lebanese mentality » ginger beirut

Looks like Beirut

“I can tell you were missing Beirut when you got this place,” said one of our visitors looking out our windows at the view across flat roofs and satellite dishes spreading from the foothills behind to the blue of the sea. When we moved to a flat in a working-class area of this medium-sized Mediterranean town, several people remarked on the resemblance to the view we left behind in Lebanon. Most Brits moving to the Costa del Sol come for a villa with a swimming pool and garden – something unattainable in England. Not us. We’re not in some charming pueblo blanco on the hills or some Driving-over-Lemons style valley, or even one of those gated developments with communal pool and tennis courts that many opt for.

We arrived with a two-year old and a baby so a flat in town meant I could take the kids out on errands and visits without hassling with car seats and loading up or unloading a pushchair and a sling at every stop. I didn’t want to end up isolated in some pretty villa sitting under the bougainvillea eating supermarket-sourced figs and wondering what Spain was really like.

flat roofs and a smudgy eclipsed moon

When we visited Spain before moving to Lebanon we found Andalusia beautiful …and the costa less than. But after a few years in Beirut we couldn’t quite face moving away from the Mediterranean with all its highs and lows. It was heart-wrenching to leave Lebanon, but here on the coast we found so many things in common.

Rampant unethical property development along the coast? Yep.

Half-built buildings abandoned? Yep.

Flat roofs bristling with satellite dishes and aerials? Yep.

Beautiful green countryside out of town? Yep.

Flexible, fun-loving people? Yep.

Zero stress about rules? Yep.

Strangers who talk to you in the street? Yep.

An overused cliché about swimming and skiing in the same day? Yep.

The scent of jasmine on an evening? Yep.

Old biddies in plastic chairs watching the world go by? Yep.

A surplus of excellent produce? Yep.

picotas, cerezas y… cherrys

A fellow Beiruti blogger used to run an awareness campaign targeting the misuse of the expression “it looks like Beirut” to refer to scenes of destruction, chaos or bloodshed. It is such an outdated expression because Beirut is glutted with luxury cars and haute couture boutiques. Car bombs are only occasional, and the Lebanese do chaos so well, you can’t really fault them on it.

Save for Marbella, here we have none of the bling and swank, so I can’t really say it looks like Beirut. But there is a little something, and I’m so glad there is.

You want a wire through your wall? We’ll put a wire through your wall. I’m pretty sure that’s a Beiruti wire that escaped to Tarshish.

“I am Arabic.”

A few months ago, my three year old stumbled onto the topic of where we all come from. I have never tried to tell her she was any particular nationality. It can be quite a false measure of culture, and it’s easy to get the two confused at a young age. Still, I often talk about the facts of where we were all born or were living at a given time. Curious to see what she had understood I asked her a few questions, starting with the easiest:

“So where does mummy come from?”

“England,” she answered confidently. Of course. I left the UK an awful long time ago (I was 18), but we always visit my parents in England, in the house I grew up in, they speak only English, and I always speak to her in English. Not too hard. Next up:

“What about you? Where are you from?”

“Beirut,” she replied, without missing a beat. This made me smile, as even her dad never says he’s from Beirut, having lived most of his life in the US and France. Plus we left Beirut two years ago, and she only knows about a dozen Arabic words.

“What about daddy, where’s he from?”

“We don’t know,” was her succinct reply. And I think that about sums it up. Her dad is a mix of three distinct cultures. The origins of a third culture kid can’t really be packaged up neatly, which is what makes the questions “Where are you from, then?” or “Are you more cultureA or cultureB?” pretty tiresome. But what tickled me was her assumed independence from us. Why should her origins have anything to do with ours?

Merci kteer 7abibté. Killik zo2.

Another generation, another new country. Apart from being brought up in a country which is new to all of us, our kids already have parents from different cultures. Does that make them fourth culture kids?

In any case, I’m glad my little Beiruti will feel the part when we return to Lebanon next month. Even though I call her that tongue-in-cheek because it is ironic that she have come into the world during the years we were there. Had it not been the case, Lebanon would have been a distant dream by now. A completed episode, a mere fling, back when we were young and childless. Instead we will always carry around Beirut with us – on her birth certificate, in her Arabic child health record, in my memories of childbirth, and defining my introduction to motherhood.

Today the topic of Arabic came up.

“I am Arabic,” announces my daughter.

Clearly we haven’t worked on ‘Arab’ versus ‘Arabic’ and I’m not intending to. It’s confusing enough for a three-year old that there’s no country called Arabland and that all Lebanese speak French and English to her.

“Yes, well… you’re Lebanese,” I say, “and you have a Lebanese identity card.” She loves her passport, her zoo pass and library card (both photocards), so I thought she’d like that idea. She did, apparently.

“Does the card say ‘thank you for being Lebanese’?”

“Sorry?”

“Does the card say ‘thank you for being Lebanese’?”

I can only suppose my little Beiruti is muddling with the thank you cards we make for friends. Or else she has a marginally overblown sense of her own worth to the Lebanese government.

Ten things I’ll never tire of in Lebanon

cherries on ice

That huge tree which grows out of the ‘autostrade’ heading out of town, its roots pushing up the tarmac in the slow lane. Yes, the Lebanon has lost a lot of green and quite a few cedars, but this one old tree (a plane I think) is willing to take on the motorway. It’s so big you can actually see it on Google maps satellite view.
How people are so enterprising and imaginative whatever their circumstances. I love that people display their goods on the roof of their car and that the parking attendant uses a plastic water bottle as a lampshade.
Stairs. The narrow stairways linking winding streets, the stairways to nowhere, the outside stairways of three-storey family homes, the stairs that are no longer there.
How people are so down-to-earth. It’s great to hear people say what they think.
That people dress up. Am I being contradictory? I just love that the Lebanese dress up for events – even the down-to-earth ones.
Wondering about the lives of houses which have been rent apart and exposed by rockets, by weeds and neglect, or by modern construction, so that the kitchen tiles now plaster the outside wall and the stairway is just a two-dimensional paint mark climbing the bricks.
Fruits in season – any and all.
The way people go out of their way for you – far, far out of their way.
watermelon
Being able to spend three quarters of the year outside – on the balcony, on terraces, in the mountains, by the sea, in the valleys…
That people adore children. It still surprises me when 20-year old male waiters coming running over begging to hold my baby, and it’s always a bit weird when they walk off with her to introduce her to the rest of the staff, but it’s wonderful not to feel the weight of frowns all round when you enter a café.

Mundane luxuries

And here’s the text of the piece the BBC aired in September, or you can listen here.

There is an old saying here in the Middle East that a woman’s grave remains open for forty days after childbirth; so I guess now is a good time to reflect on my recent experience of the maternity ward of a large hospital here in Beirut.

That’s far from the only adage I’ve heard over the last nine months. Folk wisdom is held in higher esteem than white coats and I was warned against a great many evils, from ketchup to crossing my legs. My local well-wishers spurned modern ultrasound and confidently told me the baby’s gender, basing their conclusions on what I ate and whether I looked more or less attractive than pre-pregnancy. Admittedly, their gender predictions were only wrong half the time. The few who were not categorical invariably told me, “Inshallah it’s a boy, God willing.”

Given this traditional social backdrop, I wasn’t sure what to expect during my brief hospital stay for the delivery, so I dropped by for a tour of the facilities. The façade was shiny and modern, though the effect was somewhat undermined by signs warning visitors that: “Firearms are strictly forbidden in the hospital”. In the delivery suite I innocently asked the doctor whether there would be a mirror on the day to see the crowning as in some European hospitals. “No,” he told me, deadpan, “that’s what you get for giving birth in the third world.”

The irony became apparent when the midwife showed me round the accommodation options, which have clearly been borrowed from a hotel brochure. “There’s first class, second class, junior suite and VIP,” she said. “The top-end rooms boast a separate sitting room, a fridge, a PC, Wi-Fi and a webcam.” I looked at the plaque on the door of the sitting room marking it as the exclusive reserve of the patient’s guests. “That must help keep all those visitors out of your way,” I suggested, and she made a face.

“What’s the no-frills option like?” I asked. She showed me rooms shared by two beds with an en suite loo and the shower down the corridor. Not exactly hardship. Still, what would people think? In death, perhaps, all are equal, but for the Lebanese, social distinction is just as important in sickness as in health.

The fact that a hospital does better business by reducing its patient capacity in order to provide hotel-style creature comforts is rather telling. In this tiny country, where first world meets third, luxury has become almost mundane. Extravagance is not just for the rich, the lower middle classes are getting their dose too.

domestic worker takes a brief break

Domestic help epitomises this trend. Here, live-in maids are more common than dishwashers. Unlike the latest Whirlpool appliance, they still work during the daily power cuts and they’ve got a lot more functions. And just like those one-time luxury machines in the West, immigrant workers are now cheap enough in Lebanon for families on a very average income, costing about $200/£150 a month.

But cheap labour is not the only factor behind this generalisation of luxury. Society here feels an overriding need to be seen living the high life. The civil war shook up the fortunes of many and new money has been decisive to the way that people have tried to redefine their sense of identity. When dozens of friends and family turn up the day after you’ve given birth – because they will – it now matters that you have a VIP lounge with your name on it and a fridge to store the delicacies they bring. Once home, having hired staff open the door to your guests in a frilly apron is just another way to keep up with the neighbours.

In fact, 24/7 home help is so run-of-the-mill in Beirut that new distinctions are needed to establish one’s social standing, giving free rein to racial prejudice. A Filipina with pale skin and good English may be favoured over a Bangladeshi, while a Malagasy import tops the charts for many who want their children to grow up speaking French.
As I leave the hospital, I give the parking guy my pink ticket – because valet parking isn’t just for posh restaurants and hotels, it’s for anything from corner shops to fast food chains. He expects a decent tip, of course. After all, aren’t all Westerners rich? I wonder what he would think if he knew that back home we park our own cars when we’re not on the bus, and that most people giving birth share a ward with another three to five women.

Thinking back, as my grave prepares to close again, I reckon there are harder places to dodge death for forty days.

Public space and personal questions

Here’s the text of the piece I had broadcast by the BBC back in May. You can also listen to it here.

In a city like Beirut where road intersections are a free-for-all, it is only to be expected that any attempt to regulate public behaviour is regarded by locals with ambivalence. In a country which is used to doing without a government, state intervention is seen as rather incongruous. In fact public space is largely viewed as ‘up for grabs’, ready to be reclaimed for personal interests by the Lebanese spirit of enterprise. The slow lane of the highway, for example, is apparently the ideal place to set up a vegetable stall. Shopkeepers will plant a chair outside their store and fiercely guard the spot for potential clients, in blatant defiance of the nearby parking meter.

Solidere's downtown

Likewise, an abandoned plot in Beirut will never stay empty for long. A yawning gap in the street may be the result of 15 years of civil war, but it only takes a man with a plastic chair and a chipboard sign on which to write his price to convert a patch of urban wasteland into a paid ‘car park’. Having found a suitable spot for his new business, he then packs the cars in bumper to bumper and wing to wing, playing a real-life version of the computer game tetris to optimise every inch.

Real public space is hard to come by in Beirut. Even Beirut’s biggest park, the Pine Forest, has been closed to the general public for years, out of professed fears for its “misuse”. Meanwhile, the wide pavements and pedestrianised streets of the rebuilt downtown belong to the developer Solidere, controlled by the family of Saad Hariri, a prominent business tycoon and political leader. The central business district is, in effect, privately owned which is why the usual stalls don’t colonize the niches as they do in the rest of the city.

Leaving my car in one of those improvised parking lots is always something of a tug of war. I want to keep the keys; the tetris player wants custody of them too, to keep the pieces moving. His nylon bomber jacket, with the words ‘Middle East Security’ blazoned on the back, doesn’t inspire confidence, any more than the hairsbreadth spacing of the cars.

Still, he usually wins. I tell him I’ll be a couple of hours, but he is not yet satisfied. “Where are you going now? Home?

a fairly private park

When are you going back out? For dinner?” he asks, garnering as much information as possible on my plans, supposedly so he can judge for himself just how inaccessible he should make my car. Naturally, he asks about the size and welfare of my family whom he hasn’t met.

Of course such questions are not considered personal in Lebanon. It is not only the public sphere which is defined differently from the West; the private sphere is also a much more permeable affair. You can expect to be asked: “Have you put on weight? How much did your car cost? Why is your complexion bad this week?” And that’s just the baker’s wife.

While I’m humouring her, a shadow crosses my shoulder. A basket out of the sky. The baker’s wife hands me a package of thyme flatbreads over the counter. “That’s for Madam upstairs,” she says matter-of-factly. I place them in the basket and watch as the long cord whisks it back up to a lady in a dressing gown on the fifth-floor balcony.

Buying from itinerant vegetable sellers and conversing loudly with the neighbours are also choice balcony activities. Popping out for a paper in one’s pyjamas is a regular occurrence. Unlike the Englishman’s castle, the Lebanese home is evidently not a private refuge. Rather it is an open house which draws in an endless flow of unplanned visitors and exhales everyday scenes which the West keeps behind closed doors. Life spills in through the door, out through the windows and onto the streets.

Yet privacy does exist in Lebanon; it is to be found inside the banks. Not at the counter – where other clients will crowd around you and lean across you in the hope of being served first, just like they do at the baker’s – but behind the scenes. Lebanese banking secrecy is more impenetrable than your average tax haven. In fact, banks here are everything that the Lebanese are not: private, prudent and forward planning.

Jumping through the hoops of banking precaution, you might wonder for a moment if you weren’t in Switzerland. That is, until the advisor asks: “So, when are you going to start a family?” In the end, it’s a relief to see the familiar and affable manner of the Lebanese triumph.