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Translating Lebanon
Nancy Penrose
Seattle, Washington
The best weapons are the stories and every time the story is told, something changes.
Sherman Alexie
1
There is a story on a mountaintop in south Lebanon. In a sculpture of defeat, the main gun of a tank is jammed nose down into the grip of blocky boulders. The rusted caterpillar tracks the war machine’s wheels are skewed to the sky, exposed and helpless. Curls of razor wire spiral around rocks. Two little girls in blue jeans and matching aqua jackets pose in front of the scene. Each carries a pink purse. A man crouches to capture the photo, camera to eye.
This is Mleeta: a war museum, a tourist complex, a theme park. In sunlight filtered by
fog, I stroll the narrative that celebrates the pullout of the Israeli military in 2000 after a long occupation of south Lebanon. Ten years to the day of that withdrawal, this park opened for visitors.
2
I traveled from Seattle to Beirut to visit my sister-in-law, Arlene, an American living in Lebanon and teaching at an international school. Before I arrived she sent me this email:
“I know I want to take you to the Hezbollah ‘museum’ – I haven’t been, but my friend says it is worth seeing.”
Hezbollah—isn’t that some kind of terrorist organization?
3
I read to understand. I work to unwind the tangled skein of Lebanese history. There is the ancient: first human inhabitants in 10,000 BC, then the Phoenicians, Egyptian and Persian masters, Romans, Byzantines, the Arab conquest, the Christian crusaders. There is the modern: the French Mandate of colonization, independence in 1943, and the shattering pieces of a long civil war that lasted 25 years and did not end until 1990. The pieces have names that swirl in a righteous confusion of blood, religion, and alliance: Phalangist, Alawite, Amal, Maronite, Armenian, Shiite, Druze, Sunni, Palestinian, the Southern Lebanese Army. Money from outside—Syria, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Iran—moves the pieces on the chessboard that is Lebanon.
Hezbollah arose in 1985 as a Shiite Muslim militia born from the acidity and pain of the
civil war. Complicity in the kidnapping and murder of Westerners during that time is always disavowed. By 1992 the group was a political party with seats in the Lebanese parliament. In 2000, Hezbollah’s disciplined and relentless attacks with men and machines finally forced the Israelis to withdraw from the rocky territory of the south that is bounded by the Mediterranean and by the borders with Israel and Syria. Words are thin when describing such thick history.
4
Arabic words written in English. Transliteration: to represent or spell in the characters of another alphabet. Hence: Hezbollah, Hizbollah, Hizballah, Hizbullah, Hizbu’llah. Translation does not vary: The Party of God. Can I transliterate my distaste for religious fundamentalism into an alphabet useful for understanding?
5
My tax dollars speak from the website of the U.S. Department of State: Hizballah, a political party designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, maintains a strong presence in parts of the southern suburbs of Beirut, portions of the Bekaa Valley, and South Lebanon. The situation in these areas remains tense, and sporadic violence involving this or other extremist organizations remains a possibility.
U.S. citizens traveling or residing in Lebanon despite this Travel Warning should keep a low profile, varying times and routes for all required travel.
6
I did not search out the travel warnings for Lebanon before my trip. I did that on purpose. I relied on Arlene for my truth.
7
Everybody’s friendly. On the Mediterranean coast, in the mountains, in Byblos, Becharré, Anjar, Beirut, Chtaura, Tyre, and Sidon, we are welcomed. I am traveling with my husband,David. Arlene is often with us. I learn to say marhaba, hello in Arabic. Shukran is thank you, or simply merci.
Out for a day with a driver, we cross the spans of a bridge on the highway to the Bekaa valley near the border with Syria, one of many bridges destroyed by the Israelis in the 2006 air attacks on Lebanon, part of the reprisal against Hezbollah for the killing of eight Israeli soldiers nd the kidnapping of two others at the border in the south.
I have seen videos from 2006: Hezbollah supporters in Beirut waving flags to celebrate the deaths of the soldiers; Israeli missile strikes cratering runways at Beirut’s international airport. The images repulse me.
The final count of civilian deaths in the war of 2006: at least 43 Israeli civilians in northern Israel who lived within range of the Hezbollah Katyusha rockets; at least 1,000 Lebanese civilians.
The bridge we cross to the Bekaa in 2010 is gloriously new. Arlene says it was rebuilt by a Japanese company, paid for with American foreign aid.
8
We are at the head of the Qadisha valley north of Beirut, stopped to take photos. In the azure sky above us I do not understand four great looping contrails. “Israeli jets,” says Arlene. They are violating Lebanese airspace. “Taking photos of us,” says our driver, meaning Lebanon. He is Shiite and, although he is a man of Beirut, his father’s village is in the south.
“You watch the news, one, two months from now they will attack some part of Lebanon.” Later he says, “I know what Hitler did was bad, killing 2,000 Jews.” “More like 6 million,” says David. Our driver is incredulous: “Really? That’s what you believe?”
9
The best expectations are empty and when the space is filled something shifts. After a night on the Mediterranean at a Lebanese bed-and-breakfast just 10 miles north of the border with Israel, we leave behind the turquoise waters, the green of vast banana plantations. We drive east, inland, into the mountains. Our driver today is Christian. Hanging from the rearview mirror is a wooden cross that swings like a confused compass as the car leans into hairpin turns on newly paved roads. Occasionally, there are signs in Arabic and English that point onward: Resistance Tourist Landmark.
We lose the sunshine as we climb into clouds and then we are at the top, within the soft gray mist. In a parking lot saturated with hundreds of cars, families spill out of back seats and mothers in headscarves wrestle children into sweaters and jackets against the cool air. Ahead are the shimmering outlines of modern architecture: steel beams frame glass windows two stories high; the jagged angles of concrete walls knife upward; a wide flight of limestone stairs stretches to the top of the hill that dominates the scene. There is the sensation of approaching a somber Disneyland. As we near the ticket booth, our driver puts out his cigarette and advises us: “Let’s just say you’re all Canadians, OK?”
But no one seems to care where we are from, although we are the only visitors I perceive as Western foreigners. Arlene and I are among the few women not wearing headscarves, not covered from wrist to ankle.
We enter the exhibit hall where the centerpiece is a large topographic map that sprawls across the floor. David and I lean over the glass and steel barrier and try to match the forms with the land we have just driven through. Along the walls, at the top of a row of posters showing Israel’s missile defense systems, there is a photo of the nose of a jet. Airborne Laser (ABL) says the caption in English. The letters USA are just barely visible on the fuselage. I feel as if I am blaring Americanness and quickly slide over to the next display.
We poke into the dark of a theater illuminated by scenes of bloodied and wounded soldiers, but the narration is in Arabic so we move on. Outside, the sun is breaking through. Children prance around the edge of a round reflecting pool. From a walkway above a display, I look down on the tops of green helmets arranged in rows on the ground. Israeli? Hezbollah? I do not know, but any dead soldier speaks sadness to me. I photograph a tank with its main gun tied into an improbable and impotent knot.
10
A sign in English explains the exhibits: This is military equipment that belonged to the Israeli army and its collaborators, and was gained by resistance in battlefield straight after direct confrontations with the enemy. TRUE…Israel is NOT Invincible! After the victory against Israel: the tables were turned; the resistance soared whereas the enemy fell into the abyss. Victory reached a holy rank. Yet who will tell the story.”
11
What can I grasp of this tale as the citizen of a collaborator country? What vision can I align with the occupied, the oppressed? Why do I travel if not to be jolted, to come upon discomforts that broaden my beliefs?
12
For many years, mostly Shiite south Lebanon was squeezed between the Syrian and Israeli militaries. Residents suffered the cruelties of living in a homeland at war. It was out of this anguish that Hezbollah emerged and it was primarily to the Shiite that Hezbollah channeled millions of dollars of Iranian foreign aid to build hospitals, schools, cut-price supermarkets and pharmacies, low-cost housing and irrigation. According to David Hirst in Beware of Small States, Christians and Sunnis also benefitted from the projects. In southern Beirut, where many Shiite lived in poverty, Hezbollah provided water, electricity, and garbage collection, services that helped the Lebanese state avoid a social catastrophe. Lebanese Christians, as well as Muslims, admired Hezbollah for its avoidance of corruption, something other parties and militias seemed unable to escape.
13
Even a short journey can change the story. There are many tales in Lebanon, many ways of looking at the truth. Mleeta has sent me searching for a narrative that reorients my viewpoint. I strive to stem my recoil from the celebration of warfare at the multimillion-dollar complex on the mountain. I squeeze my imagination into improbable spaces, try to understand what it means for the Shiite of south Lebanon to feel they defeated Israel: What if foreign soldiers marched into Seattle, bombed my neighborhood, killed my friends, and for nearly two decades occupied street corners with tanks and machine guns, sent death by bullets and shells?
Would I not feel pride in neighbors who pushed out the invaders, who freed our streets, rebuilt roads, provided the hospitals and schools that had been destroyed, were lacking, because the rest of the country did not care about the Pacific Northwest?
14
Qana is a village in south Lebanon. Qana is where the Bible says Christ turned water into wine. Qana is a word that shudders through regional memory. In 1996, more than a hundred Lebanese civilians, half of them children, died there in a U.N. compound while sheltering from the Israeli shells that killed them. Israel denied that the gunners knew what they were hitting; an Amnesty International investigation concluded the attack was intentional. In an interview in the Jerusalem weekly Kol Ha’ir, one of the soldiers who aimed the howitzers at Qana was quoted: “The commander…told us that we were firing well and we should keep it up, and that Arabs, you know…there are millions of them.”
15
Byblos is a pretty port town on the Mediterranean about 25 miles north of Beirut. It is one of the oldest cities on the planet, inhabited by humans for at least 7,000 years. Like many cities in Lebanon, Byblos has more than one name. On the highway signs, in the guidebook, I see Byblos (Jbeil) ﺝﺏﻱﻝ
Byblos: A Greek word written in the Roman alphabet; the word from which book and bible are derived in English. Jbeil: The Arabic name, transliterated into letters of the Roman alphabet. :ﺝﺏﻱﻝJbeil in Arabic script.
Coached by our driver, I practice saying the Arab name aloud. At first, the unfamiliar combinations of letters and sounds feel like a stiff shirt against bare skin. With the wearing, the sounds soften and begin to feel familiar. I study the curling strokes of the Arabic letters and practice moving my eyes from right to left. I try to take in all the ways of reading this polyonymous city.
Byblos, Jbeil, :ﺝﺏﻱﻝit was here, in 1300 BC, that the Phoenicians developed the first linear alphabet. Many texts have been spun from this one source: Greek, Roman, English, Arabic, and Hebrew. Different alphabets can lead to multiple translations of the same story, different names for the same events.
16
I continue the search for an alphabet that chronicles the confusion of an outsider. But I have breathed the mist on the mountaintop, fingered the wicked points of razor wire. I have traced the arc of one of the stories, and I have been changed.
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