“Do I Deserve to Suffer?”: My Life in Post-War Lebanon
Omar al-Jamal / Oct 28 / Identity
It’s 22nd October. The time is 3:30 pm. I hear gunshots, which are then shortly followed by an onslaught of rapid-fire. A type of fire that is sure to remind any Tripoli native of conflicts that are supposedly long gone at this point.
I was worried that there was going to be an escalation of violence. I was in the middle of a Discord chat with a few online friends when the whole thing happened.
I started texting one of my friends asking if he had heard any gunshots. He confirmed my suspicions and off-handedly remarked, “If one of them gets injured, let Saad fix him up”. I was a bit confused. So, I asked if these were Hariri’s guys, he said “yeah” and that “they’re celebrating his appointment as Prime Minister”. I thought his reappointment was going to be inevitable, but the outcome came a bit sooner than I anticipated.
By roughly estimating where the gunshots were coming from, I guessed that they came from Tebbeneh. My suspicions were finally confirmed when a friend sent a video of a man carrying a rifle with an obscenely long belt firing into the air, saying, “you don’t have to guess”.
The danger zone of the shots would have been within the radius of Tebbeneh to Bahsas. In other words, anyone in Tripoli could’ve gotten injured by those gunshots.
The gunfire didn’t subside until roughly an hour later but we could still hear a few faint gunshots well into the night. This vulgar display of power ended with some broken car windows and a few injuries - one girl was reported to have been hit in the head.
My revolution
I’m sure what I describe may sound like a warzone or a particularly dangerous slum, but that’s not the case. It’s been at least half a decade since I heard anything even close to this in Tripoli. That’s not to say that the city had not been exposed to gunfire since, but this degree of senselessness and pure malice for such an extended period of time is pretty irregular, to say the least.
Make no mistake. These are not sounds of war. These are the sounds of a morbid celebration. One that is all too common in this part of the world. This was not someone’s son passing a Brevet or Terminale examination (9th and 12th-grade state exams), or an engagement or wedding, or any other ordinary reason for joy. This was a celebration of Saad al-Hariri’s reappointment as Prime Minister, after having been ousted almost exactly a year before.
Last year, people in Lebanon were discussing “what’s next?”, after what we thought was the revolution’s first victory. It was during this period that I felt truly proud to be Lebanese, for the first time in my life. I had made so many new friends and met so many different people at a rate that I never had done before. It was feeling that sense of at-homeness and pride that had been robbed of me and so many young people on the day we were born.
Good things don’t last forever. I had lost interest in the revolution some time towards the end of the year. Every day I felt there were fewer reasons to go to these protests, which had at this point evolved to become a camping ground of cliques. My clique was the makeshift library that my friend ran, “Maktabat al-Thawra”, even though I admittedly only did a little bit of reading at that time. However, the camps in Tripoli were officially dismantled by the offset of COVID-19 in Lebanon.
The revolutionary spirit that had existed then is pretty much gone now.
My Lebanon
The most recent conversations I have had with people around me have been an endless array of diatribes against the Lebanese people. Our unreadiness for this revolution. A need for fundamental and serious societal change. Our inability to do anything besides lie and swindle each other, among many other classifications.
The most common phrase I hear is, “The Lebanese people are a people that aren’t worth 2 dimes.” It’s not a particularly eloquent or even deep phrase but it is an apt description of what this country feels about itself.
Ever since we were children, the idea that there is nothing for us in this country and that all we are is a mass expatriation project is drilled into our heads by a combination of the people around us and by our personal experiences. It is a cycle of misery that has perpetuated itself over several generations: pre-war, in-war, and post-war.
Anything nice we say about this country is either taken from a past that exists only in the memory of our elders, or something that exists only as an exception: something that is beautiful only when contrasted with the ugliness of its backdrop.
We describe Lebanon in the same way we describe an abusive lover who is also an amazing cook. Yeah sure, living here would require the “patience of Ayyub (aka Job)” but the food is pretty damn amazing. Who doesn’t like a great big feast of the finest food that the Levantine has to offer? A country, so small, yet so cosmopolitan in its national character; one that is best represented by its cuisine.
Good food, however, doesn’t make a country. There is something else that keeps us here, despite everything…Maybe we are just used to this lifestyle? That’s not the case, because otherwise if we ever left, we would never come back. Something keeps us coming back to this abusive lover. My best guess is, a desire to find the good in them and help them heal.
Perhaps, the country is not a living hell but rather a wound that needs to heal. Or perhaps a wrong that requires reconciliation. It is said that to grow, we must forgive not only the ones who wronged us but also ourselves for being wronged. In this crisis, there is this growing sentiment that we deserve everything that we are going through. Something akin to a people being destroyed by the hands of an angry god, as punishment for our sinful nature. Even those who are of a more secular and even atheistic leaning carry some version of this sentiment.
There is no one specific term to describe it but the best way to express this guilt is:
“I am Lebanese and therefore I deserve to suffer.”