Arab Life Blog

“Stand before a picture as before a prince…Waiting to see whether it will speak and what it will say.” 

Schopenhauer

Every once in a while, a lone photo emerges to render the human condition in all its pain and beauty. A vista that says it all.

Comes now one among a flood of snapshots of an earthquake that has disturbed the quiet of southeastern Turkey and added to the devastation in the north of war-torn Syria.

Two weekends ago, I walked from Clemenceau, where I live, to Gimmeyzeh for a rendezvous at Ginnette café with a friend.
It was a quiet, sunny Sunday morning. The walk didn’t take more than the usual 20 minutes. I took the downtown route, because the center (aka Solidere) is lifeless on Sundays. I didn’t have to suffer the car and electricity generators’ fumes.

I read a Thinking Fits post about Israel yesterday that I wrote in 2010. It didn’t feel like a lifetime ago, but if I’d had a child that year, they would be in 8th grade now. I know. It’s a rather depressing way of measuring the passage of time.

December 23rd: I looked up تقوقع in google translate. I got “squat.” Terrible! They ought to do something about that tool. But I suppose the state of us is a kind of emotional and mental squat. Some obviously squatting way more than others in this country. Around us. In Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Iraq.

An afternoon in 1972, a quiet conversation between two old Palestinian warriors in a living room filled with books. The two had not seen each other in decades, one presumes. Once protagonists on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, now they fidgeted awkwardly in their seats as they chatted.

I was barely into the first few pages of Raja Shehadeh’s We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, when a 24-year-old inscription rushed back to mind.

In 1998, my friend Christopher Dickey (1951-2020), an author and then Newsweek’s Middle East Editor, came visiting in Beirut, bearing with him the advance uncorrected reader’s proof of Summer of Deliverance. Chris was the son of the very famous (and no less infamous) James Dickey, the poet and novelist. The bestseller Deliverance, which came out in 1970, was his debut novel.

It happened when I started watching Losing Alice, an Israeli series that debuted on Apple TV in 2020. By the end of the first two episodes, I noticed a pining kind of curiosity carrying me through the show.

One summer day in the mid-1980s, in the very early hours of the morning, I sat waiting on the porch of our Shmeisani home. My friends were picking me up to go to Aqaba by the Red Sea, 200 miles away.

If there is still a Levant in 2122, will its inhabitants scour the minutiae of our lives with the same keenness we search for those of our grandparents’ times?

In this post, I shall meander simply because I want to.
My first time in Cairo was in 1974. On the drive from the airport to the hotel, I remember looking out of the window and thinking to myself, I’ve been here before. Home!