Beirut..
(don't forget the Amnesty International global candlelight vigil on Monday, click here)
(pic)

She said, “And you know what bothers me too? How they pronounce our names on those foreign news channels.. My village and your village, and all the places where my father used to take us. Just like that. Like a stranger who brings you news of an old lover and tells you he married or died or killed himself, not noticing the pain screaming in you eyes. It hurts how our names lose their meaning when they say them…”

Eve’s words give me hope and lately give me something I love to do. I love to translate what she writes and bring it to you. I love to transfer her text to a document that I hide safely and read over and over. It feels like finally finding the song that sings your emotions, the poem that articulates your pain, the painting that expresses your nostalgia with effortless lines. Reading about our identity and our memory in her words feels like finding a sense in something you felt but never made sense. She loves Beirut the way I do. The way we all do. Reading about Beirut in her words made me feel like when you have a secret love, and you want to share it with the world. Like when you run home and hide in your room, even when the house is empty, and wait for a phone call that still makes you heart beat. It is so private yet we all feel it. We all have a very intimate relationship with Beirut. We all want to hide and lock it tight in our memory. We’re all afraid to lose it and we all want to scream it to the world.

Here's another piece translated from Eve,

In Beirut

In Beirut,
there’s something, like that, just like that…
Stuck in the air, printed on the walls of small roads,
Dripping little by little from the trees right after the rain…

There’s something that makes my foreign friend drive recklessly and ignore the traffic lights. Something that makes him tell me about some of our places. Places that I haven’t had the chance to see and colors I couldn’t understand. He starts understanding the difference between mjadarra and mdardara, he starts talking politics, he loves Fairuz even when he doesn’t understand a word she says. He starts building a house in the mountain, where he would spend the rest of the summer. And sometimes, so many times, he would get carried away and say: “Us Lebanese will never learn…”

In Beirut,
there’s something that makes him love her more than i do…
There’s always a shortcut road that takes you to the sea. There are always cameras taking pictures, fearing that the eye would forget, fearing that the heart would drift…
There’s a road built just to carry your dream, while you walk, not knowing where.
There’s something in people’s eyes, like a question, like the old buildings, like an escaping look, like the ruin.

In Beirut,
there’s a secret that you don’t know until you’re at the airport with your bag… until you’re estranged stranded in young cities, one after the other, forever longing to your crude city, the city where “the difference between the darkness and the light is one word”… And you miss the familiar chaos where the cars park on sidewalks and people strut in the middle of the streets… And forever, for as much as you hide away, you’re haunted with the fever of Beirut, and you know the illness is part of you and you know that she will never leave you.

In Beirut,
There’s something bigger than me, and bigger than you. There’s an April that never ends. And a place, a place that, whenever you lose yourself, whenever you fall, whenever you hurt, you come back whispering the letters of its name once anew, in Beirut.

In Beirut, there’s something, like that, just like that…
Stuck in the air, printed on the walls of small roads,
Dripping from the trees after the rain…


Beirut though should only be praised and whispered to in the language of the heart so here’s Eve’s Beirut:
http://lebanonheartblogs.blogspot.com/2006/08/bi-bayrout.html

And so many people around the world love Lebanon as much as we do
and more small examples here...