Since September 25, 2024, a family of ten has been staying with me in the apartment where I usually live alone with my cat in Beirut. Staying with me are Yasser (55) and Maryam (47), the parents; Samiha (28), Hadil (24), who is pregnant, her husband Yussef, Yara (22), her fiancé Ayman, Mona (18), Adam (14); and finally, Lydia, Samiha’s three-year-old daughter.

Yasser, Maryam, and their children are Palestinians from al-Bass refugee camp in Tyre in South Lebanon. Yasser’s parents, Emm Jaber and Abu Jaber, were born in Haifa. For two years in 2006–8, I was their neighbor, as well as Yasser’s and his brothers’, when I lived alongside their extended family compound in al-Bass camp. I had moved there as a PhD student to conduct fieldwork for my dissertation research. We did not strictly live together, then, at least not in the way that we are doing now in my one-bedroom apartment. But the family had all but adopted me, and I hardly ever spent time alone in the room I had rented. The topic I was researching was kinship for lifelong Palestinian refugees.

We have a luxury: even as Lebanon has turned into a deathscape as of this writing, we assume that we are in a safe place in my apartment because, first, of the neighborhood (Hamra) where the apartment is located, and also because this is a small building where we know every resident. Other than that, there are large expanses of their lives that they cannot any longer take for granted. These expanses grow larger with every day that passes. As I am writing, none of us knows when and whether the family will return to Sour, nor whether their house and the mechanic’s shop that supports the family will still be standing when and if they do.

For Lydia, at three the youngest among us, this is her first time living in a place that another, nonhuman animal inhabits as well. Since her arrival in Beirut, she has kept busy piecing together my cat Aziz’s way of going about the world, conducting a thorough survey of his habits. “Does Aziz ever eat his food with a spoon?” she has asked me twice. Children pick up when adults hide things from them; perhaps she wonders if Aziz is hiding something as well. Lydia is not the only one so absorbed. We are all, in fact, busy doing something that feels somewhat similar. The family, Maryam in particular, has been involved in a constant study of my motions and habits, all in an effort to direct the rest of the family not to disrupt or impede those motions and habits, but rather to fit into and around them in a manner as effortless as possible for me. Of course it is awkward, as an anthropologist, to find myself under such concentrated observation in my own home: an involution through war and accident of what had started as ethnography, as if anthropology was a sock and we were now wearing our socks inside out.

I, on the other end, hardly do anything the way I used to do, while applying myself to make everything I do seem nonchalant, a habit undisturbed by their company. Nobody fools anyone else, I am sure, but this play of appearances is one wordless way we talk. In this language of forms, they tell me of the shame they have that war has made them, through no fault of their own, a burden on someone else. On my end, I try to tell them that war is the burden, not them. There is no end to this conversation: we must have it again and again, including because the shame I mentioned is not an error to overcome, but rather an extraordinarily sophisticated feeling (and one extraordinarily difficult to write about satisfactorily).

Aziz’s habits are not the only thing Lydia has been busy piecing together. She has also been carrying out her own experiments with a word she hears us use a lot: muhajjar (plu. muhajjarin). Muhajjar is a rich, thick word in the Levant. Muhajjar roughly means “displaced,” but this translation does not satisfy me. To my ear, muhajjar carries and expresses the subjective experience (and pain) of being forcefully uprooted before this experience is transformed into a matter for state security and humanitarian governance. In the mid-2000s in Tyre, I had observed that muhajjarin is also the word Palestinians use (rather than laji’in, “refugees”) to speak of themselves with reference to their experience of protracted exile in Lebanon. Things are complicated, however, because in Lebanon the word also carries along in its wake ghosts of forced displacement during the civil war. Right now, the word reeks of the stench of death. One type of violence Israel is inflicting on Lebanon’s residents consists in pulverizing entire buildings, along with their occupants, in places where muhajjarin are gathered, including in Beirut, in neighborhoods close to us. This is the daily news of which people speak, and of the danger they feel in the vicinity of the muhajjarin. When I was telling you that we assume we will be fine because we know every resident in the building, I, too, was speaking this language with its callous, sectarian undertones.

No wonder, then, that muhajjar would be a complicated word to teach to a child. No wonder that everyone in the family would be reticent to spell out to Lydia a rule of language and Palestinian history according to which home sometimes becomes a place so deadly that you have to leave it at once and stay far away. So Lydia is running her own experiments in an effort to piece it all together.

A week after their arrival in Beirut, Maryam recounted, during a visit to the supermarket, Lydia had taken to greeting every stranger with a loud: “we are muhajjarin!”, in a way that now made Maryam laugh but had made her nervous at the time. Three weeks later, as we were sitting in the living room one morning and had not yet put away the foam mattress on which I had slept because the cat was now sleeping on it too, Lydia looked at Aziz intently and suddenly asked us if he, too, was muhajjar. Maryam said, “No, we are in Aziz’s home.” I then asked Lydia—that’s the teacher in me, I guess—the same question about myself: “W ana, Lydia, muhajjar?” Her face tightened into an expression of effort, and then she answered that yes, I, Sylvain, am muhajjar. I do not have access to the current rules of logic and feeling that Lydia computed for these few seconds in order to reach this conclusion. Perhaps it had to do with the foam mattress, still in front of us, on which I now sleep like almost everyone else at home. Perhaps she sensed that muhajjar is a word that viciously, dangerously divides the world, even people quite close to one another, and it was hard to bear, or threatening, that this line of divide would also pass between us as we live together in the apartment.

Throughout this text, I have described Lydia (and the rest of us too) as “piecing together” a variety of things as a result of war (after Han 2020). If there is something I learned as I live together with Lydia, Samiha, Yasser, Maryam, and the rest in my apartment through a war, it is that the state of childhood is braided within the state of war in an extraordinarily dense and paradoxical manner.

I am thinking, for example, of the two times when Yasser and Maryam broke down in tears in front of me these last two months, separately and at separate times. Both times, they were speaking about the return of war, now in their children’s and grandchild’s lives, and about the effects on their children that they could observe. The sudden surge of affect in both Maryam’s and Yasser’s communication with me in these separate moments brings me to one first paradox. On the one hand, the words they were using told me of their direct knowledge that war wreaks deep injuries on the childhood of children. On the other hand, the sudden, uncontrollable tears told, it seems to me, of a simultaneous, painful tear in the fabric of adulthood as well. The direct knowledge of war acquired by children casts into doubt the adults’ sense or wish that they would know the war in a manner separate from how children come to know war. This tear in the fabric of childhood, I realized, casts doubt on one’s sense of adulthood as well.

The paradox, however, does not end here. I sometimes wondered how we would have fared, brought together in my apartment in this manner, if there had not been a three-year-old child in our midst. You see, I am not the only one engrossed by Lydia and her efforts to put together piece by piece this new milieu— far from it. In fact, if there was a way to measure it, one would probably find that a very significant amount of our collective interactions flows from what Lydia proposes. Even when we are not, individually or collectively, speaking with her, we are often talking about things she did or said to one of us during the day.

My sense is that an observer in our midst would feel that the shape of our experiences gravitates towards the shape of three-year-old Lydia’s experience, as a force of attraction, as we survive day by day through the return of war and displacement. In lieu of a conclusion, I am thus hinting (only half-jokingly) that there might be a gravitational law of attraction towards the state of childhood during war. At least such a law seems to hold sway over our small collective, and perhaps accounts for the unusual playfulness that also pervades most of our interactions in parallel to dread and grief. The return of the war takes the shape of a strange return to a collective form of childhood for all of us. Lydia shows us the way to “seeing like a child.” Even as the death drones buzz loud over our heads, and the sound and sometimes acrid smell of bombings come into the apartment, we all rush through the doors opened for us by Lydia. To me, this has much to do with the at times suffocating sense that a world at war is a world suddenly hardened and hollowed out of anything to learn. By piecing together this world at war as a world which is still her own—one in which the cat perhaps eats his food with a spoon, and in which the cat is perhaps also displaced, and in which it makes no difference that she and her family are muhajjarin and I am not—Lydia pokes relentless holes into our adult stiffness and exhaustion, and returns us to a sense of wonder.

Hamra, Beirut, Sept. 25 – Nov. 27, 2025