in Beirut

Monday, August 14, 2006

In BeirutIn Beirut,there’s something, like that, just like that…Stuck in the air, printed on the walls of small roads,Dripping little by little from the trees right after the rain…There’s something that makes my foreign friend drive recklessly and ignore the traffic lights. Something that makes him tell me about some of our places. Places that I haven’t had the chance to see and colors I couldn’t understand. He starts understanding the difference between mjadarra and mdardara, he starts talking politics, he loves Fairuz even when he doesn’t understand a word she says. He starts building a house in the mountain, where he would spend the rest of the summer. And sometimes, so many times, he would get carried away and say: “Us Lebanese will never learn…”In Beirut,there’s something that makes him love her more than i do…There’s always a shortcut road that takes you to the sea. There are always cameras taking pictures, fearing that the eye would forget, fearing that the heart would drift…There’s a road built just to carry your dream, while you walk, not knowing where.There’s something in people’s eyes, like a question, like the old buildings, like an escaping look, like the ruin.In Beirut,there’s a secret that you don’t know until you’re at the airport with your bag… until you’re estranged stranded in young cities, one after the other, forever longing to your crude city, the city where “the difference between the darkness and the light is one word”… And you miss the familiar chaos where the cars park on sidewalks and people strut in the middle of the streets… And forever, for as much as you hide away, you’re haunted with the fever of Beirut, and you know the illness is part of you and you know that she will never leave you.In Beirut,There’s something bigger than me, and bigger than you. There’s an April that never ends. And a place, a place that, whenever you lose yourself, whenever you fall, whenever you hurt, you come back whispering the letters of its name once anew, in Beirut.In Beirut, there’s something, like that, just like that…Stuck in the air, printed on the walls of small roads,Dripping from the trees after the rain…Eve

Haifa vs. el Sayed

OUF!

if there ever was joy

3 men on top of three men's shoulders
holding hands dancing

men, close
to each other as they're non-existant hips sway tot he rythms of Nancy an the other guy that everyone was holding posters up for.

men in rows...
dancing
singing
smiling.

a few women spread about

children on shouldrens...
watching

among the people...of Lebanon and Pahalstinie. if i ever saw joy it was tonight

'aint no sunshine...

there was a touching performance that i was lucky to watch last night at a theatre space on hamra street called masrah el madina. it was called a 'corps perdu' which means 'to a lost body' in French. it was about a man who was killed as a bystandered during one of the nasty bombs that assassinated him here in Beirut last year. many here were terrified by these nasty random explosives that went of one after another and are still disgusted by what took place.
the performance was touching, moving, heavy, intense, vivid,and absolutely BEAUTIFUL!
the man which this performance speaks about was passing through a region of Beirut when a bomb spontaneously went off. he was living in London apparently and decided to come back to live in his Lebnan and soon after his arrival was killed... there was a touching vigil heald at the end of october for him just after the tragedy ... we were all in white and carrying candles walking from Biel through downtown beirut. may yesterday be a trully new page that will slowly bring prosperity to the entire region. khalas ba'ah!

http://www.blueandjoy.com/blog/?page_id=343

PHALASTEN

i am standing in my underwear where everyone around me is staring
i am walking up the staircase to my house and going in though one of the windows
i am told that a christian who enters the 3rd most holy site to Islam through a special door is making sure to wear a cross or carry a bible with him to war off negative Muslim presence
i am walking in West Jerusalem worried that i might be discovered
i am angry that next to the entrance and by the whaling wall there is a 'third temple' and that THIS is why people still hate each other in my part of the world...it's religion and a fight over land that has all been imposed by a brutal occupation
i am wondering what it is that consists of the world tears when it comes to hizn ala phalastene
i am afraid for my child who suffers often from symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome but doesn't actually have PTSS
i am SO SICK of hearing the lies, half truths and untruths disseminated by the world's media


i am really just tired now
i am really just frustrated
i am really just so sick of having to constantly justify my existence through a piece of paper at checkpoints
i am really just unhappy about the world's relentless negative attitude towards the Palestinian struggle
i am really just disgusted
i am really just TFEH!
i am really just willing to throw myself in the sea
i am really just ready to give up a fight BUT how could i when we 'exist to resist'



i am shocked that a wall much larger than the one in Berlin is built and not a soul was able to intervene
i am finished with the idea that my door has to remain open at all times so that a 17 year old soldier can come in just to fulfill his IDF requirements
i am paralyzed by qualindia checkpoint
i am still in disbelief about the extreme imprisonment of Qualquilia
i am feeling that time has been wasted in crossings between Palestine and Egypt
i am grossed out at the idea that there is an israeli cultural center 'in um el douniah.' oxymoronic
i am going ONLY to return to my homeland as a Palestinian going back to my home...viva al-awda
i am fakhera bi watani yalee ba3ne MA shifto wala mara
i am happy to know that the nakba was finaly recognized but sad to know it took 60 years for it
i am BLaH!
i am about to loose it

i am khallas i am done

I AM PALESTINIAN

THIS IS PALESTINE

today

these are the kind of days that life is worth living for

a dream

have you ever been inspired by a dream before?

i mean an actual dream that you woke up so happily to... not an amazing goal or aspiration you've had for your life.
this morning i woke up feeling like there was a better place than the Lebanon we are now living in...i remembered the rest of the world and it's beauty. it's diversity and joy. the colors it finds to fill us up with love, peace and tranquility. i felt hope in a time of drakness
i had forgotten to remember how there is beauty to the fullness of life everywhere, and how now we are being deprived of that as a hijacked peoples currently basically being taken hostage by whatever hating forces be present (because they are many and don't let the media fool you into believing that it's 'this devil that starts with the letter H').

in my dream i arrived to a house...and upon my setting foot within, felt that there was something different and special about it. immediately i was greeted by my friends who lived there. it was my first time visiting them and i had never seen these people before in my (real, non-dream) life who were particularly colorful and vivacious people surrounded also by a unique, funky and colorful setting. we sat down in the living room where there were cages in many places often and usually void of animals. I LOVE ANIMALS, btw! with time slowly these animals they had in their home began to appear one by one.
there were giraffes (without their spot shapes), donkeys, dogs, felines (also without their spots so i couldn't tell what they were), seals, and other animals. the thing is, that they were tiny...each was about the size of a tall mug maybe. they never seemed to overcrowd one place of the house but, they were so sweet and all over the place, always together in their families or groups as they may be in the wild. segregated actually, which i guess speaks parallels to this wold we all live in...being also animals ourselves. it was a little wonder where they actually co-existed in this place all together with maybe 3 humans living there with them. it didn't even smell in the house at all! i don't remember recognizing a scent of any kind.

it's funny, now awake it makes me think of Lebanon. i feel often like (no offense to the Lebanese that are reading this PLEASE!) we are a bunch of savage and wild animals living here, but in this case without care for one another just each individual to themselves. now, i know that often times this is NOT the case but it usually feel like it, honestly (see blog entry rude). in this dream the animals of various species and families were all living together with the humans but in their own little sub-communities. couldn't the Lebanese and the people of this world do the same? how hard would it be? coexistence and the acknowledgment of other species (in our case races') presence. but is it that hard to live side by side in peace and stop with a continuous repetition of cycles of fighting, violence and war? if genocides and atrocities have occurred between Turks towards Armenians, and white South Africans towards black South Africans, Israelis towards Palestinians, and Americans towards Vietnamese, Japanese, Iraqis, Afghans, and whomever else received their deadly weapons in aid to use them in force towards those they oppressed and many others then also do the Lebanese impose war and violence over and over on one another and each other...what do we call this? like when a mother eats her young or a sacrifice takes place over and over but this time not for the gods that were once believed in but for what the aggressor's party feels maybe the betterment of the place where they live, maybe even for the betterment of this world. you can watch this. how naive and how ignorant...we must cease this hate. may we learn from our fellow mammals, reptiles, birds, and fish. such a disgusting place we've come to live in it sometimes feels.

i must have been affected a lot by a nice artist named Gregory Colbert that i read an article about the day before the dream and who's website George and i really enjoyed afterwards-BEAUTIFUL!
http://www.ashesandsnow.org/