“From the river to the sea, from the cedar to the olive tree”: Stories of Lebanon and Palestine
Published in Antler River Media Co-op
Republished in NB Media Co-op (1)
Republished in NB Media Co-op (2)
(*artwork: From the river to the sea, from the cedar to the olive tree by Incé Husain. A peace dove flies over a sea full of keffiyeh patterns, her left wing full of branches from a cedar tree, her right wing full of branches from an olive tree, and her chest bearing a tatreez coffee bean motif from Gaza)
“There is nothing that will compare to that childhood,” says Lebanese-Canadian PhD student Amer El-Samman, who grew up in the port city of Tripoli in northern Lebanon. He remembers the city as huge, bright, and authentic. It boomed with up-and-coming Internet cafés while remaining lush with old towns infused with unique, intergenerationally-preserved customs. The people were tolerant. Ways of life were passed down with “care, affection, and stability”. All religions lived side by side; El-Samman remembers sects of Muslims and Christians, and a Jewish family in his grandmother’s town who were a “remnant of a once sizable population before the events of 1948”. In towns with ancient names, the Arabic accent shifted - a “distortion” that sounds “slightly stubborn but in a caring way if you really know them.”
He remembers swims along nearby islands, the scent of the village air, the simplicity of village life, exploring cafés with cousins and friends. He remembers biking back and forth from his grandmother’s house among Tripoli’s small counties, gazing down over canyons and “hearing the wolves cry out at night”. He remembers venturing to nearby towns to see friends, buy snacks, and perch on ledges to eat and laugh together.
His grandmother’s house - “the best place in the world” - was stuffed with cousins, music, and joy.
“Just imagine some fifteen-cousin sleepover at my grandma's house. With pillows and mattresses on the entire living room, dining, and hallway floors. Barely any room to walk,” says El-Samman. “I grew up around all that family and sense of unity. It amazes me that I somehow managed to detach from that at an early age (when my family left Lebanon). I guess children adapt so well.”
El-Samman’s family left Lebanon in 2005. His parents, witnessing Lebanon’s “downward spiral”, applied for immigration in the mid-1990s to secure “a better life” (see subheading “Post-1990 Stalemate”).
The application was approved in 2004.
“I was too young to know the reasons exactly. But Lebanon has and still is going in a downward spiral and my parents were always the type to think long-term about life and about kids,” says El-Samman. “They made the decision to apply to immigrate (to Canada) some couple years after I was born. The application came in 2004 and it was such a shock - like, yeah, we are leaving in nine months to a whole different country. And we left in August 2005.”
El-Samman reminisces on the canyon from the bike rides of his youth. His cousin has now built a restaurant there, called Tallé Koura, that overlooks the bustling city, lush mountains, and sunset-bordered sea.
“It felt like an arm got cut off when we came to Canada. I like Canada - it’s beautiful, rich, sprawling nature. But I would literally give a kidney to look at the yellow, frail grass of my home country in the dry season,” says El-Samman. “And there’s something about scent that brings about nostalgia in a way sight does not. If I go to Lebanon now and just take a whiff of air, it will be like transporting through time.”
On September 27th, UN News reported that thousands of people in Lebanon’s rural communities had begun fleeing Israeli bombardment to Tripoli.
“We are witnessing the deadliest period in Lebanon in a generation and many expressed their fear that this is just the beginning,” said Imran Riza, top UN aid official in Lebanon. “We are running into people that are saying “What’s the way to Tripoli? How do we get there?”
On October 5th, Al Jazeera reported that Israeli air strikes targeted Lebanon’s Beddawi Camp for Palestinian refugees, located five kilometers from Tripoli. It was Israel’s first strike in northern Lebanon since October 7th and killed a Palestinian family: Saeed Atallah Ali, his wife Shaimaa Khalil Azzam, and their young daughters Zainab Saeed Ali and Farima Saeed Ali. Saeed Atallah Ali was a Hamas commander; a photo of him in a Jordanian newspaper shows a young, clean shaven man with light eyes and a baseball cap.
UN News reported that over 2,000 people in Lebanon have been killed and a million displaced since October 2023. Shelters are full; hundreds are stranded.
“I can’t focus,” says El-Samman of the violence. “I can't pretend things are okay. I can, but only to a certain extent. Things will always be haunted with this undertone of senseless destruction. I don’t care for my future that much anymore. It’s like - why care? When I have seen it be destroyed for those more deserving than me? What's the reason that I should have it?”
Most days, El-Samman says he is “running on the pure battery acid of stress” to maintain his work routines. He has yet to talk with his parents about Lebanon; all his grief has been poured into Palestine. His wife is half Palestinian with family in Gaza, some of whom have been martyred.
“I haven't even yet talked to my parents about Lebanon. It’s as if my emotional bandwidth has been reached. And if I was to talk about Lebanon now, I have no clue how I will react, whether it will be a watershed, or it will be just pure numbness where my body is still recovering from the violence of the year.”
He attests that “Lebanon is strong” and an “ancient site of resistance”. His dad has hundreds of stories, his grandmother has thousands. Both have lived through wars.
“All of these memories,” El-Samman reminisces on his childhood. “You have no idea how actually rich they are. I can just say words, right. But you have no idea.”
***
“I can't remember how many times it was just me and the sea,” says Lebanese artist Rana Abbout of visits to south Lebanon. “I used to go and just sit - and you're connected to everything around you. It is your home, your land, your sea, your tree...the smell of all the citrus trees that you start smelling as soon as you enter.”
Her grandparents told stories about the ages of their lemon and orange trees, planted in synchrony with the births of their children. They planted myriads of fruits and vegetables; Abbout says the south is known for oranges, lemons, and watermelons - “real watermelons” with black seeds.
She vividly remembers a fig tree in front of her grandmother’s house. Its figs smelled different, tasted different; other figs paled in comparison.
“In front of my grandmother’s house, there was a fig tree, and I used to love eating figs from that tree. They would get me figs from somewhere else - but I would say ‘no, no, I'll get it from the tree’,” says Abbout. “And I always thought that it tasted different when you pick it from the tree. I used to always love to pick it. Even here (in Canada) when I see figs, in my mind, it takes me directly there. It's the smell - when you pick it, it's different. I miss that.”
Abbout was born and raised in Lebanon. Her mother is from the south of Lebanon and her father is from the Beqaa Valley; her parents live in Dahiya, a southern suburb of Beirut. She moved out of her parents’ house to central Beirut - where she attended school and university - and lived there both on her own and after marriage. Two years ago, she immigrated to Canada with her husband and two kids.
“I grew up in different parts (of Lebanon), seeing the culture from different parts. But I’m a city girl - I grew up in the city. We would just visit the Beqaa and the south to visit family.”
Abbout describes the way Lebanese people “love life”. They celebrate life with music and food, are communal and in tune with each other. They are generous, flocking to support one another, especially in death - which is familiar and very close.
"We are people who love life and we enjoy every second of it. And we live it as if it was the last moment because we know that we can just go any minute, we know what death is,” says Abbout. “We love life, we love family, we love food, we love music. We’re happy for each other, we’re sad with each other. We live in communities - we support each other, especially in times of need, even if we have differences. Especially in death, we do support each other. The majority of people - we are raised on good ethics and good morals.”
Abbout has memories of Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, when Israeli forces went on a 33-day rampage that killed 1,191 Lebanese, wounded thousands, and displaced half a million - nearly one eight of the population - while claiming to eradicate Lebanese armed resistance group Hezbollah. Three billion dollars worth of civilian infrastructure was destroyed (see subheading “2006 War and the Israeli “Dahiya Doctrine”).
In Dahiya, Israel destroyed entire neighbourhoods, flattening homes, schools, businesses, and cafés. This level of violence was formalized by the Israeli military as the “Dahiya Doctrine”, which blatantly promotes disproportionate destruction and the killing of civilians.
“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on,” said Israeli army general Gadi Eisenkot in 2008. “We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”
“I remember the war,” says Abbout. “It’s different what you remember from the war as a child and as you grow up. As children, we remember our parents being afraid, we remember them with their little radios glued to their ears so that they know what's going on, with their worried faces, with their chain smoking - because they’re so worried.”
She shares a memory of a striped yellow and dark blue box that “looked like a little bee”, filled with licorice and all her favourite candies. When the bombings would start, her parents would grab the box, her favourite toy, and drag her by the hand to windowless hallways safe from the impending violence of shattering glass.
“But we also used to have fun as children,” says Abbout of the children in her neighbourhood. “I remember that we had fun. Like, we were scared to death with the sounds and all, but we also had fun and laughed when we would take shelter with neighbours. It's the culture. You know that you can die any minute, and so you just live in the moment, I guess.”
In Lebanon, resilience is engraved in the psyche since birth. The culture flares with resistance songs, like “Lebnan Rah Yerjaa” (“Lebanon will return”), “Ghabet Shams el-Hak” (“The sun of justice has gone down”), and “Ana Betnaffas Horriye” (“I breathe freedom”).
Abbout attests that resilience is important, but also feels that its emphasis can become “toxic”. It can lead to inadvertently normalizing injustice, suppressing grief, and accumulating exhaustion.
“We grew up to this word “resilience”. This is part of our culture - you are resilient, you are Lebanese, you are resilient, you have a thick skin. We get up, we keep going, we build, we build, we build, and if they destroy, we build again,” says Abbout. “But then you don't have time to talk about what you're feeling. And then, if you do, there's no time to collapse, because it's one problem after the other, one attack after the other. And so you get tired, you realize that it's not fair - it's like you keep putting bandaids on top of one other. And it's good to be resilient, but it’s not okay to keep falling and saying “it’s okay, I’m resilient”. I don't want to fall in the first place. And it's kind of a denial that you feel. We don't want to talk about injustice because then we get weak.”
At the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, Abbout says that use of the Arabic word “qaher” began to rise. It crudely translates in English to “anger”, but its meaning is far more nuanced. It is a full-bodied anger built from generations of victimization; it is intense, quiet, hyperaware, back-breaking, intergenerationally identity-defining. Abbout shares a quote from writer Khadijah Muhaisen Dajani describing “qaher”:
There is no English equivalent to the Arabic word “qaher”. The dictionary says "anger" but it's not. It is when you take anger, place it on a low fire, add injustice, oppression, racism, dehumanization to it, and leave it to cook slowly for a century. And then you try to say it but no one hears you. So it sits in your heart. And settles in your cells. And it becomes your genetic imprint. And then moves through generations. And one day, you find yourself unable to breathe. It washes over you and demands to break out of you. You weep. And the cycle repeats.
“My friends here would ask “how are you feeling” and I would say “angry, but not angry”. I didn’t know how to translate it,” says Abbout. “And then I saw people were sharing “qaher”, and I thought “yes, they know exactly what I’m going through because there are people who come from where I come from.””
Abbout shares a quote from the poem “Jenin” by Lebanese writer Etel Adnan: “Our eyes have exhausted the vocabulary of darkness.”
She had read the poem before, but this line marked her differently when she reread it a few days ago. Its gravity is amplified by the simultaneous Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Palestine - enabled by military aid from Canada and the United States.
On just the fifth day of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, the United States granted Israel 8.7 billion dollars in military aid.
“History is repeating itself in Lebanon and in my part of the world,” says Abbout.
In 1948, Israeli forces violently destroyed seven Lebanese villages and massacred all the civilians in the Lebanese village of Houla. In 1978 and 1982, Israeli forces invaded Lebanon and killed and displaced thousands under the guise of eradicating Palestinian political movements like the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). These invasions contributed to the rise of armed resistance group Hezbollah, officialized in 1985 (see subheading “Formation of Hezbollah and the Islamic Resistance”). In the 1970s and 1980s, The United States used its veto power ten times at the UN Security Council to nullify resolutions working towards restoring peace in Lebanon.
Israel’s 1978 invasion extended to the 22-year occupation of south Lebanon, a control marked by indiscriminate civilian killings and destruction of civilian infrastructure, including the bombing of a United Nations bunker sheltering 800 civilians. Displaced people in occupied villages were denied the right to return and forced to facilitate the occupation (see subheading “Lebanon in Relation to Palestine, the Israeli State and the United States).
Israel’s 1982 invasion killed 20,000 people while inflicting a three-month siege on West Beirut that blocked electricity, water, and food. The United States orchestrated the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon to other Arab countries, diminishing the Palestinian presence in Lebanon (see subheading “Lebanon in Relation to Palestine, the Israeli State and the United States).
“It’s dejà-vu. We’ve been here before,” says Abbout. “But this time it’s even more because of what's happening in Palestine. (The quote) just hit. It was very close to my heart. I could feel it.”
On October 13, Abbout’s friend Issam Abdallah, Reuters photojournalist, was targeted and killed by Israeli forces. Currently, the south Lebanon and Beqaa Valley of her memories are being bombed. Her mother has moved from the south to the north of Lebanon; the rest of her family is scattered around the city of Beirut. Her father passed away last year.
“We don’t know how things will escalate. I’m glad my dad isn’t around to witness what’s going on because he would have been heartbroken.”
Since Abbout was young, she heard stories about Palestine from her grandparents. Her grandfather traveled frequently to Palestine to visit friends; then, there were no borders between the lands. Haifa, a port city in now-occupied Palestine, fueled economic life for Lebanon and Palestine; in south Lebanon, Palestinian currency was more familiar than Lebanese currency (see subheading “Continuities with Palestine”). When her grandfather passed away, Abbout asked for his keffiyeh from Palestine - red, old, authentic, its weave differing from the modern stitching.
Abbout remembers her grandmother, in deep sickness, locking eyes with her and uttering the last words “I’m so sad I’m going to die before visiting Palestine”.
A Palestinian friend brought Abbout “a piece of the land” as a gift - some sand and rocks from Nablus.
“I inherited the cause since I was a little kid. I grew up being taught that the Palestinians are our brothers and sisters and we are one nation and we have to stand up and defend them,” says Abbout. “And so I never thought of it. It was something just like how I eat and drink water and breathe. It was part of who I was.”
At university, many of Abbout’s friends were Palestinian. She would join them at protests, learn about them and their lands. Her Arabic began to shift, Palestinian words subsumed into her speech. Her father was a “huge resistance fan”; he loved Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah since 1992, who never wavered in his fight for a free Palestine.
In Nasrallah’s final speech before his assassination by Israeli forces on September 28th, he said:
In the name of the martyrs, in the name of the families of the martyrs, in the name of the wounded in hospitals, in the name of those who lost their eyes and hands; in the name of all the patient, steadfast, and loyal people; in the name of all those who have taken on the responsibility of performing this moral, humanitarian, and religious duty in supporting Gaza, which is being subjected to genocide, mass killing, hunger, thirst, disease, and siege, we say to Netanyahu… we say to the enemy’s government, to the enemy’s army, to the enemy’s society: The Lebanon front will not stop before stopping the aggression on Gaza. Whatever the sacrifices, whatever the consequences, whatever the possibilities, whatever the horizon the region goes towards, the resistance in Lebanon will not stop supporting and standing by the people of Gaza, the people of the West Bank, and the oppressed in that sacred land.
When Nasrallah was assassinated, Abbout felt as if she had lost her father all over again. She saw this exact sentiment echoed across social media. Despite political differences with Nasrallah on internal issues within Lebanon, Abbout says many people saw him as a protector.
“I had the same feeling I felt as when my dad died. We grew up with Nasrallah. He was the leader, he was the father of everybody, we felt safe with him and protected from Israel. A lot of us had problems with him during the revolution, we did have problems internally. But, just like you have a relationship with a father - you argue about things, you're both stubborn - there's a layer of ‘I love you’,” says Abbout. “We all feel that we were defeated. We feel like he was the protector and now we don't know. I don't know if I'm ever going to see my family and loved ones again, if I'm ever going to visit my home again. It's just so evil.”
Abbout moved with her family to Canada so that her kids “wouldn't have PTSD”. She says that she “jumps at every loud sound”; awareness of the ongoing war has ingrained a mental soundtrack of warplanes and bombings that lurks behind sleep and daily routines.
“I would be sitting or sleeping or whatever, and I would hear the bombing. I would wake up jumping, and I would ask my family ‘did you hear something?’ and they would say ‘no’. It’s all in my head. And I didn’t want that for my kids,” says Abbout. “But there's a curse for people like us - that we love home, our countries, but we can't live there. We just have a curse that we’ll always be immigrants and travelers.”
***
“If I could be any other ethnicity, I would be Lebanese,” says Guy, a student at Western University with many Lebanese friends. “They are some of the finest people on this planet, some of the most honourable people. They are some of the funniest, the most charming. Also sometimes the most crass. But also the most serious people when they rise to the occasion, in every circumstance.”
Guy calls the Lebanese community in London “the people he feels the least left out with in any circumstance.” He feels no cultural barrier, a sense of unity that transcends differences and gives way to resilience and laughter. He began learning Arabic in the Lebanese dialect, drawn to its eccentric gentleness. He describes the Lebanese dialect as “flamboyant, very zesty, delicate but also flowery.”
“It’s poetic. It's soft. It's almost gentle in a way where - despite the fact that no other Arab can take them seriously when they're mad - it is the most comforting Arabic you want to hear. What it doesn't make up in strength, it makes up in the soft power that it has.”
He recalls a Lebanese woman describing how being Lebanese is a feeling, not an identity.
“She mentioned something about how being Lebanese isn't an identity, it's a feeling. And in a way that kind of encompasses a lot of the Palestine movement, the pan-Arab movement - it's a feeling of unity through struggle, a feeling that no matter how devastating something can be, we can always laugh about it,” says Guy. “And I think that's what draws me closer. And that's why I don't feel left out - I feel like I’m actually one of these people.”
Guy describes one of his close Lebanese friends as darkly witty, fiercely loyal, and among the greatest people he’s met. They met “by accident” at the Western University student encampments for human rights in Palestine, casually exchanging social media contacts and becoming closer ever since.
“He has the crassest sense of humor I have ever seen besides my own. And whenever we talk, it’s like diving into the lowest depths of a cesspool of dark humor,” says Guy. “But he's a great friend. He will always do anything for his friends, no matter the stuff that comes out of his mouth sometimes. He is one of the greatest people I've met.”
The night before Israel began increasing strikes on south Lebanon, the two were joking around and being themselves. In the morning, Guy woke to his friend staring at his phone. He sensed fear, anxiety; he saw “the life drain from his body”.
“His village got bombed,” says Guy. “Seeing this type of news is almost like you’re dying yourself, like a part of you has disintegrated. Watching a big part of someone's life almost go into the void is the most sobering experience you can have besides being in that situation yourself. It was one of the most difficult things to watch - to watch someone’s reality just crumble before your very eyes.”
For now, Guy’s friend’s parents are safe. But the situation is always changing and dread constantly lurks. Like many with family in Lebanon, his friend is on call very often with his family, checking family group chats, message boards, and news sources. Some of Guy’s friends with ties in Lebanon don’t want to talk about their feelings; some do. Guy acknowledges that their needs will not be static.
“I just leave it as an open door policy: if you want to talk about it, come, if you don't, then it's fine, we're not going to talk about it. But I think the best thing we can do is be open to the situation because the situation is always changing. If we keep one approach, it's not always going to work,” says Guy. “I do try to be there for my friends - who I basically consider family here - in a way that is open and not trying to engulf them or force them to say what's going on, because they are trying to process it as well. They have family there, and that's the biggest implication of all the news. We're all getting it at the same time. They have a lot more to process. I don’t have ties with Lebanon, I only have ties with all these great people.”
Guy feels like “everything’s scrambling” as he bears witness to the news. His feelings change rapidly from being “pissed off, devastated, or numb”. Sometimes, they engulf him all at once.
“I don’t think any words can encapsulate the rage I feel,” says Guy. “There are times when you feel hopeless. There are times when you want to go over there and fight and make a difference. And then there are times when you don't know what you want in regards to how you would like to help.”
He feels the Lebanese have an “undying spirit”, calling their history and current situation “years of shining the brightest through the darkest times possible”. He references a website where people across Lebanon began sardonically “rating” the sonic booms of Israeli fighter jets, used to psychologically terrorize the Lebanese people, on a scale from one to ten. The humor is dark and acerbic. It mocks the booms for being weak, lacking passion, or worse.
The site is accompanied by a serious statement about the victimization of Lebanese people, and also has a donation link to the Lebanese Red Cross.
“It shows they have an undying spirit. And it’s the most beautiful thing you could ever see,” says Guy of the sobering dark humor. “We can only hope for peace, for an end to this.”
He emphasizes the urgency of protesting, boycotting, putting an end to the genocide-enabling rhetoric spewed from North America and Europe, and ensuring the universal recognition of an independent Palestinian state.
“This war machine will not stop until we cut it off at its root. We have to stop sending money to them, we have to cut them off. There is no other way around it,” says Guy. “(My friend) almost did break. No one deserves to know that their family died through an Al Jazeera article. Or a WhatsApp message board. It's deplorable. There are no words.”
***
On the evening of Friday, September 27th, hundreds gathered in London’s Victoria Park for an “emergency rally” for Palestine and Lebanon organized by the Canadian Palestinian Social Association. The crowd was full of Lebanese flags, Palestinian flags, and keffiyehs.
Before the rally, a speaker acknowledged that they were gathering on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak and Attawandaron and “recognized a responsibility to honour and to respect this land.”
Impassioned speakers addressed the crowd about Lebanon and Palestine.
“Our culture is far too beautiful to stand by and let it be erased. We must free the world,” says a speaker. “When we fight for Palestine, when we fight for Lebanon, we are fighting for more than just land. We are fighting for our stories, we are fighting for our songs, our flavours, and our dead. We are fighting for the right to pass the land unbroken to future generations. It's about doing whatever it takes to ensure that justice prevails - for all of the oppressed people fighting all over the world for the right to life, for the right to breathe, for the right to exist.”
One speaker wielded the podium to respond to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech on September 27th at the United Nations General Assembly, condemning his blatant, colonizing lies.
“Today, Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the UN Assembly. I decided to come here to speak for my people, he said, to speak for my country, to speak for the truth. And here's the truth: Israel seeks peace. Israel yearns for peace. Israel has made peace and will make peace again. In response, I say this to you, Netanyahu,” the speaker says. “You do not speak the truth! You are misleading the world! Israel’s actions do not reflect a genuine pursuit of peace. For 75 years, Israel has perpetrated violence against Palestinians. It has built illegal settlements and inflicted suffering on countless, countless lives. Netanyahu, you do not stand for peace. You stand for a legacy of violence and oppression. Let me be clear: this conflict did not start on October 7. That immoral perspective erases the history of colonialism that has oppressed Indigenous communities for centuries and ignores the brutal legacy of European colonizers, the devastation of entire populations, and the enduring consequences of cultural erasure, territorial dispossession, and systemic discrimination. Today, thousands have been killed, thousands are trapped in Gaza, and the world denies this open air prison while Lebanon bleeds.”
A member of Independent Jewish Voices London condemned Israel’s genocidal violence. The group remembered Palestine and Lebanon during the 2024 Jewish New Year, a time for Jews to “atone for their sins”.
“There are many sins that Israel has to atone for. I can't tell you how shameful I believe Israel's actions are,” the spokesperson says. “It’s plain and simple. Its genocide. It’s imperialism. It's a military that's been allowed to grow and become lethal, too mighty. And they must be stopped. Palestine has lost schools, places of worship, home after home after home after home. The same is happening in Lebanon.”
From the Islamic tradition, one speaker shared a hadith - a saying from Prophet Muhammad, may peace be upon him - that describes the sacredness of land.
He shared that those who unjustly usurp even a “handspan” - about eight inches - of land bear a “weighty burden that will burn them, that will drag them down seven degrees in the earth”. Those who die defending their land are martyrs, ascending to a promised heaven.
“In the name of God, the Compassionate and the Merciful. The people of Palestine, of Gaza, of Lebanon - let them live their lives freely in a state of safety and security, where they don't have to worry about bombs being dropped above their heads, that any moment in time can destroy their houses, their families, take away their land and their lives. From the river to the sea, from the cedar to the olive tree, Palestine and Lebanon will be free.” ♦
Amer El-Samman, Rana Abbout, and Guy were consulted about this article prior to its publication to ensure their stories were respectfully covered.
Written using files received from protesters at the emergency rally for Palestine and Lebanon.
This article appeared in The Antler River Media Co-op on October 14th, 2024:
Excerpts of this article appeared in The NB Media Co-op on October 24th, 2024 and November 6th, 2024::
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