Dr Theodore Ell: Ithaka Lecture

Pictured: Dr Ell (OS 2002)

Pictured in header: History master Ms Rima Kandalaft with Dr Theodore Ell

Before it is anything else, Lebanon Days is a reckoning with the problems of speaking about the intimacies of a culture to which one has no familial claim whatsoever and which one grows to know as a privileged outsider. Whatever I wrote, it needed absolutely to avoid impersonating or ventriloquising a Lebanese point of view. That would have been presumptuous to the point of being intrusive, even violent. Lebanon has a rich literature and a passionate political commentariat of its own, which were already yielding serious insights into the corruption behind the explosion, and I had no intention of telling the Lebanese their business. Yet I was mindful that although voices and stories of Lebanon are often heard in the Arabic world and are somewhat known in the Francophone world, they rarely or incompletely filter through to the Anglophone world. We most often hear of Lebanon on the news as a place torn with strife and war. Whatever I was on about, I resolved, I must offer a larger picture, reflecting the richness of the Lebanese setting and the variety of histories and life experiences contained there. It must report the points of view that were put to me and that were suggested to me by events, places and materials. At the same time, certain things had happened to me personally which I believed were of value to the common picture, but which could never become part of that picture unless I spoke about them, which inevitably meant involving myself in the picture.

Pictured: The apartment in Beirut

My answer was ready because this question was one I had been burning to answer for a decade, far too late for the moment I had heard it posed. That had been at a conference at the University of Sydney in 2009. World news that week was seized with the massive uprising in Iran against rigged elections that had returned an autocrat to the presidency. The power grab provoked demonstrations on a scale not seen in thirty years, as hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets demanding free and fair democracy. This outpouring of generations of repressed desire, known to us all as the ‘Tehran Spring,’ electrified the Iranian diaspora as well as the masses marching in the capital.

In writing Lebanon Days, I did revisit the histories and the analyses of Lebanon’s society and politics and economy that I had read on first moving there. They had opened my eyes to certain realities in the new country I was living in, but they did not do the living for me, any more than they did for the Lebanese people who said something about their lives and in so doing revealed something about themselves. A vintner among his vines, in the foothills of the northern ranges: ‘I think when people try and kill each other, isn’t there anything better for you to do? But no, it looks like not. You try to take over the world so that you have a world to take.’ The satirical wit of demonstrators in the revolution of 2019, as immortalised on their placards: Break out of your cages and eat your zookeepers! Save Lebanon – it’s the only country with real hummus! My doctor, checking up on me in the days after the explosion: ‘I think every foreigner who lived through that blast should be made an honorary citizen of Lebanon. You might not feel honoured. But you are a citizen.’ A taxi driver, looking out at the devastated port as we pass it on the freeway, suspecting that no one will ever be brought to justice for the blast: ‘All the world knows what happened here. The only one who doesn’t know is Lebanon.’ The same taxi driver, who happened to pick me up again another day: ‘There are people in Israel and Palestine who just want to work. The Lebanese just want to work. We have nothing to argue about.’ A mountain guide: ‘Lebanon: so rich, so small. Think of people forced to emigrate. All they must leave. To gain one thing, they lose ten things.’ The point of the book was to make these and many other voices heard, beyond a small conversation with me or the noticing of details in passing.