A Memoir of War
Sediments
My mom lines up her bottles of water on the kitchen counter like a regiment of soldiers. There are a dozen or so of them that she fills up from her drinking-water faucet. She then stores some more in the fridge in case some guests ask to drink it cold.
“You never know,” she says, “when we might run out of water.”
The civil war gradually eroded Lebanon’s infrastructure. No pipe system was left untouched, neither that for drinking water nor that for what we call “service” water, used for washing and cleaning. With little chlorination to kill germs and bacteria and no filtration, the water that flows through these old and rusty pipes contains high levels of salts, lead, and other impurities. This forces everybody to buy water—except for my mom. She still drinks tap water, which gives her a special immunity and a mysterious glow.
My mom stores water and food items as if she were still living in a time of war, anticipating penury and closures at any moment. She is oblivious to the passing of time and expiration dates. When I stay with her during the breaks, it takes me a day or two to realize that the food or sweets lying around could be a day or a month or even a year old.
Furnished during the late seventies in an eclectic, baroque style, my mom’s apartment is a veritable war museum. In this museum you find silk sofas, brass chandeliers, Persian rugs, crystal bonbonnières, and hundreds of knickknacks strewn across tables and shelves. These objects, which require an army to clean, are witnesses to a bygone era. As the dust settles on and around them, they await those who have left yet might return one day: a dead husband and children who now live abroad. But until then, nothing can be touched, and especially not my mom’s water bottles. She is unfazed by cleanliness arguments and hoarding accusations, no matter how convincing or scientific they might sound. She has her system and knows where everything is and should be, until she decides otherwise.
But what system lets water sit in bottles for weeks and months? One can see in the bottoms brownish sedimentation, a mix of mud with yet-undiscovered particles.
The first thing my mom drinks in the morning is two cups of warm water. She warms the water either in a pot on the stove or in a little electric kettle, depending on the availability of electricity that day. She tells everyone that drinking warm water in the morning flushes out all fats and poisons and ensures a vigorous metabolism and a radiant, milky skin. For a woman who was born during World War II and who abhors needles and knives, water holds the secret to her beauty. It accentuates her big blue eyes and earns her compliments wherever she goes.
My mom’s recipe for healthy living can be traced to a series of books on homeopathic medicine by Sabri Qabbani, a doctor from Damascus who belongs to the Syrian branch of my mom’s family—the Qabbanis (or Kabbanis). He started a radio show and a magazine in the fifties that advocated healthy eating habits and lifestyles. His work became a bible for the generation of enlightened Arabs who came of age in the second part of the twentieth century. Having survived wars and famines, colonialism and nationalism, this generation would focus on physical health and stress reduction. Unknowingly, perhaps, they were getting ready to confront far greater horrors that lay ahead.
Qabbani’s book Your Doctor by Your Side occupies a special place in my maternal grandfather’s library. Entire paragraphs are underlined and copious notes are found in the margins. The book includes detailed advice on nutrition and disease prevention, and recommendations on how to avoid depression and bad moods.
In the chapter “Laugh…Laugh…You Will Heal,” Qabbani describes the reaction of the nervous system to sadness and stress, the poisons of the modern age. He explains how adrenaline is secreted and by which gland and to what effect. Ultimately, he advances a radical thesis: “To preserve mental and physical health, avoid depressing places, never attend funerals, and never—ever—read sad stories.”
In addition to following Qabbani’s eating and drinking regimen, my mom embraced his “no sadness, no badness” motto. Her father, uncles, and aunts lived long and healthy lives, well into their nineties. Good genes, coupled with Qabbani’s recipes, have given my mom special pride in belonging to a family that has managed to reap the benefits of modern life while keeping its poisons at bay. And she would never allow anything or anyone to come in the way of her healthy rituals and family pride. No doctor could ever take the place of Sabri Qabbani in my mother’s heart.
But fate had other plans—most notably, my father.
After my mom married a gynecologist in 1970, her homeopathic worldview came crashing into that of Western medicine. My dad suffered from ulcers and heart disease and was a heavy smoker and prone to stress. In the face of this, my mom defended her eating and drinking rituals and good mood with great ferocity. And when she gave birth to her only child, she had a natural birth and decided to breastfeed. It was only when the ungrateful four-day-old bit the nipple that fed him that she decided to wean him, unmiraculously transforming milk to formula.
The weaning episode, which I heard about repeatedly while growing up, caused Mommy a great deal of sadness. With time, I understood that the infanta dentata out to bite and hurt had to be stopped so that mom’s recipe for healthy living could continue undisturbed.
While my mom gave her little cherub formula to preserve her milky skin, Hagar from the Bible gave her son Ishmael water so he could survive in the desert and found a nation. Unable to bear children to Abraham, Sarah offered her handmaiden Hagar as a mating partner for her husband. But soon after Hagar gave birth, Sarah miraculously got pregnant. With the worsening drama between the two women and their boys in the household, Sarah asked Abraham to repudiate Hagar and her son.
The exact details of the story vary across monotheistic traditions and texts, from the Midrash to the Bible to the Quran. In the Muslim version, Hagar and her son found themselves in an arid wilderness, forcing the poor mother to run seven times between two hills in a desperate quest for water. Exhausted and on the verge of giving up,
She saw an angel at the place of Zamzam,
digging the earth with his heel (or his wing), till
water flowed from that place. She started to make
something like a basin around it, using her hand
in this way, and started filling her waterskin with
water with her hands, and the water was flowing
out after she had scooped some of it.
Hagar saved her son by running back and forth between two hills. In doing so, it was as if she had activated a pulley, working horizontally to get the water up to the surface to be stored and then consumed. In memory of this, Muslims during their pilgrimage to Mecca reenact Hagar’s quest between the two hills, which is complemented by the vertical movement of water. The angel Gabriel descended like a giant eagle, battering the earth with his powerful heel to bring water up to the surface. This bird of heaven dug a well as people do today, by piercing through the layers of earth to release the liquid of life. Water thus came from above and from below, delivering Hagar and her son from the wilderness and fulfilling what was written in the stars.
The story of water and the interchangeability of water, milk, and wine have been staples of Middle Eastern beliefs and culture since before the wedding in Cana. From Jochebed’s tossing of her son Moses in the Nile only to see him return as a prophet, to the Zamzam Spring spurting out of the warm sands near Mecca to keep Hagar and her son alive, water is at the origin of mother-son relationships and of monotheistic religions at the same time.
In the region’s mythologies, water is best represented by the constellation Aquarius—the Water Bearer, controlling flows, temperaments, and destinies. His name is associated with the Latin word for water, aqua, which has Sanskrit roots. Aquarius carries a large jug and pours the water from high above, causing rivers to overflow and human destinies to tumble. As it gradually makes its way to the ground, water creates pathways that take the shape of the scars that one carries, and of the lines of one’s palm. The water is poured slowly, gently, leading heroes to falter as they embark on their journey. Consulting the stars or reading palms is a way to decipher whether the hero will live or die, whether a mother will go on a maddening quest for water to save her son or whether she will walk into the horizon while he cries at the sky.
Some Greek sources reveal that the constellation Aquarius is based on the story of a beautiful Trojan prince named Ganymede. It is said that Zeus himself abducted this young prince so he could refill his cup with nectar on Mount Olympus. In the Iliad, Homer tells us that Ganymede was “the most beautiful of youths, so much so the immortals raised him up on high to be Zeus’ cupbearer and live with them.” When Zeus saw Ganymede playing on the hills of Troy, he was unable to resist his beauty. So he disguised himself as an eagle and swooped down from high above to grab the young prince. It is said that seeing him being taken away, Ganymede’s dogs kept barking at the sky.
Water is at the origin of miracles, myth, and love of all kinds. In fact, much of Arabic and Persian love poetry is dedicated to the figure of the beautiful cup-bearer or waiter known as al-saqi, who initially started pouring water and then quickly moved to wine. With every pour and every glimpse of his beautiful eyes, the cupbearer makes time flow.
Avenzoar (Ibn Zuhr), a twelfth-century Andalusian physician and poet from Sevilla, composed one of the most iconic poems about the cupbearer, which has made its way to us in song:
O cupbearer, our complaints are addressed to you;
We have called upon you even though you do not
listen!
Many a drinking partner have I loved for his bright
face,
And from his hands have I drunk wine!
Whenever he was aroused from his drunkenness
He drew the wineskin toward him, sat back on his
heels,
And gave me to drink four [drinks] from four [cups].
What is wrong with my eye that it is blinded by a
glance?
The cupbearer is the handsome lover, the savior, and the decider of fate up in the firmament. The poet calls on him to hear his complaint, refill his cup, and fulfill his destiny. The cupbearer can relieve the poet from his worries by listening and pouring more wine. Through his beauty and attention, the cupbearer allows the poet to dream and to gaze at the stars that reflect like a mirror his past and future.
Life’s mystery, which starts with water, leads to different pathways and desires. It leads explorers and poets to seek out water’s origins, following rivers like the Nile upstream, or excavating the site of Ganymede’s abduction on the hills of Troy, in modern-day Turkey. In this part of the world, where all life starts with water, fountains and creeks and songs about cupbearers arouse the imagination and connect people to ancient recipes and secret writings. When visiting the Middle East in the 1840s, the French author Gérard de Nerval described the water boutiques of Constantinople, marveling at the bottles’ various provenances and properties:
In shops of this sort, you can buy the waters of
different countries and different years. The Nile
water is the most esteemed: it is the only water that
the Sultan drinks, and is a part of the tribute paid
to him from Alexandria. It is considered favorable
to fecundity. The water of the Euphrates, somewhat
bitter and a little sharp to the taste, is recommended
to the weak and debilitated. Danube water,
strong in salts, is favored by those of an energetic
temperament. Then there are waters of different
years. The Nile water of 1833 is highly appreciated:
it is very expensive and sold in bottles corked and
sealed.
Nerval continues that for Europeans, water lacks these homeopathic characteristics and holy origins, which elevates it in the eyes of the Ottomans to the status of luxury goods with distinct denominations and production years that rival those of wine. For Nerval, bottles stand on the shelves like sacred objects that heal those who believe in their magic powers. But to heal and nourish, water must first rest after its long journey across rivers and seas. Perhaps this is where Sabri Qabbani and my mom, descendants of those sophisticated Ottomans, get their water recipes and drinking rituals.
Years of conflict in the Middle East—and conflict over resources, including water—made people forget water’s divine origin and miraculous properties. A far cry from the boutiques of Constantinople or the cupbearing on Mount Olympus or in Andalusia, the water we drank during the Lebanese Civil War came in plastic containers. This water had no time for aging and sedimentation, no time to reveal the messages that came from the past and from high above. The war left no time for things to settle, or for reading and storytelling.
The iconic water container during the civil war was made of plastic and called a galon (plural, galonet). This Arabized “gallon,” which broke with its Anglo-Saxon origin as a unit of measurement, circulated in Beirut in different shapes and colors. Some galonet were rectangular and had handles like suitcases, which made them easy to carry. Others were oval shaped, resembling the jar that Aquarius holds up in the sky. But the most common galon held twenty liters, about five gallons, and is the plastic version of the green metal jerrican used to store gasoline that was popularized by the American army during World War II.
In the building where we lived, every household had several galonet. Ours were turquoise and had red caps and held twenty-five liters of water. When they were empty, we stored them in the attic, and when they were filled, we lined them up on the kitchen balcony or in a bathroom. They were easy to distinguish from the neighbors’ containers. Our galonet were unique, as they had been purchased long ago, even before the war had started. And they were large, which meant that there were people in our household strong enough to carry them, or obstinate enough to drag them up the stairs until they reached their destination. It didn’t matter that carrying heavy things made one short, as I often heard. I was determined to deliver the water to those who needed it, including my family.
With the electricity off for months at a time, we had to buy water and find ways to distribute it to every floor of our eight-story building. These were the eighties in Beirut, a time of war and penury, marked by bombings and interminable sieges. In this environment, water distribution developed into an elaborate economy made up of containers of different kinds, and of schedules and needs based on family sizes and levels of cleanliness. As containers circulated up and down our building, we became familiar with those that belonged to the different neighbors. Water usage revealed how often people washed or cleaned— intimate habits being paraded for all to see. Containers’ numbers, sizes, and delivery frequency thus made for good gossip, exposing obsessive-compulsive behavior (sirseb) and the gradual toll war was taking on individuals, families, and apartment buildings.
To fill the containers in our building, we had to buy water from tanks transported by trucks. The trucks would pull into our parking lot and empty their cargo into a large metal cistern equipped with a faucet for water distribution. And though we lived in a modern building with a German-made elevator and porcelain sinks, bathtubs, and bidets, the absence of electricity and the sporadic water that came from the water company into our pipes forced us to buy water so we could bathe, clean, and drink.
It was the age of Aquarius.
At ten, I was responsible for water distribution in our building. I’m not quite sure how I got this position, but I know that I was drawn to water like an amphibian. To this day, the very sight of water brings joy to my heart. Whenever the doorman decided to wash the stairs, I would volunteer to help, hoping to partake in the splashing and soaping that started on the eighth floor and cascaded down the marble staircase to the building’s entrance. Whenever a friend came over, I would beg to have the red inflatable pool on the balcony filled up so we could play and splash. Water, due to its scarcity perhaps, was the language of play and love, and the container of early memories and lasting desire.
When the neighbors brought down their galonet to be filled from the tank in the parking lot, I lined them up and filled them in the order in which they arrived. Once filled, the containers would be tied to a rope attached to a pulley that we had installed on the roof. The other kids and I would pull this rope to bring up the containers to their specific floors: the blue one to the fourth floor, the red one to the sixth, and so on. It was a very simple system, one that had to adapt modern living to a time that preceded electricity and running water, bypassing the faucets and pipes that the war had now rendered obsolete.
Cupbearing was back in force, reversing the transformation of water into wine in myth and poetry and undoing miracles at weddings near and far.
While the lack of electricity necessary to bring water up to the different floors made us buy water, the lack of water from the water company forced us to dig wells and draw on groundwater. The day our well was dug, I stood in front of our building watching a gigantic drill pound the earth. The drilling was akin to medieval warfare, with the ram crashing against the gate of a doomed city. As the pounding went on, first came a reddish mud, then a tanned viscous liquid, and finally, finally, water, flooding the street and making the access to our building impossible. The diggers laid a border of cinder blocks around the drilling spot to control the overflow. But to no avail. The fluids oozing out of the belly of the earth were engulfing everything. I was bewildered at the transformation of muddy fluids into a clear liquid that made its way to the top and flushed everything out. It’s as if I were witnessing the drama of extraction, like a scene from Genesis. The appearance of water at the end marked the culmination of Noah’s flood, but we did not know if we had survived or drowned at the end.
Bombing cities “back into the Stone Age,” as the war hawks say, brought Beirut’s ancient rubble back to the surface. It forced one of the most modern cities in the Middle East to face its long history of suffering, stretching from Job’s lamentations on the Bei- rut coast to earthquakes, invasions, displacement, and civil wars. This war forced city dwellers to dig wells, buy water, and store it in parking lots and in makeshift tanks in their homes. Every household had to install at least one water tank in the attic, in the kitchen, or even on the balcony. Well drilling, water distribution, and tank construction and installation turned into a prosperous economy, pushing inhabitants to renounce in their daily chores, habits, and beliefs their modern outlooks. This economy revealed desperate attempts to survive the war and regain control over livelihood, hygiene, and body functions.
The water we dug up and drank during the war prevented us from forgetting the chain of being and its volatile order, which could spiral out of control at any moment. We assumed we were modern, but living our modernity on the edge, as it was constantly threatened by the portals and faucets through which gush the miraculous and the archaic. Obsessive-compulsive behaviors to which the war had given rise or accentuated—and which will only get worse with age, believe me— ushered in a new archaeology of water. Digging deeper in this site uncovers graves and wounds affecting stone and flesh, cities and people, and mothers who eventually let go of their sons to save their lives.
The war pushed Beirut to fit the perception of a water-starved and desertic Middle East and to reckon with its own geology, history, and name. In ancient Semitic languages, Beeroth (Berytus in Latin) means “well,” which is also the origin of the word bir (“well”) in Arabic. Beirut went back in time, traveled upstream to its genealogical origins, and reenacted its moment of creation for all to see. The city regressed, but sought out pathways that connected it to its past, and to its fate as prescribed by star constellations and the whims of youths pouring nectar in the heavens or filling plastic containers in parking lots. The wells that were dug up were real and mythical, saving people’s lives and connecting Beirut to epics and tales from sacred texts. And just like in Hagar’s case, the divine intervention during the war came in the shape of giant drills that broke with their hooves the layers of earth to extract water and save Ishmael’s descendants from thirst and death.
The water immersion and distribution that I practiced as a kid during the war prepared me for the cupbearing I would practice many years later as a host at parties and dinners in times of crises. Beirut’s famous “I love life” slogan, which shields its inhabitants from trauma and pain, swaps water for wine and enacts the miracle of survival in both dark and happy moments. But every time I return to my mother’s house and contemplate the water bottles on her kitchen counter, I remember what we have lived through, what I’m not allowed to forget.
My mom stores her water bottles like a weight from the past. The water comes from pipes and faucets that keep the time of war flowing. The sediments in the bottom of her bottles are suspended like memories that refuse to let go of her, and her of them. The mud at the bottom transforms her bottles into crystal balls, flickering a past that awaits those who can decipher it. To do so one has to read the inscriptions in the mud, and to look up at the stars, gazing at the Aquarius constellation and the beautiful Ganymede in the hope of knowing whether the hero has survived or not.
To this day, my mom hasn’t given up on her holistic system. She doesn’t really drink from the tap because her bottles filter themselves—by letting the water sit for days on end, she has invented an ingenious system for purifying the impure. This ability to flush out the poisonous by leaving it undisturbed is the survival tool that she learned from her family and from Sabri Qabbani’s books. Left to form sediments in the bottom of the bottles, my mom’s water will not poison her but rather give her a special immunity, to go on glowing and smiling no matter the badness around her. This is how she survived the war.
My mom’s system to filter both water and war is the same one that Nerval discovered in the boutiques of Constantinople—modern-day Istanbul, and my mom’s favorite city. The sediments in the bottles are the sad stories that Qabbani warned against. They wait for me to read them every time I visit her. But as a Beiruti who grew up in the eighties and as a literary scholar who specializes in deciphering words in multiple languages, I find myself facing a text that I cannot fully understand. These are the dangerous writings that theories of literature warn against—those signs and words that take us down pipes leading to the origins of the self and of memory.
Those writings also lead us down the pathways of cupbearing during war, of caring for grown-ups who were drunk on conflict and beauty rituals. Do children feel cared for by seducing with cups and plastic containers those trapped in modern buildings with no elevator or running water?
The cupbearers of old Arabic poetry and Mount Olympus came knocking at the door once, carrying colorful containers of life in times of war.
