When you need a visa to visit a country, you realise you’ve strayed far from the nest. When you’re not sure what address to put on it, you realise you’ve no idea where your new nest will be. When this is partly due to the fact that addresses aren’t really a thing, you realise you’re in Lebanon. In Beirut people generally use landmarks to describe the location of a place, so when getting the visa at the airport I wrote down the instructions I was given by my friends (with whom I was staying) for my taxi driver, which was to take me to Beit Kataeb, which I assumed was the name of their building but in fact is the name of the Phalanges Party building. Essentially, I had just said that I was casually cohabiting with the party implicated in the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982. A positive start to the year.
The reason this was what I immediately thought when I found out what the building was can be put down to only having read about the Phalange in history books. Even though I was not casually cohabiting with them, I was surprised to find I was living so casually near them and even now live by a square with a massive portrait of Bachir Gemayel, whose assassination sparked the massacre in retaliation. Part of the difficulty of living in a country about which you have only read is putting that history into the context of everyday life there. You might not expect residents of a relatively recently war-torn city to be as lively and friendly as Beirutis are, but learning this says more about the people than the war.
Perhaps I know something about this already – and here goes my first mention of my ‘ethnic roots’, about which I am told I talk too much. Either I am truly annoying or my friends are xenophobes, and I have never known myself to be annoying in my life. My new catchphrase is ‘Guys they have this in Croatia/Serbia too!’ I even got excited by the sea – did you know they have one in Croatia too?
Despite the haters, there is a sense in which the initial phase of living in a new country is a series of attempts at recognition, of grasps at familiarity, and consequently repeated mention of the Balkans. My friend and I were talking about sending pictures of the university buildings to our parents and she said she strategically excluded a picture of a building lined with bullet holes, whilst I sent it to my parents with the caption ‘Feels like home’. Being a second-generation immigrant means having multiple homes and not being fully at home in any. A lot of things remind me of ‘home’ here – the bullet holes, the big families, the religiously-divided country, the flashy cars people can’t really afford, the sense that all the young people want to do is get out, the coffee. I’m waiting for someone to tell me about the government’s stance on homosexuality for me to say ‘They hate the gays in my countries too!’
Try as I might to make Beirut #relatable to myself, it is different in so many ways that I am continually discovering. More French, for one. More exciting, for another. Its differences are the reason I’m here, and, in time, perhaps it will begin to feel like another home.
