Sun-Night

In the comfort of my home, on a mid-September night that pins time like only Beirut can, screams break through the usual city clamour. Women wailing, men weeping, children crying. I hesitate to go to the balcony, not wanting to witness yet another unbearable sight. As of late, images have engulfed our world and drained us. Lifeless, nameless bodies piling up, starved children, or burning inside their tents to expedite death.  

The howling sounds pierce my weary ears and pull me back to the urgency of the moment, as I waver to open the balcony door. There they are, dusty faces on the back of a truck, women lamenting, men sobbing, going somewhere, nowhere.  

Breaking news is my earnest company these days. I learn of an Israeli strike on Burjal-Barajneh this time, a popular Beirut neighbourhood. Later I hear that the family running the small grocery store below my house lived there.  

A family that had fled the war in their native Syria back in 2013, for a new beginning in Beirut, in the shape of that little grocery store. A large family. Mother, father, sister, cousins, all settled in Burjal-Barajneh; that popular Beirut suburb overcrowded with people and overflowing with struggle. They had escaped a war in their homeland to find another here, in 2024. Without prior notice of eviction, an air strike targeted civilians. Fourteen human lives ceased to exist in that split second, most of them migrant workers who had fled hell to a place they thought would be safer. 

The next day, I pass by the grocery store. My friend was there. We used to small talk while I was running my errands. With eyes still red rimmed from the fallen dust, he recounts how he was in his house with his wife and two children when the blast shook their simple world.  

A sudden blinding light, as if the sun had fallen into their living room, burning and scorching. Then came the dust. Nothing but thick dust into their eyes, into their lives. His body was catapulted into a wall that was still standing. Blinded by dust, with nothing left to see, he starts feeling the ground to find the sound of his children breathing, hearing the stuffed voice of his wife calling him. His hands finally touch their small bodies crying for help. Alive. By some miracle, he drags them out from under the rubble. But his sister-in-law and her children met a different fate. Under the rubble, they remained. Two days later, they were found. He had to carry the heavy burden of telling his brother fighting for his life at the hospital. 

“Daddy don’t leave me, I’m here” said the voice under the rubble, guiding his hands to his son.  

That little guiding voice intertwines with another, that of Hind Rajab. A Palestinian girl in Gaza fleeing with her family to find a way out of the shelling. An Israeli tank intercepted their car. As Hind witnessed the demise of her entire family from her backseat, her little voice reached the ambulance over the phone:  

“Everyone around me is dead. Don’t leave me. I’m here, I’m scared.” 

Little did she know that the ambulance would be intercepted and neutralized on its way to find her. Little did she know then that both the rescuer and the rescued would die. Little Hind was found twelve days later. Lying still in deafening silence. Like the one that has fallen upon the deaf ears of the world that witnessed her death.   

How many days unfolded in the backseat of that car? Amidst her loved ones, present with their decaying bodies but long gone. No one knows how many moonless nights or how many rising suns came and went in that backseat before the Israeli army bullets pierced her frightened beating heart.  

My internal thoughts drag me to another immediate reality. We are working on a new theater production for which we have daily gatherings with migrant women domestic workers, listening to their stories. Stories of livelihoods still in search of a place to call home. It was time to get to the meeting with Zeina. 

I hurry to the meeting spot where Chadi, the assistant director and production manager is waiting for me. Zeina arrives shortly thereafter with a shy smile, and her teenage daughter Gabriella tagging along. She looks at me and says: “You could write a book about my life. But where do I begin to tell my story?” 

I ask her to start with her real name. In Lebanon, the names of migrant workers are often changed to names that are “easier to pronounce”. Names that often neither resemble them, nor the land from which they came. She says to me: “In Ethiopia, my name is Sun-night.” 

She begins to speak about war in Ethiopia, forced enlistment in the army, fleeing from her country for better horizons, and the system of modern slavery she escaped to, called “kafala” (sponsorship labour system). How she came to Beirut as a stranger to work as a house cleaner. Upon arrival to the new house she would be living in, she was forced to cut her hair and was ridden of all her belongings. Everything she had brought from her country. She had been working from 5 to 7 ever since she can remember. She had never set foot in a theatre before. That was the highlight of her day.  

Sun-night ran away from the working place that felt more like a prison. She speaks of the extreme racism she lived through, and that stripped her of her humanity. She had to break away and went from there to be incarcerated in a real prison as a result of her misconduct. She recounted her story not to complain, but to warn. She had come to terms with her past and was moving forward. However, she didn’t wish for other women to go through the same ordeal. That is why she had agreed to this meeting.  

Gabriella looked at her mum with big proud eyes. “My mother is a fighter,” she said. “It’s time for her to rest but she still cleans houses so that I can get an education and attend Beirut’s best universities”.  

Perhaps it’s time for Sun-night to take the stage. To bring her story to light. 

A sudden noise disrupts the conversation. All eyes look up to the sky. The coffee shop empties in the panic of what’s coming from above. We follow suit. 

A message from the Israeli army comes tumbling down with warnings to evacuate the vicinity. A building five minutes away from the coffee shop, from my house, from Sun-night’s house, opposite Chadi’s house, will be targeted. We make the habitual calls to check on our loved ones, and continue the conversation. We have a new theatre production to develop, and time is of the essence.  

The airstrike is behind schedule. Zeina returns home. Chadi and I convene at my place to brainstorm. Minutes later, the walls shake and interrupt our writing. There it is. The blast. But we have survived. Now back to work.   

In the evening, another voice, very close to my heart, reaches out to me from exile. My brother Nassim (meaning Zephyr in Arabic), immigrated to Germany to live and dream better. The only poetry left in his story was his name. He could no longer tolerate the subliminal and open racism towards all that is different. He could no longer bear the indifference of daily life that will keep him in the stranger zone no matter how long he’s stayed or how well he’s integrated.   

His voice, as soft as the southern evening zephyr of our native Deir-El-Zahrani; his southern Lebanese accent that seemed to have taken stronger roots after his exile, summoned random memories to my mind. Images of his lost youth amidst the losing wars of Lebanon. Twinging recollections of his grief when our father passed away a few months after his immigration, and the German authorities wouldn’t allow him a permit for funeral attendance.  

In his voice, there’s a hint of an incomplete farewell, and truncated tears hanging on to every eyelash. A flood of emotions and grief with no place to go, two hours of video calls once too often with mother. Twenty years and counting in Europe, and he is still the brown outsider.  

He told me he wants to return home, as he always does at the end of our conversations. Even with the war raging, he wants to be home with us. But I told him to stay, as I always do at the end of our conversations. Because one of us must remain alive to tell our story.  

And the world keeps going round, looking the other way, in the darkness of a silence shining as bright as Beirut’s sun with no hint of shade.  

Children still dying in Palestine, their names written on their chests for lack of shrouds in eternal rest. 

Hind, still waiting in her backseat, crying for help that will never come, her voice muffled by the sound of silence, growing louder by the day. 

My brother is still an immigrant, a forever stranger in his new home.  

But Sun-night took the stage. The drones tried to dim her sun. The missiles tried to shudder the calmness of her night. But she raised her glass to her story, to her home, to her exile.  

Gabriella applauded, and the audience acclaimed.  

The stage, the theatre… 

That space, tiny and fragile 

Violent yet tender 

Frail nonetheless steadfast  

Unfair and impartial at once 

The warrior and the peacemaker 

The saviour and the doomed  

A lot like a homeland 

The theatre might be just that victory 

The only one possible, perhaps 

At a time when humanity has utterly failed.