Beirut: The disaster has its own logic – slow, slow, people live their lives. How does a crisis appear? What signs should we learn to read? And what does it mean to write in a time like now?




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

How to get to a city? An as yet unknown night. To take the first steps over the runway, then hear the muffled voices in the arrivals hall. Hands reaching out to us, the bus waiting for us, the light from the city on the horizon, bright orange, sleepy yellowish. The song that is sung about the city: The city was made from the people's soul / from their wine, their sweat, bread and jasmine / But how does she taste now? / She tastes of fire and smoke… 

photo 1-26We drive into the long, dark tunnels, we see the first houses, balconies covered with striped fabric, refurbished facades, cracked facades, ruins. No one sleeps. The bus driver and his wife smile, handing us strong and sweet Turkish coffee. What can I say about arriving in this city? The city of dreams, the city of poets. That it smelled ours, the old fears and the hopes of the youth? A heavy, rotten smell of garbage from the eastern suburbs. To travel to the place's name, let it flourish.

Beirut: Cypresses, hyacinths, fig trees, pine trees, almond trees, lilies. Eunomia oppositifolia, origanum libanoticum. All the evergreen here. The melting snow from the mountains, the water flowing down to the valleys and making the land lush. Lebanon, the country bordering Syria and Israel. And not too far away: the Mediterranean that extends to Algeria, Morocco and Spain.

Cornflowers. I'm writing to you from Hotel Mayflower in Beirut. It's morning, I spend hours on the balcony, trying to find words to be here in the city, it's hard. The ivory letterhead and envelope with the dark blue arabesque pattern in the nightstand drawer, which I later packed with my luggage home, a letter that was not sent: Nehme Yafet Street, PO Box 113-5304 Hamra. I'm here with the Swedish writer's school that I attend, my name is Kirstine Reffstrup. I'm in Beirut writing this. What is a name in a city? A western name. We drive along Rue Clémenceau, along Avenue Général de Gaulle. Rue Verdun. The beauty of the names here, the violence; The Battle of Verdun in northeastern France was one of the longest and bloodiest battles

We are warned: a war can break out here at any time, in one day only, and suddenly and unexpectedly it can happen in Europe as well.

during World War I. This is how the French named the city here after the misfortunes of their own country. Lebanon, a country that has been ravaged by ancient invaders; rulers from Egypt, Babylonia and Assyria. Later came the Caliphate, and then the Crusaders and Ottomans came, and not least the Europeans, the colonial powers. England and France.

photo 4-15The name of our hotel: The Mayflower. The hotel is both very beautiful and worn. Everyone in the city knows about it. An historic place, elegant, it's as if nothing has changed here since the 1970s: marble tiles, parquet, the colors; pale yellow walls, pink, dark wood. Once Beirut was divided into East and West, during the Civil War that lasted from 1975 to 1990, and here in West Beirut, on The Mayflower, Robert Fisk, the foreign journalists, lived the spies. I imagine them sitting around the table in the conference room, in the green, muted, shady room with olive-colored curtains and deep green tablecloths; western faces, drinking smoked whiskey. The West is constantly present here. It is sorrowful, a war that is impossible to get rid of, that crosses borders, from Lebanon, to Syria – and maybe, the people here ask, maybe it will come here again? Many of the conflicts in the region can be traced back to the presence of the western colonial powers, the distribution of land and their lands in between. The dead walk again on the bones of the living, writes Swedish author Michael Azar in his book on Beirut.

The language of the crisis. Beirut. Like a cracked spleen, punctured, with white bags, black bags – like a river polluting the entire city's body, the mountain of waste passes through Jdeideh, one of Beirut's poor suburbs in the east. And we can smell it, but we still walk towards the sunset that we can see over the mountains. We move through Gemmayzeh, and a sweet and nauseating rotten smell of garbage hangs in the air. The waste has accumulated since one of the city's largest waste depots was closed last year. The situation reflects a partially paralyzed political system. The current government cannot agree on a new president or how the legal process for electing a new parliament should take place. Now the garbage is in the heat and pollutes the water and the air, making residents sick. Still, the youth sit at the hip bars of Gemmayzeh, seemingly carefree, laughing, smoking, drinking cocktails. How does a crisis appear? What signs should we learn to read? The first power outages come after a couple of days, and it is as if they are returning more frequently and more frequently. Finally we get used to them, they only last a few seconds, we talk further, look into each other's eyes. From light to dark and back to light; the darkness that eats into the light, the waste that eats into the city. These are all too clear metaphors. The metaphors of the body. The metaphors of light and darkness. The language of the crisis.

Many faces. We are warned: a war can break out here at any time, in one day only, and suddenly and unexpectedly it can happen in Europe as well. We meet Lebanese author Rashid Al-Daif, he is a man who thinks about, drinks black tea from a small jug, looks at us with a light, ambiguous smile. From time to time he pours more tea into his cup, is the West's rationalism, the era of Enlightenment coming to an end? he asks. This is clearly a man who lives a thinking and writing life, the words fall, carefully measured, like his writing, the books, slightly ironic, deep and wise. He says: We are all in the dark. Those who have lived during the war here have learned one thing: that the war cannot be predicted how suddenly it came, the civil war, now we are at a turning point. And he warns us: Do not think that you are safe in Europe, the logic of war is that there is no logic.

Fairuz sings: Beirut's ashes are witness to her glory / Now my city has turned out its lights…

How to tell about a city? Horace Engdahl writes about the testimony: No one is a witness only by observing an event with his own eyes. A witness becomes the speaker and says, "I was there, I saw, I can tell!"

What does it mean to witness his time? To live, to observe to tell? And at the same time be in the dark: We are all in the dark, says Al-Daif.

How to tell about Beirut?

The questions do not stop.

I can tell you about the mint and the salty yogurt that is so fresh and good. That there are hardly any tourists left in Beirut. That I do not recognize the disastrous city as it is described in the media. The disaster here has its own logic – slow, slow, people live their lives, in the streets, fit their jobs, shops, restaurants. Waiting and hoping and fearing. Beirut: a wonderful city, a sad city.

The Armenian taxi driver is troubled, the Muslim taxi driver is troubled, and yet the youths drink cocktails in Gemmayzeh.

We are told that they have collected sandbags in the center of the city, we read it as a sign of coming turmoil; a sign in the language we are about to learn.

As I write this, there are over one million Syrian refugees in the country, most living in extreme poverty in Bekaa Valley, Beirut and Palestinian refugee camps, such as Shatila, who are already heavily burdened.

A city with so many faces.

The city was made from the people's soul… 

A face that alternates between smile and anger.

Shatila, located in the southern part of Beirut – a warning to us, to Europe, not to build camps: The permanent state camp is disastrous for the people living there. The camp has been here since 1949, generation after generation of Palestinians born here, almost without rights, neither to work, move, buy a house elsewhere, live a different life; now they have only the right to live.

Ghost. Horace Engdahl writes: For history research, an event ends when it is described. For the Witnesses and their interpreter, it has never ceased to happen. We are witnessing a time of great change. When I doubt most what I do, what I write, it has to do with this: What does it mean to write in a time like now? I'm just on a short visit here in the city, I can't even be called a stranger to the city's inhabitants, a ghost from the West, maybe, pale, awkward. Like the street names, the French and English, originally foreign to the country, its people and culture, but gradually, over decades, nevertheless grew along with the city.

Our room, No. 106. Night to Wednesday, a storm is pouring in on us, keeping us awake. Wiping the sky clean. And tomorrow we open the door to the balcony, to the city, Beirut, which is in front of us, in the blinding light of spring.

The song quoted in the lyrics is «Li Beirut » fin 1987, sung by the iconic Lebanese singer Fairuz, written during the civil war in Lebanon, translated into English from Arabic by Liz Barnard.

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