TechProfound

For whatever reason, when I woke up this morning, I remembered that I didn’t post anything yesterday. I also remembered that I wanted to start a fun sort of category called Casual Friday. It’s not deep, and it’s not meant to mean anything more than just a light-hearted entry into the weekend.

Well, as I mentioned in the previous post, I was reading some not so casual happenings. I’m just going to link to the posts that I find on this particular subject.

I cannot relate. I am befuddled with inspiration and amazement. I am silenced with inexperience and awe. I’m shocked with crass, indignant frustration. I’m listening.

NOTE: These are excerpts from the excerpts. There is a lot more if you read the actual posts. I didn’t write any of these, and take zero credit of any sort. I am just quoting parts of the writing that have moved me. I have only read and listened…

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At night we could see DCA bullets (counter-air defence) speeding through the skies like red fireworks that forgot to go off. Our parents made us sleep in the corridor every night. They still slept in their bed, until one night two bullets crashed into the bedrooms – one in ours, which was empty, the other in theirs. The bullet pierced the window, the curtains, the lampshade, ricocheted on the wall and made a hole in the bed between my parents. The sound of the glass breaking and my father cursing woke us up, then they joined us in the corridor. After that, it was every night in this narrow space whose protection was very relative. At that time of my life I had nightmares all the time, so I actually welcomed the shelling that meant I would get to sleep in the arms of one of my parents and not be afraid anymore.

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Once I was home alone with my mother and so dreadfully bored I begged her to let me go join my friends in their shelter. It was pouring shells outside but I assured her I would wait for a break in the pounding. I nagged until she was exasperated enough to let me go and dashed down the street between two explosions. Later as I returned home the same way, I found my stubbornness had saved me from a nasty fate. A DCA bullet had made another hole in our window and crashed through the wood above my bed, shooting glass shards and wood splinters all over the room. I picked up the heavy bullet in the closet and have kept it to this day.

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When, as a child, I read about my city, I wondered why I had never seen all the monuments and places described in my books. It ended up creating an almost Norse understanding of the world in my mind, with the Beirut of the books on some higher plane that was entirely inaccessible to us mere mortals. Once, during an Arabic class, we were reading an old text about the capital. A simplified map illustrated it. Seeing the peninsula of Ras Beirut, and remembering I lived very close to the sea, I pointed to it saying: “I live there.” My classmate glanced over and retorted: “No, you don’t.” The teacher, agreed. She didn’t explain, but I gathered from the murmurs that there was a part of the city that I couldn’t possibly come from, and could probably not go to either. And it began right around the corner.

I was 9 when I visited West Beirut for the first time, an adventure as exciting and lengthily prepared as a plane trip. (…) Beyond the no man’s land, lay another Beirut that felt like another country to us. I don’t recall ever feeling deprived at home, but I do remember being enthused by the commercial abundance and bustling street life we found in Hamra. So many shops, and bookshops where magazines were not completely outdated… People actually eyed us and asked us why we weren’t in school. “We’re from Sharqieh”, we said as if that explained everything. Funnily, it did. Our day out in West Beirut was done with a special escort. Our guide was killed shortly after.

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It must have been around that time that one of the school buses hit a landmine while bringing students home. Only the driver was killed, while almost everyone else suffered broken ankles, minor shrapnel wounds, and a severe fright. Unrelatedly, our dentist and one of his sons had received small bits of shrapnel in the scalp and neck. They suffered no serious wounds, but from that incident on the entire family wore shrapnel-proof vests at all times.

link removed – “As for my own book. I’m done with the draft of part 1 and am now facing part 2 (1991-2004). It involves digging up much that I had actively blocked out. I’m not looking forward to it. This is still from part 1:”

While the family kept us mostly out of the political mishmash, they couldn’t keep from us the fact the main enemy was the Syrian army, which occupied all of the country outside the area referred to as “the free Lebanon” (we only knew very vaguely at that point that other people called Israeli occupied the South, but they just as well could have occupied the moon as far as we were concerned).

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Crossing the Green Line twice daily, however, was nothing short of mad. Even today people gape when I mention it. I already mentioned how crouching in the car was necessary because of the snipers, and once past the no man’s land we had to wait forever at the roadblock before finally proceeding, thanks to some special papers, to West Beirut.. Yet it never occurred to me that we didn’t have to do this. Those of our classmates who didn’t go to school in the West during that period were going to have to catch up in summer, and that perspective was a lot more disturbing to me. Facing guns or shells was our daily bread, but to go to school in summer? That would have been abnormal.

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Then a war began in the Gulf...

…Occupation or no occupation, Beirut was preparing to rebuild itself.

End of part 1

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The Syrians had well chosen their timing to complete the invasion of Lebanon: the eyes of the world were riveted on Iraq and Kuwait, and nobody noticed the Syrian army marching into Beirut, raping and looting. For years the outside world literally didn’t know that Lebanon was occupied and governed by Syria. Some thought the war was ended and all was well, others thought it was raging on. Visitors were unfailingly astonished to see roadblocks manned by Syrian soldiers. The crass ignorance of our plight (…) was soul-crushing. They didn’t know. They didn’t care. They were bored of watching Lebanon on the news for 17 years. They seemed to say the show had been way too long and they wanted to move on. The Syrian propaganda machine was only too glad to tell them the show was over and offer them sweets on their way out.

As much as Syria claimed that it was in Lebanon solely to protect it and for a limited time period, its true intentions were hardly a mystery. A joke circulated on the other side of the border: “What is the most beautiful province of Syria? Lebanon.”

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Gulp. Wow.

UPDATE: At the request of the original author, in relation to her safety as a blogger from Beruit, and with an undefined political situation, I have removed some links.  Feel free to contact me directly if you need further info.