Muhammad Abi Samra - Beirut Noir

Originally written in French.

Ain el Mreisseh

I woke up unsure. I knew I felt something. Considerable. But wasn’t very sure. As I squeezed my way out between my mama’s legs, I knew it was already time to be somewhere else. Here in room 807 of the American University Hospital in Ain el Mreisseh, I began to let go of my life quite happily. The pounding heartbeat that connected me to my mama was slowly beginning to weaken, and everything was warm, oh so warm. I smiled and wrapped myself around our cord. I could hear the pushing and panting of my mama in the distance, and a drumming began in my head. Getting louder and louder. I wanted it like this, to go out with a bang. Here, within the pastel-green walls of the hospital where most Beirutis begin and end their lives. Cancer. War wounds. The flu. Silence. Silence is an illness that deeply affects my parents’ generation. They are the ones who grew up with the bombs. They prefer alcohol to sobriety. And silence to reality. Who can blame them?

Nothing left to say. In silence, I would die. The quiet, the end. The birth of the universe was absolutely quiet, everything that came after was chaos, loud, the beginning of our death.

On the day I was born, the Great Wall fell. They say that I was born blue and without a heartbeat. My mother, Souraya, screamed in fear as the nurses tried everything to get me to breathe. They hit my back. Spanked my bottom. Flipped me up and down. Swayed me back and forth. I would say nothing. I would not cry, I would not breathe. I could see all of this as my soul rose away to begin its voyage into another life. A short overweight nurse with jet-black hair, in a sudden act of desperation, flew back against the radio that my mother had finely tuned to 96.2 FM, Radio Liban. My father, Rida, a local deejay, had planned to spin records for my birth. He would connect to my mother through song. He had chosen a mix of Al Green, Led Zeppelin, and Ziad Rahbani. Al, he believed, would help ease my way down my mother’s birth canal, filling my heart with love and faith. Zeppelin would help me burst through her feminine folds and prepare me for life, giving me the motivation and courage to find beauty in a galaxy of pain. Ziad would be there as I took my first breath to help me accept all that was wrong and understand all that needed to be changed. Ziad would also provide me with the sense of humor and irony to laugh in the face of death, something we love to do here in Beirut. Death. Death, it seemed, is what I was destined for. I came out blue and neither Al nor Jimmy Page could help me. And Ziad... Ziad will be our last man standing in Beirut. He will survive all the wars, the civil wars, ideological wars, family wars... Ziad, even on the day the world ends, will still be here, cigarette hanging off his chapped lips, whiskey in hand, with something significant to say. As I twisted myself tighter around our cord, the final connection between me and my mama began to fade and Ziad’s words were the last thing I ever heard. I died blue, with a smile on my face. And then I began to float up...

“Ismaa’, Ismaa’ ya Rida...”

My father, Rida, so self-absorbed in his ideas, failed to acknowledge that I might be born a woman. And that it could only be a woman’s voice that would convince me to embrace this new lifetime. The nurse with jet-black hair — unable to control her tears, fears, anxiety, and bloated stomach of this morning’s fermented yogurt breakfast — stumbled back and brushed against the small radio just as my father’s voice was desperately announcing the next song. I could barely make out her name tag as I floated higher and higher. Hello, my name is Rima’ s round and shapely ass hit the radio dial, disrupting the channel. My parents had spent weeks brainstorming about the music that would welcome me into this new world. Being the romantics that they are, they asked the doctor not to inform them of my gender. My aunt, an older woman who never married, was sure I was a boy. She claimed that boys made their mamas crave salt, while girls were sweet. Souraya only ate lemons during her pregnancy. She sprinkled them with salt and cumin. She put them in her water. Ate them with mangos. She preserved them in olive oil. Put them in her tea and in her lentil soup. Sour. Sour is what she craved. My mama had asked my father to play Ella, Nina, Patti, and Alanis. She believed they were all women of virtue who would bring me into a world with strength and courage. She was convinced that Patti Smith was the reincarnation of Asmahan, and Alanis was Oum Khalthoum. Therefore they bridged East and West, providing me with the best of both worlds.

I see them crying now and I just want to hold them and tell them everything is going to be all right. That they will have another chance, maybe. My mother, alone. My father, hunched over his vinyl. Who’s going to tell him? He looks so small now. I want to hold him.

I leave the hospital and I fly over Ain el Mreisseh. I can see the Mediterranean Sea from here. It’s absolutely blue and beautiful. I decide to take the big concrete steps that connect John Kennedy Street down to the sea. Recently, the steps have transformed into a graffiti haven. In the last few years, the youth of Beirut have taken to the walls for self-expression; everything from political slogans to gay rights paint the streets of this part of town. Haifa for President! Freedom! Lesbians United! On the left side of the stairs is the very end of the American University of Beirut campus, flanked by aging yellow bricks. On the right lays an abandoned plot of land ravaged by stray cats and out-of-control electricity wires, shrubs, and ivy. From here I can also see the hotel district, specifically the Holiday Inn. During the civil war, the militias fought to take control of these hotels because they were the tallest buildings in Beirut at the time. The hotels were strategic and from their rooftops anything and everyone could be shot down or thrown over. The Holiday Inn, towering above the city, is the only hotel still standing, and it’s completely riddled with bullet holes. Large chunks of the facade were blown off by rocket-propelled grenades, tanks, and mortars. Completely hollowed out and with perfectly gridded balconies, this menacing piece of architecture is a tribute to the past, horribly scarred by artillery war wounds. A little to the right is the Murr Tower, which is even taller than the Holiday Inn. The Murr Tower was never finished and its dark and ominous skeletal structure rises above all of central Beirut like a ghostly sentinel. Neither building has been knocked down because, it is said, they are just too large and too difficult to remove. It would cost millions and no one is prepared for that sort of commitment. It makes me happy to see them among all the new glass-and-steel buildings. Physical proof of the atrocities we once committed. To me, they are beautiful memorials. We must never forget what we did to each other. They say that the world began in Beirut. They also say that the world will end in Beirut.

I pause for a minute and then glide down the concrete steps and run into Naila, struggling up. I assume she’s on her way to see Souraya. Naila, now in her early forties, went through a divorce about ten years ago. Her husband couldn’t stand being married to her and sent her packing after less than a year. She’s still in love with him and has never been able to move on. To help pass the time, she regimentally paints her fingernails at Salon Sonia just down the street. Today she painted a rainbow — a different color for each nail; it’s really “in” these days. Sometimes Sonia asks to experiment with glitter on top of color. On those days, Naila feels special, thinking she could be helping to advance fashion trends in Lebanon. Maybe one day her nails could appear in an ad or on the cover of a glamorous Beiruti society magazine. If only they weren’t already so aged. She recently saw a billboard advertising a bank loan specifically for plastic surgery. Maybe she should finally get that nose job. Maybe, with the perfect nose, people would acknowledge her perfect nails. Maybe her ex would even consider taking her back. There is not a day that goes by without her thinking of him.