Abbas El-Zein

I hadn’t become anonymous; I had been given a new, ready-made identity, a mass-produced garment which sticks to the skin. It wasn’t so much anonymity as a stereotype; blind substitution rather than white page. As my aeroplane entered British airspace and thundered through the London sky, the nationality of my passport had billowed out and, like a mild but chronic illness, had colonised a small corner of my life.

Within four generations, I found myself at this other end of the spectrum: from the world of my great-grandfather where a man’s duty is to transmit tradition, protecting it from the subversive effect of time, to one where tradition disappears completely and the only plausible raison-d’être of living is change that often sees itself as progressive per se.

In Nabatieh, the small town in the south of Lebanon my forebears and I come from, Hassiba has been the uncontested diva of Ashura.