By Lama Abi Ammar | Staff Writer
Lebanese parties always have the same ending. Picture this: you are at an underground party in Beirut. You do not usually come to this part of town, but the music is so loud, the “jaw” (ambience) so radiant that you feel right at home. All your friends are so in it. This isn’t an unusual feeling for you. It’s Beirut. The night is passing so fast; it’s already 4 AM. Suddenly the techno beats, the electronic music, the weird DJ mixes, all turn to a techno version of Fairuz. Eventually, the DJ starts playing “Libnan Rah Yerjaa” (Lebanon Will Come Back), “Rajee Yetaamar Lebnan” (Lebanon Will Be Rebuilt), “Li Beirut” (To Beirut) … and the whole crowd is entrenched in a patriotic moment. In the crowd, people mean different things when they say Lebanon – but this time, they say it together.
Beirut. Beirut. Beirut. Narrow streets. Underground. Nightlife. People. Music.
Beirut. Beirut. Beirut. Narrow streets. Gunshots. War. Kidnapping. Music.
These two Beiruts seem like they can never intertwine, but they do – in the controversial B018 nightclub, located in the bloodstained Karantina, designed by Bernand Khoury. A nightclub on a site of massacre – only that this is not the whole story.
Today, we young adults in Beirut do not associate war with the streets of our city. The war-beaten, bullet riddled buildings of Beirut have become a backdrop to the city’s landscape that we do not notice. We think that history is far away from us only because we never learn about it; but when we look for it, it’s there in the graffiti, comics, art, film, music… it’s almost unreal.
For people living in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and having to navigate life with constant shifts between war and peace, the two Beiruts had to intertwine. The two Beiruts were one; life and death were one and that was the case for Naji Gebran.
One version of the urban legend I’m recounting tells of a musician named Naji Gebran, who used his chalet as a music venue during the 1980s, in the midst of the civil war. For him, music offered a sort of therapy, an escape from the atrocities of the war. The venue would introduce all sorts of new sounds to counter the bullets and shelling outside – from electronic, to jazz, to world music, and contemporary Arabic music – all raging behind a door bearing the inscription “B018”. Another version of the tale claims that the name comes from the location of the club being 18 km north of Beirut while others claim it is a code for getting in. Nonetheless, Beirutis heard the name B018 and wanted to join the party, pushing Naji to moving into a larger venue – a warehouse in Sin El Fil. Everybody wanted to party and everybody wanted to forget. After the war, Bernard Khoury would be asked to design a permanent home for the club, choosing Karantina as the location, the location which saw the bloodiest and most violent acts of war.
This would not be the first time the Lebanese danced over a massacre site. Take the Holiday Inn and Burj Al Murr as examples – the high-rises that witnessed the most horrific acts of violence, where bullet-stained walls and the heights remind us of the militia men thrown out of the buildings. Yet, they became popular sites for underground parties in Beirut. This pushes one to reflect on the fact that every place
in the city holds trauma, every place is a massacre site. Yet, every place feels like home, every place also holds happy memories. Perhaps dancing and singing is not the most disrespectful activity to be done on those grounds. Perhaps music and dancing, for us, is not an act of joy or celebration, but rather an escape, a revolution screaming that we are still alive, that we raise our voices, and we have something to express, something to scream together in a crowd of people, something that we can never lose. Because left with all the traces of the war are little tunes of revolution that our parents still sing and dance to while we join them without knowing why.
Lebanese parties have always had the same ending. In clubs, in house parties, in your room, drowning the bullets, the MK drone, the Israeli jets, and the people you consider “others” who play the same song and call you an “other”. You dance, you hold hands, do the Dabke, you feel free, “Sharqi” (eastern music) plays, you dance some more, you fall in love slowly, you dance, you dance, and you keep dancing.