These days, I feel most users of Face Book [where I originally posted the following] can only cope with, or are interested in, contributions of a sentence or two and/or lots of photos. On that basis I don’t expect many [if any] to read the following. Fair enough!! Nevertheless, if anyone does reach the end of this, admittedly lengthy piece, I’d be happy to receive your feedback or comments, adverse or otherwise. This is another article from the ‘Coachbuilder’s Column’.
“People said of Israel. “They are coming.” They would shake their heads and say no more. They offered no evidence other than that Israel had come before. Israel would come again to strike the blow it had not struck 14 years earlier. It was another old instinct come back to life; with half of Beirut gone, Israel must be about to come again. Hamra had survived the port blast only to expect the next disaster’ [page 272 from ‘Lebanon Days’ by Theodore Ell, published in 2024].
I was drawn to this book, firstly by the current conflicts in the Middle East which has now dragged Lebanon front and centre, and also by the description that ‘this is the story of a nation largely ignored by the rest of the world, a complex country driven over the edge but still seeking faith in itself, seen through the eyes of an outsider drawn into it’s intimate struggle’.
When Australian writer and researcher, Theodore Ell, joined his diplomatic wife, Caitlin, on her posting to Lebanon between 2018 and 2021, he found himself a witness to a country on the brink of collapse, and to a disaster which almost cost them their lives in August 2020. In this book, Ell writes about that period and of his perceptions and experiences in a fascinating piece of ongoing reporting, and a piece of writing that did little to encourage this reader to ever want to visit the place!
As the book promo describes it – ‘In 2019, facing economic meltdown, the people of Lebanon rose up, united in a revolution of hope [in a country of mixed people and races who were in the main, far from united]. With the country on the precipice of war, Covid-19 swept in and the eerie quiet of lockdowns descended – a silence tragically shattered in August 2020, when Ell narrowly survived the largest ever non-nuclear explosion, which destroyed half of Beirut………………….. Everywhere from calm cedar forests to crowded Beirut bars, Ell listened to stories of the Lebanese people and tried to make sense of the maze of ideas, desires and illusions that creates the Lebanon of their imagination, a place in sharp contrast to reality’.
A country on the sea border, surrounded on most sides by enemies and hate – a nation with a vast mix of races, religions, refugees, all of whom treat the other with a combination of suspicion, wariness and historically inbred hatreds, with many of the refugees who have fled to Lebanon, themselves fleeing from the neighbouring hostile countries. But also it seems, with an element of nonchalance.
Not long before he left Lebanon at the end of his wife’s posting, Ell noted the comments of a Lebanese man he met in the street – ‘If you’re Lebanese, it’s what you know. You just know it has to go that way. Everybody is living for themselves, in their bit of town, in their street, and fighting everybody else for every lira, every piece of bread, and they don’t know that every little bit of money they take from somebody is bringing Israel nearer. Because only Hizballah will have money and, you know, Israel doesn’t want them to use it…….We let Palestine come in. They stayed even though Israel tried to chase them out. Syria came in and replaced Israel. When Syria got out, Israel came back. The world made Israel go out, but now we blow ourselves up and Israel will come again. Syria can’t do anything. That’s the only good news. Hizballah, still here. Palestine, still here. The refugees, still here. The situation, Lebanon is what happens when everybody else is done’ [page 276].
Meanwhile, while the world’s media reported on the 2020 warehouse blast that destroyed half the city and killed hundreds, many never to be found or identified [vaporised in the initial instant of the explosion], or people not even known when alive [undocumented vagrants, refugees, etc sheltering in the port area], Theodore Ell provides a personal terrifying on the spot description of the moments immediately after the blast, which had left he and Caitlin cut and bleeding in the ruination of their destroyed apartment.
From page 208, he writes:
“My hearing was dampened. Almost every sound was muffled dead. Yet although Caitlin and I could hardly understand what we said to each other, we could hear the blast charging on through the city, a single wave, which even then we recognised as the result of a gigantic explosion that had followed the first, ambiguous noise. Sounds from the wake of the blast forced themselves into the apartment and onto us, sounds that could only have been whole buildings coming down nearby; avalanches of stone walls, of steel stanchions and concrete cladding coming loose and shearing to the ground, the shocks of each impact shaking up into our floor, as street after street was overrun by a wave of force that could be sensed receding into distances I had never imagined hearing and that I would never hear again, even as the roar was trapped, storming, in my ears’.
At the end of the book, the author provides an historical timeline of the history of Lebanon, through the 1860’s to 2017, and that alone as it illustrates the way the country and it’s disparate communities were shaped, makes for chilling reading.
At this stage I have inserted some selected quotations from the latter part of the book.
From page 282: “Murmurs about Israel kept on. History and political news always on my mind, I still could not credit them. Neither Israel’s government, obsessed as Benjamin Netanyahu was with finding a distraction from corruption charges, nor its notional opponents in the borderlands, Hizballah, could seriously want a war that neither side would win. But then my reasoning always seemed to be limited and I ended up outflanked. It was history that people invoked to show that what Israel had done once it was in its nature to do again.”
From page 285: [a Lebanese taxi driver noting] “You know, I don’t feel……I don’t feel nothing. Anything. About Israel. There’s no reason. Because…..it’s like there is Lebanon and there is the government. There is Israel and there is the government. The government is not the same as the country. You know, there are people in Israel and Palestine who just want to work. You see…I know you see…how the Lebanese just want to work. We have nothing to argue about”.
From page 293: [as a storm approached from out to sea] – “I thought for a moment of the black tower of smoke that had been rising out of Warehouse Twelve in the hour before it exploded, and how it was hidden from me behind another tower-block as I worked, unawares, the whole time. And I remembered the red cloud that came after it, swelling and boiling, sucking air and debris up around it, so high it made me cower. As the waterspouts gently receded and I stepped away from the windows, I realised I had been holding my breath and there was a vein of terror in my awe”.
From page 294 [with the coming of Christmas, the atmosphere of hostility and suspicion amongst the people of Lebanon, dissipates, and changes] – “As we had seen the previous year, that different world, people laughing at a long table in a room that later would be obliterated, the voices of people in all neighbourhoods, Christian, Muslem, Druze, softened as Christmas came. For once, their instincts and the rhythms of their lives would correspond. The old men outside the Bliss Street bakery were quieter as the day drew nearer and yielded me unsmiling but accepting nods. I looked like a Christian to them. The evening before Christmas, voices raised in welcome or in lively talk drifted into the streets. As the daylight ebbed at four, the long reach of the north coast and the lower mountain slopes began to glitter with new lights, from rooms reopened for visiting kin”.
From page 297: [but then, in the early hours of Christmas morning, the neighbourhoods of central Beirut are awakened by the overpowering noise of fighter planes overhead] – “Israel had come. Those fighter planes, I reasoned, had flown low over Beirut on their way to Syria, and the sound [later] from beyond the mountains could only have come from their bombing raid over Damascus. …..But why, I demanded of the [following] silence, my breath ragged as I suppressed rage, why had they flown low over Beirut like that? What purpose could that serve, to fly warplanes, afterburners blazing, within skyscraper height, skimming the windows of homes on Christmas Eve? They had chosen the one night in Lebanon’s most terrible year in which most of its communities shared the rare common purpose of commemorating the same event. They had chosen the night, and the very moment in that night, when for once the people of Lebanon might take comfort together. And they had chosen the part of the city they had [previously] taken, held, ravaged and lost. To frighten Hamra, to harass it, to narrow the abstract world of airspace and vapour trails down to the breaths we caught as we recoiled from the oncoming, invisible force of extermination, was Israe’s revenge. The past was all that mattered. No business must be left unfinished”.
In the September edition of the Australian Book Review, Richard Freadman, in reviewing ‘Lebanon Days’ notes that “The word ‘nothing’ comes up repeatedly, but in unhelpfully shifting ways….Its range of meanings includes a thing or project without value; an absent cause; a crusade that comes to nothing, sometimes for discernible reasons; the vanity of human wishes; and people’s inability to learn from the past. In one of many moments…..he thinks of Beaufort Castle in Southern Lebanon, near the border with Israel” ‘the only spot in all those ranges commanding views in every direction, retreated from as many times as it was captured, a flagstaff on top of a pile of rubble. It stood for nothing..’
It could be suggested that following his time in living amongst the people in Lebanon, Ell became more sympathetic to the lives of the Lebanese people, and the constant fear they faced from the threat of ‘Israel coming again’ and I gained the impression from Freadman’s review that he was ‘hinting’ at that.
And perhaps that view came from paragraphs such as the following, which was written in response to the warplanes flyover of Christmas Eve.
On page 298, Ell writes – “I knew then why people took up weapons and hid in ravines and underground, to fire rockets into lands to the east and south. I knew what it was to yearn to purge the shrieking that the past had planted in the mind, to turn chaos into a blowtorch of will. To wipe out the agents of the past, to empty the fields of them. It was in the moment of these desires…..that I knew I was a changed man. I had accommodated evil”.
And finally, from a couple of reflections, which illustrate, there were quieter moments for Theodore Ell’s time in Lebanon.
From page 302: [as they had done on the few occasions when time and the circumstances of Lebanon permitted] – “Even so, this allowed us one last chance to walk among the cedars. These were young trees, taller and slimmer than the 3000-year-olds we had seen higher up in these same mountains, or those in the solitary grove above the Qadisha in the north. These cedars still reached upwards and stretched their branches wide. They were only just beginning to spread their foliage out to form the tiers and plates of their mature years, when the higher branches
would start to fall away and the trees would settle down into the knots and whorls and pyramid canopies of old age. These trees were perhaps a few centuries old. Not yet thinned down to a handful of living monuments, they covered the slopes densely, as a true forest”.
During one of the couples’ touring ventures through the mountains and farmland areas to the north and east of Beirut, they were befriended by a small stray cat, which they would take into their care and home. When the warehouse explosion occurred, they thought they had lost ‘Jazzy’ [as they named her], but a couple of days later, while Ell was attempting to salvage items from their destroyed apartment, Jazzy was found, hiding under some rubble in a corner of the apartment from which the cat had not moved for the two days since the explosion.
As Ell and Caitlin prepared to leave Beirut, at the end of the latter’s diplomatic posting, the author wrote: “New families had come to replace the embassy staff who, one by one, had been going home. The newcomers were younger than us. Some had children. We left Jazzy to them, with money for her upkeep, her veterinary records and paperwork for the many transfers and periods in boarding and quarantine that awaited her once her vaccination rounds begun with us, were complete. They looked after Jazzy for half a year until she began a long journey of her own, to come to us again”. [page 304].
Theodore Ell was born in Sydney in 1984. He studied literature and modern languages at the University of Sydney, and spent periods of further research and study, and later gained a PhD. He was working in the public service in Canberra, prior to joining his wife in Lebanon. His essay ‘Facades of Lebanon’, about the Lebanese revolution and the Beirut port explosion, won the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize.
Following his three years in Lebanon, Theodore Ell, as noted in the ABR review referenced above, was ‘tormented by involuntary memories. When he returns to Australia, he receives treatment for what is presumably PTSD’.
Note: in this article, I have used the spelling of Hizballah as used throughout the book by Ell. Generally, through the media, etc, we will see that name spelt as Hezbollah [wjk]
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