Afrasianet - Zahi Wehbe - Beirut is the idea of counter-bombing. It is the only body in the history of cities that whenever it splits in half under the iron of the invaders, it reunites with greater force.
In the beginning, Beirut was an object on the side of the sea, and the sea read its face every morning and forgot to calm down. Thus, the city was born a harbor for invaders, merchants, greedy and lovers, as if its geography had been driven from the side of the wind and salt to lust like ripe fruit at the top of a mountain overlooking eternity.
When beauty is so lustful that beauty becomes a curse, it becomes a well, and it becomes the bloody price that the handsome person pays in the land of envy and darkness.
Beirut was not just a dot on a fragile map, but a crack in the wall of logic, an exception that proves that life can be born from the womb of chaos. Who said that cities are built with stone?
Beirut was built from the excess of postponed dreams and from the tears of expatriates in the far ends of the earth. Every stone in it was deliberately filled with the wine of a lover and the blood of a martyr, and with this mixture it became unclassifiable: Is it a temple of peace or a permanent battlefield? It is both, it is the national anthem that is sung in a loud voice, and the dabke dance over the earthquake.
The Beirut that inhabits us is not just streets and buildings that are first drawn on maps, built by workers and toilers, nor are they the numbers of martyrs recited in the news bulletins with a tense voice. Beirut is the anti-bombing idea. It is the only body in the history of cities that every time it splits in two halves under the iron of the invaders, it reunites with greater force.
A fusion is born from the words of poets and writers, and from the heavenly throat of Fairuz, which turned the whining into a hymn of steadfastness. It is the city that invented a new language from its wreckage, a language that knows the conjugation of the verb "breaking" except in the form of the passive construct.
Not because it is ignorant of a hand stretched out with iron and fire, it knows the faces of the aggressors and traitors and preserves the smell of gunpowder well, but it refuses, arrogantly, not ignorance, to give them the honor of being active in its eternal totality, as if the real doer is not mentioned on its tongue because the permanent present is the act of "rising."
Time in Beirut does not yield to the noise of iron. It goes on heavy, loose, as if to give people a chance to have one last coffee before the raid, or to exchange black jokes in shelters. And therein lies the miracle: the power is not in surviving death, but in convincing death to wait a while until you finish your cigarette on the balcony overlooking hell.
It's a Sisyphean fate, yes. But the Rock of Sisyphus here is not a hollow stone, but the beating heart of Beirut that never stopped pumping the blood of culture into the arteries of the Arabs when their pens dried up or were confiscated.
Every time death tried to write his last novel on its walls with gunpowder and white phosphorus, Beirut would respond to him with a rare manuscript that she pulled out from under the rubble of the daydreams of old booksellers on the sidewalks of the Hamra.
She would respond to him with a poem recited by candlelight in a perforated bar, or with an art gallery held in an alley whose walls still smelled of death.
It stores the sky in its basements. It is the only city whose pine trees hang from above rather than below, to drink from the salty blue of the sea and cast a shrewd shadow on a tired pavement.
It is the upside-down geography, where dignity lives in darkness and light is born from the heart of desolation.
This is why the invader is afraid of it, because he stands in front of a convex mirror that shows him his true image: A dwarf holding a cannon, while Beirut stands tall like a Sumerian mural with the wind written on it: Here hope does not die.
The aggressor does not understand Beirut, and this is the secret of his eternal defeat. He thinks of it as a pile of human beings, stones, and buildings of glass, while in its depth, it is "meaning." It is the antidote to the East poisoned by its sectarianism.
It is the capital of the dream that refuses to be turned into a memory.
If you look at the picture of Beirut in 1982 groaning under the hell of the Israeli invasion, and then look at it today with smoke enveloping its neighborhoods and suburbs by the same aggressor, you will find the same thing: a green poplar tree in the heart of the fire.
In fact, you will find in the eyes of young people that same old gleam, the gleam of someone who has seen death a thousand times and said to him, "Aren't you bored?
When that "Black Wednesday" dawned, stained with the dust of what they called "eternal darkness", they thought that they had finally caught the triggers of time in Beirut.
They thought they could extinguish the "Lighthouse of the East" with a cloud of smoke and phosphorus. How naïve it is to face the secret of the phoenix!
They did not realize that Beirut is more good at the language of darkness than bats are good at flying in its corridors. It is the one that turned the long nights of siege into legends, and weaved from the darkness of the shelters beads of thought.
"Black Wednesday" is a new date in its old calendar with pain, a time that is well preserved along with other dark days: the Monday when the port collapsed and the smoke turned into a black rose in the chest of the sea, the Tuesday when they bombed the bridges and built new arteries of connection from their ruins, and Thursday when they assassinated the dreams of its intellectuals and from every drop of blood a thousand questions about freedom were born.
Beirut knows that "eternal darkness" is the one that inhabits the souls of the aggressors before their missiles, while its darkness is the darkness of the womb that precedes labor. It is the one who stores in its exhausted loin the secret of dawn, and possesses the blind patience of the seed as it pierces the veil of dust.
"Black Wednesday" will dissipate like a passing cloud in the sky of a city that used to walk in the middle of the day under the umbrella of death.
She will rise from under her new ashes to pick up her books scattered from the sidewalks of the Hamra, to restore the current to the darkness of her theaters, and to hear Fairuz singing through a crack in the wall of eternity: "Glory from the ashes of Beirut."
But Sisyphus of Beirut is not blind, nor is he one of those lovers who are deceived by the dust of battles. When he pushes his rock upwards, he feels the coarseness of its stones, and he distinguishes between the stone of the Israeli invasion and the stone of internal discord that the brothers uprooted from the foundation of the same house.
In the creaking of the rock's rubbing against the earth, he hears a cacophony that does not resemble the melody of survival, a cacophony called "corruption" when the harbor guard sleeps from the barrels of death, and a cacophony called "sectarianism" when the city's boats turn into barricades for strangers to love.
Sisyphus of Beirut pushes his rock burdened with the sins of the invaders, yes, but also burdened with the dust of the brothers' shortcomings and the lapses of their memory. This is precisely his miracle: he loves the city not only as it should be in the poems of poets, but as it is in the harshness of reality, with its distorted buildings and the chatter of its politicians about shares.
He pushes it upwards despite its weight, because his love is mature enough to know that Beirut is not an angel, but a reckless, beautiful, life-addicted human being, who makes one mistake after another, and that is why it deserves it To love even the marrow.
This Sisyphean heart will overcome "Black Wednesday" as it has overcome the darkness of the cave before, not because it is forgotten, but because it has turned memory into a root that grows deeper as dust falls on it.
Darkness forgets that Beirut has known that its name, since Sumer, means "the eye of water that never breaks"... and "The Beacon of the East that never goes out."
We do not say "Beirut will win" because that means that there is a battle that is over. Beirut wins every moment in its own way, by convincing its people not to abandon the balconies of the destroyed houses, to drink their morning coffee, even if the sound of the planes is over their heads like the howling of the wolves.
It is victorious because it insists on remaining the city of love in the time of hatred, and the city of the book in the time of ignorance.
It is a beacon that does not go out, not because the oil is not exhausted, but because it has learned to light the fuse from the ashes of its heart if necessary. In this silent daily victory lies the greatness that terrifies its enemies more than any weapon; it is the great victory, to say "yes" to life in the face of an absolute "no."
Beirut will remain more beautiful than their nightmares, darker than their rockets, and deeper than the well of oblivion. It will remain the only proof that some places are created to remind the world that the real rose only blooms on the edge of the abyss.
Its children will continue to chant, amid the dust of rubble, the sounds of vendors, the noise of cafes, the call to prayer and the bells of churches: "Here we stay... Here we live."
Sisyphus continues to push his rock upwards, not to reach the false peak, but because he loved that rock until it became part of his shoulder, and until the sound of it rubbing against the soil became his only music that he understood to be the melody of survival.
