In truth, when I first hear the news, I do wonder for a moment whether this time the collapse is serious, and whether the appropriate response is “oh shit” or the usual yawn. I am, for the time being, leaning more to the “oh shit.” I’ve been living in Lebanon for just a handful of months, and in the years since we moved away during the war, I’d been keeping up with the country’s constant ups and downs mostly from a distance. I want to play the coolly jaded Lebanese local, but to be honest, I’m not quite there yet.
In the summer of 2005, when I was in Beirut on a brief vacation and stopped in to visit the Lebanese National Museum and see the ancient Roman ruins there, I’d heard a thunderous boom outside. I called my dad on his cell phone.
“Don’t worry,” he’d said, in typically Zen mode. “It’s probably just a building being dynamited at a construction site.”
After leaving the museum, I’d learned on the news that the big boom was a car bomb, a successful assassination attempt on a former Lebanese Communist Party leader and anti-Syria critic. For the rest of 2005, back in New York, I’d followed the news from Lebanon, and there was a string of similar assassinations of politicians and journalists.
One year after that assassination epidemic, I had watched the 2006 summer war between Hezbollah and Israel in nauseated silence in my New York apartment, strung out on anxiety and unable to sleep or concentrate on work. CNN was covering the war in the predictable way, meaning mostly from Israel’s point of view, paying more attention to the tragic but smaller-in-number deaths of Israelis than to the hundreds of Lebanese civilians killed by Israel’s stunningly disproportionate response to Hezbollah’s reckless kidnapping or killing of five Israeli soldiers. I watched bombs fall on my city every day, all over again, that July and August, and could barely believe it was happening. But I’d been far away from the bombings and the wreckage and the death—safe in New York, or safer than in Lebanon at any rate.
Now here I am in Beirut, hearing “government collapse” news not from an ocean away. For this particular round of political chaos in Lebanon, I’m right here. And wondering, how afraid should I be?
A few calls to friends and family in Beirut confirm my other suspicion, the one that got trampled by my anxiety reflex: Nah. Nothing to worry about. Not yet anyway. Come on, this is Lebanon. We’re used to these breakdowns.
“What? This? It’s SSDD,” says Zeina.
Leave it to a Lebanese to turn a jaded phrase—“same shit, different day”—into a handy acronym, ready to deploy at all the countless opportunities that spring up here.
But scary or not, this political crisis is definitely real in at least one way: it’s another shiny new gift to an international media that can never resist a good “oh my god, Lebanon!” story. Here we have one once again. Catastrophe! Collapse! Lebanon in Danger!
So once we’re finished with this latest news cycle, I wonder how long it will be until the inevitable “Beirut Is Back!” travel stories start streaming in.
Well, I hope I at least get to write one of them.
About a week later in January, once the international “Lebanon Collapses!” news cycle dies down—it lasted a good twenty-four hours before making way for news about the huge East Coast blizzard that same week—I get a call from an editor in the States asking if I’d like to do a big Middle East travel story. Sweet! At last! But … it’s not about Lebanon. It’ll be about Egypt. Can I get myself to Egypt as soon as possible and do a travel story for the next issue? Hmm. Yes. Yes, I can.
I go online and book a flight for the last week in January.
In the days before I leave for Cairo, the situation in Lebanon is tense, several orders of magnitude tenser than it felt when the government had its somewhat ho-hum meltdown two weeks ago. Things are taking a nastier turn. Hezbollah ratchets up its threats that it will raise hell if the UN tribunal goes forward with its predicted indictments, and a few scary, ominous street incidents break out in Beirut. One morning groups of men wearing all black are seen hovering on street corners all over the city. The men just stand there silently, and though nothing else happens that day, their presence causes panic, and schools send kids home for the day. Some businesses close, too. The incident is rumored to be Hezbollah’s doing—as if to say, Remember, we have our own militia, and we’re fully capable of making things unpleasant around here. And we’re not so ecstatic about the way things are going with the tribunal at the moment.
Meanwhile, Richard has bought his plane ticket to come visit me in Beirut in early February, so I’m particularly anxious about the developments in Lebanon, even more than usual. Will Lebanon become too dangerous to visit, yet again? Damn this place. Impossible to ever make long-term plans here. I talk to Zeina on the phone. She’s depressed. Gone is the joking “SSDD” Zeina of a week ago. She tells me she hopes her daughter will leave Lebanon when it’s time for college and never look back.
“There’s no future here,” she says to me in Arabic, her voice sounding far away this time, wilted.
She and her husband, along with most people in Lebanon, have to worry about crucial, high-stakes issues like whether to go on trying to raise kids or pursue a career here, whether to keep planning a future in this country. At the moment, my main concern is whether my boyfriend can vacation with me and prance around Lebanon for two weeks. That’s a tiny bit less dire. Nonetheless this country has a way of squashing plans and dreams, big or small. And always when things are starting to look up again.
The night before I fly to Egypt, I hang out with my childhood friend Sawsan. She’s living in California, doing a postdoctorate there, but is in Beirut this week visiting her parents. We go for drinks at the Hamra bar Ferdinand, and to an alleyway nearby that’s crammed full of bars and usually a noisy, social crowd. But tonight all the hangouts we go to are barely half full. That’s usually a bad sign around here. It takes a pretty nasty vibe to keep Beirutis out of restaurants, bars, and clubs. Everywhere we go, people are talking about al wad’, the situation.
At least Egypt will be a badly needed mental vacation, an escape from this insane asylum, I figure. The trip will be hard work—fun, too, sure, but hard work no doubt. I have to make my way around Egypt and do all the reporting for this story in just five days, but at least I’ll get my mind off Lebanon.
Off I fly to Cairo, on the sunny, mild morning of January 24, 2011.
I’d heard two days before my trip that antigovernment demonstrations were being planned in Cairo for that coming Tuesday, January 25. I rejiggered my itinerary so I’d leave Cairo for Alexandria on that Tuesday morning instead of spending the day in the capital, just in case there was any serious mayhem and violence stemming from the demonstrations. I’m slightly apprehensive but not too worried about the protests. I tell myself, with a sense of relief that I’ll later be mortified to own up to, that Egypt has a tenacious dictatorship that will probably suppress any unrest before it spreads. Slim chance that the situation in Egypt could deteriorate so quickly—not like Lebanon always seems to. The Middle East–related anxieties I’m feeling that week are firmly fixated on Lebanon.
I land in Cairo around noon after the short flight, and in the afternoon I visit the Egyptian Museum, where I explore the mummy exhibits and peer into cases holding the fossilized remains of foods (beans, grains, prunes) that are, amazingly, still recognizable even though they date back millennia. I take an early drive that Tuesday morning to see the pyramids in nearby Giza before heading to Alexandria. Thanks to the nearly nonexistent crowds in Giza at the crack of dawn, the pyramids seem to rise up suddenly, almost unexpectedly, out of the dry and empty desert. After seeing so much film footage of them, I’m still startled by their almost cartoonishly large size and domineering presence. The view is unspoiled by crowds of tour buses, which I’m sure will start jamming the area within an hour. I’d wondered if the pyramids would be disappointing. But as I sit on a rock alone, staring up at the 450-foot-tall structures, built in the third millennium B.C., I start to think: Whatever ha
ppens to Lebanon now, and whatever happens in Cairo during today’s protests, will soon enough be buried in the dust, just like the pharaohs and all their worries and their belongings and the remnants of a once-dynamic civilization that’s now stone and dirt. I suspect I’m not the first person to have had these thoughts while staring up at the Giza pyramids. But the visit puts things in perspective like nothing else has done for me in weeks, and it turns out to be just the mind-bending experience I need after a rocky few weeks in Lebanon.
I head to Alexandria in the late morning, in time to escape the protests scheduled to kick off in downtown Cairo today. When I arrive and drop off my bags in my hotel room, I walk across the street to Alexandria’s main waterfront boulevard overlooking the Mediterranean, and I stroll along for a few minutes, enjoying the soft breeze and staring out at ships in the sea. Suddenly I hear yells coming from behind me. I turn around and spot a small crowd forming about a quarter-mile away. I continue walking forward, looking over my shoulder every few seconds to see what’s happening, and I notice the crowd keeps growing. Now it’s tripled, quadrupled, and it’s looking more like a riot, a mass of what appear to be mostly Egyptian men in their twenties and thirties streaming toward the waterfront in the direction where I’m walking. Moments later throngs of riot police, dressed in black, appear out of nowhere, running in from all sides and lining up in rows as they try to contain the thickening crowd.
I’m stunned at how the scene has just transformed, in minutes, from a calm, sunlit weekday-afternoon tableau—locals strolling, a smattering of tourists taking pictures of the curvy boulevard overlooking the sea—into a flash mob. As the crowd continues to grow and fill the area that stretches from the palm-encircled plaza near my hotel all the way across the boulevard to the shore, shouting protest slogans I can barely make out in all the ruckus, the riot police form a giant barrier around the crowd, and some cops are running amok in the middle, shoving people to the ground, holding batons and teargas canisters.
The protests haven’t been confined to Cairo today, then. I later find out Alexandria is better known for its history of radical politics and activism than is Cairo, so no wonder the Egyptian uprising would kick off simultaneously in Alexandria. But right now there’s no time for second-guessing my decision to come here. I need to disentangle myself from this thickening riot, pronto, or I’m going to be teargassed.
So far on this trip I’ve been speaking mostly Arabic, glad to be in an Arab country where people want to speak the native language with you—especially if they can tell that you speak it, too. No stubborn attempts to switch to English or French here in Egypt, not like in Beirut. My Arabic, even though I’m struggling a little with the Egyptian dialect, has already improved more in my two days here than it did in my first two months in Beirut. But on this particular afternoon in Alexandria, it comes in handy to be a foreigner, even an American one. It’s not always the wisest move to loudly proclaim your Americanness in Arab countries that have a dicey foreign relations history with the United States, but at this particular moment in January 2011—partly because of the truce signed between Egypt’s former president Anwar Sadat and Israel’s ex-premier Menachem Begin at Camp David, Maryland, in 1978, and also because of the $2 billion in aid money the United States has been sending Egypt every year—the Egyptian regime and America are on decent terms. At the moment, the government is blaming mainly Egyptian civilians for the unrest, not foreigners just yet.
As I run to get out of the crowd, I come smack up against a riot cop who is blocking my way. He and his cohorts are holding their plastic shields end to end and creating an impenetrable barrier around the entire area. I opt for the I’m-an-American pose.
“Please, please, I’m a tourist,” I beg the policeman in my best American accent, standing barely an inch from his plastic shield and the baton he’s about to start swinging. I’m wondering if I have any chance of getting out of here before who-knows-what hell gets unleashed.
The policeman looks at me for a second. The riot cop standing next to him looks, too, says something to the other cop, and they both stand there, glowering at me. Then, ten seconds later—feels like an hour—they part their shields for a split second to let me pass.
I duck out of the mob and onto the other side of the police barrier, as the voices of the cops and the protesters merge into a louder and louder din. I’m relieved to be out of there, but wondering what may happen moments from now to the Alexandrians stuck inside the riot-police trap. They’ve potentially risked their lives to come out here and demonstrate against Hosni Mubarak and his cruel thirty-year dictatorship. For the first time since he took power, Egyptians may finally have the chance—now that a revolutionary movement has obviously built up enough momentum to get people into the streets today—to take back their country.
But clouds and clouds of teargas are about to engulf the crowd, it turns out, and from a short distance away, I can see police officers beating protesters with batons. By this point I’m much farther along on the boulevard, walking fast—not running, don’t want to attract suspicion, but walking as fast as I’ve ever walked in my life—until I can’t see or hear or sense the riots anymore.
But that evening I accidentally find out what getting teargassed feels like. As I’m riding the Alexandria tram to a café, through the streets of the atmospheric city—elegant townhouses darkened by smog, and old coffee shops and bric-a-brac stores and pastry shops, all crammed side by side along the sidewalks, the scent of coffee in the air and the sea in the near distance—I hear someone yell, “Close your eyes!” Suddenly I feel a painful burning in my eyeballs and nostrils. Teargas is seeping in through the open windows; must be another raging mob of riot cops trying to break up a crowd. All the passengers cover their faces and duck. In a minute or two, the gas dissipates, and my eyes and nose are still itching but no longer on fire. One woman is having trouble breathing and scrambles out at the next stop. I continue along to the café.
What am I doing riding the tram to a coffee shop, in the middle of the historic Egyptian revolution of 2011? A fair question. But in those first few days of the uprising, as hard as it is to imagine now, there was still mostly a business-as-usual feel, apart from the scattered protests. I remember that feeling from the occasionally calm stretches of the civil war in Lebanon. When the mayhem temporarily dies down, whether it’s for a day or for a few hours, you’re not sure if something terrible is about to happen or if things are settling back down, so you try to go about your life. You run your errands and go to school or work if you can. In Lebanon during the war, you’d try to visit your friends and relatives, especially if you’ve been cooped up for hours or days in a basement shelter or at home. You take care of day-to-day business, more or less, as best you can manage and for as long as you can. In Alexandria, things seemed calm again that day, in between the protests, and so I tried to go on with my plans.
But Egypt isn’t used to chaos on this level and hasn’t seen it for decades, and the café where I’ve agreed to meet up with Raya, the guide I scheduled to take me around tomorrow, turns out to be nearly empty tonight. I spot Raya, a pretty brunette in her midthirties wearing glasses and a purple head scarf, sitting at a table alone. I ask her if our plan is really still on for tomorrow, and she assures me everything will be fine; the riots today were probably just a blip. But I notice there’s an anxious expression on her face as she excuses herself to call home and check on her kids. When she comes back, she tells me about the history of one of the sites she’s taking me to tomorrow: the Alexandria Library, the most prestigious of its time when it was built in the third century B.C.; Julius Caesar burned it down in the first century B.C., and it reopened in its current location just ten years ago.
Later that evening, as I’m just steps from my hotel, I hear more crowd noises and look back to see another throng forming down the street, holding up antiregime posters and chanting protest slogans. Cops are running in to break it up. This crowd is smaller than the riot I’d witnessed earlie
r, but it’s scary—even if a little thrilling—to be so close to the action. I’m glad I’m safely back at the hotel.
The next morning the city feels quiet again, and according to the local news I hear in my hotel room, there are no reports of more demonstrations breaking out. I continue with my plans to see the Alexandria Library and National Museum that day. Raya picks me up in her car and shows me around the library’s soaring, glassy new building and high-tech research facilities, and then takes me to the museum to see the collection of ancient jewelry and weapons from the days of Alexander the Great and Antony and Cleopatra. In the afternoon, I take a taxi back to Cairo. It feels like a normal Wednesday in Alexandria and along the highway.
In the early evening, as the cab pulls into Cairo, driving near the edge of Tahrir Square to take me to my hotel a couple of miles away, I start hearing loud crowd noises again. Suddenly streams of protesters come running out along the sidewalk past the now-stopped traffic, yelling “Gas, gas!” Clouds of teargas are blowing past our taxi, and masses of riot police are chasing after the demonstrators. My taxi driver just grunts and complains about the slow-moving traffic. I’m amazed he’s only focusing on that, but he’s an elderly driver (looks to be in his eighties) in an Arab country. He’s probably seen some unrest in his day; maybe he was even driving a cab during the last Egyptian revolution, back in 1952.
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