally.

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