The Arabic we speak in Lebanon is not entirely different to the one we write, yet it’s possible to speak the dialect and never write a formally correct sentence. A young Lebanese woman sitting at the table next to mine in a sleepy café in Ras Beirut was explaining this to her friend, a foreigner with an American accent, who said it was difficult to read Arabic news articles despite knowing the Lebanese-Arabic dialect, which, in Beirut, incorporates Shami Arabic with English and French words and expressions.
“Just look at the English reports – they’re the same,” she said.
It was late May, and Israel’s escalated war on Lebanon had been raging since March. I sat in that café between emergency volunteer shifts and argued silently with those two women in my mind as I reflected on the many complications of language and meaning. Can a translation ever be the same? Generations of Lebanese are still processing the layered tragedies that have befallen us over the last decades. We still lack the words to describe these experiences – so how could this possibly be done in a language other than our own?
The madness of being Lebanese is the learned cognitive dissonance; the agility with which we navigate from near-death experiences and devastating grief, to drinking coffee at a quiet garden café or eating كنافة by the beach when there’s a break in the airstrikes.
Kanafeh is a traditional, sweet and savoury cheese pastry with orange blossom or rose water syrupWe’ve learned to assert ourselves against war for our own survival, by seeking out joy and beauty wherever we can. This is vital to our steadfastness. The core tenet of cultural resistance, after all, is existence.
When language fails to articulate these assertions, my generation of university-educated Lebanese will still draw on an inherited codex of phrases, rituals, and denials from our parents and grandparents, who themselves lived through years of civil war and foreign invasions. We know to sleep with the windows open so the pressure from sonic booms won’t shatter the glass at night. We know which roads are safe to take during the airstrikes. We know how to forage for medicinal herbs, and how to brew them into tea to comfort the bereaved. Checking on your neighbours is vital in wartime – we send WhatsApp voice notes even when there are no words for the despair and anxiety we feel. شو بدنا نعمل What can you do? Is a rhetorical question wearily trod out between us in the face of daily tests on nerves and endurance. This is often followed by a phrase more telling of ancestral character that ranks generosity as the highest virtue: طمنّي عنك which roughly translates as, let me know how you are doing so I don’t worry. The fundamental interpretation being: I care about you, I want you safe.
What makes the vast, multi-generational Lebanese diaspora return every summer is an inheritance beyond symbol or sound – it’s a cultural heritage, an identity and a connection to the land that can only partially be translated into words. It is not so much a country as the promise of a country; something about to begin again.
Between our shifts in Beirut, a friend tried to convince me that this latest war is the worst in generations.
“This time there’s more division and people are blaming each other … It will take a longer time for things to return to normal, for our lives to start again,” he said.
He’s right. Social, political and religious divisions have further destabilised the country, and changed how we speak and write about our grief, the damage done, and the way forward. People are increasingly turning on their neughbours rather than blaming those who are responsible for our suffering. It feels like the possibilities of resistance and revolution become less and less everyday. I will leave, and he will leave, in search of work opportunities and peace elsewhere. We’ll get used to rarely speaking our dialect in western countries, as we try to process not just what we have been through, but the impunity of those who murder and destroy. Losing our futures in our homeland is further exacerbated by the dehumanisation we face elsewhere.
We need another language for existing in this chasm. Maybe when – if – we can “return to normal”, we will reset letters and words to zeroes, starting over again.
