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Identity and Loyalty
Joumane Chahine
LebanonGALLERYCONVERSATION
As a child, I never really felt a particular attachment to Lebanon. I was born in Beirut, but left when I was a few months old,...
Sometime after college, I decided maybe I could wear both identities: Lebanese and Western. In order to do that though, I needed to brush up on my “Lebanese-ness.” I moved back to Beirut in 2004, to work for a communications firm. It was a time of ebullience and hope. After nearly thirty years of civil war, and the pivotal shock of Rafk Hariri’s assassination in February 2005, the streets were bursting with a contagious sense of optimism and feeling of long-overdue deliverance.
And I thought it was possible to maintain two lives. John, my boyfriend (who has since become my husband) was living in London at the time and was slowly growing impatient. He kept asking me to leave Beirut, to make a choice. First they were polite requests. Then they became ultimatums.
You see, as much as I was lured by the comfort of Western life, I felt guilty about leaving Lebanon. Your country is not a hotel. You don’t wait for it to be completely finished with a little chocolate on the pillow and all the towels warm in the bathroom before you decide you’re going to make a home there. Leaving your country when it is most in need of you is a form of betrayal, or at the very least abandonment.
But then you also need to look out for your own interests. Lebanon’s past three decades were swallowed by civil strife and a very precarious and tense post-war era. When I was a kid, living in Paris, I would often hear friends of my parents who refused to leave Lebanon, always repeating that “It will be better next month, it will be better next year.” And it never did get better. It often got worse in fact. And their life passed, wasted, swallowed by a thirty-year black hole.
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