Raining without Gutters

March 31st 2008 9:45am

All the Ani songs on my ipod are best listened to when it’s raining. Good thing it’s raining. The drops smash into concrete breaking into a thousand pieces of glass; someone always ends up bloody.

In Lebanon, there are no gutters so the streets become rivers, almost reminiscent of when flooding meant life and food. Except now there are cars beeping and yelling at one another, organized chaos.

Your pants get soaked with all that is Beirut because the ground has seen it all. Not in some romantic fierce way that we attribute to walls of old buildings or a desk of someone revolutionary- something that just breaths the history into your being, but rather the it’s the ground, full of dirt, cats, trash, and sewage, memories of all the wars and all the struggles personal and political. And the makeshift river rushes it all away from our memories so that our mind  won’t think of what is to come. Although our eyes and ears take all that is around us, documenting each instance and filing it away in the depths of our minds to be forgotten and remembered later in hindsight

Journal Entries - For Elena

March 9th, 2008

I haven’t spoken to Elena in almost two months. I haven’t heard the sweet song of my sister’s voice. I’ve been able to read her words and imagine how her voice would ring out and what expression she would wear. I see Elena in my mind’s eye. I am capable of this but there’s a small lack of groundedness. The roots aren’t rotting, it’s just the ground around it feels a little too loose. But my heart feels strong in my love for her. I stay connected emotionally and intuitively, as we always shared.

March 12th, 2008

Her voice sang “happy birthday!!!!” over the telephone. The cadence and the different tones of happiness sounded like my mother. My mother I thought to myself, how wonderful! It was until she asked, “So how is your day?” that I realized the common mistake lots of people make especially when all three Shahin-Wood womben are in the same household answering all different types of phones. Basically, it was Elena and I was ecstatic. I laughed loudly, rushed to the balcony and called her name into the streets of Beirut on the night of my birth. It was as if I had been thirsty for two months, I would drink and drink but my veins were dusty crevices, her voice was a cold drink of water- not from a bottle or the tap but straight from the source.

It was as if the world was just her voice and mine, and they laid together cuddling in the sunlight. She was whom I needed to speak with, to tell her of a boy, who in the first few days together, I realized I had spent a hundred lifetimes before. It was in my sisters heart that I could confide what I wanted to shout from my balcony—that my heart loves another.

Beautiful AUB

Written about a month ago:

I was at AUB today and the world was beautiful. At least my world. My camera flickered, this angle, this lighting, over here, and there get that. But it was when I put my camera away that sweet nectar filled my lungs and kissed the inside of my body. I was so busy trying to capture the essence of beauty, that beauty had almost eluded me. As if I could just capture the Image for all time, mount it on paper as a hunter mounts a deer, or as to seal this fragrance in a jar.

While my day was busily beautiful it remains a horror for Gaza, as over 100 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed since this past Wednesday. Although the fighting has ceased for the ‘peace’ talks to commence, the Israeli government assures us this is only a respite. At AUB, my school, students wore Hata’s in support, of the victims in Gaza. It was the first time that I saw the dead and mourners on the news, as children, mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters cried with a ferocity that ate at the insides of their bodies, a pain so overwhelming the body and brain do not know what to do. It was strange to see this as I sat pretty comfortably in Beirut, only few miles away. I didn’t know whether to be grateful for the images I saw to truly know the abhorrence of what is happening, or to be upset for the mourners and the dead to have not only lost their lives or the loved ones but to have lost dignity, so that we could have understanding.

And what does this mean for the Lebanese? In 2006 you’ll remember that Israel had launched a huge offensive in Gaza before waging its thirty-day war in Lebanon. Many people speak of war in its inevitability, not if, but when, all with mixed emotions. Surprisingly some young Lebanese, look to the ‘incoming’ war with a tainted bitter-sweet taste. Bitter in the anger that festers in every cell of your body, sweet in the concrete identification of who the enemy is, of where that anger is directed. As stated in my previous post, of overcoming divisions, Lebanon is detrimentally divided, pointing fingers and unable to let go of the past. Let’s face it, letting go of a past that harrowing is not that easy.

But what about the families that are just struggling to get by, that just want to see their children grow up. It’s not something, I feel that any government, institution, or organization has the right to jeopardize, or rather completely cast aside.

What is right in a society on the edge of war, either between each other or against Israel? Where does one find the answers of right and wrong when everything contradicts itself here? For example, there is effectively no government still, as the elections for president have yet again been post-poned, and parliament has not met in over a year. However, the country still operates, people go to school and work, they go out, celebrate, take service’s and eat ice cream. I’m not so sure that most places would be able to function as well as Beirut and Lebanon does.

Even then, functionality is timed by the ticks of the clock each day as we move further into the inevitability.

A Poem for Sisters

It’s a cold day

the kind for sweaters

hot coffee

and lena

Where sisters giggle-

the soul-mates to their days

sweet cuddles in their homeland

The day is ripe with Al-Uzza and Allat

sitting freely singing the laundry

drying in the wind

The ground fertle with seed

Their hearts content with love for each other

     

Ok so I’m bad at a personal blog

This blog is here to let you know that I have 3 blog drafts all getting ready for the press but also letting you know that internet is slow and that life is complicated.

Yala visit the photos on flickr and let me know what you think.  More to come in two days… I promise.

One Month in Lebanon

So it is the eve of my one month anniversary with Lebanon. Oh Libnan what we have experienced in the past 30 days. Beautiful, sunny days, that warm more than the body, harsh, chilly days, that seep in your skin with the rain. O Lebnan with your complicating things and your never resolving anything, with your normalizing gun-shots and explosions. I’m in constant negotiations and analyzation- which apparently isn’t even a word- of who I am. I was ‘going home,’ I was finding what it was to be me among ‘my people.’ But discouragement settles in deep with disillusion. Moving forward is muddied with the complications of Lebanon’s realities.

I am home in a sense, as I have never really felt this at home in this skin. Although, my tongue feels a little out of the loop, when I’m expected to respond. I guess it’s the ideal of my homeland that has been removed from it’s pedestal, as it should. Lebanon isn’t everything, and at the same time she is. She is a paradox, at once unified and sorely divided. She is in psychological terms, a world of individualism and collectivism, focusing on the individual and at the same time the group. She is a contradiction as all truths are. She would be the personification of real beauty, with expensive shoes, if she were a person. She is returning and she is leaving. She is home.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been constantly running somewhere, anywhere, to make sure that this school endeavor could be a success. Run here, run there, and then come back here, sign this paper, and this one too but with your eyes closed this time, pay for this piece of paper so that you can get your loan to pay for school, talk to your family doctor, “you don’t have one in Lebanon?” The interesting part is that, just like the US, the American University of Beirut, is just a reflection of the disorganization on a national level. The United States for example, is a business, and thus their institutions of higher learning are businesses that happen to give you an education at the same time. A damn good one, no doubt. And while the country, runs on processes that are rarely broken or changed, save the current administration, thus their schools run on strict processes and guidance that one can come to count on. In Lebanon, the country at large is having trouble even electing their president on time, AUB has similar problems of a lesser magnitude that leaves no room for any type of handholding. There is no guiding, yet the processes are unknown and unfamiliar to most students. Which then leaves the students in frantic disarray, running around the campus, searching for signatures and other stitches left undone. The orientation program does a great job of trying to fill the gaps for the new arrivals, but like all successful change, it has to be a joint effort between the grassroots and the top down.

Otherwise, AUB has been amazing. Unlike large Universities in the US, each class is no more than 25-30 people, so the learning is a rich experience combined with the atmosphere of a large University filled with variety, yet it’s classrooms have the feel of a small liberal arts college. In my Art Appreciation class, which is basically an analysis of different cultural art in different time periods, the classroom is packed with my classmates, intrigue bubbling, everyone has something interesting to add. Of course I do as well, but sometimes when distraction creeps over me I look at the bulletin board which has Kurt Cobain written in chalk on it. My mind brings me back to eight years old and ripped jeans and flannel, the epitome of cool, even to me now. Which I guess is a good lead to my Psych 102 class. We’ve been studying the different perspectives of what it is that influences us, why we are, the way we are. Each view so specific to a certain aspect of life- our upbringing, our environment, our genetics, our culture. It seems the psychologists have deemed each of their studies the most true but the interesting part is, they’re all true. You can’t have one without the other, and for the most part it seems we have had little control over why we are these certain ways, but we can and must take an active part in who we will become.

Most days you can find me with a coffee in hand at the green oval, with many different characters in my life. But mainly three people Hocine, Zalfa, and Doua. Hocine and Zalfa are professors at AUB and are friends of my brother Radney when he lived in Lebanon. They have become a constant in my life, helping me with any sort of problem and are often there laughing loudly and analyzing most things to finite detail. It’s been a wonderful transition with them as most of my friends back home have been at least four years older than me, and as a twenty year old freshman most of my classmates are three years younger. Doua is a freshman as well, a New Yorker from Staten Island and a Palestinian from Jordan. She grew up in both places constantly moving. It’s been great to find a New Yorker who has a similar love for the region in which we reside.

Ok now for small details-

• Grocery men in Hamra are my Arabic teachers – testing me with the names of their fruits (fweki) and vegetables (khoura)

• Nine bulbs of garlic is less than a dollar
• A veggie cheese sandwhich or in Arabic – Sage (Saj) Gibne w khoura is also $1.30
• My classes are all on MWF
• My brothers are coming to see me in a couple weeks
• I had my hair professionally done and it cost about $10
• I have straight hair for a little while – weird

 

Overcoming Divisions

Let’s see, for the past two weeks, you may have found me kissing the cheeks of many different Lebanese types – mainly the loud, beautiful cousins that also feed me three meals for each one.  Or maybe at my new found favorite, the artsy Graffiti café, drinking down a café late- the kind that coats your mouth, while listening to venerable favorites or the nostalgic goodies of the early 90’s.  Or was it in the Chouf ( a mountain south of Beirut – home to the cedars and my cousins), clicking away at my camera, trying vainly to capture this essence of dramatic Lebanon.  Either way, I know you’ve seen me laughing; my cheeks hurt so much these days and my stomach aches with happiness.

Recently, in between latte’s and bouts of laughter, I’ve been soaking in Robert Fisk’s, Pity the Nation, or rather any writing I can get from him.  He’s been my favorite journalist for the past two years, with a writing style and wisdom that you rarely find these days.  It’s not just his words, it’s his experiences paired with his humanity that shapes each sentence.  Feverishly underlining, eyes scanning across the page, this page.

In a more ‘sinister’ look… we are divided.  I’ve grown and been conditioned in a divided world called the United States, where racism was supposedly taken care of in the 60’s.  What a wonderful fairytale written into the very text books at school. I grew up a biracial baby part Lebanese part European, divisions were written into the very veins of my body.  Those divisions, they weren’t easy and at every chance I fought to push them further and further away.  And yet they creep around the corners reminding me again and again this world is divided.

In a more sinister look we are dividing in the familiar and dangerous ways of thirty years ago, when the Lebanese civil war was just beginning.  And, yet as any broken system the political parties have once again manipulated till we are blind to what it really means to be a people, what it really means to be Lebanese.  All of us regardless of religion want similar if not the same things, and so similar are we- in the way we look, in the way we eat, the way we speak, the food we make, and how we force feed that food to our family 10 helpings out of love. 

To me this is the saddest thing, to be divided when it is futile and fruitless.  Our needs are met when we come to one another, hear one another, forgive one another, and above all love one another.  We are all guilty; there are no clean hands.  However, we can make new hands and teach those hands to love others as their own children, as their own lover, as their own hands.

En Route au Liban

En route to Libnan, I sat at the gate in London lost in thought of what it means to be me. What my identity is. Two years ago, I was so eager to come to be with the Lebanese, to finally be Lebanese that I didn’t realize how American I was. Or rather that the culture of America has allowed me to grow into the strong, beautiful, provocative woman- political and otherwise. That was “easier” maybe to develop that in me. Or maybe my fear is that I will have to put that on hold in Lebanon? Premature ideas of what will be.

Middle -East Airlines reminds me of Libnan, people sharing seats, thoughts, and meals together. The worn down seats, reminding me of Lebanon’s worn exterior, wrinkles in around the lips from all the kisses to loved ones, from all the hard days spent in tears and despair. So old, is she and has lived her fair share of experiences pushing them in extremes in all directions. She is my family, intensely in love with one another, and intensely wounded. Wounds smoothed over in garlic, lemon, olive oil as her hospitality insists on you sharing 5 more helpings.