A woman walks past a portrait of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on June 3, 2024, in the Beirut suburb of Nabaa. (Credit: Matthieu Karam)
“My brothers and I were born in a neighborhood in the belt of misery, in a poor neighborhood called Sharshabooq in eastern Beirut, near Karantina. There were Lebanese and Palestinians. All of them were poor. There were Arab tribes, Kurds, Armenians, Shiites, Sunnis and poor people from other neighborhoods. There was diversity, not like today.”Nasrallah rarely talks about his childhood. But in the speech he gave on May 28 in tribute to his mother, who had died three days earlier, he did not hesitate to draw on his childhood memories to show an idealized image of a community mosaic. It’s an image that is symbolic of the country and has been damaged in recent decades, particularly with the displacement of its inhabitants during the Civil War (1975-1990).In Karantina, these displacements tell the story of the clashes that tore the area...
“My brothers and I were born in a neighborhood in the belt of misery, in a poor neighborhood called Sharshabooq in eastern Beirut, near Karantina. There were Lebanese and Palestinians. All of them were poor. There were Arab tribes, Kurds, Armenians, Shiites, Sunnis and poor people from other neighborhoods. There was diversity, not like today.”Nasrallah rarely talks about his childhood. But in the speech he gave on May 28 in tribute to his mother, who had died three days earlier, he did not hesitate to draw on his childhood memories to show an idealized image of a community mosaic. It’s an image that is symbolic of the country and has been damaged in recent decades, particularly with the displacement of its inhabitants during the Civil War (1975-1990).In Karantina, these displacements tell the story of the clashes that tore the...