From my window

(This was supposed to be posted last week, but we've not had internet until now.)

Life in my neighborhood since the bombing has remained quiet, with only a few indicators of the tension that's burst into violence in other parts of the city.

these two have been posted here since Saturday, photo from my window

I don't know if I can express the strangeness that I feel, living in Beirut now. I've been surrounded by acts of violence, but such a distance that I can only feel the barest breath from their passing. I understand that this is a moment of great import for the country, surrounded by terrible possibilities, but it's difficult to really feel the danger in the way I suppose I should. 

This is what I've felt and seen in the past few days.

On Friday night, there was a military truck posted on the divider directly outside of our apartment, but that was the only sign of anything out of the ordinary. No tire or garbage burning, no gunshots, and the streets were only a little quieter than every other day.

On Saturday morning the truck was gone, and the only reason I saw more of the effect the bombing has had on the city was because my roommate and I went to the area surrounding Sassine Square so she could gather material for a report on the rebuilding effort. Military and police vehicles dominated the scene, clustering along with news crews at the blocked-off entrance to Sassine Street itself, where the bomb detonated. We wandered through the nearby streets, seeing apartment buildings and storefronts with windows cracked or shattered entirely from the frame. Much of the debris had been swept from the streets, and lay in neat piles along the edge of the road or heaped in the ubiquitous green garbage bins. On the other side of the blocked-off street, we walked close to the barricade and through the lines of red and white tape I saw what had once been a car and was now a blackened and twisted mass of steel, leaning against a more intact vehicle. That sight still echoes through my head. The neat, black metal of the soldiers' machine guns, the white of the emergency trucks behind them, and that shape beyond, now neither natural nor man-made, with the calm sunlight glinting off of it. 

On Saturday evening, when we returned to our flat, the two soldiers had taken up their post on the corner, and four more stood at the overpass on the building's other side.

Sunday, the day of Wissam al-Hasan's funeral and a mass protest in front of the Grand Serail, was quiet here with one exception. In the afternoon, a short while after the funeral began, I heard shouting and when I looked out the window I saw a convoy of young men (and some women) on motorcycles and scooters driving up the street, beeping their horns and waving their hands. They passed by four or five times, the last time carrying the flags of Hezbollah and Amal (a Shiite party allied with Hezbollah and predominant in this neighborhood) and an enormous Syrian flag. 

In the evening, Sana and I walked down to Hamra, and the normally crowded street in front of the American University of Beirut was almost empty.

We took a taxi to Sodeco to meet some potential renters, and as we drew closer to the building I heard a huge sound, not loud but penetrating, that seemed to rise from the street in front of us. I looked ahead and saw that it was a line of tanks on the move, filled with soldiers. By now I've grown used to seeing tanks; there are two stationed along Istiklal street that I pass on a regular basis, but I'd never seen or heard one underway before.

In front of Sodeco was a group of twenty or so soldiers, chatting with each other, red caps and camoflage in shades of grey. 

We walked back from the apartment and on the street that separated East from West Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War stood a thicket of tanks, guns pointed skywards at the same neat angle. Besides the tanks there were police cars, and personnel trucks, soldiers gathered in groups. Nobody seemed to care that we walked directly through the center of the group, and again I felt the sense of total alienation that I'd experienced at the scene of the blasted car. Beneath those rows of long guns I understood the differences there are in the world, that though people are people and concrete is concrete no matter where you go, individuals and edifices are surrounded by circumstances that are widely and truly different. It may sound naive to say so, but many times here I haven't felt the strangeness of being in a different country, just the sense that I am in a place in the world. I don't know if I can explain it more clearly than that.

On Monday, the soldiers on the overpass were gone and the two on the corner remained. I heard no sound of the fighting that occurred in other parts of the city, and again saw no form of protest. Some shops and businesses were still closed, but other than that the neighborhood was normal.

On Tuesday, the traffic was as loud as it had been before the bombing, and the shops that had been closed were open. 

Today, the situation seems stable, though I heard of more fighting during the funeral of the Palestinan man killed on Monday. I'm keeping an eye out; we'll see what the week brings.

Internetless

I have a brand-new post all ready to go, but it's saved on my computer and I have neither a flash drive nor the internet at my apartment. Thankfully, internet cafes are pretty cheap, but it's still frustrating not to have access when I need it.

We should have internet access again soon, and I'll put up new content as soon as I can.

Photography and Tragedy

Sassine Street, Getty Images

On Friday, a car bomb exploded in Ashrafiyeh's Sassine Square, killing three and wounding around one hundred and twenty. I don't have much to add to the discussion of the attack - for good information go here or here or here.

I first heard about the explosion through Facebook when my roommate, at class in Gemmayze, posted about hearing a loud "boom" and seeing black smoke rise over Ashrafiyeh. Google News and Twitter told me the rest. I stepped out on to our balcony and looked down the street, and in the direction of Ashrafiyeh I saw only the still buildings and the brown haze that perpetually hangs over the city. Below me cars still swarmed from both directions, and people crossed the streets and gathered in small groups and went in and out of the various small shops. Back on my computer, I saw photographs from the scene begin to appear on various news websites. Burning cars, soldiers and firefighters and first aid workers, empty windows, shattered concrete, all the symbols of disaster. In addition to these, of course, are the photographs of the victims. Women screaming, a child carried over a rescuer's shoulder, blood and fear.

One of these photographs in particular was horrifying. A close-up of a woman on her back, one hand raised,   face distorted with some combination of pain and despair. The image is so close that we can see her neat, manicured nails as clearly as the deep gashes on her upper arm, welling with blood. It's a photograph of a woman at her most vulnerable, and more than just distressing in the physical fact of her condition it's distressing for the very fact of it being taken. News photography seeks to offer the illusion that they show the facts just as they happen, but the reality is that somebody hovered over this woman, jammed their lens not less than a foot or so from her face, and broadcast her terror and pain for the world to see. It's an invasive photograph, an act of voyeurism. I understand the need to show the world what's happening, to make people understand as best they can the gravity of events, but photographs such as this one seem in a way to fetishize the violence, so viewers can wallow in their sadness on the part of their distant fellow-beings.

My roommate is a journalist, and she told me that she avoided going to Sassine on the day of the explosion because she would have felt like a voyeur. Even yesterday, when the two of us walked around the area, talking to people and her taking some pictures, we both mentioned that we felt uncomfortable.

Storefront two streets over from the blast site

All around us were people replacing windows, cleaning their homes or shops, and I felt that pausing to take pictures nerve-wracking. Nobody said anything to us, or looked at us beyond glances, but it still felt intrusive.

Photography is much of the time an illusion, and news photography is a greater illusion than most. We see the scene before us and this can deceive us into thinking that it's a literal slice of life, a fact in 8 by 10. In viewing photography, we must never forget that there's a person with that camera, a person choosing where they stand and how they interact with the people around them. In the case of disaster photography, I truly believe that it is unnecessary and disrespectful to photograph people - presumably without consent, as I think few would stop a first aid worker carrying a bleeding person to ask if they minded having a photo taken - at the height of their distress. By all means, photograph the scene. Write about individuals. Writing is a better solution, I think, as it can be very detailed without explicitly revealing the identity of those involved or glorifying their pain.

*

I've been asked what the situation here is, and I have two replies. First of all, I am not the best person to ask about the city- and country-wide situation. I suggest using Google News and Twitter to keep updated, as they have a variety of sources and eye-witness accounts.

Second of all, the area where I live has been quiet since the bombing. There are many shops closed, and last night a military vehicle was posted outside our building, but I have not encountered any of the road closures (through tire burning et cetera) that have happened in the rest of the city.

Share Beirut

On Saturday, my roommate and I went to a conference called SHARE Beirut, centered around internet freedom and activism. Located at Solea V, a boxy concrete building covered in elegant graffiti, SHARE Beirut featured a number of international speakers from as close as Egypt and as far away as Iceland. It was a much different crowd than I've seen so far here: girls with close cropped hair, fauxhawks, piercings, guys with long hair, gauged ears, wearing Darth Vader or NPR or stop censorship t-shirts.

What I've experienced of this city so far has been its surface, the sights and sounds of the street, short interactions with strangers. Share Beirut was a window into the city's underground life, another one of its many layers, and a side of the Arab world that I believe it can be hard for Westerners to conceive of. As I've said before, the ideas that I've encountered of Lebanon seem actually to be general ideas of "the Middle East." People don't see Lebanon as a unique place but a part of a monolithic society that is characterized by violence, religious extremism, restrictions on womens' rights, et cetera. These things do exist here, it's true, (one) they also exist in our beloved US of A and (two) it would be extremely ignorant to say they mark everything about the country. The issues, personalities, and interests represented at Share Beirut are integral parts of Lebanese culture - engineers and makers, activists and artists, hackers and journalists discussing censorship, collaboration, robots, music, and a number of other concerns. 

Much of what we heard was positive, like members of newly-formed hackerspace Lamba Labs telling us about their projects, combinations of artistry and engineering. Much of what we heard was worrisome, like Egyptian anti-torture activist Wael Abbas speaking about how conservative elements in his country are trying to limit the rights of the populace and targeting activists through religious rhetoric. Overall, it was an amazing experience, and I'm glad I got the chance to see so many interesting people speak about what they love and fear.

The next day, my other two roommates and I visited Baalbek and Anjar and explored ruins thousands of years old. I'll probably put a post up about that experience sometime soon.

I'm afraid this isn't my most coherent post, but I'm trying to get a lot of thoughts down and they're not all in order in my head.

​​البحر الأبيض المتوسط

The Atlantic is the ocean I was raised on, and in, but for all its grey-green vastness and rough beauty it can't hold a candle to the allure of the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean, called the Middle White Sea in Arabic, is a place, an environment, that I've always wanted to see. I've read about it in both fiction and historical source material as a place of piracy, warfare, trade, and legend. It's a sea with an identity, a culture, that threads its way through the histories of much of our world. When I decided that I wanted to travel after graduation, to work and live in a different country, the fact that Beirut is situated on the Mediterranean played no small part in my choice of Lebanon.

In the first few days I was here, when Sana suggested that we walk down to the shore, I was eager to go. One of the best-known landmarks in Beirut is the Courniche, a broad walkway that runs directly along the shoreline for a few miles. The walk from the apartment took about half an hour and so we reached the Courniche around sunset, in the company of hundreds of tourists, joggers, fishermen, and families.

Beyond the fence the coastline drops down to the sea, with a few scattered rock faces breaking the water's  surface. These miniature islands are were covered with people eating and swimming - mostly young men, but a few families as well. The area, though obviously modernized and made appealing to tourists, is an area that welcomes more than just the awed eye of the foreigner. Like much of what I've seen of Beirut, it's a layered place, different purposes overlapping without much discord.

A few days later, Sana and I once again set out for the coast, this time for the Pigeon Rocks, another landmark of the city. We sat at a small cafe, perched on the pale cliffs that overlook the rocks and the sea. Looking through the glass railings out at the shallow water, I saw the Mediterranean's colors, brilliant blue fading to deep green, brighter than the Atlantic but not as garish as the Caribbean.

There's still one thing I'd love to do, though, which is to swim here! Hopefully, I'll be able to make that happen sometime soon.