A2 · Elementary
11 min
culturehistoryconflictidentity
Lebanon: Culture Between the Ruins
El Líbano: Cultura entre las Ruinas
This week, Israel and Hezbollah accuse each other of violating the ceasefire as Israeli airstrikes kill fourteen people in southern Lebanon. Fletcher and Octavio talk about the real Lebanon: its extraordinary cultural history, Beirut as the Arab world's capital of ideas and food, and why this small, battered country keeps refusing to disappear.
Esta semana, Israel y Hezbollah se acusan de violar el alto el fuego mientras los ataques aéreos israelíes matan a catorce personas en el sur del Líbano. Fletcher y Octavio hablan del Líbano real: su historia cultural única, Beirut como capital árabe del pensamiento y la gastronomía, y por qué este pequeño país fascinante sigue resistiendo.
5 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| el alto el fuego | the ceasefire | Hay un alto el fuego, pero no es estable. |
| la diáspora | the diaspora | La diáspora libanesa vive en muchos países. |
| ambas | both (formal) | Ambas ciudades son bonitas. |
| el daño | the damage | La explosión causa mucho daño en la ciudad. |
| resistencia | resistance / endurance | La gente tiene mucha resistencia. |
Beirut was the first city I ever arrived in where I could feel the intelligence of a place before I'd spoken to a single person.
That was 1994.
I've been trying to explain that sensation ever since.
El Líbano es un país pequeño.
Lebanon is a small country.
Pero tiene una cultura muy grande.
But it has a very large culture.
Right.
And this week it's back in the news for the worst reasons.
Israeli airstrikes killed fourteen people in the south, both sides are accusing each other of violating the ceasefire, and seven towns north of the Litani got evacuation orders.
Same nightmare, different chapter.
El sur del Líbano tiene mucho dolor.
Southern Lebanon carries a lot of pain.
Pero Beirut tiene mucha vida.
But Beirut has a lot of life.
That tension is exactly what I want to dig into.
Because I think the news coverage flattens Lebanon into a conflict zone and erases everything else.
And everything else is remarkable.
Beirut tiene muchos idiomas.
Beirut has many languages.
Árabe, francés, inglés.
Arabic, French, English.
Todo junto.
All together.
Which is already unusual.
You'd be in a single conversation and someone would slip between Arabic and French and English mid-sentence without thinking about it.
Not showing off.
Just, that's how the sentence wanted to come out.
En el Líbano hay muchas religiones.
In Lebanon there are many religions.
Cristianos, musulmanes, drusos.
Christians, Muslims, Druze.
Todos viven juntos.
They all live together.
And that coexistence is genuinely unusual in the region.
Eighteen officially recognized religious communities in a country roughly the size of Connecticut.
Historically, that was a point of pride, almost a project.
Pero también hay problemas.
But there are also problems.
La política es difícil.
Politics is difficult.
Cada religión tiene su partido.
Each religion has its own party.
The confessional system.
Every significant government post is allocated by religious community.
The president is always Maronite Christian, the prime minister always Sunni Muslim, the speaker of parliament always Shia.
It's a power-sharing arrangement that was meant to prevent civil war and has also, periodically, caused it.
La guerra civil del Líbano es muy importante.
The Lebanese civil war is very important.
Quince años de guerra.
Fifteen years of war.
De 1975 a 1990.
From 1975 to 1990.
Fifteen years.
And before that, Beirut was called the Paris of the Middle East.
That's not nostalgia, it's a fact.
The universities, the publishing houses, the café culture, the nightlife.
It was the Arab world's city of ideas.
Beirut tiene muchos escritores famosos.
Beirut has many famous writers.
Kahlil Gibran es libanés.
Kahlil Gibran is Lebanese.
Muy famoso en el mundo.
Very famous around the world.
Gibran is probably the best-selling poet in history after Shakespeare and Lao Tzu.
"The Prophet" has never gone out of print.
And he's Lebanese-American, spent most of his adult life in New York.
That kind of diaspora story is very Lebanon.
Hay muchos libaneses en el mundo.
There are many Lebanese people in the world.
En Brasil, en México, en Argentina.
In Brazil, in Mexico, in Argentina.
Muchos.
Many.
The Lebanese diaspora is larger than Lebanon itself, which has a population of around four million.
There are an estimated fourteen million people of Lebanese descent worldwide.
Brazil alone has something like seven million.
Carlos Slim, for years the richest man on earth, is of Lebanese descent.
So is Shakira, actually.
La comida libanesa es muy famosa.
Lebanese food is very famous.
El hummus, el falafel, el tabbouleh.
Hummus, falafel, tabbouleh.
Todo el mundo come esta comida.
Everyone eats this food.
And here's where I know you're about to say something.
Because there's a real debate about whether hummus is Lebanese, Israeli, Palestinian, Syrian, or just broadly Levantine.
El hummus es de la región.
Hummus belongs to the region.
Pero los libaneses hacen el mejor hummus.
But the Lebanese make the best hummus.
Eso es todo.
That's all there is to it.
[chuckle] Settled.
But seriously, the food culture in Lebanon is genuinely remarkable as a window into the country's identity.
The mezze tradition, sharing small dishes, is almost a philosophy.
You don't eat alone.
You don't eat fast.
The table is where culture happens.
En el Líbano, la comida es familia.
In Lebanon, food is family.
Es amigos.
It's friends.
Es conversación.
It's conversation.
No es solo comida.
It's not just food.
I sat at a table in a house in the Chouf mountains in 1998, a Druze family, and I think we were there for four hours.
Food kept arriving.
I have no idea what half of it was.
It was one of the finest meals of my life.
Las montañas del Líbano son muy bonitas.
The Lebanese mountains are very beautiful.
Hay nieve en invierno y mar en verano.
There is snow in winter and the sea in summer.
Todo cerca.
Everything close together.
That's the thing that always amazed visiting journalists.
You could ski in the morning and swim in the Mediterranean in the afternoon.
In the same country.
That geographic compression is part of why Lebanon developed the way it did, all these communities living in close quarters, each with their own mountain villages, their own culture.
Pero el sur es diferente.
But the south is different.
El sur tiene mucha guerra.
The south has a lot of war.
Los pueblos del sur sufren mucho.
The villages of the south suffer a great deal.
The south, particularly south of the Litani River, has been a conflict zone in nearly every decade since the 1970s.
The PLO was there, then Israel occupied it for eighteen years, then Hezbollah filled the vacuum.
The people who live there have known almost nothing but war for fifty years.
Hezbollah es muy importante en el sur.
Hezbollah is very important in the south.
Da hospitales, escuelas.
It provides hospitals, schools.
No solo armas.
Not just weapons.
This is the part that Western coverage consistently underexplains.
Hezbollah is a designated terrorist organization in the US and EU.
It is also a social service network, a political party with seats in parliament, and for many Shia Lebanese in the south, the only institution that has ever actually shown up for them.
You can't understand the group without understanding all of those layers.
Es complicado.
It's complicated.
No es bueno o malo.
It's not good or bad.
Es las dos cosas.
It's both things.
Which is the answer to almost every question about Lebanon, isn't it.
Both things.
The country is a paradox and it wears that paradox openly.
En 2020, hay una explosión grande en el puerto de Beirut.
In 2020, there is a big explosion in the port of Beirut.
Muchas personas mueren.
Many people die.
La ciudad tiene mucho daño.
The city has a lot of damage.
Two hundred and eighteen people dead, more than six thousand injured, three hundred thousand displaced.
One of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history.
And the cause was two thousand seven hundred tons of ammonium nitrate sitting in a warehouse for six years because nobody in the government could agree whose job it was to deal with it.
The explosion was almost a metaphor for the dysfunction of the Lebanese state.
Pero después de la explosión, la gente de Beirut ayuda.
But after the explosion, the people of Beirut help.
Los jóvenes limpian las calles.
Young people clean the streets.
Con las manos.
With their hands.
That image stayed with people around the world.
The state collapses, and the citizens pick up brooms.
There's something in that about Lebanese identity that I find genuinely moving.
This idea that the country will survive its own government.
Los libaneses son fuertes.
Lebanese people are strong.
Hay una palabra: sumud.
There is a word: sumud.
Es árabe.
It's Arabic.
Significa resistencia, continuar.
It means resistance, to keep going.
Sumud.
I've heard that word in Gaza, in the West Bank, and now you're telling me it's part of the Lebanese vocabulary too.
It's interesting that this concept of patient, rooted endurance travels across so many cultures in that region.
La música libanesa también es famosa.
Lebanese music is also famous.
Fairuz es la voz del Líbano.
Fairuz is the voice of Lebanon.
Todo el mundo la escucha.
Everyone listens to her.
Fairuz.
If you don't know her, she's arguably the most beloved singer in the Arab world and has been for sixty years.
During the civil war, both sides, Christians and Muslims, would stop fighting to listen to her on the radio.
I'm not making that up.
There's documentation of ceasefires for Fairuz.
La música tiene un poder especial.
Music has a special power.
Fairuz canta en árabe.
Fairuz sings in Arabic.
Pero el sentimiento es universal.
But the feeling is universal.
And she's still alive.
In her eighties, still in Beirut.
Still an icon.
When I think about what Lebanon has produced culturally relative to its size, it's genuinely staggering.
Writers like Elias Khoury, filmmakers, architects, fashion designers.
Zaha Hadid, actually, trained partly in Beirut.
La Universidad Americana de Beirut es muy importante.
The American University of Beirut is very important.
Muchos líderes árabes estudian allí.
Many Arab leaders study there.
Desde 1866.
Since 1866.
1866.
That university predates many American universities.
And for over a century it was the intellectual engine of the Arab world.
Doctors, politicians, journalists, philosophers all trained there.
The Arab cultural renaissance of the twentieth century ran significantly through Beirut.
Ahora el Líbano tiene problemas económicos.
Now Lebanon has economic problems.
Muchos jóvenes salen del país.
Many young people leave the country.
Es triste.
It's sad.
The brain drain since 2019 has been devastating.
The currency collapsed, losing over ninety percent of its value.
Doctors, engineers, teachers, the exact people a country needs to rebuild, left in enormous numbers.
And when your best-educated citizens leave, the cultural institutions weaken too.
Universities can't pay professors.
Newspapers close.
Pero los libaneses en el mundo ayudan al Líbano.
But Lebanese people around the world help Lebanon.
Mandan dinero.
They send money.
Mandan ideas.
They send ideas.
The diaspora remittances are a genuine economic lifeline.
Something like seven or eight billion dollars a year flowing back into the country.
In some ways the diaspora is Lebanon's most reliable institution.
El Líbano es pequeño pero el mundo libanés es muy grande.
Lebanon is small but the Lebanese world is very large.
Es una idea bonita.
It's a beautiful idea.
And the news this week, the airstrikes, the ceasefire violations, the evacuation orders, none of that contradicts what we've been talking about.
Both things are true simultaneously.
The country is being bombed and the country is making extraordinary art and music and food.
That duality is Lebanon.
Oye, Fletcher.
Hey, Fletcher.
Usas mucho 'ambas cosas'.
You use 'both things' a lot.
En español decimos 'las dos cosas' o 'ambas'.
In Spanish we say 'las dos cosas' or 'ambas'.
Las dos formas son correctas.
Both forms are correct.
Wait, so 'ambas' and 'las dos cosas' mean the same thing?
I've only ever said 'las dos cosas'.
I didn't know 'ambas' was even a word.
'Ambas' es más formal.
'Ambas' is more formal.
Es 'both' en inglés.
It's 'both' in English.
'Ambas cosas son ciertas'.
'Both things are true.' It sounds elegant.
Suena elegante.
So 'ambas' is the formal, written register version, and 'las dos cosas' is how you'd actually say it in conversation.
Is that a fair way to think about it?
Sí, exacto.
Yes, exactly.
'Las dos' es muy normal.
'Las dos' is very normal.
'Ambas' es para un texto, una conferencia.
'Ambas' is for a text, a lecture.
Pero las dos son correctas.
But both are correct.
I'll practice 'ambas'.
Though knowing my track record with new vocabulary, I'll probably say it in completely the wrong context and you'll tell the story at dinner parties for years.
Ambas cosas son posibles, Fletcher.
Both things are possible, Fletcher.
[chuckle] Aprender y cometer errores.
Learning and making mistakes.
Las dos.
Both.