ALUMNI FEATURE
ﺧﺎص ﻣﻦ اﻟﺨﺮﯾﺠﯿﻦ
Teaching
Science Fiction
While Living It in Lebanon
How science fiction can help us escape upside down worlds and empower us to reimagine—and rebuild—better ones By Nadya Sbaiti
T
o be in Lebanon in the fall and winter of 2019 offered something that neither protesters on the street nor taxidermied naysayers in power had anticipated. As hundreds of thousands of people flooded cities and towns, their presence was an embrace of the unknown, a decided desire to create a world in which they would not have to leave family, friends, and country in search of opportunities elsewhere. The new future would have space for them all. The popular uprising began the evening of October 17, 2019. It was sparked by the government’s plan to impose taxes on the popular mobile application WhatsApp. But this came on the heels of uncontained wildfires that had blazed through the mountainous Shuf region earlier in the month. Firefighting helicopters sat in idle disrepair due to government neglect, symbolic of what plagued decades of successive Lebanese governments—political polarization, mismanagement of public funds, and rampant corruption and waste. That same noxious mix would once again culminate, hardly a year later, in disregard for residents’ lives and well-being with the Port of Beirut explosion on August 4, 2020. Explosions, popular and port, appear to bookend the last year in Lebanon. This is to say nothing of the country’s economic implosion and the global pandemic, in between and persisting since. To live through it all has felt surreal; to work through it, often impos-
Reem Bassous, Moribund Outlivers VI, 2017. Acrylic on Canvas. 16”x20” Courtesy of the Artist.
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