Beirut,
then and now. A son looks for where his father had lived and finds other
histories in a haunted present.
It was the year my parents would marry
in Kuwait. In the 1960s, as Goa was annexed by India and the creation of the
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC,
signalled the growth of the oil-based
Middle Eastern economy, many Goans made their
way to the Gulf states due to the rise of employment opportunities there. The
American company my father would be employed by for two decades sent him to
Lebanon as a trainee in 1969, shortly before my mother would join him in Kuwait,
the country where my sister and I would be born.
Nearly a half-century later, I try to
locate the street on which my dad had worked and lived. He had always
remembered Beirut fondly, a single twenty-something, then, out in the world on
his own for the first time. As a friend and I make our way past the weekend
crowd, enjoying views of the Mediterranean from the Corniche, the January sun glints
off the windows of the towering Phoenician Hotel to our right. “Middle of the
road as you start up on the slope”, my dad had instructed on WhatsApp, in
response to my query of how far his office building might be in relation to the
hotel that shares its name with the street he had called home. On our left, by
the edge of Zaitunay Bay, the once
glamorous St. George Hotel, now hollowed
out, stands mutely as testament to Beirut’s heyday, its Golden Age. Previously
damaged during the civil war, the hotel was the site of the 2005 car-bomb blast
that killed then-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. A large banner cuts across its
otherwise silent façade like a scream: “Stop Solidere”, it implores, in
reference to the
company at the helm of redeveloping downtown Beirut,
but clearly not without controversy. 
As I look for Phoenicia
Street, its name recalling this country’s even more distant legendary past, I
cannot help but think of that mythical bird reborn of the ashes, and wonder about
Beirut’s future, its present so at odds with my father’s recollection of his
youthful years in the city. In the midst of growing political instability,
Syrians and Palestinians continue to seek refuge in Lebanon, these contemporary
crises of displacement layered on already uncertain ground. ISIS, the Israeli
occupation, and then the November
2015 bombing in southern Beirut
that was eclipsed by news of the Paris
attacks that same month. Refugee crises
have fast become the most apparent political problem of this second decade of
the 21st century, especially as many nations, such as Australia,
have balked at taking in the world’s homeless. Yet, ironically, Lebanon has been
the shelter of its politically displaced neighbours while dealing with its own
instability.
On another day, a young boy follows
me as I walk over to Café Younis in Hamra where I was to meet some friends.
When my father lived here, this was one of his haunts. He would frequent its
cafes with friends he had made from all over the Middle East and other parts of
the globe. “Syrian, Syrian”, the lad said, attempting to catch my attention.
“Hungry”, he whispered, a shoeshine box in one hand. The vibrant multicultural city
was once known as the Paris of the East. Now, its cosmopolitanness is bred from
other causes. It is with these lines that the seminal postcolonial text Orientalism (1978) opens: “On a visit to
Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975-1976 a French journalist wrote
regretfully of the gutted downtown that
‘it had once seemed to belong to . . . the Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval.’
He was right about the place, of course, especially so far as a European was
concerned. The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since
antiquity…” Even as he exemplifies the Beirut of
the past as the epitome of how the West imagines the East, the late Palestinian
American writer Edward Said captures the ephemerality of a city lost, one still
immersed in its own pain. 
Of the impossibility of knowing
these ghosts in the way only the haunted can, Said goes on to say, “Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves
had something at stake in the process, that even in the time of Chateaubriand
and Nerval Orientals had lived there, and that now it was they who were suffering…”
As if in illustration of Said’s observation of the juxtaposition of the
fantastic past with the tumultuous present, the former somehow made more
cognizable than the critical nature of reality, in the erstwhile Phoenician
city of Tyre,
millennia-old ruins stand monumentally in South Lebanon, almost rendering
invisible the neighboring Palestinian refugee camp of modern provenance.
In Beirut city,
amidst the newly rising buildings, there are creative signs of dissent. A
stencil of an Anonymous mask on one wall, flowers bursting out of a rifle held
by a gunman on another. As I wonder how long these bold displays of public art
might last, I continue to confer with my dad who is in Goa. “There was a coffee
shop outside”, he advises via messenger, attempting to orientate me. But the
company building seems to be non-existent. I ask a few locals. No one has heard
of it. I look around to see newer buildings, their silhouettes sharply
contrasting with the older architecture of the 60s and 70s, invariably
pock-marked with evidence of the civil war. A few blocks further, the ravaged Holiday Inn of the infamous “battle of the hotels” looms
inhospitably. “I saw it go up in flames from my balcony”, a Lebanese American
friend later finds occasion to convey when we talk about my trip and memories
of her childhood. “My landlady must be dead by now. She was in her 60s, then”,
dad tells me on the phone when we speak. He had also tried to contact a
Lebanese friend he knew to show me around, only to discover that the man and
his family were long gone. I had found Phoenicia Street, but it was no longer
1969.
From India Currents. Another version also appears in The Goan.
No comments:
Post a Comment