I remember that during my years as a teacher, I founded, along with some of my colleagues at the school, a literary salon for the teachers. As an Arabic literature teacher, my goal was to encourage my students to read by creating a model worth emulating.

For me, it was an attempt to forge new bonds with those I love, or perhaps, to heal a wound, to steal a fleeting smile…

That day, I suggested that the salon read The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi. But to my surprise, the choice stirred an uproar; a wave of disapproval and indignation among some of the readers. A debate ensued about the supposed “impropriety” of circulating such works!

In short, anger and resentment filled the room, and I suddenly found myself forced to argue what I had thought were self-evident truths. I am, after all, the daughter of a religious scholar, and our home was filled with a large library — shelves crowded with books on jurisprudence, theology, and Islamic law, alongside the novels of Naguib Mahfouz, Abdul Rahman Munif, Tayeb Salih, and Gabriel García Márquez…

That was my first encounter with imposed limits — with the kind of fear that suffocates and blinds until reading itself becomes nothing more than passive consumption, stripped of any critical mind.

I recall this incident whenever I reflect on the cultural landscape of Jabal Amel. For over forty years — since religious parties took up the banner of “resistance” — we have been unable to produce a cultural environment of real significance.

Creativity has been shackled by a web of prohibitions and taboos, turning literature into a servant of political and propagandistic discourse rather than a parallel project of resistance. This, in turn, has negatively affected the quality of creative output: poetry, theatre, and fiction have remained largely marginal; or worse, subordinated to media mobilization, deprived of any genuine space for imagination or critique.

It is important to clarify here that we are not calling on writers to abandon belonging, or to reject their beliefs, ideas, or convictions. Such a demand would be absurd. We are the products of the histories and ideas that shape us, and we take pride in that. The real question, rather, lies in the space the creator chooses to move within — a space that, by its very nature, must be free, open to all possibilities.

Totalitarian movements have always sought to suppress creative minds or force them to express the movement’s moral hierarchy. The Soviet Union did the same, pushing art to serve the ideals of communism — Maxim Gorky’s The Mother being a prime example, an icon of literature that glorifies the proletariat.

Returning to the experience of the “resistance” in Jabal Amel, despite its undeniable historical weight, human depth, and the magnitude of the sacrifices it made, it has failed to produce creativity that matches its achievements. And when such works do emerge, they are often marred by the crudeness and noise of slogans, stripped of emotional or human depth.

Most of these texts belong to what is known as committed literature — a genre that appoints itself as a moral guardian over its audience, offering lessons, wisdom, and moral preaching in a direct, didactic tone, as if it constantly fears misunderstanding, or doubts the reader’s intelligence — lest the reader wander into “unsafe” territories of thought and interpretation.

The Palestinian resistance escaped such constraints when its creators gave free rein to their imagination and creativity, anchoring their own narrative in the collective consciousness. They enriched the Arab cultural library with novelists, poets, and artists such as Ghassan Kanafani, Emile Habibi, Samih al-Qasim, Mahmoud Darwish, and Naji al-Ali, among others; figures who ensured that the bleeding Palestinian wound remained visible, alive, and open for generations to come.

This influence extended to the Lebanese National Resistance, which was a natural continuation of the armed Palestinian presence in Lebanon — that small country which, despite the iron, fire, and barricades, and the absence of safety in its conventional sense, became a shared space for expression and revelation. In that atmosphere, many names shone brightly: Elias Khoury in fiction; poets like Shawqi Bzeih, Abbas Beydoun, Mohammad Ali Shamseddine, and Hassan and Mohammad and Issam Abdullah; and Ziad Rahbani, whose name became intertwined with the Lebanese Communist Party and the national resistance, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, adopting in his theatre a leftist discourse at times, and a sharp critique of the left’s failures at others.

In light of this, the barrenness of the creative scene in recent years has coincided with an inflated sense of power and control; a combination that led many within this current to forget that language remains a wild, untamed steed, resistant to domestication and molding. One cannot, under any circumstances, drag it by force to where one wishes it to go. For it is the soft power — the power of creativity and beauty — that endures long after the mightiest empires have fallen.

And because memories call forth one another like beads on a rosary, I will tell you about my grandmother, who embodied the very sky of Jabal Amel before it was fenced in, and its rivers that once defied their banks. I remember her sitting at the head of the room, reciting to us poems written by my grandfather — verses filled with daring and passion. My mother’s cheeks, shy by nature, would flush red, and she would beg her mother to recite something “more decent.” But my grandmother would cast her a reproachful look and reply, “This is poetry, my daughter!”

My grandmother’s aesthetic philosophy, one that I adopted and still hold dear, is precisely what can save our creativity from extinction. It is what can break down barriers to create a new cultural atmosphere in our society: one that embraces genuine artists, introduces them to the public, and learns from their experiences. Such an atmosphere would prepare the ground, preserving its history and legacy through a new generation of free writers.

Until that happens, however, our collective narrative will remain hidden — imprisoned within the minds and thoughts of our creators — stifled by a social authority that has long appointed itself judge and arbiter, granting and revoking legitimacy, condemning and acquitting, sanctioning and forbidding. Until that changes, the absence of great creative works will itself remain the loudest and most dominant text of all.

And if religious-partisan restrictions, as we have noted, have shackled creativity, then the Lebanese state, represented by the Ministries of Education and Culture, has been no less negligent. It too has contributed to the Shia community’s sense of marginalization. Anyone examining the official Arabic literature textbooks used in schools would notice how they feature major poets and writers from certain sects and regions — figures who indeed played a vital role in shaping Lebanon’s cultural identity — yet they almost completely ignore writers from Jabal Amel, such as Mohammad Ali al-Houmami, the poet of independence, and his daughters Balqis and Amira, as well as Moussa al-Zein Sharara. The omission extends even to historians like Sheikh Ali al-Zein, Mohammad Jaber al-Safah, and Sheikh Suleiman al-Zaher — both members of the Damascus Academy of the Arabic Language — thereby erasing an entire chapter of Jabal Amel’s literary heritage.

This erasure has not remained a mere detail; it has become an open wound in the collective memory of the Shia, who found themselves absent from Lebanon’s national literary and cultural narrative, as if their contributions to the literature of the Nahda (Arab Renaissance) and the struggle for independence, and the impact they left on Arab culture, were unworthy of mention.

Any attempt to reconnect the Shia community with the Lebanese state cannot succeed without restoring due recognition to this legacy and correcting the imbalance entrenched by decades of neglect in educational curricula and cultural policy. Without that, belonging will remain incomplete, and citizenship suspended. The Shia’s reintegration into the framework of the state must not be limited to political or security protection; it must also entail recognition of their role in shaping Lebanon’s cultural identity. Only through this acknowledgment can their citizenship be rebuilt and a new social contract established; one that guarantees justice and restores their rightful place within the nation.