Colin Sheridan: To live in Beirut is an act of love

The first is complex in its confession, as it points to personal naivety and a little ignorance.

The second can wait, only because I believe it to be a perfect sentence that needs no further prosecution. What happens in between — much like Beirut itself — will be an imperfectly beautiful, violent, emotional mess.

Though I — like so many others — was only ever passing through and can claim no ownership of a city that has been raised up and torn down by everyone from Diodotus The Magnificent to Ezra from Brooklyn, a college student operating a killer-drone from Tel Aviv, I realise I am forever stuck in Gemmayzeh and Hamra by osmosis.

The cellar door has been left open many times, but I know I will never walk through it. I understand my mental incarceration to be a voluntary one, brought upon by an imperfect love, and — with a knowing nod to my captor — a little self-loathing.

The first thing I can tell you with absolute certainty is this; I never have, and never will understand Beirut. Each time I think I do, it creeps up behind me and clips me around the ear like a disgusted Lebanese grandmother.

Despite my pea-sized brain applying its sepia-tinted western gaze to its many streets and alleyways, I was always too impatient to learn the language, too overwhelmed to comprehend its history, and too seduced by its ample bosom to be objective about its flaws.

That realisation was only amplified last week as I watched, night after night, the orange smoke billowing from Al-Dahiyeh, the sprawling southern suburb that so many foreign commentators lazily describe as a “Hezbollah stronghold.”

That phrase, almost ubiquitous across western media, succeeds in reducing a huge part of Beirut — a city that contains multitudes — into one street corner where a mythical gang of hooded terrorists hang out and bellow Allahu Akbar at one another as they smoke argileh while plotting the downfall of the West.

Picturing a “stronghold” exploding with brown jihadi limbs flying skyward is a lot more palatable than the reality, which is teachers, doctors, and nurses sleeping in their beds in their homes above coffee shops and bakeries, unaware of death’s imminent arrival. “Stronghold” works for that reason. “Vibrant communities,” not so much.

I suspect future historians will speak to something called “Stronghold Syndrome,” becoming as it so effectively has, a neat little narrative we’ve curated to calm our guilty conscience. Because, if we convince ourselves that all Beirut knows is war, then war is all it really deserves.

This misguided conviction absolves us from any blame for the torture inflicted on a country and a city that has become a plaything for America, Europe, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Israel for a century. Forget the “the Paris of the Middle East,” think more, politically and economically at least, an exquisitely dressed voodoo doll.

Back to the streets. Yes, it is true, this is a city that inspires the most exquisite poetry and lyricism, even today, as the smoke still billows, and last night’s dead wait to be buried. But such romanticism is often as reductive as the “stronghold” chatter.

In my years living there and my visits before and since, I have never met a more educated people. Their proficiency with language is astounding (to an Irish person at least), as the majority are conversant in Arabic, English and French, usually in the same sentence.

The Lebanese, too, are world leaders in self-confidence. Not superior, just incredibly assured.

It takes getting used to, being told you’re never appropriately dressed and a little overweight, but you’re always — ALWAYS — welcome on a hike next weekend in the Chouf.

The hike almost never happens, but the invite will be far more memorable than the let-down. Unfulfilled promises, you see, are to Beirut what rain is to Galway.

Perhaps it is because they have come to rely on their government for absolutely nothing, perhaps it is their legacy as a people on the point where east meets west, but their entrepreneurism, self-sufficiency, and ability to reinvent is astounding.

In Beirut, bomb shelters become night clubs, churches become art galleries, and garages morph into pop-up concept stores. Yet, for all the reinvention, it is not perpetual hope that sustains them, nor do they subscribe to the mantra that it’s the hope that kills. They know far too well it’s only bombs and bullets that do that.

Though it immediately feels like home, you are always an outsider in Beirut. So is everyone else. Everybody is either from the mountain or the Beqaa or the South.

Or they are Greek or Armenian, or Palestinian or a foreign correspondent. Or Mossad. Whoever you are, though, or wherever you’re from, it sucks you in. With the cobbled streets of Gemmayzee, the majnouneh vines creeping over the walls on Bliss Street in Hamra, or the Corniche as the sun sets. This is a city that bleeds life.

Lebanon’s civil war — as sporadic as it was brutal — may have been country wide in its violence, but Beirut was its ground zero, and though the lines of that conflict have blurred culturally and socially a great deal in the 29 years since it ended, nothing divides Beirut like trauma.

For 15 years an armistice line separated the city east and west, the latter controlled by Christians, the former by everybody else. Now, as the south of the country and its suburbs get pounded by Israeli bombs, the west of the city and its waterfront are packed full of displaced people sleeping rough on streets and in cars.

The east, neighborhoods like Gemmayzee and Achrafieh, are suspiciously clean and quiet, the security services moving along anybody who dares seek refuge in the doorway of a Hermès store.

The Israeli bombs have exposed another secret scar, one which the city would rather you never saw, and one which disappointingly contradicts it’s self-professed reputation for love and empathy.

Unable or unwilling to afford them any longer, the Beirut madams have dispensed with their hired help, leaving thousands of migrant workers— many of them young, African women from Ethiopia and Eritrea — alone and without the documentation or funds required to leave.

Lebanon is home to an estimated 250,000 migrant domestic workers from Asian and African countries. Under the Kafala sponsorship dynamic, these workers’ entire status is tied directly to a specific employer. It’s critics equate it to modern slavery, and to see it at close quarters, you couldn’t disagree with that assertion.

Among the tens-of-thousands now displaced in the city, these

women were already among the most vulnerable.

The kafala conundrum is indicative of a city constantly at odds with itself. Megalomaniac, navel gazing, poetic, corrupt, shallow, fatally hubristic. Selectively amnesic, yet stubbornly unwilling to let go or forget.

Riddled with PTSD, both remote and now, very sadly current, it strives to convince it knows much better than you, while simultaneously doing unto others what it understandably hates been done unto itself.

For decades, it turned it’s anger upon the exiled Palestinian population in the camps of Sabra and Shatila. Later, as it bore the brunt of Europe’s disgraceful disinterest, Syrian refugees felt the full force of the cities frustration.

Now, alone and unwanted, migrant workers seek shelter with no embassies to advocate for them, and, with their own children to feed, they are just another faceless victim of a war that is only a war if you are unlucky enough for it to be a war. That’s Beirut.

You might wonder, then, why one might love it so much. Why the poet Maya Angelou felt moved to say “If I were a city, I’d be Beirut.” Why literally every person who visits leaves with its mark tattooed on its soul.

Why those that are born there, loathe it one minute, but defend it to the death the next, a feeling best exemplified by the Arabic proverb “I against my brother. I and my brother against my cousin. I, my brother, and my cousin against the world.”

So why love it, then? Because from its open wound flows a life so rich it bears no comparison. Yes, it is contradictory and grotesque, riddled with conspiracy and conjecture.

But it is authentic, and capable of such random moments of majesty you forget you ever lived anywhere else. Look dead west, down Gouraed Street at dusk and see the Hariri Mosque engulfed in the setting sun.

Round a corner in Ras and be hit by the light, by a canopy of trees, a piece of accidental art. Walk Beirut at night and be struck by the incessant sound and the sudden silence. Flailing electrical wires. A half-naked old man in an apartment window. An art gallery displaying a depiction of a vagina in its lobby. The call to prayer framed against the hum of a million generators. A French renaissance building riddled with machine-gun fire.

Yes, you hate it sometimes, the dysfunction and the despair, but in a time when the ubiquity of technology is ruining everything, in Beirut, it doesn’t work.

Nothing works, yet somehow everything is alive.

Which brings me to the second thing I need to tell you: a sentence so perfect that I had to fact-check, did I write it? It is perfect only because I know it is true.

To live in Beirut is an act of love. I truly believe this. Whether you were born in Badaro or exiled to Shatila during the Nakba or displaced by the Syrian Civil War. Whether you are 20-year-old Eritrean girl sleeping in a utility room in Bourj Hammoud. Whether you are a privileged white Irishman driving a UN jeep or a foreign journalist half-hoping for a war to start. To live in that city — to breathe its dirty air and eat its batata harra — is to be a living part of a perpetual history.

It matters not whether your time there was peaceful or defined by bloody war. Nor whether the city was good to you or chewed you up and spat you out like it does so many.

To live there is an act of love. That love should not forgive the city for its many crimes, nor excuse the jaundiced gaze through which we sometimes view it, but what it does do is allow it to endure, beyond the bombs and the blasts and political incompetence.

Every person I know that has left Beirut has done so not knowing when they are coming back. This is true in peace time, and in war. For the Christians and the Sunni and the Shia. For the Irish and the Eritreans, too.

The privilege that comes with being able to leave is tempered by a perpetual guilt, a feeling that leaving the city is an act of infidelity. Writing about it, too, comes with the constant anxiety you will piss it off to the point of it never wanting you back.

I struggle to understand what causes the city to emit such mixed messages, and can only settle on this: Beirut is neurodivergent, beautifully so. You want it to understand that those of us who cherish it do so not in spite of that neurodiversity — but because of it. The bullet holes in its walls are the freckles on its glorious face.

It’s what drew us in in the first place, and what makes us want to be there now.