Anyone who has not lived in Lebanon since its civil war began in April 1975, and that is most of us, must find an incident like this baffling:
At the beach the other day, crowds of people had been swimming and sunbathing when suddenly Abou Abdou [a huge cannon] started [firing]. By now, of course, everyone was quite used to it, except for one young woman who immediately leaped up, gathered her things, and ran for cover. She looked back … and saw with visible amazement that no one else had moved. The sunbathers were still lying on their deck chairs and towels, and the swimmers continued to frolic in the water. She stood staring, transfixed for a few minutes by the collective indifference, and then slowly returned to her chair, reapplied her suntan oil, and lay down in the sun.
How can this be? How can brutal warfare and beachcombing coexist in adjacent streets?
Daily Life
Jean Said Makdisi, a full time resident of the Lebanese capital throughout the civil war, attempts to explain such mysteries of middle-class life in Beirut. She does so with vignettes. We learn, for example, of a better Beirut restaurant where the chefs piece de resistance is no longer chateaubriand but shwarma, a fast food sandwich made of mutton; and of a bookstore where the items in the window reflect the ideology of whatever group happens to control the quarter of town, but the back-room stock remains unchanged.
We learn from Makdisi the therapeutic value of housework, the bonding of victims prompted by aerial bombardments, and the black humor of the bomb shelter. She explains how the war has caused the Lebanese never to tell another person, not even a husband, where to go, when to go, or how to go: “Never take the slightest responsibility for another's fate. It is impossible to anticipate which road or room or even chair is to be the fatal one.”
Makdisi writes vividly; and at times her evocation of daily life offers real insight. Here she describes the special fear promoted by a civil war:
It is easy here in Beirut to look at every passing stranger and see the face of a potential a murderer. Those throat-cutters, those who rose in the dark of night, who put their pitiless hands around the necks of woken and infants and cut them, who are they? Which ones? Yet it is when I look at my own face in the mirror that I am most frightened. Is mine the face of one of the damned?
Or consider this explanation of how nearly all machines broke down in Beirut during the terrible summer of 1982: “Modernity and technology were now exclusively represented in the weapons; every other aspect of life was reduced to primitive, forgotten habits. The death machines worked; hardly anything else did.”
Still, Makdisi's best efforts leave much unexplained. Life in Beirut remains elusive. Why, for example, is she seemingly never prepared for trouble? Every crisis comes out of the blue, every round of shelling is a shock. The writes in May 1989 - after fourteen years of war - of going so quickly down to the shelter of their building that “none of us had even time to think of
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