"I’m preparing myself some happiness. Should I make you one as well?" said Ziad Rahbani. Though he is no longer of our world, our world is of him. Every absurd episode in the life of this country has, in Ziad’s language, its ready-made line. As if everything that happens to us is nothing but theater or cinema. As if we needed that distance, that fourth wall between Lebanese reality and the surreal script guiding it, to preserve our mental health.
The decision on Aug. 5, the day this protean artist was laid to rest, to rename Hafez al-Assad Avenue after Ziad Rahbani, was something exultant. This stretch of the airport road, adorned with an obelisk glorifying the Syrian tyrant, has since 1998 reminded whoever passed through it that Lebanon was, down to its arteries, subject to that malicious figure who bent its leaders with both carrot and stick. This marble obelisk has nothing in common with the one in Luxor. With its dismal banality, it resembles more a stake or a middle finger extended to every Lebanese citizen using the roundabout set in dry grass that frames it. Let us suggest that it be knocked down in one mighty, baptismal gesture at the very moment the road is renamed.
The decree came the day after the fifth anniversary of the sinister memory of Aug. 4. Our government, always walking on eggshells, has strangely cryptic ways of handing out its consolations. It was a neat bank shot: replacing the memory of the man who — along with his son — turned our country into his doormat while forcing us into silence, with the very figure who liberated speech and united people around the idea of a Lebanon that looks itself in the face. Erasing one of the last traces of Assad the father, that day, was in a sense to accompany the pain of an entire people who are no longer fooled about the origin of the monstrous explosion.
Whether it was caused by an Israeli missile, as one theory claims, or by an accidental fire, it never would have happened if that ammonium nitrate — intended for the explosive barrels Bashar dropped on his own people — had not been stored at Beirut Port, right in front of one of the city’s liveliest neighborhoods. Sign of the times: it took the weakening of Hezbollah and Bashar's flight for justice to resume its course.
The dead will not return. As the fabulous poet Talal Haidar wrote: "They are not dead, they have been killed."
Little Isaac Oehlers, barely one year old, had his chest split by a large shard of glass. He was having his snack in his high chair. Alexandra Najjar, three years old, was violently thrown by the blast against a wall. She was playing with her dolls. Adorable and tragic victims of Lebanon’s state of decay at a moment in its history when it was handed over to senile governance, gripped by a Hezbollah willing to do anything for the Assad regime on which its survival depended.
Certainly, life is worth little in our region of the world. Obeying the "Dahiyeh Doctrine," the Israeli army ignored civilian casualties during its July 2024 war with Hezbollah. As for Gaza, who still has words, who still has arms, a voice for Gaza and the children of Gaza? The memory of the explosion on Aug. 4 comes at just the right time to remind us that the victims are not numbers. That the mourning for a loved one, a child no less, is not just a figure of speech. That the suffering of those who are handicapped for life, of some wounded who still haven't finished treatment five years later, is not just "luck to have survived."
Those who still have in their ears the sound of crushed or swept glass, or in their eyes those tears of emotion rising when they remember all the young people who rushed in from distant countries to the bedside of their city, and deep in their throats the smell and taste of blood that flowed on the paving stones of Gemmayzeh and beyond, do not go through the rest of their lives like the rest of the world.
"The monster," as Madeleine Helou — the brilliant woman so full of love for this country she saw born, being the daughter of Michel Shiha, and herself wounded and hospitalized on that fateful day — called him, this "monster" left no one untouched by his horrible breath. For all official reaction, the inhabitants of the wounded part of Beirut had that day only a brief "it was too late" from the president, who vaguely admitted to having been informed but did nothing and who, instead of standing with devastated Lebanese, made only a fleeting incursion to the port, hands in pockets, with the indifference of an insurance adjuster assessing the damage.
How can one be surprised to see the young people from the neighborhood, overcome with emotion, throw themselves into the arms of Emmanuel Macron, who came a little later, sincere or not, to express his empathy. For at least 300,000 people, happiness is now no more than the artifice Ziad spoke of, and every day is an Aug. 4.
This article was originally published in French in L'Orient-Le Jour.
