Financial Times (London, England)
November 27, 2004 Saturday
London Edition 1
The night is always young: Having risen from the ashes of its dark
past, Pico Iyer finds Lebanon’s chaotic capital buzzing with
pleasure:
By PICO IYER
Iwalked through the streets of East Beirut on a Saturday evening, and
felt like a yokel suddenly transplanted to a cosmopolis. Sushi bars
and tapas bars, and a cafe where girls with glitter around their eyes
were deep in this month’s copy of Vanity Fair; boites bathed in blue
light, and cigar bars, and dance clubs that should have been in Soho.
Rap music was pounding out of the late-model Mercedes and BMWs that
jammed the narrow streets, and on every side couples were walking
towards the Che lounge, he in black leather jacket, with an air of
savoir-faire, she in high white boots, with midriff bare, reminding
one that Cleopatra more likely came from Beirut than from Cairo.
In the distance, I could see the heart of downtown Beirut, and
illuminated churches and boutiques and palm trees lit up as in a
museum display case. People were still buzzing in and out of the
huge, mock-ancient Virgin Megastore (open till 1am), and across from
it the spot-lit mosque seemed at once place of worship and unlikely
fashion statement.
I had heard, like many others, that Beirut keeps rising from the
ashes of its latest civil war, which ended in 1990, after 15 years,
with 150,000 dead. I had grown up thinking of the city as one of
those weathered places, driven by the worldliest of wisdoms, that had
managed to survive every change in political climate by bending to
the times and making a killing out of chaos.
But after hearing about Beirut’s reconstruction, I had thought
foolishly that it had managed to recreate the recent gilded past in
which Brigitte Bardot and Marlon Brando took in the sun in Byblos
nearby and the wealthy of the world sauntered down the Corniche, from
the Phoenicia Hotel to the Bain Militaire, in the city that provided
the entire Middle East with its nightlife and its dreams. I had never
guessed that Beirut, characteristically, would be trying to design
the future.
What I was seeing might have made New York or London seem retro by
comparison, fuelled though it was by something of the jumped-up
energy of a boy joyriding in his parents’ Porsche and determined to
take things fast because the escapade could end at any moment. The
parents, in this scheme of things, are history and geography, and
they have left Lebanon a tiny slice of a country, only three hours by
car from end to end, that is made for people from elsewhere.
Over the past 4,000 years the descendants of Phoenicia have seen the
Greeks, the Romans, the Assyrians, then the Crusaders, the Ottomans
and the Europeans, among many others, pass through, and been home to
the longtime exiles of Armenia, Palestine and Iran. For traders, this
all means opportunity; for the young it can mean severe rootlessness.
When I looked in on the American University of Beirut, I saw that six
students were putting on a play they had written called Fragments. On
the striking, ice-cool poster, they had written, “We are ourselves
geological sediments, left with no ancient concepts which will come
to our rescue”.
Lebanon’s way of coping with this absence seems to be to seek
pleasure and have faith in accommodation. When I got into the city,
at 3am on a wet winter evening, a red light beckoned down the steps
of the Godfather bar downtown, and the lights all around offered
Sushi Xpress, X-rated “super-night clubs” and a shop that said
simply, “Me and Me: A Life Philosophy.” When my Lufthansa plane had
landed, teams of smooth young men with designer stubble and expensive
jackets had shuffled off into the immigration hall, and in their
midst had stood a tiny blonde girl, no older than 10, travelling
alone with a Goldman Sachs backpack and a carrier bag from the
Ritz-Carlton Millennium Singapore.
I took myself down to the aged Mayflower Hotel, a monument to raffish
insouciance and resilience, and my dark room came with a love seat
and pictures of dallying French nymphs. The kind man told me not to
use the hotel phones, because they were expensive.
I e-mailed an old friend in California who had once taught at the
American University nearby, to tell him of my arrival, and he
e-mailed back that the Mayflower was where a colleague of his had
been found, with his throat slashed, during the war.
Beirut is not a beautiful city – or, rather, its beauty is that of a
Monaco or Macao, where shrewd developers have seen that they can
construct a time-share offering on paradise.
When you draw back the curtains, much of what you see is concrete,
whole forests of international style high-rises that almost block the
snowcaps in the distance, where you can ski, as the brochures always
boast, the same morning that you swim in the Mediterranean.
Adaptability, you could say, has become the central feature of the
city’s landscape. When I stepped out of the Mayflower my first
morning in Beirut, I was greeted by a man sitting on the pavement,
amid a blast of honking horns and construction cranes, placidly
taking in the day’s newspaper over his brioche and “Guatemalan
Coffee”.
Beirut at night may be a blonde in a mini-skirt sipping a water-pipe
in one of the lavish cafes downtown, but by day it is more like one
of the rumpled men you see shouting out numbers in English, French
and Arabic into a cellphone outside his money-changing stall. And in
the years that Rafiq al-Hariri, a construction tycoon, has been prime
minister till he resigned last month, he tried to yoke these two
sides together making of the city’s ruins a tabula rasa on which to
draft a vision of 21st century post-modernism. The Beirutis I met
often muttered that he was sacrificing history to theme-park in
building up a glittery display-city with the private company,
Solidere; after all, when I wandered across the street from the
trendy Hotel Monroe, I came upon a trade-fair from the Islamic
Republic of Iran, all dour looks and obligatory beards.
To get a clearer picture of the city’s recent divided past, which
could yet become its near future, I drove 20 minutes from the
downtown area of Starbucks’ and The Body Shop to the southern
suburbs, where cardboard-cutouts of Khomeini guard the streets, and
pictures of suicide-bombing “martyrs” promise revenge.
My image of the city was ultimately coloured by its taxi-drivers,
disarming, quick-witted and likeable, who drove me through the city,
offering me sips of their expressos as they drove or delivering a
gallant “enchante” as I got out. My very last evening in Beirut, I
looked for a cab to take me to the airport.
An aged Mercedes slowed down, and I walked into a blast of
heavy-metal music. “I’m sorry,” said the young driver, quickly
turning it off. “I am a Christian, so I don’t listen to the words
about the Anti-Christ. But the music helps me when I’m feeling down.”
Like many people in the city, he had a harrowing story of growing up
Palestinian in Saudi Arabia and driving a car now to put himself
through college. But like most people in Beirut, too, he seemed eager
to learn from his suffering, and there was no self-pity in his story,
only determination.
“Please, if you’d like me to change,” he said, turning the radio dial
down again, “I can. I know many people find this disturbing.” Then,
for the duration of the trip, he offered a definitive disquisition on
the difference between heavy metal, black metal and death rock.
“Thank you,” I said, when I got out, “for explaining this strange
passion.” He put a finger to his lips. “If they hear you talking
about this music, they will arrest you. For being a follower of
Satan.” Somehow, it didn’t seem quite a joke. Pleasure in Beirut is
never without its shadows.
Pico Iyer’s novel about Islam and the west, ‘Abandon’, is available
from Vintage (US). His next book of travels, ‘Sun After Dark’, is
published by Bloomsbury in January
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress