Lebanon is a Death Notice (Corona’s Birthday – Part IV)

In the past year the ever-worsening situation in Lebanon had (and is still having) a huge effect on me. I tried several times to address it here, but I never found the right way to do so. I feel very privileged ever since I left the country in 2015 and am not directly affected by its madness anymore, and this privilege is always holding me back from addressing my feelings and my views. I wrote many times about Lebanon in several notebooks, the first time being a general observation:

This was three months before the Beirut port explosion, and I was already feeling indecent to complain about the lockdown while Lebanon was sinking a little bit more every day in the worst economic crisis of its existence; in comparison the lockdown situation in Berlin felt like we were on a free-all-inclusive-weekend in Disneyland.
In June I was contacted by Musica Sawa, an initiative to raise funds for economically hit Lebanon. They asked Lebanese musicians in Lebanon and abroad to create new pieces inspired by the situation; they then published those pieces one at a time, calling for donations that were later transferred to associations working on the ground in Lebanon, providing food and basic necessities to an ever-growing crowd in need. My contribution was Feed Beirut Back!, a rather angry piece recorded in my living room in Berlin; i was wearing a T-shirt silkscreened in the streets of Beirut during the first days of the October 17th revolution that was already a distant memory by then.

During the summer, each time I would think of Lebanon and of the loved ones there, an inevitable feeling of guilt and hopelessness would overwhelm me. The same feeling of guilt every Lebanese expatriate live with all his life. What is it that makes us so attached to this hateful country? Another note in another notebook tries to reconcile me with my privileged yet unhappy situation.

In beginning of July, I was commissioned by the Italian magazine Internazionale to do two pages of comics on Lebanon. I already told this story here, but it is so surrealistic that I cannot get enough of telling it. On July 20, I delivered a short story titled A Subjective History of Lebanon, portraying rather negatively the country from the day I was born to the present day. My story ended with “and this is just the beginning”, and I’ll let Wikipedia say what happened 10 days later:
“On 4 August 2020, a large amount of ammonium nitrate stored at the port of the city of Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, exploded, causing at least 210 deaths, 7,500 injuries, and US$15 billion in property damage, and leaving an estimated 300,000 people homeless. A cargo of 2,750 tonnes of the substance (equivalent to around 1.1 kilotons of TNT) had been stored in a warehouse without proper safety measures for the previous six years, after having been confiscated by the Lebanese authorities from the abandoned ship MV Rhosus. The explosion was preceded by a fire in the same warehouse, but as of February 2021, the exact cause of the detonation is still under investigation”.
Below is the English version of my story, published a month later on the website Words Without Borders, with the necessary addition of the blast, presented as an epilogue (while I knew for a fact that many episodes were and still are to come).

On the day of the explosion, I made a drawing that expressed my disbelief:

10 days later, I was more pragmatic and noted for myself:

And when the Lebanese newspaper L’Orient Littéraire asked me for a drawing related to the explosion, I did what I thought was my most negative drawing about Lebanon:

I say that I thought it was my most negative drawing because I have found since in old notebooks some other drawings that I forgot about; one of them is 16 years old and express the same anger and despair than the drawings and notes above:

This Death Notice drawing was made during the wave of political assassinations of 2015; little did I know back then that I will use it 16 years later and that it will inevitably be related to a new political assassination, that of Lokman Slim a month ago.
It is always the same story then. There is no escape. And it is a story that can and will always get worse. Just wait and see. I waited, and I will see. I will see with my own eyes next month, when I will be for the first time in Beirut since December 2019. It is also the first time that I have an apprehension before going there; I am scared not of being there, but of what I will discover. I am scared in advance of the sadness I will feel. I am scared of my alienated self there. I was getting used little by little to my expat’ position; I have now to adapt to the one of the wealthy expat’, since the little Euros I will have with me will make me richer than any of my friends living there. I am scared of not being able to buy anything with this wealth. When I remember seeing my friend Sharif last month in a supermarket in Stuttgart, I feel like crying; he was looking to the colourful shelves like a man who escaped from eastern Europe in the 80’s and landed in a supermarket in Las Vegas.
What will happen to all of you? Why isn’t it happening to me too? Why is it so difficult to just be detached? Here’s a last notebook page for the road; it doesn’t answer these questions but rather amplify them: