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? READ MORE…