Bookstores and literary institutions that once flourished in Beirut have shuttered over the past few years. For New Lines Magazine, Amelia Dhuga reports on this wider trend in the city’s creative scene. “In the last six years alone,” an editorial director at a publishing house tells Dhuga, “Lebanon has faced a revolution, a financial crisis, the port blast, COVID-19, political instability and a war.” Businesses have been forced to shut down, facing immense financial pressure. Books and authors are being censored. People are exhausted, preoccupied, or simply don’t have the disposable income to invest in literature. Despite all of this, Beirut’s remaining literary spaces are trying to stay afloat and learning to adapt.
The current condition of the sector stands in stark contrast to the era that first earned it its name. “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads” is a phrase that repeatedly crops up in the conversations I have. It refers to the period before Lebanon’s civil war, when its liberalism made it a cultural beacon of the Arab world. Local presses translated Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser into Arabic. Political tracts, literary magazines and radical novels started to emerge from dissident writers expelled from their own countries.
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Beirut, at Sunset
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The Last of the Bougainvillea Years
“A poet from Tripoli was displaced in Dubai for a decade, but suddenly it felt like home as another move, this time across the globe, was imminent.”
Waste Away
“To say that we’re drowning in our shit—the shit we all made together—is no longer a figure of speech in Lebanon today.” Lina Mounzer writes about Beirut’s broken sewage system and the political and economic factors that have drowned the city in its own waste.
