Striking at the Heart

It is surreal to hear a car bomb explode. Yesterday, unexpectedly, on a peaceful Friday afternoon, a big boom rings in my ears, vibrating windows rattle my teeth and I see a pillow of black smoke rising up above the suburban skyline a few kilometres from our home in Achrafieh.  My son Mateo is having his afternoon nap and sleeps through the blast. Phew, I don't have to hide my fear. I call my husband immediately, this is big, maybe he knows what happened.

The mind wanders “Achrafieh is the safest neighbourhood in Beirut” I recall our real-estate agent affirming us just 5months ago. Mikey has no word as yet, and I’m piecing scenarios together; maybe it’s an accident on a construction site, or God forbid, a fire in an apartment block. I am both numb and preoccupied with images of death and destruction. Twitter feeds are fast and furious “a car-bomb” is confirmed within minutes.

The lens through which we understand violence is how we make sense of our existence in the world. To put a distance between ‘us’ and ‘the explosion’ is necessary to make logic to the violence, and logic to our safety. I am used to mapping equations of violence hundreds of kilometres away from us – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Iraq, Syria - not Lebanon, Beirut, Achrafieh, Sassine Square.

The distance gets narrower and narrower. Striking at the heart of Beirut. Our home.

Phone calls, emails, and texts begin. “We are fine,” I tell my family. "It was two kilometres away so don't worry.” But the reality hits home, a car bomb happened in my neighbourhood.

Thus, before it was announced that there was an actual target to this bombing, and that the target's name was Wissam al-Hassan, a high-ranking Internal Security Officer working against the Assad regime, the wounds of Lebanon’s past re-opened. Conspiracy theories between Muslim-Christian tensions, of Israeli plots, of Iranian terrorist groups, and of the Syrian civil-war spilling across boarders quickly seeps its way into paranoid Lebanese psyche. Mine included.

Now that we know the target, the violence seems easier to frame. It somehow becomes less terrifying that this was an assassination, and not just a car bomb in a dense civilian and commercial space whereby no one and every one is a target. However, most tragically, as people in urban warfare quickly find out, you never ever learn to forget the car bomb.

Paranoia is the inevitable by-product. You never know where it might be, in which car, what time will it go off, who is targeted, why, you never know anything except after it goes off, tearing everything in its vicinity to shreds. What many spectators watching the news safely from behind their screens don’t realize are the long-term effects that car bombs have on the population. Any car that looks suspicious starts resembling a potential bomb.

And now our family is torn. We want to stay in Lebanon and carry on as if nothing happened now but that is an impossibility, the event is lodged deep in our soul for the rest of our life. We need to know we are safe when we walk out on the street at any given day, place, and time.

Paranoia is a bodily experience. Every time you step out of your home, you feel the heart pounding, the pulse racing, the picking up in speed as you walk. Now imagine, if you will, the people in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine or any of the wretched countries where civilians have to endure the indescribable terror of car bombs for extended periods of time, just put yourself in their shoes and try to picture how your life would be affected.

In the five stages of grief, anger is number two, and although many of us remain in the fog of sadness and shock - many have now moved towards anger. Anger is all about retaliation and negativity. There is no good that can come from anger - it eats at us, it engulfs our thought process, it stops us from seeing clearly.

I've stayed away from the online forums because I knew people would feel the need to vent, to attack. I understand why they need to, but I also know that it won't bring me any peace. There needs to be discussion - we don't need finger pointing.

There is nothing more soothing in a time of grief than community coming together as one. Just as there is nothing more destructive than a community tearing each other apart.

In a time of grief and great tragedy we need to do what expats do best. Join together as a truly international community and show that it doesn't matter where you're from, or which God you pray to, we are all in this together. We all have the same wish. To come home to our families at the end of each day. To be safe.

My thoughts and prayers are with the affected families whose sorrow and suffering is too great for words.