Jasmine and Fire (37 page)

I may
be crazy enough to walk across the city on the most sweltering summer days, but when it comes to driving, I’ve been much less intrepid. It’s bugging me that I keep making excuses about driving in Lebanon. Everyone I’ve talked to about driving here has advised me against it, saying gas is so expensive now, and I would be unnecessarily risking my life on these insane roads, and why drive when Beirut is crawling with service taxis and buses ready to take me anywhere for nearly nothing? So what—I still want to get over my fear.

And so one morning I force myself to try. My cousin Nada is in town from Paris for a few days, and we meet for coffee, then decide to spend the day doing a mini road trip so we can catch up more—and she’s fearless enough to come along with me on a little driving experiment. We rent a car from an agency in Hamra and, since we’d both recently read about an odd-sounding place called the Mleeta Resistance Museum—a museum down south displaying war weapons and run by Hezbollah—we decide to try to find it. I’m mainly intrigued by the thought of a militia like Hezbollah running what’s been described as a quiet, meticulously landscaped outdoor museum full of … well, weapons. The idea is infuriating
to some, inspiring to others, and fascinating to me, for the novelty-show surrealness of it. So off we go.

Nada had been living in Lebanon until a few years ago, and drove all over the place here, so she takes the wheel of our rental car first and drives us out of Beirut, since I’m not quite ready to take that on cold turkey yet. I eventually take over from her in Sidon, and to my surprise, it takes all of sixty seconds before I feel normal driving on these roads. It’s not the big deal I thought it would be. As everyone had already told me, you just have to be extra decisive, never go into autopilot, and always pay 100 percent attention to every vehicle and pedestrian and pet and obstacle and who knows what coming at you from all sides and directions, and remember that traffic lights and lanes don’t necessarily count for much.

As Nada tells me about her university teaching job and her new boyfriend in Paris, and I catch her up on my life in Beirut so far, we get distracted by our own chatter and the hip-hop we’re blasting on the car stereo. We keep missing turns from the directions we’d printed out, and as usual the roads have very few signs; the ones that do exist are often hidden behind billboards or trees. We end up having to stop and ask directions at a half dozen gas stations and grocery stores along the mountainous streets south of Sidon, until we eventually get on the right track and start winding up and up the hill that, at the very top, takes us into the driveway of the Mleeta museum. The mountains and valleys in the near distance lead to the Israeli border a few kilometers away. It’s a ferociously hot day, and without hats the sun feels too close, on fire. After we park the car, we follow the pathways that lead through a forested, hilly area where tanks and Kalashnikovs and all manner of weapons are strewn around, each marked with the model
number and the war it was used in. The other visitors on this day are a few European-looking tourists and a handful of families with kids. At one end of the park, a speaker built into the lawn pipes out the voice of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah making a speech about the necessity of resistance. It feels eerie being way up on this hill, in this remote part of Lebanon, surrounded by so much weaponry and, oddly, so many perfectly manicured flower beds and lawns and well-placed garbage receptacles.

“This might be the cleanest public park in Lebanon,” Nada jokes as we head for the car, its leather seats baking in the sun. After the arduous drive here, we don’t stay long; it’s burning-hot outside and we’re ready to hit the road again. I drive us all the way back, this time staying at the wheel through the Beirut streets, which at sundown today are less trafficky than they were hours earlier. After just a day, I feel used to the rhythm of driving here, merging and passing and hanging back when I need to, traffic lights or stop signs only occasionally popping up. I’m glad I don’t have to do this daily but forcing myself to get comfortable with driving feels like a major hurdle cleared. Another way of feeling legit here in Lebanon, more fully at home.

Do I
, then, feel truly at home here now? I haven’t stopped asking myself this question since I arrived last summer. In the beginning the answer was mostly no. I felt, for those initial months, that I’d been gone for too many years, and that I couldn’t just plop myself back down in Beirut and expect to slide right back into life here. I was also more self-conscious back then about my slightly American accent when I speak Arabic. In my walks around the city in those early months, and on the first few social nights out, I was still sensing myself an outsider, disconnected, just peering in
but wishing I fit more comfortably into the scene around me. That feeling stung, especially since that’s how I’d felt for so long in the States and still feel at times.

I was hoping that by moving to Beirut I’d feel an instant
ah, I’m home
and that those outsider twinges would just vanish. Still, I suspected it might not be so easy, and it wasn’t.

But as I gradually started spending time with old friends, new friends, and cousins I could relate to, pieces of myself that I hadn’t consciously realized I’d lost started coming back. My sense of out-siderness in the States had become vague over the years, persistent but mostly visceral in ways I couldn’t always define. Here in Beirut, connecting with people who could reminisce about a similar childhood, and who had the same familiar reference points—for instance, how the city used to look, and places we remembered, and similar family dynamics and traditions, and even just memories of how we’d secretly gorge together on Choco Prince cookies or sip from those funny-looking triangular containers of Bonjus as kids—brought me closer to an elusive “belonging” than I’ve felt for as far back as I can remember.

Many of these people had felt the same kind of loss and experienced the shock of feeling suddenly foreign after they’d fled overseas during the war. They have the same scars, even if they don’t often talk about them. Some of them could tell me about how their lives here felt during the war years, after my family left. Those memories, and sometimes even the trivial-sounding details, each added a piece to the puzzle, a more tangible answer to what I’d been missing all these years.

Many Lebanese people I’ve met in the States have had similar experiences, but reconnecting with parts of my Beirut past, on Lebanese soil this time, has felt different and more crucial.
Strangely, it’s also had a demystifying effect: Painful memories don’t seem to nag as hard anymore when they’re so widely shared, and the more time I’ve spent this year around people who have a familiar background and have struggled internally in ways I recognize, the more those parts of my past seem commonplace, old news. It’s a relief to feel this way.

Still, the sense of connectedness and belonging that I once took for granted, and that I lost when we fled Lebanon, may never fully come back, and I realize that more now. I’m not sure I’m prepared to call belonging “overrated,” as Edward Said did—in his memoir of a life spent moving around and feeling out of place everywhere—but I may be more willing to let it go.

Moving back to Beirut has helped me shake the past in other ways, too. This year, by living and doing my work and building a social life here, and exploring much more of the country than I ever did before, I’ve felt more thrust into the Lebanon of right now, today—less so the Lebanon of years long gone. These adventures around the city and country have made me feel, as the months went by, that this little piece of the planet is mine.

But I also suspect I wouldn’t be feeling quite as at home here now if this weren’t such an ever-changing, dynamic place, with endless discoveries and adventures to be had—even if it’s overwhelming in its own ways, too. Beirut, like New York, strikes plenty—most?—people as a “great place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.” Fair enough. But it turns out that I do like living in Beirut, and partly for the reasons that drive casual visitors nuts: the noise, the density, the unwieldiness. It’s exhausting in heavy doses, to be sure, but still ultimately a sign, for me anyway, of life.

That said, the downsides of life in Lebanon are not trivial. Life here can be a constant grind. The government seems in no hurry
to meet the basic needs of civilians, for instance by fixing the electricity and other infrastructural problems, instead of just making windy pronouncements about plans to repair them. The constant blackouts and water-supply problems, and the unreliable Internet, bring daily headaches.

The bigger picture gets depressing, too—the fact that the political situation never seems to fully stabilize, and there’s always a looming threat of strife, if not all-out war. Some people are braver about it than others; I’m not one of the most blasé, in case that’s not obvious by now. The ever-present possibility of violence here keeps reminding me of when I lived in Berkeley and realized I wasn’t quite cut out for heavy-earthquake zones, as many Californians seem to be. I wonder if the fault lines of Lebanon’s sectarian political system, and all the bigotry they reinforce, will ever fade away. Maybe things will very slowly, glacially, start to change soon, now that there have been more vocal movements for reform.

One July afternoon on a walk through downtown, I notice a roped-off area near the parliament building and the statue of Riad el Solh, the first prime minister of Lebanon after independence. A poster for the antisectarian movement, hanging near the statue, marks off the empty space near the Solh monument as “Midan al-Taghyir,” meaning Change Square. In Arabic, the name rhymes with Midan al-Tahrir, the now-famous Liberty Square in Cairo. There’s no one at Midan al-Taghyir when I walk by except two young guys sitting on a blanket next to the poster—in their solitude looking like caricatures of just how far Lebanon still is from bringing down the sectarian system. Could this change happen in our lifetimes? I want to be optimistic, but …

More than ever, I love Lebanon, dearly. And it breaks my heart.

It’s going to hurt to leave Beirut, but now I think I’m ready.
I’ve decided to move back to New York, at least for the time being. I’m also going to make frequent visits to Beirut, to keep my life here going as best I can, because who knows where I’ll end up living in the future?

For now I’m going to try, once again, to love Lebanon from afar. A long-distance relationship. I’ve learned it can work—for two people anyway—against the odds. Maybe it will work for Beirut and me—and keep us close, somehow, through the seasons and the years.

EPILOGUE

It’s
early August and I’m back in New York. Crossing the tangled Flatbush and Atlantic intersection in downtown Brooklyn to get to the subway station, I could be in Hamra, navigating my way through the nonstop rivers of cars. For a second I’m confused about which city I’m in. The sensation lasts just for a moment, but long enough for me to notice: I like this feeling. New York. Beirut. Mad, maddening, magnificent cities. This is home. These are home. My homes, plural.

I have another home now, too: Richard’s apartment, which I’ve just moved into in Brooklyn. We’re four roommates in this giant loft: Richard, plus his friends Dan and Brien, plus me. I’m hoping this arrangement will feel like home for now. Neither Richard nor I, at this
advanced point in our thirties, has ever lived with a boyfriend or girlfriend before. It’s about time. And it’s a little scary. But all the late-night e-mails of the past year, all the anxiety about whether we’ll make it through my Beirut year, whether we’re even supposed to make it, have been worth it so far. Shopping with him at the crowded, neon-lit Target store in Brooklyn for shelving units to hold all my stuff feels oddly romantic.

Living in this apartment with Richard and our roommates keeps reminding me of Beirut, of my building where relatives live upstairs and nearby, and always did when I was growing up. This past year was like this, too, with Shireen living down the block and various family members living in the building or just minutes away. In July, my aunt Maya came from North Carolina for her annual Beirut visit and stayed in her seventh-floor apartment with her longtime housekeeper Hanneh, who used to make the best French fries in the world when we all lived in Lebanon during the war. There’s always someone around the building to chat with, someone to help lift the mood. I would’ve flinched at the thought of sharing a New York apartment with three other people at this point in my life. I like my privacy, and I’m also not the chitchattiest person in the world. But this setup has felt easy, and also familiar deep down. It’s going to be temporary—Richard and I are planning to move out into our own place soon—but so far it’s made for a soft landing.