A Thousand Farewells by Nahlah Ayed

Author:Nahlah Ayed
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Canada

And yet Lebanon is a sublimely beautiful place, blessed with fertile valleys, soaring, snow-capped mountains, and a sinuous coastline hugged by the sea. It is a ski resort, beach hideaway, shopping mall, dance club, and casino rolled into a place about one-tenth the size of Newfoundland. Its people—men and women—are worldly, multi-lingual, and cosmopolitan, the women beautiful and exceedingly attentive to their looks. When it comes to entertainment, it is a place that caters to every taste and budget. If you want women or drugs, it is easy. And if you want to laugh, there is no shortage of laughter in Lebanon—someone, somewhere is making people laugh at the expense of politicians, especially, but everyone was fair game. It’s a place at once capable of producing Hassan Nasrallah, the militant chief of the armed Hezbollah, and Haifa Wehbe, that sultry chant-euse whose singing skills are blatantly secondary to her plunging necklines and smoky eyes. It’s new and old, east and west, quiet and yet insufferably noisy, a tinny blend of car horns mixed with English, French, and Arabic assaulting your ears around the clock.

It’s such an infinitesimal place, a small world made even smaller by geography. In Beirut you could easily bump into the famous, at restaurants, cafes, even the Sporting Club on the Corniche, where some of them liked to play cards. You were almost certain to run into Ziad Rahbani if you dropped into one Italian restaurant tucked in behind a modern high rise in the neighbourhood of Clemenceau. Yet while you could run into the same person two or even three times in the course of a day of errands, you could also hide from view for weeks if you knew your way around the city’s hidden stairs and meandering alleys. And yet small and labyrin-thine as Beirut was, its people still had a serious penchant for big cars that hogged the roads and challenged the dozens of buzzing mopeds and the aging serveece taxis that snarled traffic every time they stopped for a customer.

I had arrived in Beirut many years after the war nearly killed it, but it was clear that Lebanon was well on its way to returning to its place among the living. Large swaths of Beirut had already been restored or rebuilt, and restaurants and bars were packed again with tourists, expatriates and foreigners alike, thanks mostly to the country’s long-time postwar prime minister, Rafic Hariri. Yet despite the gushing magazine articles about Lebanon’s return, live here for a while and it soon becomes clear that all is not well.

Lebanon’s problems are as diverse and breathtaking as its varie-gated landscape. It was, in reality, a failed state, home to a collection of individuals who might on paper share a heritage but were forced to fend for themselves. I learned early on that the majority of people refused to drink the water that came out of the taps because they didn’t trust it to be clean enough. The Internet and phone systems were unreliable yet expensive, and they faltered with the smallest hint of a rain shower.

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