Being Black in Beirut

My mother and I walked into the Amn el-Am, Lebanon’s General Security office, with a sense of dread. The corridors are crowded with underpaid, disgruntled employees and the stench of body odor from the anxious people being carted from one room to the next. The Security office is where Lebanon’s lawlessness meets its match in the frustrating halls of bureaucracy.

We looked around for the Director’s office who could help us with the process of renewing my Lebanese ID. In Lebanon, women cannot pass on their citizenship to their children; nationality can only be passed through the father. Every three years, I have to renew my legal status in my country because my mother had married an Ethiopian man.

An officer approached us, wary of how lost we seemed, and offered to help us with directions. She then looked at my ID, smirked at my mother, and asked: Min wen jibtiya?

“Where did you get her?”

I cannot tell you how many times somebody in Beirut, whether it be a hairdresser or my neighbor, has denied me my Lebanese heritage. My skin is too dark, my Arabic accent too choppy, my hair too unruly and big.

Ah, hasset inte minik Lebnenieh.

“I had a feeling you weren’t Lebanese.”

In Lebanon, women cannot pass on their citizenship to their children; nationality can only be passed through the father. Every three years, I have to renew my legal status in my country because my mother had married an Ethiopian man.

As per Ethiopian custom, my last name, Teodros, is my father’s first name.

In the Levant, our surnames determine which part of the country we’re from, who our father or mother is, and, sometimes, what industry they work in or the craft that they were once known for. A surname can even identify the rural village your grandparents were born in. Intrinsic to our family names is also our value to society, our positioning in the socioeconomic hierarchy. It can determine how people interact with you or generate assumptions about who you are before you’ve had the chance to speak for yourself.

In a hurried attempt to compartmentalize me, Lebanese people ask me perplexedly if I meant Tadros, which is a common Lebanese surname. They’re often disappointed, but also relieved, when I correct them––their brief confusion about my identity and physical appearance is resolved. Their intuition was right: I am not one of them.

When I first moved to Lebanon with my mother in 2005, I started the third grade at the City International School (CIS) in Beirut. I was coming from Somerville, Massachusetts, where my classmates were primarily first-generation children of immigrant families. Meanwhile, my classmates in Beirut spent the bus ride back home making fun of me. I was teased for my thick, textured African hair. They told me that I looked like their Ethiopian maids at home.

I spent my mornings getting ready for school staring at my face in the mirror, wishing I could rip the starkly Ethiopian features off my face. My lips - too full. My skin - a melanated caramel with tan undertones. People didn’t think I was beautiful, so, in turn, I didn’t think I was beautiful. With every demeaning comment about Ethiopians I heard, or every instance in which I heard others disparaging Black people, I sunk deeper into my shame.

I’ll never forget the shame that overwhelmed me, how desperately I wished that I wasn’t Black. It felt like my blood was tainted—unacceptable.

Lebanon’s beauty standards are, like many places, Eurocentric. I wanted to look like the paler, petite girls who surrounded me, and to speak in the charming lilt of their fluent French and acceptable English. The precise, almost vulgar pronunciation of my American syllables were too heavy for their tongues. In every room I walked into, I felt like the Black sheep, both literally and figuratively. It didn’t matter how much my mother or my grandparents adored me: I was a freak. It wasn’t long before the self-hatred transformed into rage.

My mother transferred me to the nearby American Community School (ACS), where Lebanon’s affluent families sent their children for an international education. I was surprised to learn that even Lebanon’s most sophisticated, cultured, and well-traveled were equally as racist, if not more cruel, than the counterparts they believed to be beneath them. While the bullying continued, and my classmates grew more creative with the ways in which they compared me to their maids at home, this time I bit back. My skin thickened and my tongue tasted vicious.

I matriculated from high school to the University of Massachusetts, back to where I had spent my childhood, eager to finally be away from the magnifying glass of Lebanese society. My resentment subsided when I was abroad. In an increasingly globalizing world, and an ever-expanding diaspora, Lebanon slowly adapted to difference. Although casual and systemic racism is still deeply embedded in the fabric of the collective Lebanese consciousness, people are gradually learning to be better. I’m not entirely sure how or why this shift occurred, but suddenly I was having healthier conversations with Lebanese people about my race.

Ah, they’d say approvingly. Hay khalta helwe. Smallah.

“What a beautiful mix. God bless.”

It is also not lost on me that with the rise of the Kardashian empire and the newfound admiration for bronze skin and artificially enlarged lips, I became more attractive to the Lebanese eye. But instead of waiting for people to decide who I was, I took my identity into my hands.

After all, what does it mean to look Lebanese, and to be Lebanese? I’ve lived through Lebanon’s most tumultuous periods, heard just as many bombs drop as I have church bells ringing on Sunday mornings. I’ve sat in my mother’s dark apartment for hours when the electricity cuts grew desperate and people showered in the dim light of a lantern. I watched as depositors' lost all of their money and their life’s savings to our government, never to be returned or reimbursed. I too have protested, raged, and bickered with vendors over the rising cost of vegetables.

More than 15 million Lebanese people live abroad, scattered like ashes across the globe in fear of ever returning to a homeland that has failed them. Many of them will never know their country, even if they carry the citizenship of a land that they feel no kinship with.

What was important was that I belonged to myself, to my family and our neighborhood, and to a vision of Lebanon that embraced her children regardless of who their father is and where he comes from. And yet despite the misery this country inflicts on its people, I choose it as mine.

Over the years, I returned regularly to Beirut, always aching for the familiarity and rhythm of its streets. When the assault on Gaza began on October 8th, 2023, with parallel tensions erupting between Israel and Lebanon, I felt the final pull to return home. I couldn’t watch the aggression from afar.

As the war shifted and intensified, I became obsessed with photographing and filming my city and its inhabitants, a nervous tic that I picked up after experiencing the August 4th port explosion in Beirut, which killed 218 people, wounded 7,000, of whom at least 150 acquired a physical disability, damaged 77,000 apartments, and displaced over 300,000, according to a report published by Human Rights Watch. Photography was my way of holding onto memories that could collapse into rubble at any moment.

What was important was that I belonged to myself, to my family and our neighborhood, and to a vision of Lebanon that embraced her children regardless of who their father is and where he comes from. And yet despite the misery this country inflicts on its people, I choose it as mine.

I filmed and photographed the tender moments that often went unseen: the cats lounging on my street with their caretakers; the elderly couple strolling across Hamra in the blistering July heat; a discarded plastic chair with an incomplete crossword with it; the electrical wires that emerged from concrete walls; and the rotting flowers bursting from the same concrete. When the anger and resentment that had built over the years faded away, forgiveness assumed its place.

But I’ll never forget that brief encounter at the Amn el-Am.

The officer, of course, had assumed I was an African migrant domestic worker who had come to register my papers with my employer under the Kafala System. My mother, who has never had patience for the casual racism pervasive in Arab society, retorted:

Ejet min batne!

“She came from my womb!”