The Whispers Of Nadia Tueni and Maroun Baghdadi

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In front of Maroun Baghdadi’s lens — in his film Whispers, 45 years ago – the poet Nadia Tueni ruminated about a Lebanon in the throes of life and death. So was she. In 1983, after years of struggling with bone cancer, she finally succumbed. She was 45 years old; the state of Lebanon was 37.

In the opening scene, they’re a threesome: her delicate voice, the gentle crash of the waves, and the faint echoes of her footsteps. As she walked among the war’s carnage, her words were at once brutal and beseeching: “Beirut has become ruins, and ruins, with time, acquire beauty. But I cannot become accustomed to this… We used to say, again and again, that Beirut needed to be burned down. We talked and talked, endlessly. But now the reality is of another order. Beirut is my city — and someone destroyed it.”

Did Nadia choose Maroun for her visual requiem, or did he choose her for his? There are no clues in the public records, but it hardly matters. In the end, the prose could only be hers, and the camera’s eye his. Theirs was, in essence, a meditative duet on their beloved country’s torment.

Technically, the documentary hasn’t aged well. But in meaning, close to 50 years after its release, it has grown extraordinarily resonant and wise, even if mistaken in the glimmers of hope it chose to convey in parts. When the businessmen, industrialists, and bankers talk about their ingenuity and resilience, the effect is that of a press release. They still talk this nonsense today. But perhaps it was passably believable then, or a necessary moral boost in dire circumstances. Likely, it was also Maroun’s concession to Rafiq Hariri’s Bank Méditerranée (BankMed), which sponsored the documentary.

Poignantly, the passage of time has been much kinder to the authenticity of the film’s other characters. When the farmer and the fisherman are given the stage, the perennial yearning for the land and the sea is all there is. When Ziad Rahbani, musician and playwright, holds sway, he imparts the ugly truth, as if fulfilling the intellectual’s enduring true calling.

These juxtapositions may have gelled well in 1980; they certainly jar and shriek today.

As cruel irony would have it, on these Levantine landscapes of cruel ironies, exactly ten years after the poet’s death, the filmmaker went. At 43, he was almost her age when she passed. Baghdadi’s demise was, in its own way, even more tragic than Nadia’s: he fell to his death onto the inner bed of his building from high up on a dark night on a dark stairway with no balusters. They were two of the war’s lettered chroniclers. Fate would not permit either one of them to witness its true legacy in the supposed peace that followed in 1990.

I did not live the 15-year war. My family went into exile well before it erupted in 1975. Amman was my home. But I have spent my youth in the simmering Lebanese disquiet that ensued. Many have taken to calling this post-strife period a kind of peace. It has been, and remains, anything but.

For this reason, I watched Whispers for the first time last week. So it was with Tueni’s poetry. They read like an accompaniment to the documentary. Context to this moment: contemporary and not vaguely recalled or unconsciously imagined. It’s a habit of mine in times of acute unease to seek interior narratives that render vital and immediate what was once intimately familiar before the hours and the years did their worst.

And time has done its worst to us Lebanese; a gift to those who have been doing their worst to the country since its inception. We live through the present in a state of fugue, as if yesterday was lived by someone else; as if its traumas are not ours, its blunders are someone else’s. In Stopped Earth, Nadia evokes her own very personal story, but it should be ours as well had we had any sense in us:

I survive my own ashes,
And know from memory the future of my time

Towards the end of the documentary, she muses about the madness of this place:

Majnoun Lebnain,( mad, this Lebanon).
Maybe its madness is what sets it asunder… Maybe its madness might save it yet. This country that was condemned, still lives. This country that has turned half-empty, still lives. This country that has become walls and alleys, still lives.
Mad, this Lebanon, because it does not want to die, because it still knows how to laugh.
Majnoun, Lebnain! (my translation, from Arabic).

In 1980, the fratricide was only five years old. Israel hadn’t invaded yet. Hezbollah had not been born. The thousands who would perish during the month-long siege and bombardment of Beirut in 1982 were still alive then, and many of the city’s neighborhoods were still upright. The bloodletting between and within sects would continue for another ten years. But by 1980, Beirut, its epicenter, already had the mood, look, and feel of a wrenched realm: desolate, filthy, and ravaged in the harsh glare of the sun, gin-soaked and heedless in the kind shade of the moon; its lost youth dancing to Marcel Khalifeh’s oud in private sitting rooms and swinging to sappy love songs on AUB’s green fields.

I look at all those young faces now and recognize mine in them. This was my generation. Nadia watches them with a smile suggesting hope and faith. I recognize my face in her today as I look upon this new generation of youth, and wonder if my failure will be theirs as well.

I never met Nadia. Force of war and distance. But the close family friendship meant that I knew things: the devastation wrought from an eight-year old daughter’s loss to a sinister disease; the scars it left in those who survived her; the redemption found in the birth of a son; the unbearable delicacy and indomitable strength of this woman that, like an emotional braid, interweave.

I would have liked to say that, in so many ways, this is also Lebanon’s story. Sadly, I am not able to.

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On Another Note

First, an excerpt from Tueni’s My Country:

My country, costumed in uniforms and mere gestures,
condemns a flower for being a flower.
My country has a look of holiness and doubt.
My country is where men die when they have time for it.
My country’s law is a toy soldier.
My country begs me, “Take me seriously,”
then turns and goes berserk as a wounded pigeon.
My country is difficult as a long poem.
My country is softer than a lover’s shoulder.
My country’s like a child’s storybook
where the theme awakens Sleeping Beauty.

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Equator, a new intellectual magazine, has just launched. Pankaj Mishra is one of its leading voices. That alone was enough for me to subscribe. Another compelling reason was Hisham Matar’s “Pity and Fear,” a masterful essay on Titian’s seven renderings of the myth of Actaeon and Diana, and what they echo in the more recent American horrors and humiliations in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and Israeli genocide in Gaza:

“Everything is closed… We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” These words, spoken in 2023 by Israel’s then minister of defense, Yoav Gallant, were meant to justify his country’s actions in Gaza, as well as explain the terms on which his troops would proceed. Like Diana and Apollo, they see cruelty as ridicule and transformation. And like the Americans in Abu Ghraib, their appetite is unquenchable. It is unquenchable because they have misunderstood their situation.

Read the full essay here.

Amal Ghandour’s biweekly column, “This Arab Life,” appears in The Markaz Review every second 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.