On August 4, 2020, the port explosions in Beirut devastated the city and sent shockwaves throughout the world within a a matter of minutes. In a year already thick with disaster, the eruption—one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions in human history—appeared to be a harbinger for the fact that the worst days are not yet behind. From south Lebanon, Reem Joudi felt the reverberations of the blast, and penned this intimate and lyrical essay in its immediate aftermath, reflecting on the felt and lived traumas of her beloved Beirut, the human capacity for survival, and what it means now to look forward.
We were having coffee at my grandmother’s house, as we usually spent most afternoons, when our bouts of daily chatter were interrupted by a series of strange events: the living room door slammed shut, the sliding glass doors shook, and a loud thud echoed outside. “Was it an earthquake?”; “No, it sounded like gunshots.”; “Quick, turn on the TV!”. After a few seconds scrambling for the remote, my grandmother switched on the television to a local news channel, which was covering a meeting with resigned Prime Minister Saad Hariri at the Grand Serail. We assumed that the building had experienced an explosion of some sort, due to the minor damages we saw onscreen.
Our first guess was an assassination attempt; Hariri’s father—former PM Rafic Hariri—was assassinated in 2005, and the Special Tribunal investigating his death planned to release the final verdict on August 7, 2020. Our first instinct was to pray that this was not the case—not out of love for the political leader, but out of fear for the people’s mental and emotional health, which could no longer sustain such consecutive trauma and instability. The list of what we had already survived was long and seemingly endless, split in two columns between pain currently lived and years of past unrest. The former enlisted a collapsing economy, a devalued local currency, hyperinflation, twenty-hour power cuts, a global pandemic, a trash crisis, predicted food shortages, a breakdown in the banking sector—an inventory of present loss piled atop years of past losses.
Seconds later, the reality of what had happened unfolded before our eyes in disjointed fragments: partly transmitted through WhatApp videos circulated with panic-stricken urgency, and partly through live news reports. The reality was more heartbreaking, more expansive, and more destructive than imaginable. Beirut’s port had exploded, and everything scattered into dust and nothingness—ungraspable, unimaginable, slipping through fingers. Beirut’s port had exploded, and we heard it forty kilometers away at my grandmother’s house in Saida, south Lebanon. Beirut’s port had exploded, yet all I could think was: “Why am I not in Beirut right now?” The moments that followed were a blur—frantic texts to friends and loved ones, agonizing moments awaiting their replies. “Are you okay? Please tell me you’re okay.” Blood, blood, blood, and rubble refracted through screens as we stayed glued to our phones, re-watching the horror of the explosion in slow-motion. Screams as loud as the blast. A crippling numbness that I could neither untangle nor understand. When I went back home an eternity later, I found my entire body covered in red marks. I did not understand how they appeared. Why were they not bleeding?
It is difficult to articulate the feelings of hopelessness multiplied, to communicate the sheer magnitude of glass shattering and lives lost, businesses destroyed and homes obliterated in mere seconds in a capital city already falling apart, in a country pervasive with tumult. It is impossible to express the soul-crushing emptiness that comes with the realization that Beirut is gone, destroyed by negligence and corruption in the early hours of the evening on a warm August day. A Beirut that embodied sorrow just as it had held joy; a Beirut that has seen blood many times over; a Beirut that has been tragically beautiful in its chaos and ugliness and muddy skies . . . Parts of it gone in an instant, residents trapped under the rubble of lives with no way to pick up the pieces.
How does one measure a city’s elasticity for collective trauma? How much can you stretch its residents’ resilience until it snaps, until they lose the ability to rebuild? What is the point at which hope is lost, and with it the ability to dream? What ripple effects are felt across the country when a nuclear-like explosion obliterates the port, the only economic lifeline left in an import-dependent nation? Time has stopped, quite literally, for many Beirutis and Lebanese—wall clocks in the rubble read 6:08 p.m. through broken glass. Over a week has passed since the explosion ripped through the city, and we still haven no answers—why were twenty-seven hundred tons of ammonium nitrate stored in close proximity to the city; who were they for; how did they explode; why are there bodies still stuck under the rubble; why did doctors have to treat patients with no electricity, their phones the only source of light; why did this happen, have we not suffered enough? There is only rage—rage at a corrupt ruling elite that has bled the country dry for years and killed its people in sheer negligence; rage at the lives and homes lost for nothing; rage at the dreams stolen by Lebanon’s mafia and militia.
There is an Arabic expression we use in Lebanon, حاسس الأرض مش سايعتني , which roughly translates to: “I feel the Earth / the land cannot contain me.” It is used to express unbridled joy. When I saw Beirut after the blast, the port in shambles and streets heavy with heartbreak, this expression came to mind, but as a declaration of profound sadness and a suffocating metaphor for what was lost. On August 4, 2020, death found its way into people’s homes and neither Earth nor land were safe anymore. Yet, many residents of Beirut and Lebanon did not have time to mourn their altered landscapes and decimated land. In the days following the blast, they came together to clean streets of rubble and glass, to offer food and medical aid to those in need—a collective effort that is a necessity in a country with no disaster relief strategies, crippled by its leaders’ negligence.
Things were not this heavy in October last year. A nationwide and decentralized movement saw both Lebanese and non-Lebanese take to the streets en masse, calling for reform and the establishment of a new political order, the boundaries of which were amorphous but promising nonetheless. The chants, the marches, the texts to organize revolutionary meet-ups—it felt, for many, like the cusp of tangible change. It is difficult not to look back at October 2019 without a strange sense of yearning. It was a time for breaking taboos and self-forgiveness; most of all, it was a time for hope of real change. We, this endless community of believers, longed for the revolutionary moment as we lived it. There was a collective awareness of its fleetingness and so an inversely proportional need to hold on, even when fingers were slippery with fear. This nostalgia for the present was an exercise in belonging—anchoring bodies in space, time, and the feeling that history was being made.
Today, the revolutionary moment has changed. It teems with blinding, bloodthirsty rage against the criminal political elite. Protestors are flooding to the streets once more, this time mounting gallows in Martyr’s Square. Instead of accountability and remorse, the murderous ruling class met protestors with increased violence, tear gas, and bullets. This is the time for political change—nothing will be the same after August 4—but many of us have lost the ability to imagine the future. Not when over a hundred and fifty people were killed by the explosion, thousands were injured, and over three hundred thousand families were left homeless. Not when the faces of the missing circulate on social media platforms, their families’ hopes of finding them dwindling by the day. Not when these hopes become a prayer to find parts of bodies—any parts—to bury. This pain we feel stretches across space and time, across post-apocalyptic geographies and landscapes. It transforms anyone who finds themselves in the throes of such heartbreak. Is there a word to describe this feeling? Are we damned to exist on the intersections of alive, dead, and barely making it? We are tired of walking on tightropes.
I remember watching a talk by Lina Mounzer on the Great Famine of 1918, which claimed over two hundred thousand lives in Mount Lebanon. In her talk, she discusses the slow starvation of an entire population. It was a gradual process that began when the Ottoman Empire joined World War I in 1914, with bread riots following shortly after. The popular uprisings were a prelude to disaster: the French and British enforced a naval blockade that cut off food supplies and wheat arriving by sea, and Ottoman rulers imposed a blockade of inland routes. Aristocratic families like the Sursocks—whose palaces overlooked Beirut port, the very same ones destroyed today—requisitioned grain from peasants at the behest of Ottoman ruler Jamal Pasha, and controlled concessions of wheat in the area. Hundreds of thousands of people starved and rioted and died and sought freedom, while geopolitical struggles quite literally redrew the map of the region. Today, just as in 1918, Beirut’s port stands as a symbol of struggle and devastation rather than progress. Today, the port blast demolished an economic lifeline that was sustaining an already-struggling nation, destroying in its wake the country’s wheat silos and increasing fears of bread shortages. Though famine is unlikely, as other ports in north and south Lebanon will be made operational to mitigate the crisis, there is a collective feeling that the aftermath may be devastating—that perhaps, the physical and imagined boundaries of what once was will be redrawn.
According to Mounzer’s talk, the accounts of the Great Famine oscillated between the real and the fictional; stories of witchcraft, of cannibalism, of women eating their own children, and of ghosts roaming streets were rife. The hunger gave rise to hallucination, but it did not matter whether the stories were real or fake—they described a hell on earth as lived by those who were dying. The villains who roamed the streets in 1918—flickering and hollowed bodies—are reincarnated in Lebanon’s postwar political regime, its leaders, and their thirty years of systemic violence. It is unfathomable to die in your own home from a nuclear-like explosion; it is unfathomable to watch lives destroyed; it is unfathomable that the living feel guilty for being alive.
Today, we are no longer hallucinating because of our collective grief. Those who experienced the blast roam the streets in slow motion amid destruction, living ghosts. Our reference points have changed, and we want to make sense of the landscapes that have been erased in our city, the ones that shifted in our minds, and the ones rendered unlivable in both imagination and reality. The ability to cognitively map urban geographies is broken for many—the neighborhoods of Mar Mikhael, Gemmayze, Bourj Hammoud, Karantina, and Achrafieh that were most damaged by the blast will forever be geolocated and described as “near the port.” This calamity, caused by the Lebanese political regime, has taken away our ability to imagine pasts, presents, and futures. Nostalgia for any moment or time is also broken, frayed at the seams and overshadowed by the sound of glass—shattered, scattered, crushed under heavy footsteps.
I am not sure where to end my train of thoughts. Perhaps I will finish at “The Start,” a poem by Iranian poet Roja Chamankar, and translated into English by Blake Atwood. I first heard it at Aaliya’s Books, a cafe now destroyed by the blast. The poem reads as follows:
When I speak of Tehran, I end up at the sea
when I speak of myself or of you,
when I speak of the sky, I end up at the sea.
When I distance myself from it, forgetting,
starting fresh, I end up back at the sea.Where is the leak in this sea
as all of my relationships turn tender?
Drenched, they end up at the sea.
Perhaps now when I speak of Beirut, I will find myself at the sea, lost amid the port’s rubble and destruction. In the months leading up to the explosion, I kept having the same dream: I am at my grandmother’s old home in Saida, which directly faced the sea. I stand on the balcony overlooking a familiar landscape, except the waves are so high that they engulf the corniche, the road, the landmarks, and the nearby buildings. I wonder why the Mediterranean is so angry and why I am unable to touch the water, then I wake up in an abrupt panic.
We have searched for Beirut’s sea many times—a city by the Mediterranean with no access to the water due to rampant privatization of its shores—but today, more than ever, we search for that crevice in which we may drown our memories and our sorrow. Drenched, where can we go from here?
Reem Joudi holds an MA in Media Studies from the American University of Beirut and a BSFS in International Economics from Georgetown University. Her interests lie at the intersection of visual culture, affect theory, urban space, and cultural studies, with particular focus on Lebanon and the MENA region.
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