I spent the whole day in the flat yesterday, as editing had come in (a dissertation on migration). I can’t say it felt a particularly productive day, as I was scattered and found it hard to concentrate, and I could hardly bear to think about my memory room story.
That is an odd side of writing, that near physical revulsion when I don’t want to, or am unable to, work on a story. I can’t bear to even think about it. Just a form of writer’s block, something to be pushed through.
I have been reading Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation and am glad I started after arriving in Lebanon. There are truly no heroes in it, and it does make one despair for humanity. I went to a talk of his once, when at university. It was shortly after 9/11 and he kept saying angrily, again and again, that 9/11 was not unique, it was something others in the world had faced again and again, it was only American self-deception that was weak. We came out of it with my American friends shaken, I didn’t know they said. In solidarity with other non-Americans I said yeah, that’s how it is but secretly I thought to myself, no, there is something unique about 9/11.
I still believe there is something unique about 9/11 but it’s not what Fisk was referring to. He was talking about his experience of going into a school basement in Sidon, with hundreds of budies. And I was thinking of the response – those hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinians unavenged, while the dead of 9/11 are memorialised in blood.
And that’s in the distant past now. The world, as I have written before, in this blog, moved on. But for me, that long ago period has shaped my life. It feels so small now, and it was so big then.
For dinner we ventured into Bourj Hammoud, which was once a village outside Beirut – it lies across the river – and is today just another part of the city. It’s where the Armenians settled after the genocide, and many of the street signs are only Arabic and Armenian.
It was a quiet, calm sort of place, with shops and restaurants but nothing raucous as you find in Germayze where we are staying. Families sipping juice on pavement tables, that sort of thing.