Lebanon’s Untimely Winter

Now I understand the visceral torture of what it feels like to want to kill someone with my bare hands

The Lebanese reign over this land now. They have crowned themselves a lumbering, incandescent queen over pathetic Michel Aoun and his disease.

Three thousand feet above destroyed Beirut lies the mountain community of Hammana, my adopted home since 2010. Here, ruination is a mind-thing, a daily ritual of playing out the droning of jets and the concussion of explosions over and over and over again in my head.

I suppose catastrophe has a way with the air. Bundles of troposphere drop to the ground and barrel around like bales of hay, steamrolling faith into fear. We are either stalwart or insane against the significance of such tremendous adversity, for in its wake, we have contractors hammering out updates in my husband’s ancestral home on Rue 9.

“We cried while working. In the mask, nobody can see you. We were looking for parts — to find a little bit of someone so their parents can bury them with dignity .” — Hammana Rescue Team firefighter

They work in the midst of unseasonable chill. Lebanon’s climate promises (or curses therein, depending on point of view) rainless, blue skies from mid-June to the end of September, yet our crew of workers have arrived each morning under low, swollen clouds. Yesterday, I sat staring in wonder as raindrops smattered the bill of lading from the morning’s drop ship of insulation.

Down on the coast, the hospitals are bulging with a backdraft of wounded people. At the blast site, search and rescue teams discovered subterranean tunnels and panic rooms where port workers could have hidden from the conflagration. No one was found there. In the rubble, there are only body parts and the smell of decomposition.

A firefighter from Hammana Civil Defense confided in me today, saying, “We cried while working. In the mask, nobody can see you. We were looking for parts — to find a little bit of someone so their parents can bury them with dignity.”

The small tables amplified how much we had in layers of beautiful food and beautiful friends. How much we had, how dizzy - how naive we were.

Gemmayze was a quarter which spent its nights swaying to heady derbaké thumps, disco and vodka. After the Civil War, the neighborhood had fought valiantly for its own preservation and won the battle against high rises. The pubs ran like stallion stalls underneath the spindly pillars, arched windows and mosaic tiles of the apartments above.

On my fiftieth birthday, we left our cars to the valets on Pasteur Street and walked through the Saifi Gardens to Café Em Nazih. The small tables amplified how much we had in layers of beautiful food and beautiful friends. How much we had, how dizzy - how naive we were.

We speak of Gemmayze in the past tense now. This leafy hamlet survived the shelling of Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil conflict. Her beauty — forty years of personal investment and renovation, decades of focus on tradition and the arts — lies in ruins.

Instead of revelers, volunteers swarm the streets now, dispatched like ants in the wake of colony destruction from a clumsy child’s shoe. They shoulder brooms as a bank of artillery. People channel their black, rumbling hatred for Michel Aoun into feeding the hungry, carrying broken and disfigured bodies to crammed hospitals, and sheltering the three hundred thousand left homeless.

From the few balconies still left attached to their buildings, the people pummeled (the politicians) with brutal curses, surrounding them in a brotherhood of refulgent rage.

The community’s exhaustive love stops short of politicians who’ve had the audacity to set foot on these rubbled streets. Justice Minister Marie-Claude Najm walked into Gemmayze. Perhaps she thought if she carried a broom, the people would welcome her. I wonder how long it took for her to realize that with every footfall there was a groundswell of anger cresting up and over her head. Seething crowds spat epithets at her and demanded she resign.

Education Minister Tarek Majzoub, Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea (pronounced “zha-zha” as in Gabor) and Foreign Minister (Aoun’s son-in-law) Chamel Roukoz were greeted in the same way. From the few balconies still left attached to their buildings, the people pummeled them with brutal curses, surrounding them in a brotherhood of refulgent rage.

A crater pocks the Mediterranean Sea and stands as a stark metaphor to thirty years of lies, corruption and theft. The Lebanese used to be able to go to work and not think about it. They went to the beach to be mollified by the blue sea. They went to Gemmayze and danced.

No more.

The Lebanese reign over this land now. They have crowned themselves a lumbering, incandescent queen over pathetic Michel Aoun and his disease. At the onset of the October 17 Revolution, the Lebanese used to chant “All of them means all of them!” in a joyous cadence calling on the government to resign. Now the lyric has darkened, and the people whisper, “Prepare the gallows.”

They want Michel Aoun gone or dead.

They want Gebran Bassil gone or dead

They want all of them gone or dead.

Yesterday, the government under Prime Minister Hassan Diab resigned, leaving a crater in parliament. This move is met with blazeh indifference. We’ve seen this before, and the strongmen are still entrenched at the top. Diab is nothing. He is a drop in an ocean of elitist crime.

In a procession of broken-hearted fury, the Lebanese march in a proud triumph along the streets. In a cowardly response, Aoun has wielded the army against the people. Young men in camouflage rip rubber bullets and tear gas into the surging crowds. People bring tennis rackets to the marches. Choking and bereft, they pick up the canisters and launch them back at the soldiers in arcing, overhand serves.

I understand distilled rage now. I understand the visceral torture of what it feels like to want to kill someone, not with the cowardice of a gun, but with my bare hands, choking someone to purply death, quartering our strongmen limb from limb in a gleeful mob, an orgy banal, so comfortable in my mind. As the workers drill screws into the walls of our home, my brain is plagued with fantasies.

Beirut’s legs are blown off. She lies weeping, face down, her heartbeat muffled in the sea. Her arms and beautiful hands reach out for life, touching off a shock wave that drives volunteers to work through the night in the dark and infuses us with enough life to trudge forward. This resplendent force has warped Earth’s magnetic field and dragged winter to lie over Lebanon. It creates a nuclear wind, a spinning vortex of sorrow and anger. On my innocent hands, it scatters raindrops at the crest of September.

Josie Elbiry, 2020