You know the
shopworn expression? A house is its master’s character! Well, there is
no place quite like that sprawling abode up in mountainous Beit Meri, a 30-minute
ride from Beirut, which lifts such banality into something close to wisdom.
The main hallway cascades down into a vision of the sea and the
fireplace warmth of the main living rooms. Mid-stairs, the library hangs to the
left, austere, majestic, inhabited. On walls, Byzantine icons intrude on modern
art. The bedroom to the side of the library is ascetic-bare, and so is the
dinning room but for a subtle elegance and ceilings high enough to render lone
voices clangorous. The eeriness of the inner sanctums, where guests rarely were
invited to tread, is softened only by the breeziness of the meandering garden.
Up and down, twists and turns, lightness and whispers, a passion for the here
and now, a longing for the gods.
That was Ghassan Tueni!
He had a rapacious appetite for that cigarette, for nightlong
banters, for early morning sweeps of the pen, for power, for self…
The public persona was colorful, dramatic. The private man was the same, his panache legendary,
his personal tragedies Shakespearean. There was an unrequited love between him
and life; he loved her unconditionally, recklessly; she was whimsical, sadistic, keener on those stabs of anguish
than with her driblets of mercy.
Ghassan segued between politics and journalism, waltzing life
away between two mean lovers. The performance was often flawless, but the trip
ups were awkward and embarrassing. The dossier is not thick with evidence, but
the episode that seared him the most was his stint as adviser to former
president Amin Gummayyel, a man who, many agree, was very becoming of Lebanon
but not of Ghassan Tueni.
His sword and shield was Annahar, for a long time one of the
Arab world’s feisty broadsheets
thanks to Ghassan and his remarkable ability to make his instinctive liberalism
and his sponsors’ unrelenting conservatism cohabit. But the toll hung heavy,
and well before the end, this delicate balance was no more.
About Lebanon he was unwavering, stubbornly magnanimous about
its failings and absurdly rhapsodic about its specialness. His famous words, “The
war of others on Lebanese land,” say it all. For him, Lebanon was almost always
victim to every insult but its own utter lack of respect for itself.
Ghassan fascinated, puzzled and infuriated his friends just as
much as he did his foes. He was made for accolades—yes, he was. But every good quality
in him flirted shamelessly with its nemesis.
He was brainy
but careless. A resounding success and a disappointment. As capricious as he
was gracious. Highbrow and hard knuckled. A wit with an inexplicable tolerance
for bores. A giant with a weakness for dwarfs. An enlightened man who was too ready to
entertain the interests of those who preferred life at its dimmest.
It is vintage Ghassan that he should fade just as we Arabs are agitating
to come out of our own slumber. But then he had grown quiet years ago. Long
before a series of strokes banished him to a punishing silence, his pain had
become immeasurable, his days sedate, his pulse faint.
In due time, much will be written about Ghassan and his era, a
time when the Arab world turned every moment of possibility into a stupefying
dead end, a time when Lebanon itself made of a presumably interesting
experiment in consociational democracy a forbidding showcase of sectarian
bloodletting. No doubt, much will be written about Ghassan’s legacy in this
unforgiving trajectory.
But if the narrative means to illuminate and instruct, it would
have to tell the story of modern Arab journalism in making this region’s
downhill slide all the more inexorable. History is home to many a progressive
journalist who either could not or would not resist the pull of power, for
survival, for fear, for proximity to that proverbial ear. History is home as
well to many who did resist and died a miserable death. Here, in the Arab
world, these journalists’ dilemma was every good man and woman’s, who often
were forced to countenance an existence stripped of meaning or principle.
By the turn of the 21st century, you were hard
pressed to name a publication that was not outright owned by patrons—public or
private— who were no longer content with mere influence. In Lebanon, once an
arena of relatively intrepid
speech, the practice, not coincidently, is still at its most unseemly.
We are now—dare we hope!--upon a different age. Extraordinarily,
a new vigor promises to enliven politics, whilst the fourth estate of old continues to nibble on the extreme
margins of dissent. But if the early signs are to be believed, Arab print journalism
may yet enjoy its own revival.
You’re mistaken if you’re sensing judgment on this page. Mine
are just fleeting ruminations about a pocket of Arab history that left most of
us in lament about the terrible choices we weaved for ourselves.
Those who loved Ghassan—gems, warts and all, like me--will have
no trouble tracing the man’s grace in a life teeming with brave stands,
fortitude, wiliness, love, humor, sadness, lapses and contradictions.
Rest in peace, amou Ghassan. An eternity without pain—at long last!
