All countries living on the edge overflow with paradox. Because of war or famine
or internecine conflict or fratricide or the hell of it all, humanity gets to
showcase its demons only to egg on the angels. Like that, destruction wrestles
with creation, lunacy with sobriety, gunfire with poetry.
Like that, Lebanon seems to have been living day in, day out. Twenty
years after the supposed end of the civil war, our sectarianism remains as
treacherous as it is vulgar. Not from nothing the video parties in Tripoli to
watch Qatari or Saudi sponsored Sunni fighters munching on Alawite
hearts. Not lost on us either the sight of Hezbollah mothers ululating sons “martyred”
while beating
Sunni Syrian heads to the ground. All, of course, courtesy of the regional
struggle for power in Syria in which Lebanese, dependable proxies that we are,
play the foot soldiers.
And yet, as is the wont of Lebanon, this month alone saw Beirut
host the Hay Festival, Ashkal Alwan’s Home Works Forum, the
Samir Kassir Beirut Festival and the Inaugural Conference of the Asfari Institute
for Civil Society and Citizenship. To cap it all, a group of art patrons has
just launched the Lebanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, with a singular
work by the ever so conceptual (and remarkable) Akram Zaatari.
No need to juxtapose the colliding images for message and
meaning. It’s a stale technique and, anyway, this is not about the push and
pull that wracks our so-called Lebanese identity. These ostensible paradoxes,
two decades into this post-war situation, actually beggar a fundamental
question: Are our creative energies little more than forced vigor in an
otherwise severely impaired nation, or do they, in fact, betray a part of
Lebanon no less real than its maladies?
In other words, are we part lie, or are we actually an extreme
type of Gemini?
Let me go even further: Close to 100 years on, is Lebanon more than a name, more than a space
between four borders? Battered, yes, but whole. If it is, then ours is indeed
a land of anomalies and absurdities.
If it is not, then we are the inhabitants of countless hamlets
simply sharing the same geography and partaking, for convenience, of the same
atrociously inefficient and corrupt state bureaucracy. Which would mean that
the only lie here is Lebanon, and the only paradox is our reflexive refusal to
treat it as such in full view of this stark reality.
Convoluted? Not really.
For years I have maintained that cosmopolitan, freewheeling
Beirut floats like a bubble above tragic landscapes; that the blithe pretense
is all ours and the dire truth is, say, Akkar’s. The contrast was
always meant to betray much more than the usual class divides and
periphery-center alienations that plague many a country. It meant to question
the very right of this tiny patch of Beirut to claim a presence as valid as Lebanon’s
other selves.
I was wrong. My mistake all along was in assuming, when it came
to this argument, that Lebanon may be mad, but it is one and distinct, the
actual sum of its many bizarre pieces. And so I thought that if there is an
overarching Lebanese paradox, it is simply in the way the genuine accommodates
the contrived, or in the way fiction mingles with fact.
It’s above my
pay grade to critique Akram Zaatari’s Letter
to a Refusing Pilot, but my gratitude to him all the same for nudging
me to revisit a matter I had long ago tucked away in the attic of my mind.
A conceptual piece, the film shows with almost unbearable grace that all
politics is very personal in anguished locales.
It is ironic that
Zaatari composed this Letter for
Lebanon’s Pavilion, because it flouts all boundaries as it looks back and
inward. The high school, which his father ran and which an Israeli pilot
refused to bomb in 1982, only to be brought down by another, is the bond
that ties the narrative even as it deconstructs it.
His beginnings.
Imagination as flight and sanctuary.
Sidon, his city.
War, loss, survival, youth as a continuum.
The skies that could be so unforgiving and the sea that could
be so merciful.
People disobeying orders on contested terrains.
These are the Letter’s frames.
It’s not surprising that Zaatari’s quest holds fast onto Albert
Camus’, “I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.”
Do we not love Lebanon when we love the justice of letting her go?
Do we not love Lebanon when we love the justice of letting her go?
