rhythm, from what shakes it out of a world of sleep rising from the previous day, and from whatever mystery it will uncover in you, will form the identity of your new day.
Because coffee, the first cup of coffee, is the mirror of the hand. And the hand that makes the coffee reveals the person that stirs it. Therefore, coffee is the public reading of the open book of the soul. And it is the enchantress that reveals whatever secrets the day will bring.
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The dawn made of lead is still advancing from the direction of the sea, riding on sounds I haven’t heard before. The sea has been entirely packed into stray shells. It is changing its marine nature and turning into metal. Does death have all these names? We said we’d leave. Why then does this red-black-gray rain keep pouring over those leaving or staying, be they people, trees, or stones? We said we’d leave. “By sea?” they asked. “By sea,” we answered. Why then are they arming the foam and waves with this heavy artillery? Is it to hasten our steps to the sea? But first they must break the siege of the sea. They must clear the last path for the last thread of our blood. But that they won’t do, so we won’t be leaving. I’ll go ahead then and make the coffee.
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The neighborhood birds are awake at six in the morning. They’ve kept the tradition of neutral song ever since they found themselves alone with the first glimmer of light. For whom do they sing in the crush of these rockets? They sing to heal their nature of a night that has passed. They sing for themselves, not for us. Did we realize that before? The birds clear their own space in the smoke of the burning city, and the zigzagging arrows of sound wrap themselves around the shells and point to an earth safe under the sky. It is for the killer to kill, the fighter to fight, and the bird to sing. As for me, I halt my quest for figurative language. I bring my search for meaning to a complete stop because the essence of war is to degrade symbols and bring human relations, space, time, and the elements back to a state of nature, making us rejoice over water gushing on the road from a broken pipe.
Water under these conditions comes to us like a miracle. Who says water has no color, flavor, or smell? Water does have a color that reveals itself in the unfolding of thirst. Water has the color of bird sounds, that of sparrows in particular—birds that pay no heed to this war approaching from the sea, so long as their space is safe. And water has the flavor of water, and a fragrance that is the scent of the afternoon breeze blown from a field with full ears of wheat waving in a luminous expanse strewn like the flickering spots of light left by the wings of a small sparrow fluttering low. Not everything that flies is an airplane. (Perhaps one of the worst Arabic words is Ta:’irah—airplane—which is the feminine form of Ta:’ir—bird.) The birds carry on with their song, insistent in the midst of the naval artillery’s roar. Who said water has no flavor, color, or smell, and that this jet is the feminine form of this bird?
But suddenly the birds are quiet. They stop their chatter and routine soaring in the dawn air when the storm of flying metal starts to blow. Are they quiet because of its steely roar, or from the incongruity of name and form? Two wings of steel and silver versus two made of feathers. A nose of wiring and steel against a beak made of song. A cargo of rockets against a grain of wheat and a straw. Their skies no longer safe, the birds stop singing and pay heed to the war.
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The sky sinks like a sagging concrete roof. The sea approaches, changing into dry land. Sky and sea are one substance, making it hard to breathe. I switch on the radio. Nothing. Time has frozen. It sits on me, choking me. The jets pass between my fingers. They pierce my lungs. How can I reach the aroma of coffee? Am I to shrivel up and die without the aroma of coffee? I don’t want. I don’t want. Where’s my will?
It stopped there, on the other side of the street, the day we raised the call against the legend advancing on us from the south. The day human flesh clenched the muscles of its spirit and cried, “They shall not pass, and we will not leave!” Flesh engaged against metal: it won against the difficult arithemtic, and the conquerors were halted by the walls. There will be time to bury the dead. There will be time for weaponry. And there will be time to pass the time as we please, that this heroism may go on. Because now we are the masters of time.
Bread sprang from the soil and water gushed from the rocks. Their rockets dug wells for us, and the language of their killing tempted us to sing, “We will not leave!” We saw our faces on foreign screens boiling with great promise and breaking through the siege with unwavering victory signs. From now on we have nothing to lose, so long as Beirut is here and we’re here in Beirut as names for a different homeland, where meanings will find their words again in the midst of this sea and on the edge of this desert. For here, where we are, is the tent for wandering meanings and words gone astray and the orphaned light, scattered and banished from the center.
But do they realize, these youths armed to the teeth with a creative ignorance of the balance of forces and with the opening words of old songs, with hand grenades and burning beer bottles, with the desires of girls in air-raid shelters and pieces of torn identities, with a clear wish to take vengeance on prudent parents and with what they do not know of the sport of active death; armed with a rage for release from the senility of the Idea—do they realize that with their wounds and inventive recklessness they are correcting the ink of a language that (from the siege of Acre in the Middle Ages to the present siege of Beirut whose aim is revenge for all medieval history) has driven the whole area east of the Mediterranean toward a West that has wanted nothing more from slavery than to make enslavement easier?2
And when they set about putting the siege under siege, did they know that in bringing the actual out of the marvelous into the ordinary they were supplanting the legend and revealing to the misguided Prophet of Doom the secrets of a heroism woven by the movement from the self-evident to the self-evident? As if a man were to be tested on being male, and a woman on being female; as if dignity had the power to choose between self-defense and suicide; or as if a lone knight had a choice other than single-handedly to cleave this insolent space and clear a path to the secret motive within him, rather than accept that his personal valor and his moral and physical heroism must await the return of official chivalry. As if a handful of human beings were to rebel against the order of things so that this people, whose birth was tempered with stubborn fire, should not be made equal to a flock of sheep herded over the fence of complicity by the Shepherds of Oppression in collusion with the Guardian of the Legend.3
They shall not pass as long as there’s life in our bodies. Let them pass, then, if they can pass at all, over whatever corpses the spirit may spit out.
And where is my will?
It stopped over there, on the other side of the collective voice. But now, I want nothing more than the aroma of coffee. Now I feel shame. I feel shamed by my fear, and by those defending the scent of the distant homeland—that fragrance they’ve never smelled because they weren’t born on her soil. She bore them, but they were born away from her. Yet they studied her constantly, without fatigue or boredom; and from overpowering memory and constant pursuit, they learned what it means to belong to her.
“You’re aliens here,” they say to them there.
“You’re aliens here,” they say to them here.4
And between here and there they stretched their bodies like a vibrating bow until death celebrated itself through them. Their parents were driven out of there to become guests here, temporary guests, to clear civilians from the battlegrounds of the homeland and to allow the regular armies to purge Arab land and honor of shame and disgrace. As the old lyric had it: “Brother, the oppressors have all limits dared to break / To battle then, of ourselves an offering to make . . . / Of a sudden upon them with death we came / In vain their fight, and nothing they became.”5 And as those lyrics were chasing out the remnants of the invaders,
