Destruction in the Mar Mikhael district after the Aug. 4 Beirut Port explosion. (Credit: Patrick Baz/AFP)
It is two hours past midnight now. Across the road from us, a single streetlight hums its familiar monotonous tune and its beacon flickers. The air is heavy with a melange of smells that our noses somehow come to tolerate; aromas of spice and charred meats intertwine with the stench of wet asphalt in a way that feels welcoming rather than off-putting. I expect, any second now, a barrage of calls from my mother. I may be a grown man, but you have a way of worrying her. You’ve worried her in the past, and you’ve worried her mum before her. Today you worry us all again, and if my children meet you someday, you may yet worry them too. You have a funny way of doing that.
Despite the time of night, Barbar’s sidewalk rustles with people. Some are recurrent customers who should be entitled to loyalty cards, and others are new, still squinting indecisively at the menu. It doesn’t matter to the man at the cash register, though: he’ll refer to them as “son” all the same. My friends and I gather in a rough circle, chowing down on our shawarmas. Moments pass, carrying with them conversations that, like an odd pendulum trained over many years, go back and forth, between the trivial and the profound. Words interspersed with laughs decorate the soundscape of the sidewalk in a way that the streets of Hamra know well. But embedded in that familiar symphony looms a low and unnerving hum, harboring an unspoken concern that we know must remain hidden. Behind the jovial face of every one of my friends is the worried thought of when we might meet again. Each of us is a tourist inside our own country now. “Expat”… That awful name that we’ve been branded with has taken its toll on me and thus, I turn to you for this little heart-to-heart.
Beirut, you have a funny way of carrying yourself. Your bold and sometimes brazen attitude knows no limits. You have a way of making the ugly seem fine and even customary, and of making light of your woes and shortcomings, however dire. We watch you humour us with that endlessly clumsy dance of yours and in turn, we imitate and learn. We learn that it is better to laugh than to cry, to move than to linger, and to shout than to settle for silence.
You shine light in the darkest of your corners in ways so subtle that, too often, we take it for granted. On the wall behind a dumpster overflowing with piles of unattended trash is a graffiti of a heart with two initials in it beneath which someone once loved. In the tanned beggar boy’s hands are cheap flowers, most of which will remain unsold by sundown, but in his smile, you’ve vested a gleam known only to diamonds. Later, that boy will gift a flower to a girl he’ll never see again in a selfless attempt to share whatever happiness he still knows how to conjure.
We learn to sail smoothly in what any fair-minded person would recognize only as chaos. To pass that insanity down onto us, you sell it as something normal, and naively, we buy it. Perhaps even more foolishly, we then end up wondering why we feel alien when we are away. The way you raised us makes us strange to most. I suppose that one thing you cannot teach us is how to truly belong anywhere else. Two whole decades of learning your lessons, only for me to go places where they don’t speak your tongue, heed your teachings, or dance to your movement. How can it not feel like a waste?
Beirut, it’s a funny name that you’ve made for yourself. I never thought I’d live to see some call you a “capital of terror.” Only scathing ignorance could spur such an idea, but it is not the first time you’ve been given an unflattering title. Not too long ago, you were given two, the ugliness of which were of a far more deceiving subtlety. You did not choose those names, you did not choose division and you certainly did not choose to be a senseless battleground for your children to spill blood on soil that cannot tell it apart. That formal division has since ended but many carry it inside them still. Projecting blame onto outsiders would be any easy way out, but perhaps we must now recognize how we failed you. At the very least, Beirut, it is us who failed you when we started looking at identification documents rather than at one’s heart. It is us who failed you when the end of a gun became the first and last place some of us would meet.
Those who hate you from afar know nothing, and sadly enough, those who love you know too little. You are not something to experience vicariously. You are someone that one can only truly know intimately. You do not know Beirut until its stench grows on you. You do not know Beirut until you’re love-struck by a passerby on one of its busy streets, or until one of its children comes to you a bare stranger and still manages to make you feel like you’ve known them for years. Nobody truly knows you until, beneath your sky, they live a lifetime of stories in a matter of days. Among all the names you’ve been given and headlines you’ve made, one title soars above all the rest. That title is an exclusive one, and I happen to be one of the lucky few who get to refer to you as such: to me, you are simply ‘Home’.
Beirut, you have a funny way of loving us. If I’m honest, I’d say you love us in a sly, if not malicious manner. You give us so much beauty to be enamored by, so much reason for us to embrace our roots, but then, you turn around and make leaving a rite of passage. You turn around and tell us that we must uproot ourselves rather than grow in your soil. Worst of all, you do it all knowing that those roots long for you every second that they are forced to permeate land that they do not care for. If I did not know any better, I’d call it vengeance. You’ve witnessed countless of your bright-eyed children grow up only to forget everything you tried to teach them. You watch helplessly as we teach our young that it is ‘us and them’, and that you are not meant to be shared. So why keep us? We would only contribute to that endless cycle of hatred that you always meant for us to bury. But it is not vengeance that you impose upon us. You are simply holding a mirror to our faces, no longer hiding the scars we left you.
I set myself up for disappointment when I made you a promise some time ago. I believe it was in October of 2019: that is when we rallied for you. That is when we demanded that you to abolish that godforsaken rite as though you entrenched it. Some didn’t buy into the hope we felt back then. I suppose I did because I was new to your game. But one night, I made a solemn promise that I wouldn’t leave you unless you told me to. Sure enough, just a few months later, you did. On that hot summer afternoon, I bled half to death. You fanned the embers of trauma across the country, and you reminded many like me that to leave is the only way. If you hadn’t done it then, you would have done it again five years later. None of this makes sense and I hope you can see that. It doesn’t make sense to me that every step in the right direction is a step further away from you. But regardless of how far away I find myself driven, I still bear the mark of that tough love of yours on my scalp: that jagged oval scar whose story I’ve told more times that I can count. When I recount that story, I do it the way you taught me: laughing rather than crying. When I tell people the story of how they maimed us, I do it with love.
We’re not like you, Beirut. We are of flesh, and we only die once. We can’t stomach death the way you have. We can’t watch our children leave, weep and bleed, and still look beautiful after the dust settles. We are made in your image but can never replicate your excellence.
Today, I vow to wear you on my sleeve and to let the world know of your eroded yet undying grace. And some day, if it be your will that I help restore it, I will heed your call. But in return, humor the foolishness of asking for yet another promise, five whole years after you failed to uphold our previous one: I want you to promise me that my children will have the chance to learn your tongue, your lessons, and your dance, not from me, but from you, for there is nothing quite like it.
Beirut, you are a strange friend and an even stranger mother.
Dedicated to Maya Salim, with the hope that she may one day visit Lebanon
