Beirut or Brooklyn?

on homes

Hi there,

While it all only adds up to a matter of months, Beirut is probably the one place in the world other than home, i.e. New York, where I've spent the most time. A handful of visits, three months maximum per visit—but the friends and connections I've made there have made me consider Lebanon a home as well.

Beirut, March 16, 2020

I was last in Beirut on March 16, 2020, a day I left Lebanon in a rush, right before the airport shut down indefinitely for the pandemic. Earlier that month, I went dancing at an event organized by the Beirut Grooves Collective, three DJs who were avid collectors of dance music vinyl records from around the world—particularly from the 1950s through the 1970s—to the enjoyment of Beirutis of all ages. The party took place in the neighborhood of Karantina, a part of Beirut where once in history maritime travelers entering the Mediterranean port city were required to quarantine—presumably for the "40 days" implied by the name. Little did I know at that time that I and the world would soon be in "karantina" for much longer than I'd imagined. 

Today in Brooklyn, in the left-hand drawer of my desk, is the key to a room in my friend Miran’s Achrafieh family home, a key to an apartment where I was supposed to live for a year. It’s still attached to its keychain, a round blue and white evil-eye symbol on a blue string. Of course, the timing of my arrival to Beirut in late February 2020 meant that this year-long stay was never meant to pass.

I keep meaning to return the key in person, though circumstances, personal or very much otherwise, have made it impossible to do so. It's still in a ziplock bag, along with some near-worthless Lebanese lira, a business card for a local taxi company, and the SIM card I was using when I left, which I thought I would be popping back into my phone after a couple of weeks once the pandemic "died down".

my Beirut apartment balcony

I left with such certainty that I would be back in a matter of weeks. I had stocked the pantry with lentils and canned vegetables, rice bags, and a few large water cooler containers. I left most of my personal belongings that I’d moved there with for the year in the dresser and on my desk and bed, all of which are still yet to be retrieved.

Maybe it's because I have unfinished business—a home I was just settling into, to which I never had a chance to return, and the fact that I've been trying to go back for so long—but anything happening in Lebanon hits me harder than it does anywhere else.

The other thing is that Beirut has a funny knack for feeling like another neighborhood of Brooklyn. My first time ever in the city, I hadn't even slept a night there and I'd already had a reunion with a host of friends I knew previously from New York, and I’d even played a casual show at Radio Beirut that evening with my late mentor Bassam Saba. Walking back through the hipster Mar Mikhael neighborhood to finally settle in with the aforementioned New York friends, I might as well have been in Bushwick.

At the beginning of another longer stay in Lebanon, my friend Gilbert, who I know from the New York Arab music scene, picked me up in his car for a drive around his stomping grounds in Beirut, which ended with some shawarma and a stop at the iconic Barbar in Hamra for dessert. Another evening, a friend from grad school, Khaled, who I run into all over NYC, and then, true to form, would run into all over Beirut, took me to his favorite joint for sandwiches, Tabliyyat Massaad.

a Tabliyyat Massaad sandwich

I hadn't seen Miles since I was in Los Angeles, but when he was in Beirut on tour, he took us to a bar called Anise run by his friend, who made us delicious za'atar gimlets, with za'atar from his southern Lebanon hometown. My friend Delaney, who last I’d seen in a rehearsal in midtown Manhattan, was visiting family in Achrafieh, so we, along with her cousin, met for brunch that week too. Another time, Gabe and I ran into the oud player Kinan at Mezyan, totally unaware that he'd moved to Beirut at that time. So many of my Lebanese friends from New York and elsewhere gave me the personal contact information and addresses for close family and friends, just in case I ever needed anything. Post-pandemic, I've run into friends in Brooklyn after several years, and we truly can't recall if we last saw each other in New York or in Beirut.

another previous Beirut balcony view

Being in New York is, in fact, the reason I ever went to Beirut. It's people from Lebanon that I met here who have profoundly impacted my personal and professional lives, who convinced me to visit the country they proudly call home. There has been a brokenness this entire year that most around me have been feeling, and now the unfathomable destruction and devastation faced by Palestinians in Gaza has spilled into Lebanon, masked by a so-called “de-escalation through escalation” strategy. Somehow all of the horror we are witnessing from a distance is simply glazed over as strategic preemptive attacks against existential threats instead of the mass carnage, the evaporation of bodies and residential blocks, poisoning of land, and non-stop displacement of families that it actually is. This is all as this past weekend, the escalation of the genocide in northern Gaza, culminating with the burning alive of people in a hospital tent camp, has reached unprecedented levels—as if what we’ve been witnessing this last year has been anything but.

And that terrorism extends here to New York: Along with everyone who has family in in Palestine, now every Lebanese person I know is constantly checking on their families and friends overseas, trying to make sure they've moved to safe ground, or are getting on the last commercial flights out, if they have the means or the desire to abandon their homes—friends who are frantically waking up their parents in the middle of the night after hearing notices of mandatory evacuations at ungodly hours. This too is terrorism. And yet, the headlines spin mass terrorism as targeted strikes, and newsrooms continue to have the audacity to call the use of 2,000-pound bombs on civilians and the deaths of 17 thousand children—largely facilitated by my country—"defense". Questions of humanity have time and again been forced to sound "complicated" this past year, when in the end all we are really seeing is gross dehumanization that is compounding every day.

Brooklyn and Beirut: I consider both of these places home, as they are connected in my mind by the same thread, by the same wonderful people. Yet only one has been flattened and shrouded by words like “enclave” and “stronghold” and the military might to match them.

Sending love, and until soon,

Insia