This sonic diary gathers notes related to listening during and in the aftermath of the Israeli wars on Lebanon in 2024 and 2026. It traces a mode of listening that remembers, compares, strays, and excavates historically, politically, and affectively interconnected auditory experiences from the past. The diary includes daily entries, specific events, and other memories and accounts spanning several months, even years. Some dates remain vague because both the sound itself and the questions it conjures up persist over extended periods. These imprecise timeframes thus enclose both punctual and continuous sonic violence. Interspersed throughout are moments of music, song, and small acts of counterlistening that accompany, interrupt, and reconfigure these sonic conditions. Counterlistening here is both performed and remembered as a singular event in a protracted state of acute alertness — it’s a slippage that returns from the machinic back to the human and the voice.
The diary listens across media during an ongoing genocide, exposing a listening mode that becomes increasingly erratic and unsettling, a mode that resists stillness and the precisions of aural studies of violence.
April 2026 – July 2026
From here on out a piano upstairs — played by an advanced pupil perhaps — will replace the drone. Rehearsal starts at 10 a.m. sharp. For days, weeks, months, I hear the same composition, practiced over and over again.
October – November 2024
My friend G. jokes that my practice of counterlistening consists of turning on the AC unit in my bedroom at night to dampen the sounds of the strikes on Dahye, which is not far from where I live. The mechanical hum of the old AC unit builds a robust and nocturnal sonic insulation that promotes the rhythm of my desired sleep. Also, a blunt to fight against blunted sleeping hours.
These audio-spatial strategies don’t always work. I feel the vibration of the strikes but I go back to sleep. An artificial sleep. I remember using the same tactics in 2006, too. I lived farther away from the most affected areas and Israel didn’t have the same bombs, but people heard them all the same.
I am having very vivid flashbacks of vibrations — exact moments, faces, and spaces — but this time around some of the sounds are different. I only care to register the news ones through my ears. Others sink into my nervous system.
I sleep just fine.
But my whole body knows.
1 December 2024
It’s the day after the ceasefire but I only remember hearing their voices months later. A group of Ethiopian women who attend the church down my street every Sunday are practicing a song on the pavement beneath my window. Draped with their usual church attire: a flowing translucent white linen shawl called the netela. They form a line on the sidewalk: three women in the front and two in the back, as if addressing an audience; they move and clap to the cadence of their song with their palms raised to the sky.
I can’t hear the drone through the recording though I hear it now.
October 2023 –
For the first time in my life, I have difficulty listening to music. There are periods, very long stretches of time, where I listen intensely, like I am cramming everything I’ve missed. No radio for now — I want to be in control.
March 2025 –
My nervous system is so shot that I cannot distinguish the sound of commercial planes landing and taking off from the arrival of warplanes. The sound of the planes whooshing lasts only a few seconds. It must be the mechanics of the wind. Why can’t I care more to learn the characteristics of these sounds? Maybe it’s too soon for the body to rid itself from this fright, and I don’t care much for their qualities, only that they mean a plane is hovering at low altitude somewhere not very far.
25 November 2024
What a treat to hear only the distant barking of dogs, cars whirring by the National Museum on the main highway and the incessant rumble of generators. What a treat.
8 October 2024
The earth shakes, no matter the ear.
8 October 2023 –
As we watch the genocide in Palestine on our screens, I notice, among the deluge of videos and clips shared by witnesses, journalists, and media organizations showing one atrocity after another, how many of them are edited with music. Depicting wounded and shell-shocked children, infants, women, and men, most of the viral clips that make their rounds on our phones and devices are edited using sacred or secular Arabic music, most of which I don’t know or recognize. This is not new. The music scoring Palestinian suffering has circulated long before the genocide, just as the violence has long preceded it. It’s not difficult to surmise what motivates these editorial choices, but I can only conclude that the real sounds of the scenes we are witnessing are too horrific to keep untouched, too difficult to mourn with, maybe even more unbearable than the images themselves.
September 2024 –
A passage from artist and writer Walid Sadek’s “Peddling Time When Standing Still: Art Remains in Lebanon and the Globalization that Was” rushes back to my mind. I think of it especially because of my proximity to the bombed areas:
Although other districts were hit, one could, for instance, remain in the predominantly Christian town of Hazmieh and be relatively safe even if no more than five hundred meters away from the targeted and predominantly Shi’i locality of Chayyah. Many gladly made that choice and many others succumbed to an executional decision taken by the Israelis to ethnically cleanse Lebanon from all of what it disdainfully marked as Shi’itic Hizb Allah. The splitting of the event in two as Khbeiz argues necessitates a crucial amendment when applied to witnesses residing in what were generally nontargeted areas. For the latter, if the event of the war is secondly experienced televised and provokes in the spectator a bitter sense of relief, it is firstly experienced, not in the vagueness and obscurity of distress as Khbeiz proposes, but rather lucidly even if not directly viewed. Those residing in Hazmieh, for instance, may not have stood on their balconies superciliously watching buildings collapse in Chayyah. Yet they knew, through the reverberating blows they heard, that a discriminating and criminal line of fire granted them a respite they did not earn. Not seeing, in their case, does not warrant lack of knowledge, for hearing was already clear and plentiful. Their ears, our ears, saw all there was to be seen. The line drawn by the Israelis across Lebanese territory during the summer of 2006 was not a first. We, the Lebanese, have drawn similar lines many times before; lines which allowed blocs and factions to look upon the destruction of the other and claim victory; bloody lines which have eventually turned everyone into a witness who knows too much.1
I ruminate on Sadek’s “witness who knows too much” to consider how it translates to the present. The same “discriminating and criminal line of fire” is drawn again almost twenty years later. Sadek has long been invested in the figure of the witness, but his passage is perhaps the only instance I know in which sound and hearing assume such a central political role. From the 1990s to the present, memory work in Lebanon’s artistic and intellectual production has been predominantly ocular, grounded in the inextricable relation between seeing and the complex nature of witnessing, through which questions of utterance and/or representability have been examined. In the passage above, however, hearing itself is witnessing. I have returned to Sadek’s writings repeatedly since the financial collapse of 2020 in search for ways to understand our current predicaments. The above passage and the demarcation lines it describes frequently haunt me because we are hearing their return and because there are additional lines that complicate our understanding of politics and time.
4 May 2025
I attend Lebanese choreographer Ali Chahrour’s dance performance “When I Saw the Sea” at the Al Madina Theater. Three performers, all women, speak in Arabic and Amharic on stage. The entire theater hall is pitch dark in the beginning and the sounds that erupt are especially violent and penetrative: a loud boom that makes the audience shriek in muscle memory and recordings of voice messages sent by foreign women and domestic workers who are abandoned and left to their own devices to flee the bombs. In one of the short recordings, one of the women says that while she has lived here in Beirut for years, this is the first time that she’s seen the sea.
It’s the first time that I choke up since the so-called ceasefire. The voices remind me of N. who was helping more than four hundred women seek shelter and sustenance. It reminds me of the communities that are born from a violence that isn’t limited to the one from above but from the prisons below, on the streets, in apartment buildings, between us.
The rest of the performance is rife with beautiful but sorrowful sounds, voices, and music. Song is what endures. In the makeshift shelters and beyond.
September – November 2024
Resuming life is not an option. For the next two months, I will hear the sound of voices through my phone: calling, messaging, calling, messaging. The rate and intensity of our exchanges drop when the bombs stop. And there are scattered notes written diagonally on the margins, both of things to do and messages dispatched to hundreds:
Wednesday, a hundred and twenty two boxes left, going to Bekaa, check with N.
Call other N., see if he needs extra hot meals today and tomorrow
Sudanese club, twenty parcels needed
Who is buying blankets
What goes in the box? How much is it? How much money do we have?
Thirty three parcels
A hundred and fifty parcels
Two parcels
Did anyone pick up the rice and bulgur from Beit Aam?
Life and death on WhatsApp.
Messages upon messages upon messages, it’s the only way. Stillness is not a viable option.
In my phone there is an architecture of relations held together by different voices and some of these voices will never have faces — an acousmatics of war’s logistics.
A man in his mid-fifties walks into the dispatch center with two young girls wearing princess dresses with purple and pink tutus. He greets me and tells me: “I am their uncle. Both of their fathers have been martyred.”
Epilogue
The knowledge of sound is survival and curse at once.
Many times over I have listened to friends and family from older generations recount the sounds of different weapons and planes, their knowledge unfailing, as robust as the material that makes them. It’s an expertise that continues to plague them, us.
Shortly before she was murdered with her family in the Manara neighborhood of Khan Yunis on October 20, 2023, the Palestinian writer from Gaza Hiba Abou Nada wrote this in her diary:
15 October, 5:19 p.m.
That sound we hear is the sound of death that has passed over us to choose another. We are still alive, we hear the death of others we know, we say: Thank God the last sound they heard was not the sound of the missile. Those who hear the sound of the missile survive. We are alive until further notice.2
Endnotes
- Walid Sadek, “Peddling Time When Standing Still; Art in Lebanon after Globalization,” in The Ruin to Come, Essays from a protracted war(Motto Books, 2016), 99–100.[↑]
- Hiba Abu Nada, blog post of a diary in Passages Through Genocide, last modified October 26, 2023, https://www.gazapassages.com/hiba-abu-nada/english. [↑]
