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.
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