Cassandra Voices

Tag: night

  • A Rainy Night in Saifi – Luke Sheehan and Nadim Shehadi in conversation

    What is a ‘real country’?

    For the Irish, living as we do on a divided island, the question doesn’t have to be facetious. As a negative example, to try to land on a positive answer, Northern Ireland comes to mind. Wherever that congenitally deformed statelet ends up, its passage through the twentieth century will form a storyline we will never stop arguing about. God bless us.

    Lebanon, where I lived briefly from January 2011, is a mystifying and compelling organism.

    Were it on the seafloor, it would be brightly coloured, shape-shifting and perhaps equipped with a defensive poison. A territory carved out of the Ottoman Empire via the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, it formed with Syria the ‘French mandate’. It has held together against expectations, and enjoyed tangible golden ages through the same century-long lifespan as our post-colonial Ireland.

    At the Beittedine Palace, 2011.

    The local cultures, which still roughly map onto the religious arrangements of the confessional political system, have incredibly deep roots. I say ‘cultures’ and ‘roughly’ because this is a land where people will seriously make the case that they are the direct descendants of the Phoenicians, if not the Canaanites. Some of the ingredients here are antiquated enough to make monotheism look like a recent fad.

    Other claims include references to identifiable cities and mythologized landscapes in ancient history that remain traceable today: the cedar tree that appears on the flag is of the stock used to build the Jewish Temple, and the forests are referred to in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

    In cities like Batroun, Saida and Sur, the phantoms and visible stubs of Phoenician harbours can still be observed. Compressed between the plains and deserts leading to Mesopotamia, and the coastal route to the Nile and Egypt, it has produced merchants and travellers over the millennia. The Lebanese diaspora may number seventy million.

    Beirut’s Green Line after the Civil War.

    To live in Beirut at the time I did, was, I now realize, a taste of a brief golden age all on its own. One of the clichés that had to be learned was the fable of the glorious 1950s and 1960s: the period after the Second World War and before the domestic civil war, when the traditional merchant classes were joined by elite émigres from other parts of the defunct empire to create prosperity. They became ‘bankers to the Middle East,’ a role now occupied by Dubai.

    Wealthy post-Ottoman families that retreated there included the Sursocks, who would form a link to Ireland, and Jewish families from Iraq and beyond. Nadim Shehadi, the guest speaker on our latest podcast, is a product of the cosmopolitan confidence of that time.

    Sursock Palace before the explosion of 2020.

    In 2011, the Arab Spring was triggered by events in Tunisia the week I arrived. Through connections, I had the opportunity to meet the renowned journalist Robert Fisk for coffee, and as we sat in a place on Sadat Street, the TV in the corner was flashing images of Mohamed Bouazizi burning. I had been reading about the story, and Fisk hadn’t, so for a few minutes I was the one explaining events to him.

    My journalistic Larp brought me up and down the country. No-one ever called me out on it. I wrote one story for the Daily Star, the Saad Hariri-sponsored newspaper, about a scheme to write essays and theses for brattish students at the American University of Beirut. My real job was writing multiple choice questions for a rich private school and educational company.

    I had a blast. Young and hopeful journalists were everywhere, and the dismal course of that profession, with Facebook annihilating the business side and ISIS looming into view with plans to cast them in their snuff movies, was not yet obvious.

    One young English writer I knew noted that “the next few years are looking pretty good for work.” She might have been right, but that sort of attitude, shared by the foot soldiers of the international NGOs, was already watering seeds of uncommon bitterness among the Lebanese. Their rivers of trouble were sources of fresh water for well-paid and often decadent hordes of expats. One wonders how high the shoots might have grown by now.

    At the moment of the horrific Port explosion of 2020, I was living in Paris. A Lebanese woman I knew there, a filmmaker[1] and activist, called me briefly, with her voice inflamed from sobbing. “Really Luke, what have we done to deserve all this?”

    Sursock Palace after the explosion of 2020.

    Add to this the financial collapse which wiped out savings and plummeted the domestic currency, the Syrian refugee influx which increased the population by at least 30%, the pandemic pains and now a very possible Hezbollah-Israel war, and you might have a country that even her most ardent lovers will leave. Who will stay, and who will join the seventy million-strong diaspora? What cause for hope might persist?

    One of the characters I met during my time there was Nadim, during a dinner at the palace of the Sursocks in Gemmayzeh. With characteristic Lebanese curiosity and openness, he simply stayed in touch with me, a random person who had breezed through then strayed very far from Beirut, like most of our overconfident cohort running around at the time.

    One also wonders, incidentally, whatever happened to all those little girls and boys?

    Feature Image of Beirut: Jo Kassis

    [1] Of course she was, and is. Her first films were beautiful, artful, personal things shot through with a heatwave of avant garde, mostly concerned with her much-traumatized locality of the Shia south. Some recent work is here.

  • Walking at Night

    Night Walking Deserves a Quiet Night

    I’ve always walked alone in the city after dark. Recently, it’s with my dog, along the banks of the Royal Canal. Of a winter evening, the path is quieter than during the day, when bikes and scooters fly by, and the dog’s senses are lit up by the city wildlife revealed in the still of night.

    Last week, as we strolled along a quiet stretch, a man entered the canal path from the road and began walking towards us. Something wasn’t right about him.

    For so many women, there is an understanding, so quietly absorbed that we don’t even give it much thought, that there are risks attached to walking alone at night: of physical violence, of sexual violence, of harassment. It’s the water in which women swim. It’s the reason why our male loved ones show concern for us over their male counterparts when out walking alone – because we all know there are greater risks to it by virtue of being a woman.

    I saw a post on social media, in the aftermath of the recent shocking murder of Ashling Murphy. It was by a male journalist who decried the blaming by women of men ‘en masse’ for individual atrocities by men against women.

    The ‘not all men’ mantra seems to me as dull-minded as it is deflective, for whoever made the claim that it was?

    The perpetrator is the person to blame. What is being called to account in women decrying male violence against women is a culture that means all women, including female children, swim in the waters of often unconscious fear when facing the public world of men, from a young age.

    In this world, we know what it is to go from feeling safe to on edge in the blink of an eye, from puberty on, if not before – when we flinch in the face of that first catcall, or unsolicited approach on the street. Ani DiFranco sings of it in her resonant song ‘The Story’:

    I would’ve returned your greeting

    if it weren’t for the way you were looking at me.

    Only men can change that.

    It doesn’t make all men to blame; but it does make them potential agents of change for the better.

    The man who began walking towards me last week was young and, as I said, something wasn’t right about him. His behaviour was heightened, edgy. Maybe he was high. He shouted greetings at the dog, but it didn’t sound friendly. My adrenaline kicked in. I furtively glanced behind to see if I was alone. I was.

    I braced myself for his approach. It wasn’t that I thought the worst, it was that I knew that whatever came to pass on this canal path with nowhere to escape to, I was to a fair degree at his mercy. I gripped my key between my fingers – that reflexive move women make even if only to feel safer.

    The whole thing probably unfolded in less than thirty seconds but it felt longer. He knew that I was the vulnerable one and I sensed his knowledge as he approached. He came closer than he needed to. ‘How are you, love?’ Spoken loudly, into my face. We both knew it wasn’t a genuine question.

    I answered as friendly-casual as I could. Not too nice, not too nonchalant. Definitely no hint of aggression. In my voice I was trying to impart lots of things. I’m relaxed. I don’t see you as a threat. I’m friendly (whatever the nature of your problem is, I don’t judge you). That wasn’t true. I did judge him – for getting his kicks from being able to be scary towards a lone woman just by virtue of being a man. Any soothing note my tone might have imparted was tactical.

    After he passed, I slow-counted to twenty. I was afraid to turn around too soon in case it gave him cause to return. I glanced over my shoulder, then exhaled slowly, relieved to see he had continued on this path – and I was nearing the road.

    Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that I don’t think I’d even have committed the incident to memory, let alone mentioned it to anyone, if I hadn’t returned home to the devastating news that a young woman had been murdered while out jogging on a Tullamore canal path. Ashling Murphy was a beautiful, talented, generous spirit, with her life in front of her. But this is the water in which women swim, the air in which we walk, or run – where risks, conscious and unconscious, sometimes, brutally, come to pass.

    The particular attributes of her murder – that it took place in broad daylight, that it looks to have been an attack by a stranger– make it ripe for description as a tipping-point event, and the outpouring of grief and anger in its wake suggest this may be so. Time will tell.

    For while the cold threat of such an attack may strike the greatest fear into most women, the reality remains that for victims of male violence, the perpetrator is rarely a stranger.

    Per the Women’s Aid Annual Impact Report 2020, since 1996, 236 women have died violently in the Republic of Ireland. 61% were killed in their own homes; 55% were killed by a partner or ex (of the resolved cases) and almost nine in ten knew their killer.

    And while domestic and gender-based violence prevails across social class, often its victims face higher rates of social inequity, including homelessness – in a European study some 92% of homeless women had experienced violence or abuse throughout their lives.

    For society at large, the issue of gender-based violence is one that remains behind closed doors, dealt with within the confines of the private rather than public domain. Charities that support victims of gender-based violence consistently struggle from underfunding, and consecutive governments have treated the issue as one of low priority.

    Lockdowns have been shown to create the most serious impacts for the socially disadvantaged, so it is no surprise that the 2020 Women’s Aid report reveals a startling 43% increase in contacts with their services, compared to 2019. The Covid-19 pandemic and its measures have had an ‘unprecedented and exhausting impact’ on victims of abuse. Surely this and other social inequities of lockdowns must be given consideration as Covid-19 policy shapes itself towards the future.

    As the government quickens pace to steer through its new strategy on domestic and gender-based violence, due to be published in March – its stated goal being a zero-tolerance approach – time will tell what it delivers on a structural level, and we can only hope that it signals meaningful change.

    Whatever comes to pass, it remains the case that on a societal level, all men do have a role in changing the waters within which women swim, along with the air within which we walk, run, and carry out our lives – private and public. And owning that fact may be what separates the men from the boys.