Leaving Beirut Read online

  About Mai Ghoussoub

  and Leaving Beirut

  ‘Mai lived to fight the Lebanese civil war, and she was living and thinking in the heart of the project that is Lebanon’s only hope of liberation – by establishing a unified civil identity beyond sects; a unified civil culture beyond linguistic and ethnic boundaries, East or West.’

  Adonis

  ‘She was open to the future because she was naturally, independently and continuously creative. Few countries need these qualities as much as Lebanon. I hope a new generation will step forward to try and fill her role with the same intelligence and humanity.’

  Anthony Barnett, OpenDemocracy

  ‘Her life is almost a continuous expression in her sculptures, installations, performances and writings, and her travels and her relationships. Her overwhelming sensitivity and her energy spread without fragmenting. Mai, who was at once very patriotic, was at the same time a woman of the world … she was being herself without any compromise, but she always cared for everyone.’

  Abbas Beydoun

  ‘A message of universal applicability.’

  Banipal

  ‘Ghoussoub’s reconstruction, historical analysis and conscientious examination of the Lebanese civil war gives any individual or student an almost personal account of what happened.’

  British Journal for Middle Eastern Studies Newsletter

  ‘Seeing her around Beirut or London, at exhibitions or performances or festivals, was like catching sight of Debbie Harry in New York. She was an icon, she made things happen, she left a remarkable record of work, and she will be deeply, painfully missed.’

  Daily Star

  ‘One of the most moving chronicles to come out of the Middle East.’

  Moris Farhi

  ‘A gripping and enlightening meditation on how you can live beyond the horrors of the past and find new hope without forcing or falsifying forgiveness.’

  Maggie Gee

  ‘For Mai, all aspects of art – music, sculpture, dance, literature – were elements of a continuum, and she made no intellectual difference between them. She did, however, see sculpture as her work – but writing was a compulsion and an urge, an avocation that often took her unaware and tore into time that was always too little and too full.’

  Aamer Hussein

  ‘One of the most moving and revealing narratives about a conflict that baffles many of us to this day.’

  The Jewish Quarterly

  ‘One woman’s personal and imaginative reflection of war in Beirut.’

  Lebanese Gazette

  ‘An insider-outsider perspective of the postwar situation and the options to move beyond the violence into civility … a thoughtful book.’

  MESA Bulletin

  ‘Examines the propelling forces of war from the distance of exile and reminiscence … and women and their reaction to war … embittering some and empowering others, as they escape or join, forgive or destroy, the social forces that oppress them.’

  Middle East Report

  ‘She was a pioneer in establishing freedom of expression, and being open to all other cultures.’

  Rawas

  ‘Reflecting on the Lebanese civil war, the author wanted to portray the internal wars inside women as a result of the misery, treason, or resentment they have suffered. According to Ghoussoub, resentment is a feeling that every human has, but being civilised will restrict this feeling of resentment, and she doesn’t consider punishment as revenge, because revenge makes punishment barbaric.’

  Mikhael al-Khouri, an-Nahar

  ‘Mai Ghoussoub’s memoirs about Beirut in peace and war are a launching point towards the world. By using the Beirut experience Mai can return to the Nuremberg Trials, and see the Bosnian and African ethnic conflicts. Beirut becomes a mirror for cities throughout the world, and it is not leaving Beirut, as the title suggests, so much as returning to Beirut.’

  Iman Younes, as-Safir

  Mai Ghoussoub

  LEAVING BEIRUT

  Foreword by

  Maggie Gee

  SAQI

  Contents

  Foreword, by Maggie Gee

  A Kind of Madness

  Madame Nomy’s Lesson

  An Uneasy Peace

  Masrah Farouk

  Honour and Shame

  The Revenge of Leila’s Grandmother

  The Heroism of Umm Ali

  The Metamorphosis of Said

  Kirsten’s Power

  On Being Judged

  Noha’s Quest and the Passion of Flora

  Traitors and Conquerors

  Symbols with Shaven Heads

  Homelands

  Responsibility, Truth and Punishment

  Foreword

  by

  Maggie Gee

  In his Independent obituary, Moris Farhi tells the following story about the author of this book, Mai Ghoussoub, who died with tragic unexpectedness on 17 February 2007, at the age of 54, after a very short illness. ‘In the late 1960s a terrible murder shocked Lebanon. A young servant killed her newborn baby by throwing him from the ninth floor of a building. For days, the media pilloried her as a monster. Then, a student, barely 18, discovered that the maid had been raped by her employer and that, unable to endure this ‘shame’, she had chosen to expiate it by killing the evidence of that rape. The student went on to write a searing plea for the maid and offered the article to every newspaper in the land. Not one dared publish it. In patriarchal Lebanon, men could not be guilty of rape; the fault always lay with the woman. So started the extraordinary career of Mai Ghoussoub, sculptor, writer, publisher, human-rights activist and one of the most remarkable women of our times.’

  In his article about Mai Ghoussoub for Open Democracy, Neil Belton tells how during the Lebanese civil war that began in 1975, when she was still only in her early twenties, Ghoussoub, together with her childhood friend André Gaspard, helped set up a dispensary for poor people in Nabaa, an area of Beirut that was cut off by fighting. One day she was driving a wounded man to a hospital when she crossed an invisible line and the car was shelled. She lost an eye and spent three years recovering from her wounds in Paris and London.

  The freedoms of London were deeply attractive to her, but the city lacked a really good Arabic bookshop. So Ghoussoub rang André Gaspard, who was hitchhiking across America, and suggested they set one up together. Though English was their third language, he at once agreed, and before they even had residency permits they had taken out a loan. Al-Saqi Bookshop opened in 1979, and Saqi’s publishing house followed in 1983. Ghoussoub was the source of many of its most daring and creative ideas, and she also took responsibility for the bookshop’s exhaustive stock of Arabic titles and books about the Middle East. Somehow or other, living nine lives in one short one, she also enjoyed a vividly happy marriage to the writer and journalist Hazem Saghie, and found time for her real vocation as an internationally exhibited sculptor, playwright and performance artist. In her full-page obituary in The Guardian, Malu Halasa tells how ‘in 2004, in a duo show with the Israeli artist, Anna Sherbany, [Ghoussoub] became one of the first Arab women artists to explore the veil in a public space by dressing up in an elaborate Islamic get-up and carrying a tennis racket around the art haunts of Shoreditch. To her delight, nobody took any notice, proving a pet theory that Britain is a tolerant country.’

  Leaving Beirut is probably the most extended record we have of Mai Ghoussoub’s ideas. It is a subtle and profound book, a fascinating mixture of autobiography, semi-autobiographical fiction and meditations on how human behaviour is distorted by war, cunningly woven together by one central story that seems to come directly from the author’s childhood. (At any event, she makes the reader believe it, and it gives a beautiful, spiral form to the bo
ok as we circle it, every time going deeper, rejoining it for the last time at the end.) When Ghoussoub was a twelve-year-old girl at the French Lycée in Beirut, there was a teacher called Madame Nomy, a diminutive dark-eyed ‘maîtresse sévère’, a strict teacher whom she greatly admired. Trying to impress Mme Nomy one day, Ghoussoub wrote, in an hour-long exam, a story about some friends trying to frighten her in a dark wood. She thought about the poem ‘La Conscience’ by Victor Hugo, a writer Mme Nomy had always praised, which ends with a line about the inescapable wrath of God: even after death ‘The eye was in the tomb, staring at Cain’. Accordingly Ghoussoub ended her story by pledging to revenge herself on her friends, staring at them with a look of thunder, a regard foudroyant.

  She confidently expected a sixteen or even eighteen out of twenty, but Mme Nomy shocked her by instead awarding her ten out of twenty and pulling her up in front of the class, telling her that revenge was ‘the meanest of human sentiments’, and that she should have been more generous-spirited. This had an enormous impact on Ghoussoub. The rest of the book is a continued questioning of Mme Nomy’s lesson, and the last chapter of the book is called ‘Responsibility, Truth and Punishment: an essay for Mme Nomy.’ These are the grownup’s final conclusions – or should I say final questions, because her restless intelligence never allows her to be dogmatic – about Mme Nomy’s lesson on the futility of revenge. And in the arc of the book that carries us from the adolescent’s story to the mature adult’s essay, we have confronted a number of themes that are crucial to understanding life in the world order that has followed the instigation of the so-called ‘war on terror’ after 11 September 2001.

  Though Mai Ghoussoub’s book was written three years before 9/11, it feels very contemporary. She asks what makes a revolutionary fighter, and what makes a torturer and murderer, though she makes careful distinctions between the two. She tells us the story, first, of a girl, Latifa, taken on as a maid at nine-years-old by a bourgeois household and cruelly treated, who during the civil war escapes their stifling flat to become the fearless guerrilla fighter Umm Ali. Secondly, she tells the story of Said: in peacetime the grocer’s son, a perpetually smiling boy whom everyone knew and liked, but who secretly hated to see his father cringing and kow-towing before customers; in wartime a murderous bully and torturer. Ghoussoub explains both transformations by a past of powerlessness and humiliation which left Latifa and Said only able to feel safe in roles of unnatural strength. She is not, quite, ready to forgive the torturer; but nor is she ready to dismiss him or dehumanise him. Said remains terribly human, and so is her honesty about her reaction of horror, which she is not yet able to leave behind. Forgiveness is not easy and cannot be forced. ‘Could we all start again, as if we had had a bad night and were leaving its horrible nightmare behind?’ she asks. She answers that it ‘depends on [our] own inability to face the unacceptable reality that the line that separates the criminal from the next-door neighbour, the helpful lad from the torturer, is not as clear as I had always thought before the civil war.’

  We live, even more now than at the time when she was writing, in an age when governments, religious leaders and news journalists like to talk up extremes of human behaviour, archetypes of good and evil, heroes and villains, traitors and martyrs. Mai Ghoussoub’s narratives show how these myths are created, and ask what the more pied and parti-coloured human truth is behind these black and white creations. She writes about how religions breed martyrs. Noha Samman, a Lebanese suicide bomber, a young girl almost sexually in love with death, is compared to a Christian ‘virgin martyr’, Saint Flora of Cordoba. ‘Ten centuries apart, the quests of Flora and Noha had a similar taste of dreadful passion, a taste of eternity and blood.’

  In a later chapter, examining the mythologising of heroes in times of war, she looks at how the Christians made a martyr of an eleventh-century mercenary, El Cid. She says ‘[El Cid] lived at a time when the Christian West needed martyrs and the Muslims were relaxed and more inclined to toleration. Today the roles seem to have been reversed … The Christian martyrs are barely remembered … Today it is the unhappy Muslim world which is uneasy with itself … and whose discourse is packed with heroes, supermen and martyrs.’ Of course she was writing before the beginning of the ‘war on terror’, in which unhappy and uneasy Christian fundamentalists have reverted to a Manichean discourse of angels and devils.

  Though she had a past of political activism, and consistently asks what I would call political questions – how does today’s world connect up? where does power lie? how might it distort truth to fit its own ends? – Ghoussoub also recounts her own disillusionment with politics after the factional horrors of the Lebanese civil war. She fled, she says, for a while, into ‘fun, kitsch and lightness … my sculptures [would be] colourful, superficial and useless … They were made to enjoy themselves … I painted them in silver and gold, and I painted my own lips with a striking red.’ This was just a phase, but her book still draws in its search for enlightenment far more on art and literature than on political theory. She asks us to think about that great popular film Casablanca, and asks why we don’t hate the corrupt police prefect, played by Claude Rains. ‘Is it because we sense that the corrupt characters are less dangerous than the fanatics?’

  Despite the courage that characterised her own behaviour, she refuses to condemn those who, in times of war, are labelled cowards or collaborators. She asks us to consider whether, given a choice between collaborating and risking the lives of those we most love, all of us might not be cowards and collaborators. She is repelled by (even though she writes of it with understanding) the censorious French attitude to women who slept with Germans during the occupation of the Second World War. And yet she honours the impulse towards accountability and justice behind the South African Commission for Truth and Reconciliation: ‘understanding but not vengeance’, ‘reparation but not retaliation’. She is aware that however much we dislike, and have an aesthetic distaste for, the self-righteous, ‘we are human and cannot survive without judgements’.

  She becomes afraid, as she goes deeper, that the world is more complicated than the one Mme Nomy saw, but she never speaks of her with anything but love and respect, because of the great gift her teacher gave her: the knowledge that revenge must be avoided at all costs, in the law-courts, in war and in our personal lives.

  Yet I should not say ‘must’, because Mai Ghoussoub never does. She does not make statements in this book, she tells stories. And she ends by citing Bertolt Brecht. The best way for the artist to treat people who permit terrible political crimes is through comedy, because comedy, according to Brecht, is more serious than tragedy. This is a wise and complex book that leaves us with the sense that loving people, with all their imperfections, is worth the candle.

  25 February 2007

  A Kind of Madness

  The laws of the State were flouted, no tradition, no moral code was respected … In the collapse of all values a kind of madness gained hold.

  Stefan Zweig

  The phone had only rung twice when she picked up the receiver. She thought she would never get used to the indifference with which the phone was treated in Paris. She herself had often hung up when she had made a call and nobody had answered at the other end by the third or fourth ring. People here didn’t feel the urge to jump to the phone as soon as it started ringing. Maybe it was because their homes were less crowded and less likely to have somebody always sitting next to the handset. As soon as she lifted the receiver she knew, from the slight, familiar disturbance on the line, that the call was from Lebanon.

  ‘Beirut calling, hold the line.’ The voice of a bored female phone operator in Beirut.

  Her heart sank. She could never help feeling nervous when she was connected to Beirut, and she reacted resentfully towards her irrational agitation. Whenever she was drawn back into the country she had left, she was no longer in full control and her pulse would run at a fast pace. Faster than she wished. Impatiently, irritably, she waited to b
e connected.

  ‘Go ahead love, you have Paris,’ said the same off-hand voice to whoever was calling from the other end. It was him. It was the same voice that she believed she had silenced forever. This voice did not belong here. It should have stayed where it had been left, muzzled under the rubble of the collapsing buildings of Beirut, safely confined behind the austere scrutiny of the immigration authorities. It had no right intruding into her new universe, her cosy Parisian exile. This voice, his voice, was a transgression, a trespasser into her acquired space. She hung up in the middle of his desperate hellos. ‘Can you hear me …? Hello … Hello …?’ She hung up violently. Angry with him, yes with him, only him. He had no business invading her new serenity. He belonged to a war that she had escaped and that she never wanted to be reminded of again.

  The phone rang again. She rushed to unplug it. The sound of silence in the room was deep and devastating. She turned her back on the table where the lifeless telephone stood, and moved towards the window. She tried to immerse herself in the enchanted sight of reclining roofs competing for space on the city’s horizon. She had been lucky to find this flat. Here, on the top floor of this old building, at the end of a winding, narrow street. L’Impasse des Eaux Douces, in the heart of the Latin Quarter. She had spent hours observing the angles created by all these cluttered roofs, imagining the lives that unfolded beneath them. This was her present panorama, one that she had made and designed for herself. A tangible reality, with a starting point that she had drawn as an act of will, reducing her past and taming its recollections. His voice, his existence must not interfere with this landscape … She would not allow it … she could not afford to …

  Allen came from behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. She jumped.

  ‘What is it, darling? Sorry, didn’t you hear me coming? Who was that on the phone?’

  ‘No one. I unplugged the phone. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  Allen’s face could not hide emotion. She had been attracted to the serenity of his eyes, to his cool and nonchalant manner. She had met him in the English bookshop one Saturday afternoon a few months previously, and now he stayed with her when he came to Paris. He came regularly, every other weekend and during the academic holidays. She appreciated his discretion and valued his easy-going attitude. She was always grateful to him for not insisting on explanations. Yet somehow at that instant his controlled performance seemed theatrical. It was irritating. It had the smell of inhibition and had lost its charm. She moved away from him abruptly, took her jacket and walked out of the flat. She went swiftly down the steps, avoiding Madame Dufour’s cat and ignoring the scrutiny of its piercing green eyes. She walked firmly out of the building, giving the concierge no chance to step out of her cubbyhole and engage her in one of her tedious conversations.