The Meaning of a Party in the Midst of War

In the summer of 1980, I visited Beirut for a month. It was June; I had just finished my freshman year of college, the civil war was five years old, and Lebanon had settled into the absurd rhythms of living and dying in fragments. I was in West Beirut, a section of the capital whose marred face wore the cruelties of Lebanon’s warring children.

The first night, a friend took me to a dinner party. As we were enjoying ourselves on the balcony, gunfire erupted in the neighborhood. I panicked and prepared to rush inside, but the other guests very quickly reassured me that it was two streets up. “Nothing to do with us.” And so it was for me for the rest of that month. A stranger to the city where I was born, I followed my friends’ patterns. I stuck to my turf, sunbathed, went to dinners, danced at the Beachcomber and Mikano, navigating daytime clashes and anticipating violent nights. When I left, the thought that outlived all the fond memories was that this was a mad, mad country.

Lebanon has become famous for this heedless mindset. Some admire it as resilience, a people’s will to seduce normalcy out of a chronically abnormal life. Others understand it as the inevitable callousness of human beings long conditioned to match their empathy to the size of their universe. Still others explain it as nothing more than reflexive pragmatism on the part of perennially vulnerable human beings.

Our own leaders bear much of the blame for actively sealing us into our separate realms. Hassan Nassrallah himself, Hezbollah’s martyred secretary general, lent support to this detachment we feel from one another. In the early months of the 2023 war with Israel, he instructed those of us living outside the south to go on with the business of life while he prosecuted the conflict within it. At the time I thought it a tragic statement about the terminally sacrificial role of southerners as the rest of us obliged with our usual shrug.

But a recent pricey AUB post-graduation party at Sporting, a beach club on Beirut’s corniche, made many of us wonder whether we have finally lost all sense of connection to our fellow Lebanese. It made us wonder what life lessons our best students at elite universities draw from living in such close proximity to pain and heartbreak. It made me wonder whether, in this apparent thoughtlessness, the younger generation was actually manifesting the perverse implications of Nassrallah’s counsel.

In the midst of a ruinous war on our south and brutal assaults on our southern suburbs that have atomized whole communities, partygoers raved till the early rays of the sun. This revelry took place within striking distance of the hundreds of thousands who were displaced.

What has happened to us?

I don’t know if the beach club that night was the sum of the better part of Lebanon. The very notion that such a tiny space packed with a crowd of graduating youngsters could betray the mood of a country itself functioning in pieces is ridiculous — or it may be the point. The party became controversial because it is part of the raging Lebanese discourse over the war. For an exhausted people that can neither appeal uniformly to their leaders nor find succor in a nurturing state, they have all the discretion they need over their obligations and commitments in times of war. Especially this war, into which many of us feel we were dragged by Hezbollah — rightly or wrongly.

I cannot attribute political agency, in the traditional sense, to the young grads’ act of partying. But it is an expression of agency all the same.  It could be a total rejection of any responsibility towards anyone outside the self. It could be a declaration of fact: we expect nothing from this place and, in turn, offer it nothing.

Or we might be reading too deeply into an event that was little more than an opportunity to pretend, if only for a few hours, that all is well.

On Another Note

I was planning to share a piece that took the reader to a place, a topic, a world away from the Middle East. But then I came upon this article in New Lines magazine on the ordeal of the Abassi family, whose tragic story is stitched into Syria itself under the monstrous regime of Bashar al-Assad. I share it because we owe it to the six Abassi siblings, God rest their souls.

For you, The Last Traces of a Family the Assad Regime Marked for Destruction.

Amal Ghandour’s biweekly column, “This Arab Life,” appears in The Markaz Review every other Friday, as well as in her Substack, and is syndicated in Arabic in Al Quds Al Arabi.

Opinions published in The Markaz Review reflect the perspective of their authors and do not necessarily represent TMR.