Beirut and other drugs

Bella,

It is a windy Saturday. I took Tommy on his favorite morning walk. I got him apples from the cocktail bar in Sassine Square and some grapefruit juice to mix with my gin. Tommy loves to watch the Christmas lights dangling from the shops and the buildings. There are fewer this year. They only glitter when the government electricity is on, at most three hours a day. The generator only lights the holy tree in the square. It’s decorated with angel wings this year, a mercy call to the Holy Spirit. You would have loved it. I close my eyes and laugh at the thought of your laugh. How I miss you. Beirut misses you. Tommy misses you. Come back.

Last night I threw a house party. I always find it easier to heal around new faces who know little to nothing about me. After a few glasses, I decided with the help of a guest I vaguely knew to remove the famous painting from the wall, to welcome 2022 with an open heart. The wall actually looks lighter now, warmer. You would be proud. You always wanted me to throw this piece of art or burn it on his doorstep. I have to admit that the thought of it always amused me, but I did like the painting. I could always see myself in the woman featured on that canvas. There, naked, trying to catch her breath in a crumbling city, her red lipstick intact. I was the inspiration for that painting after all, or so he said, yet he managed to hide me in the shadows for years. The therapist had two theories: I castrated him with my strong character, or helped him shine while I remained backstage.  Don’t we play both roles in relationships? The supportive and the do-it-all woman? What a vicious doomed cycle! What does your therapist tell you?

It is still eleven in the morning. I fix myself a glass and fall on the sofa to the rhythm of Sabah Fakhri. Since he passed away, I play his track “Khamret el Hobb” on repeat until I fall asleep drunk on love, or should I say: drunk on my longing for love? Sabah’s voice travels inside me. I go to parallel universes, into my past lives. Maybe one in old Damascus, another in Jaffa, and on the hills of Serifos. There, I was betrayed, and there I was worshipped. There I committed suicide. There I was an empress, and there I was a Roman slave. I open my eyes to Tommy’s lick on my eyebrow ring and come back to the warmth of Sabah’s voice.

Do you really think we ought to have one life partner, Bella? I am not really sure I want that anymore. Partners are like seasons. They water the heart in the spring of love then fall off like leaves in the cold, each to heal a sore spot. They give us refuge, they open our sacral chakra. They heal and hurt. On the verge of my thirty-seventh birthday, I came to accept that each relationship damages us; we never fully recover. Melancholia seems like the only constant. Maybe the heart doesn’t have to heal. This is natural physiology: collecting patches of scars, loss, and love. Maybe we ought to create collages of our hearts and sell them as art or artefacts at exuberant prices to European museums. Maybe then, we will heal.
I go to therapy and yet often wonder if healing is an illusion. Aren’t the answers to our pain already known to us?
At night, I stopped adding Perrier to my Tanqueray so the ice cubes melt slowly. Did I tell you I have been dating the same person since you left? It has been five months now. He is a happy boy who makes me smile. Unusual. He talks to plants rather than beings and makes amends with the sun and soil. I go sometimes and see him in his mountain house. I indulge in oneness trips and orgasm to his fingers. He is also a great cook. Last week he made me salmon tacos. I haven’t asked about his past nor about his relationship with his mother. I don’t speak to him about healing nor therapy. I sidelined myself just to see his smile and cuddle with him at night. Tommy is fond of him. He knows he is the cook.
I am embarrassed to go on about my daily rubbish while you try to sleep to the sound of shelling. Are you able to handle the cold nights? Are you eating any warm meals? You seemed pale last time we spoke. I got worried. You moved away from the windows and closed Skype in a hurry. Bella, if you are unhappy, you know you can dump everything and come back home. We are strong women, but acknowledging that we have endured much and need a sense of peace is also strength. We are already successful. We do not need to fight new battles to prove that. Come back. Syria is still a battlezone. I know you were not expecting this when you signed up. I did not think Aden would be that tough also when I went there.  I couldn’t survive in Yemen more than two weeks. I slept two full nights in the corridor next to my grab bag with my passport in hand. I can still see the face of the burnt child lying on the sidewalk by the market, and I can still hear the shouting of the gunmen under my building. It brought back memories of our days in Beirut. Our cities seem doomed, tired of our wrongdoings. They wished to vanish, as Beirut did seven times. The Fairies have left us to fight our demons and despots. Our Middle East has become a haven for broken dreams. 

How are you holding up there? Is there still no diesel for warm showers in your station? You mentioned vaguely that you made some friends. Send me more details! Have you been sober since you left Beirut? Do you manage to go to Erbil for some rest? When is your next retreat? Your organization should be taking care of your well being and sending you home every now and then! Bella, come back.

My street in Ashrafieh scares me now. The other day while entering the building in a hurry just past midnight, I heard a woman calling me. I didn’t look back. Then the doorbell rang the moment I reached my floor. I froze. My heart raced. I didn’t open. I held on to my phone with my brother’s number on speed dial. I held my breath, locked the doors, and stayed awake for hours. The next day I discovered that it was my neighbour alarming me that I had left my car lights on. I thanked her, and cried. When did the city turn us to anxious, hysterical beings?
Did you see the latest tragic news on the Mediterranean? The death toll has reached a new record high this year. There are countries who have been prosecuting the swimmers who saved refugees at sea. Activists on the flotillas receive death notes on their doorstep. There is a growing rage inside me. Sometimes I see the souls of these Mediterranean travellers wandering at sea while I walk on the corniche. The faces of the street children I couldn’t save and who died on my watch also haunt me. 

It was a failure wasn’t it, this program? Did we really believe we could pave new lives for those souls through art therapy sessions and psychosocial support activities? Do you remember Kaissar? I have recurring dreams about him. That I resigned from work to adopt him and broke all humanitarian work rules. True I never wanted children, but Kaissar broke pieces of me I don’t know I can ever mend. Do you really believe in what we do, the humanitarian aid work? I always lectured you and the team about making a difference, that we save lives. But I also always wondered if any of you believed me, if I believed myself. Response plans funded by the same powers who created these crises. Reflecting on all this now, did we do more good or harm? I don’t need validation, nor do I want sympathy. I just want to wash away the guilt that keeps me up at night.

Back to you now. Tell me about your daily routine. Is it the same Syria we always loved visiting? What languages do they speak where you are stationed? Are people really in conflict between each other or is it again some big country’s conspiracy play? Tell me about the women of Kobani. Are they as the legend portrays them: fighters who’ve liberated their city?

 Your Internet is never connecting. Your whatsapp checks are never blue. Facetime doesn’t recognize your number anymore. I can barely catch a word or two with you on Zoom and I cannot find you on Facebook anymore! Come back.

Last week I tripped over an advertisement selling flats in the Greek Islands. I always dreamt of resigning from corporate life and even humanitarian work and dedicating the rest of my days to writing. I could go to the South of France, or maybe a village in Italy. But I cannot seem to leave Beirut. Am I addicted to drama? My heart still melts into a nostalgic dumb comfort each time I get drunk on the city streets, or eat mfatqa from Barbour or spinach pies dipped in labneh from Makdessi bakery at dawn. I drink and pretend drinking makes me overly emotional.  The truth is, alcohol is a mere excuse. I have been waking up overly emotional for some years now. With each departing friend and each security blow. I can leave the mfatqa and manakish el zaatar about which our fellow expatriates reminisce, but my dilemma is wider. I feel guilty. I assume holding onto what remains might prevent it from collapsing. If I go, will it disappear from the map?
Nayla says that I am a romantic. She was hinting at the Romantic school of the 18th & 19th centuries. Maybe I am. Everything around me is sunsets, the sea, windy winters, Sundays.  Beirut with all its distortions, its rainy sewage, and burning corpses is still romantic. And what if I am romantic? Do I need therapy for that too?

Tommy fell asleep on my feet under the yellow cover. The electricity is back on and I need to order some food. I feel  lucky since they switched our salaries to dollars. Privileged to have the luxury to reflect on my existential dilemmas such as the ones in this letter.

Do you notice, Bella, that the holidays are lonely? I need to trip on magic truffles again, I need to believe again that I am alive and breathe happiness into my lungs. Last time, I saw myself as an avatar traveling from one life to another, becoming a beautiful tree. I heard my soul’s mission: to make people’s lives softer. That is my calling. And here I am in Beirut, trying. Maybe my animal spirit, a baby elephant, would help soothe hearts and heal bullied souls. I can adopt one. It will make magic. We need magic. Maybe then I can convince you to come back. Although coming back now is losing the self, sanity, physical rest. Maybe we ought to consider a few years in the Peloponnese. Restore sanity there or plan a revolution. We tan and sip Mastiha on sandy beaches while we wait for the waves to drown Beirut for the eighth time. Only then maybe we can resurrect to the life we want.

The electricity is out again. Tommy is impatient for his walk. I send you my heart enveloped in kisses. 

Stay warm. Come back. We either pack and leave or succumb to this madness together. What matters is togetherness, right?

Bhebbik,

Sisi

Beirut, December 31, 2021

Published initially with Rusted Radishes- edition Letters and Liminality, 2022

Yellow and Pink

Yellow and pink. She piles them on the sofa. Toby follows the new sheets’ candy smell, jumps high, and then lays down on his furry back, fixing her with his puppy eyes. Orange sun rays meet the entrance mirror and rest on his brownish belly. He grunts. She smiles.

It’s Independence Day. It’s Bloody Maria’s day. She picks up her violet vibrator and snuggles it all in, in celebration. She closes her eyes, fastens the pace with the marching army’s show. Their beat picks up, then slows down. Her hand adapts to the rhythm. She sweats. She poses. She holds her breath and then comes with every bit of pulse, in synchro with the drums’ closing ceremony.

It is a happy calm November day in Beirut.

She missed her morning yoga session. She blamed it on the electricity. Her phone died as the alarm did. The truth is that she woke up sore to a stranger in her bed. Not a total stranger. They had met a few times in protests, exchanged fiery political views. Him a cynic, and her an Aquarian. Unsaid layers of tension lingered each time they had an encounter. He stopped approaching her after a while. Her boyfriend back then became his thought partner. She only saw him again yesterday night. Somebody’s car blocked hers. He watched her fidget looking for the car owner. He then helped. With no success unblocking her car, he proposed to drive her home.

She had a couple of Sipsmith glasses at her friend’s farewell. This one was leaving to a far island; she couldn’t even memorise the name. It doesn’t matter she thought. This was the third farewell she attends in less than a month. She is not angry or sad. She is just numb.

She got to discover that feeling at her second EMDR therapy session. Eye movement Desensitization and Reprocessing; a new technology that focuses on unblocking traumatic memories and rewiring the brain to heal from them and create new belief systems challenging the old. Numbness was a first layer. Little did she know; the monsters were just about to be unleashed at full speed.

They go for a ride and find themselves at a live music bar. She recognises the guitarist strings’ sound and decides to stay. Beirut was smiling at her, or that she thought. Sipsmith was definitely swaying her beautifully that night. That was the last bit she remembers. Here she was this morning, with Mr. Cynic under her sheets. She pushes him out of the bed “accidentally” in an attempt to wake him up. Success. He gets up, gets dressed, and leaves her for the Independence Day celebration.

Toby was staring at her. He never liked her ex. Nor this one; he chewed one of his yellow shoes during the night. She tried to apologize yet hysterically laughed with every attempt. She knew that was the last of him. She did not care, nor did Toby. He doesn’t like men’s hormones smell in this house.

She opens Facebook to the mourning news of Belmondo. She stares at the eulogies and quotes from his movies, on friends’ pages, here in remote collapsed Beirut. Why is she emotional? She never watched any of his movies. Minutes earlier, she skipped the news of dozens dying in the Mediterranean in the attempt of crossing over to Europe. She muted those tragic stories. Yet she found solace in the French actor’s death. Why is she shedding tears over an 88 years stranger and is unable to relate to lifeless bodies washing off the shore? 

It is a happy calm November day in Beirut.

She zaps the emotion and orders tomato juice instead. Electricity cuts. The delivery boy gets stuck in the elevator for twenty minutes. He screams. She screams. Anxiety kicks in mixed with the gin in her blood. The neighbours free him at last.

She pours an extra ounce of tequila with a dash of lime. No celery needed.  Her recipe for overcoming headache’s hangovers and Sunday’s melancholia. That’s the beauty of Beirut and dating its bartenders. Knowledge for the soul.

She settles on the afternoon movie “À bout de souffle”. Halfway through, she shuts it off.

Rakan, 3 years old, died of dehydration, just across the Libyan coast. She reconnects to her search engine. She looks up the number of casualties this year on the sea death road. Too many to relate to. She rages, yet still unable to connect, to shed a tear. She doesn’t wear the saviour cap today. She faces the brutal reality that she lives in denial, in a parallel life where Godard’s movies are more significant to her heart pulses than any other tragedy. That is how she is surviving Beirut. That is how they are surviving the doomed city. By pulling up the curtains during the day and wearing shades during the nights. By hiring personal trainers, recycling lovers, and reducing the number of ice cubes in drinks. 

Toby heads for the door. He looks at her and wags his tail. Not wanting a baby, she adopted him. He had behavioural issues. Still does. The trainer at the dog school told her that Toby was just fine; his separation anxiety is inherited from his owner and the only way to solve it was to head for the source. She changed the trainer twice after that, and then decided that they were a waste of money.

She wears her jogging pants and ventures outside her nest. Toby drags her to the fruit shop. She gets him a kilo of cucumber and orders herself a carrot juice and another bottle of tomato juice. She checks on the delivery boy. He survived the shock. On her way back, she stops at her favourite pastry shop. A sign was hung on their door: For rent. She just lost her daily dose of happiness. 

It is a happy calm November day in Beirut.

She makes a second stop instead at the liquor shop. One tequila gold added to the cart. She didn’t realize they had just changed the clock, one meaningless hour forward. It was already five PM. The street became darker, and before reaching to her phone to light the way, she tripped over the broken sidewalk. The cucumbers fell off with the carrot juice washing over them. She was so focused to save the tequila and tomato juice that she let go of Toby’s leash. He ran off after the neighbourhood cat. She froze. A hand leaned towards her to help her off the floor. As she was redressing herself, she realized that was the creepy man dressed in army patterns who harassed her two weeks ago next to her car. But Toby was not near to scare him off. Instinctively she grabbed the tequila bottle to smash his skull. Toby was faster. This time he jumped and scratched the man’s outfit taking away with it a bit of skin. She was a proud mama, took Toby in her arms while the army patterned harasser ran off.

She took the stairs up back home, prepared a pitcher of Bloody Maria and filled the bathtub with hot water. It was not only numbness she opened the door to. She knew that now. She had opened the door to the monsters within to see the light. She doesn’t know just yet how to tame them. She texts her therapist and asks for two sessions a week. She puts on Queen’s concert at Band-Aid on high volume and then sinks in deep pink salt.

Time to Decolonize the “Anti colonialist humanitarian movement”

You would expect mainstream western news outlets to whitewash the image of the occupier. Newspapers, TV stations and social media accounts of major global news are not only selective in their coverage, but they also tend to twist facts and more dangerously omit news of what are clear breaches of human rights.

It has been always the case when covering for the Middle East, and in specific when it came to Palestine.

Since our early ages, whenever a disaster took place in our countries, which was quite frequent, we learnt to read news with skepticism. We trained our mind to be critical to uncover a glimpse of the truth.

With the rise of social media, we found a medium to spread our truth and our versions of the Middle East realities by raising awareness on our channels and our blogs.

We lobbied, we advocated, we raised flags and unleashed our revolutions loud and wide. We fought our systems of oppression and our own government. We exposed abusers and thugs. Yet the ones in power fought back with counter social media attacks led by the corrupt system. Algorithms conspire with our abusers. Human rights activists’ accounts were blocked. Social media architects are in a sly agreement with the fascists. Terrified of exposing violence and abuses they hushed the voices of the oppressed.

Social media is betraying us once again while fighting occupation and colonialist settlers today. Accounts are being blocked, contents removed and replaced with an ugly propaganda. Footages of massive unjustifiable ethical cleansings are omitted. Algorithms recognize that the truth of the killings of Palestinian children would harm the occupation state. They shut our mouths and manipulate the masses.  They consciously and unconsciously lead the public into a unilateral type of news with the illusion of being democratic, objective and neutral.

Neutrality. We have heard it, supported it maybe and thought of it to be one of the most noble humanitarian principles to be promoted, and to guide all our approaches to support people suffering from any type of disaster and conflict.

Recently the concept of neutrality has become debatable in humanitarian spheres. Should it really be a core humanitarian standard? Merriam Webster dictionary defines it as “the quality or state of being neutral; especially refusal to take part in a war between other powers”.

Is this really what should be the core of humanitarian principles and what they should stand for?

I honestly prefer to abide by my mother’s teachings. Her ethics go beyond any international standards. It is not that complicated; the perpetrators of violence, the colonizers, the occupiers and violators of rights should be called out and condemned.

At our home we learnt to take sides. We learnt to resist oppression. We raise our voice against injustice. No, we do not stand silent. We take actions and defend the rights of the people whose lives been scattered by injustice. We take sides with the people of the land.  

Today more than ever I stand by my mother’s teachings.

Neutrality in such circumstances should be condemned.

Taking acts of solidarity with Palestine is the only ethical imagination we should abide by.

Injustice is not subjective. Standing with a population whose lives and lands are being stolen is not a point of view.

This is a freedom struggle against apartheid and colonial occupation.

We do not call it a conflict. There are no two sides. There is only one Right Holder.

But these truths were expected to be hidden by mainstream colonialist media and spokespersons.

The major disappointment comes from many humanitarian outlets. These same entities who are leading a new humanitarian map, who are encouraging a revolution of the aid system and appear to be waging a war to decolonize the humanitarian sector, many couldn’t pronounce a word of condemnation to the acts of violence.  They make claims to transfer back the power to the communities and yet cannot denounce the colonial state. Some call it on their platform “a conflict” and describe the violence as “clashes”. They “objectively” define the war as a shared responsibility between two parties. Who is the second party they are throwing equal responsibility on as the attacker? Are they the 75 children killed? The head doctor of the COVID response who has been murdered? The children who survived saving their fish? The youth who committed suicide? The 10 years old girl who is in agony unable to act nor suffer like a 10 years old child? Are these the ones to share responsibility in this war?

Who are the humanitarians who can shift and dismantle colonialist power?

I will not trust a body that has a selective criterion on who to call an abuser, an occupier and an oppressor. We are not to trust these types of mechanisms to influence agendas nor to bring back power to the people. Maybe they will, but I do not trust which side of justice they will chose.

Today we need to create our standards of justice. We are the humanitarians. We raise our voices to speak our truth. We self- fundraise. We are the ones to claim our land back and our rights against our own countries’ corrupt systems and the global colonialist powers. As the genius and wisdom of Audre Lorde once said:

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”

It is the time where we children of these lands, claim back the space and decolonize the movement of decolonization from the hands of the headmasters of colonization.

Article Written by Sara Sannouh

Disclaimer: All statements and views are my own and do not reflect the positioning of any organization I am affiliated with

Association Libre

I perform while writing. That’s what I am told.

I wait for how your eyes and his are going to meet my sentences on this
white background, how would you interpret my state of heart and what emotion will you project.

I erase and write again. My thoughts fail to meet my speed of writing. Am I
dyslexic?

I wish my brain processes panic attacks the way it rationalizes riddles.

I asked her in my first session; how do people grieve? What are the sets of
emotions that I should feel and in what order? And do you grieve the living as well as the dead? Could you give me a timeline for the process to be closured?

She remained quiet, although she is not a psychoanalyst. She asked that my
exercise for the first week is to witness my emotions.

Easy. After my session, I went to the market and bought the goods that made our only common bond. I didn’t taste any. I took a photo and put them on the shelf in an attempt of completing my mourning checklist.

Do we ever not perform? Isn’t it embedded in our creation, our
reason to be?

When God pushed him from the angels’ platform he ordered his son to
perform.

I even perform when I dream.

Sometimes when I doubt that he is guessing what I am thinking, I
perform in my thinking.

We met randomly in a remote village. After an hour or two of soul
connection, he held my face and offered his view of my thirty-six being.

Tu es cartésienne. Ne prétends plus. Ni dans tes écritures, ni dans tes émotions. Ça ne va jamais faire aucun sens. Ça ne doit pas faire un sens. Relâches.

I took his hand and placed it on my neck. My blood flow pulsed his fingers
at above 100 beats.

I cannot seem to calm it except in my sleep or when I am washing the dishes. Instead of consulting a cardiologist, I downloaded a mystic application on my phone that guides me through messages from the universe. Probably from various parallel universes; I keep on asking and the answers keep on flowing, even at dawn, on holidays and Sundays. I am failing to stop the heart from racing. I intentionally try; yet it teases me by running faster, faster than the beeps of the oximeter. I indulge in stress relief activities, like going on a retreat. They tend to have a counter effect, like Chet Baker Diane’s album. My heart sinks behind the closed doors into the melody and creates counter turbulence, maybe in an attempt to solve it from the inside. Yet, it fails. Let me try the crow pause; she says it helps with the blood pressure and releases stress. My wrists get cramped, and I spend the afternoon distracted on google, wondering if I can still use these hands. Calm is medicine but I get to hear me louder. Baker is a better medicine.

They call me from the reception. He is waiting at the restaurant. I did not
give him my number. Anticipation is sexy and sexy is caffeine for my veins.
Wine flows through the night, red as my cheeks next to the fire. It is
self-validation that my non psychoanalyst told me to work on in session two. I affirm my strong independent being as a source of all safety needed. Still I force an unsettled smile when he pours his heart to his friends about what an exceptional woman I am, how smart, how accomplished, how I escape all stereotypes. He doesn’t stop.

Elle est trop sympathique.
Regardez-la. Sublime.

Sensing my distress, his friend urges him to stop.

Elle n’est pas ta trouvaille ni ta trophée enfin !

My palpitations take a strange turn. I try to carve a space in my brain to
keep that episode intact so I can retell it in my next session; I register the
feeling of discomfort and the number of heartbeats per fifteen seconds and the eyes of his friend paused on my lower neck, all of this kept faithfully in one of my memory pockets.

It is a little bit past midnight, my eyes are still roaming the ceiling,
turning from one side of the bed to the other, the colder side. I replay the
question that I have been revisiting all week; what did you lose when he died. Possibilities. Possibility of what I wanted him to be, of what I wanted us to have.

Our brains function in a sly devious way. Aren’t they ours to tame?
Shouldn’t they be our allies to strategize and win? I add this existential
reflection to another brain pocket proudly to share later. On the flying
bridge, I stop pressing on the gas pedal. I want the ground to swallow me or a bird to pick my car, fly and place it on the other side of the road, where the earth is flat under my feet. I hit a record of my heart race, I am glad I
didn’t have the oximeter on me. I am all nauseous. I lost six kilos since four
months now. If that’s not grieving, then what is, doctor?

In the morning we go on a “small hike”. He starts asking about my
relationship with him, about my mourning, then right after he asks about my exes. I don’t see quite the link. I answer in abrupt sentences, not
purposefully, I haven’t walked uphill in the forest since my class of sports in
1999. I was trying to grasp air in between my words. A cool breeze of November sends chills up my spine. When I return to my room, sweaty and cold, I open my laptop and search for pneumonia then meningitis symptoms. I take a hot shower and hide my tears in the steamy bathroom.

A new face started following me on Instagram. I open my account and relook at my 504 posts. I try to wear his skin and guess how he is going to look at each photo. I scroll down slowly, stare at the absurd captions I wrote, at the nature scenes I didn’t quite capture, at the different angles of my cleavage and at the various hair colors I had. My heart is in my mouth. I lose an hour scrutinizing the screen; that is definitely performing; I am sure of it.  But what about them performing? Is it necessary on a first
conversation to list all the films d’auteurs they have watched? Bergman.
Godard. Kiarostami. Yes I know them. Yet Eat Pray Love is a movie I enjoyed
watching many times. I do not need to be impressed. I am not. I am not
impressed by how many books they have read nor intrigued by their mysterious solo living. I just want to have a genuine laugh and feel the warmth on my skin.

It is the third session. I feel more confident. I am clear on what I want. I
want him to serve as a bridge. A transition. We do not share much in common and he is drawn into his own macho drama. But he nourishes my ego, he is my trophy to break hearts. He has a good looking familiar face. He helped me as well so far ace one great unapologetic orgasm.  Isn’t this progress towards raising my worth score doctor? All that I could get out of her was; you see him as a bridge? Interesting.  All my hormones of stress awoken to the alarm. I didn’t have much more to say about him. I think he knew all the way what he represented to me. He kept silent when I left in the morning, and for several days to follow.

In the corridor I laid on the ground and held hands with the electrician
when the blast exploded. They fixed the door and painted the ceiling. I wanted to buy a cactus to add a green spirit to the space. It costs double my retreat night. I bought a shoe cabinet instead. You never came on the day of the blast. That was the day of separation. Not before. After we evacuated the building, the electrician came back and started gathering the windows’ glass scattered on my bed. I wanted to send you a photo but you didn’t ask for one. Our brain can be kind as well. I do not recall the details of my anxiety. I think I did not panic. I just held his hand silently, mistaking it for yours.

She describes anxiety as the mother company that hires OCD, panic attacks,
phobias and other behaviours to embody it to take form in physical space. To heal it, one should start with controlling the behaviour, the symptoms, not the emotion, not the thought, not the root cause. If one succeeds in controlling the heart beats and avoid the nausea, sweat and numbness, one loses the validating emotion that their body is in danger. The cycle is broken. One then could discover the root cause.

As a methodological thinker, the concept is easy for me. It makes sense. One
should know how to follow instructions.

I finished my healing session and took the bridge towards the city. The
amount of oxygen shrank in my car. I am in control. I am creating this
illusion. The brain seems unavailable at the moment. Sweat covered my
eyeglasses. Unable to keep pressing on the gas pedal forward while seeing cars’ spotlights as blurry dots, I took the first available exit. I spoke with the
first man I encountered under the bridge during corona lock down with 2000 cases and 20 deaths registered that day. He blew his cigarette in my face, smiled toothlessly and offered to accompany me to join each other in our loneliness, he described. My brain cells woke up. I took the flying ramp back home.

I am impatient. My fast pace only accelerates the blood machine in my body. But I am in a hurry of completing my healing checklist and new documents keep on getting attached to the original mail, out of the magician hat, my non-psychoanalyst chair. In session four, we learned that the brain needs time to break patterns. Memories buried in our subconscious during childhood, times of war and mourning, were reinforced by experiences lived throughout our upbringing and adulthood. The mind is faithful to them and doesn’t abandon its creations easily. I wonder if all the 70s and 80s Lebanese generations witnessed the same brain metamorphosis. The flight, fight, freeze modes activated for decades, how did we survive keeping our amygdala on constant alert? If we take a scan of the brain today, the signals look distortedly bright on the MRI. Not very bad after all, it could serve as an artistic contemporary installation.

I decide to let him drive me back home from the mountains. He doesn’t look
like any of them. Maybe it is the extra years he gathered, a possible
advantage. I enjoy the novelty of the conversation. Nothing in common. I enjoy the compliments I am showered with a foreign language.  I turn off my facebook notifications for another week. The other two could always wait, including the boy with the handsome familiar face. I embrace my temporary independence, confidently this time, even with the surplus of tachycardia. I decide to stop cooking my signature dishes for a while. I turn his steering wheel to the other side of the city. It is a start. He smiles.

I am aware of my performance. I embrace the beast and tame the ego.

Can I publish now?

Disclaimer:

I performed while writing this piece, all of it. I would need you to read it
to validate this performance.

Category: Fiction-maybe- Written by Sara Sannouh

Under the Mediterranean Stars

In this area of the globe, we believe that our destiny is written on our hands. The carved lines have the secret prophecy of how our life is evolving, in which direction our health, financial stability, and productivity move forward or backward, and it describes our miserable or happy heart state. Very few are skilled and connected to discern those lines. They read them silently and keep most of the knowledge in their heart, as most of it is heavy to share. They also say that these lines change every five years, as per the number of fingers on our hands, that’s why destiny is supposed to be literally in our hands.

On an individual level, a societal level and a national country level one might argue that experiences differ from one another. Aristotle saw destiny as a result of the driving force of necessity yet with a conditional qualification that is free will.  Considering this hypothesis positive, that destiny is about free will, is it really in our hands?

A young mother who has been fighting for the custody of her child paved a hard path dotted with a sectarian resistance; she died before completing her mission on one of the highways of death in Lebanon.

A young activist was protesting the streets, demanding his bare basic minimum rights for a dignified living; he was shot in the North of Lebanon by one of the army bullets.

A domestic worker who has been working for years in Lebanon was dreaming of returning to her home country; she was found a dead body at her employer’s house.

A father shot himself in one of Beirut busiest streets at daylight; he couldn’t afford his daughter’s food and survival.

A 14 years old daughter was burnt alive in the suburbs of Beirut after a brutal rape; as barbaric previous acquitted examples of rapists just did not go behind jails.

A footballer was killed by another funeral’s random shots in daylight at Beirut doors.

196 victims died in the Beirut blast that was caused by hidden neglected chemicals stored at the port.

Was destiny written in their hands’ lines? Was this a necessity Aristotle? What free will could they have chosen to influence their fate? Travel across the borders of the cursed land?

Well, in the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean seas, since 2014, so at least during two cycles of hand reading, it is estimated by IOM (International Organization for Migration) that more than 20,000 persons including at least 850 children, have died at sea trying to break their curse for a better destiny.  Most deaths were potentially caused by pneumonia, drowning, heart attacks or actual shooting by state officials.[1] The latest deaths were Lebanese victims, fooled by boat traffickers who left them to die at sea with no food nor fuel to go on. A mother had to throw her dying toddler to the waves.

How does the map of the hand of our Mediterranean look like? What do the stars above us tell us?

How does the hand of Lebanon look like?  Who has written its lines?

All the above deaths are not destined deaths. They are not the anger of the Goddesses of Stars and Sea Asteria and Amphitrite.

They are our rulers’ doing. People who died had families, people who cared about them, aspirations, dreams and hopes for a better life. They had lands, some had jobs and had routine dull daily lives or exciting ones. Some wanted to marry, some wanted to meet their other half, some wanted to find a career, some were running away from judgments, others wanted to set their children into their road of fame; all of them wanted to just escape the fires and be able to breathe.

These deaths were orchestrated, planned and mapped by our monarchs, in alliance with ex and neo-colonialist powers who sentenced in their turn this region to be doomed.

Emptying the land by using the force of misery or by attraction is succeeding.

Today thousands of Lebanese students are enrolling in scholarships programs across Europe, while hundreds of families are flying to Turkey, Cyprus, Canada, and other lands who are offering easy citizenship passes. You just need to leave this land. Leave the fight for your rights. Leave your grandparents. Leave and take your children with you or make new ones in the promised lands. Take with you the photo albums and mother’s recipes.

We have managed in the end to even fail Aristotle theory. Our destiny, in this reading cycle, under the Mediterranean stars, is in the hands of the most devious souls carving lines of death by air, land or sea.

Post Blog Written by Sara Sannouh

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[1] https://missingmigrants.iom.int/region/mediterranean

Beirut. A brand new Tabula Rasa

It is my nephew 7^th birthday.  It is also post Beirut Port explosion, August 2020.

I look at him playing with his cousins, screaming in laughs and waiting for the cake, carelessly, innocently. Running breathless, happily like children should do. Maybe he recovered from what he lived on August 4 and forgot how he ran with his mama from the scattering glass; or maybe like our generation did, like his mother did, hid it under his skin, well-guarded in his memory to metamorphose into some repressed fear when he grows up.

This is how we did it, children who were born and who grew up during Lebanon civil war in the 70s and 80s. We learnt to hide and suppress the pain, act in denial and “reinvent” ourselves into positions of rescuers or victims. With each situation, we wore a different hat altering between the oppressor and the oppressed.

There are a lot of differences between our generation and our parents’ generation: cultural differences and norms, eruption of new social contracts and emergence of a new dimension of humano-spiritual realm. Yet with all this elevation of the spirit, we fell into the same trap and I am concerned for the children of this generation to fall as well into that abyss.

We were in the past and are today in a constant state of shock. I do not call it an aftershock. We never had the time to be in aftershocks. Ongoing traumatizing episodes occur in our lifecycle, as many as the turns of the earth around the sun, as many as the planets, as many as of our heartbreaks, and sometimes in dark periods, as many as the years of our political leaders’ years of reign. We learnt to look at the trauma in the eye, cry or scream if the damage was beyond our understanding, or act in denial when we consider the blow minor, a blow that didn’t leave us physically on our knees, a blow that is invisible to our eyes. In both cases, we readjust in a split of seconds, sometimes days, and accept the mediocre new realities as our only possible choice and sole savior.

The human brain response to any crisis when the alert system is launched, is one of the 3 Fs: we either Freeze, Fight or Flight. Our amygdala answers by launching a response system to danger and push us to take an action. When this part of the brain is in constant alert with no reassurance taking place and no going back to a state of normalcy with our body and brain unconsciously frightened and this hysteric state becomes our daily bread, we enter the void of toxic stress. Connections between the neurons die little by little with time, and we might even start to lose major functions such as recognizing and expressing emotions, experiencing limited loss of memory or in extreme cases loss of speech. This happens for example to children wo lost loved ones over a traumatic event, or were abused over a period of time; if they do not regain their sense of safety and routine and are not showered with love, the effects of their experiences become long-lasting and sometime irreparable.

This is what we live in Lebanon: an ongoing long-term trauma; we are not in post-traumatic state, but in a continuous nuanced trauma experience.  It is on loop. Our brain is adapting to the 3 Fs to a limit where we cannot call it a response anymore. It is a state of being. Social scientists and psychologists should coin a new term for us. This is a shared destiny that our collective Lebanese consciousness has been recording for decades. It is written in the stars of the land, with ancestors’ trees and family of souls sharing a common fate of deceits. And with each treachery, a new order rules, a fake system that we accept as the savior since all our brain receptors are so damaged that they are unable to fight anymore. A new tabula rasa installs itself and we embrace it with open arms of denial or a heart attack caused by humiliation.

This is not random, this not the work of the Gods. This is a systematic planned intervention designed by states. These shocks worldwide were aimed and are aimed at reprogramming our brains to accept lower standards of living and be injected with any new doctrine. Naomi Klein called it the shock doctrine.

When new Orleans was flooded and mostly destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, one economist saw opportunities there “ Most of the New Orleans schools are in ruins. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity’- Milton Friedman. A sentence that sounds familiar to our ears. In the new Orleans, public schools were reduced from 123 to 4 after the hurricane, in a structured plan aiming at privatization and increasing profits.

This same economist Friedman (who is a Noble price winner…) apparently explored his devilish strategy long before 2005, he did it in Chile in the 70s. Naomi Klein explains in her book the shock doctrine,  how Friedman  “acted as adviser to the Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet and launched the concept called the  ‘Chicago School’ revolution. Friedman coined a phrase for this painful tactic: ’economic shock treatment’.” ; which in reality were based on cells of torture. The same scenario was used in Iraq war, and the same reflected in Argentina 2001 crisis,  

How does this remind us of what we are living in Beirut?

First Step: impoverishing the population, having them fight for bread and sit in line at the feet of their frozen accounts or begging their political parties’ leaders for some cash. Poverty rate skyrocketed leaving more than half of the population at bare minimum spending per day.

Second Step:  infiltrating thugs and gangs in the street to fight, kill each others and spread insecurity. Dozens of unexplained street deaths in the last few months of 2020.

Third Step: Using excessive unlawful force to shut up the mouths that protect injustice. Hundreds of cases of abused protestors were documented by lawyers and doctors in Lebanon from the October uprising in 2019.

Fourth Step: Destroying or minimizing the efficiency of all the vital infrastructures that provide services such as water and electricity leaving the population in stone ages deprived of basic survival needs. During July, the electricity cuts in Beirut reached 21 Hours per day.

Fifth Step: flooding the streets with garbage leaving it for months to pile up, creating unhealthy dumps and landfills, costing millions of dollars loss per year and health hazards with high rate of air pollution. chronic diseases are increasing with high rates of cancer documented each year.

The Killing Step:  Beirut August 2020 blast, more than 180 deaths and thousands of injured reported. Assessments collected by humanitarian actors are shocking. With an estimated 200,000 housing units affected and 40,000 buildings damaged, of which 3,000 are severely damaged. Over 15,000 enterprises – which constitute 50 per cent of all Beirut establishments – are also estimated to be damaged as per UNDP numbers.

In the first few hours, following the blast, our politicians had announcements on the media how this tragedy is an opportunity, for humanitarian aid to flow to Lebanon after the long boycott from the international community. A Friedman school of thought. We are part of a field experience where we accept any new notion with no breath to fight.

The 80s generation in Lebanon grew up during a war, with killings and maiming targeting innocent neighbors and family members. It left us with thousands of disappeared and with no memorials to mourn them. This is followed by a difficult upbringing with traumatized mamas wearing black, an adolescence and adulthood planted with street bombs, and a series of economic instability and environmental toxicity that steals lives of friends at an early age. We had to say goodbye for many who quit their battles. Our mothers never got to change their black robes, and we couldn’t lift our head up beyond the debris.

A 60 years’ old doctor feels like he is on a treadmill since his school days, living in a system that drains him with a daily sense of incertitude; his only days of peace were lived in London. Colleagues in their 30s feel that they are losing their IQs, they are becoming dumber, unable to have a quality discussion that goes beyond the electricity cuts, price of the dollars, and how to run away from the police force during tomorrow’s protest while fighting for what is left of their dignity. There are no plans for artistic creation; and when we dare to unleash our solar plexis, layers of debris, dead corpses and struggles come out on paper, we cannot think beyond that limit. We turn in limited circles of friendships tormenting ourselves into a deeper state of depression. A young mid 20s activist remembers how his brain rewired when he lived in Berlin; he was able to engage in philosophic and political debates that goes beyond bare survival.  I have to admit that we miss the randomness of thoughts, we are unable to plan a dinner, we cannot promise our children a better school year or even an ice cream escapade on the corniche on a Sunday afternoon. We are also unable to love, we lost the passion that is buried under layers of insecurities; we destroy our partners, our loving relationships, as the country stole our ability to feel.

Our evolution is counter advancing; has it become embedded in our Lebanese genes for generations to come? Our traumas are so inked under our skin that we associate places, villages and cities in our country with bombings sites, army assaults or with an explosion that wiped out our souls.

Lebanon needs to drop the resilience absurd concept and release the Phoenix to where it belongs.

We need to find the bodies of the disappeared and mourn so our mothers can take off their black dresses. As cliché as it sounds, murderers need to be behind the bars so our panic attacks can disappear. Our collective memory filled with traumas needs a physical space for remembrance and mourning so artists can break the curse of redundancy. Our souls need healing so we find the capacity to fall in love again. Our lungs need a clean air so we gain back the ability to think and fight.

Until then, we will remain comfortably numb, buried under our delusional Phoenix.

Post blog by Sara Sannouh

Broken Glass

Everyone is screaming and writing their anger and pain in an attempt to mourn the loved ones we lost and mend the broken pieces of our souls and streets.

I am trying as well to write. Maybe I could breathe again. Maybe I could document our pain and the truth that might be derailed with time and be substituted with a fake memory created by media outlets, history books and the monsters who are killing us.

August 04 2020 at 6:07 PM- Two explosions (rated the 3^rd blast in magnitude worldwide following Hiroshima and Nagazaki) wiped out the city at Beirut’s port.  

Less than 48 hours after the blast, Beirut is counting its deaths, still looking for the missing, maybe at sea or under the ruins. That same sea who was our only source of fresh breath, who healed our hearts and offered us gateways to dreams, now it has swallowed its rescuers into an abyss.

Hundreds of calls and messages from loving hearts across the globe showered us to check on our safety. It is not a first. We have been welcoming endless disasters that keep caring people at the edge of their toes when they hear the word Beirut on the news. But it was a first that my voice broke and didn’t find any positive replies. We are alive and grateful but I was not able to find any comforting answer.

Yes we survived;

my mom and dad carried each other and hid in the corridor just like old times;

my sisters and their families escaped the falling front of glass that scattered their apartments;

my brother survived while his car windows flew when driving in the opposite direction of the sea.

My friends endured similar scenarios, escaping death by seconds or by chance.

Yes we are safe but we are not ok.

Whatever is being broadcasted on television, should be multiplied by ten to have a taste of the reality on the ground. It is a nightmare that we won’t be able to wake up from, not anytime soon, not anytime.

The sound of broken glass mixed with the screams of my neighbours is playing on loop in my head; I was lying on the floor holding the hand of the electrician who was installing lights in my new flat in Ashrafieh. I didn’t want to die yet, not here, not alone, away from all the familiar faces. The stranger next to me became a rescuer, a selfless being evacuating people from the building. We were lying side by side after he pushed me away from the front windows and pulled me on the floor. I was standing in the middle of the room mesmerized: “It is Israel, it is Israel”, that all that I could say, and I wish this was true. I pressed my hands covering my head and my ears, followed my rescuer instructions, crawled, picked the keys and took the stairs. All the building front glass balconies were on the street. People barefoot, in their pyjamas with their dogs and children on their sides were looking at the sky mumbling prayers, screaming and not yet aware of what hit us. It was the start of the aftermath of a shock. Shaking, looking at each other, looking for answers in the midst of the broken glass, fumes and screams. I woke up the second day sore, like I had run a thousand miles, like I was beaten up to my bones and muscles, all my body aching. Is this the trauma that I talk about in workshops and proposals? Well today it hit me harder than I ever thought.

I checked on my loved ones, they are safe but I am still scared. I am scared to hear a familiar name in the victims list. Actually I was terrified to watch on social media more videos of mourning mamas, the faces of firemen who were sent to their death with a cold blood, I am afraid my heart breaks a bit more, but I feel selfish if I look away.

I have to watch, I have to feel the tragedy.

It is like a definite fate that we need to face, to feel the victims’ pains and share their sorrows.

Isn’t it a shared fate of a city we all chose to love no matter the odds and try to mend its façade? I look at the map of the port, at the streets, at the faces of the injured, and I cry. I shed tears out loud then much more in silence.

I feel guilty that I am very privileged and was saved with the least damages possible.

I don’t know what I am mourning, maybe myself, my choices, my heartbreaks, submerged by my anxieties that all surfaced at once, the demons that I have been fighting for years, here they are all the fears combined, our frail body unable to digest them anymore, not with Nexium, not with librax nor any other numbing drug.

It has been a while we are numb in Lebanon. After the failure of October uprising, the fear of the disease, the economic collapse and loss of livelihoods, we became robots, shadows of souls that walk around the city, say hello from apart and continue to our loneliness. We were numb, but still trying to build some sun rays, calmly, at least I was trying and trying hard.

I was watching my closest souls, my loves and friends lose color each day, lose the appetite to live, to laugh, to wake up; and I believed I could change that with some love and energy, that I could still create a safe haven for us to be.

All is gone now, I can only smell the fumes of dead corpses and see the colourless shadows and souls trapped in bodies that are not theirs anymore, depleted of any type of resilience or spark of passion for a better day.

My endurance has burnt out, I declare.

Loss of familiar and preferred spots in the city overtaken by giant corporations.

Loss of clean air and clear sea with a garbage crisis filling up our lungs.

Loss of harmony in the midst of a hatred speech, sectarian, homophobic and nationalists debates.

Loss of the self with poverty.

Loss of hope with a failed revolution.

Loss of safety with covid striking numbers.

Loss of partner and friends departing, emigrating, becoming strangers leaving you in heights of panic attacks, depression and absolute chaos of emotions.

Yet, you try to find a new corner to re-create yourself, to look at the moon and release your anguish, but this same corner fills up with scattered glass, and ends your struggle.

My endurance has burnt out, I declare.

I am a humanitarian aid worker and have trained on psychological first aid.

I am a meditator and practice breathing exercise, laughter yoga and all healing strategies.

I am usually calm, optimistic, spread loving sun rays around me, and is often described as a strong woman.

Today I feel I have failed myself, I failed others that I am unable to help. I am tired, unable to give nor spread loving sunshine. I am just looking for some oxygen to reach my lungs painlessly.

Today I don’t want to fight back, I don’t want to be resilient, I don’t to practice what I preach and what I teach.

Today I cry. Today, I mourn and receive some warmth that remains in the hearts of those who stayed.

Written by Sara Sannouh

Sunny Sundays, Eucalyptus and Catacombs

It is sunny Sunday in Beirut 1994.

Two little heads in swimsuits, flowery dresses and sandals jumped into the back seat of the white Renault 12 parked glamorously in al Itihad building in Tarik al Jdide. Mother, with her chestnut proud bun, lit a cigarette and settled behind the wheel after pouring water into her cherished vehicle. She was waiting, patiently, unlike her, for the neighbor to move their car blocking the alleyway. I thought it was patience; but I deduct now that she was just waiting for her the Renault to warm up. One minute down the line, she hammered the klaxon until the whole building pumped out of their windows Sunday 9AM.

 A small background note.

No one was to mess with Mother. The last time her car was blocked, a police patrol arrived for the second floor neighbor. They arrested him for a couple of hours until his uncle, who happened to be her dentist, interfered. She dropped her rights, they released the guy and she got free dental care for a year for our family.

Our Renault 12 didn’t have to wait much. By the time she finished her cigarette, the passage was cleared.

On the road, my eyes devoured each moving object and landscape. If I closed them, I could still describe the tiniest detail of each stray dog who roamed in the small alleys of postwar Beirut. The mixed smell of blood and sea infiltrated my nostrils and gave me a weird feeling of nostalgic nausea.

I still get it sometimes next to the new water front built on seaside Beirut leading to Beit el Katayeb. Other times, I feel it up my throat, on Madfoun road next to the old railway trail, and occasionally on Sundays when heading back from South on Damour road.  

On the daily sea passage that we took with my mama, I had memorized by heart each pacing scenery, although the same daily, but I was still able to be amazed each time by the unsettling dull layers of abandoned concrete and landmarks that the war had left.  A few eucalyptus trees remained standing tall near the corniche. Savoring their odor until she filled up her lungs, euphorically, mother would lower the windows every day and retell us the same story:

 “When I was 10 years old, I used to ride the tram with my grandmother, Primo seats, and all of this corniche was planted with eucalyptus trees. There were no buildings, just hills of trees.” She would inhale now the last puff of her cigarette, throw the butt out of the window and start singing batwanessbik chorus of a great artist whom I despised her music back then, Warda al jaza2iria. Mother repeated the cassette from side to side, smoking one bafra after another, smiling, yet with tears running from behind her black wayfarer.

I hated Warda and the eucalyptus trees, for a long time. Her voice and the smell of the eucalyptus stung to my memory along with the agonizing sceneries of the corniche and reminded me of the horrendous pains that broke my heart at the age of 10.

It was when we reached Raouche’s intersection that the oxygen was sucked out of my lungs.

During that same year, I developed asthma.

Children my age and younger were scattered on the street, screaming with laughter and fear. I remember them barefoot, gluing their bodies to the cars’ windows, asking for breadcrumbs and niggles, with pink candy floss in their tiny hands. Their hair looked different than mine; I envied them and stood in awe in front of the magic sunbeams coloring their heads. I memorized their faces from one Sunday to another and imagined their lives and stories. I had built with them a one way silent affectionate bond that they never discovered, but that stayed with me in my dreams and books and which paved my career twenty years later. My mother used to speed up when we passed them by and lock the windows, as if she was afraid they would steal her children’s colored sandals or maybe their seats at school. I begged her so many times we invite these children with us even if for a day to spend it at the beach. Most of the time she stood silent, turned off the radio and shut “my nonsense”. The next Sunday she would bring them manaeech or knefe from her favorite Halleb branch.

This memory inked my skin at a very early age with a growing feeling of helplessness that just got hollower with every child I saw on the street. From one decade to another. From one country to another. From one post to another. The bitterness remained. The awkwardness dominated. Helpless I felt on every crossroad.

Children are not made for wars nor made for injustice. Children in shelter. Children on the street. Children during wars. Children on the verge of famine. Children at home abused. Children behind bars. Yet we are unable to stop their pain, the bombs, the stigma or the fear.

Four years ago I had the chance to reconcile with Beirut postwar years and build a two way relationship with the children whom Warda and eucalyptus trees once constructed a wall between us. I came to discover that my unilateral relationship with them and the stigma I fabricated was nothing but a faded fiction. Children on the street are stronger than me and you. The brave labourers, who still roam today Raouche, Corniche al Mazraa, Hamra and other Beirut 2020 streets, are highly resilient heroes fighting the system on our behalf.

We have little to offer them as long as we are not waving a revolution in the justice and social system.

Many children succeeded in escaping the streets and going back to school with supportive communities’ efforts. Some were removed from abusive environments with the aid of social workers. Others were offered safe spaces to just be, play and find moments of peace and pure joy. Others were reunited with their beloved families across seas.

The lives of some children on the street changed for the better, and they have grown their resilience to defend themselves and pave a new future. They were able to create their own safe haven where no abuse nor fear can infiltrate.

As a community, we might fight and single out abusers on an individual level, we can impact lives of hundreds maybe. But how many perpetrators in reality are we able to bring to justice in postwar Beirut and in 2020 Beirut? What about the abuser who is a system and not an individual? Are we able to fight it? Able to fight corruption, cultural stigma and racism? Are we the ones who would stand along street children and fight their struggle side by side?

It is sunny Sunday in Beirut 2020.

Since two weeks, a general mobilization order was issued by the government in an attempt to contain Corona virus ravaging the country. It is 12 noon. An unprecedented silent is hovering over the city. It is a first time in my 35 years that I see this popular area deserted. After a few minutes, a first car passed by. It stopped at the red light. Two girls, barely aged 8 years old, covering their face with scarves and still giggling, ran to the car parked at the intersection. The man ignored them at first. After a few knockings on his window, galvanized, he lowered the glass and screamed at the girls from the top of his lungs, as if he was blaming them for all the calamities of the universe. He extended his hand to grab one of them, to terrorize her maybe, or to unload his cumulative frustration, or probably to project on her his anger from his wife, maybe his mistress, perhaps his beloved country or maybe God. He then controlled his internalized oppression at the last minute, remembering, from behind his N95 mask, that the girl might contaminate him. The children mortified by the man’s aggressiveness started crying, and ran each in a direction.

Everyone left and I stayed there watching from my balcony the cruel system. Aside from the daily harassment and struggle children on the street face, now lay a whole new array of risks.

These children would struggle to abide by curfews and lockdowns. For many they found refuge in day centers and shelters, where they had a meal, a space to play, learn and be safe. Now they have closed down. The homes that the children go back to at night might mean sometimes an unsafe environment where higher level of abuse and violence could take place. The streets are heavily policed or empty leaving ways for aggressors to attack.

We have little to offer them as long as we are not waving a revolution in the justice and social system.

It is Dark Friday night in Beirut. It feels cold and lonely. While everyone is sleeping and confined, a shoe shiner spirit frees itself from the bottom of the building shaft in Tallet al khayat. That same abyss where his body laid breathless, silent, unjustly, a few months back. His soul, garnished with his apotropaic amulet around his neck, found peace today and flew high in the sky, away from our Beirut’s suffocating catacombs.

Jamile and the curfew

Jamile never thought she would live to see Beirut metamorphose into a ghost city.

She went out to the balcony, lit her Cedars light and rose to her toes to spy on the mini-market on the other side of the road.

“Even Abou Sami is closed!” she sighed with stupor.

She couldn’t believe that every human being was imprisoned home tonight; she had heard the prime minister babble some decision on television but did not pay him much attention and switched the channel instead to the soap Turkish series she was watching, shushing her husband’s wishes to follow the news. Nevertheless, despite her nonchalance, the curfew was still implemented. All shops were to be closed from 7 PM to 5 AM; measures in place in an attempt to contain the new virus invading the globe and the city.

She turned to Yasmine in agony: “I have spent all my life wandering Beirut streets on foot, in tram, in service or in my Renault 12, even during the war. In 75, I was still going to work. During the Israeli invasion in 82, we were summer camping in Aley. During the heavy shelling, I used to line up for bread and chat with the soldiers on the front lines to cross borders in exchange for fuel. I only stayed indoors two times in my life: When your uncle died, and the week after you were born during al Tahrir battle.  Your uncle bled to death at the door of the damn hospital and no one dared to pick him, afraid from the snipers. Today the snipers are still here but wearing suits instead and creating systems forbidding people to access the hospital. Different scenarios, same result.  I stayed in my bed crying for a week after he passed away, may God rest his soul. He was a son to me.” She opened her hands in prayer and let escape a tear from the corner of her eyes then continued her monologue:

“Look at where we reached today…An evil disease is imprisoning me in my own city!” she mumbled ironically letting fumes of her cigarette rise into the unpolluted air of Beirut in the lock-down era.

“Hunh, 3eshna w shefna ya Beirut. .. God forbids it’s the end of the world. May God protect us with all the power of his all-mighty -Amin. For the love of Prophet Mohamed, may God protect his worshippers all over the world.”

As if in a moment of revelation, she added :

“Look at his world crumbling Yasmine. You said how many sick people are there in America today? 50,000? It’s the capitalism that is killing them!”

Jamile spent her last five months glued to the news watching the uprising of Lebanon and revolutionaries talk shows. She memorized one slogan in specific that resonated with her in the two demonstrations she had joined with Yasmine: “This revolution is for the workers. Down with Capitalism.” Since then, she kept on promoting this discovery as the source of all evils. Jamile is a proud retired worker; she completed a full cycle of labor from the age of 18 until the last bits of 64 without missing a day of work. Yet her retirement money did not do her justice for the years of duty she had served. Her grudges against the system just got unleashed in her seven-decade of struggle.

” Yes mama. Do not underestimate capitalism’s maliciousness. The US registered more cases of sick people than China! Imagine? The most populated land on earth. These are the signs of the end of the world. Yajooj and Majooj are coming out from behind their walls. Astaghfirullah. May Allah forgive us all.” she closed her eyes and recited the verse memorized by heart {Are they waiting for anything except the Hour, to come to them suddenly? But its Signs have already come!} [Quran 47:18]

She nodded in approval of herself, sealed the curtains and returned to her sofa, her sunflower seeds’ joy and Murad Alamdar series.

Our exotic poverty

 

There are some things that are just “unpleasant” for our eyes to see; a tasteless painting, a muddy weather, a pile of rubbish, a man taking a shit, maybe a starving child, a woman skinning a man alive or just ugly slams surrounding our cities. Our retinas are sensitive and can only absorb a measured amount of light and images over a certain period of time. They were programmed throughout centuries to become selective. Some invasive footage should be filtered automatically and directed into the spam folder not to damage our very core existence. And when our security system fails, when small cockroaches manage to crawl through our high walls of defense, we are faced with the inevitable decisions of either killing them or beautifying them.

This is not a technical cinema review of the movie Capharnaüm; I am not a professional of art nor a critic. This is simply an observation and a bold personal opinion from a woman working in the humanitarian development field.

The movie obtained the Jury’s prize in Cannes and then the applause of major international and national public figures including humanitarian aid workers in the field of protection.

I was intrigued to watch it ever since the trailer was out; I had mixed feelings of content and excitement. Finally the topic of street connected children was brought up to light. Maybe now came the time where art was a medium to expose the misery of working children and impact new policies.

I watched the movie. It was emotional. It depicted ugly Beirut’s slams. It charmed the public with the wide shots of despair flowing on the big screen. Tears were rolling down the faces of all watchers in the theater. All enraging censored topics fled through the big screen: early marriage, child labor, domestic workers, drug abuse… For a moment I was happily surprised. Yes we were close enough to sensitize the population around core topics and violations we are very frustrated about. But again that was a close call, a missed opportunity I would even say, or a bullet in the heart maybe.

Poverty was described in its rudeness in this movie, true; yet still with a taste of blaming the poor and with a total dismissal of government policies that are in fact the root cause of the misery. The movie ends with the main message that was disseminated bit by bit throughout the film: the abused neglected child in the end sues his parents in court for bringing him to life.

I am sorry Nadine, it is not family planning and birth control that will put an end to the poverty and injustice cycles. No, we do not have the right to tell poor people to stop giving birth and that is the ultimate solution for a worldwide crisis that has been running for centuries. Our own system is perpetrating abuse and violence upon its citizens in so many shameless and sly faces. We have been taught by western societies and ideologies that making less children will make us less poor; the cause of inequality resides in multiplying in numbers. But in reality, we do not have a surplus of population in our lands. Our ex colonized territories are vast and rich in resources that could last us for centuries. Eduardo Galeano exposed this in his book “Open veins of Latin America” in 1970; giving the examples of “Brazil (that) has thirty-eight times fewer inhabitants per square mile than Belgium, Paraguay has forty-nine times fewer than England”. He explained how the west has “nightmares about millions of children advancing like locusts over the horizon from the third world(…); (they tend) to justify the very unequal income distribution between countries and social classes, to convince the poor that poverty is the result of the children they don’t avoid having, and to damn the rebellious advance of the masses”[1].

The family who is portrayed in this movie having so many children, did not chose to be poor nor did the parents chose to be stateless. They have been born in a country that stole their identity, their existence and their free will. We are very busy judging and smudging irritating scenes that hurt our eyes and soft emotions by blaming the weak and sucking every inch of dignity from a powerless society.

The children acting in the movie are not acting; they are in reality working on the streets of Beirut following a crisis that destroyed their country. As only resources for the families after they have lost all their savings, they found themselves obliged to be the breadwinners. By acting in this movie, and reliving the harsh situation of the street, aren’t we exposing these fragile beings to additional trauma they have been already subjected to over years and years? Is it even ethical to use the real pain of a child to create art? This might be debatable. Zain the child, the main actor, was successfully resettled to Norway after the release of the movie. It is a happy outcome for Zain. But what about Cedra? What about the other thousands children who are working in harsh conditions whether on the street or a stone quarry? What about Mohannad, Bashar, Zouhour and the rest? Where are these children? Probably still roving the streets at night or abused by the system in construction sites,   being stereotyped and stripped of their innocence and every bit of life. Around 5 % of Syrian refugees residing in Lebanon were resettled since the start of the crisis. I do not think we need a movie where the child relives his traumas to ensure his safe successful exit strategy from this damned country.  It is good news for Zain maybe, but this only highlights the fragility of a humanitarian system that is majorly moved and mobilized through media pressure.

As for the Hollywood scenes in the movie, they remain a production of Hollywood and do not reflect reality. Domestic workers are piled up in dozens like sardines’ cans and expelled from our country following ill treatment. They are not heroically treated in the airport but rather humiliated under a racist sponsorship system.

Spectators walking out of the movie had red eyes but also anger towards the poor and their ignorance. The blame was channelled right there, whipping underprivileged souls and digging deeper their graves. I want people to be angry, to feel frustrated and remove the selective parental guidance from in front of their eyes and let the ugly cockroaches creep into their minds, and taste the bitterness our societies live in. I want them to be angry at the real monster that is eating us alive from centuries onwards. I need them to raise their voices and push for policies’ change. Even us, humanitarian aid workers are doing it in the wrong way. An awareness session around family planning conducted for the refugees is not the key to stop the poverty cycle. Lobbying and pressuring for policy change is the key to give the masses their innate rights. We need first to be convinced that these are our natural rights; to be born, to use the resources of our lands, to move freely between continents and oceans without being criminalized, to have access to basic rights and development opportunities, to laugh, to couple, to have children without being sanctioned.

The wide screen shots with eye bird view of the Beirut slams are artistic, eccentric and could serve as a beautified painting fighting injustice in the galleries. But is this what we need today?

Do we need a more sophisticated art that serve the intellectual, the elite and Oscars’ venues? Are we still painting poverty so we make it softer for our eyes to see it and accept it? Same goes for the Ouzville project; an art project initiated in 2017 where Lebanese and international artists painted giant murals over the walls of the neglected buildings in Ouzai. What is the goal from behind this cultural initiative? Is the purpose to spread colourful and kitsch designs on the slams surrounding the airport? This family featured in the movie or a similar one would be probably living there in the Ouzai suburbs. They will wake up tomorrow more hopeful in the morning, surrounded by blue green and yellow rainbows.  Mr. Ambassador will be inspired while landing on Rafic Hariri’s airport this evening. Aren’t we making all of this better for our own eyes to dismiss the core painful fate of the families who are living there?

I find this very dangerous if not cruel, covering up our pains charmingly and falling into a comfortably numb status. A staged crime against humanity, against our own salvation. We have been trapped since colonization’s centuries and we are tightening the ropes around our necks stronger each day, stronger each day, stronger each day.

Written by Sara Sannouh

[1] “Open Veins of Latin America”-1970- Eduardo Galeano- page 6

Phot credits:

https://wsimag.com/architecture-and-design/26711-ouzville

Cannes. A “Capharnaüm” della libanese Labaki il Premio della Giuria ecumenica