Learning to Live

Lana Ghazale

Instructor’s Introduction

Writing about the love of one’s homeland while that place – bilad, in Arabic – is under siege and the safety of family members is unknown is a creative act of enormous emotional courage. Power in creative nonfiction often arises from such truth-telling, the channeling of what writer Sonya Huber refers to as the “body voice” – the seat of longing, memory, sensation, grief and love – from the heart of vulnerability. When writers access that voice, even and perhaps particularly in a time of profound grief, they are also inviting the intimacy of “mimesis,” a writer’s animating the rich details of her own experience. In Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto, Huber goes on to say that these details “trigger moments that feel alive in the reader’s head,” a process she describes as linking the lives of writer and reader in “an urge toward empathy or connection.” Viewed this way, writing is not merely the capture of memory but an act that resists the dehumanization, “othering,” and reduction to tropes of the people we are told are “enemy.” What the writer Lana has presented in these pages, then, is nothing less than an invitation to love not only our neighbor, but ourselves – to trust the impulses of our own “body voice,” which tells us in smells, sounds, and sensations, that we have more in common with all people than not. At the risk of cliché, Lana’s writing is a gift…and an uncommonly generous one.

Melanie Smith

From the Writer

The impulse to write this piece came from a frustration with the way Arabs, specifically Lebanese, are so often reduced to our headlines of violence, corruption, collapse. This piece is an attempt to capture the fullness of life in Lebanon: the good, the bad, and everything that exists in between.

Part of what I wanted to convey is a tension that I think many people in the diaspora carry: the guilt of having left, the disorientation of watching life continue normally somewhere else, and the strange experience of being physically safe while remaining emotionally tethered to a place that isn’t. Diaspora is often framed as departure, but for many, it is something more ongoing. It is a constant pull between the life you are building abroad and the one you left behind.

I hope this piece offers an image of Lebanon that goes beyond what makes the news: a place that is, above everything else, deeply loved by the people who come from it.

Learning to Live

One of my earliest memories takes place on the balcony of my apartment in Beirut. My grandfather was looking down to the street below, as he still does, with his hands clasped behind his back. These moments were the only times he glanced away from the news, as far as I can remember. He was not the only one. We lived in the Middle East, who could look away?

I was 5 years old when I first understood just how “third-world” our third-world country is. It’s in the way the country goes dark every 3 hours, but only for a few minutes. It’s in the way the water takes 27 minutes to heat for my shower, but that gives me more time to be with my family. It’s in the way the roads twist and cave and rise without warning, how I once thought that made every car ride more fun. Then came the day the road stopped being a game. I don’t remember the sound of the crash, only my mother’s voice screaming loud enough to drown it out, then the silence that she left behind. I didn’t know how years of corruption and neglect could sneak into something as simple as a drive home. All I knew was that the road didn’t care who it tore out of my life, reflecting the politicians who allowed the road to do just that.

I was 13 when I forgave Lebanon and began to fight for it. I had developed a deep love and acceptance for my country and its people. The kind of people who have always been so misunderstood and misrepresented. The news outlets portrayed us as violent and angry. They never showed how we wait every year for April to come, so we can ski and swim on the same day. They concealed how we call strangers “habibi”, meaning “my love” because that’s how much we adore each other. That’s why, when the revolution came in 2019, it didn’t feel like a political movement, but like a reunion. It was millions of us remembering we deserve better. I stood in the middle of the streets I had grown up on, watching my father pick up cans of tear gas and throw them back to the other side while I waved my flag high. For the first time, it felt like Lebanon belonged to us. Not to the men who inherited power instead of earning it, not to the corrupt leaders, not to the headlines that only told half the truth. Even in our darkest moments, we found ways to celebrate. A wedding passed through one afternoon, the bride lifting her dress above shattered glass as strangers formed a circle around her, clapping like she was one of our own. Music echoed through the sound of rubber bullets hitting the walls of buildings around us. We treat celebration as a form of resistance. It’s the only way we’ve learned to live with the unbearable. We remind ourselves, over and over again, that we’re still here.

I was 14 when Lebanon broke my heart again. The ground shook for 2 seconds before it happened. It was long enough to wonder if it was an earthquake, just long enough to be afraid, but not long enough to brace for what followed. When the explosion happened, we lost cell phone service instantly. For four and a half minutes, I didn’t know if my family was alive. I sat, bleeding, ringing echoing in my ears, not knowing if the people I loved were dead or alive. The first time I heard my sister’s voice after the explosion was when I could breathe again. I didn’t sleep for the 3 days that came after the port explosion. I shared a bed with my sister and our two cousins, huddled close as if the walls might fall again. We stayed silent. Every sound felt too loud. After the shock wore off, we began to rebuild, as we are conditioned to do. We shared food with neighbors and pretended the cracks in the walls were there before. We sweep the damage into corners and tell ourselves we’re lucky to be alive.

I was 15 when Lebanon drove my entire family away. They scattered to places on opposite ends of the world: Ghana, Australia, Venezuela, and beyond. One by one, they packed their lives into suitcases and left behind the only home we had ever known. It wasn’t because they wanted to, it was because staying had become too much to bear. Somehow, we found joy in the distance. Every summer, no matter how far we had scattered, everyone returned to Beirut. It didn’t matter that the power cut in the middle of dinner, or that we had to fan ourselves through the night. I grew to love sharing my bathroom with six others and giving up my bed for the couch, as long as my people were home. There’s a kind of closeness that exists in Lebanon, where nothing is guaranteed, and so everything is shared: time, space, food, grief, love. Our country, even in its brokenness, still knows how to bring us back together.

I was 16 the first time the war planes flew overhead. The sound started low, like a hum you could ignore, until it grew too heavy to pretend it was anything else. I remember looking at my sister and felt a quiet relief just seeing her there. Her presence brought a sense of comfort I hadn’t known two years earlier, when the explosion hit. We didn’t say anything. We were born knowing what to do: wait, listen, don’t move. But that’s all that happened that day. No missiles. No strike. Just the sound. A reminder. It didn’t take much to remember that safety here is always uncertain. It’s difficult to explain what it means to love a place that scares you. To feel your heart swell and tighten at the same time. You learn to live with it, to cherish the quiet while preparing for the noise. You memorize electricity schedules and the potholes on the way to school, but also the way the light looks over the sea at sunset, or how the man at the corner store knows your favorite snack and asks how your father’s doing. This is what it means to belong to a place that hurts you and heals you all at once.

I was 17 the first time I heard the bombs. For an instant, I thought it had been a sonic boom. We’d learned how to tell the difference: two loud distinct sounds, a split-second apart, meant a jet had broken the sound barrier. But this time, there was only one. A phone call from my father confirmed it. He was almost too calm. He had been here before. Forty years earlier, one of the many times the occupation invaded during his childhood. He told me to sit in the hallway, away from the windows. For the rest of my time in Lebanon, the bombs kept coming. The sound settled into our days, always somewhere in the background. We learned to live with it. To pause mid-sentence and then to keep talking once the echo faded. When winter came, the thunder and the bombs sounded the same. The sky shook whether it was nature or man. We planned our days to avoid the strikes. We never went south of Beirut and our windows were always cracked open at least a few centimeters. My home in the village was occupied by family friends, whose home was no longer standing. There was no hesitation. We made space. School days blurred into one another. Some weeks we went, others we didn’t. We stopped marking calendars because they no longer meant anything. Plans were tentative, always followed by inshallah. Uncertainty became the only constant, and we learned to live around it.

I was 18 when I left everything I’ve ever known. It was an unspoken understanding that existed among everyone in Lebanon: if you want a shot at a future, then you have to leave. Leaving didn’t feel like a choice. It wasn’t my choice. Despite the blackouts and bombs, I wanted nothing more than to stay. Instead, I left my heart in Lebanon and I didn’t find comfort in the distance. There’s no peace in safety when your people are still in danger. Here, life moved on. Classes continued. People made dinner plans and gossiped about things that felt unbearably small. Survivor’s guilt creeps its way into my days, while I try to lead a regular life, as everyone here seems to do. But I still flinch at thunder and helicopters sound far too much like the drones that circled us daily. The sound of the garbage truck outside my dorm makes my heart race before I can reason with it. I find that some part of me is always waiting for the next sound.

I come from a country that holds you close while it leaves bruises you learn to call home. Still, there is nowhere I’d rather be. I carry my country in everything I do: in the way I find beauty in chaos and in the way I never take quiet for granted. It lives in my laughter and in the food I crave. I count the days until I return to Beirut, then brace myself for the flight back to reality. But one day, Beirut will be my reality again. I’ll unpack without a return ticket, wake up to the sound of the Mediterranean waves, and stay.

Lana Ghazale is a sophomore from Beirut, Lebanon studying Human Physiology on the pre-medical track, with a minor in Public Health. Shortly after leaving Beirut to start university in Boston in the fall of 2024, war broke out in Lebanon, causing her to feel even more isolated from her home, but also unable to be fully present during her first semester in Boston. After a ceasefire was declared, Lana was able to spend her winter break in Beirut. Spending time at home gave her a renewed perspective on the distance between lived experience and the way the country is portrayed. Lana enrolled in WR 153, which provided her with a space to express her feelings and experiences through her writing. Lana is grateful to Melanie Smith, her WR 153 professor, for her understanding and unwavering support.