After Four Nights in Beirut

School has begun and water keeps dripping out of the lightbulbs in the various rooms they've moved me to. I'm learning the alphabet and the first simple phrases like Marhaba (Hello), Kifak/ik (how are you?) Ahziim (Great!) and some others that I don't have in front of me right now. I've been asked for a more thorough description of Beirut by a few people so here it goes:

Walking along the sunset shoreline we came upon a brand new black Porsche Cayenne parked next to a beat up old Peuguot covered in dust and missing the back windows. That's essentially a metaphor for the whole city. Poised on the edge of Phoenician history and modern powermoneybeauty (Lebanon has the highest number of plastic surgeries per capita in the world), the view from anywhere in the city is mostly stunning, but it can easily be blocked by either an ultramodern multimillion dollar luxury apartment or a shelled out, smokeblackened corpse of what appears in the semblance of a once glorious mansion or high rise tower. In some neighborhoods (namely the one I live in), there are little guard shacks at every intersection with guards holding AK47s who will stop you at will to randomly search your bag - no protestations (pick your battles).

In the bookstores, there are all the most modern, controversial titles regarding Middle East policy, the history of Palestine, Hizbollah, Syria, etc and it's noticeable for the lack of censorship one feels. Particularly in contrast to Syria where Facebook and Youtube have been banned by the government. Yesterday I walked with two friends through 4 neighborhoods that "if you're not a Shiite, you can't go or else you'll get your head cut off" or so we were repeatedly told. THe residents were friendly saying "Welcome" or "How are you?" the two stock phrases most Middle Easterners know. We ended up in the Palestinian refugee section of town where the cheap flea market and all the trash heaps can be found...a few blocks away from a whole host of Porsches, BMWs, Mercedes, Jeeps, Citroens, etc. We had some nice conversations and I got some sandals, a wok, a kettle, a pocketwatch with the Ka'aba on it, a dusty old horseshoes with a cedar on it, a bowl, a plate, a big wooden spoon, and some bread for about $11 total. I had to admit that it was the Lebanon I expected, not the Beverly Hills that most of the rest of Beirut is.

On a different afternoon, I went cliff diving with a friend, jumping 40 foot cliffs at the sunset into gorgeously warm water. Then having a chat with two round oldtimers who began the conversation about how great Lebanon is, turned it to failed American foreign policy, then an annoyingly lewd series of comments about the best function of females...

As far as cultural relativity is concerned, my interest has been fully refueled as of late because so many of my conversations are clearly geared towards the condemnation of America and celebration of wherever I happen to be. There seems to be a powerfully natural agenda in people to insinuate cultural superiority through very pointed questions and finding my back so often against walls for American imperialism and the Israel question, I've really begun reevaluating how I feel about this whole imagined East-West split.

I stopped writing for a moment to consider how I would proceed, but I'm not sure that I can at this point. It'll take more time and thought before I can express myself as I need to. But it has something to do with postmodernism - that is, the destruction of the binary. Whether western scholars focus on it or not, our whole vocabulary has gradually shifted from an either/or means of expression to a whence and whither, isolation to incorporation. I'm yet to have a conversation that doesn't ultimately come down to ultimatums of this or that. Either secularization is a good thing or a bad thing. Either God is important in the life of the community or it isn't. Either the Western approach since the Enlightenment is good or it is bad. When I try to contribute to the conversation with the vocabulary I've been taught with, I get smiles regarding my "tolerance" but then am told to pick a side because we all know that it's not logical for it to be any way beyond one or its opposite. We just got a lecture by a highly respected professor from AUB, and it seemed that he followed the same path. He was explaining why the West can house people of all faiths but ethic/religious deportations are still very frequent in the Middle East. His explanation was that the West had the Renaissance, The Reformation, the Counterreformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. Then he got into a series of digressions about theological questions that had nothing to do with politics, and ultimately concluded along the lines of the black/white worldview. He ultimately felt that the separation of church and state inevitably must lead to the elimination of God from public, then private life, then even the church. I don't know how he concluded that, but all of his arguments relied on certain assumptions that I just felt were kind of obsolete considering the vocabulary of linguistics that those same discussions operate on in America. I don't know if this is an example of cultural relativity, the evolution of intellectualism, or what but it's emerging as one of the prime foci of my interest in this dialogue.

Also, this is an incredibly fertile country for art. I understand why such an inordinate amount of thinkers, poets, writers, and philosophers have come out of here. The country is so schizophrenic with sectarian violence, and the contrast of the ultrabeautiful with the the painfully decrepit, but the landscapes are awe-inspiring and the history and natural diversity come together. It's the type of country that flies more flags than most other places and one feels as though the locals are madly in love with their roots. Lebanon is an idea that I'm starting to realize, most Lebanese would die for and it's not standard blind patriotism, but something more akin to an enrapturement with the idea of Lebanon and the surface beauty that makes it all the more easy to love. Walking through downtown this afternoon, I felt an overwhelming surge to write a book - without ideas or sentences or any seed to work off, I just felt something in the air required literary output. It was a strange feeling.

That's all for now,
love tcm