Can you imagine what it meant to grow up in Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s? If a shell didn’t kill you, hopelessness surely would. And death by despair is a thousand times worse, and more final, than death by a missile. But something kept me hopeful and alive, day after day, despite all the misery and desolation surrounding me. Something almighty, intensely transformative – something magical: it was literature.
I didn’t read to learn (the latter was a mere collateral benefit); I read to unlearn. To unlearn hate and fear and distress and despair. To unlearn closed doors and clipped wings and tunnels without a light at the end of them. I read to forget everything and everyone that was trying to kill me, outside as well as inside.
Then, from reading, I moved on to writing. It wasn’t a choice; it wasn’t a decision; it wasn’t a luxury: it was a ferocious and vital necessity. I composed poems and invented stories in order to survive; just like my cousin Fouad played the piano in order to survive; just like my friend Leila sketched dresses and our neighbour Sylvia painted, in order to survive. It would come as no surprise that Fouad is now an accomplished pianist, Leila a successful fashion designer, and Sylvia a well-known painter. The likes of them can be found in each and every Lebanese household.
The big war ended – at least officially – in 1990, but our tribulations, our petites guerres, did not. From car bombings to foreign occupations, from kidnappings to assassinations, from political stalemates to confessional tensions, from Israeli rockets to Hezbollah’s gradual takeover of the country, our misfortunes went on and on.
Then, three years ago, while the whole planet was grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic, and Lebanon was also coping with a ghastly economic meltdown – the downfall of our banking sector after years of corruption and mismanagement by the ruling elite – there was a horrific explosion in our port, one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions in history. Caused by a fire, which detonated tonnes of improperly stored chemicals, the blast destroyed nearly a quarter of the city, killing 233 people, injuring 7,000, displacing 300,000 and leaving 80,000 children homeless. Poverty, homelessness, unemployment, insecurity, medication shortage, vanishing services, and human rights violations all followed. The number of young people seeking to emigrate jumped by 50 per cent after the blast. The currency has been devalued by 90 per cent, meaning many people’s life savings have evaporated. You name it: we now have all the ingredients needed to make a people completely lose faith in life.
Nonetheless, despite all that – and perhaps because of all that – the Lebanese creative scene has never been more prosperous and vibrant: it has kept on blooming like an unlikely flower on a volcano’s crater. Painters, sculptors, poets, dancers, photographers, musicians, novelists, designers, playwrights, chefs, performers … these are the superheroes of our country. They are the ones keeping this place from collapsing completely, saving it – and us – from the devastating havoc that politics and politicians have brought, and continue to bring upon us.
Wherever I travel, people ask me about the “Lebanese secret”: what makes us so driven? (Notice how I did not use the word “resilient”, which I, and many others, resent.) Is it the fact that we have been trained, through decades of hardship, to get quickly back on our feet and recover after each blow? Has it become an instinct engraved in our genes? I am convinced it’s much more than that. It’s a defiant, offensive stance, not just a defensive reflex. It is, to put it bluntly, our individual and collective middle finger in the face of everything and everyone that keeps trying to dishearten us, scare us and murder us.
Don’t get me wrong: this is not the cliched refrain of “what doesn’t break us makes us stronger”. I’ve always found that to be horribly reductive of people’s suffering and pain; a way of depriving people of their right to feel vulnerable and wretched. No. This is a story of revenge and atonement through art and creativity. And there’s no sweeter revenge, nor greater atonement.
So, here’s to middle fingers, and to the creators, and creations, that they inspire.
Joumana Haddad
Joumana Haddad is a Lebanese author, journalist, TV presenter and human rights advocate
Aline Kamakian
Chef-restaurateur
Aline Kamakian is the chef-owner of Mayrig, an Armenian restaurant she has spent 20 years building into a Beirut institution, with branches around the Middle East. Today, the restaurant is buzzing with NGO workers who flock there to eat mante dumplings and wild-cherry kebabs in homely surroundings (mayrig means “little mother” in Armenian).
The restaurant is just a few hundred metres from Beirut’s port, and when the blast struck, Kamakian was in the office with her management team. “It was like a huge earthquake, like something sucking you in and then blowing you up,” she says.
None of her team was killed, but many were badly injured. Kamakian found her financial controller under the photocopier. “His left eye was not there and blood was welling up, and he was trembling.” She did her best to stop the bleeding and helped to get him and others to hospital.
That evening she told her staff: “We’re going to rebuild” – and against overwhelming odds she kept her promise. Not only did she get the restaurant back up and running but she managed to keep paying and supporting her team throughout with the help of NGOs and a friend’s crowdfunder in the US.
Kamakian, 54, also fed local people whose homes had been destroyed. Aided by US chef José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen and a team of volunteers, her chefs dished out thousands of hot meals a day for the following two and a half months. Cooking for others was a form of therapy, she says. “It helped us to stand back and be the ones changing things, instead of being the one who takes help.”
The problems persist – electricity keeps cutting out, sourcing produce is a daily challenge – but Kamakian refuses to give up. Her brother in the US begged her to “please get out of this crazy country”. When she mentioned the 65 employees who depend on her, “he said: ‘They will find another job.’ I said: ‘Yes, they will, but I will never find something. I love this country and this is not the way they will shut me up.’”
Aurélien Zouki
Actor, dancer, co-founder of Collectif Kahraba and Hammana Artist House
“We see people arriving exhausted, tense and worried – and then we see them changing,” says Aurélien Zouki, who co-runs Hammana Artist House, a residency space in the tree-lined hills outside Beirut. For artists worn down by financial and social pressures, and those whose homes were destroyed by the 2020 blast, the space has provided a vital refuge in recent years. “Their faces are becoming more relieved,” says Zouki, “and they’re able to dig into their own research.”
The residency was created six years ago by Zouki’s performing arts company Collectif Kahraba, which has been staging workshops, theatrical events and festivals around Beirut for the past two decades.
Essentially, it is “a place where we dialogue, share ideas and brainstorm together on how to continue in this whole mess,” says Zouki. To keep it going, along with the collective’s other work, Zouki and his collaborators have to grapple with unreliable internet and electricity supplies, labyrinthine bureaucracy and dwindling funds. “Everyone is affected by heavy daily concerns that take a lot of mental space and don’t allow a lot of creativity to happen,” he says.
So why continue? Because even if the political situation seems hopeless, art remains as vital as ever. “It’s an alternative door that people can still reach independently of all the political games,” he says. Being human “is not just about destroying and running after profits or political agendas. We are also able to create amazing languages that touch the heart and soul.”
Eric Mathieu Ritter
Fashion designer
One of Lebanon’s most in-demand fashion designers, Eric Mathieu Ritter uses discarded materials found in souks to create his clothes. His label, Emergency Room, is thriving in spite of a turbulent start, with an outlet in Beirut and an international clientele boosted by appearances at fashion weeks around the Middle East and in Europe. “We often talk about the first five years of a business as being the hardest, and I think mine were particularly complicated,” he says. “It can only be better from now on.”
Ritter, 29, studied fashion in Beirut and interned in Paris, but grew disillusioned with the industry and ended up working with underprivileged women in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, “teaching them how to sew, knit and embroider and building a small cooperative”. This led in 2018 to the formation of Emergency Room. He now employs 20 people.
Ritter counts himself lucky that he had one good year of business before the current wave of crises. When Covid struck, his company started making fabric face masks out of upcycled materials. The dire economic situation prompted him to focus more on selling abroad, and when the Beirut blast damaged their physical store in 2020, they had an online shop ready to go. “Being young,” he says, “it was easier for us to adapt each step of the way.”
Unlike many of his friends who have abandoned Lebanon in the past few years, leaving “was never really a thought for me”, says Ritter, who also heads up the fashion department at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts. “At first, I was very angry at the people who left but you’ve got to realise that whereas I have the privilege of having a foreign passport, they don’t. For them, it’s a way of securing whatever future they could get. It’s this harsh realisation that this is not an OK country, not a secure country, not a country that cares about your future.”
Nicole Hanna
Dancer
In 2020, Nicole Hanna was preparing to leave Lebanon for Canada when she got word that her dance group, the Mayyas, had been selected to compete in America’s Got Talent. “I had started filing for immigration,” she said. “When we received the news, I said to myself, maybe I’ll just put Canada on hold and do this one thing.”
A 36-woman group known for their spectacular, kaleidoscopic dance performances, The Mayyas went on to win the 2022 competition. “It was one of the craziest experiences,” she says. Amid all the tumult in Lebanon, “being part of that dance group really gave me hope again that we were able to achieve something”.
Born in 1989, Hanna practised dance throughout her childhood in Beirut but studied biochemistry at university. After graduating, she joined a staffing agency for hospitality events and became a shareholder in the company. The job, which she loved, went quiet during Covid. On the afternoon of 4 August 2020, she left work early and missed the blast, which completely destroyed her office, by 30 minutes.
In the days that followed, people mobilised to clear the wreckage and Hanna joined them. “That really helped me deal with my PTSD, for a while,” she says. “But when we finished cleaning up the streets, that was when I just sat at home and said: ‘Now what?’ I really struggled with insomnia for six months.”
Staying in Lebanon no longer felt tenable. Then came America’s Got Talent. Immediately after the Mayyas’ win, Hanna found herself feeling unexpectedly homesick for Lebanon and made her way back. Now she dances as her main job and tours regularly – in January the Mayyas performed with Beyoncé in Dubai.
Hanna feels that the mood is lifting in Beirut. Businesses are rallying and new places are opening up in the areas worst hit by the blast. “It gives you hope that something eventually will change,” she says.
Frédéric Husseini
Artist
Last October, Frédéric Husseini put on a show of raw, unsettling work in Beirut. Titled Overexposed, it depicted a broken city, its buildings shattered and askew – a clear response to the blast two years earlier. The title refers in part to the city’s fancy new skyscrapers stripped of their glass exteriors. “We have been overexposed by vanity building on quicksand,” he says.
An architect by training, Husseini established himself as an artist in the late 2000s and has exhibited in France and Spain as well as in Beirut. His paintings are abstract but they reflect the world around him, particularly the rough edges of urban landscapes.
They are political, too. “My exhibitions are based on resistance through art, resistance to rebuild a country, and issues around cultural heritage and protection,” says Husseini, who served as Lebanon’s director general of antiquities for a decade until 2010.
Husseini was physically unharmed by the Beirut blast, but he lost a dear friend, the architect Jean-Marc Bonfils, who lived close to the port. “It was like a tsunami or earthquake,” he recalls. The people caught up in it “were not exposed in the streets or in a battle, they were just sitting inside their houses, most of them, and were killed by a very simple weapon, which is glass”.
Prior to the blast, Husseini had been experiencing artist’s block. His motivation had stalled after the disappointment of the 2019 revolution. “People lost their will to fight for something new,” he says. “I stopped painting completely.”
The blast compounded his block, overshadowing anything he might think to paint. It wasn’t until early 2021 that Husseini took up his brush again. The resulting paintings are among his most powerful, visceral work.
Blu Fiefer
Musician and record label owner
The past few years have completely reshaped the music of Mexican-Lebanese hip-hop artist Blu Fiefer, not least politically. “There’s so much anger,” she says of her latest songs, which she is releasing with self-directed videos before a full album drops later this year. “It was not an option not to talk about what was happening.”
Her biggest hit to date, Sint El Ew, opens with the words “It’s 2020 and the country is fucked”, before running through the calamities that have befallen Lebanon, from the thwarted revolution to the collapse of the pound, to Covid and the Beirut port explosion. “How lucky one is to live in this shitty year,” she sings over a juddering beat.
Fiefer, 30, took part in the October 2019 uprising to protest Lebanon’s tanking economy and rampant political corruption. “We had small victories,” she recalls. “We’re an extremely diverse country, and I feel like when the revolution started, we got to see other people’s perspectives. It really opened our eyes and there was a lot of hope – hope that we could unite against corruption.”
That hope soon dimmed, and things went really dark after the blast when a peaceful protest to demand accountability from the authorities was met by gunfire from police. “It was very clear from the beginning that nobody cared,” she says. “And then when they started shooting at us and my friends got shot, that was when we realised – this [protest] is not working.”
Sint El Ew, which went viral after its November 2020 release, marked a turning point for Fiefer’s music. Where she had previously written and performed in English, now she was singing in Arabic. It had become increasingly hard to listen to music from other parts of the world, she says, because “there was nothing that we could relate to. We felt really isolated.” Switching to Arabic was a way of “representing where we are and giving an outlet to Lebanese people”.
Sélim Mourad
Film-maker, writer
In late 2021, during a scriptwriting residency in Paris, Sélim Mourad had the idea to shoot a documentary that would encapsulate the feeling of living in Lebanon during these turbulent times. Returning home, he secured some funding and shot the film last November under the working title Jungle Heat.
Chance was at the heart of Mourad’s method. “I would decide the first scene, and whatever interests me there – a character, or something that was said – would lead me to the second scene, and so on.” The shoot, which lasted eight days, was “so blessed. Doors were opened for us. We heard very beautiful stories.” The film is now in post-production. “If one of your readers would like to invest to help us finish the film, it would be great,” he laughs.
Mourad, 35, is a film-making graduate. He had spent the past decade teaching film in Beirut schools and making documentaries and shorts in his spare time, many of them self-funded.
Then, as the pound plummeted, his salary lost most of its value. The port explosion destroyed his flat, forcing him to move in with his parents (he was at the other side of the city at the time of the blast; his cat survived with minor injuries). During the pandemic, he spent a whole academic year teaching online from his parents’ small flat. “I remember crying before opening the meetings,” he says. “It became too much, for a salary that was 5% of what it was before.” He quit teaching in 2021 and now makes ends meet as a director-for-hire.
When he went to Paris in October 2021, “many friends were telling me: ‘Tear up your passport and stay, don’t ever come back,’” he says. “But my work, my life is in Beirut.”
In spite of all that’s happened, Mourad can imagine brighter times ahead. “I feel Lebanon is passing through a dark night of the soul,” he says, “and I want to be part of the rebirth.”
Carole Abboud
Actor, director, producer
Carole Abboud is a highly regarded Beirut-based actor, director and producer. She has starred in numerous films made in Lebanon and beyond, including Phantom Beirut, Never Leave Me and Terra Incognita, which premiered at Cannes. Normally an optimist, she hit an all-time low after the failure of the 2019 revolution and the collapse of Lebanon’s economy: “A veil was ripped off,” she says.
When Lebanese people first took to the streets to protest “it was like magic”, she says. “To see that people, despite all their differences, were united enough to be in one place, it was good to turn things upside down.”
That hope was dashed as the revolution stalled and the scale of Lebanon’s economic woes became clear. Then came the Beirut blast. Abboud was meant to meet a director that evening at a cafe by the port but neither called to confirm, so she stayed at home. “I wasn’t injured, but I was in shock. And we’re still, all of us, very traumatised.”
Since then, in her professional life at least, Abboud has been busier than ever. Thanks to the spike in demand for home entertainment during Covid, she’s been starring in numerous TV shows, including an Egyptian horror series, The Visit. Last year, she won a best performance award at the Cairo film festival for her role in the Lebanese film Riverbed. Currently, she is rehearsing in Beirut for an ambitious multidisciplinary project involving theatre, music and dance.
Her work has always been political. Along with many in her generation, growing up during the 1975-90 civil war, she had “a will to build a better future for others” by trying to help reunite a country riven by religious and political differences.
But she worries that she’s lost her ability to dream of a better tomorrow. “I don’t think, in this survival mode, I can come up with a clear vision of any future. A bit of love and care would be enough for now, to help me wait for this dark tunnel to end.”
