Jasmine and Fire

by Salma Abdelnour

  Living in Beirut, it’s hard not to feel pressure, real or imagined, to be out socializing on a regular basis. This is, after all, one of the world’s most hypersocial cities. There’s a definite partying imperative here. No matter how old you are, you’re expected to go out a lot, whether to dinners and lunches or, for the younger set (by which I mean anyone younger than fifty), to clubs and bars and all-night parties. I’m not sure exactly where this high-octane social life comes from, but here are some theories. First, plain old Mediterranean-style decadence, a love of eating and drinking and dancing and sitting around for hours talking, passions shared by our neighbors across the sea, the Italians and French and Spanish and Greeks—maybe it’s something in the water. Also, as a port town, Beirut has for centuries been a hub for travelers from around the world, and its historically mixed population has meant a more liberal attitude toward alcohol and partying. The Lebanese addiction to socializing fills more specific local needs, too—like catharsis, not just during periods of violence and fear but also as a way to numb stress from the ongoing unemployment crisis and political instability. Even parents with kids can go out all the time if they want to, since most Lebanese families from the middle class on up hire live-in nannies, immigrants from Asia and Africa who work for very low wages. The nightlife here is undeniably tied into Beirut’s self-image and into the way tourists from around the world perceive the city.

  I definitely need a social life, not just to feel like a normal Lebanese with a pulse but also to avoid going stir-crazy or wallowing in loneliness and self-pity. Even though I’ve always liked spending time solo, succumbing to too much of that in Beirut seems pathological somehow. So far I’ve had some phone chats with my childhood friend Zeina, whom I’ve managed to keep up with over the years. She’s married, has a four-year-old daughter, and lives a half hour away in an eastern suburb, but we’ve vowed to hit the town together soon. One Friday night in mid-September, I’m holding a DVD of Spirited Away, an animated film by the Japanese director Miyazaki—I bought it for a buck at one of the many pirated-disk shops nearby, easier to find than decent rental shops—and I’m wondering if I should go ahead with a night of Japanimation. But on this beautiful Friday evening in Beirut, sitting home alone with a video seems a little too poignant. I wonder if I should call or e-mail Richard or one of my friends in New York, or try to find some random strangers’ party to crash.

  The phone rings, interrupting my self-pity spiral. It’s Zeina. She and her husband, Marwan, are going to meet a friend or two later tonight in the hopping Gemmayzeh area on the east side, and do I want to join them? Yes. My lonesome Japanimation evening turns, in an instant, into a classic Beirut night. I put on a silky sleeveless blouse, slim-cut jeans, and heeled boots—trying for a certain Beiruti summer look, stylish but faux nonchalant—and grab a taxi for the fifteen-minute ride across downtown and into Gemmayzeh. I’m heading to meet Zeina and Marwan at a place called Joe Peña, a loud Spanish-cantina-style spot on Rue Gouraud, Gemmayzeh’s main drag. When my taxi arrives, traffic is already backed up on Gouraud, so the driver drops me off at the edge of the street and speeds off. I walk along Gouraud, strolling past the rows of restaurants, bars, and nightclubs that occupy the ground floors of the street’s beautiful old townhouses, with their arched windows and wrought-iron balconies. Some of those houses survived the war, although signs of damage and age are showing in the dozens that have yet to be renovated. But somehow their old elegance shines through: in walls painted colors like eggshell blue or apricot or lemon yellow, peeling but with plenty of charm, and in the windows, typically three in a row across the upper facade, the glass forming a half-moon at the top.

  It’s just past nine, and the hangouts up and down the street are already starting to spill over with crowds, as groups of friends stand lingering on the sidewalk or meandering into the narrow street, dodging the cars that are trying to squeeze through as they honk at the oblivious partyers. I walk into the bar and find my friends. Zeina and Marwan lived in New York for a few years in the late 1990s, and the three of us had hung out regularly around Manhattan’s East Village, where they were living at the time. They’re a striking pair: Zeina with her short reddish hair, model-curvy eyebrows, and porcelain skin, slim and stylish in jeans and an off-the-shoulder top; Marwan with rakishly curly hair and metal-rimmed glasses.

  I’m happy to be out, nursing a couple of ice-cold Lebanese Almaza beers and watching the crowd at the bar, as more and more trendy-looking types pack into the room, glance around for people they know, and light cigarettes while attempting to get the bartenders’ attention. A deejay spins electro-pop and hip-hop in a back corner. It’s getting too crowded to move much, but dancing often doesn’t happen until later in the night anyway, as I remember from past summer visits to Beirut: around three or four A.M., people will sometimes jump onto the chairs or tables, waving their cocktail glasses and cigarettes, and dance.

  Zeina and Marwan introduce me to their friends: one guy around our age who owns some hipstery bars in town, and a former classmate with a big laugh who recently moved back to Beirut with his Spanish wife. We compare notes on New York versus Beirut—everyone in our little group has spent time in both cities—and about the social scenes in each: Beirutis tend to stay out later, is the consensus. But we agree that the bar scenes are fairly similar—boisterous, energetic, and overflowing on weekends—and at some clubs in both cities, it’s not unusual for people to be sneaking drugs in the bathroom. But here, I’ve noticed, people make more of an effort to look stylish, as a rule. And they can still chain-smoke their way through the night, as New Yorkers once did before Mayor Bloomberg’s smoking ban.

  It’s starting to get a little too smoky inside this bar actually, but right now I’m not minding much. It’s a festive and fun night, and we stay out, drinking and shouting at each other over the loud music and the crowd, until just past midnight. That’s bush league in Beirut, but everyone except me has kids or early-morning obligations the next day. Still, I’m glad Zeina called, happy I rallied to join them, and relieved I finally made my own tiny contribution to the city’s party scene.

  Socially, things continue to look up, bit by bit, as the month goes by. My college friend Jeff has e-mailed to tell me his old Berkeley housemate Curtis just moved to Beirut with his wife, Diana, to spend a year. Curtis is an American from southern California, and Diana is British. Both are graduate students at Harvard, and they’re in Beirut this year to work on academic projects. I’ve never met Curtis even though we were both at Berkeley at the same time and had a friend in common. I e-mail them to introduce myself, and it turns out they’re living in an apartment near me. They invite me to a dinner the next week. I wonder if we’ll hit it off.

  On the night of the dinner, I walk up the wide marble stairs of their echoey Ras Beirut building and into their third-floor apartment and am greeted by the tall curly-haired Curtis and Diana, also tall, with long, wispy blond locks. We click instantly—both of them are laid-back and have a dry wit I quickly take to—and they introduce me to their friend Nimco, a Somali-American who lives in Boston but is based this year in Sudan with her husband doing research. Nimco is in Beirut to visit Curtis and Diana, and she’s cooked dinner tonight. Our group of a half-dozen gathers around the table to eat her Somali soup of lemony broth with lamb bones, from which, on her instructions, we suck out the buttery marrow as we laugh at our messy technique, and her fragrant lamb stew over rice, similar to a classic Lebanese stew I’m fond of called a yakhne. For dessert, I’ve brought ashta ice cream, ultra-rich scoops of cold sweet cream mixed with sahlab, the wild orchid ingredient that creates an elastic texture. When I brought a similar ice cream to Umayma’s Ramadan dinner, everyone there had grown up with it and knew it well. But tonight no one at the dinner has had this style of ice cream before, and I enjoy watching them try to figure out what to make of it, the spoonfuls pulling away like stretchy strings of chewing gum. After a few puzzled bites: big smiles.

  At the dinner part
y, I meet an American woman named Wendy, who teaches political science at Northwestern University in Chicago and is here researching Lebanese emigration patterns. After dinner she gives me her business card, and we exchange cell phone numbers, promising to hang out again before she moves back to the States next month. As I look at her full name on the card, I realize it sounds vaguely familiar, but I can’t place it right away.

  Several days after Curtis and Diana’s dinner, I’m home on a Friday evening, and I hear loud booming sounds outside. Fireworks? I’m not sure. They sound like shelling, a visceral memory from the civil war. I wonder if the annual Hamra Street festival I’ve been seeing posters for around the neighborhood has just started, tonight, with a literal bang, an explosive fireworks display. That seems unlikely, though. I didn’t notice any festival preparations on the street earlier, or any vendors setting up food or crafts stands, and I don’t remember what day the fest is supposed to start. I’m slightly panicked by the noise but keeping myself calm—a skill I hope I’ll muster if, god forbid, the political situation in Lebanon blows up again. The sounds go on and get louder, and now I’m even more worried that they’re not fireworks. I rush into the windowless bathroom near my bedroom and crouch on the blue-tiled floor, away from any glass. That’s what we used to do during the war when the nightly shelling raids would start. The sounds continue for another half-hour, me still on the floor in the bathroom, alternately panicking and wondering if I’m being silly. Suddenly everything goes quiet.

  I listen for noise, a reaction, sirens, and don’t hear anything. No sounds of trauma or mayhem out on the streets. So those must have been just fireworks after all. I call my aunt Nouhad upstairs, and she confirms: fireworks for the Hamra festival, but she’s angry because these were much louder and longer-lasting than usual.

  “Isn’t it amazing that we keep blasting these sounds, here in Beirut of all places?” she asks.

  Yeah, I say. In what other country that lived through fifteen years of shelling and rocket grenades nearly every night is there still such an appetite for fireworks? Fireworks for every wedding, political speech, lavish birthday celebration, holiday, festival, you name it. Are we hopelessly addicted to the sound of things going boom?

  Back in May 2008, when scuffles exploded among militiamen from opposing sects on various streets around Beirut, some of my relatives thought they were hearing fireworks—but quickly realized they were actually shells. They all ran for safety to the windowless hallways of their buildings, and some slept on those corridor floors all night until the shelling stopped. Some of their buildings were hit. None of my friends or relatives were hurt, thankfully. But you never know around here.

  Wendy, the political scientist I’d met at Curtis and Diana’s, is living in an apartment near mine during her Beirut stay, and I call her after the fireworks die down. I need a drink. Luckily she’s on her way home from a dinner. We meet on the sidewalk near my apartment—I spot her blond hair and small-boned frame from down the block—and we take a walk around the neighborhood. I tell her about the fireworks incident and laugh off my paranoia (she hadn’t heard the booms downtown where she was). And I silently wonder if I can live like this again, in fear that the world is about to blow up around me.

  Over beers at a small, divey Hamra bar after our stroll, I ask Wendy a question I’ve been meaning to ask her since the dinner party, namely what it’s like to be Jewish in Lebanon these days. I’m wondering what the climate is right now, especially given Lebanon’s mutually hostile relationship with Israel. Has she encountered locals who were suspicious of her for being Jewish? I want to know, too, because I’d like Richard, who is Jewish, to visit me in Beirut and to feel comfortable here. Wendy tells me she’s avoided bringing up the fact that she’s Jewish in the months she’s been living here, thinking there’s no point and it could potentially be disruptive. Hiding an identity strikes me as unfortunate, but I can understand the impulse in regions as messed up as the Middle East. Thanks to Israel’s repeated invasions of Lebanon and its occupations of parts of the country, Zionism is not a particularly welcome stance in Lebanon, and unfortunately locals don’t always make the distinction between Zionism and Judaism. Many assume someone who is Jewish must also automatically support Israel’s policies. I can see how even opening the subject could be exhausting and time-consuming, and how it could seem less cumbersome to avoid it most of the time.

  Leaving the bar, Wendy and I stroll along Hamra Street, past the stands that are being set up now for the first night of the Hamra festival—some to sell labneh sandwiches or shawarma, others coffee or lemonade or Arabic pastries, or all kinds of jewelry and handicrafts. The scene reminds me of the ubiquitous New York street fairs that I’ve tended to avoid since they cause so much annoying pedestrian gridlock. But a local rock band is playing on a makeshift stage, there’s an upbeat vibe in the air, and we’re enjoying our stroll. As we chat and get to know each other, it comes up that, a few years ago, Wendy published a collection of essays by Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. And suddenly it hits me: this Wendy is the Wendy Pearlman whose book, called Occupied Voices, has been on the shelf in my Manhattan apartment for a few years. I’d bought it once while browsing at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square—this book, by a Jewish author compiling essays on Palestinians’ experiences under occupation, had caught my eye—and after she’d given me her card at the dinner party, I’d thought her name was familiar.

  “Small world” is an even bigger cliché in Lebanon than everywhere else. The country is fairly compact—the population is roughly 4 million, about 1.5 million of that in Beirut—and social and family circles collide and overlap constantly. You can chat up the cashier at the grocery store, or the manager of your local bank, or your taxi driver, or your orthopedist, in Beirut and discover you know a few people in common or even that you’re related. Happens all the time here. I’m stunned by the Wendy coincidence, but I have a feeling this won’t be the last time something like that happens to me here.

  Sure enough, it’s not long before it does again. One night later in the month, I hear that a Lebanese singer named Ghada Ghanem is performing a free show in downtown Beirut. I’d randomly met Ghada last year in New York, at a party at the home of my Lebanese friend Ahmad, and she’d sung a few a cappella Arabic songs that night. I was enchanted by her voice. Now here she is again, a not-yet-famous singer but this time with a gig at an outdoor theater in the newly rebuilt shopping district downtown, and luckily I’m in Beirut to hear her sing in her hometown. I invite my aunt Nouhad, a music lover, to come with me. The concert isn’t until ten thirty, but the late-night start makes it all the more dramatic.

  When Ghada comes out onstage, under the night sky, the crowd hushes, and it’s instant magic. She performs a series of old Arabic songs, a genre called tarab, her voice soaring out over the darkened city. An older woman, a brave audience member, gets up by herself and does a Middle Eastern dance called the dabke, right in front of the stage. The audience is clapping, cheering, singing along, the older members maybe feeling this is a déjà vu of the prewar Beirut that’s lost, or was lost and is now “inshallah,” hopefully, on its way back, but you can never be sure. Ghada has that iconic Lebanese voice: mournful and hopeful at once. When she sang at that party in New York last year, a guest had called out to her, “Your voice is more beautiful than Fairuz’s.”

  At the end of the show, Ghada says she’s glad to see Beirutis coming together over pleasure instead of suffering. She’s referring to the meaning of tarab, a musical style that’s mournful at times but ultimately about the pleasure and even the ecstasy of a profound musical experience. And she’s also making a dig at the seemingly eternal Lebanese tendency to accentuate and fight over differences. My mind drifts to an old Fairuz song, melodramatic but stinging: “To Beirut … peace to Beirut … From the soul of her people she makes wine … From their sweat, she makes bread and jasmine. So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?”

  The political situa
tion here is, by most accounts, looking dicey yet again. There’s a sense that another civil war may be on the way. The long-anticipated results of the UN Special Tribunal investigating the killing of the former prime minister are looking more and more like they may set off another round of sectarian violence in the coming months—likely between Hezbollah and the opposing March 14 Party, launched by ex-premier Rafik Hariri’s son, Saad Hariri; Israel and Syria and Iran, all with allegedly vested interests in the proceedings, could get dragged in, too. All parties are speaking ominously about what’s to come if the various sides don’t settle their conflicts over the tribunal and other matters with all due speed: possibly not just another civil war but the biggest regional war the Middle East has ever seen.

  But for now it’s a beautiful September night, and Beirut is sparkling, from the window lights in distant buildings, to the yellow lanterns glowing in the dark along the downtown streets, to the flickering lights from ships pulling out to sea, and Ghada’s voice is gorgeous, and we’re happy to be here and to be alive. We’re caught up in the magic of the tarab and the haunting minor-key string music of the oud, and life is sweet. You hang on to that feeling when it hits, and you hang on to it with all your strength, especially in Lebanon. You never know how long it will last.