On Loving and Leaving Lebanon
As yet another academic year starts, and with it the routine of fall, one phenomenon goes on repeating itself: that of young students, fresh out of college, saying goodbye to their families as they get ready to board a plane with a ticket to a better place. A place of more opportunity. Expatriates who visited Lebanon for the summer, for wedding celebrations and family reunions, also make their way back to the countries they’ve learned to call home. Lebanon, in September, is a place for goodbyes.
It should be easy to fall in love with my country; this modest piece of land that runs alongside the Mediterranean, a gateway to the East. Its mountains and trees, its shores and dunes have been the subject of poetry and prose since early scripture and they have not diminished in beauty. Even the bible pauses, more than once, to describe it in its psalms: “The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly, the cedars of Lebanon that he planted”.
It should be easy to want to stay here, in Lebanon. To love a country that is at the heart of culture and history. It should be easy to be in constant awe of its beauty and potential, and yet, more and more, loving Lebanon feels like a challenge. Obstacles get in the way: the so-called “situation”, the instability, the multitude of infrastructural and economic problems, the conflicting interests and blatant misinterpretations of faiths and religions. It is true that these factors are all capable of getting in the way of this love and of tarnishing it with their stains. Loving Lebanon feels like a promise we made a long time ago and forgot to keep. However, it is exactly during those times that I find it twice as necessary to keep this promise, even if one has no choice but to leave it.
Once upon a time, Lebanon used to be a melting pot of different cultures. Today’s situation has the country’s ‘diversity’ transformed into a dirty word: diversity is spoken of as a threat to our existence, a dormant tumor that we should bury deep. And yet this diversity keeps driving us to gridlock: crippling governments, ending jobs, and driving young people out of the country in search of opportunity. To ignore our differences rather than embrace them is a notion that is both perverse and dangerous, for diversity, and even contradictions, have always been the pillars of this country. They are everywhere we look: we have mountains and shores, we have summer and winter, modern and traditional, old and new, East and West, Christian and Muslim. We have learned to repeat these contradictions in praise of Lebanon but have forgotten that they are more than touristic slogans. They are what makes this country special, and they are what we should embrace, if we are ever to fall in love with it again.
Throughout my career as television host and producer, I’ve interviewed hundreds of personalities from all the different corners of the world, and a significant number of them were Lebanese. Some live at home, some abroad, but they all have one thing in common: one way or another, they have left their mark on the world. They wear the diversity of their culture like a badge of honor, one that they have used to their own advantage, ever since that day when they had to board a plane out of their beloved country.
And here is another thing that is obvious but true: no two Lebanese individuals that I have spoken to think the same way. They experience Lebanon, and through it the world, in different ways. It is from their differences that Lebanon draws its richness and its strengths, and I believe that there is a lot to be learned from these personalities.
It should be easy to fall in love with Lebanon again, and many times it is. We fall in love with it by remembering how special it is for holding so many differences in such a small space. We fall in love with it because it has been through a lot, but it still stands. We fall in love with it because it is different, and because we will only ever save it by falling in love with it, all over again.
It is easy to want to leave Lebanon. It is impossible to not want to come back.
Ricardo Karam
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