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Three years after the Beirut blast reduced part of our apartment to rubble and led to the neccesity for several surgeries, what do I feel?
Anger.
I am angry because I sometimes find myself apologizing for having been a victim of the most terrible non-nuclear explosion in history. Whenever the topic comes up, I notice that I am inconveniencing the person I am talking to, as if the pain and horror I experienced are not subjects for polite discourse. My interlocutor turns away in embarrassment, avoiding my eyes for having witnessed the indescribable. I want to say:
“It’s okay for you to show sympathy…I am not holding you, fellow citizen, responsible. Like me, you are a victim, not only of the explosion itself, but of the inability to reach justice. Nothing will bring back my broken hands, there is no restitution for the thousands of private and public tragedies that occurred that night. Nothing will reunite the Coplands with their little Isaac or the Naggears with their Alexandra. But we need to know. We need to expose those who knew about the evil in the silo, and those who did nothing about it. We need to explain to all the children we lost, in a language they could understand, how we, the adults, their protectors, allowed them to disappear into the dark, dead weight of their absence.”
There will be no respite until we articulate the horror. It will continue to haunt us, and the evil will fester, like the remains of the ammonium nitrate in the demented silo that mocks the restoration of Beirut harbor as a safe haven. Only hope can heal this country. And hope can only be possible if we plumb the depths of our tragedy, tell its story, and let the truth be known.
The Mouranis were on their balcony in Gemmayze looking at the silo on August 6, 2020