It is two hours past midnight now. Across the road from us, a single streetlight hums its familiar monotone tune, and its beacon flickers. Looking at it, you would think the light it sheds will go out within the minute. But for the time being, it valiantly offers its flimsy beam and, at the very least, it has outlived its peers down the road. The air is heavy with an incoherent melange of smells that our noses somehow come to tolerate. The aroma of spice and charred meats, modestly complemented by the mild and discreet undertone of vegetables, intertwines with the damp stench of wet asphalt in a way that feels welcoming rather than off-putting. Any second now, I will start to anticipate 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 mom before her. Today you worry us all, and if my kids 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 at the menu and indecisive about what to order. 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 chow down on our shawarmas, gathered in a rough circle. Unanimously, we agree that one such sandwich, without garlic, is simply not worth eating. “What if you have a date later that day”, one of us asks. “Eat shawarma another time then. Either do it right or not at all”. One of the cooks overhears the rebuttal and we hear him chuckle along with us. Further culinary discussion reveals that, as opposed to garlic, a consensus cannot be reached when it comes to pickles. Some can’t seem to agree that they invariably belong in any shawarma sandwich, be it chicken or meat-based, and after some passionate debate, we agree to disagree.
Moments pass, carrying with them conversations that, like an odd pendulum trained over many years, go back and forth, striking a right balance 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. If that streetlight across the road could talk, it might even say that I laugh like my father. But embedded in that familiar symphony looms a drone, a low unnerving hum carrying an unspoken concern that we know must remain concealed, lest the bliss of our symphony turns sour. Behind the jovial face of every one of my friends is the worried thought of when we would meet again. Each of us is a tourist inside our own country now. Each of us, in a quiet yet harrowed endeavour that we learned to hide, is desperately trying to cultivate every passing instant that expatriation is relegated to the back of our minds. Each of us dreads the day that we will have to type out a text message saying: “I won’t be coming back for Christmas this year”. That day has come for a few of us already, and it has now inevitably come for me. And so, 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. You have a way 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 from you. We learn to find appreciation and love in what little life can have to offer: the small local thrift store stinking with incense, the playful acknowledgment of a stranger’s joke from across the street, the humble bragging of knowing the best spots and corners in one of your suburbs. You shine light in even the darkest of your corners in ways that we often overlook and take for granted. On the wall behind a dumpster overflowing with reeking 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. When the sun sets, that boy will gift one of those flowers 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. We learn that it is better to laugh than to cry, to move than to linger, and to shout than to settle for silence. 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 abroad. You mould us with your big, callused hands, doing your best to hide those calluses, and indeed, your upbringing makes us strange to most. I suppose that one thing you cannot teach us is how to truly belong anywhere else. When I begin to miss the feel of your palms, an occurrence that I’d hardly qualify as rare, I start reaching for straws, trying and often failing to find some semblance of it anywhere I go. You see, if I’m lucky, walking home one night in Newtown; if I stop at a pedestrian light and close my eyes, maybe by some spatiotemporal miracle of chance I’d be graced with the roar of a car horn, the whiff of a cigarette and the phantom taste of some cheap garlic. It does sound like a lot to ask, but maybe then, I could feel a glimpse of your touch. Two 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”. To label you as such can only be the result of scathing ignorance, but it is not the first time you’ve been given an unflattering title. In fact, not too long ago, we were given two, the ugliness of which was 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, much to your disapproval. It would certainly be easy to project blame onto outsiders for the hurt that you’ve endured but perhaps the honourable thing to do is to 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, and when the end of a gun became the first and last place some of us would meet. It is us who chose the colour red to paint your portrait, and today, we have to suffer the ignorance of those we enabled to call you names.
Those who hate you from afar know nothing, and sadly enough, those who love you know too little. It really is upsetting that even those who speak highly of you can’t quite do you justice. You are not something to experience vicariously. You are someone that one can only truly know intimately. You do not know Beirut until you’ve smelled its stench and gotten used to it. You do not know Beirut until you’re lovestruck, smitten by a passerby on one of its busy streets. You do not know Beirut until one of its children comes to you for the very first time and still manages to make you feel like you’ve known them for years. You do not know Beirut until you’ve heard one of its eldest passionately rant and shake their fist at what the country has become. Nobody truly knows you until, beneath your sky, they live a lifetime of stories in a matter of days. Those who wish to meet you have reason to, for there is no other way to feel your embrace. Those who wish to steal you can only ever dream of doing so, for there is no place on this God-given Earth that could possibly be what you are. 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 in this world who get to refer to you as such. When to some you are ‘Paris of the Middle East’, and to others a ‘terror base’, 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 most slyly, if not maliciously. You give us so much beauty to be enamoured by, so much reason for us to embrace our roots, but then, you turn around and you 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. Yes, it would certainly make sense for you to be vindictive. Why wouldn’t you be? 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’, that you are not meant to be shared. So why keep us? All we would do is contribute to that endless cycle of self-servient hatred that you always meant for us to bury. It would then make sense for you to refuse to harbor this darkness, even at the price of expulsion. But it is not vengeance that you impose upon us. Believing so would be naïve. You are simply holding a mirror up to our faces. You are simply 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’s when we rallied for you. That’s when we took to the streets demanding for you to abolish that godforsaken rite of passage as though you had entrenched it, and for you to shine anew as if you hadn’t tried. My father didn’t buy into the hope we felt back then. I suppose I did because I was new to your game. But one night in my room, I made a solemn promise that I wouldn’t leave you unless you expressly told me to. I was old enough then to know that it would sadly be a unilateral promise but sure enough, you’d eventually tell me to leave. You’d break all our hearts, you’d fan the embers of trauma that our parents thought they had extinguished, and you’d leave me bleeding half to death. You’d remind me once and for all that to leave is the only way. If you hadn’t done it then, you’d 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. It doesn’t make sense that to estrange myself is to do right. Just know that 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 tell that story, I tell it the way you’d have wanted me to, the way you taught me: with a laugh rather than a cry. When I tell people the story of how they maimed us, it is not with spite that I do so. It is with love.
We’re not like you, Beirut. We are human, 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. That same excellence we have failed time and time again to preserve and alienation is the price we pay. But I have hope that what comes next is a better chapter. The previous generations will have me think that hope is poison, but I see hunger and ardour in my friends that would suggest otherwise. It is a sorry state that we’ve left you in but we will do better. Today, the best I can do is vow that I’ll wear you on my sleeve and let the world know of your eroded yet undying grace. One day, if it be your will that I help restore it, I will surely heed your call. But in return, maybe just make me a tiny promise. Humour for just a moment the foolishness of asking you to honour an agreement, five whole years after you failed to uphold our previous one. Some things don’t change I suppose… But I digress. Here’s what I ask of you. 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.
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