Between Beirut, Gaza and Glangwili
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I was offered liquid morphine by a windswept nurse at Glangwili General Hospital. ‘You’re not having a stroke,’ she reassured me. The left side of my mouth flickered in a failed attempt to return a smile. I nodded and winced instead.
‘Are you alone?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I slurred. ‘I have you and the doctor.’
The moustached doctor pressed his lips together. I shrugged off an inconvenient ache for Beirut. There was a period in the mid-nineties when all Lebanese men of a certain generation seemed to sport a thick black moustache. He handed me a tissue paper and explained that my tear (Epiphora) and peripheral facial paralysis (Bell’s Palsy) were likely due to a viral infection of the ear. I was comfortable in the knowledge that my elaborate Arab hand gestures would compensate for the temporary shortcomings in my facial muscles. I had inherited my father’s propensity for knocking over half-empty glasses in heated conversations across Lebanese restaurants without breaking stride.
In the preceding months, as the latest Israeli assault on Lebanon unfolded, I would check on family after every other airstrike in between seminars, workshops and meetings with students. My parents occasionally pre-empted this by sending a brief text to indicate that they were fine. I knew then that it had been a close one or a loud one – or in any case that they had thought of me and my sister in that first instance when they were not quite sure how close it was or how imminent the next one was going to be.
From a privileged, guilt-ridden and distant vantage point of Aberystwyth in Wales, I squinted to see the onslaught against Lebanon and the genocide in Gaza. I prepared my lectures, met with my students, conversed with my colleagues in the hallways and in meeting rooms about assignment briefs and module moderation and student satisfaction as if children were not being slaughtered in their thousands, as if all twelve universities in Gaza had not been reduced to rubble. In my time as a student and then lecturer and guest speaker, I have been associated in some capacity with numerous western academic institutions. When a brief clip showing the last of the universities in Gaza being flattened was widely circulated online more than a year ago, I anticipated having to scroll through a slew of morally vacuous statements released by the erstwhile pillars of western culture. Even said statements, however, riddled as they usually are with disingenuous obfuscation and false equivalence, were not forthcoming. Calling out, let alone divesting from, scholasticide, ecocide, genocide, starvation and ethnic cleansing was deemed, for the most part, a step too far. Months of trampling upon students’ right to protest and civil liberties – or worse, outright silence – would follow, buoyed by the Trump administration’s punitive measures against both student activists and universities themselves. Sitting opposite one fastidious colleague on a late Tuesday afternoon, I considered asking him whether he would not mind printing out his comprehensive four-page module moderation form, stapling the document, rolling it tightly and shoving it all the way up into the second stage of his psychosexual development. I did not. And my thoughts drifted to my former colleagues in Lebanon who were doing the exact same thing I was, except they could hear the airstrikes and smell the sulphur.
For two decades, I had watched as the last of my school friends left Lebanon behind. There was a litany of reasons: the series of assassinations in the noughties, the July War of 2006, the internal armed conflict of 2008, the Beirut port explosion, the hyperinflation and collapse of the local currency, a better education, better job, better prospects, better life. The final one to depart phoned me up to inquire about the port explosion of 2020 in the immediate aftermath. I was still living in Beirut then. He wanted to know whether the explosion was like any of the ones resulting from the car bombs or Israeli airstrikes a decade or so prior. I let out a whistle and offered little else in response. Instead, we reminisced about the time a car bomb assassination attempt took place a couple of kilometres away from my parent’s flat: how we’d tossed our philosophy textbooks to the side and leapt over the dining room table and fell flat onto our stomachs against the cold, hard ceramic floor tiles. As my mother burst into the living room screaming for us to ‘get down boys’, he briefly peeled his cheek from the ceramic tiles to suggest that he did not think we could get any lower.
He had latterly developed the habit of gritting his teeth before his laugh reached a natural end, even as it fought its way out of his nostrils. The air slipped through his dental gaps and into the phone receiver. A year later I too had left Lebanon.
I lurched upright in my bed at Glangwili. Two clenched fists – my own – hovered in front of my face. An IV tube dangled from my left forearm. In my feverish liminal state, I conjured up images of Shaban al-Dalou: the Palestinian teenager who had burned alive while still connected to an IV drip as a result of an Israeli airstrike on Al-Aqsa hospital, almost a year ago today. Shaban was a student at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. He had applied to universities in the UK with the intent of furthering his education abroad.
‘Don’t startle yourself,’ whispered the nurse, painkillers in hand.
One lesson of the Nakba, passed down to me by my Palestinian grandfather, was to do with the enduring importance of education and dignity. Both were seen as a lifeline for those who had known unfathomable loss. During a recent meeting in which a supervisee explained her longstanding difficulties with structuring an introduction, my phone flashed with the news that Israel had bombed an area in Beirut less than a kilometre away from my parent’s flat. This was promptly followed by a message from my parents. They were fine and wanted to know how my day was going.
I was, in that moment, the thirty-four-year-old lecturer discussing the craft of writing with a young British student in my office at Aberystwyth University on Penglais hill. I was, also, the fifteen-year-old boy in his parent’s bathroom on the sixth floor of an old building in Beirut sheltering from Israeli airstrikes of 2006. In his ‘Reflections on Exile’, Edward Said once famously described a somewhat similar experience as being ‘contrapuntal’ in that ‘the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together’ and ‘habits of life, expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment.’ The temporal and spatial distance which had formed between my homeland and myself now began to collapse. Even the linguistic distance seemed to crumble with Arabic intonation and syntax finding their way into my increasingly laboured English.
In my subpar attempts to reassure my monolingual teen student that her anxiety about that introduction was ‘perfectly normal’, I inadvertently settled on the Arabic ‘baseeta’ and interrupted this with the aforementioned English equivalent. The classically elastic nature of the Arabic word had imposed itself, the manner in which the medial syllable could be stretched for decades and snap back into shape with the sharp finality of the ultimate syllable. Code-switching is not unusual for a bilingual speaker. On this occasion, I heard the Arabic bleed, uninvited, into the English from afar.
When the moustached Glangwili doctor instructed me to puff my cheeks out, I failed to hold the air in my mouth. When he instructed me to whistle, I could not purse my lips, nor could I voluntarily shut my left eye or blink. It seemed fitting then to speak unintelligible words out of the corner of my mouth as if in another language, to raise a single eyebrow and not wish to imply scepticism, to smile a half smile and mean it to be full, to be subject to the whims of a temperamentally wet eye pregnant with the tears of others.
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A. Naji Bakhti is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer. His novel, Between Beirut and the Moon, was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. His work has appeared in the Guardian, New Statesman and Kenyon Review. He is a lecturer in creative writing at Aberystwyth University.
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