The Same Defeats: On Half a Century of Growing up as a Child of the War

I remember my first encounter with the dark longing that has shadowed me throughout my life, with its full power and shape. February 14, 2005: a blue-skied, spring-like day. I had just finished the morning gossip over the coffee station at work and taken a seat at my desk when a light rumble rolled through the office and the windows rattled in their frames. My body recognized it before my mind could even find the words, the adrenaline leaping me to the balcony along with everyone else in the office. A faint wisp of black smoke rose up somewhere in the distance in the direction of the sea as the details — gathered from phone calls and news broadcasts and office speculation — began to coalesce: an assassination, targeting Rafic Hariri. The bomb was so huge it had taken out the entire Corniche in front of the Saint Georges Hotel. Our boss interrupted our nervous chatter, deciding it would be best if we all cleared out of the office and went home to wait out what might happen next. On my walk home from the office in Hamra to Ain al-Mreisseh, I weaved through the stuck traffic with a lightness supplied by the feeling of an unexpected holiday, a jittery excitement coming to me from the chaos of an entire city reeling with the hugeness of what had happened.

The closer I got to my neighborhood, just a couple of streets away from the massive explosion, the more glass there was strewn and glittering all over the pavement. I entered my apartment to find that all the windows but one had been blown out; the one I’d left open was intact. The old childhood lesson remembered, though I had no inkling I’d ever need it again. Along with the tinkle of broken glass being swept up, news jingles came to me from the shattered windows of all the surrounding apartments, the way they used to make their way into my childhood bedroom at night — broadcasts that I couldn't quite hear, but whose serious tones had all the reassurance of a lullaby, sung by a grownup who would watch over you in your sleep.

Standing there that afternoon in Ain al-Mreisseh, in the midst of all the confusion and uncertainty, I felt something else stirring inside the shell of fear. The most intense, delicious sensation of relief; a feeling of dissolving back in time.

I was born three years and seven months — almost to the day — from when the Lebanese civil war began on April 13, 1975. This means that I, too, will soon be half a century old.

My whole life I’ve marked my age by the war, and marked the war, and our growing distance from the war, by my age. This is what it means to be someone who lived through any part of that bloody decade and a half: whether conscious or not, it remains the single organizing principle by which we make sense of the world.

The war was synonymous with Beirut, with Lebanon, inextricable from it. To this day it remains my Beiruti citizenship, stronger than any nufoos scrawled down on my hawiyeh.

There is little that surprises me when it comes to violence and injustice: I never experienced a moment of disappointed realization as I came to terms with just how terrible people could be to one another. I grew up knowing that the world contained militiamen who, with the authority of hatred and a gun, could herd people into groups for roadside executions and dump their bodies into unmarked graves. But I also knew that it contained neighbors (like ours) who ran into the street under hails of sniper fire to drag strangers out of range. Or teachers (like my fifth-grade teacher) who taught multiplication drills by day and volunteered with the Red Cross by night, pulling bodies out from under the rubble and scrubbing the blood out from under their fingernails by candlelight afterwards before falling exhausted to sleep.

For those of my generation, who lived our entire childhoods according to the war’s staccato rhythms of artillery fire and disrupted schedules, to recall any happy memory from those years is also to recall the war. And to recall the war is also to recall a longing for a past not ours: we grew up fed on the pablum of nostalgia before we were ever old enough to reach for it ourselves. Through our elders, we were conditioned to live in a perpetual yearning for a time before — that golden age before the war. Our parents sighed over it, our grandparents recounted it, Fairouz sang of it every morning on our radios and everybody wept. But it was not our longing, because we didn’t know that time. It was as unreal, as fantastical as a fairytale. The only thing that was real was what the war made real: the sound of machinegun fire; the games of ghammeeda and cards in the malja’; the browned bananas ambered in Jell-O at every birthday party; the squeal of battery-powered neon lights; the test you prayed you could get out of with a well-timed bout of shelling; the Sunday lunches that went on forever, the Sunday lunches that sometimes had to be hastily packed up and abandoned so that we could troop down into the malja’; the kitchen drawer filled with loose rolling batteries and yet not a single one with enough power to keep the flashlight going; the siphon your dad kept to be able to fill up gas from friends’ cars, or plastic bottles when the gas could only be had on the black market; the neighbor whose face had nearly been shot clean off by a sniper, whose scar you weren’t allowed to stare at (“it’s a miracle he’s alive at all mama!”), and yet still you did imitations of the sideways slant of his mouth as he talked to make your little brother laugh. These were the indoor lives we led, all the hugeness of our childhoods mostly compressed behind closed doors.

I understood then the full power of the darkness that had emerged with me from the darkness of the malja’ — that had perhaps emerged with us all. It was not a nostalgia for a childhood lived during the war. It was a nostalgia for the war itself.

The war was synonymous with Beirut, with Lebanon, inextricable from it. To this day it remains my Beiruti citizenship, stronger than any nufoos scrawled down on my hawiyeh. It doesn’t matter that my parents are “from” other towns, and that according to Lebanon’s sectarian rules of belonging, I am therefore “not from” Beirut. The war overrides all that: the city and I shared — share — a primal wound. And, cut off from my parents’ villages by checkpoints, West Beirut was my only village, its khtoot tamess marking the limits of my belonging. I would not encounter what lay beyond them until those frontlines were dismantled (at least in theory), after the Taif Agreement was signed, putting an end to the era of overt violence and ushering in a new age: the bloodless suffocation of neoliberalism.

But for a long time I was oblivious to the language required to understand any of that. In the decade that followed, as I grew into a teenager, the post-war era felt like one of infinite growth and possibility, as open as the once-divided city that my friends and I now crossed and recrossed with the impunity of complete ownership over both the past and the future. We zoomed arrogantly past the collapsed husks of checkpoints, confident in the knowledge that we had emerged from something to which we would never return.

I made friends who had grown up in various enclaves of the city and country that had once been closed to me, only to find that they shared the same memories, had grown up watching the same Arabic-dubbed Japanese cartoons — “Jazeerat al Kanz,” “Sasuki,” “Grendizer,” “Zeina al-Nahla” — and singing along to the same ad jingles — “Shou battariytak?” “Ray-o-vac!” — and knew all the words to Remi Bendali’s “Atuna el-Toufoule.” They had also played Monopoly and arba‘ta‘esh in underground shelters deep into the night, all notion of bedtime obliterated by the deafening sound of falling shells. The only difference was who they had been hiding from. How could the future not be better? It belonged to us now. For despite any differences the adults still had over who the true enemy had been, we children knew only one: the war itself. We had all emerged from the same darkness of childhood, blinking at the sudden light, united by our common knowledge of the damage and horror of war. We went to vigils commemorating April 13 every year, holding up candles and photographs with the families of the 17,000 disappeared. “Tenzakar ta ma ten‘ad,” we’d recite, “we remember so as not to repeat” — as though the only thing missing was some kind of collective grief therapy for the country, and then we’d be able to move past it all; that if we only made the right art, built the right monument, ousted the right leaders, had the right conversations in the right public forums, we could get past it.

This is what it means to be someone who lived through any part of that bloody decade and a half: whether conscious or not, it remains the single organizing principle by which we make sense of the world.

In the weeks that followed Hariri’s assassination, uncertainty reigned. Protests, counter-protests; army tanks stationed on the Ring bridge; a military curfew; friends gathered at all hours of the day and night, watching the news together, whiling away the hours as all work and all schedules were forgotten. My office had us come in some days and stay home others. The Spanish classes I’d been taking at the Cervantes Institute downtown halted; I’d been behind anyway and felt relieved I wouldn’t have to study for the final exam. All of downtown shut down, in fact. Once again the map of the city was redrawn, with certain areas off limits; once again the city felt like a living, unpredictable thing, expanding and contracting at will. If the material of reality itself was so collapsible, then I was beholden to nothing and no one. In that shifting space I bore no responsibility for anything except trying to keep myself alive. Deadlines didn’t exist, because neither did the future. Only the endless now. I spent entire days floating through my apartment, reading, watching TV, cooking, listening to music, napping at odd hours, indulging in the endless holiday, the buzz of fear and apprehension not quashing the lightness of existence, but adding to it.

One night, as the news droned on (I kept it on more as a kind of comforting background noise rather than out of any real desire for information), I was jolted into sudden attention by a familiar cadence: some talking head advocating for more staunch division between the sects, between those who “loved life” and those who cheered for death. We needed, he said, a “bold new direction” for the country’s future. We have to, he said, “avoid repeating the mistakes of the civil war.” We’d gone to school together; he’d been two grades younger. I had a moment of vertigo seeing the two versions of his face layered atop one another. The chubby, hairless preteen face overlaid by the bearded, hard-eyed adult one. My god, I remember thinking, when did we get so old? When did we turn from those who hid from the world to those who were now making it? I understood then the full power of the darkness that had emerged with me from the darkness of the malja’ — that had perhaps emerged with us all. It was not a nostalgia for a childhood lived during the war. It was a nostalgia for the war itself.

“Tenzakar ta ma ten‘ad,” we’d recite, “we remember so as not to repeat” — as though the only thing missing was some kind of collective grief therapy for the country, and then we’d be able to move past it all.

I had the same longing for that past of the time before, before the war ended, that my parents had had for their time before, before the war began. But as the disasters in Lebanon have continued and mounted, every subsequent disaster — from the endless car bombs following Hariri’s assassination, to the 2006 war to the Syrian civil war next door, to the economic collapse, the port explosion, and now, worst of all, the decimation of half the country by the barbarity of the Israeli military — has brought us ever-closer to a resumption of the civil war. Even the responsibility of keeping myself alive seems too big a burden now. There is no sense that the grownups have it under control. We are the grownups now; we are the ones either steering this ship into the rocks, or else failing to divert its course. This shadow that stalks me is no longer a mysterious doppelgänger, drawn to the excitement of the unknown, but the exhausted, broken shell of a self that doesn’t know how to exist except in the single moment of the known.

For it turns out that the war ended the way childhood ended: at first seemingly left behind entirely, a time to which you will never return. But then, as you approach middle age, you realize: the more distant you get, the closer it looms. And you realize, too, that everything was already decided there already, in childhood — the future, its horizons, its possibilities.

Half a century on, the civil war remains more present and alive than ever, and no amount of remembering can ward off its return. Because the conditions that made it are ever with us. Only the generation bringing it on has changed. It is us now.

And yet I still have a pathological nostalgia for it. Yes, I long for simpler times. Or perhaps I long rather for a simpler war. One toward which I bore no responsibility. One in which I was free to imagine myself innocent, a child.