Beirut has become a byword for chaos, terrorism, internecine war, intractable violence. It used to be known for its beauty, its tolerance, its joie de vivre, its openness to the world. What happened to it and to its residents between 1975 and 1989 is the subject of Jean Said Makdisi's war memoir.
The author is a remarkable woman who, not content to have remained in Beirut throughout this fratricidal war, decided to record the trials and tribulations, the sufferings of its residents. Although not a native Beiruti, she came to love this city that has withstood so courageously the onslaught of fifteen years of war. As she tells it
I feel today … more attached, more committed to Beirut than ever, even dependent on it in a strange sort of way, like a suckling child toward its mother. This commitment has something to do with loyalty; … with solidarity with those who could not leave … and with all those who have committed themselves to keeping the place alive. But it is also based in anger, in a kind of furious defense of the collective humanity so outraged in Beirut.
Having lived and worked in Beirut during the war between 1979 and 1983, I have shared her love for that beleaguered city. Though feeling mother rather than child, I too wanted to protect Beirut, to shield it from the evil that was being perpetrated against it. I worked for the United Nations, believing naively that I could do something to alleviate the pain and stem the violence.
I also shared her anger at the ultimately suicidal destruction. What was threatened was not only a city but a community, a way of life, values and beliefs, innocence and goodness. Like her, I felt anger at the apparent indifference of others, the world at large that seemed to be treating Lebanon as an anomaly in human history, as somehow deserving of its suffering because it was perceived as self-inflicted. But, as Makdisi points out, “Beirut was a city like any other, and its people were a people like any other. What happened here could, I think, happen anywhere.”
In fact, history abounds with stories of cities under siege, of indiscriminate violence by the armed against the unarmed, of man's cruelty toward man. One need not search far to find the record of the atrocities committed during World War II in Europe, of the gulags and forced collectivizations in the Soviet Union and China, of the brutalities of the Spanish Civil War or the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. No, there is nothing unique about Beirut, nothing distinctive about its suffering. It only serves to remind the world of the futility of violence and war.
Born in Jerusalem in the early forties, Makdisi grew up in Cairo. As a Palestinian and an Anglican, she was twice over an outsider in Egypt; in her words, she was “not only a member of a minority but a minority among minorities.” She attended English schools in Cairo where she learned English history and culture; her exams were even mailed back to England to be corrected by British academics. Little was taught about Egypt, the Arab world, or the environment in which she grew up. Only gradually did she become aware of her family's privileged existence and of the sea of poverty surrounding the family compound. There were two Cairos: that the well-to-do, with beautiful houses, gardens, servants; and that of the poor, the beggars, the women
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