Jasmine and Fire (19 page)

Whatever the hurdles, intermarriage is on the rise, and that bodes well. Lebanon needs all the mixing it can get in order to someday, with any luck, break up the religious-tribal mentality that continues to choke the country.

The ongoing lack of a civil marriage procedure is by no means the only religion-related inconvenience, shall we call it, of life here. The Lebanese government, ever since the country’s independence in 1943, has been organized along sectarian lines, with political parties normally identified by whether they’re Christian—usually Maronite, the most common Christian sect here and related to Catholicism—or Sunni, or Shiite, or sometimes a mutually beneficial alliance of two or more sects. As a result of a document called the National Pact established in 1943, the year of independence, the president is always a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni, and the speaker of parliament a Shiite.

Whether Lebanon’s sectarian system is, as some would argue, a delicate balancing act of competing claims to power, or a grossly unjust and outdated setup that perpetuates tribalism and favors certain sects over others even when they’re no longer a majority, it’s obvious that it’s a giant mess. Maybe that’s the only thing the Lebanese can agree about, in principle anyway. And many times in the recent past—from the first civil war of 1958, to the civil war of 1975–90, to a number of explosive instances since then—the sectarian system has brought Lebanon to the brink of total collapse. As a Sunni parliament-member friend of my father put it to us when my parents were visiting in October: “Sectarianism will be the end of Lebanon.”

You can personally choose to live a nonreligious life here, and you can complain all you want about the injustice, absurdity, and dysfunction of the sectarian distribution of power. But year after
year, sectarian-tribal realities continue to rule life in Lebanon, and the political system stays in place; call it inertia, corruption, or an age-old combination of the two. Lebanon may be, outwardly, a fairly unrepressed country, forever famous for its jet-set nightlife and risqué fashions. It may have the Arab world’s least-persecuted gay scene (though it’s still mostly underground), and a much-professed love of partying and sex and you name it, plus a political system that acts like a democracy thanks to its regular elections—however uninspiring or rigged—and absence of a dictator or theocratic regime. But it’s still a long, long way from the separation of church and state, or mosque and state.

As if Lebanon didn’t have enough of its own sectarian problems, it also tends to inherit some of the tensions and clashes of its neighbors, none of whom have set a particularly fine example of secular governance. That includes virtually all Arab countries as well as Israel, which, although it calls itself the only democracy in the Middle East, is primarily a democracy for those who happen to be Jewish—and significantly less so for the Palestinians, no matter how far back they trace their ancestry on the land. The strife down south in Israel between Jews and Arabs has had violent reverberations in Lebanon for decades, and so it, too, remains a roiling issue for the Lebanese, whatever their opinion of the situation.

As I get ready for a series of holidays, feasts, and social outings in December, I can’t help thinking about what Lebanon’s—and the Middle East’s—religious divisions will mean for the country in the coming years, and what they may also mean for my relatives, my friends, and myself, not to mention for Richard and me. One December night, my mom’s old friend Nadia invites me to go see a play by Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian playwright reportedly assassinated by the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, in 1972.
The play is about a Palestinian couple who returns to the Israeli city of Haifa in 1968, two decades after they fled in 1948 when Israel was created, and try to visit the house they once lived in. They’d left their baby behind in the house when they escaped back in 1948, in all the chaos and confusion surrounding the evacuation of the Arabs from Haifa by the Zionist military forces; when the wife went looking for her husband on that day of the evacuation, she wasn’t allowed to come back to the house, so her baby stayed behind. When the couple decide to go back in 1968 to see what’s become of their old house, they find a Jewish woman from Poland living in it, and they eventually realize that her twenty-year-old son, now a member of the Israeli army reserves, is the baby they’d left behind. The woman invites them in, tells them how she and other Poles were brought en masse in 1948 by the Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah and placed in houses all over Palestine, and how at the time she had noticed and felt uncomfortable about the lack of Arabs anywhere in sight. But she had nowhere else to go, and when she was given the abandoned house and found the baby in it, she moved in and adopted the child.

After the show there’s a Q&A session. A young Lebanese guy in the audience raises his hand and says he thinks the play is groundbreaking in showing that many Jews who were brought to Israel as a result of the Holocaust weren’t actively trying to displace Palestinians, but were themselves caught up in the horrors of the era, in Europe’s extermination of the Jews in World War II, and were focusing on escaping persecution and death, not necessarily on colonizing the land. I hear booing from some people in the audience. I turn in his direction, to nod and signal to him that he’s raising a point worth discussing, but I feel too intimidated by
the crowd response to make an obvious gesture. Some members of the audience obviously took his comment as tacitly excusing the systematic erasure of Palestine, which didn’t sound to me like what he intended to say.

Nadia and I walk over to her apartment after the play to catch up and discuss the show. Over tea, I confide to her something I’ve been anxious about at times: that Richard and I will have a relationship-ending fight someday over the Israel-Palestine issue, especially if Israel bombs Lebanon again, which it keeps threatening to do if Hezbollah makes another provocative move. Will his Jewish background and my Arab roots eventually clash? I tell her I’m worried that our opinions on the region, while overlapping in many ways, are not fully in line either. Maybe they’ll present an obstacle in the future.

“Don’t worry too much about that, Salma. You and I both worry too much,” she says, giving me an affectionate smile and grabbing her silver-flecked hair into a ponytail. “Just think about your relationship on its own. Focus on all the things you love and value about it, and deal with any complicated situations if or when they come up. You’ll find a way to manage them.”

Nadia tells me to think of it this way: if Richard and I have a healthy relationship, politics doesn’t have to be a central issue. It can often be compartmentalized as just a thing two people can differ on. We can disagree about some questions but still respect each other. She also promises me that we have her full support, and that mixed relationships are the only way Lebanon, not to mention the whole region, will eventually get over the sectarian bullshit.

I nod. I’m not quite as optimistic as she is, but I feel reassured
for now. I needed to hear this tonight. The sage tea we’re drinking suddenly seems more fragrant, its forest scent filling the room.

I open
the balcony door a few days later to a still almost balmy mid-December morning, hovering in the low sixties. To do some morning errands—the dry cleaner around the corner, a labneh run at the grocery store downstairs—I’ve put on my jeans, a bright blue top, and a pendant that says
BEIRUT LIL-JAMI’
(Beirut for Everyone) in Arabic. I bought it at a jewelry store around the corner and have been wearing it daily. As I adjust the pendant on my neck, I stare at it for a second, realizing it might seem silly and quaint to anyone who lived here throughout the fifteen-year civil war and feels chronically burned out on idealism.

I don’t blame anyone for resenting Lebanon for its eternal dysfunction, and for never improving much politically or economically, and for offering no real hope to those who’ve lived through the war here and the constant explosive incidents since then. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone took a look at my pendant and scoffed,
Beirut for No One!
But I’m going to wear it anyway and hope it doesn’t seem too silly. Is it like the
MEAN PEOPLE SUCK
bumper stickers I used to see around my college campus in the 1990s? Here in Lebanon, though, a collective, post-sectarian vision for the country is a far from obvious or widely accepted idea.

Meanwhile, as the holiday season sneaks up, the political situation is looking hairy. Again. Rumors are heating up that if Hezbollah is implicated in the findings of the UN tribunal investigating the Hariri assassination, the party is going to protest the results, possibly by taking to the streets. I’m checking local news sites like Naharnet.com every day now, several times a day. The constant
running headlines about Lebanon’s impending political catastrophe are scary. Every reported incident of a scuffle on the outskirts of town, however tiny the headline or potentially nonpolitical the cause, is starting to make me a little nervous. For instance today: “Several men attacked each other by knives near Hadath and a woman was injured by gunshots during a wedding in Mraijeh.”

I’m remembering how deceptively small incidents like these can, and have in the past, set off a much bigger conflict.

I ask my parents on the phone one morning about their opinion on the situation right now, which they’re monitoring from Houston via online Lebanese news sites and Arabic-language newspapers, and I ask Umayma, who keeps close tabs on political news on the big-screen TV in her apartment. None of them believes there will be violence this time around. They all give me some version of “no one wants war again.” But according to the local news, the political tensions are building up to a crescendo, and no one can predict where we’re headed. I realize most media are in the business of sensationalizing any event, however small, but I can’t help feeling slightly on edge.

One cool, overcast day, as I’m finishing some edits that are due to the university alumni magazine, I’m searching my files for a document I need, and I come across a pamphlet I’d brought with me from New York, titled “Emergency Preparedness Advice for You and Your Family.” I’d received it in the mail years ago after 9/11, and while I was decluttering my Manhattan apartment last summer and getting ready to move to Beirut, I’d thrown it on a whim into the pile to pack in my suitcase. I find myself staring at it now. I’m supposed to be sitting at my laptop working right now, but what better distraction than an emergency-preparedness brochure from New York, circa a decade ago?

I flip through the pamphlet. There’s a “Household Disaster Plan Checklist,” divided in sections. “What to Have in Your Head: Decide where your family will reunite after a disaster.” “What to Have in Your Hand: Copies of your important documents.” “What to Have in Your Home: One gallon of drinking water per person per day.”

As I page through it, my mind drifts back to the civil war days, when I used to take a strange comfort in helping my mother prepare a duffel bag of supplies in case we needed to escape to a basement shelter, a
malja’
. We did on many nights, when the shelling was too close by. I’m not sure whether I kept this New York emergency-prep brochure in my kitchen drawer in Manhattan as a practical guide to what I should have on hand, or just as a nostalgia trigger, albeit a dark one. I did contemplate packing an emergency kit in New York after 9/11 and again after the big East Coast blackout of 2003, although I never got much further than a few cans of beans that I threw away when their edges began to rust in my kitchen cabinet. Now, with that pamphlet here with me in Beirut, I’m wondering if I shouldn’t take its advice and pull a few things together.

If the
sinister drumbeat in the local news continues, I just might have a disaster-preparedness grocery trip in my near future. But for now I’ll take comfort in my more seasoned and (somehow) optimistic elders, and—in true Lebanese fashion—in cocktail nights out with friends. One afternoon at midmonth, Mirna calls to invite me out for happy hour drinks at one of Beirut’s old-school-hipster hangouts, Pacifico, on the east side. She’s meeting some friends there, some of them former classmates and others colleagues from her urban-planning job. I walk into the crowded bar area and find
the group, a coed bunch mostly in their mid-thirties. Mirna introduces me around, and as soon as we clink our glasses to toast the end of the workday, the conversation flows instantly. We talk about local bands we’ve been listening to lately (the Beirut retro-punk group Scrambled Eggs, the trip-hoppy Soap Kills) and eventually wind our way to the usual drink-session topics: work stress, family dramas, relationships. I notice how at ease I feel around this crowd, right from the start. Like me, they all spent their childhoods in Beirut and have at some point lived or studied or worked in the States or Europe.

It’s rare that I feel so immediately comfortable in a group of total strangers, but this shared history does count for something, I’m realizing. I love making friends with people who have entirely different backgrounds from me, but even in immigrant-country America, I’m often the one person in a group who’s slightly different, more “ethnic,” and I still sometimes get self-conscious about that, oddly enough. Here, as a somewhat mixed-up, multinational Beiruti, I feel in my element in a particular way I haven’t experienced for a very long time.

I stay for a few margaritas, Pacifico’s specialty, and as always, I find the vibe of this place, sort of a Mexican cantina meets bistro, cheery and energizing. I’ve been here a few times during past summer trips. Once the beating heart of Beirut’s Monot area—a small section of the Achrafieh district that was a nightlife center in the 1990s—Pacifico has hung on to its clientele, die-hard loyalists who still come here even long after Monot gave way to the Gemmayzeh area, and now slowly to the Hamra side streets near my apartment, as the place to find the hippest bar scene.

Mirna drives me home and drops me off in front of my building around ten
P.M.
, and I decide to take a short walk to a street-food
stand called Marrouche. I’m craving the chicken sandwich there, in my humble opinion one of the world’s best: two crusty toasted sides of baguette slathered with toum, the garlic spread, and topped with shredded strips of grilled chicken and spicy pickles. Many times before, I’ve inhaled this sandwich so fast I’ve had to force myself to resist going for seconds.