Lebanese Flânerie

In the city of ghosts, in Beirut, the foreigners still have dollars. But not the Lebanese, unless they have ‘wasta’ and can finagle access to their savings in the banks.[1] Most of the beggars, the destitute Lebanese and the Syrian refugees, have moved their daily quest over to Hamra where some of the shops are still open and people who still have jobs walk in the streets. In Ashrafiyeh only the old men remain. They step gingerly along the cracked pavements trying to learn how to hang around, how to live among the hollow and the dead. These are well-dressed, proud men who have found their bank accounts frozen and their pensions worthless. They do not know how to beg, were not bred to lower their eyes, are unused to lack. They cannot live the life they had promised themselves despite a life of frugality spent saving for a rainy day, yes, but never for this relentless flood of need. The ones with ironed shirts have their wives waiting at home in the dark, waiting for the electricity to go on for a couple of hours so they can find each other’s eyes before they go to sleep. The ghosts of Mar Mikael and Gemmayse whisper to them, leaning out of broken windows, swinging from dilapidated shutters and trying to trip them up on the steep St. Nicholas steps. The only other people around, their potential benefactors, increasingly seem like members of a bright-eyed super-race. They sport recent haircuts and carry computers and cash. If not all foreign, all are paid by foreign companies and can afford to pay for generators, internet and French coffee.

They are all heading to the same place. In an alley just off Gemmayse they slip purposefully into a parallel pretend-previous, a living world enveloped in a quiet cloud of jazz and the aroma of ease.

The artists, poets, journalists, photographers and foreign NGO workers gather at Aaliya’s Books. They are served by Syrian refugees and now homeless Lebanese. Armchairs and sofas are arranged along the windows and dining tables and chairs sit amongst scantily provisioned bookcases. All the book imports have stopped. The English artist wears a clean T-shirt and neat pony tail. He stands by the bar with his girlfriend and orders coffee and peach ice-tea. He has stopped painting. Now the romance has been cast out of Beirut, the gentle decaying ‘dolce vita’ feel of Ashrafiyeh defenestrated along with all the glass, he has purloined a wife from Sidon and practices love-making instead of art. Towards the back of the café a writer, like a bearded daemon, slumps dozing on a sofa, a glass of Habibi vodka on the table in front of him. No bag, no book, no pen. In the neighbouring armchair bay two women, zed-legged with high heels tucked to one side, have their heads bent low over a document about the logistics of helping ‘those poor people’ and the data they need to justify the evident need and the necessary spend, ‘necessary’ being a moving target in a world where plastic sheeting with the name of an aid agency printed on it is deemed to be an abode. One has a stylish leather-backed notebook with an elastic loop to hold her pen. Later, she thinks, she’ll ask the waiter for an expresso martini. It’s eerily quiet, everyone waiting for something to change.

Except in one corner of the main bar. There the fiercely busy journalists cluck at each other and clack on their machines, bespectacled crows feeding on the carrion of copy. For them the city’s extinction requires constant annotation. This seems like change to them because they are so occupied with it. But it is really just a baroque repetition and refinement of details which, because there are so many colours of ruin and because ruin is so ubiquitous, comes to seem like a perverse stylisation of horror. They have so much to write about of which really nothing can be said except maybe ‘Oh my fucking god!’

In the city of miracles, in Nabatieh, an optimist and his poet sit on a café terrace in the main street. The café would seem normal almost anywhere else. It is modern and glassy and clean and affluent and is filled with bright yellow-green lights displaying counters overflowing with all manner of cakes, biscuits and sweet treats. A wonder, it seems a miracle of light sending a glowing insult out into the dusty grey street in front and over towards an old and decrepit baklava shop where the electricity is turned off.

The optimist and his poet choose Arabic coffee and ‘mahalabia’, the custard dessert named after Aleppo.[2] It comes in a clear plastic pot steeped in rose water and is topped with cardamon, cinnamon and flakes of pistachio nut. Just twenty minutes ago, driving through a silent hillside village, they have passed by a parade of massive poster photos of dead boys, Hezbollah martyrs sent to support Assad in the Syrian Civil war. One hangs from every street lamppost, not that the streets are lit these days. Down below the raised terrace a group of young men gather around a moped, spooning arms in greeting, ancient faces on young, unfit bodies. They chide each other listlessly, mimicking joy as if it is an effort to be young here when to be a success in their world means being dead. The optimist explains to his poet that ‘The paternalism of sect belies also a constant need to negotiate what is politically acceptable not necessarily according to belief but rather according to geography and where their homes are situated in the puzzle of armed allegiances in this district.’ The poet, playing solitaire on a purple mobile phone, thinks the young should be allowed to believe in miracles rather than destiny.

Next to the young men a women’s clothing store exhibits faceless shop dummies wearing blond wigs, the colours sombre and mostly black, like the flags that are everywhere. A stooped tea seller, his kettle mounted on a children’s pram crosses the road towards the café and stops to set up shop between a jeep and a BMW. The BMW family are eating baklava on the table next to the optimist and his poet. Three women blink and rearrange their robes. They turn their heads towards a small child who is refusing to eat his sweet treat. They do not speak to each other. They speak only to the child. One coaxes most. Pistachio is good for children as it is for pregnant women.

The ‘mahalabia’ tastes of hills and fields, not of town. It tastes of a mythical pastoral past, of the city of miracles of old with its holy grottoes and its name, Nabatieh, ‘The Appearance’. Now grief kills creativity. Not even the graffiti voices a protest. Here, there is none of the elaborate calligraffiti you still find in Hamra even as Beirut hangs by a thread. Here a fading photo will do and the odd dangling scrawl on a derelict wall, emblems of the sabotage of the spirit that ensues when a mother is asked to send her child to his demise.

After coffee the optimist buys buy far too much baklava for far too little from the old friendly man in the dark baklava shop. They drive away from the place of wonder munching on tubular honeyed sweets, with more rice paper packages wrapped up in string stuffed onto the dashboard. The optimist says, ‘Oh my fucking god, just taste that!’ His poet looks across the hills searching for any sign of the grottoes and murmurs, ‘Oh my fucking god!’

In the city of blood-bespattered Dido, in Tyre, the lovers sleep in a sandstone hotel with the window open to the sea and are lulled to sleep by the swish-swish of the waves. When they wake early, they watch the sun turning the lobster men rose-gold as they go in their boats to fetch the night’s haul.

The lovers ascend through hillside villages, roads curvaceous as Arabic script, to the harvest-gold of Beaufort castle, a crusader castle. A thousand years of dying, ancient and new, shines in the sun, the only document a lover’s message scratched into a wall whose window looks out onto the borderlands. Olive trees in rows, like a military guard, stretch out along the valley floor. They seem to be looking towards an Israeli village laid out in neat, modern lines in the distance.

The student who stands in the bar opposite the Maronite church later that night explains how people, including his uncle, disappeared after the Israelis left. The lovers, sipping red wine and still feeling the swish-swish of the waves and the warm winds from the high castle, agree his uncle must have been taken by the Israelis rather than by his own people. Though one can imagine how people feel forced to survive when their city is occupied by a foreign force. A widow dressed in black sits at a small table by the wall of the church. Pastel-coloured paintings appear briefly bathed in yellow light as someone opens the great wooden door to her right. She stares across at the bar, or perhaps at the student, and lights a cigarette. The lovers ask for more wine and nuts. The student waits for them to be served. He says he has started to study marketing though he can’t afford to finish the course. He has a business idea to sell drugs to the local hospital. He is looking for investors. He has benefitted from psychological therapy and has convinced his always-angry father to do the same. He places his faith in the modern, resists the urge to look back just because there is no future in sight. He doesn’t accept that Dido had already made a phantom of hope with her suicide thousands of years ago. But he has never been to Beirut. It is enough to make you wish Dido had not set off for Carthage and had not fallen for that reprobate Aeneas, enough to make you wish Alexander had not flung all those rocks in the sea to join Tyre to the mainland. The lovers agree though that life must have been worse before penicillin and that people still revere and remember Fleming.

In the city of Phoenician script, in Byblos by the sea, there is an elderly woman who has tried so hard not to make a mark. People have tried to tell her she needs to take a side. But she feels there is poetry in missing words. Even when she dreams that the mermaid in the bay is offering her a voice if she really doesn’t have one of her own, she shakes her head in her slumber and rolls over to face the other side of the room. She is weary of her eight children and their freely expressed opinions. She would like fewer words and no shouting at all and thinks the less written the better. She knows words become swords. She wants to be fossil-still like the fish in the mountain rocks above her home. These days when she comes home from the market, she is weighed down with bottled water which glugs and bashes her leg as she walks up the hill. Hezbollah have recently cut off her water because she spoke to a ‘mukhtar’ about a problem with a family house she keeps for her grown-up children in the Amal part of town.[3] She wasn’t taking sides. But the ‘mukhtar’ is Amal. She closes her shutters early in the evening and tears up books to heat her home.

In the city of turtles, in Tripoli, the four Palm Islands have been designated as a safe haven for turtles by the Barcelona Convention. They are protected in the way the people are not. On the long city esplanade a dozen men hold fishing rods over the wall. They are hungry and seem frustrated when sometimes they haul in strips of rubber from the dinghies that are supposed to take the desperate to Cyprus in exchange for the last of their worldly possessions. The traffickers make sure to take everyone’s mobile phones before they get on board and then send texts to their families to tell them they have landed safely. They almost never do land though because the rubber boats do not have enough fuel. Occasionally the dead who, realising the fate that awaits, have tried to swim for it and are washed up onto the sand. Most though are drowned and eaten by the fish long before sight of land.

Here, money is so scarce that almost everyone is hungry. During the hunger riots when the banks are set on fire, no-one complains when in the mayhem people steal the metal railings rather than helping to put out the fires. The woman in a green hijab who stands watching the looting tells the news team, ‘They can’t take any more. They are hungry.’ Now the protests have stopped. No-one has the energy. If they can leave, they will. A young man tells his mother he is going to see his fiancée. He never turns up. Instead, he sets off to Iraq with his best friend as joining IS seems like a better choice than staying in Tripoli.[4] He and his friend perish days later in an Iraqi army airstrike. This is how they are dying in Tripoli, either of hunger or hope.

In the city of ghosts, in Beirut, the price of bullets has risen tenfold. So has the price of bread. Everyone watches and waits just like the angels, just like the ghosts.

[1] ‘Wasta’ (Arabic: واسِطة) means 'clout' or 'who you know'.

[2] ‘Mahalabia’ is a Middle Eastern milk dessert.

[3] A mukhtar (Arabic: مختار "chosen one";) is a village chief in the Levant.

‘Hezbollah’ and ‘Amal’ are Lebanese political parties, both affiliated with the Shia sect.

[4] ‘IS’ refers to The Islamic State (IS; official name since June 2014)

Lebanese Flânerie was published as ‘Lebanese Flânerie’, published in German as ‘Libanesische Flânerie’, Beirut Belongs to Us, ed. Pascale El Moussobaa, Rainer Merkel, Christoff Hamann, Die Horen: 68.290, 2023 pp. 29-35