April 2025: The Folly of Flowers
Can the gifts of Spring be a balm for all *this*?
I went to Fleurs du Liban with a friend this weekend. After we were done collecting flowers and playing with kittens, we headed back to her Beiruti balcony for banana bread, fruit, and coffee. Her new neighbors, who are also friends of ours, joined in for the slow Sunday. The previous one was spent on my parents’ terrace where they hosted a family barbecue for Eid el Fitr. Spring makes me miss having an outdoor space that’s still inside the house (I don’t have a balcony). I also miss having neighbors as friends/friends as neighbors.
My flower haul was small: half a dozen white roses and two packs of poppies that were still dormant in their fuzzy shells, save for two yellow stems. When I’d be asleep or out of the house, I’d hide them behind closed doors because they’re toxic to my fluffy roommate. She seems uninterested in them when I’m around but I won’t fall for that act.
Tuesday morning, when I went to move them back into my line of sight, I found that four had dropped their husks to reveal their colors: soft pink and bright vermilion. A few more made their gradual and incredibly beautiful debuts by the hour. Even though I saw opened versions of these flowers at the warehouse when I bought them, seeing them emerge one by one as singular bursts of suspended silk was making me ridiculously happy??
I’ve got avocado pits in water and they have finally cracked open. I have a little tree emerging! The last time I grew baby avocado trees was during the pandemic. They didn’t make it through the summer though.
This beauty and growth feel contradictory to what is happening around me. In Lebanon, Israel has killed over 100 people since the “ceasefire”, be it due to airstrikes, gunfire, or drones. There were two strikes in Beirut in less than a week. The viral videos of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of and mass murder in Gaza are worse every time I go online and they are punctuated by White Lotus memes.
Shouldn’t I be (re)packing my emergency grab bag instead of watering plants and flowers? Why did I unpack to begin with?
When the Israelis threatened to bomb Beirut on the Friday afternoon just before Eid, my first thought was, I can’t believe this is going to start again and I spent the last 4 months being angry about how we’re alive instead of just living. Why didn’t I take advantage of the calm?
And then I got angry again because what was I feeling bad about? Not embracing delusion during the period when they were still killing people outside of Beirut?
I turned push notifications back on for the deathwatch beetle’s Twitter account a month ago. They’re bombing all of us but when it tweet about Gaza or Syria, I hate that I feel relief because it’s not about Lebanon. I hate that they are turning me into this, that they are letting me exhale normally when the target is someone else’s neighborhood, that they are slowly lowering my threshold for what constitutes as “living,” that they are dictating what I should be grateful for.
We haven’t been going to the South. It is “accessible,” in that the roads are open and you can go but if you are shot/maimed/killed, your name won’t even be mentioned in a headline. You’ll just be dead. The Israelis have made us afraid to visit rubble and we are not allowed to think about building a future yet.
I was working on a proposal to participate in an upcoming exhibition (🧿). The call asked for concepts that revolve around the paradoxical qualities of fire. I obviously thought of our village, smoked and smothered in white phosphorus shells, but when I told my sister about it, she said, Kfarkila again?
Maybe it’s not sitting with her because she didn’t see it that day in February.
I’m participating in a film workshop. I told the instructor that I’ve been wanting to produce a new video but I’ve been stuck since the escalation of the war in September. I want to make a video about my return to our village but I don’t know what I’m trying to say. But also, Kfarkila again?
The latest two essays I’ve submitted to print magazines are also about Kfarkila, one directly (about my grandparents’ house) and the other indirectly (through food).
I went on Pinterest for inspiration and found this authorless (might be JM Storm?) quote: “Sometimes, we don’t want to heal because the pain is the last link we have to what we’ve lost.”
In this case, I feel that line’s only partially true. I want to preserve the memory of something that has been lost and doing so is like stuffing pain into a box stashed under my bed. I don’t think healing is the absence of pain. I think it’s when you learn how to sit with your pain. You let it bloom.
AT LEAST 10 LITTLE LINKS
“How did it become acceptable for extermination warnings to be casually posted on a social media platform–which not everyone has access to—and considered a form of “civility” in war?” asks Michelle Eid in “The Occupation of Feeling: Grief, Numbness, and the War That Lingers Within”
Drawing inspiration from the Camino de Santiago, Caminos Lebanon is coming soon.
“Inside the Narrative War: Mohammed el-Kurd’s ‘Plea Against Pleas’” from Tracy J. Jawad for The Public Source
I watched Cilama solo at Metropolis last night. If you get a chance to see it, please do. Next up is Marcedes, also by Hady Zaccak, which is on Aflamuna till the 23rd.
Watching Adolescence exacerbated my existing and constant worry that my sweet nephew will grow up to be an asshole or worse. Is that a normal fear?
Speaking of kids and tech, “Is This The Middle East? explores the violent Orientalism of video games” from Dazed
NYT’s Eric Asimov discusses the impact of tariffs on the U.S. wine market in “For Wine, Tariffs Mean Fear, Uncertainty and Higher Prices”. Note: At 30%, South Africa is the highest tariffed of all wine-producing countries. Lebanon’s wines will be subjected to 10%.
- asks, “how on earth are we going to hold onto who we are?” while in Cairo for Eid. It’s the same question I ask myself when thinking about my family and our South.
“What We Worry About is Not Death, It’s Vulnerability” from
tackles what we think about when we worry about aging without children, a thought I have pretty frequently as my parents age and my sisters become more wrapped up in their partnerships. Related: “101 ways to make and maintain friendships” by , “The New Singlehood Stigma“ from The AtlanticIn the Q1 Bulletin, I mentioned that Chateau Marsyas opened a new tasting room in Gemmayzeh. They recently announced the opening hours and it seems it will operate as more of a boutique as they close early (5pm on weekdays, 1pm on Saturdays, closed Sundays). Even as a boutique, those hours aren’t convenient for customers.
Another event that was mentioned in the Bulletin: The Mediterranean Wine Symposium.
recapped it here but the takeaway that you need to see is from Maria Snoussi of Morocco: “It’s getting warmer 20% faster than the rest of the world. By 2050, the overall temperatures will increase by 4C, a much higher number than the 1.5C predicted for the world at large. Nights will be tropical all year round and ultimately, viticulture won’t be possible in the manner we see it today.”The Discontent’s fifth issue is out and copies have been shipping out everywhere. There are some fantastic contributors (including myself) who took part in it. You can order a copy or stop by Barzakh in Hamra in late-April/early-May.
PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS
THE LAST MONTH OF AANAB NEWS
🚨The Q1 bulletin of Aanab News is a round-up of news items relating to Lebanese wine paired with my brief, hot take. That’s for paid subs only so you know what to do!
Beautiful photos of poppies. Love how their petals are like crinkled silk.
Good to know also that Lebanese wine is only subject to a 10% tariff - fingers crossed it won’t make too much of an impact.