Leaving Beirut

by Ghoussoub, Mai;

  News of Kirsten continued to reach me through the numerous activities that she organised to keep Hashem’s memory and his mission alive. Kirsten, I was told, had dedicated her life to Hashem’s memory. ‘She is such a faithful, devoted woman. She’s even given up practising law,’ I was told by a mutual acquaintance who had seen her during a trip he had made to Copenhagen. I never heard from Maria.

  Kirsten had succeeded in erasing her from Hashem’s posthumous existence. Hashem was all hers now. Now that he was dead, she could do with him whatever she liked. She was in full and absolute control. She was still taking her revenge over the frustrations that she had endured so willingly while he was alive. I have never been to Copenhagen since. I could not envisage either seeing her or not seeing her, if I had gone.

  I find I can no longer quietly savour the ordinary anonymity of a hotel room. Hotel rooms have a taste of stale revenge and silent rage. They are inhabited by Kirsten’s voice and tense smile, and they leave no place for your advising/teaching voice, Mme Nomy.

  On Being Judged

  On the wall behind my bed graffiti survives, unaffected by the damage done by the shelling. Angular words in red declare bluntly on a wall that is less than white: ‘Les moralisateurs sont des insolents et des hypocrites.’

  I couldn’t bring myself to paint my bedroom wall during my last visit. Much as I hate slogans of any kind nowadays, I wanted to leave this graffiti that had survived so much. We children of the sixties loved such phrases: they felt generous and, more importantly, they sounded liberated. We hated to think of ourselves as sounding judgemental, let alone being judgemental. The worst insult we could hurl at somebody was that they were ‘self-righteous’. And the most shameful feeling was when we felt that this accusation, when directed at us, carried some truth. And how could there be no truth in such accusations? After all, we are human and cannot survive without judgements. The best we can hope is that they are kept to a minimum, and that they are not always entirely based on prejudices.

  We still like to think of ourselves as not opinionated, even when passing opinions on justice versus injustice, fairness versus unfairness, or maybe just on which is the best film in town. This is why, after having fought the ‘battles of the sixties’ and adored Pasolini’s films and Allen Ginsberg’s poems and the lifestyle of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, postmodernism appeared to be our saviour. We could have opinions and support causes while at the same time claiming that they were not purely ‘just causes’, but personal inclinations and choices. Our own relative values. As in shopping, so in ethics – feel free to pick and choose.

  All this seems possible until something happens. Like the mass cold-blooded rape of hundreds of Bosnian women. Like the fire bomb thrown into the house of an Asian family by an over-excited white racist in east London, which resulted in the death of a mother and her five children. Like the slaughter perpetrated, maybe with axes or maybe with guns, by a white gang or a black gang which is not benefitting from the recent anti-apartheid measures in South Africa. Or like one family in France and another in London, who defy the law and hold down a four-year-old girl by force and make her lie naked on the floor in order to cut her clitoris with sharpened scissors for the sake of family honour and tradition.

  This is when you find yourself passing opinions and holding forth about what is right and what is wrong. This is when you want the family of the little four-year-old to be punished. This is when you do not care about cultural relativism but dream of one thing and one thing only – to save this little victim from the self-righteous torture that her family is inflicting on her. You want to call the police to bring their ‘Western law’ to stop the parents. You utter words of anger. You feel disgust. You long for the parents to have to go through the same hell that their daughter has endured. This is when you have to face the fact that actions have to be related to their consequences. And that the business of pardon, forgiveness, blame and punishment is not to be left to those who confuse it with revenge.

  Listen to this, Mme Nomy, because this concerns us very directly – you as a teacher and me who is writing all this because of you. Wherever you are now living, do you still read, as I do, French magazines? After all, you are the one responsible for our inability to escape French language and French culture. Did you happen to read the complaint by the French philosophy teacher entitled ‘The Perverse Consequences of Tolerance’ in Le Nouvel Observateur, 6–12 July 1995, where he talked of his students’ total lack of desire to pass judgement? He had been marking the papers of 200-odd baccalaureate students, who had been asked to write an essay on the theme ‘Can we justify everything?’ He had been struck by the fact that almost all the students gave what he called ‘strange answers’. With very few exceptions, all thought that Hitler had fought for something which he believed just, and that if one lived in a different context, if one could look at things from Hitler’s point of view, then it became difficult to judge him. Nine out of ten of the essays tried to explain that, grosso modo, we could and should understand everything.

  The professor was terrified by what he called the deadly relativism that was taking hold of the young generation.

  We have been engulfed by the sovereign religion of tolerance and we have raised children who find it difficult to differentiate between values and beliefs, between opinions and truths. Justice, impartiality, neutrality and indifference are nearly the same thing. Aesthetic tastes cannot be discussed either; only with great difficulty will they accept the idea that there is such a thing as ugly and such a thing as beautiful. It is forbidden to judge! I think we should all start to question ourselves on this spirit of our times, which is leading our youth to be incapable of thinking and of having dialogue with others.

  The professor’s article made me uneasy with my over-enthusiastic point of view about non-judgementalism – an enthusiasm that grew out of my experience of the civil war in Lebanon and its hellish fanaticism, its readiness to label people according to their religion, their beliefs or their national origin, and once this rigid label was made to stick, to do with its wearer what one does with merchandise: adopt it, reject it, or tear it into pieces if it’s faulty. I understood better a phrase that Václav Havel, the person whom I most admired of all modern statesmen, once said. It had really annoyed me when I first read it: ‘Notions such as justice, honour and betrayal possess in this world a content that is very concrete.’

  I will never forget the terrible afternoon when I saw a group of men, in Nabaa, a poor neighbourhood near Tell el-Zaatar camp on the outskirts of Beirut, trying to haul a young woman away from the door of a militia centre. She was not easy to tame. In her hand she was holding a hammer, and she would not let go of it. I was told that she had gone into the centre and had begun to rain blows on a young prisoner from the opposite camp. Her brother had died in the fighting the previous day, and she was coming to take her revenge on one of ‘them’ – one of those from the other side responsible for the death of her brother. The prisoner may die from her vicious blows, they told me. She would not stop, they said.

  I walked away, nauseated. I still cannot forget her terrible, distorted features, her wrathful eyes, her wild, disconnected gestures. They recur in my memory like a badly programmed video. She could not comprehend why her own side was acting as if she was not within her rights. The more her obvious ‘truth’ was challenged, the more her gestures seemed disconnected. What was it that made a woman act in this horrible manner? Is it permissible for us to condemn her with values that are alien to her? I always wonder whether they would have let her go ahead with her bloody and hysterical revenge if she had been a man. Did they try to stop her because she was acting as a ‘hysterical woman’? In a way she looked like one of the witches that filled our childhood nightmares: dishevelled, her face red and ugly with fury, her hands splayed like an octopus around the hammer. We know today that witches were victims, and the haunting memory of this woman disturbs me as a woman. Since I saw her eagerness to spill blood and to
kill, I find it harder to say things like: ‘Women don’t need war, they don’t have penises to project in the way that men do’, or ‘We have our periods and men are envious – they want to be able to bleed and spill blood too.’

  For the last three days I have been obsessed by images from the film Farewell My Concubine. Images of success, greed, sensuality, all in scarlet and gold. But most of all, the story of punishment, both ‘deserved’ and ‘undeserved’. Punishment deriving from a haunting need to cleanse and start again from a point-zero of memory, or punishment to satisfy the need for revenge in the new victors. At first it was the images that kept me awake, but then came questions, of increasing complexity. Is the old Teacher-Master really despicable? In one way yes: he is a torturer, he hits children and makes them bleed with his whip for the sake of art and perfection. In another way no: he was pursuing his profession in the way that he understood it, a method inherited through centuries of tradition. His student victims even come back to him after they become famous and successful, to show gratitude and respect. They have internalised his values and end up like him, ready to be torturers themselves for the sake of perfection in art. Or are they perhaps telling us that compassion is not a basis on which to build a future – not when ambitions are too big, and definitely not in a totalitarian society?

  Is cruelty a relative value? I find such an axiom hard to digest. I am sure that you do too, Mme Nomy. However valuable the category of Oriental despotic society may be to analysis, people from those societies themselves have revolted against despotism and cruelty. The film-maker of Farewell My Concubine is Chinese. In the best tragic tradition he depicts the dilemma of a frightened, weakened person who ends up ‘betraying’ the person he loved most before the accusing masses of the Cultural Revolution. He, in turn, is betrayed by the person who owes him his life. The circle of accusation, betrayal, revenge, fear and ‘cowardly’ behaviour is dramatised in a way that would be recognizable to a witness of the McCarthyite trials in the US, to a citizen of Athens some thousands of years ago, or to any citizen of Baghdad in the last thirty years. There may be more or less blood – and that is important – and there may be more or less subtlety but the expression on the faces of the protagonists would reflect the same dilemmas of the human condition.

  I am terrified by the idea that you might find this world more complicated than you thought when you explained it to us.

  Noha’s Quest and the Passion of Flora

  I am the martyr Noha Samman. When you watch me and hear my words, I will not be on this earth any more. I will have joined the heroes and the glorious combatants who gave their blood before me for our sacred cause. I am not the first martyr for our great struggle and I know that I shall not be the last. I shall die in an explosion that will shine with a fire in which dozens of our enemies will burn. My death will glow in a feast of light that will allow no traitor and no coward to show their faces in our land ever again.

  Her face is passionate and her voice limpid. They come through the TV screen on this hot August evening, and they silence us. Noha, the sixteen-year-old woman, the lively adolescent, blew herself up this afternoon. We witness with fear and silence the ritualised preparations for her death. She had filmed a video for us to see, for her message never to be forgotten, and for her face to inhabit our nightmares. Somehow the sounds of shells and bombs seem to have receded into a hush and Beirut is invaded by one single sound: the voice of a pretty young girl speaking from a TV screen. The dead brought back to life.

  Beirut had been noisily debating the suicide attack that killed dozens of people in the South that afternoon. Some maintained firmly that the number of the enemy who had perished was in the hundreds. Others ventured nervously to disagree with such methods of resistance. A man claimed that he had heard the sound of the explosion in his home in the southern suburb, and that the blast had knocked things off his kitchen shelves. The stories were exchanged, the rumours were transmitted, and the opinions expressed were agreed with or disagreed with in the loudest and noisiest way until the grave voice of a TV broadcaster announced the big surprise. ‘Noha Samman, a sixteen-year-old martyr was responsible for today’s bomb in which dozens of the enemy perished. We will shortly show the video that she asked us to broadcast to the nation.’

  Forgive me, Mother. I know my death will cause you grief. I had no choice. I responded to the need of my country and I had to leave you. Mother, I love you. Be proud of me. Rejoice, for today is the happiest day in my life. Don’t think of me as dead, but as an undying symbol of sacrifice and combat against evil. You dreamt of seeing me in a white dress. Look at me. I am wearing the white dress. My virginal blood I offer to my cause, our cause: the best and most honourable suitor. My blood is not mine alone, it belongs to my people.

  A circle of silence, heavier than the August heat, falls on us, and death speaks to us from the little screen through the lips of this woman-child. Her hair is long and black, her mouth tense and determined, and from her eyes shines the passion of the absolute. On the wall behind her hang the portraits of various martyrs. They look down from the wall as if placed there to give weight to her words. Her tense lips sketch a smile. Noha is expressing happiness to the camera, like a character in a play. We see only her face, and we listen to her joyful words:

  My mother, my people, don’t feel sad. Dance, sing and rejoice in my funeral. Prepare yourself for the feast. This is my wedding day. I have written the word ‘Martyr’ with my blood on the sheets of my wedding night. I am happy today. I feel alive, for life is in honour, in combat; and death is not what I am going to meet, for death is in resignation and national shame. I am overjoyed. I am looking forward to joining the heroes and the just in Paradise. I am looking forward to feeling the embrace of the land that my spilled blood will water and nourish. I am not dead, I am starting a new life. A life of pride and new beginnings.

  Noha’s face fades from the screen, and the silence in the streets is broken by the firing of thousands of bullets, in celebration of her martyrdom. The atmosphere is sadly apocalyptic. Radios all over the neighbourhood compete in playing loud nationalist songs. TV watchers surf channels, seeking more details, more drama.

  ‘Soon we will be going over to our reporter, with Noha’s family, to hear the reaction of her parents, and her young sisters and brother. Stay with us.’ So says the pretty blonde TV announcer, who looks excited at the prospect of being so much in the middle of things.

  Our voyeurism is excited by the blonde reporter who is shown standing outside the door of Noha’s home. But we lose patience, and move to another channel hoping to see more, to explore this feast of death from all angles. On the next channel, a modern nationalist militant dressed in an impeccable Western suit is giving his opinion:

  Noha’s glorious action is a sign of great hope. This is a sacrifice that announces a bright future. We Arabs are known for our generosity, and we are proud of it. If we have only a little food in our home, we keep it for our guests. The highest generosity is to give one’s soul and one’s blood to the most welcomed of guests: to dignity, and authenticity, and the glorious revival of our great nation. What is man’s greatest virtue and his most cherished quality? Generosity. Noha gave her pure blood and her beautiful youth to what she believed in, to our fight for sovereignty and national pride. Against the enemy and his Western allies. Look at her face – she is beautiful. She did not decide to die because life held nothing for her. She had many suitors dreaming of having her as a wife. She died because she loved her country more than her own life, and because her soul was even more beautiful than her face.

  We return to the blonde TV reporter. She is interviewing people in the crowd that has gathered around Noha’s home. There is a lot of movement near the door. Important political leaders, surrounded by bodyguards and militiamen, come and go from the building where Noha lived. From time to time a voice shouts, ‘With our souls, with our blood we will avenge you, oh Noha’, and hundreds of voices repeat the phrase in unison while Kalashni
kovs are raised and clenched fists wave above the heads of the crowd. The reporter has to raise her voice to ask us to be patient. Soon, she says, she will be talking to Noha’s mother. We try a third channel and there, between verses from the Koran and some colourful pictures of the South, a sheikh is telling us about martyrs.

  The martyr reaches a happiness that the ordinary believer does not know. The believer does not want to kill, for he is on this earth to glorify God. But if he has to die defending his religion then he is a martyr, and he will know all the pleasures of Paradise. No pleasure is higher than that of worshiping God. And if this worship means that the believer should die or kill the enemies of God, so be it, for if death is inevitable, let it be honourable. The martyr’s blood is of beautiful red and its smell is that of musk.

  The sheikh stops, adjusts his position, adopts an authoritative tone and a more solemn posture and then advises:

  Bury the martyr in his clothes. The clothes he was wearing when he died. For he should not be separated from his wounds and his blood. He should meet his God bearing all the marks of his heroic sacrifices. The world exhibits plenty of attractions, it has many wonders that can attract the eye and steal the heart. Money and gold and pretty women, they all play with man’s soul and reason. But when the knowledge of God is well rooted in a man’s heart all these attractions turn into ghosts. Ghosts that are despicable. The pleasure of knowing God and worshipping him is the most delectable pleasure ever to be known.

  The sheikh is speaking as if we still live in the era when martyrs perished with a sword in their hands. And he speaks as a heterosexual man. No trace of Noha would ever be found among the rubble and the fires left by the blast of her car bomb. But since the sheikh is charismatic and the atmosphere is so loaded with tension, nobody notices such details, for in these moments centuries long gone are re-emerging in a sudden confusion, like a sleeping volcano that has waited too long to erupt again and now begins spewing out a lava that nothing can stop.