Book Looks at the Collapse of Lebanon and the Women Who Survive

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2024, p. 64

Book Talks

THE MIDDLE EAST Institute and the American Task Force on Lebanon held a virtual book talk on March 1 featuring award-winning multimedia journalist Dalal Mawad, who spoke about her recently released book All She Lost: The Explosion in Lebanon, the Collapse of a Nation and the Women who Survive. The Lebanese writer was a senior producer with the Associated Press (AP) based in Beirut when twin blasts rocked the city’s port on Aug. 4, 2020. The blasts were one the largest non-nuclear explosions in recent history, killing at least 220 people, wounding more than 7,000 and causing massive property damage. “The explosion was really the apocalypse and the death of the Lebanon that I once knew,” she told the French-language Lebanese newspaper L'Orient-Le Jour. “For me and for many people, there is always a before and after Aug. 4. There’s something that died on this day, forever, that I’m never going to get back. It’s maybe a relationship I had with Beirut, my sense of security and safety.” 

After Mawad moved to Paris to work as a freelance producer for CNN, she took a close look at her AP reporting in the aftermath of the blast and noticed that most of her interviews were with women. “Arab women are incredible storytellers but they rarely have a safe place or the opportunity to use their voices,” she said. Overall, women don’t write the history of the world even though they play a prominent role in events. 

The story of Lebanon’s civil war, from 1975 to 1990, has been told by the winners, foreigners or experts but not by ordinary Lebanese survivors. The grievances that caused the civil war have never been addressed, so the war never ends. Mawad believes that documenting the port explosion and the civil war are the first steps toward truth and accountability. She hopes amplifying the voices of families calling for a port fact-finding mission will help victims recover. 

Mawad spent two years interviewing survivors of the port explosion who lost loved ones. “I’d ask a general question and the interviewee would take the lead and tell me what they wanted to tell me. I recorded hours of interviews and returned for more…I used chunks of narration as is and then added context in my voice, including the recent history of Lebanon to explain to a non-Lebanese audience.” 

Some of the women have turned grief into meaningful action, including daughters and mothers who lead the survivors’ fight for justice. Others, like Mawad, have left Lebanon. Those who remain lurch from crisis to crisis or have adjusted to the trauma of Lebanon’s economic calamity. The women who share their extraordinary stories of unimaginable loss, tragedy and corruption show us that history repeats itself in Lebanon—and everywhere else—when there is impunity.

 —Delinda C. Hanley