Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse
Lebanon is a theoretical country, cobbled together from shards of the Ottoman Empire following World War I. Europe’s Great Powers hoped the different religions jumbled within its borders would work together to create a cosmopolitan nation. Unfortunately, Lebanon’s oligarchs and their family clans more often have colluded than cooperated. Khalil Gibran, a Lebanese-American poet born to a Maronite Christian family, worried about her native land’s survival. “What will remain of your Lebanon after a century?” she wrote in the 1920s.
Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse by Charif Majdalani is an extended lamentation that documents the unending challenges of living in a failed state that are brought into sharp relief by a massive explosion on August 4, 2020 that destroyed the city’s port as well as many of the capital’s historic neighborhoods.
