It was the summer of 1992. While my father drove on Route 5 from Santiago, heading north to Chile’s wine country through La Serena on a beautiful summer morning, my mother pressed play to Fairuz’s latest album into the cassette player. We had received the cassette a couple of weeks earlier, along with others that included recorded letters from relatives, and other compilations of the latest music from Beirut. For a Lebanese family then living in the so-called end of the world, when phones were unreliable and the internet was still the stuff of science fiction, this was as interactive and coveted as the communication and connection to the homeland could ever be.
Continue reading “Ziad Rahbani: The comrade who left us something “good””
Beirut-based Fiction & Other Writings
Eye on the East 