Inside Beirut's Broken Heart

After the catastrophic blast of August 4 – one of the largest recorded explosions in human history – Beirut was coming to terms with an unbearable trauma. In the days that followed, Nasri Atallah grappled with his country’s past, present and future

- Nasri Atallah

To be Lebanese is to be broken-hearted. You learn that early on. For three weeks in Lebanon during late July and early August, I spent a lot of time being heartbroken. Like many in the diaspora, I had been witnessing the deepening and overlapping crises in the country from an uncomfortable distance. By the time I was in Beirut in mid-July, the financial freefall which had led the currency to devalue by 80 per cent and frozen life savings in the banks was all anyone could think or talk about. No one had time for coronavirus, or any other of the world’s concerns. People spent their days juggling four different exchange rates, figuring out how to get essentials, how to feed their kids. Many friends were quietly figuring out how they might get themselves out of the country in a few months, once they’d scraped enough cash together.

By the time Tuesday, August 4, came around, Lebanon had begun to exhaust me. The heat and the sadness, I didn’t know how to navigate them anymore. I left our new offices on the Beirut Waterfront, less than a mile from the port, earlier than normal. It was an inconvenience. We had just moved in the day before. The new office signalled a coming-of-age, moving from the informal setting of one of our flats, to this all-glass box by the shimmering Mediterranean. But the power generators needed to be shut down at 5pm, so we called it a day.