Through the devastation, the fire and the smoke, the truth remains here
a mediation on clearing the smoke and the dust of the lies the settler world tells us
Last night at Haymarket House I attended a screening of “Buffer Zone” by Farrah Berrou. In her words:
"Buffer Zone" (2025) is an 18-minute short film by Lebanese-American writer, artist, and filmmaker Farrah Berrou. It is a part-documentary, part-memoir film that chronicles her return to her ancestral border village of Kfarkila in Southern Lebanon, marking her first visit since October 8, 2023, following the November 2024 ceasefire.
In the documentary, you see the filmmaker exploring the ruins of her ancestral home and land with her family in Southern Lebanon, as well as expounding on the psychological, spiritual, cultural, genocidal after-effects of its destruction at the hands of the Israeli occupation. Among other humiliations, her family can no longer access the burial ground of her grandfather, a man she never got to meet as he was a political prisoner kidnapped and held by the Israeli occupation. The mosque at his burial site is also destroyed. Harrowing and muted but plainly spoken, Berrou lays out frankly the layered devastation of the destruction, attesting that it acts beyond just destroying physical place but also the memories of it so as to say “you were never here.”
As we in North America sit with the colonial devastation of the Ontario wildfires, the torrid air thick and rank with the polluted rotted smoke, I can’t help but think about our own turmoil with revisionism, and how fire plays a role in that. Even the language for the fire—wild fires, named alone, not used in conjunction with any other term or language to lay responsibility where it belongs, as if they are an inevitability, just an environmental happenstance, and not what occurs when land is deeply exploited and neglected in equal measures. Hours before the screening while masked yet still reeling and coughing from the smoke, walking mournfully through the Walgreens by my apartment, I bemoaned the reasons we find ourselves in this situation and named the Israeli occupation out loud. Because the main reason we are so invested in a “Free Western outpost in the Middle East” is to continue our sick reliance on fossil fuel, Biblical prophecy be damned.
This constructed and forced reliance on fossil fuel and land exploitation is heating up the planet and guides our genocidal, colonial imposing on the world’s nations. A settler world that is falsely built on the forced nationalistic construct of ownership versus true indigenous belonging also won’t care about Native fire ecology and the proper maintenance of the land through prescribed burns. It won’t see anything beyond violent myth-making and a battering ram as solutions.
So we lie. Say this is a normal fluctuation and there’s nothing you can do about the fires. We lie and say terrorists in Lebanon and Palestine care more about their fringe ideology than their people and that is why they suffer, because of their own pride. We lie and we say the people and the earth deserve colonial abuse, and it isn’t actually abuse at all. It’s just natural recourse. What would happen anyways, what needs to happen if we want nice things. We delete, erase.
Berrou doesn’t leave her documentary with a neat positive note because there has not yet been a positive solution, only the aftermath of the occupation and looming annexation of her family’s town. They can no longer safely go to the rubble of their family home. She bemoans not having grabbed fistfuls of dirt or rock when she had the chance to.
But I believe in this want, in this desire to have wished to have known her grandfather or regret in the loss her family has experienced long before October 2023, in laying blame where blame belongs, we have clear instructions for what should be. In a hacking cough and a want to breathe clear air we have our directives. A world that would destroy a grandfather’s grave and choke our children should not stand freely and uncontested, its lies with no one to question them. Berrou and her remaining family mementos stand as testament to what has not yet been erased and what we should be fighting to preserve, that which when done and accomplished will also clear our breathing air of caustic smoke laying clear and beautiful and undestroyed for those to come.