I.
Before I arrived, before I read Darwish, before I knew where it was on a map and some time after my mother tried to describe what her father’s father told her about it, Beirut was a part of me. At family gatherings in Boston or New Jersey or New Hampshire, sitting on wall-to-wall carpets or on soft couches in rooms with homemade tabouleh and store-bought hommous on the coffee table, conversation would struggle toward remembering. None of us actually know why the strangers whose blood we share left Beirut in the 1920s – there are rumors of flight from the law or from politics, others say our ascendants were merchants seeking a better life.
But of this there is no dissent: “…the city was like Paris” (say those who had never been; after all, if it was so great why did my family leave and never go back?). They were repeating the nostalgia of their parents. Our forebears each had compelling reasons to come to this country but the reasons eventually dissolved into the history they carved.
The one that still fascinates me though is about my mother’s father’s mother’s sister, great aunt Lathifi, at that time a young girl. Her parents packed their bags for the United States, gave her a few coins and asked her to go to the store to buy some bread for the journey. When she returned, they were gone to America, taking her favorite donkey to get to the boat.
II.
“I asked her how she felt at the place. She told me that it is not good and that she missed her family. And I was counseling her every weekend. We met at the church; all the Ethiopians came. If the people they work for are fair, they bring them to the church so we can meet and talk about our family and talk about how we can help each other.”
– “Metasibya”, Beirut, speaking in 2006 about another Ethiopian girl she met in Beirut
Needless to say, I loved Beirut, as any young man does, and could write here only about that. But this story is not about coffee in Hamra, nor about a night in Ashrafieh when a battalion of Lebanese army soldiers prevented me from entering the nightclub, nor about the architecture of confusion left by decades of bullets, nor the sweaty minivan on the road through Saida to Suur or the sunset I watched through the curtain as I arrived or the hospitality of a Shia family or the meal of kibbeh they served me in a bombed-out building in Zebqine where I made photographs with people in the village. This story is not about me returning to Beirut long after my family fled; it is about a girl I knew in Addis Ababa, who fled her home for Beirut.
III.
I was on that flight from Ethiopia because I had been working for the previous eight years on a series of shortfilms with “Sudden Flowers,” a group of twenty-three Ethiopian children affected by HIV/AIDS, each of whom was left alone at roughly the same age as Lathifi. Two of the members, Daniel, a young Ethiopian filmmaker, and a beautiful girl I will call “Metasibya,” were given an award and flown to South Africa to train with other young African filmmakers.
Metasibya made an impression on the South African trainers. She won praise for her acting and her clear sense of the kinds of stories she wanted to tell, informed by the intensity of Metasibya’s own story: her mother contracted HIV when Metasibya was young and begged for money to keep her daughter in a one-room home and in school. Metasibya sometimes walked past with her friends on her way home from school, her mother begging on the side of the road without acknowledging her; both knew that Meti’s friends would not look kindly on the daughter of a beggar.
When Meti and Daniel returned from South Africa, they embarked on a new film with the others in Sudden Flowers, which eventually won second prize at a film festival in Addis Ababa. But Daniel ended up making the film without her. She had called him one day early in the shooting to say that she would leave for Beirut the next morning. He hastily organized a goodbye party for her with the twenty or so other members of Sudden Flowers. I was in Beirut at the time, so I could not attend. The photographs of the party show that everyone is crying and dancing. One of the boys told me later he did not know what to do, so he cranked up the music and they danced until the taxi took her to the airport.
IV.
Eighteen months later I was sipping coffee at Ta Marbouta in Beirut when I received a call from Daniel in Addis Ababa. He told me over the phone that Metasibya was coming to Beirut and did I know anyone she could contact. I gave him a few phone numbers and before I got off the phone with Daniel, I asked him to give her his video camera.
Looking back, I think I wanted her to have a camera so she could reflect on her experiences as she was going through them, so she could retain a distance that might provide comfort as she endured what she was about to endure. More than making a movie, I wanted Meti to continue making things, to be a viewer rather than an object. I just wanted her to have the camera; Daniel and I never discussed what would be done with the videotapes she shot.
The next day, I sent an email to a friend recounting our conversation:
“…the other weirdly big, half-depressing half-i-don’t-know-what news is that one fo the kids from ethiopia, Meti, the one who won the laughing contest and who won that big UNICEF award, decided last minute to work as a house-maid in beirut. she said she couldnt bear to watch her mother beg on the streets any longer. i got an email from danny yesterday so i scrambled to make sure that she got a video camera to take with her to document her experiences. i can’t believe it. it happened so quickly: she decided on sunday and left on monday. can you imagine the system that is set up so that girls can decide, on the spur of the moment, witihout considering the consequences, that they want to leave? the other kids are so depressed about it. i don’t really know what to feel. it is hard for me to conceive of flight. i have to respect her decision but i am just worried about her. Plus, I didn’t think it through last night but i should have gone to the airport to meet her. i don’t know what it will be like to get in touch with her now. apparently, there are menus of girls, telling what training they have, what language, etc. but i’ve also heard some stories of physical and sexual abuse; being pimped out by their “masters” to other men. i really hope meti got that video camera and i really hope i can find her.
I don’t know why I thought the video camera could protect her.V.On my flight back to Addis, only two of the other passengers were young Ethiopian women. I dreamt of the return voyage of a slave ship.
I left Beirut without hearing from Metasibya.
Nine months pass. Daniel receives infrequent phone calls from Beirut. Meti’s mother receives monthly payments of $100, the entirety of Meti’s earnings. I return to Addis Ababa to continue making films with Sudden Flowers. One day, my friend calls me to smother offers to make me coffee.
