Jasmine and Fire

by Salma Abdelnour

  Even though the Lebanese government still seems a long way from turning secular, the concept itself isn’t new in Lebanon. It sprang to life and died a quick death over and over again before and during the civil war; the treaty drawn up to end the war, 1989’s Taif Accord, specified a phase in which Lebanon would do away with the sectarian quotas in government and move toward a nonsectarian system. But this obviously hasn’t happened yet, and beyond the renewed calls from activists and the occasional politician, it seems nowhere near happening.

  Ending the religion-based system that is strangling the Lebanese government won’t be nearly as linear as the process, however long and arduous, that led to Mubarak’s fall in Egypt. As usual in Lebanon, when it comes to making changes, there are no credible strategies yet, a scant few inspiring political candidates to back, and no immediate hope of making real and sustained progress. Getting rid of the sectarian system is, for the time being, still a somewhat utopian goal. No politician is backing it in any vocal or significant way. Sectarianism is too deeply ingrained, the habit of thinking in terms of one’s own tribe—Maronite, Sunni, Shiite, Druze, Orthodox, Protestant, or whatnot; Christian or Muslim—is simply second nature to too many Lebanese. Electing politicians who profess loyalty to various sects is still widely seen as the only way to avoid persecution and advocate for day-to-day basic needs (electricity, water, and so on) in the various religious enclaves. Not to mention that most political and religious figureheads of every sect in Lebanon gain too much from the status quo; marriage procedures, for instance, currently require red tape that’s simply too lucrative for the priests and imams and religious powers-that-be to surrender without stubborn resistance.

  Some of those skeptical about getting rid of Lebanon’s religion-based setup argue that a secular one-person-one-vote system that does away with the prearranged distribution of power among religious groups would be doomed. That it would, for instance, allow a radical Islamist government to take over, if Shiites are now the most populous group, as most estimates guess, and if the conservative or Hezbollah-supporting voices among them end up winning. Or else a right-wing Sunni regime could take over, if conservative Sunni politicians were to win. Or else a Muslim-baiting Christian administration could end up running the government—although Christians are by virtually all estimates no longer a majority, so a secular Lebanon would mean the long-overdue end of a locked-in Christian presidency.

  It’s a tangled issue on all fronts, with no easy way forward. But even if I have my doubts that getting rid of sectarianism is a realistic goal anytime soon, showing up at the Laïque Pride rally, and marching and chanting with the crowd, felt like an adrenaline kick.

  But, funny thing about Sunday’s Laïque Pride rally: even though it drew a big crowd—around ten thousand, according to an estimate in the French-language Beirut daily L’Orient—Le Jour—and even though it blocked the streets in a busy part of the city and drew tons of attention from passersby and drivers trying to get through, there was virtually no other coverage of the march apart from that article in the paper. Why? Because the Laïque Pride rally happened to take place on May 15, the anniversary of the establishment of Israel as a state in 1948—commemorated across the Arab world as Nakba Day, the “day of catastrophe,” when millions of Palestinians were dispossessed of their land.

  Thousands of Palestinians and other sympathetic protesters from around the Arab world marched from Lebanon and Syria to the Israeli border on Sunday, and although the Nakba protests were nonviolent and the demonstrators unarmed, some of them tried to breach the border. Israeli soldiers shot at them and killed fourteen protesters and injured more than one hundred. It was major news internationally. The antisectarian march in Beirut? Barely a blip on the radar of the local media.

  Shortly after the Laïque Pride and Nakba Day rallies, I’m scrolling through QifaNabki.com, a blog run by a Lebanese graduate student at Harvard. The writer says he “couldn’t help but notice the sad juxtaposition of the two marches scheduled for last Sunday,” and adds: “A friend of mine regularly chides me for imagining that any of Lebanon’s problems will ever be solved before the Arab-Israeli conflict is settled. On days like yesterday, I think he’s probably right.”

  That following Monday I was planning to leave Beirut again and start the second half of my rural exile; I’d decided to go back to Marjeyoun, my great-uncle Cecil’s town down south. He and Zelfa are back in London now and the house is empty, but they’d left me a set of keys in case I ever wanted to return. Since the town is right near the Israeli border, I decide to postpone my trip by a few days, to see if the Nakba Day events will ignite any further violence down south.

  Meanwhile I sign on to take a road trip with my cousin Josette and aunt Marcelle up to Akkar, a region in the far north of Lebanon, considered an eternity away by most Beirutis. If you’re Lebanese and not from Akkar, you’ve probably never been there, even though it’s just two and a half hours by car from Beirut. This week a group called the Association for Protecting Natural Sites and Old Buildings has organized a rare free tour to take anyone interested up to Akkar to visit Tell Arqa, a hill thought to have been inhabited by a series of ancient civilizations and currently the site of a major archaeological dig, and to see the spectacular forests and waterfalls farther north.

  When I arrive that morning to meet Josette and my aunt at the departure site, in front of a church in Achrafieh, I find three vans waiting to take the signed-up guests. From what I can tell, the crowd gathered in front of the vans is virtually all Lebanese. I overhear only one foreigner, a French graduate student studying at AUB.

  The roads winding up from Beirut to the far north are dicey in parts, and the drive is tiring and sometimes treacherous, so even though the trip isn’t so long, it makes sense that car-weary Lebanese who have never been to Akkar would jump at the chance to take a rare, not to mention free, sightseeing bus tour up there. The organization hosting the tour normally sets aside just one van for its various trips around the country, but apparently more people than expected were interested in seeing Tell Arqa and the Akkar landscape. When we arrive at Tell Arqa, the vans let us out, and we climb up a steep hill covered in pink thistles and red poppies. An archaeologist from the Sorbonne, the university sponsoring the dig, is waiting for us at the top.

  He explains that the dig is attempting to uncover houses and artifacts dating back thousands of years, to the ancient Romans and beyond. Right now only some stone structures are visible in the dug-out sections of the hill, possibly used at one time as baths or rooms. Even though ruins of ancient civilizations are scattered up and down the eastern Mediterranean—and construction sites in Beirut still often turn up stone formations from centuries or millennia ago—Tell Arqa seems to hold extensive and still-unexcavated remnants of past civilizations. It feels like a rare privilege to be here as the dig is under way. Depending on what they find here, I wonder if one day in the near future, Tell Arqa will become as important a stop in Lebanon as Baalbek or Byblos.

  A little later, as the vans take us from Tell Arqa up into the curvy cliffside roads north of the site, an enchanting green vista slowly comes into view: steep forested mountainsides, plunging valleys, craggy white-rock cliffs, tall crashing waterfalls. So this is Akkar. At times, I’ve heard it described as mostly a string of poor villages and monotonous stretches of forest or farmland. In fact it’s a gorgeously varied landscape, and seems to spread for endless miles up into the sky and the horizon. Scattered houses and farms dot the landscape here and there. But mostly it feels empty up here, like a film set for a mysterious green planet far away.

  “Shoo hal dini?” What is this world? asks an elderly man sitting behind me in the van, talking to himself. For such a tiny country, it’s incredible how much its own people, including myself, don’t really know it.

  When we arrive in Beino, a town farther north into the Akkar region, we get out again, this time to walk around a forest preserve created by a billionaire and former parliament member named I
ssam Fares. The spread covers hundreds of acres of trees and green hillsides, home to populations of birds and deer and a variety of flora and fauna. The forest vistas and nature paths through the preserve are breathtaking, especially against today’s clear blue sky. Guests have to make an appointment in advance to tour the park, and it seems a shame that such a dreamlike landscape isn’t left wide open to the public, to wander into and discover. Later I find that almost no one I mention this forest preserve to has even heard of it.

  Outside the park, Josette and I stroll around together for a while to look at the humble but classic, graceful Lebanese-style houses on the residential side streets. We eventually rejoin the group and pile back into the van for the ride back to Beirut. The mountain air smells fresh through the open windows, and I gaze outside nearly all the way home. This trip felt like a journey to another country, and I didn’t have to cross any borders to get so far away—even if it was only a couple of hours up the road.

  In Beirut that night, I check local news sites and learn that the area around the southern border is calm again. I’m looking forward to being in Marjeyoun again. In the same week, I’ll have gone from way up north in Akkar, down to one of the southernmost points in Lebanon.

  Two days later I’m on my way, and the driver I’ve hired for the ride pulls into the quiet center of town, with its cluster of little shops and small family-owned restaurants, just minutes from Cecil’s house. From town, a few one-lane streets lead up a hill to a smattering of cottages and farms, and the driver drops me off on the leafy street in front of the house. I open the black metal gate to Cecil’s garden. Just as I did on Easter weekend, I wind my way through, gazing at all the flowers as I pass by—the pink and white rosebushes are in full bloom now, and the geraniums are thriving all over the garden. Cecil employs a gardener who works on the property all year, and it shows in this blooming little oasis. I unlock the wooden door and walk into the living room. It’s a thrill being here alone. I throw open the terrace doors, put my bags down in the guest room, next to the four-poster bed, and make myself a cup of tea.

  Here, too, as in Amsheet, I spend hours each day outside, working on my laptop or taking walks. I eat very well but a little more ascetically than in Beirut, which feels good for a change. There’s a bakery down the street that makes excellent man’ouches, which I pick up for breakfast or lunch on some days, and I stock up on local sheep cheese, tart yogurt, tomatoes, and cucumbers from a nearby farm, sold at a tiny grocery nearby. For dinner I make simple soups—tomato, lentil—or pastas, or sometimes one of my favorite solo dinners: sardines on toast, with a little mayo and hot sauce. In the afternoons, I snack on sticky-sweet mulberries and on janarek, tart green plums that have a short season in spring. And as I sit on the terrace, I drink pots and pots of tea, put my feet up on the balcony rail, stare out at the mountains in the distance, the green valleys and farms, and the stepped garden that descends in row after row of pine trees, lemon trees, rosebushes, and jasmine branches.

  One day, at Cecil’s urging, I go visit his friend Hussam, who runs the local grain mill down the hill from the house. Hussam comes from a Shiite family that first put down roots in Marjeyoun around 1900, and he and Cecil have been friends for decades. Cecil encouraged me to visit Hussam and his mill because, as he put it to me over Easter, my generation has lost touch with where food comes from. He’s right, of course; that also happens to be the mantra driving every food trend in the States over the past decade (backyard chicken raising, rooftop gardening, farm co-ops). Hussam’s mill grinds the wheat grown on farms nearby, along with sumac seeds, zaatar, and other spices. In the shop in back he also has burlap sacks of herbs and grains sold by weight, and all manner of the fruit, vegetable, and dairy preserves the Lebanese call mouneh, including jars of olives, jams, and local goat cheese rolled into balls and soaked in olive oil.

  I introduce myself to Hussam, who looks to be in his late fifties. He smiles, his tanned face wrinkling around the eyes, a warm expression as soon as I mention Cecil. The electricity has just gone out, he tells me, so the grain-grinding machines are down, but I should come back another time to see how they work. I buy a bag of dried marjoram, or mardakoush, as it’s called in Arabic, to make the smoky-sweet herbal tea my late grandmother Alyce used to make for me in her house in Aley when I had a stomachache; and I pick up some zaatar and freekeh, the roasted green wheat, so richly nutty-tasting when cooked in butter and chicken stock and topped with pieces of spiced roast chicken.

  When I thank Hussam and start to leave, promising to come back another time, he insists I stay for a cup of coffee out back with his family. I try to decline, saying I need to get back to the house. As usual in Lebanon, “No thanks, I really can’t just now” is an unacceptable answer to an offer of food, coffee, or hospitality. I end up sitting on the veranda out back, overlooking the plots where Hussam’s family grows strawberries, lettuce greens, lemon trees, and askadinias. The mountains rise up in the near distance behind the farm and span the horizon from east to west. Hussam’s wife is wearing a pink apron and a head scarf and sitting on a chair with a neighbor, trimming parsley for tabbouleh. I shyly introduce myself and apologize for the intrusion, and Hussam’s wife puts her hand on my shoulder, smiles, says, “Ahla w sahla,” You’re welcome here, and goes into the house to brew a pot of Arabic coffee, despite my protests.

  Hussam tells me that in the century since his family and ancestors have been on this land, a mix of Lebanon’s taifis (sects) have always lived here together in peace. “I’m Shiite, and we’ve always been friends with the Christian families, and there are Druze here, too, and we all live together,” he tells me. “Where else do you see this in Lebanon?”

  It’s a shame that this kind of coexistence among sects only happens in rare places around Lebanon—Marjeyoun, and my Ras Beirut neighborhood in the city, and a handful of other spots—where the various groups happened to establish footholds next to each other decades or centuries ago. Otherwise, intermixing is still slow going, when it happens at all. Towns and neighborhoods all over Lebanon have become set in their ways, wary of outsiders trying to buy land or establish any kind of beachhead.

  Back at the house, I don’t feel like sitting still in a chair and opening up the laptop just now. If I’m going to hold a metal object in my hand this minute, it’s going to be an instrument that feels a little more tied to life here, not so much to my Beirut or New York realities, to the breakneck high-tech work pace. I decide to water the geraniums, the only task Cecil and Zelfa have agreed to assign me, probably more for my own pleasure than for the geraniums’. I wonder if the gardener has just watered them himself, but I can’t tell. I find a tin pail hanging on a wire trellis, and I fill it up in the stone fountain in the front garden. Then I walk from the front of the house past the flower beds on the side, the jasmine bushes sending out their perfumey scent, and on to the back of the house, to the stepped terraces, and I rock the pail back and forth, throwing splashes of warm fountain water on all the geranium beds I can find.

  Someday I hope I can bring friends here to Marjeyoun. If they’re not Lebanese, they’ll need special permission to visit, unless the country finally lifts the ban on foreigners in this area. I want them to smell the flowers and the pine trees, sit on the white iron chairs and the blue cushions on the terrace with me, drinking marjoram tea, gazing out on the mountain in the distance. It still has snow in streaks running down from its very tip, but for how much longer? Will the snow last into midsummer? I want Richard here with me, too, and I don’t want to call this Lebanon and that Israel, and me here an Arab, and him there a Jew. Just both here, both there, or wherever, the important thing being the smell of the trees, the sound of those tittering insects—are they crickets?—and the bird I’m hearing now with its loud wa-wa-wa call. The important thing being the sounds and the smells and the air and life—and whoever loves it here, on this land, can live on it, work it, be here, and that’s all. But we’re not there yet and maybe never will be, the regio
n, the world, human civilization. Not nearly there yet. But I’m here now, in this garden in this town, and I want these minutes and hours to linger like this, suspended in time, to always be here, at least as a memory, even when I’m not here.

  I stop in front of an exploding white rosebush to smell the flowers, and I hold myself there, not walking now but just standing, leaning near the branches, the white rosy perfume taking me instantly back to the parks of London, when my parents would bring Samir and me there for a few weeks at a time to escape Beirut and the war. We’d rent a flat in London each time, but once we stayed with my great-uncle Albert and his wife, Odile, in Oxford, and helped pick the crabapples from their trees out back, and slathered black currant jam on buttered toast every morning. That thick smell of roses—was it the garden in Oxford? Or the London rosebushes? Holland Park, Regents Park? Playing in the lawns, running through the gardens, the war so far away.

  Walking out the gate and along the winding street that runs up the hill, I stroll by the houses next door to Cecil’s, some lived in now and some falling apart for years, their arched windows smashed, the stone partly eaten away, or bombed, or just decayed somehow. Along that street, the smell of jasmine follows me from a neighbor’s garden, the bushes pushing over onto the street, the way they do here in this country, the jasmine delicate but fighting for its space in the air, never to be ignored or forgotten.

  I walk back to the house and notice there are more geranium plants I’d missed the first time, and I spot another watering pail, the real kind with the spray nozzle. I go over to the fountain, fill it up with the buggy warm water, and sprinkle the rest of the plants. It’s an arm workout, carrying around a pail full of water, and walking up and down the stone garden steps makes me feel stronger. I’m hauling the water and stopping again to smell the white roses, and in my head I’m humming the old song about country roads. Can I make a home in the country, in a place like this? I think maybe yes, for the first time. A dream to have long quiet stretches like this, walking and sitting and working in a garden, and blocking out the rest of the world.