 Photo credits: Chloe Nasr Chloe Nasr The title Ṣawt al-Maʿrakeh is toponymic wordplay: both “the voice of Maʿrakeh,” the southern Lebanese village, and “the voice of the battle,” since the name also means combat in Arabic. Urbanism in warfare privileges spectacular physical destruction and the ruins it leaves behind. Just as telling, though far less talked about, are the logics through which war organizes daily life and urban inhabitation. Sound is where this may become audible: as diagnostic archive and analytical entry point, acoustic phenomena expose how violence restructures urban habitability and exerts territorial command over the home, the town, and the capital. Listen to this sound.
Listen to it loudly. These are the moments after today’s airstrike on the town of Maarakeh. With every name of a village being bombed, this sound rises. Fear, terror, catastrophe—the sound of death. This is not news. This is a massacre half an hour away from ordinary life. Those who cannot do anything, at least do not stay silent. Please, do not stay silent. Please, do not say this is normal. On a grey screen, Bu Nasser Touffar—a politically conscious Lebanese rapper and a leading voice in Lebanon’s underground and Arab hip-hop scenes since the 2000s—placed this text above an audio bar and told viewers to listen, not read. The clip carries the aftermath of the Israeli strike on a residential building in Maarakeh during the month of May, 2026, southern Lebanon, whose death toll rose to eight. A woman’s voice rises first, unconsoled, before breaking into wailing; a man follows, steadier, until he names the scene: “Lēk el-ḥāra kīf hiyye”—“Look at how the neighborhood is.” Beneath them, a child cries without pause. The damaged home is recorded as texture, no longer as a home. Many cultural producers, Lebanese rappers among them, live inside this soundscape and work it, sampling, narrating, cursing, rearranging the sounds imposed on them during the 2024–2026 Israeli war on Lebanon. Their lyricism and lived experience make audible dimensions of warfare that land-centric, Euclidean approaches obscure, revealing subaltern forms of urban inhabitation. The Sound of Vertical Occupation: Booms and Drones The sonic boom (jidār al-ṣawt), produced when a military aircraft breaks the sound barrier, is one of the clearest examples of how sound can reshape urban life and inhabitation, even without damaging buildings. It brings war into the home, fractures its Bachelardian refuge, and replaces the ordinary rhythms of the city with fear and suspicion. Jamul, a Beirut-based rapper and software engineer originally from southern Lebanon whose artistry crystallized around 2019, captures this disruption in “Rasi Malan” (“My Head Is Full”): “We now wake up to the sonic boom / We used to wake up to the sound of the Adhan / Welcome to South Lebanon.” The lyric shows the boom displacing the canonical, routine call to prayer as the sound that structures the day, replacing a familiar communal rhythm of the city with one of aerial threat. Bu Nasser places it onto a continuum with physical annihilation--jidār al-mawt aw jidār al-ṣawt, “the wall of death or the breaking of the sound barrier”, a menacing “acoustic reminder that [Israel] can turn Lebanon into Gaza at any point”, destroyed into rubble. If the boom is a sudden rupture, the “MK” drone, the local name for Israeli long-endurance UAVs of reconnaissance and target acquisition, is its normalized counterpart. It turns the sky into a layer of “vertical urbanism”, weaponizing altitude for asymmetrical panoptic control. Its continuous hum reorganizes sleep, labor, and mobility, producing an ambient trauma between hypervigilance and desensitization, while it maps the city beyond public knowledge and state cartography. Bu Nasser answered in kind: he sampled the hum, cursed Israel, and rapped his song “Kazifi” (Bomb) straight over it, stripped of studio vocals, an acoustic counter-map that reclaims epistemic authorship of the sound from below, even as the violating apparatus codes the streets from above. The Uneven Geography of Wartime Discourse: Media and Normalization Wartime sound is also discursive. After the multiple ceasefires throughout the war, fewer spectacular strikes on Beirut let the capital adopt a “postwar” register, masking a South and Bekaa still under airstrikes, blocked (re)entry, demolitions, displacement, and evacuation warnings. The shift in media vocabulary to “violations,” “tensions,” and a “precarious ceasefire” shrank systematic warfare into episodic infraction. Bu Nasser named it in March, 2026, as killings under the ceasefire became “daily, ordinary, boring news.” His line in Kazifi—“Live Love Beirut, but the South—never mind”—confronts the hierarchy head-on: Beirut is the internationally legitimized metric and valorization of suffering, while the devastation of the South and Bekaa is broadcast yet muted. Some outlets sharpen this noise into a weapon. Channels like the Saudi-owned Al Hadath were reinforcing the sectarian organization of urban space, foregrounding “Christian” towns as exceptional targets while making attacks on Dahieh or the South sound expected. When Bu Nasser joked in March 2026 that people should not trust Al Hadath even if it called him a rapper, he exposed how a misleading headline claiming that a bombing in a “Christian” town allegedly targeted by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard could spread misinformation, strengthen pre-war sectarian tensions, and fuel panic, rent-gouging, and housing discrimination against displaced residents. Jamul’s Baten El Beast stages the same TV noise, subverts it, then shows how on-screen reassurance can pacify destruction, rent, and displacement: “They occupied my wall / And blew up my house / The land-owner lady wants to raise prices […] We turned on MTV / They said the situation was positive / So we cheered and ululated a lot / Blablablabla” Sound thus becomes an urban technology of war: media re-orders attention, dictating whose destruction is a national emergency and whose loss fades into background noise and experiences psychological alienation. The Sound of Disappearance: Warnings, Maps, and Urban Legibility Within this asymmetric cartography, peripheral villages, previously unknown to the public, began to be heard only through warnings, casualty lists, and bombardment footage. Responding to Bu Nasser’s bulletins on May 26, 2026, one follower voiced a cruel epistemological contradiction: a town’s absence from the strike logs signals its “urbicide” and erasure, yet its appearance means there is still something left to destroy, a lifeline to it. Hearing that a place was struck becomes the only proof it survives, forcing these geographies into legibility through the architecture of their disappearance. “[…] May God keep you all appearing. But also, God, may you not appear anymore, may you stop being hit… God, how ugly this feeling is. How strange…” The maps and evacuation warnings disseminated by Israeli spokesperson Avichay Adraee are their own weaponized noise. The mere possibility of destruction empties urban space, inducing panic, displacement, and flight even without strikes. And the emptying is tactical: an order to leave clears the streets for drones and fighters to gain a clear line of sight, turning the city into a sterile target or mapping zone. Independent artists like Jamul and Bu Nasser Touffar offer situated cultural knowledge, war registered not outside factional discourse but also through survival, embodied consequence, and inhabitation. Their literary lyricism keeps the war at the scale of its actual effects, where politics was reducing it to divisive negotiations and corporate media folded devastation into sectarian misinformation and background noise. Their significance is that cultural production enlarges the political field itself, not standing outside it, nor outside factionalism, but pressing questions of habitation, embodiment, and the unequal terms on which urban life is sustained, destroyed, and remade in war. About the Author Chloe Nasr is a PhD candidate researching border dynamics in Lebanon and an IFI-PPIA Junior Fellow (Spring 2026 cohort). To learn more about the Junior Fellowship Program, visit https://www.aub.edu.lb/ifi/Pages/Junior-Fellows-Program.aspx Comments are closed.
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