NIGHTRISE Through the Valley of Jabal ‘Amil’s Shadow

Abstract

This thesis is about the night, and particularly about nightrise, which I propose here as the social and cultural construction of the nocturnal landscape. It sites itself along a twenty-six-night walk across the Lebanese hinterland that I made in August 2020, where moving shadows begin to awaken amorphous subcultures capable of weaponizing their formlessness in the name of self-preservation. Because the night resists the reign of any solitary subculture, these nocturnal cohabitations often rely on unspoken rules of civility all but invisible to strangers. And it was on the sixth night of this walk into the heart of Jabal ‘Amil – what is today known as South Lebanon – that my transgression of these rules was matched with an act of hostility that, strangely, culminated in the opportunity to imagine and implement an architecture of nightrise: a path on the southern border of Lebanon between a mountain and a river. If a path for the day seeks to impose the lone perspective of a single direction, then this path for nightrise revels in the unseen, in the ability to interrupt, and perhaps invert, the ubiquitous association between eyesight and insight. The erasure of the unidirectional line comes to propose a series of scattered stations that whisper, hint, and conjure countless variations of the same path in the minds of its visitors. These stations draw out the nocturnal qualities inspiring some of Jabal ‘Amil’s oral myths and legends, and the politics that are deeply rooted within them: from distressing celestial appearances to the imaginal world of the Jinn, and from tales that follow the spread of Shi’ism to the darkness surrounding the famous proverb, “Look under any stone in Jabal ‘Amil and you will find a poet.” Unfolding across the pages of this thesis is thus a peripatetic journey of two nocturnal voyages, one that begins in the past with the stories of my walk across Lebanon, and another in the future, on the Path of Nightrise, which will be implemented in the months following the submission of this work.