August 4, 2020. Beirut mon Amour. 4 am, Beirut falls asleep. There is absolute silence and total darkness. The “engines” were turned off to catch their breath, their roaring and spitting smoke and soot deafened and polluted us all day and night, so that was the light.
“The Lebanese adapt to everything”. No electricity ? Never mind, the more affluent start their “engines”, the others die in the scorching heat of summer, become dehydrated or die, for the weakest. Their oxygen machines go out, their fever rises and medicines are missing, they are extinguished in the total indifference of crooked politicians supposedly responsible for the safety and well-being of citizens.
Responsible, no one feels. Here, it is the country of resourcefulness, not of responsibility. What a bad word, when you can always blame the other. Starting with myself, the fault of my parents, the fault of the colonizers, the fault of the invaders, the fault of the petty religious, the fault of the horrible politicians / mafia / war criminals without scruples, without conscience, without morals, ethics , humanity, respect, consideration.
For Christians, the fault of Muslims, Palestinians, Syrians, Iranians, Russians… For Muslims, the fault of Christians, Israelis, French, Saudis, Americans… Although not so simple: some Christians support the Iranians and some Muslims support the Saudis …
It is the Lebanese quagmire. The responsible is always the other. How convenient! We are the eternal victims of a rotten system at the base, of a feudal clan confessionalism, of an obsolete traditionalism, of a defective heredity, of a stupid narrow-minded majority, blinded by its temple merchants, anencephalic collectors of baksheesh, selling their votes to the highest bidder.
This is not the land of the cedar, nothing is majestic in our victimizing mediocrity. We wash our hands of it, the dirt always comes from elsewhere and our blame radiates at 359 ° but does not affect us, our irreproachable, limpid, immaculate person. Our victim aura protects us like a rampart of a medieval fort, like an oxygen bubble around our space station.
Untouchables. Until the explosion. The ultimate explosion. Ignominy.
On August 4, 2020, at 6:07 am, I was on the highway, in front of the Beirut Forum, less than 2 kilometers from the port.
It’s my head that exploded, its gray matter, its cells, neurons, amygdala and cortex, thalamus and hippocampus, hormones, all in millions of particles that have been scattered throughout this city that has been martyred many times. Submitted to the Pharaohs, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Crusaders, Ottomans, French, Israelis, Syrians …
A vision of the apocalypse. In front of me was a nuclear mushroom, the whole sky darkened, as I became tiny in front of this giant coming out of our Aladdin lamp, this very one shaped by our years of menfichism, absenteeism, civic-mindedness resigning, egocentricity. Our Lebanese lamp, our hangar n ° 12.
My millions of brain particles spread through the bruised, destroyed city, covering the rigid, wounded, amputated, bloody bodies. My body, after having come to a standstill, believing itself dead, begins to flee forward, or rather upwards, towards the mountain where my son was accompanied by a friend to join his grandparents.
All of a sudden the instinct of self-preservation kicks in, phone calls and automatic driving, excruciating fear in my stomach, and if it was Israeli aerial bombardments like in 2006 and if a bomb hit my friend’s car, the killing as well as my son?
Madness seizes the remnants of my tattered brain still clinging to my skull. Arrived at the mountain where everyone had felt an earthquake, I collapse. Terrified not to see my son and my friend again, by the immensity of the catastrophe that had engulfed my city, my relatives, friends, my house. Feeling of end of the world.
A year later, a few words come to the rescue of the unspeakable. A year of mourning to be able to express a few meager palavers unable to describe the abomination.
I’m still strangely alive. Pain all over. I feel like the mother who lost her baby, mother, sister, father, brother and companion. I am the girl who lost her eye, her arm, her head. I am this homeless woman, dazed in her armchair, surrounded by broken glass in her living room without walls. I am this raped and tortured people. This annihilated city.
The particles of my brain mingle with the dust of the city and the blood of the murdered. I haven’t put the pieces back together, suffocated by my guilt. Because I am also responsible for this massacre. The profiteer of a system that I could not fight enough.
Those directly responsible, without faith or law, feast in their yachts or in their ivory bunkers from where they instigate other clever crimes. Haven’t they always gone unpunished? Encouraged even! The interests of each other, the imperatives of profit, the desire to own this tiny country in a strategic location, led to his repeated gang rape.
Consent victim? NO ! This land did not ask to be despoiled. It was majestic with its peaks, its cedars, its rivers and streams, its sea and its sky. The human who occupied it did not support its perfect NATURE, he exploited its fertile land, its pure water, disfigured it with wild constructions, suffocated it.
We Lebanese citizens are responsible. Unless there is a general awakening, an awareness by the whole people to change the rotten foundations of the system by a RESPONSIBLE vote, this little piece of land is doomed to total disappearance.
5 am, the engines start again, Beirut wakes up. It will be the race for dollars, fuel oil, water, food, gasoline, medicine. To survival. In the sense.
Amal Saade, Paris
