Beirut: Day Two

On Sunday we had brunch with an expanding network of new friends at Dar on Hamra. Dar used to be a house that was converted into a café and has – in the back – converted an office space on the premises into a bookshop with a fairly eclectic magazine collection including the recent issue of Brown Daze/Days (something)  ‘a magazine for the Arab community in Sydney’ and had helpful tips on things like ‘Things to do in Sydney on a Saturday”. None of which included the Aussie essential “Get bombed”.

Cee and I held them hostage over brunch and plied them with questions about our respective fieldwork. C is an anthropologist and looks at the aesthetic and impulse towards the dominant trend towards plastic surgery in different classes in Beirut. I am interested in state provision of low-income housing and the use of public space through architecture.

In Beirut there is a narrative link between the two. Writing your chosen story on your body and on your city through reconstruction. As we talked through more zaatar and labneh and cups of tea, one version of a Beirut life became more visible. (You can’t help but be bounded by the group of people you associate with and the lens they give you for a life. I would have been a different person had I been at SOAS instead of Oxford. I would have had a lot less black tie and white tie in my wardrobe for one.)  This version of Beirut had people with an international background, growing up in Beirut and choosing and wanting to live there and still having one foot somewhere else. Just in cases. So different from the people I chatted to at the airport security clearance and border control who warmly said “Welcome in Lebanon” and asked “Why have you not been before?” and when I countered with “Have you been to Karachi? Or Oxford?” they’d laugh and say, we haven’t been out of Lebanon at all. The version I heard about in the early part of the weekend was one where teenage girls would get rhinoplasty done over a winter break and where little girls played around with scotch tapes on their noses pretending they’d had surgery. Where in 2006 the airport closed down because of the bombing of Beirut and one class of the young worried about college applications because although you didn’t know when Israel was going to stop, you had to think of a distant point in the future. Where there was a class divide between the intelligentsia, the old money and the nouveau riche almost. The former’s aesthetic subtle, more toned down and the latter’s more influenced by glittering, glitzy, gaudy sheen associated with a certain strata of the Arab world in Gulf states in dressing, in home décor and in how to be seen. One girl at the Friday night party had told me about how people take out loans to invest in image, their houses will be crap from the inside but they will have the coolest car and the latest handbag. The men also go for plastic surgery but they more than the women will say “we had an accident” and since they were under the knife they considered they may as well… So on and so forth.  Where is all this funded from? Lord knows. I couldn’t tell.

For some it may be levels of savings they make by living in a city that has not altered its rent control laws (rents can only be freely agreed between tenant and landlord since 1993). It started as a humanitarian attempt to acknowledge the loss of property and wealth that the civil war had wrought on the population. Today it has become circus of common sense as people pay as little as 60 dollars a month for living a beautiful, old style apartment in downtown Beirut.

How can a landlord get out of this situation when the legislation is not on his side? The list of exceptions is equally farcical.

1.     You wait for them to die

2.     You prove that they have another property within 7 km

3.     You drive them out by leaving dead cats on their doorstep or similar such plagues

4.     You prove they haven’t paid rent for 2 months

5.     Not being present for 6 months

I am increasingly itching to see another version of Beirut, however superficially. I ask Cee about the Muslim areas and strongholds and we make a plan next day to go to Dahiye, the Hezbollah stronghold.

The rest of the day, we wander the city down towards the coast because I want to see the surf breaking over pigeon rocks at the corniche. I had flown over it on my way in and it had been a ferocious sight at night to see an otherwise calm stretch of sea rippling gently towards the shore, losing it at the edges, hammering insistently into the rocks. The walk all the way on the promenade down from Hamra up to the American University of Beirut was hilarious, not the least for channelling Cee’s inner model sidling nonchalantly into my amateur attempts at landscape photography. There would be an oblivious man eating potatoes and Cee glamourously smiling and presenting him  to the camera with gestures best reserved for emergency exit indications in airplane aisles. The promenade social scene consisted of a line of cars parked on the edge of the road populated by couples of friends unwilling to get out; fishermen down on the rocks or just up on the promenade handling their rods and hooks with little sensitivity of space (it could take an eye out) and lots of kiddies roller skating and famililes walking up and down (plus aforementioned fleece-garbed wannabe gangsters).

We walked up to AUB guided by its verdant campus and clocktower on the hill above us and skirted it to meet a friend for coffee. It was then Cee pointed out proliferation of beauty salons outside the university gates to me where girls would get their hair and nails done before classes on a regular basis.

It made me wonder about plastic surgery again and reconstruction and housing in Beirut. Cee spoke of how clinical psychologists come into play in the process when people don’t get the social validation or the imagined result after a plastic surgery and keep trying again and again before help is needed to manage their expectations. Once the city does become the modern city of the ancient future that Solidere is aiming for, will it also deliver the economic uplift associated with that kind of high living for all? What happens when the freshly painted but looming gaunt eyed buildings cannot deliver the expectations for the city? Beirut’s slogan in my head is “watch this space”.