• English Site
• >Under the Scope
• >Found in Salon.com
• >

  The Attraction of Beirut: How Lebanon Rescued Me

The Attraction of Beirut How Lebanon Rescued Me

By Alia Malek

Part 3: Part III: "Beirut is an island of freedom, destined to drown"

During my days in Lebanon, I headed in a different direction from Monot, taking the bus that runs to the southern suburbs, the ones that lie destroyed today, getting off well before them at the Lebanese American University, where I had been recruited to teach undergraduates Introduction to Human Rights. Of course, my students had already learned and lived lessons about human rights much more salient than anything I could teach, from the dispossession of Palestine to the oppressive collusion of Syrian dictators and their Lebanese co-conspirators, to the barbarism of the civil war's militias and warlords, to the invasions and incursions of Israel, to the apathy of the West -- all of which had played out in some way in Lebanon.

Around the same time, the then editor of the Daily Star, the Middle East's English-language daily newspaper, himself a journalist who been interpreting the East and West for each other, recruited me to do the same on his pages. And so I began to write.

On days off, friends and family would whisk me to different corners of Lebanon's environmental treasures, like the dense cedar forests of the Shouf, protected by the Druze during the civil war, and the Bekaa Valley, cultivated to produce wines that no doubt delight Bacchus in his nearby 1,856-year-old temple in Baalbek, where Israeli troops landed this week. Communing with Lebanon's nature is a national pastime, enjoyed by all, regardless of class or religion.

The Lebanese understand that God has given them this bounty as a sweet bribe for living in a small land whose destiny and fortune are forever tied to the whims, aspirations and bullying of its neighbors and megalomaniacs.

And so adults in all sorts of bathing attire -- from Speedos to veils -- frolic in the water, whether at public or private beaches, or at restaurants like my favorite, Jamal's, in the north, where tables are placed in alcoves near the sea so that adults can dine with the Mediterranean lapping their ankles.

And thankfully, there are more than just the beaches, a third of which today lay smothered under 15,000 tons of spilled oil after Israel bombed an energy plant. The forests and the mountains also cradle Lebanon's rich and poor alike, who go there to ski, snowboard and picnic, or to take a drag from a water pipe in the company of trees and stars. But there are reminders even there that beauty and peace have their limits, parables told in both the thinned-out forests and the tree line where the mountains suddenly become bald, the cost for reaching so high, beyond where vegetation can exist. It seems ambitions -- even if just for self-determination -- must know limits as well.

There, in the refuge and caresses of Lebanon's hysteria and triumph, pain and mad joy, in the infinity of the sea, in the fragility of Lebanese life, and in the ability of the Lebanese to appreciate and perpetuate beauty, I found the courage to forgo a legal career for one in writing. In D.C., it would have seemed a crazy gamble, but in Lebanon it made perfect sense. Yet my epiphany of sorts was quickly sobered by the realization that living those dreams would mean leaving Lebanon and returning home to Baltimore, where I knew I could lean on the strong shoulders of my family, as the Lebanese do in their country.

When I flew away, watching the airport and city streets recede below clouds, I comforted myself with promises that I could come back; tethering me to the airport was an invisible thread, which only recently snapped when that gateway was sealed shut by Israeli missiles.

Only when the season of car bombs returned to Lebanon in 2005, heralded by the loud boom of Rafik Hariri's assassination, did I understand the complete and frantic abandon of the Lebanese to living life. I finally saw that they were trying to outrun the potential truth in what poet Mahmoud Darwish expressed in "Memory for Forgetfulness" (a tour de force on Israel's 1982 siege of Beirut, eerily relevant today) and restated in an interview a few years ago: "Beirut was an island of freedom, destined to drown."

I was not the first to seek refuge in Lebanon's freedom; the country's history is rife with the stories of others who have come before me: from the religious minorities -- particularly the Maronites and the Druze -- who had taken to different mountains to escape the persecution they faced within Christianity and Islam, respectively; to the Armenian victims of Turkish genocide; to the Palestinians, dispossessed by the founding of Israel; to the Syrian, Egyptian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Palestinian intellectuals and artists of the 1960s and '70s, repressed by Arab regimes; to the southern Lebanese escaping Israel's 1982 invasion, which birthed Hezbollah; to the returning Lebanese expatriates and Arab-Americans flocking to find their roots after the civil war ended; to the refugees from Sudan, Iraq, Somalia and Sierra Leone who work in Lebanon's black labor market while the United Nations decides on the worthiness of their suffering; to today, as another generation of displaced, homeless, villageless southerners have filled Beirut's churches and schools, including the noisy one underneath my old window.

But this freedom has historically also had its limits; Lebanon could not protect the mountain minorities from famine, and in 1860 they began pouring from their villages to ships that carried them to the Americas, flinging them from Birmingham, Ala., to São Paulo, Brazil. Lebanon could not protect its residents, citizens or refugees from Israeli invasions, Syrian repression, Phalangist murders, or even from each other, so now more Lebanese live outside Lebanon than in their tiny country.

Today, who threatens Lebanon's freedom -- Israel, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah or some toxic blend -- is debated endlessly. But who has betrayed Lebanon's freedom and its civilians is clearly the United States, which has failed to understand that what was born of the birth pangs of the 15-year Lebanese civil war, the 18-year Israeli occupation of its south, the 14-year presence of Syria, and the ongoing domestic reconciliation process since Hariri's death, was a fragile yet functional coexistence that could have proved to be the viable model in the Middle East that Iraq will never be.

The perpetual exodus of Lebanon's people was echoed in the song, "Waynoun?" ("Where Are They?"), by the chanteuse Fairuz, the voice of Lebanon and at times of the entire Levant. Though written about an ancient time and penned in 1972, on the eve of the wars in Lebanon, it would soon become relevant again. She sings without accusation but only sadness:

Where are they?
Where are their voices,
Their faces?
Now there's a valley between us!

They fled in the arms of oblivion,
They left their children's laughter
Abandoned on the walls.

Lovers in the streets went separate ways,
No words, no promises.
I'm the only voice in the streets;
I'm the only lantern of sorrow.

Where are they?

Today Fairuz is perhaps singing to those dual and foreign nationals who fled Lebanon, leaving the Lebanese to face alone a fate Europe and the United States would not tolerate for its own citizens, evacuated on warships within view of the Lebanese left behind. Perhaps she is singing to those whose conscience has yet to be riveted out of slumber. Her inquiry plays on a loop in my mind, and I, again, want to flee to Lebanon.

For reasons of data protection and privacy, your IP address will only be stored if you are a registered user of Facebook and you are currently logged in to the service. For more detailed information, please click on the "i" symbol.

Post to other social networks:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•