Born in Paris in 1988 to Lebanese parents, Sabyl Ghoussoub maintains a very special relationship with his family country. An imagination that feeds his novels, steeped in corrosive humor. After The Jewish Nose and Beirut in brackets, Beirut-sur-Seine (Stock), published these days, recounts with melancholy and spirit, rage and laughter, the fate of his parents, emigrated to France since 1975, and of Lebanon, hit by wars and crises. We met this jack-of-all-trades writer in Beirut (he is also a photographer, exhibition curator, etc.) during the French-speaking and international literary event “Beyrouth Livres”, launched by the Institut français and the Embassy of France. He tells us about the Lebanese diaspora and their own irrational ties to the land of their ancestors. Between laughter and anguish.
L’Express: Your parents arrived in France in 1975, settled there permanently, but never broke ties with their country. Are they in this respect perfect representatives of the Lebanese diaspora?
Sabyl Ghoussoub: Definitely. Their connection to Lebanon is indeed intense. The same goes for the parents of my Lebanese friends in France. My parents never stopped going home, in the summer and at Christmas, even during the war, except when the airport was closed or when the fighting was too intense. I was born in 1988, I went there the first time in 1991, then every summer. There is nothing else in my parents’ life but to go to Lebanon and see the family.
Is the Lebanese diaspora specific?
Yes I think so. I have a lot of Iranian, Algerian or other friends. The first, for example, emigrated since the advent of the ayatollahs in 1979, do not plan to return, they do not think that their country can improve. Ditto for the Algerians, while Lebanon has always remained open and the hope of a possible return has remained. As a result, the link of the Lebanese diaspora with the country is very strong.
But then, why didn’t your parents return there at the end of the war, in 1990?
They asked themselves the question, but concretely, they could not live from their profession in Lebanon. My father was a translator/interpreter and my mother was an executive assistant… That said, I don’t think they would bear to live there now. After three days there, my father goes crazy, he insults everyone, and he comes home. As soon as he hears someone talking about politics or sees a politician’s poster on the side of the road, he gets angry. He can no longer bear the misery in this country where there is neither electricity nor water, and where the administration functions only with pistons and corruption. He can’t stand being disrespected by his own country anymore, which I understand.
To evoke the war in your novel you had to do research in the archives. Does this mean that it is a subject that we do not address or no longer?
Nobody talks about the war. I have just made meetings, here, in Lebanon, with college students, they are totally ignorant of what happened. There is an astonishing silence. I was one of the first to have spoken to them about the war, when all the families had experienced it. If young people knew more, they would understand that good and evil were on both sides, that everyone was right and wrong, that everyone allied or opposed everyone. To teach them the history of Lebanon and the war is to open their eyes to others.
Should learning from the past be done at school?
Yes, because in families, it’s more complicated, there were fighters on opposite sides, we try to avoid the subject. At home, after the war, at the table, everyone was arguing. It was screaming, it was throwing glasses, I stopped hanging out with my family because of it. I have never seen so much violence in my life as when people talk about politics. It’s bloody and bloody. It happened to me myself to put myself in this type of state of nervousness, it was with a Palestinian woman, she defended Hezbollah in front of me after the revolution of 2019, I was no longer myself, I had become a Christian in my village.
You left for Lebanon at the age of 19, and you came back after seven years, “exhausted by Lebanon” as you write. What prompted you to leave in 2008?
I wanted to make films, and all the stories I wrote took place in Lebanon, everything that inhabited me had to do with Lebanese arts. Lebanese education took precedence over French, going to Lebanon was obvious. I arrived in 2008, we were coming out of the 2006 war, things were pretty much okay, despite the attacks by those who were called anti-Syrians at the time, then by those linked to Daesh and Hezbollah. I got to work straight away, I was a madman, I did everything, 24 hours a day, waiter, DJ, journalist, photographer; I was learning on the job. After five years, that was the beginning of the downfall. It was more and more difficult to finance artistic projects, and then, I was afraid of a war with the Israelis and afraid of losing everything. I didn’t want to find myself, at 27, in the dark, and I was lucky enough to have a French passport. I came home tired and disillusioned. This country takes everything we have, it washes us out. I did well to return.
You write that you have “the wobbly impression of having grown up elsewhere while having grown up in Paris”. Is it destabilizing?
Yes, it destabilizes me, in the sense that I feel foreign to what is happening in France. The poet Etel Adnan told me: “It’s strange, we’ve been living in Paris for years and the first newspaper we open in the morning is the Lebanese newspaper.” It is still surprising to be so moved every time something happens in Lebanon. When there was the revolution in October 2019, when I had not set foot in Lebanon for two years, I took a plane ticket after two days. When there was the explosion, same thing. There is nothing rational, I do this by reflex. I admit that if one day I have children, I would like them not to have that weight on their shoulders.
Does this very special relationship therefore constitute a weight?
Yes, the transmission by my parents of this idea of a return to the “beautiful country” is a weight. That said, my brother does not react at all like me, he is much more detached. In short, there is no fatality: you can have Lebanese parents and not feel what I feel.
The diaspora is consubstantial in Lebanon, you say…
Yes, the country was built on that. It is crazy to think that in front of the port of Beirut, there is the statue of the emigrant. The symbol of the country, there it is, it’s emigration, it’s leaving to better come back. Lebanon is a country of diaspora, it is its DNA, whether the country is doing well or not. In my eyes, this is a wealth. That said, unlike previous generations, those of my generation no longer want to return to live in Lebanon. Something is breaking right now, our connection to this country is going to change.
Wouldn’t it be tragic if all these young people who go to study abroad do not return to Lebanon?
Everyone I’ve just met said “I’m going to leave”, all of them, without exception! Or to study or to work. There, it is no longer even a question of the brain drain, it is the flight of the entire youth, the flight of a country.
Interview by Marianne Payot