Persiflage & Paroxysm

If you are leaving Lebanon, good luck and Godspeed to you and yours, keep going, do not look back or think of what you leave behind, just be thankful, you have been saved. There will always be kind souls who will place flowers on the graves of loved ones. The rest of us must stay behind for whatever reason, my advice is forget us, unless our paths happen to cross in some safe, foreign land where the birds still sing. You have to be merciless and tear out your own beating heart and cast it on the flames. Stop telling people you are Lebanese, it’s really not a point you would want to stress. To my dear naturalized 48ees, i.e. all you Palestinian-Lebanese out there who have had to adopt Lebanese accents over the past half century, its time to find a new accent to adopt. Lebanon is the tragedy of the millennium, some Lebanese would tell you, and as violins play a sad dirge in the background they will insist that all what happened to their country was other people’s fault and not their own....

In Lebanon, as with many small countries and small towns, limited social horizons stifle dreamers’ hopes and small minds sadly prevail. People really don’t like one another very much over here and are eternally suspicious and envious of each other, families in particular are so often torn apart by incessant bickering, internal competition and bad feelings. The end result is no one raises a finger to help those closest to them, creating even more bad feelings which perpetually propagate a pattern of behavior and conduct that borders on mean, rude and inconsiderate. The main driver behind adopting this attitude and mode of behavior is the concept of: ‘if no one will lift a finger to help me in my time of greatest need, then I will not lift a finger to help anyone else in theirs.’ ‘Après moi le deluge,’ becomes the defining maxim for every Lebanese living in this jungle of a country. My own personal experiment at social isolation has therefore born some interesting fruit. Having kept my d...