Taxi

In the sea of Beirut's afternoon traffic, our taxi inches along the way towards Hamra. There are no lanes; when I look out at the cars crowding together and the scooters darting in between it's more like a river than any other street I've seen.

We've passed the balloon shop and are cresting the hill that slopes towards downtown on the right and the air's full of dust and soft tires squealing and horns. A woman in a small silver car with a pink six spray-painted on the rear door cuts in front of us from a side street, and our driver looks at her, a quick, sharp look. He doesn't make any angry gesture or comment, though; he whistles instead, a sweet birdlike trill without aggression or anger.

Further on, but not much, we're stopped altogether next to a car with the windows down and two young men in front. "How's it going, guys?" our driver asks, smiling, and I'm thrilled that I can understand him and their response, a laid-back, "everything's good." We start to move again and they speed ahead of us.

The road clears as we approach the hill that leads down towards Verdun and two kids on scooters veer across the road in the wrong direction, almost scraping against our bumper. Again, our driver's only comment is that warbling whistle as they speed into the other lane to join the traffic headed in the right direction. He says something to my roommate in the front seat that I can't quite catch, and when he repeats it I'm too flustered to come up with a reply. "Fifty years," he says, and I realize he's talking about how long he's been a taxi driver. I want to make conversation but the best I can manage is a quiet, "wow."

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.

Safety

As a recent college graduate, I spent a lot of time explaining to people what my plans for the future were both during this past school year and this past summer. The explanation generally went along the lines of "I'll be spending the summer in Salem, and in the fall I'll be moving to Beirut for about a year," and among the various reactions and pieces of advice, the most common thing I heard was concern for my safety. I think this is partially due to the vague idea that many Americans have of the Middle East, a place that to our imagination suggests terrorists, conflict, and anti-American sentiment. This is, of course, a generalization, but the common expression of concern for my safety is one that I don't believe that I'd have encountered if I were traveling to Germany, or Denmark.

In this post, then, I'll try to address the issue of safety here in Beirut. Some of the issues I'll touch on are more political, and I want to say that I am by no means an expert in Lebanon's political situation, and that I'll only be giving my idea of the situation.

But first, I'll start with the neighborhood I live in. Here's the view from my window:

And from some other windows in the apartment:

As I mentioned before, the neighborhood is called Basta, and it's located between the better-known neighborhoods of Hamra and Ashrafiyeh. It's best-known feature is the Dinnawi gas station, right up the street from my building, and that's the landmark that we use to guide taxi drivers. An aside: here in Beirut, people don't really use addresses or even street names, just directions based on stores and other landmarks. I'm bad with street names anyway, so that works well for me, but I need to get a better grasp of the city before I can navigate comfortably on my own.

It's a very lively neighborhood, with cars passing at every hour of the day and night, and people shopping, walking, sitting out on the sidewalks, gathering in stores to chat. It's a primarily Muslim neighborhood, with a mosque visible from the living-room window, and an every-day feel. Besides my roommates, I've seen no foreigners here, and everyone I've encountered is very friendly. Even though I'm the odd one out here, I've never felt unwelcome, and it's much easier to learn Arabic because people don't really speak English. Walking alone has not been a problem, and neither has walking alone at night -- there's always plenty of people on the streets. I dress like I would in America, and Sana (my landlady and roommate) goes unveiled, as do many women in the neighborhood. I've found that whether they wear the hijab or not has no effect on their attitude towards me or towards anyone else, and it's not uncommon to see groups of women veiled and unveiled.

Now, as to the wider situation. The violence that's happened here in Lebanon recently has been concentrated in the northern city of Tripoli. Though Lebanon is a small country, Tripoli is unique for its Alawite population -- the sect of Bashar al-Assad. The relationship between Lebanon and Syria is too complicated to explain here, but suffice it to say that what happens in Syria does not leave Lebanon unaffected, and the violence in Tripoli is partially due to that relationship. 

As far as the rest of the country goes, the protests over the film Innocence of Muslims that Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah called for did not actually take place in the center of Beirut. The enormous protest occurred in Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of the city which is basically ruled by Hezbollah. It was, according to Nasrallah's instruction, explicitly peaceful. Lebanon's Civil War, which took place between 1975 and 1990, is fresh in the minds of this country, and nobody wants another violent conflict to break out in Beirut's streets. For this reason, there's reasonable hope that the Syrian conflict will not spread over the border into Lebanon.

Well, it's getting late here, and I should go to bed, but the message of this post is that as far as it goes, I am safe here. Let me know if I got anything wrong about the political situation, or if you have any other questions!