More than anything, Beirut is a city defined by creativity
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Daryl Champion Daily Star staff Date: 18 January, 2004
Beirut is not Lebanon. Beirut is, in fact, many things.
It can be anything you want it to be, almost. Singing the praises of a city is not something new literature, song and even the visual arts have been used as mediums throughout history to sum up the spirit of this or that metropolis, or to at least portray an aspect of its life.
A sign of a great city a metropolis on a world scale is often its ability to inspire a love-hate relationship with those who dwell within its environs.
Beirut is such a place.
There are contradictions and paradoxes aplenty. There is squalor but a short walk from the reconstructed old world glory of the Downtown district; there are battered old Renaults and Peugeots, dented and rusting, parked next to glittering new Porsches and Mercedes; there are bars and clubs in the Rue Monnot precinct that reverberate five times a day to the call to prayer from mosques on or near the Green Line which divided the city when it was at war with itself. There is the notorious “Lebanese amnesia” about the civil war itself mentioned in whispers.
Take Hamra, for instance, the now-declining, post-war de facto downtown district of central West Beirut. One small area in Hamra, on two adjacent streets, has been described as the quintessential representation of Beirut it harbors a church, a mosque, a supermarket, an office of the Syrian mukhabarat and a brothel. It is a far cry from the small, more-traditional, conservative cities of Tripoli and Sidon and the more relaxed Tyre, let alone the multitude of small towns and villages that dot the coast, mountains and valleys of Lebanon.
Indeed, Beirut is not Lebanon. Beirut is, actually, not Beirut. How can Francophone
Achrafieh of East Beirut, for example, be reconciled with the southern suburbs, centered around the concrete monolith of Haret Hreik where Hizbullah has its headquarters? How can West Beirut’s trendy Verdun, a shopping strip packed with French and Italian fashion stores, be reconciled with the dusty, streetside dukans and vendors of South Beirut’s Ouzai? How can the mountain chalets in the east of Greater Beirut be reconciled with the Palestinian refugee “camps,” embedded as suburbs of their own in Beirut’s south?
“Cosmopolitan” is not quite the word. Religiously and therefore socially diverse even ethnically diverse are more appropriate: sectarian, in a word, and still quite fiercely so in many quarters despite the rhetoric of post-civil war reconciliation.
But cosmopolitan is also applicable, especially considering the mix of nationalities residing in, and constantly passing through, Beirut. Foreigners ajanab from African and South Asian house servants and laborers to Western executives, students studying at the American University of Beirut, and UN personnel of all descriptions live, work and love in Beirut.
Still extant is the influence of the French mandate period, and not only in some of the 1920s and ’30s architecture. Even today some young “French-educated” Lebanese speak French as their first language; although they speak Arabic fluently, and often English as well, their written language is also French.
Beirut is safe, by and large. It is certainly safer than a Western city: random acts of violence, thuggery, homicide (perhaps the civil war took care of that animal urge en masse), violent crime, although they exist here, pose nowhere near the problem they do in other parts of the world. The city is, moreover, mostly safe for women, even alone at night. Men have been known to express their inadequacy by flaunting their questionable manhood it must be questionable or they would not be flaunting it but, while women can be harassed, they are rarely physically molested on the streets.
All of this will not be news to those who know Beirut, but it might just be a new perspective for those whose only acquaintance with Lebanon is what they know from the mainstream Western-oriented media. The Daily Star’s website may leave much to be desired, but it clearly has many readers worldwide (and we here in the Beirut newsroom have been assured the website will be upgraded shortly).
Beirut shares something in common with Sarajevo, for obvious reasons. In Bosnia, there is no “war amnesia” it is a focal point of art and expression as that historic Balkans city undergoes its own reconstruction and rejuvenation. Yet Lebanon, for all the reasons mentioned here, is also an incubator of ideas.
Lebanon’s international festivals need no introduction. The festival season may display a certain amount of creativity in putting the events together, but they rarely present on stage the ideas and art of the Lebanese. One has to dig deeper.
Beirut hosts a large number of (small) art galleries, and exhibitions come and go, in, it seems, a whirlwind of year-round activity. Is this where Lebanon’s creative ideas begin and end? Hardly. The gallery circuit provides an indication of the potential lying under the surface of contemporary society.
Art, design, literature, intellectual life they all exist here, and in no small measure, although the offerings vary enormously in depth and quality. But what is their context in a rapidly changing, “globalizing world?” What is their place in society, their links to the past, their role in, or even their influence on, the future and Lebanon’s place in the world? Who are the people, what is the environment, the activities, the thoughts behind what is happening on the fringes of the everyday?
Sometimes the everyday, too, has a knack in Lebanon of being somehow different and intriguing. And then, of course, there are the undercurrents of Lebanese society, of which there are no shortage and which offer fascinating insights into alternative lifestyles in what is, essentially, still a traditional Middle Eastern society.
Who are those necessarily loosely affiliated individuals who may in the future form the nucleus of new social, artistic or intellectual trends? For geographical and historical reasons Lebanon enjoys a rich cross-fertilization with the Western world. Beirut, especially, is one of the “gateways” between Europe and the Middle East.
What happens, then, when a “gateway” meets a crossroads? Lebanon is at a crossroads. Globalization or, in its most tangible form, economic internationalization is pressing upon the country. It is, in fact, one of today’s great challenges facing all Middle Eastern states and societies. Change, possibly radical change, is on the horizon.
Some economic analysts give the Lebanese economy one more year of life, khallas.
In such a turbulent and chaotic social, economic and political environment, how could some stimulating ideas not emerge? The problem for artists, designers, writers and intellectuals the country’s creators, whether they be Lebanese or its adopted sons and daughters is how to channel their ideas, their creativity, into tangible projects that are valid at a global level. Actually producing something of quality must be the first step on the road of refinement that leads to a world-class product, whatever it may be.
Like most internationally oriented cities, Beirut has many distractions. Creators who have it in themselves to produce world-class work have to be focused not, as is too often the case, submerged in the social hype about producing something: bukra is a dangerous word when there might not be a “tomorrow” for developing creative ideas.
Ultimately, it is not inanimate Beirut which imparts to itself its own character, but the people who live in it and make it breathe especially, in the midst of the everyday, those who strive to achieve and create something new and unique.
The question is, where do they the creators as well as their ideas go from here? |
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