Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

Creating people's geographies

Beirut, modern jazz and the new Middle East By Nizar Ghanem

Common Ground News August 2006

There is a kind of beauty in jazz, a broken beauty, so-to-speak, contradictory in nature yet very complex. New things are discovered while listening to it. Hidden, secret and relative, it resembles a certain uncertainty.

Beirut is like jazz. I smiled, holding on to that thought as I drank the last sip of my Almaza beer in Café de Prague in the once again war-torn Beirut. Obscure, lively, unwilling to die and constantly reinventing itself, the city is a puzzle of endless contradictions. I considered this as I watched the smiling faces of Beiruti intellectuals sitting around drinking their beer after a rough day in Beirut. Beirut is still dancing, still listening to jazz and still able to reinvent itself under siege. So here’s to Beirut, the heart, the passion and the love. Cheers!

People who visit this city say that Beirut has a certain charm to it; it’s full of art, pubs, theatres, crazy ideas and that sweet, sweet liberty where bikinis go side by side with veils. It’s where hippies and rockers walk side by side with mujahideen, sheikhs and priests. I have always wondered why Beirut possesses this lively nature that is so entrancing. I have finally determined that it’s because, unconsciously, we are very aware of our own mortality, and so life becomes dear, and every moment is lived.

Beirut is at war, and there is a huge cloud of black smoke that encompasses the capital and its surroundings. “Beirutis are breathing their own destruction,” as Robert Fisk wrote recently. Ironically, just a few days ago, Beirut was roaring with life as hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the world had come to get a taste of the exquisite Beiruti experience. Hotels were fully booked, downtown restaurants packed with customers and streets bursting with people of different races, religions and nationalities. Beirut was displaying the glamour that had been tragically absent during the civil war of 1975-1990, though never forgotten.

Waking up to the sound of bombs and F16s roaming the city skies, the Lebanese cannot believe what is happening. A taxi driver once said to me, “to understand Beirut, you have to understand the world.” Another contradiction: Lebanese taxi drivers are as much political analysts as they are providers of transportation. Understanding what happens in Lebanon is inherently linked to understanding regional and international forces and their interests; it is the curse of geography and the burden of history.


“Why are we at war?” — a question the Lebanese are asking themselves as they hurry to mend their wounds and count their dead in the remains of a city they trust only to be unpredictable. Other questions remain unanswered: where did all this international silence come from, does the Geneva Convention mean anything in today’s world, what about human rights, children rights? But in Beirut, nothing seems to make sense, one political party waging war against Israel, another against Syria, while Westerners are enjoying their own party in the endless Beirut nightlife. I have the feeling that I am watching an existentialist movie with no heroes and a grey background; from my corner, I see an attractive Lebanese woman walking by, followed by a man wearing a necktie, then by one of the self-styled mujahideen, a missile, and an Israeli tank with Bush on top of it singing about democracy. The tank is followed by a woman on a bike, a European, and yes, she’s demanding peace!

Earlier, in a grubby apartment in Beirut, I sat in my room listening to the news. Hundreds have been killed and injured in brutal wars involving Iraq, Palestine and now, Lebanon. My room mate, a supporter of Hizbullah, is smoking hash and listening to Mushrooms, an Israeli band. Outside, the sound of bombs mixes with the Muslim call for prayer, while the deadly black smoke creeps along the city streets and alleys. On television, Condoleezza Rice talks about the “New Middle East”. And then it hits me: if rock speaks about pain and rap about anger, jazz expresses a form of imperfection and uncertainty. Jazz is dialectical, it turns and moves, and like mathematics it constructs a world of complex relationships. But somewhere in its development, when all the variables have been exhausted and all the contradictions expressed and elaborated upon, it is no longer possible to dissect or analyse it. You fall into numbness. Jazz is about numbness…What I want to say is that while Middle Easterners are subjected to all forms of violence, oppression and injustice, they are called upon to express love and forgiveness. No offence to Ms. Rice, but the call for a new Middle East seems to bring out a hysterical, manic laugh. We are completely numb, to the extent that any form of rhetoric, logic or speech is bound to fail. It seems not to matter, as President Bush will build this “New Middle East” and is doing so with blood and fire.

How many times can we rise from the ashes and build our lives again, I asked myself as I sat there in the darkness of that Beiruti night. How many times can we forgive, rebuild our homes and give life another shot? How many times can we listen to the same song playing again and again, even if it is jazz? I had no answer. It seems that if the Middle East had to compose a music that would express its past, its troubled present and its un-certain future, the pain of rock won’t suffice, neither will the aggressiveness of rap, and it would definitely be something much more complicated than modern jazz. It would be something yet to be discovered.

* Nizar Ghanem is a project coordinator at the Forum for Development, Culture and Dialogue in Beirut. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org.

Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), August 1, 2006

Visit the website at www.commongroundnews.org

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This entry was posted on 14 August, 2006 by in Arts, Empire, War and Terror, Geopolitics, International Relations, Lebanon, Middle East, Opinion, Strategy, Syria.

Timely Reminders

"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley

"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.

"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"


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