A constant memorial to the civil war are destroyed and abandoned buildings such as this one whose beautiful lines harken back to the golden age of this city.
I’ve been back in Beirut two weeks now and have settled in comfortably. Before my return I had been apprehensive about the street life here as the war in Syria drags on and the refugees get increasingly desperate. To my surprise, Beirut seems almost absent of beggars and shoeshine boys this year As a friend in church said, the city has been “pacified”. The schizophrenic woman who sat on the streets and sang beautifully is gone. My scary peasant lady is no longer down the street selling her vegetables and I must resort to a green grocer. There seem to be police and soldiers everywhere but their focus – like that of their brethren elsewhere – appears to be their iPhones.
This past week we experienced a frisson of war when an Israeli drone killed six Hezbollah fighters in Syria. Hezbollah responded by firing anti-tank missiles into an area the Israelis continue to occupy (despite the claim they withdrew from South Lebanon) and killed two Israeli soldiers. Even before this happened, a member of my English-speaking church decided to leave Lebanon out of fear of an Israeli invasion. Israel last invaded Lebanon in 2006 and was squarely defeated by Hezbollah which became enormously popular here as a consequence. An opinion piece here in The Daily Star said that since Hezbollah is a social movement as well as a militia (and a political party) Israel dares not escalate this conflict. For its part, Hezbollah is fighting in Syria and really can’t afford another war either. Such is the ritualized dance in this balance of terror.
Can this beautiful country ever free itself from the shadow of war? On Saturday I went to a conference at AUB about lifting the veil of silence around the civil war here, a cataclysm that lasted fifteen years and resulted in 150,000 deaths, 200,000 injuries and mass emigration of about 250,000 –all from a population of about 4 million — but that number isn’t solid as Lebanon hasn’t had a census since 1932 out of fear of what the demographics it would reveal. The civil war is a painful topic and its end resolved nothing. There is no national narrative about the events of the war and their meaning – how could there be? It merely ended in an armistice in which the warlords, war criminals all, were given impunity in exchange for peace. Some of them are still in the highest echelons of government. There are NGOs taking down oral histories of the war (closely watched by the sectarian political parties) and another trying to locate the bodies of the 17,000 disappeared. Part of me agrees that there is a “right to truth” about the war but I wonder if the analogy of a nation with the individual psyche isn’t dangerously stretched. A similar attempt with the Irish “Troubles” backfired, although in that case impunity hadn’t been granted to combatants and the oral histories became evidence for the courts.
My classes are going well. I alternate between hope and despair about acquiring this language. Probably the most productive part of my week is sitting around the table at the Baptist church listening to members chit chat as I sit and knit. Sometimes I understand things and sometimes I don’t – it feels like receiving a squeaky transmission from a distant planet that occasionally comes in loud and clear and then the crackle starts up again. In the end, learning a language is a feat of memory. Around here one learns to take the long view, that is where hope lies.
goingfortheguttural 