The lunch rendezvous had barely begun when Nour Al Jalbout started to sob. Seated opposite, Dalal Mawad could do little to contain her own tears, the plates of food all but untouched between them.
Looking back on that summer afternoon in a Parisian cafe, Mawad thinks fellow diners observing their encounter must have concluded that the two women were united in grief for a loved one.
In a way, any such assumption was correct, although it was not a particular person being mourned but rather their homeland, Lebanon, that each had been compelled to leave – Al Jalbout for Boston and Mawad for the French capital.
Neither could stay any longer after August 4, 2020 when a large amount of ammonium nitrate stored at the Port of Beirut exploded, causing hundreds of deaths, thousands of injuries and billions of dollars in property damage.
Each day before then had been lived with the expectation that something bad was about to happen, although, over their neglected meals, Al Jalbout made clear: “Not of this magnitude.”
The extent of the suffering that the Beirut blast unleashed has been well documented but Mawad, wanting to tell it differently, approached Al Jalbout and more than 20 other women whose lives were affected to represent “the marginalised actors of my country”.
A collective memoir
“This is an attempt by me to have a collective memoir about Lebanon’s recent and modern history told through their lens,” the award-winning journalist and author of All She Lost: The Explosion in Lebanon, The Collapse of a Nation and the Women Who Survive, tells The National.
“History repeats itself, and women go through these cycles of violence again and again, from my grandmother to my daughter. The only way I felt I could protect my daughter was to break these cycles of violence, get out of Lebanon and rebuild my life elsewhere.”
Multiple investigations by human rights groups and Lebanese media have concluded that the explosion was caused by criminal manoeuvring among the ruling political establishment. So far, though, there has been no trial and no final count of the dead, believed to be as many as 250.
Mawad has vowed to return only once those responsible are held accountable for their loss. She knows this might mean never.
Writing the book enabled her to process the trauma she felt about the devastation wrought three years ago and put aside some of the guilt over choosing the exit door rather than continue the “interminable battle”.
In return, she hopes that lending an ear might have helped the women who shared their stories by giving them a safe place to tell their ordeals in detail.
But there is no doubt that the journey was not an easy one for any of those involved.
Mawad, 37, suffered severe insomnia after listening to testimony after heart-rending testimony, and sought cognitive behavioural therapy as a means to avoid having to resort to prescription drugs.
“What was hard was sitting alone with these women for many hours and feeling helpless. The stories live with you. It’s not over,” says Mawad, who stays in contact with many of the interviewees.
One of those is Al Jalbout, who was working as an emergency physician at the American University of Beirut Medical Centre when the ceiling fell in, the fire alarms erupted, and people began to arrive “with blood on their face, some carrying their eyes, shrapnel in their head, screams, chaos”.
She struggles with the guilt of surviving, of perhaps not doing enough to save those who didn’t make it, and is constantly haunted by their faces day and night.
As Al Jalbout puts it, she left a dysfunctional relationship, “someone that I adored but abused me. I love Beirut. I think about it every day … but I needed to leave to heal. A piece of me is broken”.
The force of All She Lost lies in its vivid depiction of how the blast highlighted systematic inequities foisted upon women by men in positions of authority, including, in some cases, their husbands.
Most who feature are Lebanese, but there are also voices of victims from elsewhere, such as Ethiopia and Australia.
Mona Misto, a Syrian citizen, speaks of still pouring a cup of coffee every morning for her daughter, Rawan, a model who died in the cafe she worked at near the port in the bustling Mar Mikhael neighbourhood.
“What hurts me most is that with everything I have been through, I also ended up losing my daughter,” Misto says.
She finally obtained a divorce from her violent, alcoholic husband after Rawan’s death, but a Muslim court ruled that 25 per cent of the responsibility for his abusive behaviour must be attributed to her.
Mawad put Misto into contact with a local NGO to legally defend herself against her former husband being awarded two thirds of the compensation money given to victims of the blast because he is a man. “This kind of discrimination is what pushed me to write a women-led narrative,” Mawad says.
There is Liliane Chaito, whose infant son was taken by her husband while she lay on a hospital bed in a coma, Karlen Karam, who needs a court order to receive reparation money for her children after losing her husband, brother and cousin, and Siham Takian, wounded in the blast but unable to afford medication since the economic collapse.
Throughout all the conversations, there were frequent lapses into tears and hugging as well as an awkwardness that occasionally crept in when some were completely overwhelmed by the pain of speaking.
But Mawad’s own experiences enabled her to empathise with the women she writes about, making the book a deeply personal account of recent history.
The traumatic past of her own family is a recurrent theme and sets the tone from the outset in the dedication:
“For my late grandmother Dalal who suffered in silence.
“For my daughter Yasma, may you find the peace we never had.”
Yasma was at a birthday party with her grandmother on the outskirts of the city when what she refers to as the “big boom” occurred.
They 'can't fix all of it'
During a drive to Beirut airport last summer, she feared again seeing the houses that were destroyed.
“It’s hard to fix Lebanon,” Yasma says in one of the final chapters. “The fixers of the house are trying their best to fix the houses. The problem is they can’t fix all of it. It’s too messed up and it takes a lot of days to fix.”
Yasma might have been only six but “she got it all”, her mother writes.
Ibrahim Maalouf, Mawad’s husband, was among the fixers. He is still in Beirut where his glass-processing factory donated supplies to a local NGO to help replace the facades and windows of the most vulnerable families in the immediate aftermath. For many weeks, Mawad recollects, the sound of shattered glass “became the soundtrack to our lives”.
She compares her grandmother, who “died a bitter woman, denied the right to live, to love, to seek justice, to heal and start anew”, with the women interviewed.
Her grandfather, a pharmacist, was shot in a cycle of revenge killings in 1957 in the northern city of Zgharta. She grew up watching her grandmother unable to grieve properly in the knowledge that those who killed her husband would never be brought to justice.
The massacre in which he died is, Mawad says, “considered by many as a rehearsal for the wider divisions that would trigger Lebanon’s civil wars” a year later.
“People tell me I’m very pessimistic about Lebanon,” she says. “But it’s because I love Lebanon so much. What’s the point of lying?” she adds, citing oft-circulated images on social media during the summer tourist season.
In these photos and videos, the country’s beaches, bars and restaurants, the preserve of a select clientele with foreign cash to spend, hide the bleak despair in which the rest of the country lives.
“The Lebanese are not resilient,” Mawad says. “They’re surviving and adapting to something really bad. They’ve reached rock bottom and haven’t found a way to change anything. This is definitely the worst period Lebanon has known in its history.”
The situation is unlikely to get better any time soon, but Mawad is determined to fight, even if from a distance, against a foe she describes as “collective amnesia”.
Many other women in Lebanon have led such fights, including Wadad Halawani, who continues to demand answers about the fate of the disappeared in Lebanon's bloody 1975-1990 civil war.
Forty years later, the timeline of events in the country's school history books stops after independence in 1943.
Women like Halawani have, Mawad says, played a significant role in the Lebanese narrative, but "not a lot of people know that, because history is never written by women".
She wonders for a moment whether the mass fading of memories is a coping mechanism, but immediately goes on to talk about her great sadness at the impending third anniversary of the catastrophic port explosion.
“The blast didn’t happen a long time ago,” she says, “and you feel like people have already forgotten.”
'All She Lost: The Explosion in Lebanon, The Collapse of a Nation and The Women Who Survive', by Dalal Mawad (Bloomsbury Continuum), is available now. A portion of the proceeds will go towards those who shared their stories
