Batoul Yazbeck

Two women sitting outside their tents on Beirut’s waterfront told me that the life awaiting them would be hellish, even in the best circumstances. Tomorrow seemed too far away. Their concern was simpler: finding lunch for their families. Life in a tent, still unfamiliar to most Lebanese women, resembled what we had long heard about Palestinian and Syrian refugee women, and displaced women across the Middle East. The Arabic word is qahr قهر. It means more than oppression or domination.

Since I can remember, I’ve wanted to live in New York. The aspiration lives in my earliest memories, like when I was around five years old and my father brought home a colourful atlas with pages detailing the ‘Big Apple’. Every city has a symbol, and New York’s was an apple. Years later, I learned that my home city, Beirut, is also called an “apple”. But even so, I suspect I might love the “Big Apple” more.

Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... The only Lebanese truth is that public misery and dread are not confined to Dahyeh, the South, and the Beqaa. Nor is it true that Lebanon’s cities—from the capital to those of the North and the Mountain—are indifferent, as if the country’s latest ordeal, and what preceded it and may follow it, merely passed them by.