I was there during the Beirut port blast - and my life has never been the same since

On August 4, 2020, I thought I was going to die. I’ve had some near misses in my life – high-speed car crashes, terrorist attacks – but I never thought I would actually die. There was something about the sound of the blast that day and how it knocked my mother and I off our chairs on a balcony in the hills overlooking the Beirut port. The way it cracked through the air, it felt final. It felt like something you don’t survive.

In the hours after the blast, we couldn't locate my father. He had been in the offices of An-Nahar by the port that day. I sent frantic voice notes to my wife in London. I avoided messaging my sister in Paris, to not bring her into what was becoming a nightmare. Part of me was sure I’d never see any of them again. In the frantic hours after the blast, as we tried to understand what was happening, all everyone could think of was that another blast would come to annihilate the rest of us.

The day before had been a happy one. My business partners and I had just moved into the gleaming new offices of our production company. It was an upgrade from working on our dinner tables and out the back of cafes. Now we had glass partitions and iMacs. A fresh start. We’d arrived.

At about 5pm, we were told the generators would be shutting off. There would be no air conditioning for the rest of the day. Reluctantly, we packed up and left early. An hour later, the office was gone. I never went back to collect the debris.

During one of my sleepless nights after the blast, I measured how far that office was from the site of the explosion. It was 900 metres away. The blast damaged buildings 10km away.

I bumped into our landlord for the office at a wedding in Lebanon recently. He told me how the glass exploded into shards and stabbed every wall. How a security guard on duty in the building had been in a coma for weeks after the blast. If we’d stayed, we’d all have been killed or maimed. I still don’t understand how we weren’t.

For weeks afterward, I was wrecked. I cried constantly. Friends would message just to check if we were alive. Not metaphorically. They would text those exact words. “Do you think we’re alive?” It felt like I shouldn’t be. Like none of us should.

Beirut felt like a city of the walking dead. For weeks, I rewatched the footage of bloodied survivors walking through the streets I call home. I would spot friends and then I would be too worried to call and ask about them, guilty that I hadn't thought about them earlier. But who do you call when your entire city has blown up? Where do you start?

Trauma is a strange thing. You think it’s in the past, but it lives in your body. I often tell myself enough time has passed. That August 4, 2020 doesn’t haunt me anymore. Then someone brings it up and I start to remember it in my bones.

Weeks after the blast, my father told me that after the explosion, he decided to just stay seated where he was in the building as the roof tiles collapsed around him. He was just awaiting his fate. “Where is an 80-year-old man going to run to?” he said. Then I saw security footage of that moment circulate on social media. I saw my father accept his fate. But then I saw the young journalists who ushered him out. They would not let him accept it.

That is the story of that day to me: the helping hands that emerged from everywhere to carry those who couldn’t carry themselves. The NGOs that popped up to fix the doors and windows of those who had been left penniless by Lebanon’s overlapping crises. The people who set up food banks and offered shelter.

Today in Lebanon, I see a country emerging from what happened that day. One of the areas most affected in Gemmayzeh is thriving again. My fears that developers would come in and destroy its heritage in a land grab have proven unfounded. I hear stories of the architects who stepped in to ensure it was restored just as it was.

But I feel guilt five years on, dwelling on that day. With the continuing genocide of Palestinians a few hundred kilometres away, with the destruction wrought on Lebanon by Israel in the past two years, with the sectarian violence in Syria. The list goes on. It feels strange to carry August 4 as my trauma. I lost nothing that day. After all was said and done, I was lucky that day.

But it is trauma, laced now with shame because others lost everything: 220 people died, thousands were maimed, the city was broken.

We have a Lebanese habit of not really reflecting. A lot of our trauma is not post-traumatic, because we are still in the phase of being traumatised. It is tempting to say “that was five years ago and many horrible things have happened to us and others around us in that time". All of that is true. But avoiding trauma – and the systemic dysfunction that led to it – is not a solution.

I say I lost nothing that day, but that’s not entirely true. Explosions from war or assassinations felt horrible but legible. I could assign some reasoning to the criminal intent behind those acts. This blast felt worse – senseless, rooted in neglect. It felt like the very structure of the country had betrayed us.

I’ve never looked at life the same way since that day. It broke something in me. Since then, I’ve only returned to Lebanon for funerals and family emergencies. Like a reluctant relative, doing the bare minimum. I know many people who feel the same – who left that day and never looked back.

But now that my relationship with the country is on the mend, I realise that it wasn't what I was turning my back on. I was trying to run away from what that day made me feel. The blast shattered any illusion that I might control my life. It made me realise how close we are to everything ending every minute of every day.

And yet I feel guilty that I sometimes forget that day. Guilty that I try to forget the people who died - because remembering them means confronting the fact that I didn’t.

For years, my relationship to Lebanon was defined by all the trauma I hadn’t lived. I moved there in 1997, after the civil war. During the decade I spent there on and off, people often dismissed my opinions with: “You didn’t live through the worst of it." Not sharing the collective trauma made me less Lebanese.

In a perverse way, an entire city shared a collective, instant trauma that day. We owe it to those who lost everything that day to mark it, to memorialise it. The blast – and the lack of accountability that followed it – were caused by chronic neglect and corruption. If we use our trauma for anything, it should be to ensure that something like this never happens again and that we can look forward to a day where we bond a nation through our joy rather than our pain.

Beirut blast: How warnings were ignored before 2020 explosion

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