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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 April 2023
Introduction
I am of that intergeneration who has survived a civil war only to witness all their references, associations, distant memories, and their short-lived youth-hood turn into the otherwise unsayable.
As a grown man I live in an ill society saturated with infirmities and its occurrences visibly manifested in our present collective mental state. Even for the toughest amongst us that would be too much, yet here I am.
My formation stems from the urgency of staying alive versus living. That urgency is my single ‘medium’ manifested in multitudes of presentations. As a remonstration against that memory, I hold pieces of black charcoal in my palms and wash my hands in a bowl of clear water to wash the ever hard dark residue from that stinking war. So here … one more drawing for this instant, one more for the trail, one more for the witness series, one more for my testimony, one more for that which should never happen again.
I paint on stretched canvases and put them through the mail unprotected as I was in my youth, to have them travel as far away from me as possible alone on their own.
These paintings have become my emissaries to scream their eyes out; ‘Handle (me/ you) with care’ to convey the disorders they/ I survived. (Ara, 2014: np)
The title of this chapter translates a phrase from Lebanese rapper El Rass’ (2019) track Shuf (see, in Arabic), released in reference to the unprecedented scale of protests that started on 17 October 2019 in Lebanon. The opening quote, meanwhile, is the reflections of Lebanese artist Ara Azad (2014: np) on the 25th anniversary of his mailed paintings series – posted to various museums, galleries and art collectors around the world. The two productions were born 25 years apart, yet the experiences to which they speak resonate with each other. They express in poetry our situated experience of everyday being in Lebanon.
We had initially planned for this chapter to reflect on street art more generally in Beirut. But as we were in the initial phases of formulating our thoughts 17 October happened, and the subsequent emergence of public conversations suddenly became too loud to be ignored. This was the evening the country was overcome with unprecedented protests over decades of corruption and a bankrupt economy (see, for instance, Dib, 2020; Fjeld and Abdunnur, 2020; Fregonese, 2020).
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