Seeking connections beyond borders
Photography Aya Alameddine
For the 40 women who’ve joined Beirut-based researcher Nur Turkmani’s expansive email chain, writing is a shared tool to memorialise strange times
By Nur Turkmani
During the initial phase of lockdown, from February and March 2020, it felt as though we were waking up everyday to an odd, imposing landscape. In my dreams, it was an endless stretch of small grey hills, or a dull sky meeting the sea halfway before turning achromatic. Some nights, a long white corridor with no doors.
There was a lot waiting, a lot of absence, and a lot of laughter at the confusion of it all. Our eyes fixated on screens, doomscrolling for hour after hour. We spent our days trying to understand the virus, how to protect ourselves and our families from it, where the safest place was. It was a moment of historical collective shift, whether we liked it or not, and it felt eerie that many of us couldn’t be with each other physically to try and make sense of it. We couldn’t hold hands or lay on a couch side by side. Our bodies were vehicles for transporting the virus, and so we had to rely on digital media to communicate.
Early on, I had reached out to some of the wonderful women in my life, around 40 of them, with the idea of documenting our daily lives during the pandemic — but I wasn’t sure who’d respond. We were spread out between London, Beirut, Dubai, New York, Bali, Doha, Paris, Tunis, Houston, and Amman, each of us navigating these times as best as we could. While some women belonged to a close friendship group from university or work, many others had never even met.“That we can meet at a time when we're so physically isolated is beautiful,” wrote Erica. “Hello to old friends and I open my heart to the new and wonderful women.”
Lujain, writing from Doha, was the first to respond saying that she felt trapped and alone, “away from everyone I love in a new city.” Others, like Lara and Samar in Dubai and Sima in Amman, joined the thread later on, as lockdown was being lifted. We shared our anxieties, routines, highlights, what we missed the most. Some of us were ending relationships, others stepping cautiously into new ones.
Lockdown gave us time for introspection and rumination, for some to sit with their eating disorders and others to acknowledge that their home was no longer the one they had once shared with their parents. Nour H wrote, “These feelings of pain, guilt, loneliness, confusion, anger, resentment and so on — may have turned into demons: little guys and big guys who I continued to feed and sedate throughout my life.”
For Grace, quarantine was a “chance to clean — both my inner and outer world.” Some learned how to prepare maamoul and fresh artichoke and arepas, and others realised they were ready to have babies. Many sat with the contradictions of the lockdown: the gift of slow-pace and the yearning to return to the world before the one imposed on us. Tara wrote, “I find myself on a roller coaster of gratitude for this opportunity to de-grow and desperation for a return to ‘normalcy.’” The question of normalcy was ultimately a common theme throughout. Dina asked, “I wonder how we will get back to normalcy after all of this? But we can take care of this when the time comes.” Meanwhile, Carla traveled to Bali for two weeks to disconnect and ended up stuck there, unable to return to Dubai, waking up to empty rice fields for over two months.
As the months stretched, the pandemic underscored grave issues of economic inequality, structural racism, total political incompetence, and climate change. A police officer kneeled on the neck of George Floyd as he cried out, “I can’t breathe,” and we sat at home watching in horror and despair. Akyeamaa says she wasn’t able to sleep properly since seeing that video, her long repressed anger pulsating through her body. As protesters took to the streets across the world under the slogan of Black Lives Matter, the lockdown felt oppressive and at times silly (although, of course, crucial).
In Tripoli, where I was staying during lockdown, protesters also returned to the streets to chant that hunger will kill them before corona does. Muriele said when she was having an internal discussion with herself, the revolution — which had swept through the country around four months before lockdown — was the “the elephant in the room.”
“I miss it a lot,” she added, “feels like heartbreak.”
Nour A also returned to the days of the revolution: “A few months ago, the street right under me was full of people revolting. Now, it is eerie and deserted, and the policemen guard an empty house.”
And by August 4, for many of the people on the email thread connected by their love for and rootedness in Beirut, life as we understood it exploded. Over 2,700 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored in our port blew up, killing nearly 200 people and displacing hundreds of thousands. It was a massacre, cloaked as a mistake, by our government. Many of the women in the email thread alone had lost their workplaces and homes in the span of five minutes. Some saw this as the last straw and moved countries. And who could even think of coronavirus while we were still looking for our missing? But weeks after, there was an alarming spike of cases. Three hospitals were destroyed by the explosion in a country already suffering from a weakened healthcare system and total financial and economic collapse. The government once again ordered a partial lockdown.
Over the past year, a line from Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” keeps returning to me. Okonkwo, the protagonist, is devastated after being exiled from his village for seven years. His friend Uchendu, in a masterful monologue, tells him of the song they sing when a woman dies: “For whom is it well, for whom is it well? There is no one for whom it is well.”
The uncertainty and sheer grief is not just contained to Beirut. Like dust, they rise and settle as one of the truths of our lives. Perhaps that’s the truth of this strange, strange year.
It has been a year since Lebanon’s revolution, and almost a year since the first coronavirus case. I am less surprised by masks now than by the sight of crowds, more surprised by routines than weeks merging into one long blurry hour. We have given up on foresight. We tell each other: one day at a time — كل يوم بيومه. It still feels almost impossible to process, to rebuild.
Meanwhile, trees let go of their leaves. The weather is slowly changing, the air clogged with uncertainty of what this winter will bring with it. In the morning I watched men gather to swim in the sea with an urgency that was almost unbearable to witness.
But looking back at these emails is invaluable, anchoring. It memorialises a shared moment of precariousness and garnishes it with delight, as though we sat by a fireplace, trading stories and songs to dull the foreboding for a night.
In many ways, it is also an ode to resistance, to empathy. Farah put it so well: “It takes a shared experience to really understand how others are coping, or not coping, because of their social and economic circumstances.” I think back to Yusra’s question in the email — “How do we build/work on ourselves in a way where we come out stronger/more energised on the other side to build for equitable realities for our loved ones and earth?” — and connect it to Nawal’s words: “Whether you are currently in a place of pain or of freedom or any of the layers in between, you are part of this, and your experience is necessary in bringing this new consciousness to fruition, so that it can solidify into change, into revolution.”
Nur Turkmani is a Lebanese-Syrian researcher based in Beirut. She is the managing editor of Rusted Radishes: Beirut Art and Literary Journal's website, and is currently studying creative writing at the University of Oxford.
