Prologue

It seems impossible to ensure a narrative of what Lebanon is going through, at least it is so if one is coveting a classical narrative structure, what is informally referred to by journalists as a ‘simple story’. “It is complicated”.

Explosions blazing, bullets shrieking, all through the hot and humid air of the northern Lebanese coast have become the natural sound-scape to be heard daily. It is the fifth week already of this all-too-national battle against the nation’s mysterious common enemy – that no one wants to see as common – and for the last two weeks the end has been scheduled ‘in the coming hours or at most days’. Who are these people ‘we’ are fighting? Many answers or none at all. They are nothing less than the Enemy; everyone’s enemy. But each is looking for a different enemy, so they are nothing at all.

It is a slow and steady slide towards a bloodshed of another kind; the bloodshed that will revive the ‘war of others on our land’, of these momentarily unaware brothers killing each others unknowingly, but with no regret. These are the all too known lines of our innocent history, the one we seek to believe in; it was ‘them’ who disrupted our enjoyment and our state of bliss. In Lacanian, they stole our ‘real’, and left us trapped in the deadlock of the ‘symbolic’, seeking, tirelessly, to fulfill a desire to go back to our natural state of innocence and peace. Have we ever loved each other? We never care to look at our history to find the obvious answer: No.

It is Saturday night. The new portraits – with comments – of the newly ‘martyred’ MP have overwhelmed the walls of the city as customs entail. History and facts are easily dismissed when death is involved. The late MP has redeemed his crimes by dying; only his new symbolic values are to be remembered. More than three days have passed since that purgatory explosion that makes all those who die pure and innocent martyrs. It seems as if sudden death erases the past in memory and replaces it with a future-directed memory.

In the Barometre, that relic of a pub in Hamra, crowds are too big to fit inside. Dozens of living bodies are packed outside the entrance having their drinks standing or sitting on the stairs and wherever it is possible to improvise a seat. One looks around, and for a glimpse of time, life seems to be going on as usual, as if the very notion of normality still exists in this country of unexpected-as-normal. That everlasting myth of the Lebanese ability to sustain shock and ignore instability and violence seems to be true for that glimpse of time, in this fragment of space. But not for long, the city is empty, it is out of tune. Driving around, or walking, one can smell worry, or even sometimes fear.

It is Sunday afternoon. Three rockets have landed on the other side of the borders, in this piece of land whose very name is polemic: northern Israel or occupied Palestine. These are no-one’s rockets; found but never lost. On the highway that stretches from the South to Beirut, the traffic is suffocating in the direction of the city. The over-crowdedness of this ominous road is not due to an excessive number of passengers, but to security measures. Closed roads, and thorough checks mix with the seasonal heat to create that all too familiar scene of refugee columns heading north. These are not refugees however. Going North in Lebanon has recently become the direction of danger. In one day in the south I heard more than five times the same conversation: “are you going to Beirut from time to time?” “No I stopped going there, it is too dangerous”. This conversation would be held next to the rubble of a destroyed house, victim of last summer’s war. Last year’s dangerous space is this year’s safe one.

And then the night comes with its dark surroundings and its political talk shows. Heads start talking of future, past and present. Discomfort is ever-present and seems to extend its everlastingness towards future tenses. There is more to come.