BEIRUT IS A CITY, IS A PLACE
A stream of consciousness on current events in Beirut; an attempt to make sense via excerpts from Ghada Samman's 1976 novel, Beirut Nightmares.
An essay! On a Sunday!
It’s not really an essay but rather a short stream of consciousness. I’ve been writing an essay on language and violence that I planned to publish this week, about how dangerous it is to conflate the two (and yes, still working on that other forsaken piece about Lauren Oyler and “sincerity” in fiction) but given current events, I can’t seem to write clearly enough through a constant rage and sorrow I’ve accrued. These emotions have plaited together to conjure grief, a feeling of endless loss, even if my own feelings about what is happening in Lebanon are laughable and existential, embarrassing to admit since I personally stand to lose nothing except a dream. But my dreams of this place have been lifelong: of Beirut, of Lebanon, of my flimsy connection to it. I am not 100% Lebanese, my family roots are watered down to a weird (but admirable) admixture of Appalachian, European, and yes, Lebanese. Still, I grew up in a large and encompassing Lebanese community; I know these people. They were part of my childhood, my ancestry, my education, my memory. I know this moment, too, this nightmare of war that has haunted every dream of Lebanon for decades. And I know everyone in the Lebanese diaspora is consumed by what has been lost, by the loss that is yet to come.
I know these people. I know them as humans, and thus, as individualized members of an extraordinary culture. As both Muslim and Christian, as intellectuals, some without deep political affiliation (unlike this country would want you to believe), as involved mothers and fathers, as world travelers, aptly trained doctors, boutique owners, entrepreneurs, antique dealers, dentists. I know them as friends I’ve grown up with, fought with, learned alongside, their parents who raised me alongside my own. I know them as survivors of war, who continue to live deeply despite war (I know of someone who got married yesterday in a full fledged wedding, despite having to evacuate the bombs). I know them as relatives and distant ancestors, as a sittee who passed down her kibbeh recipe, as a giddee who decorated his house with camel paraphernalia and pictures of “the old country.” We indeed ate sittee’s kibbeh every holiday, with green beans and pumpkin pie. (Food is often the last surviving seed to any one root.)
What reason do I have for feeling such immense grief that an entire neighborhood in Beirut was flattened? That hundreds of innocent women and children and men were evaporated to dust in exchange for one military target (the leader of Hezbollah, yes, but still only one!)? What sadness do I feel when I see the south of Lebanon being decimated? And this rage when our media writes of Lebanese bodies as some monolith of faceless terror, as an afterthought too subhuman and inconsequential to give a name to? Hundreds not awarded a crumb of the attention bestowed upon one Israeli or Western body; millions considered destined and deserved of death by geographical association alone?
The reality is, I’ve never been to Beirut! I’ve only dreamed of the place, heard its stories, missed some weddings, planned trips that fell through. One might think, then, that I must feel immense grief because of some percentage of shared blood, but that would be too esoteric. It is this: I know these people. They are people.
I have friends with so much more to lose in Beirut than me—everything, really—their parents, cousins, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and friends whose lives could be extinguished off this planet in a nanosecond, without one headline reporting it as significant. My friends and family are feeling a depth of loss that I could never truly imagine or understand. I’m constantly at a loss for words. Language cannot seem to ascend to the gravity of the event.
Perhaps it’s too surreal.
***
Ghada Samman is a Syrian writer and journalist who lived and studied in Beirut when the civil war erupted in 1975. Her autobiographical novel, Beirut Nightmares, was published the following year, about a narrator who becomes trapped in her apartment for weeks as war rages on around her. Instead of chapters, the novel is dissected into “Nightmares,” 151 of them. These are nightmares both real and imagined, capturing a surreal nature of war, of isolation, how an everyday life can become anomalous, a reality so disturbed and brutal that it grows both abstract and vivid. In this most singular circumstance, the actual and the imagined are inextricable, their horrors linked and undetermined, their delineation almost moot.
I have read this novel twice, to learn more about a war that so many of my friends’ families endured and/or fled, but also because of Samman’s striking prose. In my most recent reading, and in the context of watching a new war unfold on my screen, I realized that perhaps the only true way to write about war accurately is to summon the surreal. A writer or journalist can and does discuss war’s actualities—the catastrophes, the maimed bodies, the gore, the outright violence, the tediousness and the relentlessness. Yet such realities will always exist far outside our human realm of consciousness, particularly our Western consciousness, so that war by description alone is nearly impossible to comprehend.
War is real and surreal. Watching images of a place you know, if only in a dream—Beirut being more than a dream but an actual place, where people I know work, live, and yes, die—being blown up is a nightmare of the mind’s eye. The mind, indeed, has difficulty catching up to the image, engages in disbelief even if one’s gut registers the death and destruction as true. It’s a reality inverted. Obscene. Enraging. Unfathomable. One must constantly remind oneself while watching, this is actually happening.
Thus, here are three excerpts (or Nightmares) from Beirut Nightmares, by Ghada Samman, to help reflect on the current bombardment of Beirut, and Gaza; to help us recognize that what we have seen done in Palestine, and what is to come in Lebanon, may be terrifying to witness, near impossible to understand…but is very, very real.
Nightmare 1 When dawn broke, we were all staring at each other in amazement, wondering: How did we stay alive? How did we survive that night? We’d spent a night during which bombs, explosives and rockets had been galloping around our house as if the elements had gone mad. The explosions were coming so thick and fast you might have thought we were in some tacky, overdone war film. We hadn’t yet fully awakened from our ‘non-sleep’ when we made a quick decision: to get the children and the old people out of the house. So after ten minutes of hysterical running back and forth between the various rooms of the house – to gather up belongings which we would no doubt discover later were unnecessary – the caravan descended the stairs leading from the house to the garden, and from there to my ancient car. The windscreen had a bullet hole in it right at the place where the driver’s head – my head, that is – would have been, while the back window was shattered although still in place. I ran my hands over my head and was overjoyed to find it still there and with no additional holes in it. The sight of the bullet hole in the glass made us all the more determined to smuggle out the very young and very old. It was as if the sounds of the explosives had a mysterious, drug-like effect…releasing a hidden strength stored somewhere deep inside us, while at the same time silencing the voice of everyday logic and common sense… We must have closed the car doors really hard once we’d got in, because the shattered glass that had been in place in spite of the cracks now began falling in, showering down on us in little white pieces like some sort of wicked snow. My only fear was that my old car would decide to play one of its tricks, like clinging to the street where it was parked and going on strike for the day. As I turned the key in the ignition, my heart was pounding as wildly as an African drum. But the car started and, like someone in a hypnotic trance, I began driving with one single thought in my head: to deposit our human cargo – those of us least capable of enduring the terror – and get back home. I dropped them off at the house of some relatives, then returned by the same way I’d come, like a doll that’s been wound up and follows her pre-set course without stopping – even if she bumps into the edge of a rug or a chair leg, she keeps up her mechanical movements as if nothing has happened. That’s exactly how I was as I passed through the innumerable new checkpoints guarded by armed men. I didn’t stop and I didn’t speed up. I didn’t even feel that I’d seen them. As for them, the only expression on their faces was one of bewilderment and dismay. It was obvious that the car had been bombarded by a hail of bullets, especially in the spot where my head was, and amazingly I was still alive and driving the thing around without any expression on my face. Maybe they thought I’d died when the car was shot at, yet here I was driving it, on my way to the afterlife. The road to eternity was the only one that was passable, safe and free of checkpoints. Consequently, no one even stopped me.
Nightmare 41 Ah, nightmares, nightmares… They were sprouting inside my head and climbing the walls of my brain like some sort of wicked, mythical plant… Ah, nightmares, nightmares… They were erupting from inside my head (or might they have been outside as well?). At first I would see them only when I closed my eyes, especially after reading the stacks of old newspapers from the preceding months since the war had begun. Nightmares would assail me from time to time like seasonal plagues of locusts. But now I was seeing them constantly, even when I had my eyes wide open. I’d stand in front of the mirror and see ants coming out of my mouth, my nose and my eyes consuming me as if I’d died long ago. On this particular day I wanted to put on some eyeliner but was astonished to find that my head had turned into a bony skull. I no longer saw myself in the mirror, but rather a cloud of fire and smoke. Then I grew smaller and smaller until I was the size of a fly, while the mirror grew larger and larger until it became like a translucent curtain in a theatre of madness. I stepped forward into the mirror. Then, roaming about inside, I came to an immense field of trees whose branches were rifles. I saw masked men picking the rifles off the trees and gathering bullets off the ground as if they were heaps of ripe fruit. They were melting down the iron from the ploughs, hoes and scythes and turning them into more bullets – many, many bullets. The bullet-strewn threshing floors stretched out to infinity. I remembered the wheat, the summertime and the threshing floors from my childhood, and how I used to sit on top of the wooden plank that the mule would drag along over the wheat on the threshing floor. The mule would go around and around, and the golden ears of grain would gleam under the rays of the sun. I’d been determined to enjoy this fantasy ride through the field of blessing as the peasants’ songs mingled with my childlike gasps of delight. This time, however, the threshing floors were covered with gunpowder and filled with the stench of wrath, while the sky had become a field of rusty iron. And singing? There was none. There was nothing now but either cries of woe and destruction or matters too trivial to mention! Then the men emerged from the field of madness carrying with them the fruits of the bitter summer season of Beirut 1975 – the harvest of blood.
Nightmare 49 The wall had been demolished and the wind had become my own secret kingdom, where I could listen to any conversation I chose anywhere in my woebegone homeland, thanks to this remarkable apparatus: the short-wave band on Amin’s transistor radio. Listening was more exhausting than I’d anticipated, so I got up to look for something to eat. When I came upon the remains of a bottle of vitamins, I was overjoyed. After all, who could tell how long my incarceration might last? Here I was nearing the end of my third day without a single soul having knocked on my door or even passed by on the pavement across the street. When the roar of the gunfire had died down, the voices of the poor creatures in the nearby pet shop broke through to me once more. This was the third day of their isolation and imprisonment too, the third day since they’d seen the sun. Perhaps they’d begun to get hungry. Perhaps the food in their cages had run out and the water as well. Even if the shop owner had wanted to feed them, he couldn’t have in these circumstances. I didn’t think anyone from outside would be able to get to them, but I thought that I might be able to via the garden behind our house. However, knowing that I’d become an enticing target for scores of snipers all around us, I decided to wait until sunset. What was it that drew me to them? Why did their voices haunt me so? What was the common something between us? I’d always loved all sorts of creatures, from owls and squirrels to lizards and frogs. But what I was experiencing now was entirely different. I felt a bond between myself and the creatures incarcerated in the storeroom across the way, who sat in their cages quaking in terror, defenseless and bewildered. Might it have been the tie that develops between beings that share a common fate? Might I have been one of them without realizing it?