How Lebanon rescued me

I fled America for Beirut's cultural freedom. Now I watch as bombs destroy my refuge -- and the best hope for a viable Middle East democracy.

By Alia Malek

Read more: Lebanon, Opinion

Photo credit: Christophe Katrib

A view of downtown Beirut from the author's apartment.

Aug. 4, 2006 | In March 2003, I fled to Beirut, Lebanon, wanting to escape the made-for-TV war on Iraq, the monotony of Washington, and the man who had become my boss, John Ashcroft.

Naturally, in this era of pretexts, the convergence of those events was itself also just an excuse. Even if my job as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department had not been increasingly meaningless under the Bush administration, I would have been fantasizing about returning to Beirut, as I had ever since it seduced me in the summer of 2000, when I first visited it as an adult.

So it was with irony, sadness, disbelief and anger that I watched thousands flee last month from Lebanon.

Of course, this is where we -- in the collective American consciousness -- had last left off in Beirut: a steady stream of wailing mothers clutching children under the watchful eyes of soldiers, menacing helicopters and merciful warships, as if Lebanon has been in perpetual evacuation since the 1970s.

The intermediary post-civil-war years were only occasionally memorialized and then often in publications and by writers desiring to be so hip as to discover what everyone else in the Middle East already knew: The former war zone was one movable party.

These writers, usually white men, were in constant awe that Lebanon's women were beautiful and wore bikinis, that the liquor always flowed, and that the nightlife rivaled -- according to the usual comparisons -- that of South Beach or New York City. The bullet-pockmarked façades of several buildings lent gravitas to their writing and reporting on, essentially, hedonism.

Admittedly, Beirut's famed partying had in part beckoned me to Lebanon; it provided a comfortable buffer to living in a part of the world incredibly fragile and scarred while affording me the chance to probe the nagging questions of what my life might have been had my parents stayed in the Middle East and whether its chaos was better for me than the United States' contradictory offerings of comfortable assimilation and interminable alienation.

But I was also drawn by the intoxicating blend of antiquity, modernity, freedom and struggle with a history and culture that I could partly claim as my own. Though my parents are Syrian, my father's roots were in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, and I had, coincidentally, been conceived in Beirut. While my parents had swallowed their regrets when they gave up family, friends and lives to try to make it in America, their nostalgia and longing were evident everywhere, from the Arabic names they gave their children to the Arabic cassette tapes they listened to, over and over, for years. And their cravings became my own.

So when straight from the airport I arrived outside the apartment building I would eventually call home, to find a crowd surrounding a minibus that had crashed into a popular snack shack -- its tail end emerging almost organically from the concrete wall -- there was no place else I wanted to be.

The driver had lost control of his vehicle, and it slid down the hill, gaining speed and smashing into the unmovable edifice, in much the same way that history slams into Lebanon, the way the sea has been pummeling its coastline for millennia, forming its geographic character, and the way I hoped that, in Beirut, my missing destiny would crash into me.

Next page: Out of the bomb shelters, into the clubs