All Strangers Are Kin by Zora O'Neill

Author:Zora O'Neill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2016-04-20T19:21:40+00:00

As I walked west through the quiet streets, more memories of my first visit returned. Humidity. Hills. Bougainvillea and staircases instead of streets. Green almonds, fuzzy and tart as stunted apricots: an epiphany that linked almonds (lawz) and stone fruits (lawziyat). French fries in my sandwich: just as revelatory. Armadas of gleaming new BMWs, their windows tinted black as oil, interspersed with rickety old jewel-toned Mercedes with matching hubcaps. The Ziad Rahbany album Bema Enno, all jaunty jazz and cooing vocals, as we cruised the coast highway in a rental car, concrete blocks and Hezbollah banners giving way to banana plantations. “Such long straws!” I marveled in my trip diary, because the other differences from Egypt—historical, culinary, geographical, linguistic—were far too large to capture on paper.

On that trip I had stayed with a grad-school friend who had studied in Damascus and Cairo. I admired her adaptability, her gold-trimmed sunglasses, and her habit of greeting people with the groovy phrase “Shlonak?”—literally “What’s your color?” For years, I had treasured this as my sole bit of Lebanese dialect. Finally in Dubai, in class with Manal, I had a chance to try it out. Manal had tossed her lustrous black hair and laughed: “Only Syrians say that.” So here I was in Beirut, starting my language education nearly from scratch.

I arrived downtown faster than I expected—Beirut was small. Two million people in eight square miles, and less than two miles between East Beirut, where I’d started, and West Beirut. In between, I crossed Martyrs’ Square, named for nationalists who were executed for leading a revolt against the Ottomans in World War I. The area had been the cultural heart of the city in the 1960s; then, during the civil war, it was the Green Line—the no-man’s-land divide between the two sides of the city. Now it was a glorified traffic median.

When I had visited in 1999, this area had been consumed in reconstruction as far-reaching and complex as open-heart surgery in progress. For the most part, it was now all sewn up. Café chairs were stacked in rows, and dress mannequins stared mutely through the windows of the Hermès boutique. A Rolex-branded clock tower presided over a cobblestone roundabout. If East Beirut was, in the broadest brush strokes, Christian and West was Muslim, then downtown had been claimed squarely by capitalism.

I pressed on up a hill, past a vacant lot where the weeds smelled of the countryside, to Hamra Street. Like Martyrs’ Square, this had been a swinging social and intellectual scene fifty years earlier; I had tasted a bit of it at chrome-trimmed cafés and a bar decorated with a life-size photo mural of Georgina Rizk, Miss Universe 1971. I knew many of these places had closed in the past decade—a shame, after surviving fifteen years of war—but I was appalled to see, as I walked the length of the street, that they had been replaced by Starbucks, Caribou, and Costa Coffee.

I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, unexpectedly overcome with exhaustion and irritation.

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