SHATTERED GLASS AND TAXI DRIVERS
By Naji Bakhti
In the summer of 2006, following the Israeli airstrikes on Beirut, I rushed to help my mother pick the glass off my mattress. For my efforts, I received an almighty scolding. At 16, I was too young to handle shards of broken glass. After the internal conflict of 2008, now old enough to smoke and drink, I tried again. It was easier and quicker to do it herself, she claimed. This was not an attitude she had held about my share of the household chores growing up. In the intervening years, amidst political assassinations, car bombs and the like, she developed the technique of elbowing me out of the way as I made valiant attempts to reach for the odd sliver of glass or splinter of wood. After one window shattered twice in quick succession, my mother insisted that we have it boarded up. I sometimes catch her staring at it instead of through the glass of an adjacent window. I wonder if it is her favourite view from the apartment.
My family and I were fortunate, once more. For us, the extent of the Beirut port explosion on August 4th, which ended 200 lives and destroyed more than 300,000 homes, was shattered glass, remorse, anger and relief. After the first blast, my father pronounced that it was a mild earthquake or fireworks—or some simultaneous combination of the two—and went back to reading his book. After the second, my sister leapt from her old bed, below my parents’ wooden-framed windows, and was flung across the apartment and into my arms. I had been standing in the hallway with my mother. None of us still believed in earthquakes or fireworks: an inevitable offshoot of my father’s attempts to maintain calm in the face of chaos over the years. The conviction had long since deserted him, but he kept it up for appearances. It was the latter blast that sent a shock through the flat, knocking over books, shattering windows and propelling my sister. When we found my father, he was inspecting the glass. My mother had reached for the masking tape and the broom even before assessing the damage.
At 30, I resigned myself to the couch in the living room. I knew my role. I watched my father support the battered frame of the window against the ledge. I watched my mother apply two or three layers of tape, using her teeth to cut it down to the desired length, never once failing to estimate the size of the crack or the dimensions of the gap. As veterans of the civil war, they do this mechanically, detached and steadfast, unperturbed by the intense summer heat or the breaking news on the TV behind them. Etched across their faces, my mother’s in particular, is guilt. It is as if she holds herself personally accountable for the explosion, as if the resulting debris is her perpetual burden which she must shoulder alone and not breathe a word about for fear that a dammi or kasra might shatter more glass.
In the end, I received a telling off from my mother anyway for coming back to Beirut, when I had made a home for myself in the UK for most of my 20s.
Throughout that year prior to the explosion, which featured the economic crisis, the collapse of the lira, and the revolution threatening to topple the corrupt ruling elite, there had been a burgeoning resentment amongst my contemporaries directed at the civil-war generation: my parents’ generation. It was felt that our parents had let us down, that they had been complicit in their silence, in their “resilience” comprised of masking tape and broomsticks and not breathing a word for fear that a vowel or two might shatter a fragile state.
One of the earliest pieces of advice my mother gave me was not to “refrain from talking to strangers”, but rather specifically to “refrain from talking about politics and the war to taxi drivers”. At nine, I found this to be a reasonable request albeit one I did not expect to struggle with.
The war generation’s unwillingness or inability to engage in the difficult conversations meant that the warlords were able to grant themselves amnesty and rob the country for 30 years without so much as an inquisitive nine-year-old holding a presumed militiaman turned taxi driver accountable for his war crimes.
A brief disclaimer here: not all taxi drivers are embittered former militiamen or part-time agents of the Syrian regime. Some of them double as primary sources for foreign correspondents.
A few days on from the explosion, I trod lightly past the remains of an unrecognisable Mar Mikhael street, handing out bottles of water to the youthful volunteers who swept the glass and rubble to the side of the road. I looked into their simmering, masked faces: some of them were younger than I had been in 2006. My mother was wrong, or so I thought. You are never too young to sweep the glass off the floor.
Then I noticed their technique. It was poor, unbalanced and carried with it none of the swift, graceful movement of my mother. Sweeping glass is a different skill to sweeping dust. The former demands a firmer grip and more agile manoeuvers.
I suspect that was my mother’s gift to me. She believed in raising a generation so ill-equipped to sort through the debris, so ill at ease with the act of sweeping the rubble, that it might busy itself with the task of toppling a corrupt regime instead.
For the many who lost their loved ones or their homes during the latest act of criminal negligence perpetrated upon the Lebanese people, the broomstick and masking tape solution would not do. On the evening of the 8th of August, I stood by the devastated Gemmayze Street, overlooking the clashes with the security forces at the heart of Beirut as gunfire, rubber bullets and tear gas were launched into the night sky. I believed in fireworks then. When the government announced that it would resign—the second in the space of a year—I believed that we could make the earth quake, too, or if not the earth then at least Nabih Berri.
Unfortunately, former PM Saad Hariri is preparing to form a government despite ongoing clashes with security forces in Tripoli as the ruling elite looks to consolidate power and further hamper the investigation into the port explosion. Fifty-five per cent of the population lives under the poverty line, with many having lost their jobs, their homes, their savings, their livelihoods, their lives or their loved ones.
In Lebanon, every year is so much more dismal than its predecessor that the next one is always bound to be better. A taxi driver told me that. I listened. And then we talked politics and the war.
Naji Bakhti is a novelist based in Beirut. His debut, Between Beirut and the Moon (Influx Press), was released last August to critical acclaim.
PHOTO: HASSAN AMMAR / ASSOCIATED PRESS
