When I saw her with her cane collecting litter in the abandoned school, which flew the UNRWA flag, I thought to myself that she would beat me with that cane if I dared approach to ask about the working hours of the UNRWA official in this Palestinian refugee camp that was established in 1956 on a hill belonging administratively to the Mount Lebanon Governorate, some 12 kilometers from Beirut. She passed me without taking heed of me. I moved to a different spot, awaiting someone else to pass by. However, I was surprised to see her heading my way and then ask me about what I was looking for. I said that I was looking for the UNRWA official and asked her whether the building outside of which I was standing was indeed his place of work. She said yes, adding that it was Saturday, which meant that he would not come in today, before she headed towards her home, which, incidentally, was right next to the man’s office. I stopped her and explained that I was a journalist. This loosened her tongue about the water that suddenly dries up in «faucets» and electricity that rarely made an appearance in her home. After she was done, I inquired about her nationality. She said that she was Lebanese. So, naïve as I was, I asked her about her relationship to Palestinians. She said that she had Palestinian and Syrian friends and had never had any problems with them.
We were standing precisely at the entrance of the camp and above our heads stretched a banner bringing together the leader of the Lebanese Forces Samir Geagea and the Change and Reform parliamentary bloc leader Michel Aoun, who would just two weeks after this meeting become the President of the Lebanese Republic. My conversation with her did not end at this, for I did not want to let her go before she had led me to an employee of the UNRWA. I asked her on which days I would be able to find the official in his office. She said that Semaan, the agency’s cleaning man, knows better and she showed me to a flight of stairs leading to his home. I thanked her and went in the direction she had indicated.
An undisturbed sleep
I got to the street where Semaan lived. I inquired about his house and I was given directions. When I approached the house, I saw two men standing next to it. I asked one of them about the door to Semaan’s house. He pointed to it, adding that he would be sleeping at this time because he starts work very early in the mornings and that it was not a good idea to wake him up. I did not knock on his door and decided to come back on another day. The man asked me what I wanted to see Semaan about. I repeated what I told the woman, and asked whether he would like to talk about life inside the camp. He did not mind talking and being recorded. Thus, Joseph Moussa began talking about the artists of Dbayeh Camp, of whom he knew much being a percussionist. He spoke of the difficulties Palestinians faced, including being unable to travel to take part in concerts outside of Lebanon and not benefiting from being unionists. Putting artists aside for a while, he moved to talking about the suffering of others, like the surgeon Fahd Farah who was not able to open his own clinic inside the camp since Lebanese laws prohibit him from practicing his profession. So in order to make a living, Fahd went about taking contracts with companies to treat their employees and continued to help the camp’s inhabitants for free until he gave up and left Lebanon a leaving the mission of treating the camp’s ill to Christian nuns who offer primary medical care. I asked him whether there was a clinic inside the camp. He said that there was an UNRWA clinic, but all that patients received from it were some painkillers, if there were any in the first place, whereas those who did not have the means died outside hospital doors following the drop in the Agency’s aid recently. At this point, he went back to where he had started and the name of the musician Raji al-Asaad popped up. Joseph spoke of his teacher, who had died two years before, saying that he was the song writer of «Mama Ya Mama», which was performed by a young Armenian on the Studio el Fan talent show in 1973, before being performed by George Wassouf without crediting the man who wrote it.
Hunting for Robert al-Asaad
Speaking of Raji el-Asaad, Joseph mentioned his grandson Robert, who had inherited from his grandfather his love for music, and told me that his uncle Abu Omar, the man who was standing next to him, could take me to him. I said goodbye and took off immediately with his friend to the young man’s house, talking to whom would become a goal that I decided not to give up on as I had done in Semaan’s case, after seeing his room from behind its glass door packed with musical instruments.
I saved Abu Omar’s phone number and told him that I would call him later to set a meeting with his nephew. And I walked away among the houses of the camp… among the icons of the Virgin Mary lined up on the doors of these houses. I reached the street that leads outside out of the camp, and I walked downwards towards the sea, which was not visible except from this street, its view blocked from the residents of the camp’s horizontal streets interconnected with stairs by the Le Royal hotel, towering on a hill overlooking the Beirut-Tripoli highway. In my mind, questions were building up about this place. A place which 40 years ago was one of the theatres of the war between the Lebanese National Movement and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), on the one hand, and the right-wing parties first and later those parties allied by the Syrian army on the other. A place which was under heavy shelling from the Kataeb Party, while the party’s fighters besieged the refugee camps of Tel al-Zaatar and Jisr al-Basha. How did Dbayeh Camp escape the ground-zero fate of the other two camps? How did Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians live in such a small geographic area on a mere 0.8 square kilometers, displaying the harmony typical of the residents of a single village? A communist who had taken part in the Lebanese Civil War once told me that he noticed with the breakout of the revolution/war/events/crisis in Syria the propagation of many stories about the incidence of rape among the parties to the conflict and that such stories were rare throughout the 15 years of warring in Lebanon, and that this was what, in his opinion, would make the return to coexistence in Syria that much more difficult. Is this the answer? Are those living in Lebanon coexisting in the first place? Material and conceptual barriers are clearly visible from the north of this small country to its south, and from its mountains to its coast. Is it the shared religious identity that brings together the residents of this serene hill? Is this coexistence in the first place, or are those «victors» imposing their terms on the «defeated» in their area of control? Maybe it is the affairs of everyday life recover the upper hand after the sounds of guns and rifles have gone quiet? Questions about the meanings of things in this region of the world are too many for people to find answers to all of them.
I went back to Dbayeh two weeks later. I had called Abu Omar the evening before and agreed with him to meet next to Mar Gerges Church where he worked. I called him again after passing by the UNRWA office and finding it closed, and having learned from a young man who worked at a nearby car repair shop that the director came to the camp on Mondays and Thursdays only. I did not hear the voice of my friend this time but rather the voice of a girl, perhaps his daughter, who told me that he had forgotten his phone at home. I thanked her and went back to the mechanic and asked him about the location of the church. He pointed to it. Once there, I asked for Abu Omar, but I was told that there was no man of such name working there and that there were two other churches bearing the same name in the area. I asked about the direction to one of them, hoping to find him there and not have to search for the third church.
I arrived at the Mar Gerges Church number two, which stood in the middle of the road between the camp and the gigantic hotel. There was no one to be found around, so I knocked on the main door and then a side metal door. I heard a voice from behind it that offered me hope. The door opened. «I’m looking for Abu Omar.» The door closed in my face. I laughed and went my way looking for church number three. «At the top of the mountain. By the Lebanese Forces’ project.» I did not see anyone in that secluded, lofty place and went back from there in the company of an amiable driver and the voice of Wadih El Safi coming from the Sawt Lebnan radio station empty handed. I asked the driver to take me back to the camp which he did. I went again to church number one and asked again a man in his sixties. He said that there was a monastery at the top and perhaps Abu Omar would be there. I ascended the hill. On the side of the road was the building of Sawt Lebnan (I later discovered that this building did not belong to the Phalange Party but to the Modern Media Company that had set up its headquarters there following a dispute with the company of the Party, which ended with listeners getting two radio stations of the same name). I took a turn past the building, and a cross appeared before me at the top. I set about looking for the door to enter the monastery, but all the metal gates appeared to be out of use. I looked up and saw a man watering. I waved to him from afar and he approached me. I asked him about the entrance to the monastery and he directed me with an Egyptian accent. I asked him whether Abu Omar worked there; he said no. I waved goodbye and turned around. From there, the camp houses resembled one another very closely and not one of them stood out, while the hotel looked very far and very small. The sea seemed within arm’s reach. I thought of taking out my camera to take a picture, but I remembered what my colleague Alia Haju had told me. The mission to take pictures of the camp that she had embarked on, ended with her being asked to obtain a permission first. I did not want my search to stop here, so I forgot about the shot and left the camp intent on coming back the next day. And so I did.
This time I decided to take a cab so as not to be late for my meeting with Abu Omar that I had arranged the night before. Before getting into the car, I noticed a huge poster of General Michel Aoun on the side of the coastal highway almost concealing Le Royal from view with the phrase «History Loves the Strong» written in a huge font underneath it. On our way up the hill, I asked the driver whether he knew anyone who had been residing in the camp for a long time, in anticipation of surprises. He told me to ask for the barber Elias Abu Merhi. I arrived at the camp and called Abu Omar. I heard his restless and reproachful voice for the delay on the other end. I apologized to him and thought about going to see the barber, but I realized that I knew the way to Robert’s house and cursed my stupidity, which had made me go on a search trip, that had seemed now absurd, the day before–although it was not in fact so, as it had helped me get to know the field that I had been moving around for the past month better. I walked down the road that I knew would not be difficult. I reached the alley where the house of the object of my wanderings easily, and it was Semaan’s house that provided the indication that I was going in the right direction. The door to Robert’s house was open this time.
More questions
I did not know anything about Robert except that he was the grandson of Raji al-Asaad, the unsung songwriter of «Mama Ya Mama». I did not expect to meet a young man barely aged 18, who was working in a recording studio, played thirteen musical instruments, and aspired to learn to play more of them... who wrote lyrics and music, and sang. Our conversation got going quickly. I learned that his uncle had not told him anything about me, so I introduced myself and immediately asked him about the origins of his love for music. When he was five years old he heard the song «Ghannili Shway Shway» performed by Umm Kulthum in the company of his grandfather, so he began to sing along with her. His grandfather asked him to sing it again, and continued to repeat the request until one day he put him on stage to sing «Shway Shway» for an audience. Later he watched with his father Umm Kulthum singing the same song on television and burst into tears, protesting to her performing his song. Thus his path was laid out for him and it led him to take music lessons with Professor Robert Lamaa in Beirut. His grandfather was his biggest supporter, so when the latter passed away Robert was plunged in a depression phase that ended only recently with the help of his passion for music. This passion runs in the family. His father and uncle are musicians and his aunt a singer. This passion also offered me the chance to hear him play the piano that morning, and see him pick up his grandfather’s oud, which had been left as it was since the old man died. His eyes welling up, I heard the song «a small house in a country that is not mine», whose lyrics and melody he had written, to express the lump in the throat he experiences from living in an «alternative homeland». Hearing the song made me ask him about his sense of belonging and relationship to this place. He expressed his love for Lebanon, which had taken him in and his attachment to the camp and its people. Our meeting ended after he told me about his band «Jazzabiyat», a name that integrates jazz, a music form that transcends all rules, and the strict eastern Bayat musical mode, and about his ambition to obtain a doctorate in philosophy of music that would allow him to open a music school for Palestinians and the Lebanese.
I said goodbye to Robert knowing that I will come back to see him some day. I set off to the barber shop of Elias Abu Merhi, after the «music prodigy» had given me directions of how to get there. It turned out that Abu Merhi was a Lebanese who had lived in the camp for 37 years. He was originally from Damour (South), displaced by the war to Dbayeh. He had tried to live outside the camp subsequently, but the simplicity of life here and the affinity with his neighbors brought him back. There was also Abu Hanna in the shop, who was granted Lebanese citizenship in 1994 along with those residents of the seven southern border villages with Palestine. Abu Hanna talked about the partaking in «misfortune» among the Palestinians, the Lebanese and the Syrians in the camp. But when Abu Merhi went out to prepare some coffee, he said a sentence in passing that made me re-examine the paradise of coexistence that I believed to be sincere in the mouth of the barber, but my skeptical mind refused to believe its existence. «Those who are proud enough have left,» said Abu Hanna. Abou Merhi returned and talked about many things, from the loss of his wife and the grief that he still experienced from this loss, to visits to Tripoli (North), which he loved. I spent quite some time listening to him and the few interventions of his contemporary, laughing along with them, putting off my questions and doubts. Then I took a picture of them and left.
Later that day, I met Raafat and his wife Marah, two Syrians who had settled in the camp almost a year ago. Marah had not lived elsewhere in Lebanon, while Raafat had been working in Lebanon for many years. She did not talk much compared to her husband who was more voluble, and who informed me that there were about 50 Syrian families in the camp and that he had no experience of any ill-feelings on the part of anyone in the camp, but imputed it to being hard-working, which offered him economic power and made his neighbors respect him and treat him as an equal. The meeting did not last long, so I said goodbye to the young couple and I said goodbye to this place whose occupants, to whom I talked, all agree that it is more of a village than a refugee camp.
I came in an outsider in search of stories and came out looking forward to going back and bearing conflicting ideas about the best way people should adopt to manage their lives after they are done with their wars. Robert said he did not know anything about what had happened during the Civil War, so I will put my earphones and listen to him sing his song; the one appropriated by Umm Kulthum!
