Beirut’s devastation shook me from across the world
Michael A. Lindenberger says the unexplained blast hits home because of the people he knows.
The tremendous explosion in Beirut on Tuesday caught our attention, pulled at our heartstrings, and then, in the words of Robert Frost, not being the ones who died, most of us turned back to our affairs.
That’s the normal course of things, when tragedy announces itself on the other side of the world, isn’t it?
Our capacity to love is limited, often by proximity, and when events and people are far away, we lack the affection for that place and the imagination to put ourselves there. That was the argument made by poet and author Wendell Berry eight years ago as he delivered the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities in Washington. Only by attaching ourselves to a place — a city, a farm, a neighborhood — can we really love it and the people who share it with us.
That’s why, he said, news of 1,000 deaths in an faraway earthquake can bring fewer tears than news of a car crash that kills a couple who shops at the same grocery we do.
But were I sitting once more on Berry’s porch looking out toward the Kentucky River, as I did in 2012 while he was still preparing that
lecture, I might offer an addendum. Can’t such affection also grow out of a relationship with another person? Can’t our affection for that person engender a deeper feeling for a place we may have never been but that we feel we know somehow because we know and love our friend?
A few months after my pilgrimage to Berry’s farm in our native state of Kentucky, I left for a yearlong fellowship on the West Coast, where I befriended Mariam Semaan, a young journalist from Beirut. That friendship, as the best ones always seem to, sprung up without notice and has refused to dim no matter how many miles and years pass between us. Since Tuesday, I’ve been reeling in the aftermath of the destruction of the city which I know has nurtured and challenged her and her family for generations.
On Tuesday, Mariam sent a video of the neighborhood where she lives with her husband and her infant son. It was heartbreaking. “I went for a three-hour walk,” she wrote. “It was a continuous show of devastation. Not a single building, house or shop spared. People died in their houses, in their cars, at the door of hospitals and on the streets.”
She said the state, which has
been the subject of ceaseless protests since the fall, has seemingly faded from view, leaving the city to fend for itself.
“Every relief effort is conducted by people like you and me,” she said. “My sisters-in-law are cleaning houses of the elderly. My friends are doing sandwiches; my mother is bandaging and stitching people at her pharmacy because hospitals are unable to cope with the number of injured. We are all opening our doors to the homeless.”
I called her Thursday morning to check in, and she told me the explosion shattered the glass and shook the walls of her home five kilometers away from its center. The blast has devastated her neighborhood.
The city was already facing its worst economic slump in its modern history and the piling on of the coronavirus. In October, banks announced new limits of access to capital and depositors were barred from withdrawing funds in dollars. Meanwhile, the savings held in the Lebanese lira have been all but wiped out by soaring inflation.
“There is no money to rebuild anything,” Mariam explained. “We have 12 windows that were blown out and need to be replaced. But there is no glass to be had. To import anything you must pay in dollars. No one has access to dollars. To buy fifty dollars’ worth of
glass would now require tens of thousands of lira.”
Since Tuesday, protesters have been in the street angry over a long pattern of corruption and incompetence even as questions of who is to blame remain unanswered.
“It’s the role of the state to clean the streets, to make sure its citizens are safe, to take care of the elderly, to make sure that glass dangling from above doesn’t fall on our heads. But the state is missing,” she said.
More than 135 have died. Thousands are injured. Small, private enterprises — charities, nonprofits and networks of helpers — have stepped in to try to provide aid as well, she said. They desperately need support from foreign donors.
“They have the networks, the databases, to really know who to help and how,” she said. “They need all the support they can get. These small, social enterprises are the hope of the city.”
She has also seen an outpouring of love, or as Berry might put it, affection. “It’s also kind of amazing to me to see individuals working with their own hands to help. I am seeing friends, family, colleagues walking through the rubble with a broom in their hands and in these times of corona, a mask on their face going into houses that might collapse at any time just to help people who can’t help themselves,” she said.
Back in 2012, Berry and I discussed my impending year as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, where he had been a creative writing fellow in the
1950s, and he fondly remembered his teacher and lifelong mentor, the novelist Wallace Stegner. Stegner had divided Americans into two camps — Boomers and Stickers — a concept that would play a large role in Berry’s Jefferson Lecture later that year.
Boomers, Stegner wrote, were people driven to pursue success, regardless of where it took them, feeling a primary connection to their work or ambition. Stickers, by contrast, were people whose ambitions, big or small, were rooted in a sense of belonging to a place.
Berry was a sticker, as he showed in 1964 when he left a faculty job at NYU to return to a farm in rural Kentucky, where he stayed ever since. Years later, writing about that decision, which had been fiercely contested by literary figures he admired, Berry recalled, “What I had in mind that made the greatest difference was the knowledge of the few square miles in Kentucky that were mine by inheritance and by birth and by the intimacy the mind makes the place it awakens in.”
Mariam is a sticker, too. She could have chosen anywhere to live after her fellowship in California. Lord knows, the violent,
wondrous and millennia-long history of Beirut has offered excuses aplenty for anyone seeking a more tranquil place to live. But she returned to where she was born, where her parents and extended family live, and has invested time, money, attention — ultimately her affection — in its future.
This week, Beirut is full of stickers. They are carrying brooms. Dodging falling rocks and glass. And demanding the ouster of a criminally negligent political class.
All of that is happening far away from Houston. But their struggles aren’t so foreign to any of us, not if we feel about our homes the way Mariam and her neighbors feel about theirs. Not if we recall the agony of the fatal 2013 blast in tiny West, Texas, nor the years-long effort to put that town and its inhabitants’ lives back together again.
Now, Mariam and her city are in that struggle to make a new beginning out of the rubble. I hope I’ve helped you feel a connection to them, some affection for the place they love — that beautiful, ancient faraway city on the other side of the world that, somehow, at least for me, doesn’t seem so far away.