Lebanon
Oriental Night
Or how to build castles in Spain while smoking chicha
One chicha please. Two actually. Lemon-mint for her, two-apple for me. Local beer. Beirut? Almaza? Go for an Almaza! Two! It is one in the morning and we have been building castles in Spain for the past couple of hours while smoking our water pipes.
The well-groomed-well-behaved client base of the early evening is steadily replaced by more sophisticated clients, for lack of a more suitable term. The valets rush to attend to the German sedans and other Range Rovers to which the little commoners of the early evening give way. Less students. More Rolexes. More Polo riders and flashier horses on the gents shirts, more cleavage for the ladies.
We Lebanese are fans of the bling style. Nothing illustrates better this mix of show-off and bigger-is-better attitude than the size of the horses on the Ralph Lauren shirts that dress our oversized egos. We are experts at anything and everything. Economy, business, politics, fashion, you name it. We know it all and we loudly dispense our self-proclaimed knowledge to whoever wants to listen. “They” do not get it. “We” now better.
We, however, obviously failed at attending to this small piece of land on the Mediterranean shores, but it is not our fault. Everyone knows that the country is playground to the regional and world powers and that fate gave us impossible neighbors. We made so sure to repeat it endlessly to whoever would listen that we ended up believing it ourselves. If you probed our collective mind, you would hear these cold words:
Our destiny does not belong to us, it is decided in the chancelleries of the regional and super powers of this world.
This belief is not completely wrong. It is not right either. No country is immune from the influence of its neighbors, no nation is impenetrable to the interests of the world powers. Despite that, all nations can and should have a word in their destinies.
All the Lebanese of my generations have been fed a narrative haloed with legend: Lebanon, land of milk and honey, seventy times chanted in the bible, country with an Arab face turned towards the West, French-speaking country at the forefront of the Arabic revival of the turn of the twentieth century, multi-confessional country founded by a National Pact, message of fraternity, historical refuge of minorities, Switzerland of the Orient, and so on.
Time taught us a different reality, that of otherness, that of difference. Our country is much more fragmented than we thought. Its 10454 square kilometers are too narrow for so many differences, opinions, confessions, customs, accents and landscapes. Lebanon is too narrow for all the bitterness left by the civil war.
Upon this realization, the country morphs into airtight bubbles. It reduces to the region where we grew up, to parents and relatives, old friends and people we know. Others are perceived as neighbors at best, and many times as opponents.
The ensuing exile, which ultimately pushes the Lebanese youth to other countries where the grass is greener, makes things worse. It changes us. This very bubble in which we reveled becomes too narrow. Nostalgia chains us to it but we grow distant from our fellows there. They vote too wrong. They moan too much. They bling too much. They no longer look like us, or rather, we no longer resemble them.
After having reduced to a bubble, the country reduces to its most simple expression: close family, the house where we were born, a couple of dishes our mom used to cook for us. Even so, this most simple expression soon ends up melting like the strawberry ice cream from our childhood. The country becomes the Self, a tear between living life as it has become and the nostalgia of a few memories from a time which will never come back.
Our country will only become whole again in the face of oblivion.
The ambiguity you just read is intended. It can be understood as a burst of patriotism in face of dire circumstances, as the children of a country on the verge of oblivion rally to face nothingness. You can also read between the lines. You see, a sudden realization just dawned on me between two puffs of apple-flavored tombac.
To love our country, we must forget. We must reconcile with the folks back home. We must accept their difference, or ours actually, and understand that departure, which was our choice, has made us who we are, but that our brothers who remained there are not responsible for it. That their democratic choices have been confiscated by a corrupt ruling class, that the economic situation with which they struggle dispenses them from our remonstrances, that those who count the blows from afar do not know what it actually means to ply under them. And that given the circumstances, a no bling policy may be ill advised. A bit of bling-bling never hurt anyone.
And so, I put on a pink polo shirt with the largest and reddest horse, a chrome wristwatch with a 48 mm bright dial, Ray Ban aviators hanging from the unbuttoned collar, blue swede moccasins and white chinos, and a Panama hat in my hand, not to overdo it since the sun has set hours ago, and I borrow my brother in law’s SUV and his sister to go build castles in Spain around a chicha in a seaside restaurant somewhere in Batroun or Byblos, while dispensing my self-proclaimed knowledge in economics and international politics, without suffering competition from neighbors wearing white horse-adorned polos and Rolexes. I will blend in, I have to.
Bling has charm. Weirdly enough, it reconciles me with my fellow Lebanese and my home country. It brings forth the charm of the people there: despite their shortcomings, whether real or supposed, the Lebanese are good company. But first and foremost, the Lebanese are beautiful.
