“I’m knowledgeable in sports, arts, culture, and politics,” Haj Ali repeats a matter-of-factly, fumbling back and forth between colloquial and formal Arabic. Haj Ali served forty-six and a half years of his life in the Beirut Municipality as the Head of the Social Aid Registry in which he became the talk of Khandak Al Ghameek in the Zokak Al Blat neighborhood.
“My childhood, I spent in the Achrafieh area, our neighbors were ministers and representatives, well-known architects…” he trails off to mention names that are beyond me. Going back to his beloved Achrafieh, he treasures it for holding his youth in memories: “I always pay visits to Achrafieh, my friends and family there… I used to play in the Al Sabbah football team.” His voice clicks with enthusiasm as he starts reminiscing about his football stories and how he climbed from one position to the other, including playing with the Nejmeh team back in his youth. Nejmeh Sporting club is a Lebanese football club based in the Manara district of Ras Beirut. Haj Ali is seventy years old now, a number so big and loyal, such as the forty years invested in football. The municipality sold the playground he used to play on in 2005. He flips through his life like chapters in a book and concludes bitter reality: “The Kabbani household has been in Achrafieh for a hundred years now. When I was 25 years old, we left the neighborhood for war-related reasons, and my mother bought an apartment here in Basta Al Tahta.” The fate of his childhood folded onto itself, and left Haj Ali with more places to mourn.
We’re two people sitting in his living room, but I can hear the happenings in the building next to theirs, a baby’s crying as if unattended; it’s crowded as if we were lounging on the balcony. Records say, Haj Ali helped 600 families in this neighborhood, he received a total of 8,500 requests for help from people all over Beirut. The last request he received was from a woman with a missing file at the social aid registry. She had started crying, helpless. How could such a mistake happen? “Probably, one of the employees had her file tucked into his drawer and got sick. During his vacation away, we would have been collecting the cases to file them and so you can see the events unfolding then.” But Haj Ali reassures that “the last one to submit [the worried lady with the lost file] was the first one to get paid! [amended]” With a heartfelt smile, he beams: “She was my last chance to do some Sadaka [helpful/charity] work.”
Haj Ali recalls that when he was working in 2011, a housewife living in Verdun exposed a huge act of corruption that had been taking place. He was unaware of it until later when it was reported by Younes Al Sayyed in Al Liwaa, a local Arabic newspaper. He remembers that two billion and seven hundred and fifty million Lebanese Liras were embezzled. Wide-eyed, erratically gesturing, he starts: “The group of 30 people were retired workers of the finance department in the municipality. They stole the book of invoices and forged many.” Haj Ali’s wife gets excited and pitches in: “So they would go from door to door and take fees from innocent people, until…” They’re now in jail, after 10 years of theft.
Haj Ali trails off often into blurry memories and whispers the word Ahdeth in between. It steals my attention: “What Ahdeth?” I interrupt for clarity.
“The 1975 war, of course, the civil war.”
Either politics found its way into the conversation or it’s simply difficult to escape war stories. He points to the stack of old newspapers casually thrown onto the coffee table, his five-year-old granddaughter pulls a few more out from behind the couch cushion. “I have witnessed five wars. Every ten years there’s a war: from 1956 in Egypt, 1952 revolution in Lebanon, 1973, 1967, to 1975. I learned to differentiate one bomb/attack from the other by sound.”
Having fasted all day, he opens a bag of pita bread and cuts it into little pieces, then dips it into his yellow lentil dish. He didn’t need to fast because Ramadan had not yet knocked his door, but fasting was an act of faith, and many Muslims took pleasure in doing it for health or Taqwa [worship] reasons. “My favorite place to be is in mosques, unfortunately, I pray home nowadays as I have a herniated disk (back pain). Alhamdulillah, we’re committed to religion.” May God be with the Lebanese people; he says shrugging off misfortune and goes back to a recollection of Lebanon’s glorious golden days.
Haj Ali enjoys Lebanese theatre and comedy acts, so he recalls: “Al Dirwande on the TV show “El Denye Hek” (Life is Like This) would sometimes incorporate impromptu acts, and so once, he was jailed for 3 days because he delivered an act where he slandered three major politicians in one line: the President of the Republic, Head of Government, and Speaker of the House of Representatives.” The story tells of puns approximating corrupt politicians to shoes, thus lessening their worth, and indicating they deserve to be placed on feet. Haj Ali describes the actor’s lean figure and funny features, weak in comparison to the bold play Al Dirwande staged. He repeats this story twice in case I can’t understand the humor behind it, as I’m from the newer generation, even comedy is different.
“24/7 electricity, Beirut was beautiful before downtown’s completion.” When I arrived at his building, I had to climb five floors while the electricity was out before its due time, trash stored in every nook and cranny, between the windows.
“Marcel Khalife was my classmate in 1976 when I used to study music and its composition in the Conservatoire.” He still remembers his first lesson there, taking an interest in percussion. He remembers his first teacher, Toufic El Basha, a well-known composer. Haj Ali wrote fifteen songs of which some were about ghazal while others were about Lebanese patriotism and folklore. With his coarse voice, he starts singing the lyrics he has written, complimenting himself in between: “Allah aala hek! Shi rae3.” (God’s glory! This is super). Never failing to forget a line, he conjures it under his breath, and his gruff and guttural voice fills the room. “A song I wrote 30 years ago will soon be sung by a chorus with the Lebanese army stomping their legs to the rhythm,” his ambition promises.
He tells the story of a song called “Light up the lantern” (قنديل شعشع). The lyrics describe two lovers during the civil war who go down to the basement to meet with one another, but because of the blackout, they light up their lanterns and speak in signals. He got married to Aisha Kabbani in 1978 and with her, he moved all over from Beirut to Saida to El Eqlim to the mountains to Syria. “Zokak el Blat was a demarcation during the civil war between East and West just like Chiyeh and Ain El Remmaneh. Snipers would shoot here; you can see the bullet holes in the buildings all over. We left this place for 10 years but when we came back, we found the same people persistent over their homes. We tried coming back in between, but every time the situation would remain inflamed. In the 1990s when Rafik Hariri took power, we finally managed to.” Haj Ali holds a grudge over him and his Solidere project, which he calls the “company of thieves.” It promised renovation and better lives for the people living on the edges of Downtown Beirut, but alas, they were ripped off their shares with their stakeholder stock percentages decreasing by time. “Beirut from 1950 till 1975 was the gem of the Middle East. And then after, it became a cemetery for cars, parking spaces.”
Haj Ali turns on the TV briefly, showing me that he usually watches the football match with his friends from the neighborhood in the local cafeteria. One look at the scoreboard quenches his thirst for the results. He already knows who’s winning and who’s losing. “You want to know about this street? It’s your typical ‘chaabi,’ ‘popular with the locals’ street.” The neighborhood looks makeshift; pavement fresh while the buildings are stuck in the late 1970s. The 7th floor of his building was a clear target for bullets, two floors down save a life; Haj Ali gave the house keys to his frightened neighbor to take shelter. “Btaarfe, we had a birthing hospital nearby back then, but during the ‘Ahdeth’, it was of no use. No one got to reach it. It was too unsafe.”
“Once Beirut was laylanhar w nhara layl, you wouldn’t differentiate between day and night. It was bustling all the time.” Maybe Beirut owes Haj Ali nostalgia; it owes him a devotion to stagnancy so that he may be reminiscent of when times were better. Because if present Beirut wasn’t a disappointment to him, he would not have been stuck in memories of his greatness.
This article was written in February 20th, 2020
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