Mounira Al Solh was unable to join the Flaherty x Boulder Q & A due to the ongoing events in Beirut. Read more about relief efforts by on the ground, grassroots organizations and NGOs: https://lebanoncrisis.carrd.co/
To all those who are reading, I thank you for understanding my current inability to stand and speak in front of a public. I am witting this, as just recently, in Beirut, we have experienced an apocalyptic explosion, as I suppose you might have heard.
When the blast happened, I was somehow saved! I was saved because my mother changed my plans and made me leave Beirut, and come back to Broumana, and that’s how my daughter still has me. Today I count her fingers daily when I hold her hand, I wonder, how come they are still there. I hold a leg of mine, and feel it’s not mine. Each body part is a surprise to know it is still there and why? Do I deserve to have it? Others lost themselves and their children and their parents! It is a hate relationship with each body part.
In my house on Mar Mikhael, I was hosting a couple, the main door wasn’t able to close anymore, like many flats in the location, the glass was everywhere, but they luckily weren’t wounded. They heard a plane as well, and hid in the corridor, when everything blasted. My neighbor downstairs was driving home, when he saw the blast from a distance, and thought that his mother should have died! He drove madly until he reached our street, and found his mother lost on the sidewalk fully blooded, he took her in the car to find a hospital, no one let them in. Hospitals in the area were completely damaged as well. He finally found a hospital, but no one to help, he tried to heal his mom’s wounds himself. He stayed up three days and nights, cleaning the house and helping his wounded mother. People slept without windows, others without walls and windows in complete destruction, and with Nitrate and explosives in the air. I stayed two nights unable to sleep, shaking, and imagining a next attack, and trying to open the windows on time before the blast comes back and glass falls on my daughter.
It took me two days to realize the scale of what happened, and the next 5 days to make sure people I know are OK, and I am still checking, not sure yet. People are still missing.
Today, as we are trying to understand what happened in Beirut on August 4 at 5:30 PM, it is very strange to see that film, “Now Eat My Script”, or rather, the textual ballad which I made in the form of a film. Around the end of 2013, I had the urge to make the video “Now Eat My Script” as the situation was escalating in Syria, and family members were escaping from there, or trying to escape and arrange visas/work permits elsewhere, to save themselves from the war, and we were all terribly affected specifically at that time by the chemical attacks that took place in Ghouta. This occurred on August 21 2013! If you remember at that time, Obama and and other political leaders were pretending that chemical attacks are the red line for the Assad Regime. But in fact, the chemical attack happened and soon after, no one did anything.
Assad is still here until today.
At that time, I had to do the film. Even though I hate it, and I am against showing crude meat images, I had to do it, to deal with the images that were haunting me, due to what was happening in Syria, how images were spread to us via Youtube, and then also, in relation to my own childhood, my own family history, having also lived in Ghouta as a child, and in Damascus, while escaping the Lebanese war. It was also atrocious to be pregnant in 2011, as the war was escalating in Syria. So I had to make that film, to process the terrible moment we were going through in Lebanon, not being in the disaster spot directly, but witnessing the disaster from a very close-by and oblique mirror: as family members and huge numbers of Syrians were obliged to escape their war, and drive to Lebanon in terrible conditions most of the time! I had to think of how we had to do that in the eighties, escaping in a taxi under the bombs from Lebanon, to Damascus. I was by then 12, and I had to care for a ten year old younger sister and brother, and I was really scared to lose my parents. I imagined having to beg for money in order to care for my younger sister and brother. We were lucky! Parents survived. They often had to stay behind in Lebanon to care for important matters, while I stayed in Damascus often alone with my younger siblings, and aunts and other cousins. Waiting for a war to finish.
“Waiting for a war to finish” hasn’t been resolved, since I was born in 1978, until today.
I am sorry if the film contains those terrible meat images! After seeing on Youtube a fighter eating the heart of a soldier, those images had to get out of my imaginary. To get rid of them. The meat was treated by a professional Syrian butcher, from Damascus, who had just moved to Lebanon, in coordination with the street butcher on Mar Mikhael Ennaher, who has been there since the 50s. They cut the meat according to the norms, before selling the meat, Halal. The animal and the meat parts which we sadly sacrificed was stored and eaten, by people who live in a community, we didn’t waste the meat just for the images. I thought it’s important to share that with you.
As for the blue car/van I filmed, a week later, my father and Abu Sakhra who usually drives that car, had a terrible accident, and the car was totally broken, but they survived with no serious wounds. Abu Sakhra has a white one since then.
I thank the team who helped me realize that work, from Abla Khoury and Ginger Beirut production, to Karam Ghossein who helped filming, and Mansion in Zoukak el Blat where were able to film the meat. I also thank the cats who were there, and who didn’t approach the meat at all, as we were filming.
—Mounira Al Solh