Dimashq #11ː More of the Lebanese Beat

More of the Lebanese Beat

April 23^rd, 2011

Yesterday I awoke in the misty grey chill of Zahlé in my hotel room with two beds. No traffic noises at that early hour, just a few voices drifting through the dark green shutters from the street below. Probably some staff at the MASSIVE hospital facing the old hotel. I rose from the saggy softness of the bed, used that gloriously clean bathroom that I’ve come not to expect in the Middle East, did my meditation routine, and that was that. Downstairs in the huge parlor room that probably once welcomed family members coming from all around the provinces back in the Ottoman Empire days, before the mansion became a hotel, I unceremoniously handed over my key to Nada. She was smiling, sleepily, as we talked about where I could get breakfast and how much I should pay for transport out of Zahlé, and was speaking Arabic in a way a little less Lebanese and a little more Damasc-ish for my benefit. Yet she was nonplussed about my departure all the same. “Merci. Ma3a salēma,” and I slipped out onto the cold drizzle street on the hill.
What a barren place in this season, human-wise. I shivered in the cold wet on the street alone, growling inside when an old guy walking past said assumingly “Hello!” But, I did snap some shots of imposing old 19^th-century mansions, all grey stone, green shutters, terraces, and orange tile roofs, with that highly French look, to the point where one aesthetic is indistinguishable from the other.
Found the “bakery,” really more of a new, chi-chi café, where I was able to great workers with “Bonjour” and have it mirrored right back at me. If the French iħtilēl (occupation) of so many years ago left anything, it’s this repressed awkward distance between those who don’t know each other, and a desire to culturally one-up everybody else, for I felt little human warmth, and sensed my “coolness” decrease upon entering. Funny, though, that I had been speaking Arabic with the black-haired woman at the coffee press, but when she brought a café au lait to the table and saw me reading a book in French, she said “You’re welcome” in response to my “Merci.” What are we trying to prove here? Tasty breakfast of bread and za3tar and croissant, but too light.
And I kept walking down the light slope, making an important observation: that I felt much more at ease—mentally and physically—when actually moving along down the avenue. I think it it’s because I felt that I wouldn’t have to worry about engaging anyone in a language I might falter in, like Arabic or French (getting people to speak to me in the language I want them to always has, and does, make me really tense), and that I didn’t worry that I was somehow wasting time by sitting around somewhere. It’s all part of my difficulty being in the moment. On the way down, the signage was getting more eclectic and bold, with shop names in French like “Jean Saliba & Fils,” “Toutes Choses,” but also huge billboards of sectarian political leaders, and a big nationalist banner reading “Let’s get back to our roots, back to our values, back to LEBANON.”
Got down to the دوّار (duwwār: “roundabout”) and after talking to a shopkeeper about where to grab a servīs (public minibus), took one out to Ba3lbek. Nice and cheap. The road was straight, and we rose out of the tangle of unfinished apartment buildings at the edge of town, and through pine forest that reminded me of New England. Soon we entered the valley where Ba3lbek sits, and the fields on either side of the highway rolled away in rich black soil, up to the hilt of mountains on both sides topped with snow and mist… fancifully beautiful.
Hopped off in front of epic ruins, rising from behind fences and foliage in the distance, and dove right in—for the equally epic price of 10,000 Lebanese lira. But after dodging old guys saying “Monsieur, you need guide? Est-ce que vous voulez un guide?” And walking around the high walls, columns, and massive space a Roman courtyard, I was impressed. Huge arches, and neatly carved hollows in the walls of the Temple of Jupiter where idols must once have stood were bright despite their grayness. I toddled around fallen column heads with faces of old gods carved into them. Tour groups of French and German and Lebanese walked around the high walls guffawing at the jokes of their guides, looking afraid somehow. It appears that though the temple complex, as it stands, was originally Roman, and subsequently used by a slew of Arab chiefs as a fortress, it was likely built on top of something much older, from the Phoenicians perhaps.
The size and intricacy of these 2,000 year-old remains was more than anything I’d seen, and at the end of the ruins there was a slick museum of pictures, sculpture, and quadrilingual signage. I enjoyed checking out photographs of Ba3lbek back in the late 19^th century, when apparently the German Kaiser made a visit, because so much was different: intense “oriental” clothing of Fes caps and vests and baggy sirwāl pants, and architecture of stone arches and drainage canals and domes. None of the brand new, yet crumbling and hollow apartment buildings everywhere built on torn earth. And no tight jeans, leather jackets, and semi-mullets, as was the modern attire of the shebēb (young men) in Ba3lbek. What I dug heavily too was the shots of nomadic Turkomen tribesmen outside the town, with tents and head wraps and flutes and smiling, barefaced women. The crazy medieval-ness and naked ethnic diversity of tongues and tribes is something I miss here, something perhaps yet to be found, but something I felt, at least, that I was encountering in North Africa. Siiiigh.
After all that, I walked and I walked and finally found a kebab sandwich for 3,000 lira in a little butcher street. This is not a cheap country. There I sat out front of the butcher shop and ate my sandwich, watching men fan coals under kebab skewers with pieces of cardboard, the shitty mopeds try to pass sleek two-door coups in the little street, the huge dry carcasses swinging lightly. I spoke to a few guys who were amazed that I could speak Arabic, despite my stumbling.
Then I walked all the way up to a sweet, windy park where families picnicked, and hijab-wearing moms called out to little kids. Restaurants and cafés full of locals bustled despite the windy chill. Took a seat at a near-deserted café and attempted the poem below. Certainly not my proudest work, but there might be something worth keeping in it:





A teapot and a teaglass
A spoon and bits of sugar
That cling like sand

“Ey? Shu hiyye?”
The one woman in
Shadow-black hijab asks her son
And the grains of green
Tree leaf and seed pods like pebbles
Tap my table and
Roll down the front of my blue kenze
Slipping from the grip
Of the tree overhead
Its stiff fingers pushing
Through the café roof

The kids keep playing
In the park between me
And the crack-dry streets
And the mothers keep scolding
“Sma3ti shu ‘ilit?”

No one knows the mountains we’re in
Or this town hung on their edge
They might only say the name
If Hezbollah here starts a war
Or if the old temple here tumbles down

Today it’s just us
The argilé pipe
The sweetness of the tea
And the sun.

I walked back to the butcher street, on the way stopping at a sha3bi (popular) internet joint. There, finally, I got a little rooted in this country, in some regular Lebanese people after I stopped fighting and pretending. Upon entering, I speak to the fellas in Arabic. They smile and answer in bumpy English. I talk back in English, and they get curious. After reading some e-mails—one e-mail of which declaring my acceptance to NYU Gallatin School with a fifteen-grand scholarship—and bullshitting a bunch, I got talking to the chattering shebēb in English, then meaningful Arabic, and a bit of French. “Why are you live in Syria, no Lebanon? Life is too much better here,” one says. I found out that most of them spoke the Gaulish tongue, but a couple of them had studied English more recently at the university and felt stronger in it. Thus their initial linguistic inclinations. But it was great connecting a bit in whatever tongue. It made me feel more settled.
On that note, though, French in the Levant, it’s starting to seem, is becoming a relic, only surviving in Lebanon, it seems, because of an official status. Kicked out of Syria without mercy through the Arab nationalist program. It’s odd—I consider myself a devout anti-imperialist, but I’m fascinated by, even intellectually trapped by, the layering of some imperial language on top of another culture. I think the existence of French beside other tongues around the world is so cool, that I get wounded when I see things moving to favor English more, as might be the case here. My fellow activists are gonna kill me for such old fashioned, if-only-the-natives-spoke-French talk, but it’s a big part of how I see the world.
Anyhow, I hauled my tired body and heavy backpack towards the ruins, past the men trying to hawk me T-shirts and guidebooks, and stood on the highway shivering in the wind. I grabbed a servīs that hauled me and bunch of locals back down through the fields, a sharper green now with the darkening sky and cloud-cover, and we stopped at any and all beat, nowhere corners to pick up more passengers. Down, down to the main highway to Beirut, made a right, and we began to climb. Up through the mess of apartments and banks, up into the treeless mountains. The road was steep, and the traffic ahead stretched to infinity. Soon we ascended into the mist at the mountains’ tops. Another few minutes, and we began to descend. The mist let go of the servīs, and steep gorges fell away on either side, their slopes dotted with pimples of poorly-placed apartment buildings. Then the sun, shining in from the sea, was all red and orange, and we passed a peak astride the highway where a fancy new church jutted out into the air, like a fist. Everything folded down towards the sea, towards the last golden sun. The packed disorder of roadside buildings signaling the Beirut suburbs began. I had no idea where to find my friend Ali, living in that big bad city, but I knew he was down there.

This town again. Here we go.