In the Middle East, history is never written from the perspective of women. That’s why I wanted Lebanon’s women to narrate their country’s recent, unprecedented financial collapse and share their untold stories of surviving the Beirut blast of 2020, when stocks of ammonium nitrate blew up in a port, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. The result is All She Lost, a collective memoir of Lebanon’s recent history, as told by its women.
When I went to interview these women—a mix of Lebanese citizens, refugees, and migrants—I was surprised to see how many of them had lingering traumas from events preceding the past four years of Lebanon’s history. Women in the Middle East never get to heal from their wounds. In Lebanon, new traumas pile on top of previous ones, and generations of women have survived endless cycles of violence.
When I asked women to tell me about the Beirut blast of August 4, 2020, that killed about 220 people and injured thousands, many took me back to the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, Israel’s wars in Lebanon, political assassinations, and bombings. One explosion triggered the sounds of another. One pain triggered the memories of another.
I met Salwa Baalbaki, a Lebanese journalist who survived the Beirut explosion, and she recalled a moment from the civil war that has haunted her for most of her life: the sight of a man outside her home bleeding to death. Salwa’s arm was injured in the port explosion, and she witnessed many deaths that day, but throughout our conversations, she kept mentioning the violence she’d survived in the past.
Women in the Middle East never get to heal from their wounds.
There was Leila Baramakian, a mother of three, who spent years in the basement of her house trying to protect her children, including her son Jack, from the shelling and the bombings of the Lebanese civil war. Thirty years on, Leila failed to protect Jack from the explosion of ammonium nitrate. Jack was killed in the very same house where she’d protected him during the civil war.
Then there was Fatme Kinno, who fled the war in Syria, seeking refuge in Lebanon, only to see her daughter Sidra, who was just 16, get killed in the Beirut explosion.
On top of surviving this violence, these women also have to survive Lebanon’s economic crisis, which the World Bank calls one of the top three worst crises since the 19th century, with no social safety nets. Siham Takian, 65, lost her savings in Lebanon’s financial crisis, lost her business in the Beirut blast, and, today, has neither a pension fund nor any other kind of support to keep going.
My daughter and I survived the Beirut explosion. My mother, my grandmother, and I also survived the violence that preceded 2020. It’s a generational trauma with no end in sight because of the prevalence of impunity. In 1958, my grandmother lost her husband in a family-feud revenge killing that was considered a prelude to the 1958 short civil war. The killer never served his prison sentence, and so she spent her life with that injustice.
More than 60 years on, not much has changed. Lebanese women are still fighting for accountability for all that they have lost, a justice that is elusive. Impunity is why history keeps repeating itself and why Lebanese and Arab women never find peace and never heal.
Dalal Mawad’s All She Lost: The Explosion in Lebanon, the Collapse of a Nation and the Women Who Survive is out now from Bloomsbury
