It has been three months since the devastating explosion in the port of Beirut. Since then, inhabitants of the Lebanese capital have been struggling to return to some kind of normality. For many, however, things will never be the same again. Andrea Backhaus reports from Beirut
The smoke of abandonment permeates ″Beirut Noir″. In this collection of short stories, we find the remains of the crippled, the lonely, the lost, and the dead. They move – or fail to move – through a landscape violently reshaped by fifteen years of civil war. Many of the characters are stuck in an afterlife of one sort or another. Or, if they′re still alive, time has stopped.
It has been three months since the devastating explosion in the port of Beirut. Since then, inhabitants of the Lebanese capital have been struggling to return to some kind of normality. For many, however, things will never be the same again. Andrea Backhaus reports from Beirut
The district of Khandak Al-Ghamik, a five-minute walk from the city centre and about fifteen minutes from the port, bears witness to a historical and architectural heritage that has been relatively untouched by the bulldozers of reconstruction, but is decaying due to neglect. After the August 4 Beirut explosion, I would find myself walking and looking for alleys I once visited, houses I once stopped to admire or markets and neighbourhoods I would find solace in. On one of my recent walks, (.)
« Où habitez-vous ? » La question semble anodine, mais la réponse fournit de multiples indices sur la personne qui y répond. Par la localisation de l’habitat (ville, banlieue, campagne, quartier…), sa typologie (appartement, maison), son occupation (habiter en famille, en couple, seul, en colocation…) chacun a vite fait de se faire une idée de son interlocuteur, tant le logement est un marqueur social qui fait état des inégalités. La crise du logement affecte chaque pays du monde arabe de manière (.)