It was my first day at school in Lebanon. We’ve decided to come back to Lebanon to live there for good. I was 13. I was so excited about it…finally I was meeting people who live like I do, talk like I do, and look like I do.

But living in Lebanon after spending all my childhood abroad was somehow challenging…new people, a new way of life and a new language. And by language I don’t mean just the Arabic language in which I struggled for more than a year, but the “language” Lebanese people spoke. I’ll tell you about my first day at school, and you’ll understand what I mean.

So again, it was my first day at school. I was given a form to fill, a usual form with name, date of birth, place of birth, etc. Then I arrived to a space I had to fill, and it said “rite” in French. I’ve always been in French schools, French was the first language I learned, but this word wasn’t familiar…I went to “Madame Alexia” (I can still recall her name) and asked her: “What does this word mean?” She looked at me with anger and answered me: “You don’t know what your rite is?” I said “no”. She was getting more upset (I don’t know if it was me or she had some issue): “Your rite! Sunni, Shi’a…your rite!!”

I went back to sit on the bench where I was filling the form and started thinking. I knew these two words, I’ve heard them somewhere, but what was I? After some thinking, I thought probably I’m Sunni, I’m not sure but somewhere in my head I had the memory of this word. So I wrote it down.

This first incident on my first day of school in Lebanon made me understand exactly what language Lebanese people spoke. It was the language of segregation, classification and fanaticism. You are who you are depending on what you have inherited from your parents, something you never chose, a membership in some clan you don’t know much about, you ignore the members, and you don’t even find many common things with except maybe for some traditions…And there it is : you are classified. And starting this day, I knew I wasn’t only Lebanese but also Muslim, and more: Sunni. All aspects of me were minimized in this word “Sunni” which didn’t mean anything to me. I didn’t know what it was or how it was defining me, but the Lebanese chose this is the way I’d be, and this is the way I had been since that day.

I left the country again a few years ago (I’m now 29), and I left it as a Lebanese. But even abroad, things have changed. When I say I’m Lebanese, they ask: “From where in Lebanon”? (When I was a child, people didn’t even know where Lebanon was…now they know its cities!) I answer: “North, Tripoli”…”Oh! You must be a Sunni!”…Classified!