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””The Good Old Days – أيام الزمن الجميل
“This living room used to be wider; this balcony used to be more spacious. Of course your love, ya habibi, was as big as the whole wide world.” – Fairuz, “It Wasn’t Like This.”
In one of many songs written and composed by her son Ziad, Fairuz laments how different things around her once were. The living room, the lemons, the olives…even the soap was different! ‘Different’ undoubtedly implying ‘better’, and applying to everything from inanimate objects to the love of a dear one. Apparently, that someone’s love ended up as sour as the lemons…
Continue reading “The Good Old Days – أيام الزمن الجميل”To a Lebanon that is slowly drifting away…
In less than a week, two giants of Lebanese and Arabic music and literature are no more. Sabah will no longer charm us with her eternal smile and enchanting voice nor warm our hearts with her simplicity and modesty. Said Akl will no longer speak to us in his characteristically intense and lyrically robust voice nor provoke us with his radicalism and idealism. Continue reading “To a Lebanon that is slowly drifting away…”
Eye on the East 