“Nothing is left for us except the weapon of madness. To be or not to be. To be or to be. Not to be or not to be. Nothing is left except madness. Besiege your siege with madness.” I recently read this passage from Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness, written during the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982, capturing the despair of being abandoned to Israeli violence and savagery, with the world turning a blind eye.
Now, decades later, as I witness Israel’s massacres continue unabated in Palestine and Lebanon, with every possible avenue to demand an end to these aggressions exhausted, I, too, feel that nothing is left but madness.
Madness is losing all sense of reality when the world’s order collapses, and lives, lands, and homes that form a world you cherish are deemed disposable, destroyed by Israel in an instant, with your pain unheard and unacknowledged. It’s the clash between the urge to fight this relentless injustice and the paralysis of powerlessness, feeling stripped of any control or agency.
Madness is the disorientation of walking through the streets of New York City, where I live, surrounded by people who have the privilege of living lightly, absorbed in the distractions of American life, while bearing the heavy weight of unending violence, loss, and grief.
As madness consumes me, I feel that the only relief comes through forgetting—purging these violent emotions. Darwish titled his book Memory for Forgetfulness as if he also needed to resort to forgetfulness to confront the madness, and memory only becomes a tool for that. But for me, his recollection of the 1982 invasion was a powerful act of reclaiming the narrative of that violent event. It was a rejection of the normalization of violence, destruction, and war—rejecting how they are covered as if they were ordinary events.
Instead, Darwish narrates them as the extraordinary, existential turning points they were for so many and exposes a world order that enabled this to occur. In this way, memory becomes a powerful act of resistance against the submission to the existing world order, a way to reclaim narratives and restore power: Memory for resistance, and resistance as the opposite of forgetfulness.
Resisting by remembering Beirut
For weeks, I watched through my small iPhone screen as Israel unleashed destruction on my homeland, Lebanon. My pain merges with the suffering inflicted on my country and city, Beirut, once again. The perpetual instability, and violence haunting, or more accurately forced on the region, and my homeland means we, as Lebanese, cannot afford the privilege of taking the permanence of our cities, our safe spaces, or our homes for granted. Every time I leave Lebanon, I carry the weight of knowing that I may return to a completely different Lebanon, a different Beirut.
“As for Beirut, no one knows her. And no one is looking for her,” wrote Darwish. My last visit to Beirut before the current war was during the summer, eight months into the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the aggressions on Lebanon. For eight long months, I waited, fearing that the violence would escalate into a full-blown war, one that could once again engulf Beirut. It felt as if the city could slip away at any moment, much like it does now. I felt an urgent need to search for her—to rediscover her essence before she was lost to us once more. But perhaps “search” isn’t the right word. What I truly needed to do was “remember,” because much of Beirut’s loss is rooted in forgetfulness.
“We forget. So much has happened that our memories become foggy,” my mom said when I asked her about the 1982 Israeli siege of West Beirut, where she and her parents were trapped. The amnesty law, passed by Lebanon’s wartime elites after the civil war to secure their own impunity, played a key role in this forgetfulness, burying many of the war’s memories.
But, as Elias Khoury, the late Lebanese intellectual, points out, this erasure extended beyond the war—it was about the city itself. Reflecting on the neoliberal reconstruction that swept through Beirut after the war, he described it as “the new world order invading Beirut aboard a bulldozer.”
Neoliberal policies, introduced even before the civil war and accelerated during reconstruction, prioritized Western frameworks in reshaping society. These policies enabled the encroachment of capital, benefiting the country’s elites while also serving the interests of the world’s large capitalist powers such as the United States. And by doing so they reinforced a ‘world order’ that advances the United States and other western powers’ economic dominance and principles at the expense of Beirut and Lebanon’s urban identity, cultural heritage, and social fabric.
In this process, our agency to shape a self-determined present and future, independent of foreign dominance, was constrained as the country’s collective memory—and that of its people—was attempted to be reset.
Yet, a reset cannot erase history. As the current Israeli invasions and assaults echo the events of 1978 and 1982, and the threat of civil war looms once again, it becomes evident that enforced forgetfulness, and the consequent loss of agency, has allowed structures of violence to persist and repeat, fostering powerlessness in confronting them.
In this context, remembering becomes an act of resistance—a necessary tool to shape a political consciousness and expose and dismantle the social and economic systems that perpetuate violence. Ariella Aicha Azoulay, a scholar and critic of colonial power structures who renounced her Israeli citizenship in protest of Israel’s imperial practices and treatment of Palestinians, emphasizes the need for a “rewind movement” to face imperial violence, foster repair and revive ways of being together that liberal democracy has dismantled and relegated to the past.
To remember, then, is to reclaim agency in shaping Lebanon’s present and future. As Elias Khoury expressed in an interview in 2017: “There needs to be a past that the present reads.”
I sought Beirut’s memories from a rebellious, everyday perspective—a view from below rather than a panoptic gaze from above—through the lived experiences and personal reflections of writers deeply intertwined with the city, such as Elias Khoury, Rashid El-Daif, and Mahmoud Darwish, who searched for meaning in its history and events. I also aimed to capture glimpses of Beirut’s pulse before and during the civil war: the daily lives, stories, reflections, and the political and intimate conversations unfolding in its streets, as portrayed in the films of directors like Jocelyn Saab and Maroun Baghdadi.
This journey, however, was not without challenges. Unlike the readily available international or US American films, few platforms consistently stream or showcase these Lebanese films, underscoring the difficulty of accessing Beirut’s layered memories and preserving its stories.
Surrendering to Western hegemony
As I searched for these books and films, I came to see just how deeply Western and American hegemony has permeated Lebanon’s culture, literature, media, and entertainment, often leading us to neglect our own heritage, language, and literary traditions. The depth of this influence is evident in the fact that, today, I find myself more comfortable writing in English than in my native Arabic.
In her 2009 memoir, A World I Loved, Wadad Makdisi Cortas reflects on the potential harm of Western culture, “if we did not adapt it to our lives through the medium of our language.” Yet she also recognizes how Western forces have actively distanced us from our language and local culture. She observes that “anything that inspired love of country or language, or drew us nearer to other Arab countries, had been discouraged by our colonizers.” Similarly, Mahmoud Darwish observes that the Arab-speaking world’s submission to Western and American models undermined the effectiveness of its resistance efforts, noting that “the race was run on the American pattern, even if its goals were anti-American.”
Amid the violent Israeli invasion, Darwish mourns the erasure of cherished local practices and traditions, symbolized by Fairuz’s song “بحبك يا لبنان” (I Love You, Lebanon). He writes, “And the sung beauty, the object of worship, has moved away to a memory now joining battle against the fangs of a forgetfulness made of steel,” capturing how elements of culture struggle to survive against relentless forces of erasure.
I set out to uncover elements in Beirut that resist Western hegemony and have not yet been erased. I found them in the everyday rhythms of life. Along Hamra street, resistance appeared in small bookstores and street vendors selling a range of Arabic books—about Beirut, about Lebanon, translations of Western classics, and old Arabic political magazines. This felt like an act of defiance against digitalization and the erosion of the Arabic language.
In one bookstore, Al Dar, a sign in the window read: “ما دمنا نعيش في هذه البلاد الضائعة… الكتاب سينتصر” (As long as we live in this lost country, the book will win). I saw this resistance in street vendors selling vegetables, fruits, kaak, corn, and local spices, reclaiming urban spaces from the grip of capital. I felt it in local coffee shops along the Mediterranean, like Café Rawda, holding their ground against the expansion of exclusive seaside resorts.
And I witnessed it in the newspaper vendor on the corniche, who criticized the digitalization of news and continued his daily sales for the few who still cherish physical paper. “When you believe in something—like reading physical newspapers—you must stand by it and embody it in action,” he told me.
Darwish likens the sharp, unyielding force of forgetfulness pushing against these cultural elements to steel. To me, this steel came to symbolize the hegemony of the US, which fosters forgetfulness to secure its uninterrupted influence and dominance.
Resisting the regime of forgetfulness
The regime of forgetfulness has largely been promoted by the US to protect the current social and economic order and its imperialism. To exist and integrate into the United States—the belly of the beast—requires a form of reconciliation with the internal conflicts it creates, and this demands forgetting.
Forget its endless wars, its injustices, its hypocrisy, and, most of all, the collective struggles in your home countries and its role in them. Forget common sense to accept absurd justifications like “escalate to de-escalate,” which rationalize its continued support of violence against your people. Through this enforced forgetfulness, along with its distractions, the US seeks to make you comfortable within its system, so you don’t question it or attempt to resist.
The expectation of forgetting is exemplified in Kamala Harris’s recent response to a question about losing votes because of people’s disillusionment with the administration’s Gaza and Middle East policies; she stated that these voters also care about lowering grocery prices, urging them to prioritize consumer comforts over recalling the US-backed violence in the Middle East.
Living in NYC, it became clear to me how the US capitalist system attempts to mold us into passive consumers—distracted, oblivious, and ultimately complicit in the horrors the US government perpetuates worldwide. While there is nothing inherently wrong with seeking a life of comfort—everyone deserves that—when comfort is built on the suffering of others in other regions, it becomes a passive surrender, which unsettles me.
In Ziad Rahbani’s popular play Film Ameriki Tawil, set in a psychiatric hospital in Beirut during Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war, various forms of psychiatric treatments fail to pacify the patients. Rashid, one of the patients, defiantly declares: “If he thinks the pills and injections will make me forget what’s on my mind, he’s mistaken,” repeatedly alluding to the grand American conspiracy he is determined to expose.
Listening to this, I couldn’t help but think of the many forces that attempt to pacify us and make us forget, stripping us of the will to resist or free ourselves from imperial dominance. Like Rashid, it is crucial to resist these forces, including subtle forms of economic and cultural hegemony and forgetfulness—even if doing so means embracing madness.
“I can’t surrender to this fate, and I can’t resist it” writes Darwish. The madness lies in this trap—being unable to accept a reality built on violence and injustices, yet equally unable to resist or fight against it. The only way out is to embrace the madness, using it as a weapon to break free from the confines of this entrapment. As Darwish urges, “Besiege your siege with madness.”
