Emily sings when she waters the gardenias on the balcony. Yesterday morning, Mama Hiam came into the living room with a black eye and rows of curlers in her head. Her coffee, water, and half-apple were waiting for her on a silver tray. Hiam wakes up before six everyday, and I never usually see her until nine. So, I didn't say anything about the black eye because I thought that maybe it was something normal, that maybe she always wakes up with a bruised eyelid and just puts make-up on it. I went out onto the balcony.
There were six gardenia flowers. Beaming, Hiam lurched up from her couch and hobbled outside and plucked them from their stems. She added them to the plate of moist flowers that she keeps next to the picture of her and Ammo Wafiq. The image sits in a silver frame. They are in a hotel lobby both in business formal wear--in glasses, looking to the right. Wafiq's hands are entwined in a beaded necklace, and he's laughing.
They must be leaving a party, early. Bidding a friend farewell.
Hiam's eyesight is so poor I wonder if she can even see this image. When we finally told her about the black eye, she couldn't see it in the mirror. I'm sure though that she's memorized the picture of her and her husband. So whether or not she can register its details in her field of vision may not matter anymore. Its presence is what counts.
Otherwise, there are very few pictures of Ammo Wafiq in the house.
The morning after the Walid Aido bombing, the entire city had been relandscaped with giant posters with the faces of him and his son, who also died in the attack. Beirut made him a ghost before he had even hit the soil. The slogans of these posters vary slightly:
Lan Ninsaa - "We will not forget"
Rijal al-3adalleh shahada' al-3adalleh - "The men of justice are the martyrs of justice"
Walid lil 3adalleh - al-3adalleh li Walid Aido - "Walid for Justice - Justice for Walid Aido."
[The English translation loses the astonishing morphological relationship between the judge's name--Walid Aido--and the word for "justice."]
Phantom-images of Aido blanket the city now, but of course they by no means dare to challenge the supremacy of images of Rafiq al-Hariri. The Hariri ghost hovers over streets, on building facades, in the lobby of my apartment building, and behind the counter at the pharmacy. The Aido and Hariri phantoms compliment the architectural terrain, battered from the civil war. With gaping holes like Swiss cheese, structures throughout Beirut bear the scars of the fifteen year civil war.
The ghosts of political leaders evoke memories of contemporary political violence while the corpsed architecture raises the history of the civil war. The result is a collage a la Rauschenberg which blurs the distinction between the two historical moments. The collage renders the past (ie the civil war) the canvas and the foreground of the present (political assassinations).
The irony is that, as far as I have perceived, the discourse in the public sphere has essentially erased the memory of the civil war. Furthermore, many of the reconstruction projects, for instance Solidere in downtown, manifest this conscious effort to cleanse communal history of the civil war. Standing in sharp contrast to the rest of the cityscape, the streets of Solidere are lined with Ottoman arches (pre-civil war aesthetic), and every facade is as smooth as a baby's ass cheek. It's like Disney World. My friend, VT, is studying the recent history of reconstruction and found that more buildings were destroyed in the Solidere project than in the fifteen years of civil war!
I can't help but thinking about the relationship between Beirut's notorious plastic surgery obsession and this reconstruction effort. Someone should look into this.
Back to the ghosts: there is, however, one man--LIVING--who occupies the same space as the phantoms: Saad al-Hariri, Rafiq's son and the leader of the Mustaqbal (Future) Movement. He is living in the post-mortem terrain and in the present tense. He is a demi-god, straddling the spheres of the living and the dead.
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