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From Beirut to Paris, the same sweltering heat of the streets prevails, but it is arid. The same oppression, a yearning to seek refuge in the shadows. The walls here evoke memories of the trees in Jeddo’s village – olive, pine, or lemon. The unattainable cedar teases the imagination with its ample branches, but I am without the choice of trees. I withdraw, embracing the salutary silence of August solitude.
An odd, rare urban isolation grips me since that day, filling my moments. I am far from them, caught in the turmoil. Fear encloses me like an instinct, but it’s now outside me, forever shackled. I forsake no sign of the forsaken land, reading texts, viewing images, haunted by voices, notes muffled by their emotions. Tears, constantly withheld beneath full eyelids. I do not weep; my body cracks. My pulse falters, a wild dance in my chest, bones quaking – disassociated from thoughts like divergent responses to fear’s abstraction when it descends in totality. A fear of the all too familiar, a nebulous past like latent breath. I watch, I do not weep; tears simply are.
I have escaped the worst. Tears within the body, like words; a need to embroider horror with syllables to limit its scope, its confusion. To contain without concealing. I write from the margins, if necessary, since I am not there. To write, to solidify expression as a shield of modesty, a drying caution. Indecency is my haunting. Since I am far from them, a citizen of a government that protects, that answers. Since I have escaped the worst, having spent ten days in Lebanon the week before the tragedy. As I have repeatedly left. “You have abandoned us,” say those closest to me. Abandonment, and I think immediately of childhood, of tragedy. My everyday betrayal.
Since that Tuesday, I hear the sirens of the nearby hospital again. They carve a space with their alerts, like calls without a possible response. I am useless. I witness, on guard. The same powerlessness, the same starts. Threat and night gaze back at me; the immanence of danger has never left us. These are not memories rising but stones that mark life. The war has not ended; it has settled in our collective body, weighed down by our needs, our forward motions, our faith in life. We have “paused,” a necessary survival. On our shoulders, we bear not children, but politicians, and the immense shame of belonging to this. We must futilely reject this ignoble connection. We challenge it in our roars as splendid monsters who have nothing left to lose.
Today, the youth rise, the dignity of a wonderful generation less dumbfounded than we are. Their beautiful determination, arms sweeping, clearing the streets, as if repairing with their bare but united hands. People say of this generation that they did not know war. We are mistaken; they have lived our war, we have conveyed it on every lip, in the flutter of every eyelash. The battle we left unfinished, now borne by the majesty of their gestures, as simple as those of our mothers, a splendor of ordinary conquests.
I call family and friends, fear lodged in my throat. Their voices deformed as if pulled from the rubble. Their tears, screams held back to spare me. I divert them, talking of my insignificant daily life, my stay-at-home vacation, the novel taste of empty time, the dishes I cook. I avoid, as they do. We are overwhelmed. And if I try to analyze or opine, I get the same answer, like parents to their children: “Leave it, you don’t understand the politics here, you just repeat what you read.” And I fall silent, I listen as a child who no longer trusts adults, I listen without believing but loving them wildly, terribly. I love you. I do not weep, halted by the fury of connection. Split by love, this surfeit.
My mother’s voice message on WhatsApp soothes me like the hypnotic lilt of her songs: “Do not worry about anything; you did the right thing when you left; do not think of us in your country over there.” “My country,” I am her French daughter. Here, I am the Lebanese person to my friends, colleagues, hairdresser. I receive messages, counting these proofs of connection. All compassionate, and I ashamed: yes, my capital is in ruins, my country facing the impossible, but I am undeserving. Like them, I watch, read, listen, secure in a chair or bed. Sometimes standing, not to miss the first seconds of an illusory change. This primacy, as if I was there. But without horizon.
I write, I assemble my video poems, recycling old sequences filmed with my iPhone. I revisit the aerial views of Beirut over several years: Beirut from above, Beirut of before, with its thousand limbs raised to the skies, an impossible-to-contemplate condensation from the ground. I write, approaching on the tips of words, as if forbidden to breach. As if looking from all sides at a glowing object. Hypnotized, stunned. I feel as if I’m usurping my pain, stealing the right to collapse. To suffer from afar, uncertainly.
Texts sent into invisibility; they will not read me. “We don’t understand; you complicate everything.” I am without otherness, though, the rage of their streets rooted in my belly. The despair of my lifelong friend magnified in me. She apologizes: “Let me cry for two days.” She asks forgiveness for turning away from faith for a weekend, for two days off from God. “Let me cry, two stupid days without hope or dreams of rebuilding. I want to mourn the dead children, mourn our capital. Then I will believe again; I promise you.” I listen silently in pain; she is not speaking to me as she was asking forgiveness for two lost days of faith. She addresses her god. I am their absentee.
Gracia Bejjani’s wesbite
Gracia Bejjani’s YouTube page
Text rewritten from a column published on August 24, 2020, in Courrier International.
