Transit Beirut: Portraits of a city
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By Ramsay Short Daily Star 2 February 2004
Perhaps the most informative and daring piece of work in Transit Beirut,
a new collection of literature, photography and journalism published by Saqi Books, involves a car ride on the Corniche.
More than a car ride in fact. It is about poverty and male prostitution. And, ultimately,
it is about the experience of life in the city.
The photo essay, Hey Handsome, by graphic design graduate Nabeel Kaakoush, is a series of black-and-white pictures taken from the view of the driver with hand on steering wheel looking out the window. Transposed over the pictures is a conversation in Arabic (English translation is printed beneath) that ends:
“How much, then?”
“About $100.”
“Whoa, that’s a lot.”
“Don’t forget, I’ve got to survive and I also have the rent to think about … Otherwise, it ain’t worth it.”
“Fine … I’ll give you $100 for two nights … You seem kind of desperate.”
“Cool … It’s all good … Let’s go.”
Hey Handsome, which Kaakoush was unable to get published previously due to its controversial subject matter, is one of 21 English-language pieces included from new and established writers on life in the capital in 2003-04. It is the first time that new and old writers are included together in the same anthology.
According to Roseanne Khalaf, assistant professor in the English department and coordinator of creative writing at the American University of Beirut, who alongside writer Malu Halasa conceived and edited the book, Transit fulfills a number of roles.
“We wanted to do something with young voices that expressed what was happening to them in Beirut and produce a book on the cutting edge,” she says in an interview at her office in AUB. “All of the people published have carved out a niche for themselves and they can bring about change in a damaged society if their voices are listened to.”
Indeed, many of the writers, including Kaakoush, have colorful roles in the city and have suffered for their individuality and opinions. They all, it seems, have plenty to say.
Nadine Touma is an artist who can be spotted dressed garishly and provocatively around town flying in the face of conventional Beiruti uniform. She once made 6,000 marzipan noses and sold them from a vegetable truck in protest of the high incidence of plastic surgery in Beirut.
Her story Red Walls is a painful, poetic tale of a man on the path toward self-destruction. It is abstract in style and particularly moving, though at times a little heavy-handed in delivery.
Rachid El Daif is the author of 11 works of fiction and poetry including the international bestseller Dear Mr Kawabata. He teaches Arabic at the Lebanese University. His contribution, The Mouse, The Visitor and The Man Who Was Killed Wearing My Clothes, is a short, witty and finally dark piece about the effect on the mind of life in Beirut during the war in the guise of a romantic rendezvous in an empty apartment that becomes a lone vigil with a Kalashnikov.
“Beirut is a hodge-podge of diversity, and many issues that remain left over from the war have not been resolved. Like Beirut, the stories in Transit are also diverse about Lebanese fast food, Arabic music and personal reminiscences,” Khalaf says. “Yet what is good about this book is that all the writers have so much hope,” she adds something that many, many young people with few opportunities and older, jaded intellectuals do not possess.
“The fact that all the writers here continue to live in Beirut and do their own thing despite many problems is very exciting,” Khalaf says. “It shows that this generation does exist- that is, trying to move the country forward and break the chains of the past.”
Khalaf herself submits an intensely personal chronicle entitled Living Between Worlds detailing fascinating insights into how her students express themselves through their creative writing and what it shows her about the young generation particularly resting on their disappointment at the country and need to escape a constraining reality often imposed by their parents. It is a moving piece of prose.
“Life in Lebanon often leaves you feeling like you are a pawn in the hands of higher powers and you have no control over your future,” says Khalaf, “It is a small country.
“But the characters and people depicted in this book and the writers are examples of people not waiting for events to happen. All the contributors in Transit are trying to take change forward themselves and make their own destiny especially through their writing.”
Transit Beirut certainly succeeds in projecting a city and people that is, in the publisher’s words, “a melee of pop culture chafing at Mideast traditions.”
Rabih Alameddine, author of the brilliant and controversial Beirut novel Kool Aids, meditates on occidental noses on Lebanese faces. First-time writer and lawyer Zeina Ghandour, a former peacekeeping worker for the United Nations, ponders the intersecting lines of T. E. Lawrence, Orientalism and a PLO grandmother’s revolutionary milk in Warmilk.
Established novelist Hassan Daoud unpeels Beiruti humor and lifestyles in four pieces entitled The Conqueror of The Dollar; Let’s Spend the Evening In That New Restaurant After All, It’s The Most American; Beirut’s Suburban Fringe Changes It’s Character; and Beirut’s Athletes Celebrate The Defeat of Cholesterol.
The journalist Fadi Tufayli reveals a makeshift graveyard at the heart of the city’s psyche in The Garden of The Two Martyrs. Kamal Kassar, a lawyer and musician, writes a detailed essay and history on an essential part of Beirut life classical tarab music in Confessions of Tarab Addict.
Where Transit Beirut is most disappointing is not its writing but its graphic design. The text is printed in a small courier font that is unfriendly to the eye and not particularly innovative and runs in double columns down the page, annoying to read. On the other hand, the photographs by Dalia Khamissy and Nabil Ismail interspersed throughout the book are impressive in their eye to detail and composition.
In total, Transit Beirut is a welcome manifestation in words and pictures of people meeting ideas and ideas meeting each other. It reflects the significant reserve of cultural capital, individuality and deep-seated artistic and intellectual tradition that is extant in Beirut through a relevant cross section of the city’s residents.
With its release internationally Saqi is a well established Lebanese-Anglo publisher based in Beirut and London and the fact it is all in English (some pieces have been translated), Transit also reflects the healthy artistic environment here one that has brought together diverse forms of writing, images, daily life and subjectivity, and projects them in a concise format for a global readership.
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