^{Photo by Kathy Dahdah.}
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The Third Largest Blast

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Again and again, like any other day, people wake up and go about their business and look at the world around them, seeing for the nth time, the same others. Walking the same roads, and treading the same paths, they imagine this day is normal, and that soon it shall swell with the sounds of cars and chatter. People wake up and find their way around the city. Their houses are still their houses and the people they know will still thread through their lives. This ordinary day is happening in Lebanon, and it has happened over and again. And the stories from that day describe the invisible hand of God that has spared some while punishing others. This is August 4th, 2020, and the clock is about to stop at 6:07PM.

Maxime was making beats by the window of a first-floor apartment in Ashrafiyeh أشرفيّة. Nidal was sitting in the dining room. Suddenly a sonic boom erupts, deep and distant, is Israel striking us again? An earthly guttural rumble follows, and the entire window frame is tossed into the house. The awareness of wartime survival strategies offered Maxime and Nidal the reflex to jump into the small bathroom tucked in the corner of the hallway. Shards of glass penetrated the back of Maxime’s neck as he used his body to protect his mother, it was only a matter of seconds before the ground was littered with glass. I have seen photos on Maxime’s phone. Drops of his blood, scattered on the glass, glistening on the ground. The front door had been opened by the force of the shockwave and in the vacuum of the moment that follows tragedy, the neighbor’s dog came rushing into the house cutting its paws on the glass-littered floor, barking loudly and aimlessly thrashing about. Nidal described an insatiable emptiness in her heart, something that she used to feel when the bombs would devour her senses during the Civil War. The void that she described felt like the air that was sucked in before the shockwave. She had to live in a house with no windows for two to three months. Maxime, trying to find a silver lining, a glimmer of hope in the most morbid humor, talked about the blank expression on Nidal’s face as she picked up the broom and started shoveling the window splinters into the dustbin. That tool was too small to contain the horror of the moment. Nidal could not stand being in her house for long periods of time, so she slept at our house for a while. The clock stopped at 6:07PM.

Chloe hears about the explosion while she is in France and her first reflex, while all phones are dead and communication is impossible, is to imagine the worst. “I thought that everyone I love was dead” she said to me. Being away while the country is being devoured by devastation yet again is a feeling so impossible to ignore. Chloe’s clock stopped at 5:07PM.

Someone told me that a couple died from heart conditions. They had no outer wounds but collapsed from fear. Their clock stopped at 6:07PM.

There’s another story about a girl in a white wedding dress walking around with her neck slit open; her garment slowly drinking the crimson. Was she a ghostly apparition in the confusion following the blast, or a real person? The clock does not stop for paranormal beings and urban legends.

My grandmother Mona wakes up every day and after a brief workout, she drinks a shot of vinegar and lemon for good health. She goes for a walk in the morning to stay active and her health is still solid despite her 85 years of age. On certain days, she visits her friend Rachel رحيل. They’ve known each other for 60 some years now and they still live in the same city, just a couple of kms away from each other. Both of their houses were in the area that was greatly damaged by the explosion. رحيل was finishing up a hairstyling appointment before she rushed back home to see my grandmother. And Mona always repeats that she was kept safe by the Hand of God because she made it through the calamity unscathed. But the clock stopped at 6:07PM.

Edward was driving with Cindy towards the mountains, and they did not even hear the blast. They were passing above the Valley of Skulls or الجماجم وادي when news of the explosion reached them. They tuned in to different radio channels and because the shockwave was so powerful, its impact was not initially ascertained. Different channels started reporting on explosions happening in different parts of the country in very rapid succession. At first, it felt like a doomsday moment where the Lebanese soil was being struck by the Israeli air force sending Edward and Cindy’s memory back to the 33-day war of 2006. Past الجماجم وادي an overlook gave them a clear view of Beirut Port. The Ammonium Nitrate was a red volcanic mist that split the sky, and the billowing cloud veiled the firmament with its thickness. Edward said that the days following the explosion, the lilac sunsets of Lebanon were overtaken by an apocalyptic shade of cherry. Cindy volunteered to help people clean their houses and some cleaning operations, which involved mainly debris removal, took months. Although the volunteers were doing their best to make the homeowners feel seen and understood, those who were displaced had lost the privilege of privacy. Their clock stopped at 6:07PM.

I met a fellow Lebanese guy named Elie on my journey back to America. We talked in Frankfurt airport, and I learned that he was a resident doctor on his way back to Baltimore, where he was working. He pulled out his phone and showed me pictures of the explosion from the doctors’ perspective. He said that he doesn’t remember much from that moment except that he felt a sharp pain hit his body. The exact location of the dolor he could not identify. But he did remember how emergency rooms were destroyed and electricity was cut off. Patients’ wounds were stitched on gurneys and sidewalks. When the evening came, doctors’ phones were the only source of lighting. There were stories of midwives who momentarily paused their work before delivering a baby in a room that no longer had a roof. How do you tell a baby the miraculously cruel circumstances of their birth without giving them the impression that they are unloved? The clock of the hospital stopped at 6:07PM.

Jean Maroun described the expression of disbelief, sadness, and disillusionment he saw in the eyes of an older gentleman who bore witness to so many instances of destruction in his lifetime that he could no longer muster any reaction beyond a shrug of the shoulders. Hopelessness struck when the clock stopped at 6:07PM.

Nay, my cousin who was 7 years old at the time, draws the mushroom cloud of the August 4th blast for a school assignment. Her clock stopped at 6:07PM.

My uncle Rachad sprints up the stairs, three steps at a time, wading through a cloud of dust: "!ماما ماما" as he searches for my grandmother. The printing press had been devastated and the damage done was valued in the millions of dollars. Millions lost in a split second. The clock stopped at 6:07PM.

Riad Kobeissi appears on Sarde After Dinner, a Lebanese podcast hosted by Mouin Jaber and Medea Azouri and says: “So, the investigation is important in its practical way because people will see who tried to find out about the truth and who’s trying to put obstacles in the investigator’s way. Its importance relies on the coming elections and those after that and so on. Because the 4th of August will deeply impact the collective memory. It’s not something we can easily forget about. And it’s not a one-sided political attack like an assassination.” The clock stopped at 6:07PM.

I am constantly wrestling with the fact that I collected these bits of information while laying down on a patch of grass in the middle of a Chicago public park. My body was safe when all these events were taking place. Am I even allowed to speak about this incident? Am I the right person to tell the story? There is a semblance of peace among the people who are ambulating the pavement around me. They are unaware of what is going on. A child is attempting to climb a tree. And the same mundane day will not be disturbed by a seismic situation. How can I look at the irreconcilable realities without suffering a deep psychological schism? A kite flies against a clear blue sky and the weather is temperate, the wind is smoothly caressing my body. I am safe and I ran away to watch the tragedy of immigration unfold through the screen of my phone. My clock stopped at 10:07AM.

Recovering from an explosion that has been ranked as the 3rd largest blast after Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the work of generations. Recounting the memory does not attenuate its violence and asking people to share their stories demands resilience. Transforming trauma into hope takes centuries of laughter in the face of desperation. The devastation of بيروت مرفأ is now the renewable memory of a coup de grace dealt to a regime that was already struggling to sustain itself. The truth about the August 4th blast is being concealed effectively. I saw the video of the explosion. An ash-colored spherical cloud spread outward transforming buildings into dust like a handful of shredded papers. That fateful date has become a dwelling for the collective-permanently-manipulated Lebanese memory. August 4th has joined the ranks of anniversaries and memorials that commemorate death, destruction, and the inevitable decline of this beloved country.

Pierre Nora says that memory acts as an essential agent participating in the recalibration of a population’s self-perception. In his book Entre Memoire et Histoire, La problematique des lieux he talks about the stark contrast between Memory and History.

Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.

This incident has not been forgotten and it will not disappear. It will forever remind us of the Lebanese politicians and their gang of thieves. It will reinforce the omnipresence of lies and the constant manipulation of information: “It’s Israel’s fault. It’s an accident. It’s negligence à la Chernobyl. We will never find out what caused this.” Months after the incident warehouse 12, the hangar that was the epicenter of the blast mysteriously caught on fire. The citizens theorized that the government was trying to supplant any possible evidence that would yield a successful investigation.

This is the immigrant’s paradox: a reality that houses within other contradictory realities: for we live in multiple places at once. A kite, a blue sky, a uranium depleted bomb with a 1500-meter radius of damage, 200 dead Lebanese, 6,000 wounded compatriots, 300,000 homeless migrants in their own country. All these sensory and intellectual possibilities ingested within the lick of a second on yet another Tuesday afternoon. And Tuesday afternoon will become Wednesday morning and Thursday evening, and a 7-year-old American boy will fly his kite against the picturesque cloudless sky of Illinois while a 7-year-old Lebanese girl will draw the mushroom cloud of the explosion with crayons on flimsy A4 papers.

I have always heard this story growing up: “My land is the place I must forsake.” How can I translate the experience of a person who is born in a place they are raised to abandon? How does that message pass through to someone who was never forced to become estranged from the land that offered them their first breath? And I know that this elusive feeling is not unanimous. I know that there are those who – even as I write this – are excavating corpses from the rubble underneath the toxic sky of Beirut swearing that they will never forsake their homeland.

The Arabic word for homeland is وطن. One of the meanings that can be derived from the Arabic root of this word is: Battlefield.

The motherland. The fatherland. The country of birth. The battlefield. الوطن The capital of Dust...

غبار

Dust is the keeper of time. What is it made of? Where does it come from? Is there any use to it beyond reminding us that we are passing through? Grey, lifeless, mixture of things. Dead pieces of us swim within the amalgam: Hair, skin, nails. When I swipe my hand across my neglected Dusty books, I see a grey, lifeless, line on my index finger. The more dust I scrape, the more neglected the book has been. Dust hides color, erodes contrast, devours vibrancy. But attributing sentiment to Dust is unproductive, at least that is the initial thought. Dust is as divine as it is lifeless. Dust gives shape to sunlight. A month of Dust is less daunting than a year of Dust.

Dust never disappears, no matter what tool is used to remove it. Once I sweep my duster against the desk, I am simply capturing the Dust, trapping it within the fabric, and tossing it in the trash can. The trash bag that sits in the can is then thrown into a larger bin in an alley. The bin is then emptied into a truck and finally discarded in a landfill. But the Dust is still there and in an impoverished country like Lebanon, garbage cleaning services are not available. Stuck to the banana peel, or floating in the yolk of an egg, the dust lives on. Dust is the liquid of meaning. When it attaches to the ground, it’s a commonplace nuisance but when it lands on my aunt’s photograph, it becomes melancholic and imbued with history. There she is, sitting on a small straw chair, garbed with a red shawl, looking at the camera with her gentle eyes as the fireplace quietly dances beside her. Her chestnut hair is cut short and her arms rest on her knees. She died a natural death, but her illness was painful. Is it fair for me to consider her lucky because her body was allowed to kill her and not some unseen enemy?

Dust is generational trauma, war, destruction of property, the byproduct of rubble from buildings ground to tiny particles by a large blast. What happens when the dust settles? Do you get the optimistic Hollywood-like story of a population rebuilding its home? Will it be useful to watch a montage with a soothing piano tune in the background? Are the Lebanese people supposed to rise from the ashes to conform to the tritest metaphor of the mythical Phoenix? Ash and dust are relatives. The dust has now inevitably made its way into the lungs, eyelashes, skin cells, nostrils, ears, hair follicles, of the survivors so that when they return home and see their children and their families, they are shaking off imperceptible pieces of Dust from their bodies and sharing in their misery. Perhaps that is why they love each other so deeply. And perhaps that is why I love them so deeply.

Five months after the explosion, I went to Lebanon to photograph a city suffocated by dust. Our mistakes were all out in the open. The stores were abandoned by their owners, without “For Rent” signs. The locale was flayed open. I saw things I never thought I would encounter. A broken watch stopped at exactly 6:07PM covered with Dust, a heart in a locket hanging on a small nail covered with Dust, empty cupboard legs teetering above holes in the ground. Lebanese people pride themselves in being a population that excels in hospitality. We never abstain from cleaning the house for our guests. But there is no population here and these houses are mere places not dwellings. Dusting all the surfaces before the arrival of a guest is a mark of self-awareness and respect as we show our esteemed visitor that our space is in a perpetual state of renewal. Renewal is a welcoming sight. Stagnation is repulsive. But Dust never seems to concern the living although one of its dictionary definitions is:

The mortal body of a human being

Just as Dust is carried from one place to another without ever disappearing, the bodies we inhabit also live on through the stories we tell about them, even when we expose the way these bodies were killed. When we die, we are buried and in turn we feed the ground, help fertilize the Earth. When we are cremated and cast into the air, we float freely, and land on the soil to fertilize the Earth. When we are shredded to bits by a blast, we receive no dignified burial and are sometimes killed beyond recognition. Immigration is a mere changing of form, and we are, like Dust, a permanent thing that sticks to all surfaces and shapes them. We erect large buildings and simultaneously craft bombs that can tear them to shreds. We travel to new places and seek the instances that remind us of what we left behind. But most of all, we arbitrarily judge who deserves to live and who deserves to be erased.

Are we at the whims of certain people who belong to enormous operations that plan the detonation of 2,700 tons of Ammonium Nitrate into the commercial district of a country already afflicted by an economic crisis and a pandemic? Human cruelty is a bottomless pit. And within history’s relation to politics, all military and geopolitical goals are accomplished with the aim of expansion and victory. The cost of civilian death is quite unimportant. So, while we sweep the dust off our streets and from out our hearts, someone looks at our misery and basks in a grandiose sense of victory. Someone is happy with these results; someone continues to hide the truth because they are benefitting from our misfortune.

I have daydreamed, dreamed, and had nightmares about that day. These dreams always involved the soundscape of a street, right after the detonation of the third largest explosion of the past two centuries.

I heard a scream for help, the doppler effect of small mopeds driving by, the sound of falling rocks, the sound of people cursing and yelling, the crunching of glass under footsteps and rubber tires, Allah must have been invoked there one way or another, the sound of a piano playing in a destitute apartment, the cries of babies, brooms sweeping glass off the ground, the strained voices of men attempting to hide their fear, the voice of an old woman resigned to witness another horror in the history of this country, the strident sirens of ambulance vans, the clicking of the gurneys, a little farther the hospital’s phone is blowing up, the metal trays fall on the ground with a loud crashing sound, the employees talk over each other because a wave of patients is about to hit them, the camera crew arrives on the scene, the doors of the van slam shut with a hollow boom, the sound of the cables slapping against the vehicle, the sound of the reporter who is feigning professionalism amidst the chaos, the waves on the Mediterranean sea crashing loudly against the dilapidated port, the siren of the fire trucks that are heading to the scene, the click clack of their gear, the gushing noise of their hose against the billowing cloud of smoke, someone declaring that their final moments are at hand, messages are being sent causing phones to emit a loud tingle or song, the firefighters yelling out in frustration because they won’t be revered as the heroes they are meant to be, and the loudest sound of this nightmarish landscape.

                    The Silence of the Government.