Before returning to Old Blighty and the heart of the Essex countryside, I spent several years working as a journalist and broadcaster in Beirut. If a magazine or radio station had anything going out in the English language I was there eager to communicate. Like most of its inhabitants, I worked hard and played hard and thanks to the wide array of places to park your bum in, I was thankfully much entertained and amused by the fact that since the war had finished, Everyone I met in Beirut had been given a ‘Pants to war- let’s party’ microchip. It made my heady university days seem so safe and sheltered in comparison. Not that anyone believed me.
Post war Beirut in the early 1990s was something quite magical because it felt like every single part time arab had been given a call to arms and at that very same moment had decided it was time to leave there non arab lives and bring there western skills and tools to help re-build the nation. Naive … yes, sadly we were, yet I and a vast majority of those I met with each passing day wouldn’t have thought so at the time.
Very few of us understood the territory, our mother tongue (now rusty from years of non use) tripped us up and made us stand out in a service taxi, on the streets or a wedding and none of us, seemed to have a clear grasp on what the fighting had ever been about barring the obvious and marked milestones that we had watched unfolding from the security of our living rooms. Worse part was, no matter who I asked, I never got one version of events anyway so seemed like a pointless exercise and one that led to a dead end. In the end I took a number of versions and mashed them up with the Robert fisk account of what happened figuring a combination of all of the above would give me a more honest overview.
I remember interviewing a young lifeguard in the mid 1990’s about what he now thought about looking forward to his future now that the civil war was over to which he replied “ lady, the war isn’t over, its just less official and more underground…” How right he was. Who would have predicted that 10 years after the last remaining remnants of war had been forgotten and gentrified, all that official anger would whirl up again and turn the streets into bullet ridden playgrounds for men who should no better and younger men who shouldn’t know that much. Reminds me that part time Arabs have a critical role to play by offering alternative ways of looking at the world – and the places we call home.
Perhaps my naivety is resurfacing and my die-hard optimism is giving me a blind spot. Could the idea that Part time Arabs have an added more open filter in which they see/feel and explore the world around them make them part of any potential solution ? could they really make any difference at all in our motherlands given all the anger, apathy, random politics, questionable motivations … and yet – if Part time Arabs can transcend religious and political obsessions what might be possible? How could a collective intention to create a new path … what if it doesn’t make the blindest bit of difference, what if we knew we couldn’t fail, what if I ask you for your thoughts … answers on a postcard please
