The City of Strangers

I

 

I do not know where Mahmoud Darwish got the metaphor of the apple to describe Beirut, as he does in his poem named after the city. New York is the Big Apple, or so New Yorkers describe it. So now we have two apples—a big apple on the shores of the Atlantic and a little apple on the Mediterranean. The two apples have a number of common denominators: both are realms that exist outside of the space they inhabit. New York, according to Paul Auster, is not part of America, and Beirut, according to the city’s own account of its tragic history, is not part of Lebanon.

Two apples hanging from metaphor’s branch. Two apples of temptation, creativity, and misunderstanding: New York is not Babel, and Beirut is not Sodom. Two apples containing within them every contradiction, from Fifth Avenue to Greenwich Village, and from Hamra and Jimmeizeh to Achrafiyeh and Basta.

While the New York apple appears immune to and able to overcome the tragedy of its Twin Towers, destroyed in 2001, the Beirut apple lives through one wave of destruction after another. Each city is a mirror, and it is the mirror’s fate that while those who pass before it see themselves, it retains no memory of them; its memory is fashioned from the brand left on its body by passersby.

Adonis built a “Grave for New York”, and Khalil Hawi “screamed before the borrowed faces”. The grave, though, was no grave, and the borrowed faces did not take off their masks. Khalil Hawi committed suicide during the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982, and Beirut still stands in the storm path of a history that destroys it, and then destroys it again.

But Beirut is not an apple.

The story tells that Beirut means “pine tree”. Pines once girdled the city, lending it the aroma of incense. Forests of pines stretched down to a sea ridden by ships made of pinewood. The pine nut, though, of which the people of Beirut have made a festive flourish to flavour their food and a succulent stuffing for their sweetmeats, will not do as a metaphor for it, or so the poets seem to think: the apple carries within it the seductiveness of the first sin, according to biblical legend, and the cedar is the tree planted by God, according to the psalms of David, whereas the pine is just a tree whose shade offers little shelter from the sun and whose scent, and the flavour of whose small fruits, need well-schooled senses to be appreciated.

Beirut has schooled its senses to pick up the most evanescent of smells and elusive of flavours but its own smell has no name by which the city can identify itself. How can we give a name to a smell that we grasp only as it slips through the fingers of our inadequate language (though all languages are limited and incapable of picking up the rhythms of the senses and tremors of the soul)?

Beirut was born as a pine tree on the shores of the Mediterranean. Founded by people from Jbeil, it became a major Roman presence before entering a long historical slumber from which it woke only in the nineteenth century, when the city was re-established as a port for the Syrian hinterland.

A new city, then, whose port began to expand in the mid-nineteenth century and that lives today a moment not unlike the agony of death, as though the monstrous explosion on 4 August 2020 did not simply blast the city and destroy almost one third of it, but came also to deliver the kiss of death to an Arab Levant murdered by occupation and tyranny.

And even though Beirut may not be an apple, it is extremely hard to find a logical answer to a question put to me by my son when he was a child.

We were listening to passages from Darwish’s poem “Beirut”. When the song came to the part about Beirut being an apple—Beirut is an apple/Yet the heart does not smile/An oasis besieged/In a year of killing/We shall make the square dance/Taking the lilacs as our partners—my son asked in wonder: “An apple? You mean we can eat it?” His sister exploded in laughter and tried to explain to us that apple didn’t mean apple (“it means like an apple”) so things became more complicated. I said that “apple” was a metaphor and that metaphors say one thing so we can mean another.

We could not explain the meaning of the apple metaphor but the rhythm of the music intoxicated all three of us. Literature is an attempt to get around language’s inability to name things by inventing new names wrapped in the rhythms of the senses and the possibilities of speech.

But we have seen the monster bite through the metaphor’s back and tear the apples to pieces.

The smell of wine mixing with water, which Abu Nuwas said made him think of the apples of Lebanon, has been replaced today by the smells of death. An old wine from the tun—as it mixes with the water/An aroma rises like that of apples in Lebanon.

On 4 August 2020, we saw a kind of ending.

The shattered glass became the city’s eyes, strewn over the rubble-covered asphalt. The wound bleeds from the eyes, and Beirut sees itself for the first time in broken mirrors.

As we walked over the eyes of the city towards the centre of the darkness, we found our way by following the gouts of blood that had seeped from the thousands of the wounded.

 




II

 

“Is Beirut beautiful?” he asked me.

“It depends on what you mean by beauty,” I replied.

“Beautiful means beautiful. Can one compare its architecture to that of Aleppo or Damascus or Jerusalem or Nablus?”

“Of course not,” I responded.

“In what then does its beauty lie?” he asked me.

I was walking with a French Arabist through the small streets off Boulevard Saint Germain in Paris. The man, who had studied Arabic in Damascus, was obsessed with the magic of that city. He said he had been disappointed when he visited Beirut for the first time. Concrete hugging concrete, chaotic architecture, and a city whose sole beauty lay in its sea. He said many of his friends in Damascus were bewitched by Beirut but he felt an aversion to the city.

“You’re right,” I told him. “Beirut isn’t beautiful but it has fitna.”

Fitna?” he asked. “What do you mean?”

I tried to explain the meaning of fitna but French offered no help.

“You mean attirante?” he said.

“No, my dear chap. It’s its fitna that I’m talking about, not its charm.”

I told him of the fitna tree that used to fill our eyes in the Little Mountain. A tree that produces only white flowers with yellow centres and whose smell perfumed our evenings. I said that Beirut is like a fitna tree: the scent of its flowers makes you feel fitna, or infatuation, and its velvety whiteness coloured by the blush of its yellow centres carries one off into the world of love and its secrets. I sensed, as I talked to him, that this comparison (which came to my mind spontaneously in an effort to avoid the seductions of the jasmine of Damascus), was apt, not because of the flower, but because of the name.

“Beirut is fitna,” I said.

It is difficult to explain the nature or cause of its fitna. The infatuated one is unaware that it is its fitna that has ensnared him, just as the lover seeks to cure his passion with words in the hope of uncovering the secrets of his heart, only to find that those secrets have grown yet more mysterious.

Not to mention that in the language of the ancient Arabs fitna can also mean a tribulation, or a smelting by fire that causes gold to shine, or madness, or torment.

This city possesses none of the beauty secrets of other cities in the country. It is not the Tripoli of the Mamelukes with its enchanting courtyards. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was just a small, neglected town surrounded by a rectangular wall; a small, square, cramped city whose inhabitants were fishermen and peasants, a city that had forgotten the meaning of its name and dug in on the edge of the Syrian coast.

Starting with the Egyptian invasion, the city was turned upside down. It spread in all directions and became a port, which the French turned into one for the entire interior.

Beirut grew and became an Ottoman governorate, and, starting with the catastrophes of the mid-twentieth century, began taking in all who fled there.

Beirut expanded because it was a city of refugees. That is its secret.

During the first civil war, in 1860, it took in refugees fleeing the horrors of the massacre on Mount Lebanon. Then it took in those fleeing from the massacre in Damascus. Those who took refuge in it found that it was their city, because without them, it would never have become a city. And wave upon wave of refugees followed.

The Armenian migration following the Great Armenian Massacre.

The Palestinian migration following the brutal ethnic cleansing in Palestine.

The migration of peasants from southern Lebanon in the nineteen fifties and sixties, creating “the poverty belt”.

The migration of Syrian, Egyptian, and Iraqi capitalists fleeing nationalization.

The migration of Arab writers and artists from their countries in search of a freedom that they found in the city.

The migration of Arab journalists fleeing repression.

Migrations without end that reached their peak in the great Syrian migration, set in motion by an unprecedented slaughter carried out by the regime against a people determined to defend its right to freedom and human dignity.

Endless migrations made of Beirut a welcoming city for those compelled to leave their homelands, a city of strangers who turned their place of banishment into a new homeland of creativity, renewal, and risk-taking.

Modern Arabic poetry began in Iraq, but found in Beirut its journal, which its two Syrian founders, Yusuf al-Khal and Adonis, named al-Shi‘r (Poetry).

Literary modernism also found in Beirut its journal, founded by Suhayl Idris, of ancient Beiruti lineage, who made al-Adab (Literature) the literary review of the Arabs.

The banking renaissance began with a Jerusalem-born moneychanger named Yusuf Baydas, who created the largest banking empire in the region.

Even the theoretical idea of Lebanon—from the mountain to the sea; the republic of merchants—was crafted by an Assyrian Christian from Iraq, Mishal Shiha.

Everything in Beirut was made by Beirutis, Lebanese or non-Lebanese, whether from cities or from the countryside.

The towering buildings that shaped The Taste of Cement* were built by Syrian labour.

Even charlatanism and magic developed at the hands of “Dr Incredible” (Salim al-Ashi), a Syriac Christian Palestinian from Bethlehem. The man cowed Beirut and drove Beshara el-Khoury, the country’s first post-independence president, into a nervous breakdown that almost led him to resign.

The St Georges Hotel was built by the genius of the Lebanese architect from Bhamdoun Anton Tabet, who founded the magazine al-Tariq (The Way), which became the voice of the Lebanese and Arab leftist vanguard.

Beirut is a city of universities, of the new consciousness and revolutionary movements. Arab Nationalist thought began there with Kustantin Zureiq, who coined the word nakba, meaning “catastrophe”, now synonymous in all languages with Palestine.

It is the city of Raif Khoury, Umar Fakhoury, al-Akhtal al-Saghir, Amin Nakhleh, Elias Abi Shabakeh, and Yusef Ibrahim Yazbak.

It is the city of Ghassan Kanafani and Men in the Sun.

It is the city of the newspapers that Gamal Abd el-Nasser insisted on reading with his morning coffee.

It is the city of Kamel Mroueh, and of his killer too.

It is the city that was written in the ink of Palestinian-Syrian-Lebanese Samir Kassir’s love of freedom.

It is the city of strangers.

It is the city of all, meaning the city of none.

The fitna of Beirut is also its door that opens onto the rhythm of the waves. The Beirutis whose stories we read in the satirical texts of Muhammad Eitani were known for their passion for music, as though the music played by the people was the echo of those waves.

The Beirut horizon is blue, its sky embracing its sea in a colour whose name is hard to pin down: a colour we call green meaning blue or call blue meaning a special combination of colours whose name we have yet to hit upon. It was here, before its sea, that I understood why our language has itself become confused and gives the name green to the colour blue.

Against this horizon, Beirut gave birth to its poet—and when I speak of “the poet of Beirut”, I mean Omar el-Zaani, the poet of the people who set political and social critique to music and watched as the blue of the horizon disappeared to be replaced by the orange of the explosion, after which the city was devoured, to the sound of the deathly, earth-shaking thud that struck it, by a greyish white.

It was then that el-Zaani wrote the poem Alas for You, Beirut:

 

            See what’s on the screens!

            Deception and deceit!

            A bride in a catafalque

            Sitting motionless in her coffin.

            Alas for you, Beirut!

 

            The ignorant are in power.

            The shit has risen to the top,

            They live well, the rogues of the elite

            While the good guys die.

            Alas for you, Beirut!

 

Popular poetry of this sort, which used to be sung, found its embodiment in Hasan Alaa El Din (Chouchou) on the boards of the National Theatre in El Debbas Square. The square has disappeared and along with it all memory of the man who cried, Ah! Poor Beirut!

Omar el-Zaani’s voice was the starting point from which the rhythm of Beirut would take magical shape in the form of a woman born in the city’s Zuqaq El Balat neighbourhood to a Syriac family whose roots go back to the city of Mardin, one of the northern districts peeled away from Syrian territory in 1923 and added to Turkey. This Beirut woman, daughter of a refugee, would, on encountering the two Rahbani brothers, from Antelias in Mount Lebanon, become “Fairouz”. The magic of Fairouz’s voice reconciled Beirut to Lebanon, turning voice and music into a sea that swells to enfold in its arms the whole of the Arab Levant.

 




III

 

The relationship between Beirut and the State of Greater Lebanon is not easy to understand. On 1 September 1920, General Gouraud proclaimed the establishment of a small state as the initial phase of a plan to enlarge the Ottoman mutasarrifate of Mount Lebanon. The Ottoman governorate of Beirut—the little mutasarrifate created by the European consuls in 1864—fell within the new state’s boundaries and suddenly found itself the capital of a country of which it had not chosen to be a part.

The State of Greater Lebanon was built on the ruins left by two disasters—the Great Famine, which had killed a third of the population of Lebanon, and the collapse of the country’s independence project with the defeat of Faisal’s kingdom by French forces on the outskirts of Damascus.

Suddenly, Beirut was transformed from the capital of an Ottoman governorate, established in 1888, and to which the governorates of Acre, Tripoli, Latakia, and Nablus had been attached, constituting an area of 35,000 square kilometres, into the capital of a small country called Greater Lebanon!

There was confusion from the outset as to which country the city belonged to. It had become part of Lebanon without being made Lebanese, and it remained within the Syrian domains without being a part of them.

Its bourgeoisie and merchants, headed by Riad el-Solh and led by the Syrian National Bloc, made a deal that attempted to remove that confusion, but not completely. The deal was epitomized by the slogan “an Arab face for Lebanon”, a way out that allowed Lebanon and Syria to gain their independence from the French mandate.

Nevertheless, and despite the economic break with Damascus at the beginning of the fifties of the last century, Beirut retained its liminal role—a city whose cultural and economic horizons exceeded its geographical borders and that was at once both the outlet of the Arab hinterland to the sea and a port that was transformed, following the fall of Haifa into the hands of the Zionists, into the point of access for the entire Arab interior.

The end product of the Lebanese project was to restore the balance between the Arabs and the West and allow the city to increase its size and expand its role, which burgeoned both economically and culturally. However, the June 1967 defeat and the submissive peace of 1973 ushered in the period of the Arab civil wars, beginning with the Lebanese civil war, which cut Beirut in two.

From 1975 on, compromises were no longer possible, Beirut fell into the Lebanese trap, and the long and painful process of its integration into Lebanon began, to reach its peak with the fatal, criminal, explosion of 4 August 2020.

The long civil war announced the beginning of the collapse: old refugees fought new; working classes and marginalized social groups found that the sole means to express themselves was through the muzzle of a gun; the ligaments holding together a political order led by merchants and political feudalists rotted and became an obstacle to any evolution. Fascists took over the reins of the religious sects and the dream of an Arab Palestine was blown to pieces by bombs even before the Israeli incursion could drive it from Lebanon. And this incursion could not have been completed without the intervention of the tyrannical regime in Syria, which gave that dream the coup de grace. As the Israeli army strutted, the first bullets of resistance were fired in the streets of Beirut.

Instead of Damascus reclaiming its Beiruti port, it slit the country’s throat with thuggery, a revival of clientism, and manipulation of the sects after the manner of Ottoman governor Fuad Pasha. At the same time, the city embarked on a monstrous dance of rebuilding under the aegis of the Saudi-Syrian equilibrium, so that it seemed to some, especially after the expulsion of the secular national resistance from the South, forcing the remaining resistance into the arms of Hezbollah, that Beirut was destined to become a mixture of Hong kong and Hanoi!

That mixture, however, became explosive, starting with the American invasion of Iraq, which marked the beginning of the Arab collapse and their return to an age of renewed imperialism.

It was then that tyranny and the petrodollar began preparing the city’s coup de grace. The city that had struggled, through its culture and its press, to reclaim its soul, was defeated by the sectarian regime’s inability to build a nation. The Lebanese political establishment, instead of combining into a new vision of independence the twin achievements of liberating the South from Israeli occupation and compelling the Syrian army to withdraw, returned to the game of pledging its allegiance to outside players, leading to bitter struggles over the government, which became simply an instrument of barefaced plunder and robbery and turned corruption into an all-encompassing economic and political system.

The story of Beirut is many-faceted and will need a historian of the ilk of Samir Kassir or a creative writer such as Muhammad Eitani if it is to be written. But on 4 August, when we beheld the end with our own eyes, we discovered that this city is the storehouse of our souls, that its confused history is our personal history, and that its death means our death, as a collectivity and as individuals.

And we screamed in pain.

Can pain become our language, so that pain becomes the language of Beirut that echoes around the Arab Levant during its dying moments?

 



IV

 

New York, winter of 2001.

With remembrance of New York comes remembrance of Edward Said. The intellect quickens and words become keys to mind and soul.

Said was talking about his Reflections on Exile and telling us stories of the exiles who created modern culture, from Auerbach to Adorno to Hannah Arendt to Benjamin to Joyce to Dante. He spoke of Conrad’s migration to the English language, and I spoke of the migration of Georges Shahadeh, Samuel Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco to the French. Said used the language of metaphor to describe his experience in exile and how his New York exile had played a critical role in crystallizing his theory of post-colonialism and the vision that shaped his Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism.

I told him I had given a lot of thought to his analysis of The Divine Comedy, in which he writes, “Who but an exile like Dante, banished from Florence, would use eternity as a place for settling old scores?” Said spoke of exile and displacement, pointing out that “Modern Western culture is in large part the work of exiles, emigrés, refugees. In the United States, academic, intellectual and aesthetic thought is what it is today because of refugees from fascism, communism, and other regimes given to the oppression and expulsion of dissidents.”

Talk of exile brings us to the tragic experience of the Palestinians. Talk of migration takes us to that of the Lebanese.

Palestinians, women and men, have fashioned a country of creativity in exile (and even those who remained in occupied Palestine were turned into refugees). The migrations of the Lebanese and the Syrians, which have continued since the nineteenth century, fashioned a new Arabic language, starting with al-Shidyaq, who fled the oppression of the clergy, up to Gibran, whose migration was a flight from want and hunger.

The line that divides refugee from migrant is so fine that it is hard to distinguish between the two, unless we are to suppose—and it is a supposition that calls for meticulous examination—that the migrant has left never to return, while the exile burns to go back to the place from which he was expelled.

The supposition is imprecise because Lebanese migrants would buy a piece of land in their home villages, which people would refer to as his “return”, while Palestinian exiles gave the names of their towns, villages, or cities to the cities and neighbourhoods in which they settled; this happened not only in the refugee camps but also in America.

At this point I asked myself: Why had I not left Beirut?

I had lived through all the wars, tragedies, defeats, and disappointments. I had lived through the dream and the nightmare and the fear. Yet despite this, I had never felt an urge to leave this city.

I had travelled a lot from Beirut, but only to return. New York had enchanted me, but I had worked there as though it was an extension of my life in Beirut, and I had never once put to myself the question of whether I should migrate from that city, despite the contradictory feelings it provokes in me.

Today, as I watch how Lebanon’s young people burn to migrate and how they have lost any gleam of hope for a life in their city, I now ask myself the question that had never before occurred to me.

I remember the grief I felt when the hordes of young cultured Syrians who had come to Beirut to seek refuge, borne there on the flood of the greater Syrian tragedy, began to leave the city, fleeing racism, repression, oppression, and persecution.

When cultured Arabs left Beirut following the Israeli incursion, we were sure that resistance to the occupation would bring Beirut back to Beirut once more.

With the most recent cultural migrations from Beirut, however, we have begun to feel that the City of Strangers has entered its death throes, and that the one killing it is not some foreign enemy but the savage gangs of the sects that have turned Lebanon into a place of pillage and set thugs, with their hateful discourse of racism and their debased treatment of Syrian and Palestinian refugees and female foreign workers, in authority over our city.

These are the things that set the scene for the slaughter of 4 August.

I have not left Beirut because I am not in need of a place of exile. My city is a city of strangers and exiles, and I am a stranger like them and I share their exile with them.

But can we Lebanese exiles remain in the city of our exile after all the Arab exiles have left it?

I do not know the answer. What I do know is that if we are incapable of protecting her from death, Beirut has the right to demand that we die with her.

 

 



V

 

The eye is the window of the soul, and the windows of our souls have been smashed and become shards.

Where is Beirut?

I wanted to cry out, “Where am I?” but my voice betrayed me and would not speak. The words had left me and I found myself naked before my language.

Everyone was crying out. I heard that exclamation that holds within itself pain, anger, and grief:

Ah, Beirut!

The city lay writhing in pain, a city cast down onto the pavement of these days.

Have you ever seen a city weep?

We have read in the history books of the tragedies that have befallen cities—Baghdad during the Mongol invasion, Jerusalem during that of the Crusaders—and the words covered the pain because they could not be it.

Our Beirut, though, we watched as it lay quivering, its throat cut by the glass of its houses and the rubble of its walls. Houses became the enemies of their inhabitants, not a refuge from the cruelty of the ammonium nitrate. Nothing protects us from the hands of the crime. Nothing.

The house is not a house, the words are not words.

Ah, Beirut!

A regime has fallen on Beirut, a regime that, dying, has decided to kill the city so that no witnesses are left to its political and moral decadence.

But Beirut jeers at them—a city that awaits its killers with the contempt they deserve, and wraps itself in its own annihilation, and tells its story.

 

 



Translated by Humphrey Davies for Banipal 69

* A documentary film by Syrian director Ziad Kulsoum

 

This article was published in Arabic in Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniya 124 (Autumn 2020) as part of that issue’s special section “Salute to Beirut”. It is published here, in Banipal 69, in agreement with the author.