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| Artwork by Tarek Chemaly |
Here's a hint: Don't grow up during a war. I once wrote "The first time I saw wounded people, I felt excited. I wasn’t afraid, just excited. When smoke came out from a place near my one of my friends’ house, I thought it was cool: I knew someone who was in danger." (In my book "Beirut Mayhem-eh - here). Still bravado aside, I remember Sebastien who died at the age of 6 when a bomb fell right next to our school and basically was too close to his mother's car when she was there to pick him and his brother when a new round of shells started.
But death was always there. Lurking in the shadows. I escaped it several times, like many Lebanese people during the war. The last of which was - twice - on the day of August 4th 2020 and the gigantic explosion of the port of Beirut (here). But this kind of laissez-faire with death had other ramifications. Mainly on my career (among other sectors).
I was always "OK, what's next", I have done, quite honestly, much more than any normal human could cram in a half century of life (born in 1974, you do the math). And the more I saw, the further I did, the less impressed I was. "A new published book?" "an exhibition in a country where my art was not displayed?" "a lecture for people who still did not meet me yet?" "a juror in an international festival?", "another interview for a TV channel?" "a new film to write?" and on it went.
I should have enjoyed the light immensely. But as the projectors got more and more frequent and intense, I found myself crawling back to my private space. I've been there, I've done that, sometimes I got the t-shirt sometimes not. Little by little you start realizing that no team is as professional as you are, that few people can match your speed and can go as high as the bar you have set. And all this bothers people, because suddenly, compared to you, people start looking incompetent.
Long time ago, a professor I was consulting with (she was Canadian), suddenly looked at me and said "you realize you are on your way to become unemployable?" - and that is true. Because even with any employment I got as my career progressed, my exactitude and impeccably high standard along with my lack of tolerance to any "client" being disrespectful to me (as most Lebanese clients are!), led me to hot water. Sure, I did impeccable work, when I was teaching I drove the students like a maniac to get them to deliver (here).
All of this should make me proud like hell - and many times I can actually be (here) - but also, paradoxically, because I grew up during a war, and because the nihilism one is subjected to, things tend to lose meaning, a great big "meh!" around every win, and every milestone.
The reason I brought Mozart into the melee, is because, in 1994 while still a student at AUB I was talking about the great composer (can't even remember the context) and a classmate of mine simply asked "minou hayda?" (who's that fella?). I thought quickly and asked "hey, do you know ya ana ya ana by Fairouz?" (here) "yes?" he went. "Well, that's him!". For all answer he goes "byotla3 menno, 3endo mosta2bal" (well, he's talented, he has a future ahead of him). Remember Mozart died in 1791. Some 203 years before my classmate's statement.
So combine this with a death who is casually there, with notions of never enjoying triumphs and never living in the present, with "if people don't know Mozart, why on earth would they even remember me?", and all of this gives you this incredible of feeling of "m'en fichisme" which waits for a future, and never realizes that the future became a present because it did not matter anyhow.
Some days are - honestly - quite difficult to go through. Perhaps oddly, this what drives me to create further. As everything is bound to be forgotten, maybe someone will say, some 203 years after my death, that I too "have a future ahead of me".