It has been over a year since Beirut’s port explosion.
The morning of August 4, 2020 started out as another day in the capital. We were oblivious to the catastrophe that would come to be.
Within a few months, the reverberations of this devastating event—coupled with the spread of a global pandemic, successive lockdowns, and the collapse of the economy—amplified the overwhelming sense of a downfall and collapse. The haunting aftermath of Beirut’s explosion exacerbated people’s embitterment towards an unbending ruling elite whose only consistency was the service of their own interest at the expense of the country. An intense year of hopeful protests instigated by the October 17 Uprising had amounted to little change. Most of us were fatigued, some nursing their defeat and battling numbness, and yet others yearning for the next moment of protest that would, in the least, sustain remnants of hope towards change.
As two anthropologists familiar with Lebanon through our professional and personal lives, we wanted to create an ethnographic record of the intricacies of the turbulent times we were living. We wanted to focus on people “living in” (Moghnieh 2017) the crisis and privilege their voices and experiences. But how to capture extraordinary moments when we are in the eye of the storm, consumed by fixing facades of broken glass and managing life with everyday power cuts?
Our project aspired to chronicle the fluctuating textures of everyday life before our experiences became too routine to deserve attention, blending into Lebanon’s sea of troubled normality. In “Ethnographic Diaries,” we sought to provide a space in which we could share our individual accounts and process, together, the events unraveling around us. We hoped that this exercise would ultimately construct a broader story that would resonate collectively as we and others read our diaries; that they would serve as a point for future contemplation and comprehension. As researchers who have been using ethnography within the confines of academic writing, we were keen, through our collaborative project, to explore ethnographic writing as a means to transcend the divide between academic and non-academic forms of knowledge production, and to tap into ethnography’s potential for alternative and creative ways of writing. We are delighted, therefore, that our diaries found a home in Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal.
Apart from a few people who knew each other through their professional circles, the twelve writers had never met. They were residents of different cities across Lebanon and comprised ten women and two men; Lebanese, Syrian, and Egyptian nationals; ages ranging between early 20s and late 40s. Michelle co-coordinated the project from the UK, where she was spared the everyday anguish of living in Beirut but was still consumed by the concern for it, and supported the process of writing. Our group wrote and spoke in Arabic (both standard and colloquial) and English. We explored how the shift in language opens up, at times, and closes at others, also affecting form and tone. As project coordinators, we were open to interpretation when we asked our writers to observe and document everyday life around them. We invited them to be attuned to space, materialities, emotions, interactions, journeys, ambivalences, absences, and presences.
The task of writing for a group of strangers was intimidating at first. The everyday we were hoping to pin down seemed too broken to simply reconstruct in a diary. A sense of bewilderment hindered our ability to make sense of the moment. In the midst of collapse, the act of writing, even for some of us who wrote for a living, appeared too challenging. Was writing a privilege, some of us asked? Was it a luxury that transcended Lebanon’s violent reality and the hold that its chaos had on our lives? Could we proceed without guilt over such an indulgence when we were surrounded by despair and death?
As members of the group read each other’s diaries, our relationship to writing morphed. We found that writing allowed us to face our own internal turbulences, to open up and to find relief in expression. Pascale Ghazaly felt that “writing is a desperate act and a glorious one at the same time. It is like when everything blurs out and we take roughly-made torches to discern where we are.” Zainab Chamoun realized that “writing is a right, not a privilege. Whoever you are and no matter what skills you have, you have the right to put your thoughts into words and experiment with language. In such turbulent times, the least we can do is write.” Writing peeled away some of our inhibitions as we delved into the murky depths of what it means to live through destruction and what it takes to reconcile with complex layers of loss and the estrangement we felt towards our upended social world. Our writing helped us survive; in a landscape of wounds, it was a “construction of the soul, so it recovers from its pains” (Matar 2016).
As we talked about our diary entries in our bimonthly meetings, we found solace: We were not alone in our vulnerability. Our stories connected, our observations aligned, and as our worlds shrank to the confines of our isolated bedrooms and corners of our living rooms during two lockdowns, our introspections resonated. Through small screens, power cuts, intermittent WiFi and frozen faces, we found intimacy and friendship. We expressed frustration and loneliness at our isolation. We shared anger at our politicians. We lamented the sudden exodus of people we knew, desperately seeking safer pastures and a more predictable life outside of Lebanon. We shared our acquired survival strategies to secure daily services and discussed how these practices invoked war-time memories we thought we, and our parents, had forgotten. We alerted each other to spaces of beauty, hope, and imagination that chose to persist in our surroundings in spite of the overbearing sense of melancholy. And we found humor in the absurdities of re-learning to do what at one point we took for granted: filling the car with fuel, withdrawing money from the bank, or expecting an item in a shop to retain its price from one day to the next. Our individual experiences and affects began to draw together a collective picture.
The extracts presented in this issue, while they comprise only a portion of the wealth of entries from our writers, speak to these themes. Accompanied by a timeline that contextualizes the events taking place in Lebanon through the period of the project (November 2020-February 2021), and a podcast that vocalizes the entries, the diaries, we hope, will shed some light on everyday experiences in extraordinary times.
Muzna Al-Masri and Michelle Obeid
Coordinators and Editors of “Ethnographic Diaries”
