There are cities you visit, and cities that visit you. Beirut is the latter. It seeps up under your skin, and never leaves you.
How do I experience fear and/or love in Beirut City? While I search for an answer, a door slams and my heart skips a beat. My body goes into fight or flight mode in a fraction of a second. It is somewhat used to going into that state whenever I hear a loud noise. Whether it’s a bomb, fireworks, a slamming door, screeching tires, my body reacts the same.
I remember the first time I heard a sonic boom. I was 11 years old, newly returned to Lebanon, just starting school. I sat in a classroom when suddenly a deafening boom shook the windows. Startled, I looked around only to find my classmates unmoved. I raised my hand to ask the teacher, and she explained: that’s when an aircraft, usually Israeli, flies faster than the speed of sound at low altitude, the pressure waves merge into a single shock wave that explodes into a powerful boom.
Why does a loud sound scare me?
I discovered that fear is not just an emotion, it’s a biological alarm. At the first sign of danger, or what my brain translates as danger, the amygdala sends a distress signal to the hypothalamus.1 In turn, the hypothalamus activates the sympathetic nervous system, flooding the body with adrenaline. Heart rate increases, breathing quickens, and muscles tense, preparing you to flee or confront the threat.1 All of this happens before your conscious mind has even processed the sound. As psychologist Joseph LeDoux writes, “The amygdala is a danger detector, not a fear center. Fear is the conscious awareness of the fact that you are in danger.”1
For our ancestors, no loud sound was neutral, it meant predator or enemy. Here, sounds are doubled, we live between two readings of the same noise.
Fireworks and bombs, garbage trucks and shelling, even airplanes overhead startle us in equal measure.
Celebration and war sound alike in Beirut City.
Sound travels by vibrating air molecules. In a city, it’s constantly reflected and scattered by surfaces like walls, windows, glass, even asphalt carrying it further in certain directions rather than others. This is why during the latest Israeli attack on Lebanon (September 2024 – still ongoing), one neighbourhood would clearly hear the bombs while another right next to it, heard nothing at all.
Our bodies have been rewired to interpret loud noises as threats. The same chain reaction repeats itself, a reflex imprinted over decades of uncertainty etched even in our DNA. I read the research of Rachel Yehuda & Nikolas P. Daskalakis: descendants of holocaust survivors showed the same altered DNA markers of trauma as their parents, though they themselves had not lived it.2
Yet, what do we speak of a trauma that has not confined to one generation but transmitted and relived across several? In Lebanon trauma has affected my grandmother, my mother and now me as well. Like many other Lebanese, we all share generational trauma.
Fear is born of insecurity and security is a fundamental right to all human beings.
Yet we Lebanese live insecurity on every level. Physical, as we are subjected to war. Material, as most have lost their life savings in the banks. Emotional, as so many of our loved ones have left, not only in search for a better future but as a lifeline with expats now sustaining entire families.
And still, I am bound to this city like one is to a toxic irresistible lover.
Despite everything, I find beauty and grace in every corner. Attraction to Beirut is magnetic. It has a certain je ne sais quoi that keeps us coming back to it, no matter the danger.
Fear and love live at the same address in Beirut. They share the same apartment, even sleep in the same bed.
A mural in Beirut reading Old Beirut Matters. The word Beirut is written in Arabic. The writing is a call to preserve the city’s heritage, with a backdrop of an abandoned, graffiti-covered building. Photographed in June 2019 by Rosemary Zeynoun.
Architecture as a Shield
The port silos fig.2 stand at the far edge of the city, ribs of concrete facing the sea. Built in the late sixties, they were considered a state of the art engineering work. It was used to store Lebanon’s grain supply. Little did we know some 50 years later they would become the site of the greatest non nuclear explosion of the 21st century. Around 2500 tons of ammonium nitrate, stocked for a decade at the port of Beirut in a densely populated area, ignited causing a catastrophic blast with massive devastation and 240 victims accounted for to this day and over 6000 people injured.3
The silos became a wall that caught the blow in August 2020 shielding the blast away from half the city.
People say the silos saved hundreds, maybe even thousands. 25,000 cbm of concrete, and 2,740 tons of reinforcing steel. They were holding 85% of Lebanon’s grain supply at the time of the explosion, according to the Ministry of Information.4
Sometimes I think the city is like those silos: full of grain, full of ruin, somehow still standing.
The silos protected half the city that day. To the east there was nothing to contain the blast, in Gemmayzeh, Mar Mikhael, Ashrafiyeh, it tore through lives, walls, balconies, homes. To the west, their massive bulk slowed the wave. A wall of concrete and grain standing between life and death.
The silos have recently been declared a historical monument by the ministry of Culture in Lebanon. I remember the uproar in 2022, when the previous government announced plans to demolish them. The families of the Beirut Port Blast victims along with many others cried out in protest. It felt like an attempt to erase the crime scene, along with the memory of those we lost.
Today, the silos stand as a symbol of pain, yes, but also of memory and resistance.
We will not stop demanding justice. Civil society groups are advocating to transform the site into a public space and a memorial garden. A place where memory can take root. Because we must remember, so it never happens again.
Whenever I drive past the silos, I look at their torn carcasses, and remember that day. It actually started as an idyllic summer day, I spent it at the beach with my friends. It’s funny how heaven can turn into hell in a fraction of a second.
The torn silos, silent giant of concrete, protector of the city, a silent witness to the corruption and failure of a state.
It matters that the silos remain. For in Lebanon we have no memorial to the civil war that tore the country apart between 1975 and 1990. No monuments for the innocent lives lost, no reconciliation with the past.
To this day the civil war is not taught in schools, because historians and politicians cannot agree on a single version of history. We sweep our wounds under the carpet, pretending they never existed. But does that really work? Can we ever face the future, if we refuse to face the past?
The extensive devastation of the Beirut port after the August 4, 2020, explosion, with destroyed grain silos and ruined port infrastructure set against the backdrop of the Mediterranean Sea, illustrating the immense impact on the city’s landscape and heritage. Photograph by Mahdi Shojaeian, August 9, 2020.7
Freedom in a Cage Without a Lock
Beirut gives you a kind of freedom you can’t buy. It’s the freedom of going anywhere, anytime, of improvising plans, making everything possible. The chaos opens doors that elsewhere would remain closed, here rules bend, systems are bypassed, space is made for creativity, celebration, even joy. The kind of freedom you love to have in your 20’s and dread in your 40’s, once you have children of your own.
Because this feeling is deceptive. It offers an illusion of freedom while underneath the absence of accountability takes it away.
Laws are not applied equally, corruption tends to decide who gets prosecuted and who doesn’t, the freedom we thought we had becomes fragile, conditional, even reversible.
In Beirut freedom is both a gift and a gamble, it liberates us for a moment, only to remind us how much has already been taken.
In Lebanon, people mark occasions such as their children passing national exams, weddings, or even speeches by political leaders, by going to their balconies or rooftops and firing rounds in the air. This reckless practice has led to numerous accidents, causing injuries and even deaths.
Here life can be taken away in an instant by a bomb, a stray bullet, an explosion. We live with this risk the way others live with weather. The sun shines until it doesn’t.
A cage with millennial walls, shimmering beaches on one side, mighty mountains on the other and Beirut caught in the middle. And the old apartment of your grandmother with its molded ceilings and the lingering smell of naphthalene, still stands with all the family’s memories. Fragile walls that could collapse at any moment, and yet, when you dream of home, this is the place you see.
Fear has become part of our daily lives, so much we barely pay attention to it anymore.
You keep a bag with essentials and some money ready by the door. You don’t sit near windows. You look up to the sky at the first buzz of an Israeli surveillance drone. The habits become part of the body, like breathing.
We still work. We still meet for coffee. We still put on lipstick. It looks like denial from the outside. From the inside, it’s simply survival.
The past doesn’t leave. The wars, the bombs, the days we counted the missing. They are still here somewhere, lurking beneath the surface of our smiles.
A common scene along the shores of Beirut, especially at the Beirut Corniche, where people are fishing in the shallow coastal waters, highlighting the vibrancy of everyday life in the city. Photograph by the author, 2025.
Five Senses on One Street
I walk down a street and see every era unfolded out like an open book. Phoenician stones rest beside a Roman column. A 1930s house with arches, its paint faded like an old postcard, stands next to a glass tower still smelling of cement. Jasmine drifts in the air, mingling with diesel and garbage. A city of contrasts and endless juxtapositions. Million-dollar apartments next to refugee camps.
Should I leave or should I stay? The question never ends.
On one corner, a delivery boy balances a tray of figs as he crosses a road without lanes.
On another, a balcony overflows with magenta bougainvillea beside a wall scarred by shrapnel. The smell is of zaatar man’ousheh –the warm flatbread with thyme sesame and olive oil, a popular Lebanese breakfast– exhaust from generators making up for the void of electricity, and salt from the Mediterranean sea.
Many young people have already left for a chance at a better life, better future, better job. Still I ask myself, should I leave or should I stay?
When friends abroad ask why I stay, I tell them: here we lack many things, except human warmth.
It is a wounded city but its true wealth lies in strangers who offer you fruit, coffee, who run toward a scream instead of away.
One day I’m ready to leave. The next, I witness a breathtaking sunset, a total stranger making a random act of kindness. I stay.
“Despite the upheavals of war and peace, Beirut remains standing strong, like the goddess Inanna or Ishtar, her high mountains and deep sea soak up the poison and turn it under the sun into oxygen that dissolves in the warm blood of its people’s veins, recreating Beirut in ever renewable brilliance.” 5
writes Nawal El Saadawi in Off Limits. For Saadawi, Beirut is
“the city […], where everything is bought and sold, […], the city of conversations and contradictions, where missiles explode by day and dancefloors erupt with music by night. In Beirut, virtue and sin go hand in hand, nudity and hijab, love and war.”5
I love Beirut.
But I fear it will take what I love by blast, bullet, or accident.
We live suspended between a sunset and an explosion. Sometimes they arrive together in the same breath.
A child rides a bicycle in the street. A man looks for plastic scrap in a dustbin. A young girl crosses the street in high heels. A loud noise and we all freeze, glance at each other in silence, what was that? Was it a bomb?
It’s nothing, a door slam, don’t worry.
“Everyone loves Beirut and everyone is scared of Beirut”6
writes Rawi Hage in Beirut Hellfire Society. It doesn’t ask you to choose. It accepts both. That’s the city’s truth: fear and love at once.
No matter how long I live here, Beirut never ceases to amaze me with its grace and poetry.
Life taking root in the most unlikely places. Flowers breaking through stone noone waters. Trees growing inside abandoned buildings, leaning towards the sun.
Life, despite and in spite of everything.
A city like no other, riddled with contradictions, crippled by corruption and war, and yet, it somehow endures, kept alive by the love of its people. It is a place that wounds and heals, that pushes you away and pulls you back like the tide of its sea. And I wonder, will it ever let go of me?
A street vendor selling corn from a cart at night along the Beirut Corniche. This is also a common scene in the Corniche and other places around the shores of Lebanon, where snacks like corn and other foods fill the air with a bouquet of smells, while the sounds of waves crashing against the stones, children playing, and families gathering and laughing create a lively atmosphere. Photograph by the author, 2025.
Beirut
Beirut, you are not a city I walk through
You are a city that walks through me
in heels on broken pavement
in the hush between two sirens
in the salt that dries on my lips by your sea
You live under my skin like a splinter
sometimes a lover pressed to my chest
sometimes an assassin at my neck
I know your body, you know mine
the mole of a jasmine bush leaning over a wall
the silos split open at the port
the spine of minarets and churches at dusk
Every slam of a door is your voice
sometimes just a voice
sometimes the echo of a bomb
My heart flinches, then pretends it is made of stone
You have taught it that
Fear here does not whisper
it moves furniture in the night
hums in the elevator shaft
when electricity dies and lights are out
I have stared at your devastation
cement skin with shrapnel past and present
now claimed by birds for their fragile nests
violence and beauty braided together
still holding the taste of gunpowder
And still you lace your air with jasmine
Spread warmth like fresh cardamom coffee
Laugh across balconies and rooftops in the dark
Grow flowers from wounds
Wheat from spilled grain
Beirut you are chaos and freedom
a bomb and a sunset
fear and love rolling on the same tide
pushing and pulling in a wave
You are ruins and towers
You are exile and return
The dead and the living
The sacred and the rotten
Fear and love entwined
And if a city can endure them all
Perhaps a woman can too.
