The Siege of Beirut
Excerpted from A Block from Bliss Street (MFA Thesis, 2006).
My mother gave birth to me with the sound of shelling, the call to prayer, and a post-labor hemorrhaging that almost killed her.
I was born on سبت النور. The Saturday of Light. Easter morning.
I was born into a war that we survived. ...الحمد لله
I came into this world in مستشفى طراد only fifty days before small brown and pink leaflets fluttered down from the sky, dropped by screaming Israeli jets, ordering the residents, in Arabic, to take their families and flee their homes if they valued their lives. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were entering Beirut to fight ‘terrorism.’ The Palestinian Liberation Organization, established in 1964, had set up their headquarters in West Beirut, and Israel wanted them expelled; they were too close for comfort. The IDF would be occupying within three days, and there would be “collateral.”
To the citizens of Beirut: The Israel Defense Forces have not used all the means at their disposal to defeat the terrorists. Save your lives and the lives of your loved ones. Leave Beirut. The following roads are open—Save your lives (Fisk, Pity the Nation).
Two months before the leaflets fell in west Beirut, my Jiddo and Téta’s photograph hung in the stuffy bedroom of our sixth floor apartment on Makhoul Street, where my mother nursed me. Jiddo stared at me in black and white, sternly, while I cried for food or sleep, and that is the only face of him that I know. I know that face like I know the echo of gunshots and sirens. As an infant, I was too young to understand the noise of war because those were the only sounds I considered normal. Now they remind me that I was born on a battlefield--not two armies marching towards each other or blowing each other up in trenches, but an urban battlefield where jets blew up buildings, snipers took people out on their way to their cars, tanks rolled through neighborhood streets, militia checkpoints re-zoned the city determining who was allowed in and who had to get out.
Like every refugee or child of war, I can finally recognize that the wailing of the sirens or the bombs and bullets outside my window in Beirut—safely packaged in a TV or iPhone screen now— meant that when the sniping or shrieking stopped piercing the night sky, we could be dead. The stillness of silence after the shooting is almost more terrifying than the noise because when it all stops that may mean you’ve been killed. Or that your mom is dead or your neighbor. It’s only when you hear someone else whisper through the black to you that you know you’ve made it through one more night. Home is no longer safe and every loud noise or sudden movement is a threat now. From that moment forward, for the rest of your life, you’re both terrified of silence and use it for your own protection.
The day the leaflets fell over Ras Beirut, my mother doesn’t remember what we were doing. I find that strange because I’ve been told that people who experience a traumatic event always recall what they were doing the minute the news hits. I remember painting my nails a metallic blue when I found out about the death of my grandmother, and I’ve read about people who can still taste the flavor of the gum they were chewing before their life was struck by tragedy. But, I think this heightened sensory memory is true for those who witness tragedy--they remember the details of the moment right before the tragedy hits. For those who are directly impacted by the tragedy, it’s a different story. Memories are not formed. They cannot be retrieved.
So, I’ll never know where we were the minute our lives shifted. I only know that it was June 27th, 1982. My sister was almost two years-old and I was almost seventy days-old and this was the beginning of Beirut’s seventy day siege. I only know what was happening outside, in the sky. Silver American F-15 and F-16 jets pierced through the sky at 1500 MPH, breaking the sound barrier and shattering windows (just keeping matt’s not here hovered). They scattered phosphorous balloons to protect themselves from heat-seeking missiles. Five huge explosions accompanied the chemical balloons. Beneath the smoke, the PLO’s anti-aircraft missiles—humble in comparison—flashed green fires behind the silver jets. And the city was falling, flattening, receding on itself. And children, whose schools had shut down or blown up, were screaming, their faces burning from the reaction of flesh to phosphorous. They were picking up booby-trapped toys that fell from the skies, first smiling then maimed or dead. Families, like mine, were hiding in pitch black shelters, basements that had seen generations of Lebanese with candles (Fisk, Pity the Nation).
A massive explosion had destroyed the power station in Jiyyeh so we sat in the dark. If someone took a picture from a skyscraper or a tower or a plane, the city would sparkle from the hundreds of lit candles. Then the photographer would see a big blast of light as if all the candles merged into one ball of fire and the city would look orange, floating in flames and smoke. Then, peace. The moment in between. And the candles would flicker again. Inside the shelters, beneath the rumbling ground and the swaying buildings, the victims of this war couldn’t see anything but each other’s faces and the shadows of their movements magnified on the walls that surrounded them. Our own giant hands, arms and legs floating, almost engulfing us.
When the leaflets fell on June 27th and told us to save our lives, many west Beirutis packed their cars and headed east. Families argued over whether they should stay at home or leave. The battle of Beirut began under the mission heading “Peace for Galilee,” but Lebanese know that any operation that involves the word peace immediately implies death. Families were torn apart knowing that to stay meant to die and to leave meant to lose. “Operation Peace for Galilee” rolled in, building momentum and power. My parents agreed that my father should stay in his office, in west Beirut, where he would be needed for relief work, and that my mom would take Maria and me to my aunt’s house in the East. So my mom packed a suitcase with our clothes and canned food, and my father asked one of his employees, Wael, to take us across the green line. Wael was late picking us up and with each minute that passed, my parents held me tighter, almost convinced that he’d been caught in the crossfire. But, hours later, he parked his car in front of our building on Makhoul Street, ran out and opened the back door for my mom. She put me in the picnic basket she had lined with cotton sheets and a feather pillow. She wrapped Maria up in a shawl and ducked in the backseat of the car. My father waved and rushed back inside.
In the backseat of the car, I was very quiet, hidden in my picnic basket like a loaf of bread. The man who drove was brave and loyal to my father. He sped down the deserted streets knowing full well that he could have lost his life for our family. But the Lebanese civilians, like any other citizens in times of war, always pushed the limit because to challenge was to resist, to deny an unnatural death. We crossed over the green line at the museum checkpoint, the most dangerous and most deadly checkpoint during the war. Every faction tried to claim it: Amal militiamen, PLO guerilla fighters, Syrian army, Lebanese army sentry, the Mourabitoun militiaman, Israeli soldiers, and the Phalange militiamen. Above the hood of the car, snipers shot bullets at their targets, but for some reason decided not to shoot us.
Wael couldn’t get across the Green Line. They were stopped by a militia checkpoint. The same place where our grandfather was stopped, kidnapped and killed. Five years after his kidnapping, when the militia crushed his skull with a brick or a rock, my mother was ordered to exit the car with me in a picnic basket and Maria wrapped in a shawl and to leave us by the car while she was searched and interrogated by the militia guards. They would not let her bring us with her during the interrogation, so there she was, a young American woman in a warzone, alone, on the side of a road, separated from her babies. Somehow, and I don’t think we’ll ever quite understand how, Wael was able to hail a taxi to take us the rest of the way. This scene aptly captures the carnivalesque essence of war: A taxi cab appears at the Green Line in the sniping hotzone. A young woman with a baby in a picnic basket in the same spot where the baby’s grandfather was killed six years before she was born. A father on the other side of town where rockets shriek into apartment buildings, exploding and sending the contents of lives showering down on the street below as shrapnel and debris. A wife who doesn’t know if the father of her children will ever make it out alive.
Hours later, we were out of the air raid zone, climbing three flights of stairs to my Aunt’s apartment in East Beirut. My mom climbed and I rocked in my basket. The two-bedroom flat was filled with twelve people and cigarette smoke. Cousins, aunts and uncles crowded the living room, biting their lips and whispering. My aunt, our hostess, drank glass after glass of whiskey on the rocks and my grandmother tried to feed all twelve of her relatives from the sparse selection of canned goods and frozen delicacies that were slowly going bad in the melting freezer. Since the electricity had been cut, the ceiling fan didn’t work either and the thick drapes shut out the daylight and the tracer bullets at night. The sound of bombs and gunshots in the distance were the only outside noise we heard and I wonder how my mom did it, knowing that her husband was in the neighborhood where the bombs turned the city into a hell of smoke and fire. He slept in the underground shelter, and looking back, I don’t understand the logic of those basement shelters. Every building I’ve seen that hasn’t been recovered since the war--and there are still many of them around Beirut to this day-- is a collapsed mass grave.
At my aunt's, the radio crackled in the background every day and night. Families were broadcasting messages to each other, pleading for news, reassuring their relatives that they were still alive, informing them that someone had been killed.
My father sporadically came to visit us at his sister’s, slipping into Red Cross vans that could get through the checkpoints with their passes. He reassured his family, kissed us, and left again. He must have said goodbye to me more than any father in any normal life would do with their newborn. My mom never knew if he’d come back again to find me in the corner of the dim room sleeping in my picnic basket.
For the children in the apartment, parents tried to act natural, but my cousins and sister tell me they could sense their artificiality like prey can smell their predators even when they don’t see them. And like animals, like the big ears on rabbits, the children understood it all. Our parents didn’t recall what it was like being intuitive, being children; they struggled to keep their sons and daughters from knowing what was happening behind the closed drapes and the smoke-- a consistent coping strategy used widely across Lebanon during this time, and even still to this day: if you don’t look at it and panic, then it doesn’t have to feel real. Outside, if you looked to the West, the city was burning and the fire below returned bodies to ash.
My family survived.
***
When I wrote that section of my MFA thesis that attempted to piece together my family’s history, my mother hadn’t remembered a very significant part of the story of our escape from West Beirut to East Beirut: Wael couldn’t get across the Green Line. They were stopped by a militia checkpoint. The same place where Jiddo George was stopped. Five years after his kidnapping, when the Mourabitoun militia crushed his skull with a brick or a rock, my mother was ordered to exit the car with me in a picnic basket and Maria wrapped in a shawl and to leave us by the car while she was searched and interrogated by the militia guards. They would not let her bring us with her during the interrogation, so there she was, a young American woman in a warzone, alone, on the side of a road, separated from her babies. Somehow, and I don’t think we’ll ever quite understand how, Wael was able to hail a taxi to take us the rest of the way. This scene aptly captures the carnivalesque essence of war: A taxi cab appears at the Green Line in the sniping hotzone. A young American woman with a baby in a picnic basket in the same spot where the baby’s grandfather was killed six years before she was born. A father on the other side of town where rockets shriek into apartment buildings, exploding and sending the contents of lives showering down on the street below as shrapnel and debris. A wife who doesn’t know if the father of her children will ever make it out alive.
