Christmas

Something has to be done, when the weeks leading up to Christmas are rain-sodden, perturbed and creaky with tiredness, and when the office Secret Santa holds sway every day for two weeks and vast amounts of chocolate and kneffe sandwiches are consumed for breakfast every morning to stave off the boredom. Something has to be done, and we do our best. We go to the German Orient Institute and drink mulled wine in a graceful courtyard with a many-sided fountain next to the library, all golden light and inlaid wood and fraying cloth-bound volumes. We go to Franco-German Jazz at the American University of Beirut chapel, where a thin man in a poppy-printed shirt introduces a small fat one in a grey t-shirt whose glorious beatboxing has people jiggling in their pews by the organ, and to classical Koranic music sung in a Maronite church with Mamluk mouldings in Gemmayzeh. Here an old man in robes, his face lined like the pages of a book, spins chants that when you close your eyes to the kitsch and the chandeliers makes you think instead of tents in the desert and Mohammed at dawn, communing with his god in the quiet. We go to the Old Souk in Kaslik for the food and wine festival, and do our dégustation in honey-coloured halls, beneath multicoloured lamps, and on the terrace overlooking Jounieh bay, while a man who glories in the career title of pizza acrobat spins his dough in ever-widening circles and the crowd goes oooh. But we come home early, because tomorrow is Saturday and we must sleep before work, and our feet drag. Something has to be done.

And so, we do it. The Sunday before Christmas we haul ourselves up at the crack of dawn and head for the Bekaa valley. The way to Syria, the way to the Roman temples, the way to the fertile lands and vineyards, the way to mountains and mists and snow and the breath of the new.

So many stories pave the road to the Bekaa, and here we are taking a tour bus to the vineyards. But it is the season, and in the spirit of Lebanon, to forget the trails of blood and war and ideology and to go pleasure-seeking instead. In the early white-cloud hours we are scarves and hats and arms around each others’ shoulders – and when we look back north towards Mount Lebanon our hearts lift at last with winter and adventure, for it is vast and unearthly icing-sugar white, the first snow of the year.

Up bare and stony hills the bus climbs, past as much ugliness and emptiness borne of destruction and poverty as we have seen before. Past half-built apartment blocks with child-sized pink mosquito nets set up bravely and significantly next to nonexistent walls, past bridges still under construction after Israeli bombing in 2006, with signs next to them that read, with jaw-dropping insouciance, Bridge reconstruction project: From the American people, for Lebanon’s progress. Past mangy dogs scavenging at the roadside, and a seasonal rash of men dressed as Santa selling bags of pink candyfloss outside barely-identifiable grocery shacks.

Edging round mountain corners above lumps of rock and frozen streams, the valley creeps into view. The hillsides are just as bare, deforested, but dignified – not scattered with ugly buildings but merely with grudging grey stones and occasional dark fuzzes of hard-bitten trees. The line of sky beneath the clouds and above the mountains is yellow and grey; the vast flat floor of the valley is rumpled at the edges by great ribs of rock and earth, driving plow-shaped into the land. Beyond them the hills rise higher and higher, shrugging into themselves in the cold, lavender and steel blue and greenish grey, blanketed in the distance with early snows. Mist is pulled along the valley floor like a ghostly scarf, that settles only uncertainly and barely warms the bony limbs it drapes.

On the flat between the ribs, with its dark clumps of trees and grey fields and heartbreaking plastic tents cobbled together by Syrian migrants, we are soon full of Arab bread with labneh or kariche and honey. We reel from vineyard to vineyard – Ksara, Kefraya, Kouroum, Clos de St Thomas – and our heads are full of Roman passageways and shining steel stills and signs that read dégustation or fermentation in stencilled white letters on black boards, halls full of stopped-up barrels stained pink and smelling of honey and oak. Piles of corks, winter-stubby vines in neat lines between dark firs with the snow far away in the blue, the sky changing above the mountains every hour, and always, always the wine, honey or pepper or summer fruits or who really cares, when you are warm and tired and settling down to a late lunch at the last cave, sitting à l’Arabe on bright low seats with a few full bottles and piles of cheese and bread and sausage tasting of anis.

In eight hours, we have visited four vineyards. Our lungs are full of fresh Bekaa air and our mouths with sweet scents. Something had to be done, and we did it well. As we slumber back to Beyrouth, the skies over the hills welcome us in pink and grey, sunlit patterns of cloud and mist and the dark silhouettes of trees standing lonely by the roadside. Soon, it will be Christmas.

Christmas Eve, and the mildly inebriated day spent watching Tom & Jerry in the office in protest at the 3pm end time (because you have Saturday off) and the macabre office “party” with self-congratulatory management speeches, lorded over by the obese eight-year-old heir apparent to the company, is quickly and thankfully forgotten. For now, we will come from Zouk, from Hamra, from Sodeco, from Dahiye, to Bourj Hammoud for a night among the lamps and the spices and the sweetness in the dark.

Fatima and I walk from Dora, along my favourite streets. They are as obstreperous as ever in the lamplight, except that everyone is wearing Santa cowboy hats. We turn off the main road and walk through hazes of nargileh smoke, the steam from roasting chickens, the scent drifting from herbs hanging in armfuls above magical mounds of polished fruit and vegetables. A battered estate car stands idle, full from roof to window, from boot to front seat with enormous white pumpkins. The sweet shops spill out on to the road, cardboard boxes full of coated peanuts, walnuts, dried fruits, things in toffee, sweets in twists of paper and sweets in boxes, scoops shoved in at the ready for filling greedy paper bags.

Onno brings out the best in everyone. Hummus haar, we say, and zeitoun haar, and tabbouleh haar the Armenian way, because khalas with the mild Lebanese everyday. Red wine, we say, and we talk about Lebanon and Iraqi refugees and our dreams and mop up oil with Arab bread, until the others fall in the door. Cherry kebabs, we say, and batatas al toom. Sausages with cloves, soujouk in yoghurt, fattouch, chicken livers. Sparrows, I insist, not without trepidation. Ruba catches on – frogs, she says, and announces a CDBB party – Cute Dead Baby Birds. The tiny once-feathery corpses disappear, bones and skulls and all, juicy mouthfuls soaked in wine-rich sauce. The frogs have no power to unnerve beneath their herbs and juices, and the small creatures make a happy communion in our bellies.

Under a self-consciously cheese-like horizontal half moon, we find our way to red wine and almaza in Gemmayzeh. We are tired, still, but tomorrow will dawn bright and sunny and there will be nothing but pyjamas and lazy dozes and thoughtless yawns in front of The Snowman and Father Christmas and Brideshead Revisited. We laugh until our throats are sore in the smoky bar, and as we waver home in the dark, we know that we will sleep dreamlessly, and well.

Zico House

When do you first start to notice the domestic workers in Lebanon? In Zouk, you can’t escape the Syrian migrant labourers who squat by the roadside day in and day out, waiting seemingly without hope or foundation for a truck to pull up and offer them casual employment. They inspire sympathy and revulsion in equal measure as they loiter filthy and miserable in the dust, leering and hissing every time you walk past on your way to the Charcutier or the autostrade. But they are Arabs, and men, and their trials are of a different order, though certainly they are regarded with disdain by the Lebanese. Elsewhere, the streets of Lebanon are anyway overflowing with such a motley ethnic mix that at first the faces of Filipinos, of Ethiopians, of Sudanese, of Mozambicans, of Indians and Pakistanis and Nepalis do not stand out from the rest with any particular significance. Bourj Hammoud on a Sunday is a parrot-bright conglomeration of colourful outfits and different trilling accents, everyone laughing and talking and going to church and eating along boisterous roads hung about with cheap goods and strings of sausages. Passing through on one’s way into Beyrouth, one might casually believe in some harmonious coexistence of communities within Lebanon’s fractured whole. But soon enough the everyday seeps in, insidiously. Perhaps you first notice it when you see those pantomimic maid's uniforms you saw on sale in the supermarket and thought were hilarious being worn by Indian ladies fielding troupes of Lebanese children, or when you see families out to extravagant lunches sitting with an African girl to one side of their table, without a menu, or when you suddenly catch yourself assuming that a Lebanese man and a Filipino woman together must be involved in some distressing transaction. Perhaps it is when Ellie, the ray-of-sunshine Filipino lady who cleans our offices and apartments with backbreaking enthusiasm, talks about her son. She has not seen him since she came to Lebanon thirteen years ago, during which time she has not had a single day off. Perhaps, it is when you are forced to conclude that Ellie is one of the luckier ones.

Because of course, things do not stop merely at outward expressions of a social attitude, one where a permanent shadow in one's wake of a downtrodden scullion is a sign of wealth to be admired as opposed to one of reactionary unpleasantness, and where the daily experience of an African or Asian* in Lebanon is one where people look askance, leer, throw verbal abuse, or ban certain races from their businesses (especially swimming pools) unless they are there as employees. Instead, dehumanization of others and of what are perceived to be lowly professions has led to a situation of such widespread human rights abuse that governments around the world are forbidding their citizens to leave for work in Lebanon. But, seduced by false promises of well-paid work in tourism, they come anyway by back routes and, lost to their embassies, join the ranks of workers whose passports are confiscated as standard practice, who are denied time off or phone calls home or their pathetic wages, who try and flee their abusive employers but are returned to the same family, who are beaten and raped and killed and driven to suicide. They become trapped in a country where the system is a legal, political and moral loophole that allows all this to carry on barely challenged and which – whether or not the vast majority of citizens treat their domestic workers with a decent amount of consideration, and whether or not there are a few glowing examples to the contrary – sustains a culture where a death or suicide – often it is not clear which – among the domestic working class a week is a cause for, at most, a shrug of the shoulders and an offhand haram.^**

Perhaps it is the clarity of outrage that belongs to a foreigner who is equally blind at home, but the sickly daily reality of racism and snobbery appalls. So when some exemplary ex-pats organised a gathering at artists' commune-cum-cafeteria Zico House to discuss what is what, it only made sense to go along. A big battered house in a prime location in Beyrouth, this place drags me back in seconds to the SOAS bar – in fact at least one person is there from my year. There is the same smoke-thick air and stained furniture and bad murals and insistent feeling that you are not and never will be cool or interesting enough to fit in here, coupled with a sneaking suspicion that dreadlocks and weed are not an automatic passport to visionary sociopolitical insights. The music is world, the food from the countries of the domestic workers, but apart from the speakers and perhaps one and a half full-time Lebanese, the entire audience of eighty or so is ex-pats or overseas-educated Lebanese who have come back to recoil in horror at some of the customs of their homeland.

Still, through smoke and local beer, voices have a chance to speak and to be heard. A Nepali voluntary support worker explains that for countries without their own embassies (Nepal, Bangladesh, Madagascar), honorary consulate positions are filled by indifferent Lebanese, leaving those who do manage to navigate their way to official help thwarted yet again. An Ethiopian deacon talks about the suicides of four of her countrywomen in October. They came indirectly and illegally to Lebanon through Yemen, Qatar, Syria, and their deaths went uninvestigated – the Lebanese state takes no responsibility. She can barely speak of a woman whose skull was broken by her employers when she damaged their TV. A Sri Lankan prison visitor tells of those who are kept jailed long after the one-month standard sentence for visa violation, and who have no legal or financial recourse, no family or connections that can help. Her English is hard to follow but she passionately repeats one phrase – insisting that everyone has a right to the personal life of a human being. This is what gets to her most, and it is the core of the problem; how to change legislation on behalf of people who some Lebanese consider less than human, and when the country’s labour laws exclude workers in the home – 90% of which are foreign. Children’s books exist for Lebanon that attempt to de-alienate other cultures, but the school system cannot even agree on the history of its own country for long enough to produce an up-to-date history textbook, let alone implement radical social awareness programmes, even if they wanted to. As such, the next generation are growing up according to the example of their parents, treating others as they have learned to treat their own nannies and servants ­– as those without the right to the personal life of a human being.

***

Beyond the far more important calls to action, and problems like lack of funds and manpower for a centralized legal and social effort on behalf of the domestic workers, what I take away from Zico House is another piece slotted into place in a more general feeling of growing dismay. It is the end of the year, no doubt, and times are grey and dispiriting and exhausted. But I have been trained, like most of the other nice social science minds at the meeting, to look everywhere for expressions of control. And perhaps for the first time I am consciously feeling what it is like for other people to consider you powerless, and seeing daily and overtly how people with power choose to express it. For many, it is in their curt words to their servants as they load up shopping bags into range rovers. For me, it is in the way that LDL keeps everyone on tenterhooks until the eleventh hour waiting to hear whether public holidays will in fact be granted to the company staff, and every day, several times a day, in the way that men believe that because I have the temerity to walk around Lebanon without a male escort they have the right to drive alongside me with their windows rolled down and fix me with lecherous stares. These are inconsequential things, of course, in the context of the problems faced by the domestic workers, and even more so in the context of other political and social problems faced by Lebanon, but I am starting to see it all as part of a whole – if you have status and power in Lebanon, then everyone else must be made to dance grotesquely to your tune.

***

Feeling like this, the temptation is to stay home until the blues pass. It is seductive, safe in the strong ship, whose wide windows are nightly now smudged and sloshed with bucketfuls of dubious rainwater and whose industrial panorama is dramatised by sheet lighting as a matter of course. Here there are glorious hours alone, music and warmth and the smoke rising from mosquito coils smelling of summer houses in the woods, and there is me alone in the light, reading or writing or grappling fairly unsuccessfully with Arabic. Outside the air is an unidentifiable winter industrial soup of food manufacturing smells, there are no drains or pavements, and at least three kerb-crawlers are guaranteed between here and the nearest bus stop or source of cornflakes.

But the mood will pass, and people will continue to meet and talk about what is what, and I will go too, and for now this is what matters – that people care enough to start something, and that there are people who feel the same way, and that on the same night as the Zico House meeting there are concerts and dinners and adventures to be had, and that there are always Lebanese to meet that remind you of the good in people. The New Year will bring fresh eyes and fresh heart, and many more months of exploring, and of education.

***

*There are exceptions to this rule. Arum and her Korean friends find that when obviously well-turned-out they are taken for Japanese, which apparently exempts them from the general attitude. The rest of the time people address her as Filipina and she has far too good an idea of what it is like to live on this dark side Lebanon’s attitude to race. There are no such distinctions for Africans – a well-off or nicely-dressed Ethiopian or Sudanese will invite only speculation about how they have illegally come by their good fortune.

**A multipurpose term originating from a word meaning “forbidden by the Koran” – in Lebanon it means, rather, “poor you”, or “shame”.

Watching films in Beyrouth

It’s a thin month, December, with the bike chained up round the back and the belt tightened right in close. It's cold, at last, and the country is no match for the increasingly frequent and astonishingly heavy rains, having apparently constructed its roads with a mind above drains. Within minutes of the start of each storm, the streets are two inches deep in furious torrents and the news full of houses swept away in the Bekaa. Thin, also, on tolerance – even as Zouk blushes fluorescent under the seasonal frosting of tinsel and fairy lights, the markers of prejudice casually thrown about the place become suffocating rather than interesting, and the Lebanese Forces tea towels on sale in the supermarket far less funny. I feel prompted by some unhelpful demon to suggest that the office Christmas charity collection be sent to Palestinian families in the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila, unleashing a sickening, hysterical torrent of bigotry*. I know that they have their reasons, but retain an unconscionable tendency to try and remember the reasons of others as well.

It's a thin month, with the bike chained up and no money for a licence, but speaking of tracks further afield, soon, where green grows and the air is clear and the landscapes of religion and history become more manageable with distance.

There is time, then, with poverty and disaffection, for the things that should have come earlier. Evenings trundling up and down the pool of the local hotel, evenings reading, evenings scribbling illegible ramblings on multicoloured papers that metamorphose, caterpillar-like, into a satisfying butterfly flourish of envelopes with red-and-blue airmail wings. Does my letter-writing style speak somehow of my character – incoherent, mercurial, unreadable, lost in the post? Evenings ditching dear Jeanne d'Arc for the less splendiferously named but far more effective (and dangerously delightful) Michel, who takes you through Beyrouth on the back of his bike and up and up marble stairs to a lean-to bedsit in a roof garden in Achrafieh. Basil plants grow round and about, palms arch below, a rug is spread out for smoking narghile on and elegant windows in the air beside are golden-lit from within. He teaches me Arabic in French and by the end of the evening I feel properly Lebanese, my head a fractured mess of three different languages, incapable of expressing myself properly in any of them.

It's time, too, to seek out the spaces that are warm with the colours of art and of curiosity. For even if in Zouk narrow-minded attitudes are immovable and creativity limited to an eight-foot dancing Santa in the supermarket, elsewhere people are talking and thinking and writing and taking photos and campaigning and making films about it all. Happily for one always disposed to watching obscure and miserable accounts of man's inhumanity to man, Beyrouth's artistic scene and violent past has attracted enough similar souls to sustain a fantastical parade of art house films from the miserable to the magical and everything in between.

So, to the Metropolitan Sofil, where the festivals are held – European or Documentary or Animated – for LL3,000** a throw. Here, the farmer in the One Man Village documentary talks lovingly to his cows and refuses to speak about family deaths in the war. He has a photograph of his parents on the wall of his house – “but they were never actually photographed together. This was a picture of my father with his cow, and we took a picture of my mother and placed her where the cow used to be. But it is still good, no?”. Here, Fly by Rosinante is a truly mad but largely hilarious film about a travelling Romanian opera troupe and Zelary is beautiful Czechoslovakian hills and the vileness of men and the impossibility of war and time. Here the arrogant, insensitive American pontifications of Car Bomb make me even more susceptible to the sensibilities of Sa'at Sa'at and Mother, Lebanon and Me, two beautiful films about war and sadness and old age and diseased minds and history that send me back to Zouk fuzzy with ideas and with melancholy. To the Empire Sodeco, whose names in lights and red velvet armchairs would grace any screen in 1950s Hollywood, were Julie & Julia is colour and fun and food and the breath of Paris and of home, and the dark eyes of the heroine in Melodrama Habibi glow with all the intelligent bemusement of a thirty-five-year-old single woman in Lebanon, while her boss's chauffeur's embonpoint steals every scene it appears in. To the ArtLounge, in a dark warehouse full of pink lamps off La Rue d'Armenie, where on Sunday nights people come to drink beer, curled into a collection of podlike armchairs or squatting on leather pouffes, and to watch free cycles of cinema from Persia, from Hong Kong, from Bollywood. Here Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham cuts from a Mumbai palace to the hero and heroine inexplicably writhing in see-through clothes in front of the Pyramids, and the people in their armchairs fall about in exultation.

Even to City Mall, to ABC and the rest, where you can disappear among neutral decorations and designer shops for a popcorn-fuelled ninety minutes of Johnny Depp and his ilk shooting each other glamorously and forget that you are in Lebanon. To all of these, to sit in the dark and see the people around laughing and nodding as you do, and to emerge into the night feeling restored by trips to different worlds.

And afterwards, in the quiet dark, walking between buildings grubbily beautiful or buildings with the beauty bombed out of them, even the clicks and hisses that seem to come constantly from arrogantly loitering men grate less, and the fuck-off finger you direct at the ever-present kerb-crawlers lacks the proper outrage. It seems, then, that there are always worlds outside Zouk, and outside Lebanon, and that those worlds are good.

But in the dislocation between the celluloid and the everyday, I realise for the first time that I miss the company of the very few people in this world who I like without reservation. And for no particular reason I remember, yet again and by no means less so for being in Lebanon, how far and insurmountable the distance is between who you want to be, and who you are.

* The vast majority of people in this area are more or less evangelical supporters of the Lebanese Forces, a phalangist Christian militia (reinvented as a political party after the war) responsible for the massacre and rape of somewhere between 300 and 3,500 Palestinian men, women and children in Sabra and Chatila after the agreed evacuation of PLO forces from Lebanon in 1982 – an incoherent but deadly revenge for the assassination of president-elect Bashir Gemayel.

** About £1.50