Jasmine and Fire

by Salma Abdelnour

  Rula is a short, trim woman with salt-and-pepper hair held in a tight ponytail, and a pleasant laugh that lights up her eyes. Diana spent a few weeks living on the roof of Rula’s building in Shatila last year while filming a documentary, and the two are now close: tall, soft-voiced British Diana, and diminutive, vivacious Palestinian Rula. Diana and I have brought some pastries with us—zaatar-filled croissants and chocolate petit-four cookies—and we hang out in the living room snacking and chatting with Rula while Diana’s blond one-year-old daughter runs merrily all over the sparsely furnished space. Rula’s neighbor, a middle-aged Palestinian woman wearing a light-cotton dress and a head scarf, is there, too, and offers us cigarettes, and though I normally decline, this time I say yes. A plastic fan is blowing, the conversation flows–Rula’s son is trying to get a visa to the United States to find work—and soon her husband, Ziad, brings in Arabic coffee on a tray for us. I feel welcomed here and comfortable even though I’ve only known these people for a few minutes. We all chat in Arabic, though everyone in the room can speak English, too. Ziad tells some stories—funny, and also poignant—about his frustrating work as a taxi driver in Beirut, the only job he’s able to do since Lebanese laws prevent Palestinians from working in most professions.

  Living in a concrete-slab building nearby are some other friends of Diana’s, a couple with three sons and a daughter in their teens and early twenties. We pass by to bring them pastries and stay for a coffee. The couple is sitting with friends and with their teenage son, who is stretched out on his side on a mattress in the living room, nursing an injury. Turns out he was shot by Israeli soldiers during the Nakba Day protests in mid-May and has just come out of the hospital after several weeks.

  As I sit here in front of a sweet-looking, dough-faced kid who, in his mind, was joining his friends in the camp to protest what he and Palestinians all over the Middle East continue to mourn as the loss of their country—and who was shot for being in the wrong place (in Israeli soldiers’ view) at the wrong time—I’m suddenly aware of what someone who either doesn’t understand or doesn’t share this view of the Israel-Palestine struggle might think of this tableau. What if I just presented these bare facts: me in a Palestinian refugee camp, having coffee with a family whose son has just been shot by Israeli soldiers for venturing too close to the border? So, having coffee with militants, then? I imagine someone asking. How would this look or sound to someone who hasn’t grown up here, hasn’t been soaked in the realities of this conflict, and has only watched one-dimensional renderings on televisions oceans away? Even some Lebanese people I know would flinch at this kid’s decision to protest, wondering, Aren’t we done with this struggle already? Why should we keep on carrying the Palestinians’ burden along with our own? Or, as I overheard an acquaintance at a party asking the night before crowds streamed to the Israeli border for Nakba Day, “Isn’t it time to move on?”

  But when Palestinians have so much difficulty getting visas so they can look for work opportunities overseas; when they can rarely find work in Lebanon, which still denies them their basic rights and outlaws their employment; and when, as Israel and the United States and various parties to the always-stalled peace talks tell them again and again, they cannot hope to return to Palestine in their lifetimes, how exactly can they—and the whole region—move on?

  Walking me out of the camp to find a taxi back to Hamra, Walid, the twenty-four-year-old brother of the boy who was shot, gives me a brief tour of Shatila: the mosque his family goes to over here, his old high school over there (he’s now enrolled in a master’s program at a university in Lebanon), and the burial ground of the Shatila massacre victims over there. I ask him whether, growing up in Lebanon and having never been to Palestine, he was raised to think of Lebanon as home.

  Walid, stocky with curly brown hair, his smiling cheeks still showing signs of baby fat, comes off as a vibrant young man, eager to start his life. He tells me he and his siblings and friends in the camp grew up thinking of Lebanon as temporary, and thinking of Palestine as their real home. But it’s strange to think of your home as a place you’ve never actually been, Walid adds after pausing for a minute. He tells me he was afraid to go down to the border to protest on Nakba Day because he suspected things might turn violent, and he wondered if he’d get too emotional catching a glimpse of the place he’s been hearing about all his life and never seen. He’d tried to convince his brother it would be dangerous to go to the protest.

  Walid seems undaunted by what’s ahead for him in life, and I don’t sense that he’s downcast or embittered. Not yet anyway. He tells me he’s one of only three Muslim students in his graduate program. At school he’s become friends with some students who grew up in families loyal to the Phalange, the Christian right-wing militia that participated in the 1982 massacres of Palestinians in the Shatila and Sabra camps. He also befriended Jewish students he met on a recent trip to the United States, sponsored by a nonprofit that’s trying to expose Palestinians to life outside the camps, and expose Americans to young Palestinians and their hopes for the future. Walid tells me: You don’t have to agree completely about politics to be friends with someone. I tell him I, too, have friends from lots of different backgrounds, and we don’t always agree politically. Walid nods: If there’s friendship, he says, then pauses, trailing off.

  JULY

  It’s getting too hot to walk much—the city is a bona-fide sauna now in early July—but I’m venturing out on foot as often as I can, and for as long as I can stand. I’m still mulling over whether I’m ready to leave Beirut, and walking, as always, helps me sort out the clamor in my head. On these walks, I’m also memorizing the city again, as many parts as I can, the way I did in those weeks when I first arrived and was trying to reconnect with the streets, carve out my paths through them. All these months later, as I contemplate leaving, walking around feels like a way to seal the city in, once and for all, to fuse the streets to my body.

  On these sweltering July days, I stop often at Bliss House, a college-kids hangout at the edge of the AUB campus, to pick up one of their fruit cocktails, which aren’t really cocktails (no alcohol) but instead some of the most thrilling fruit concoctions I’ve had. My favorite is the fresh-squeezed strawberry juice topped with a mountain of chopped pineapple, mango, kiwi, apple, banana, strawberries, grapes, almonds, and a dollop of sweet ashta cream. One of these fruit bombs in hand one morning, I stroll downtown to the Beirut Souks, the recently rebuilt downtown shopping area. The first few times I came here last summer and fall, I felt alienated from this spanking-new downtown, felt it was much too artificial and scrubbed and soulless. Now, on this sweatbath of a summer day, when I need some light-cotton tank tops and a couple of skirts and a new bathing suit, I figure I might be able to find what I’m looking for at one of the few discount shops in the Souks or, if I’m lucky, at a sale in one of the pricier designer stores.

  Fans are blowing soft breezes through the Souk’s tunnel ways, and window-shopping here feels not too unpleasant today, similar to what walking around Houston’s malls felt like when we first moved there. Sterile and lacking any street life, sure, but conveniently laid out, the air-conditioning a lifeline on days this brutally hot. Beirut has plenty of street life everywhere else—too much, some might say. So an easy-to-navigate, architecturally stunning shopping center isn’t too bad an option, is it? It depends on the weather, and on your mood, I suppose. And it depends on your willingness to overlook this area’s past as a livelier, noisier, smellier, more diverse city center. With any luck, downtown will recover that dynamism again someday.

  The other night I had a dream that I was trying to explain Beirut to a group of American friends who had all come to visit me at the same time, knowing I might be leaving soon and wanting to see this place while they had a handy guide. I heard myself spout the usual clichéd contrasts of the glossiness and the grime, and the east and the west, and so on. But in my dream I took them not just to the major sites but also to Dahieh, and to Dora
, a part of Beirut where many of the city’s Asian and African immigrant workers live and where some of them have opened food and spice shops, textile stores, and home-style restaurants. These businesses crowd along the dusty streets that spoke out from the enormous central Dora intersection, from which buses leave Beirut for points north and south. If you live in New York, Dora is Flushing, or Sunset Park, or Jackson Heights. A bustling ethnic enclave, and maybe you’ve seen something like it before. In Beirut, it’s one of the necessary reality checks to a snazzy district like the new Souks, and a chance to dig deeper into a city that sometimes seems to worship only the tidiest, shiniest surfaces.

  Shireen and I decide one July day to get to know Dora better, not just pass through it quickly en route to somewhere else, as I’ve only ever done before. We spend an afternoon strolling around and poking into the cluttered shops. I buy a spicy cashew curry sauce, to stir into rice and chicken I’ll make some night; she buys a beautiful purple Sri Lankan fabric to sew into a handbag. As we’re eyeing the samosas stacked up on a tray at the front of an Indian food and spice shop, the owner tells us his family runs a restaurant upstairs. We find the tiny stairway hidden in back and climb up, to find a few Indian men sitting around platters of what looks like biryani. That’s today’s lunch dish, we learn. The place doesn’t look gleaming-clean at first glance, but two efficient women are working side by side in the kitchen—spotless when we take a closer look—and the customers are chatting with the cooks. Everyone here must be a regular. Soon we’re served heaping plates of the warm rice, spiced with turmeric and cardamom and topped with pieces of roasted chicken on the bone, with a boiled egg and a cold yogurt-cucumber sauce on the side. I haven’t had biryani this good in years. We linger over our plates—too much food, but we devour every last rice grain—and I marvel once again at the variety of people and communities this city manages to squeeze in. Incredibly, as relatively small as Beirut is, it never seems to run out of neighborhoods, alleyways, realities. Anyone eager to poke around will always find new places to stumble into.

  I may be crazy enough to walk across the city on the most sweltering summer days, but when it comes to driving, I’ve been much less intrepid. It’s bugging me that I keep making excuses about driving in Lebanon. Everyone I’ve talked to about driving here has advised me against it, saying gas is so expensive now, and I would be unnecessarily risking my life on these insane roads, and why drive when Beirut is crawling with service taxis and buses ready to take me anywhere for nearly nothing? So what—I still want to get over my fear.

  And so one morning I force myself to try. My cousin Nada is in town from Paris for a few days, and we meet for coffee, then decide to spend the day doing a mini road trip so we can catch up more—and she’s fearless enough to come along with me on a little driving experiment. We rent a car from an agency in Hamra and, since we’d both recently read about an odd-sounding place called the Mleeta Resistance Museum—a museum down south displaying war weapons and run by Hezbollah—we decide to try to find it. I’m mainly intrigued by the thought of a militia like Hezbollah running what’s been described as a quiet, meticulously landscaped outdoor museum full of … well, weapons. The idea is infuriating to some, inspiring to others, and fascinating to me, for the novelty-show surrealness of it. So off we go.

  Nada had been living in Lebanon until a few years ago, and drove all over the place here, so she takes the wheel of our rental car first and drives us out of Beirut, since I’m not quite ready to take that on cold turkey yet. I eventually take over from her in Sidon, and to my surprise, it takes all of sixty seconds before I feel normal driving on these roads. It’s not the big deal I thought it would be. As everyone had already told me, you just have to be extra decisive, never go into autopilot, and always pay 100 percent attention to every vehicle and pedestrian and pet and obstacle and who knows what coming at you from all sides and directions, and remember that traffic lights and lanes don’t necessarily count for much.

  As Nada tells me about her university teaching job and her new boyfriend in Paris, and I catch her up on my life in Beirut so far, we get distracted by our own chatter and the hip-hop we’re blasting on the car stereo. We keep missing turns from the directions we’d printed out, and as usual the roads have very few signs; the ones that do exist are often hidden behind billboards or trees. We end up having to stop and ask directions at a half dozen gas stations and grocery stores along the mountainous streets south of Sidon, until we eventually get on the right track and start winding up and up the hill that, at the very top, takes us into the driveway of the Mleeta museum. The mountains and valleys in the near distance lead to the Israeli border a few kilometers away. It’s a ferociously hot day, and without hats the sun feels too close, on fire. After we park the car, we follow the pathways that lead through a forested, hilly area where tanks and Kalashnikovs and all manner of weapons are strewn around, each marked with the model number and the war it was used in. The other visitors on this day are a few European-looking tourists and a handful of families with kids. At one end of the park, a speaker built into the lawn pipes out the voice of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah making a speech about the necessity of resistance. It feels eerie being way up on this hill, in this remote part of Lebanon, surrounded by so much weaponry and, oddly, so many perfectly manicured flower beds and lawns and well-placed garbage receptacles.

  “This might be the cleanest public park in Lebanon,” Nada jokes as we head for the car, its leather seats baking in the sun. After the arduous drive here, we don’t stay long; it’s burning-hot outside and we’re ready to hit the road again. I drive us all the way back, this time staying at the wheel through the Beirut streets, which at sundown today are less trafficky than they were hours earlier. After just a day, I feel used to the rhythm of driving here, merging and passing and hanging back when I need to, traffic lights or stop signs only occasionally popping up. I’m glad I don’t have to do this daily but forcing myself to get comfortable with driving feels like a major hurdle cleared. Another way of feeling legit here in Lebanon, more fully at home.

  Do I, then, feel truly at home here now? I haven’t stopped asking myself this question since I arrived last summer. In the beginning the answer was mostly no. I felt, for those initial months, that I’d been gone for too many years, and that I couldn’t just plop myself back down in Beirut and expect to slide right back into life here. I was also more self-conscious back then about my slightly American accent when I speak Arabic. In my walks around the city in those early months, and on the first few social nights out, I was still sensing myself an outsider, disconnected, just peering in but wishing I fit more comfortably into the scene around me. That feeling stung, especially since that’s how I’d felt for so long in the States and still feel at times.

  I was hoping that by moving to Beirut I’d feel an instant ah, I’m home and that those outsider twinges would just vanish. Still, I suspected it might not be so easy, and it wasn’t.

  But as I gradually started spending time with old friends, new friends, and cousins I could relate to, pieces of myself that I hadn’t consciously realized I’d lost started coming back. My sense of out-siderness in the States had become vague over the years, persistent but mostly visceral in ways I couldn’t always define. Here in Beirut, connecting with people who could reminisce about a similar childhood, and who had the same familiar reference points—for instance, how the city used to look, and places we remembered, and similar family dynamics and traditions, and even just memories of how we’d secretly gorge together on Choco Prince cookies or sip from those funny-looking triangular containers of Bonjus as kids—brought me closer to an elusive “belonging” than I’ve felt for as far back as I can remember.

  Many of these people had felt the same kind of loss and experienced the shock of feeling suddenly foreign after they’d fled overseas during the war. They have the same scars, even if they don’t often talk about them. Some of them could tell me about how their lives here felt during the war y
ears, after my family left. Those memories, and sometimes even the trivial-sounding details, each added a piece to the puzzle, a more tangible answer to what I’d been missing all these years.

  Many Lebanese people I’ve met in the States have had similar experiences, but reconnecting with parts of my Beirut past, on Lebanese soil this time, has felt different and more crucial. Strangely, it’s also had a demystifying effect: Painful memories don’t seem to nag as hard anymore when they’re so widely shared, and the more time I’ve spent this year around people who have a familiar background and have struggled internally in ways I recognize, the more those parts of my past seem commonplace, old news. It’s a relief to feel this way.

  Still, the sense of connectedness and belonging that I once took for granted, and that I lost when we fled Lebanon, may never fully come back, and I realize that more now. I’m not sure I’m prepared to call belonging “overrated,” as Edward Said did—in his memoir of a life spent moving around and feeling out of place everywhere—but I may be more willing to let it go.

  Moving back to Beirut has helped me shake the past in other ways, too. This year, by living and doing my work and building a social life here, and exploring much more of the country than I ever did before, I’ve felt more thrust into the Lebanon of right now, today—less so the Lebanon of years long gone. These adventures around the city and country have made me feel, as the months went by, that this little piece of the planet is mine.

  But I also suspect I wouldn’t be feeling quite as at home here now if this weren’t such an ever-changing, dynamic place, with endless discoveries and adventures to be had—even if it’s overwhelming in its own ways, too. Beirut, like New York, strikes plenty—most?—people as a “great place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.” Fair enough. But it turns out that I do like living in Beirut, and partly for the reasons that drive casual visitors nuts: the noise, the density, the unwieldiness. It’s exhausting in heavy doses, to be sure, but still ultimately a sign, for me anyway, of life.