Golgotha, Beirut

Abstract

This partly biographical narrative recounts its narrator’s first-hand, ground-zero experience of the Beirut Port explosion, one of the largest and most destructive in living memory. As the narrator recollects her mother’s distress over the possibility of losing her children post-divorce and her joy at finally obtaining—after a seven-year legal battle—the annulment of an abusive marriage, Beirut Port explodes. The focus shifts to a memorable encounter with another anguished mother who, on the heels of the blast, is hysterical but then completely transformed once reunited with her children. The writer of the memoir culled its material through a number of interviews with the narrator who consented to have her story shared in narrative format, so that the resulting creative nonfiction may contribute to the nascent corpus of gendered writing exploring and interrogating, not only the August 4, 2020 national tragedy in Lebanon, but also the patriarchal system facilitating this calamity.