Nadia Tueni (1935–1983) was a Lebanese poet whose extraordinary beauty and tragic life shaped her profound work on identity, loss, and exile. Her poetry became an outlet for her grief following the death of her daughter at age seven.
“I dream of rivers that flow backwards,
Carrying the dead home.
And the mountains,
They do not fall,
They simply remember.”
Tueni found her voice in the fractures of history, her words echoing across boundaries of time and place. To encounter her poetry is to face the raw truth of loss and belonging. Her life and work reflect a world marked by memory, culture, and conflict, a mirror to the shifting contours of a nation and the self.
“My hands cannot cradle the years
That vanished like petals in the wind.
Her laughter still dances in shadows,
A melody the Earth refused to hold.”
Tueni’s extraordinary beauty was often remarked upon by those who met her. Photographs capture a woman whose grace seemed to reflect the lyrical intensity of her work. But her ability to inhabit and articulate the fractures of her world made her remarkable.
In her poetry, she carried the weight of a divided Lebanon. For those of Lebanese and Syrian heritage who arrived in the West Indies, particularly in Trinidad, Tueni’s poetry carries a resonance that feels immediate.
The migration of Levantine families to the Caribbean began in the late 19th century, spurred by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and waves of sectarian strife. These early migrants brought with them the traditions of the Levant—its foods, crafts, and oral histories—and planted them in unfamiliar soil. Over generations, they built lives that combined the memory of mountain villages with the vibrancy of Caribbean islands.
For the descendants of these communities, Tueni’s meditations on identity, exile, and resilience mirror their own experiences, even as they adapt to the rhythms of life far from Lebanon’s cedars.
Born in 1935 in Baakleen, a Druze village in the Chouf mountains, Tueni grew up in a home shaped by contrasts. Her father, Amin Arslan, was a diplomat navigating a region constantly reshaped by empires. Her mother, Gabrielle Copin, a French intellectual, introduced her to the works of Baudelaire and Mallarmé. These influences anchored her between the lush landscapes of Lebanon and the intellectual traditions of Europe creating a voice that was restless yet rooted.
Tueni’s early years were spent in Lebanon, grappling with its identity. The French Mandate, carved from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, brought a fragile modernity. The National Pact of 1943 attempted to balance the country’s many religious communities but left tensions simmering. In this environment, Tueni discovered not politics but poetry, where the mountains stood as silent witnesses to history.
From Les Textes Blonds (1963):
“The cedars bend in whispered grief,
Their roots clutch secrets of the soil.
↓↓A mountain’s silence is heavier Than the loudest city cries.”
In French, Tueni used her poetry to capture the contradictions of her world. Her work moves between intimacy and expansiveness as if trying to reconcile the distance between Lebanon and France.
In Vingt Poèmes pour un Amour (1973), she returned to themes of exile, not as a place but as an emotional state.
“What is a homeland?
A mother’s breath?
A stone too heavy for the sea to take?
Or the promises broken
Before they could be spoken aloud?”
Tueni’s Lebanon was a country of many communities—Maronite Christians, Sunni and Shia Muslims, and Druze. Its diversity was both a strength and a source of fragility. As a Druze woman educated in French traditions, Tueni understood negotiation as a way of life. Her father’s diplomacy dealt in alliances and signatures, while her poetry worked in silences and ambiguities, capturing the spaces between words where meaning often lies.
The Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) shattered the delicate balance Tueni had lived with all her life. Beirut, a city once celebrated for its vibrancy, became a battlefield. For Tueni, the war was less an event than a condition that was part of everyday life. In Archives Sentimentales d’une Guerre au Liban (1979), she documented the war not through graphic depictions but through absences and silence.
“Rivers forget their songs.
Mountains bleed without falling.
And the sea, eternal accomplice,
Swallows bodies without a word.”
Her poetry became a way to witness and hold what could not be spoken. To read Tueni is to confront the weight of history and its limits. Her work avoids simple narratives of exile or belonging, finding meaning instead in the spaces where these ideas blur.
In one poem, she wrote:
“Memory is not a road
But a stone thrown into water.
Its ripples touch the shore,
And then disappear.”
Her later work grew even more introspective, an unflinching confrontation with the landscapes of war and memory. In one haunting line, she wrote:
“I dream of rivers that flow backwards, carrying the dead home.”
Such imagery, steeped in mourning yet resolutely grounded in hope, forms the heart of her legacy. Her poetry reconstructs what remains, piece by piece, through language.
“The cedars bend in whispered grief,” she reminds us, their roots clutching the history of a land that refuses to forget. The echoes of Tueni’s poetry are also heard from far away in Lebanon. Her words resonate deeply in Trinidad and other parts of the Caribbean, where Levantine communities have woven their traditions into the cultural fabric.
Having carried their histories across oceans, these communities find the voice of a shared heritage in her poetry. Her meditations on belonging and loss strike a chord with those who, like her, navigate the duality of rootedness and wandering.
Tueni’s poetry challenges readers to face their own fractures and see identity and language as processes of change. Nadia Tueni died in 1983, her life cut short by cancer, but her words live on, a reminder that even in pain, there is beauty. Her legacy continues through her granddaughter, Nayla Tueni, a journalist who explores questions of identity and belonging in her own work.
Nayla serves as a key figure at An Nahar, the influential Lebanese newspaper founded by the family, and has represented Lebanon in its parliament, intertwining the personal and political much as her grandmother did through poetry. Her voice, shaped by the same traditions and upheavals, traces the ripples her grandmother began.
For those discovering Nadia Tueni’s work today, her poems can often be found tucked away online, on sites dedicated to preserving the literature of Lebanon. Sites like An Nahar newspaper archives or pages devoted to Lebanese poetry offer glimpses of her work. Each verse carries the weight of a Lebanon that still speaks to its diaspora, those who left and those who stayed.
In her poetry, the personal becomes universal, and what was lost can endure. Her poems ask us to imagine a different way of seeing—to carry both grief and hope, to hold the silences and the words, and to find healing within the fractures.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian Media journalist and the winner of the 2023 Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction for her memoir, Love The Dark Days.
Website: www.irasroom.org.
Author inquiries: irasroom@gmail.com
