Splitting time between Lebanon and Canada was once my normal ...

Dalia Rahhal is a Lebanese-Canadian photographer based in Toronto.

Snow-capped mountains. Poppy fields and ripe mulberries. Pines older than my family tree. The rooster’s crow at the crack of dawn. Trips to the sea and Sunday markets. Children’s laughter and the sound of drums echoing through the village during Eid. I have not known this version of Lebanon for what feels like a lifetime.

In September, 2013, I moved to Canada along with my mother, Laila, and my two younger siblings. I grew accustomed to its winters. Mornings spent shovelling the driveway. Pink noses and raspberries. Maple-syrup popsicles made in the snow. Walks home from high school alongside friends. Dandelions in the spring and summer weekends by the lake.

For the past two years I’ve grappled with a concept I have dubbed my 50/50: This month I have officially called Canada home for exactly as long as I did Lebanon. A 50/50 split. Which will one day become 40/60, then 30/70 and so on. I can no longer tell people that I’ve lived most of my life in Lebanon.

I still have ties to the country, of course. We’d return home every summer to visit my father, Ramy, who still resides there. This arrangement continued until the summer of 2020, when the pandemic effectively shut down any chance of travelling to Lebanon.

But I didn’t imagine it would take me four years to return – the longest time we’ve spent apart, and the longest I’ve ever been away from home.

My family has a long and complicated relationship with the concept of home. While both my maternal and paternal sides originate from Lebanon, my mother grew up in Ontario, whereas my father grew up in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon. This resulted in a lot of back-and-forth travelling in my youth to visit my mother’s side of the family, though we always returned home to Lebanon.

My parents’ relationship was not initially the focus of my reflections on home, but I found myself drawn to a series of letters between the two of them that spanned the length of their relationship.

The first was a letter from my father, just after they had met when my mother had visited Lebanon with her family. The second was a letter from my mother, not long after giving birth to me in 2002, updating him on both of us. My mother had wanted to be with her parents during the weeks after my birth, and my father couldn’t be away from work for too long.

They don’t write each other letters any more, but every morning he sends her a photo of tulips over WhatsApp. My parents have spent the duration of their relationship going back and forth between two countries. It has been 11 years since they have lived together full-time, but their love has never weakened.

This distant smoke, seen from our house, is from burning garbage during my 2018 visit. Since then, Lebanon’s economic crisis has grown worse, and people cannot afford to waste anything.

In August, 2023, I finally had the opportunity to return for three weeks. With my 50/50 deadline rapidly approaching, I knew I had to document this trip. My existence is linked to the Beqaa Valley, in the eastern part of the country; its mountains act like the sides of a box holding my family’s history. Being away from it, though it never felt like my only home, was like losing a part of myself. I always felt drawn to Canada, yet I yearned for the place I don’t belong in any more.

Coming home was like burying a loved one. The days spent running after my cousins in fields of tall grass are now long gone. The friends I once had are now strangers; my family members live farther and farther apart. Returning to Lebanon hurt, yet it felt like it finally filled a void left in me. It was a strange yet comforting feeling, to think that these valley walls know a version of me that I no longer am, and that I know a version of this place that is long gone. Solar panels lined every roof in my village, a result of the ever-worsening economic crisis. The prices of everyday items have skyrocketed. The temperatures were higher than I’d ever experienced, the snow no longer covering the mountaintops year-round. My room in my childhood home remained a bright purple, starkly contrasting with the neutral paint of my bedroom back in Canada. Childhood toys were stuffed away into the closet, and old posters still adorned the walls. My mark here was made, but my presence would be fleeting. How does three weeks begin to compare with four years away?

My fear now is that I may never see my home again. My father sits idle in our family home as the war in the Middle East spreads to Lebanon. We don’t know when or if he can join us. It has been a long 11 years of waiting to live under the same roof again. Watching the footage of the Israeli strikes, it is hard for me to fathom that I was there just over a year ago. I hope that, one day, Lebanon will have the freedom to exist without the ever-looming fear of war.

Still, I take solace in the unmistakable resilience of my people. Lebanon is said to have been rebuilt upon its own ashes seven times, earning itself the title of the phoenix. What I saw there is not only a people who will rebuild themselves again and again, but also my own memories, piecing themselves together. Returning home after so long, after reading the letters between my parents and looking at these fragments of what once was, I’ve never been prouder of where I’ve come from.

50/50 is a non-linear narrative photo series retelling the Rahhal family’s lifelong struggle of living and loving while worlds apart, and what it means to feel like a stranger in the place you’ve only ever known as home.