Remind me to forget12/14/2023 ![]() Some afternoons, my mother and I sit outside on our small balcony to look at the streets of Tripoli, which had been home to some of the loudest and most resounding protests during the revolution. ![]() The weather is slowly turning into that familiar Mediterranean summer breeze: a silky scarf you want to wrap around your neck. I have barely stepped outside of the house in over a month. Since the lockdown, I wake up every morning to the sound of birds. We wanted to kill the virus - the mafia ruling elite and their engineered sectarian and economic system - and we believed we could. Like most revolutions and uprisings, it is hard to pinpoint the exact reason why it broke out right when it did - of course, there are always compounding reasons - but what remains clear, until now, is that on October 17, something broke. Billboards were broken, tires lit, chants created. It was the night of October 17, when we rushed to Martyrs’ Square, the site of the capital’s intermittent and often short-lived protests. Before we realized the ramifications of the virus on our lives, we would turn to each other - terrified, amused, self-indulging - and ask, what now? No, really, how much more can this country withstand? For too long, Lebanon has been a whirlwind and its people, like debris, have been picked up by it and thrown into the spinning funnel.īut six months ago, it felt like something was changing. Two months ago, the first coronavirus patient in Lebanon was announced. I write this and I tread, clumsily, in between economic collapse and revolution and pandemic. As though we’ve waded halfway through a swamp only to realize the swamp is an entire continent. This year, Ramadan has arrived with a sticky dread. ![]() People in Tripoli are either on the streets, chanting that hunger will kill them before coronavirus does, or locked up at home with their mounting anxieties. In my brother’s scrunched up face and tired eyes, glued to screens as he follows the news of the protests. ![]() I see it right in front of me - in my mother’s face, as she tries to create some semblance of Ramadan by turning on old white plastic lamps. A night where families in Tripoli would have otherwise gathered at mosques to pray, gone to supermarkets to stack up on dates and almonds, visited neighbors and discussed what desserts they would prepare for the first iftar. I write this the night before Ramadan, from my home in Tripoli. ![]()
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