Imperial time begins with victorious conquest, valiant efforts against enemies, and establishment of the metropole. Magisterial time strides outwards towards more colonies and the taken-for-granted eternal progress of empire. Colonial time begins with discovery, or subjugation and control, insidious saviorism and brutal assimilation. The time of dominion moves with linear momentum towards the predetermined future (that is already here) of the naturalized colony having always been. Of genocides being out of time. The past becomes crystallized, static, dead. As dead as those slaughtered. The future is already written. Only the narratives of the worthy, the centered, the righteous will prevail. The center holds time, weighs it, doles it out in bureaucratic or scientific dribs and drabs as it sees fit. The lived time and urgency of those in the margins is denied, suppressed, and entombed. Their stories are erased, their histories concealed, their concerns and realities undermined, their lives foreclosed in societies where their untimely deaths are a built-in fact.

Stately time buries conversations about change so that they go nowhere. Debates feel stuck with no alternate discursive possibilities as each hang onto their unearned entitlement, their ideological certitude, or their fears of barred futures. The door slamming platitude “let us agree to disagree” is on repeat, interring moral conflicts and lives on the line. Time doesn’t even go around in circles; sometimes it’s a psychotic perpetual present where no realities-languages- intentions can overlap to expand horizons and generate possibilities. Ancestral time is forgotten and lies in the unmarked graves of Indigenous children kidnapped into residential schools; original cemeteries covered over by the introduction of invasive tree species, hydroelectric dams, and golf courses. Traces of Others concealed, erased, immured all over again without farewell or markers. Place is gone, so it never happened, so time is expunged and replaced with a different narrated timeline.

Time gets usurped to conceal alternatives, the peripheries, the contestations. Lived time is bent to the rhythm of capital/ism. Bodies get bowed in ways that reify and serve the metropole, the dominant, the supreme/acy, the physical and ideological empire. The borders between the actual and the possible are maintained, hardened, eternalized.

These/those are the times of burial of our feelings, hopes, past, futures. Of facts. Then concealment of the burial. Never was sliding insidiously into never will be. At least, this is one form of time that attempts to subjugate. The frozen time of trauma, of crowing narrators, of vanquished spaces and places.

They were married young, in the grumblings of a war that mediatized itself through religious reasons, but which decades later was – and still is – about moving colonial borders through unlawful occupations. My parents were interfaith in a place which boasts 18 official religious sects and possibly almost 25, excluding atheism. Still a taboo now, they were married thrice to appease all parties: a civil wedding - the true anniversary in their eyes, in a church, and with a Muslim sheikh. They celebrated each as instances where they stood up together and were witnessed as contesting the boundaries drawn by doctrine. Over their half a century together, they came to symbolize the possibilities of a society without those arbitrary lines for so many in their communities and beyond. Gathering people to our home to celebrate easter, every Eid, Christmas, other interfaith weddings, and simply parties where nobody asked anyone their political affiliations or identities because what mattered more was the laughter and shared sustenance during exile. Fundraising and fighting for kin across enclosures established by French and British mandates – military crossings that meant nothing to their hearts. Arguing against a kindergarten teacher who insisted that I should color between the lines - “she knows how, she just doesn’t want to or have to.” Not putting walls between themselves and those from different histories and places, offering shelter and care as best as they could.

Fifty years later, they had returned to a section(/ed off part) of their homelands, and the issue of their burials loomed. They would not be allowed to be laid to rest in the same place as their faiths were different. They tried buying land to turn it into a family plot, but the regulations prohibited it. They tried converting to the Mennonite community in their village, only to be kindly turned away during a theological argument at the weekly Sunday meeting of friends. After years of legal work, and much money, they had their wills drawn up for cremation upon death – an unacceptable option in all formal 18 religious sects. My mother asked for a mass at the village church, my father stipulated his life be celebrated at home, with the request that all the women in the family wear their favorite shade of red to the party. In traditional Arabic calligraphy, he handprinted a sign to be placed on the door upon their deaths, stating that anyone who would consider shaming the couple’s untraditional ending, never understood their beginning or life together, and therefore was not expected to attend the festivities. They both signed the scroll.

He died during the pandemic. It doesn’t matter how, but it does matter where. When we called the hospital with the only crematorium in the country, we were informed that it was destroyed on Aug 4, 2020, in the Beirut Port explosion. My mother crumpled: “It’s a whole life, a whole life, where will he go now?” My uncle organized a plot in the cemetery where all my paternal family lies, for my father and him. When we went to visit, my mother exhaled. “It’s a garden”, she said, “I can come here and talk to him. When I die, you can put me in my cousin’s family graveyard in the mountains, that is a garden too. We won’t be together, but ...” There was no way to end that sentence.

She died 8 months later. It doesn’t matter how, but it does matter where. In my home, on Turtle Island. When she arrived for Christmas, it was clear she wasn’t well. I offered to get on a plane with her the next day, if she wanted to die in Lebanon with her extended family. She wasn’t sure. Her whole life lived in a suitcase, she wondered if it was fitting that she depart one final time while traveling. I leaned over and whispered to her, “If you pass on here, then...” She sat up straight. “Yes.”

She is cremated three weeks later.

My uncle dies two months after her. Having lived his life under my father’s watchful eye, it is fitting that they are laid directly into the ground together, no boxes holding their bodies distinct from land. I am too far away to attend the funeral.

Between hospital bills, pandemic restrictions, and wars, two years go by. I take a deep breath and get on a plane. I stay with friends. I check on the house. I light a candle in the village church. I go out late at night wearing red, inhale cigarettes and weed when I’m not a smoker, and sip on whiskey. Downtown is a series of deserted stores and wooden planks. The air is inexorably thick with an old, too familiar, dread. I go with my mother’s best friend, third cousin, and my uncle’s youngest. I dig with my bare hands into the earthen space in the center of the horizontal marble stone, right under the consoling inscription: “we are from Allah, and to Allah we return.” My cousin keeps a look out. This is illegal. My mother’s ashes have been blessed by a catholic priest. I mix them with water and churn them into the earth. We say our quiet prayers. We shed long-held tears.

I plant a jasmine tree directly into my mother, my father and my uncle, their favorite scent. My mother’s grave will never be marked; it will be passed down in stories.

I leave Lebanon and war breaks out one month later. Again. Their beginning and ending were a circle, of coming together and back home over and over and over despite dividers drawn in the sand, breaking the linear presumption of a progression of time that reifies imposed truths.

Indigenous time is circular, relational, seasonal, connected to land, ancestors, and future generations through stories. And each time a story is told and retold it shifts, shifting the edges of where things begin and end, so the teller and listener hear something anew. Possibilities to restart, reimagine, and rewrite are core to the story telling process. The past can be retold to hear the pain, the losses, the grief, to honor the dead and failed attempts. The past can highlight animated lives, rising from ashes, perseverance, nobility, and simply the fact of having been, therefore of being and of still being here. The past can be storied for the silly times, the joys, the communal celebrations and care. The stories of medicine, healing, and elder wisdom. The past can be rewritten carefully, with regret and accountability. And each different story of the past, circular, speaking also to the present, revealing multiple futurities. Some futures where foreclosure is inevitable, yes, but not yet. And futures where the actions of the past and present have taken root, and grow across generations, intertwining to contest the arrogance of imperial time.

In each of our own temporalities, lived and ancestral, we must go back, and rewrite ourselves into the/our past. We do this so that we can step out of the press of a seemingly inevitable march of processional time and choose to act now as if we will all be there, in that future that doesn’t want some of us, a future yet to be collectively desired.

November 1st, 2025

Acknowledgements

With gratitude to the co-constructions taking place in the Clinical Consultation Group: The World & the Psyche, offered by the Centre for Critical and Clinical Analysis.

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