Philadelphia, 2006..

..the last footage of me before I knew how much could break.

Let it burn

Let it all dim a bit 

Let the lights flicker and die 

Let the noise chatter itself soar 

Let this chaos wind itself into the ground 

It all shall be...

Let the words wrestle themselves into oblivion 

Let everything exhaust itself 

Like dogs 

Like street walkers 

Like this city 

The trash shall burn, and we shall choke

Someone cannot breath, this too shall pass 

Taste the char in the air, the remains of what was 

Looking back, what does he miss the most?

Or is he beyond? Beyond missing 

Beyond the yearning, beyond the din 

Is he now only a memory, like so many others 

Fading, receding, but haunting 

Every now and then, in the making of the self 

In the unmasking of life, in the crevices of the everyday 

In me, you live in me, whether I like it 

Or die in you, as I would..

Condemned To Be Free

“Liberty! Liberty! Liberty!” they cried.

“Liberty! Liberty! Liberty!” I echoed.

“Our liberty,” they cried.

“My liberty,” I echoed.

“No, ours; not yours.”

“My liberty is yours, and yours is mine.”

“No, you’re not one of us.”

“I thought liberty is universal?”

“Only as long as it doesn’t conflict with ours.”

“And when it does?”

“Then our liberty trumps yours.”

“I thought we’re equal?”

“We made up this equality, so technically we’re more equal.
Besides, you don’t even believe in liberty!”

“But I do.”

“You may, but your religion doesn’t; ours does.”

“I have no religion! And I thought you were secular?”

“We like our churches; aren’t they pretty?”

“But you said: secular, human rights, etc.”

“You poor kid; you believe everything we say?
Why don’t you go back home, back to your people…”

“But I left my people; I live here now!
My clothes are here; my cats are here…”

“Oh, tant pis… Schade… Next!”

I’m still not ready to leave

I’m still not ready to leave, but dare not say it to anyone. There are words behind my eyes still maturing, still not ripe for utterance. I have made a habit of keeping things to myself, but every now and again they weigh on me. Sadness is like that, it begs to be shared, to be spread like a cold. But I am resisting the decadent temptation, this once.

My throat is ready to leave; it is charred with exhaust. But something in me lingers, not wanting to pack just yet. More things to fold within: these congested streets, my backache, unwrapped endings, and the hesitation of what’s to come—I’ll have to pack them all. But I’ll have to unpack them first: lay them on the bed, fold them one by one—I don’t have much room.

But what to tell the dust coating everything and our lungs? What to tell the tired dust?

I shall return. Every now and then I breathe from a different nostril, and always gasp for air.

(Originally posted on April 14, 2007)

Self-Sabotage

 

Last year I interviewed an artist (Tania Bruguera) who'd played Russian roulette as an artwork—not once, but twice! No one I spoke to outside the art world seemed to get it, piling on incensed superlatives of outrage and accusations of insanity. Tania, very appropriately, called her performance “Self-Sabotage”. And recently, with what’s happening in Lebanon, I could think of no other work that sums up the situation there so succinctly and powerfully: the entire country is playing Russian roulette! Not once, not twice, not three or four or five times, but… But how do you even count this? By cars? By people? By days? And where do you even start? Every time I hear about another car bomb in Lebanon I feel like another gun went off at my temple. But it’s not my life that’s at stake here; it’s the lives of my loved ones. This time they’re safe, and the last time they were, too; and the time before that… But how many times can we all play this insane game of collective Russian roulette before we all lose together?

 

"Bombing in Beirut Kills Four: Blast Hits Southern Beirut District"

(Originally posted on January 21, 2014)

Another Day in Paradise

Another day of pretending it didn't happen: it's just news on the TV, only as real as "reality TV"… Another day of counting blessings: they're alive, it was close, but they're all okay; all those I care about made it through… Another day of moving forward: everyone's okay, move on, next; there's a project to work on, a symposium to organize, the things of the civilized world, the world where people voice their misapprehensions instead of bomb them… Another day behind the impregnable borders of this world, this safe grey world of rules: try as they may, desperate outsiders can only dent the peace of its gates by their insistence of dying against them every now and again…  Another day, another reminder of mortality, of distance, of the frailty of life, the futility of our endeavors, the silliness of our humanity…

Terror strikes again in Beirut southern suburbs, five dead

(Text originally posted on November 19, 2013)

Lebanon: A Counterpoint

When this country glows, it sparkles! It makes you forget all that it is, and makes you believe in all that it could be. This is a country of the night: the dark hides all its outrageous faults and lets you see the lights shimmering in the hills and breaking over the water. You forget the checkpoints, the mad traffic, and politics of the day; all you can think about is the enchanting breeze off of the sea, the music reverberating in the midnight air, and the beat that thunders in your rib cage. You think, Who are these shiny happy people? Sometimes at night I can believe the insipid lyrics of old patriotic songs, I can remember feeling homesick to this place still. I can forget how we've cursed it, and how it cursed us all back. At night, I can smile at the dust on the windshield catching the street-lamps, the stillness of the moon through electric wires, and think, "There is hope yet."

Thoughts from a Broken Country - Day 2

We went out again today. That's often all it takes for me to change my mind about this mess of a country. I used to think the traffic was bad, the congestion and density of people oppressive, especially in this godforsaken part of the city known as Dahye, the (southern) "Suburbs" (of Beirut, a.k.a. Hezbollah-land).

But that was before it all went haywire, before the car bombs, before the paranoia... It was before the "Suburbs" went from a ghetto for-all-practical-purposes to a real official one, with enforced boundaries, a true country-within-a-country. There are now "self-enforced" (i.e. Hezbollah-manned) security checkpoints at all entrances to Dahye. The nightmarish traffic at the entrances went from oppressive to unbearable. But the indignity of the checkpoints is what's most disturbing, eerily reminiscent of the "civil" war days, something I thought we've left behind.

At the turn to our place, a bearded man in civilian clothes stops our car and pulls us off to the side; apparently we look too Westernized, not Shiite enough. He asks "Where are you from?" and demands to see ID-cards (Lebanese code for "What religious sect are you?"). My idealistic brother replies, "I'm from Lebanon. I'm secular. I crossed my religious sect off of my ID." My father thinks he's asking for trouble; he's glad my brother is leaving the country next week for another masters in the UK. I side with my brother; I tell the bearded guy, "I'm from here before you were born; where are YOU from?" He replies, mockingly, "Syria." I ask him, "By what right do you ask to see our IDs then?" He says, "I'm trying to protect you; why are you so upset?" I say, "Because we're trying to get to our house right there and every time you stop us." At this point, my mother is glad, too, I'll be leaving soon again. And I... I'm not sure of anything anymore.

I feel like Don Quixote battling the windmills: just as foolish, just as delusional, just as aimless... Soon enough, I'll be back again in the cold comfort of my life in Zurich, I hope. I'll be back to railing against the Swiss, and the Americans, and the Art World, and whatever windmills I could muster--just another foolish man and his grandiose deluded ideals. And what becomes of here? What becomes of them? I'll pretend not to think; even a foolish man can take on only so many windmills....

'Stranger In Paradise'

"Take my hand
I'm a stranger in paradise
All lost in a wonderland
A stranger in paradise"
-Tony Bennett, 'Stranger In Paradise'

Here am I in paradise, they said. This is as close as it gets to it on this earth, they said. But someone forgot to mention that I don’t belong in paradise. I breathe my air charred and sticky with sweat. I take my water salty and warm. Even our mountains are shabby and riddled with people. And it’s the people in hell that I miss the most: red-hearted, red-tempered, loud and obnoxious like their laughter.

Here, I take trams all day, going nowhere, always seeking a savior. I reach out my hand only to find it in my pocket. I seek in the frozen faces floating by a little bit of the warmth of hell, but hell has frozen over, leaving me all lost in wonderland.

Here, Prince Charming wears an Armani suit and picks up his “date” in a Porsche Cayenne with an unsuspecting child-seat in the back. The princesses are all trapped in castles up the hill, looking down, missing it all. Looking beyond, dreaming of that hand, pretending it’s not the same one that locked the door this morning. Pretending paradise is still elsewhere, somewhere they may belong to…

Willing Life Back to Normal

It's been strangely quiet in here, in my mind. I've been trying to will life back to normal, trying to shed the rigorous routines I've acquired in the past month. Exhaustion is evident in those around me, those that have been touched, even from a distance. My words seem trite and packaged to me; I feel like a news agency repeating the same tired script.

There's a strange quiet, a tangible vacuum in here. I want to pretend that this never happened, and it's easier for me to do so here. This is strangely reminding me of when my grandmother died. I wasn't there. Her death was sluggish to materialize. It took my going back home, to my grandparents house, for it to get closer to home. But even then she was simply strangely absent, like she just stepped out to get a bundle of bread and took a bit longer to return. Even seeing her grave didn't help that much in making it any more real. There was a marble slab with her name on it, her first name, which I never used anyhow. Just a name, and dates. But she wasn't there. I couldn't imagine her below, just like it was difficult to believe her to be dead. Her smell wasn't there, nor her ragged day dresses. There was just a strange absence, and nothing could be less tangible.

And here, I have only pictures. And voices. And words. There's the rubble, and here's my adamantly self-protective mind that wants to forget about it. And here's my world that is more than happy to conspire with me on pretending it never happened. Here's the concert in the park we went to last night, the refined string music, and the malevolently oblivious kids running around the pond. Here's this "civilized" culture that pretends it never killed anyone, it never paid for massacres, I never paid for massacres... It is easier to pretend that we're civilized when listening to violins in the night. It is too easy. I keep replaying old stale songs to remind me that this isn't it, that life is happening elsewhere, that life stopped elsewhere. But the songs with faded lyrics can barely compete with Bach. It is too easy to pretend we're civilized with Bach.

Yes, this is peace, this is serenity, this is affluence and plentitude, laying there, on the impeccable grass, pretending that it cost nothing. There's the rich of Chestnut Hill calling for someone to give their "meals on wheels" to. I pretend to forget my sister's message about the 500 or 5,000 that were stuck underground somewhere in the south of Lebanon without food for days, or the report about the people that had to drink from puddles of collected rain water that was closer in consistency to mud, and had started greening already with algae. I pretend this has never happened before, elsewhere, and will never happen again. I pretend that this is all there is, this concert, the good food, and my strangely silent company.

Mazen's mother's birthday was weighing on his mind. And on ours. He was supposed to be with her for it, in that World Before Any Of This Happened. There was the Peace my mother believed in in that World, the Life As It Was Happening Before. There was life as I remember it too vividly, as I try to will it again. The life with its infinite small details that have become strangely irrelevant now. And there's the silence, this unrelenting silence in my mind, that gets quickly filled, at the first thought of words, with old fragments of song, of Fairouz wailing, "Ya natreen el-talj, ma aad badkoun tirja'ou?" You waiting for the snow, don't you want to come back?

(Illustration courtesy of Ben Heine)

Comment

That same night they bombed the mosque at the cemetery at the end of our street in el-Dahyeh, where my grandma is buried; I have never been happier that she's already dead. (So much for "Rest In Peace"!) No wonder my mother and sister are starting to think they can feel her ghost sitting by their side on the bed in the mountains; it must have taken her a week or two to walk up there... In their hurry, people always leave the dead behind.

That night, they also created some new tenants for the cemetery, right from the buildings next door (though they have to dig them out of the rubble still). Forty of them, my sister said.

Yesterday my mom opened her pharmacy again, at the other end of the same street. Not all the neighbors, or employees, are back; but those there were happy to get some long-needed pills.

Today I heard a reporter on the radio saying that the Dahyeh smelled old, like an abandoned house. Or a woman by the side of the road.

A photo of what remains of a nearby pharmacy of my mother's colleague .
Click on it for more photos that my friend Eve took.

1982 revisited?

Last night the electricity went out in Philadelphia for a couple of hours. I was almost nostalgic lighting up the candles around the house. In the dark, anywhere could be Beirut.

But then one of the candles burst out in flames; the wax itself was on fire, the round top of the thick cylinder was ablaze. I tried to put it out, throw water on it, but that only made the boiling wax splash onto my hand. I tried to sleep, with my hand dangling in a bucket of ice water, but I just couldn't. Underneath the pain I must have sensed something in the air, a whiff of the news I was to wake up to.

Today my nostalgia took a darker turn...

Blasphemy!

This is actually not that old, but perhaps explains the hiatus...


Poetry… must be the dullest, most laughable hobby—as I would never have the masochism it takes to call it a profession—ever. Even dead butterfly collectors are more interesting—way more! God, even stamp collectors are something of a rarity these days. But poets? I guess there is nothing cheaper than words, after all. And we are all so special, every single one of us unique. And needy. And lamentably self-absorbed. Oh, but we are supportive: scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. All the leftover nerds in the world have found a hallway narrow enough to hear their thoughts echo. Magic! Pure magic, this camaraderie of spirit, of words! The only magical thing about it is that we actually believe it. But we’re not the first to believe; there will always be God ahead of us, attracting more wayward souls. Or less. Oh, what difference does it make? What does it take to wake us up? Our death served on a bill? And wake up to what? I’m going back to sleep; Kathy Griffin is waiting.

Human Wreckage

Below are a few entries from my journal that never made it here...

I have often looked at human wreckage with the awe and anticipation born out of a fear of the very real possibility, if not likelihood, that one day I could join the ranks.

Proem (yes, katy)

I sweat profusely in airports, like I'm clenching something illicit in me. I become wet and slippery as phlegm. I reek of anxiety; the more perfume I try on, the worst I smell. Anxiety grows on me like a pungent mold. Almost imperceptibly, but obstinately, until I am no more than a concoction of animal essences riddled by paperwork. Paperwork to prove the paperwork, the stale stench of bureaucracy. I am one smelly drawer of manila folders, with proof of existence inside. What becomes of me when the paperwork burns? What becomes of it when I do? I will reek further, and it—it will procreate.