Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse

Charif Majdalani

3 ideas

1. Beirut's summer collapse and port explosion

   In summer 2020 Charif Majdalani kept a daily diary in Beirut as the Lebanese pound lost most of its value, banks froze depositors' savings, prices soared, and power cuts spread, while the political class did nothing. On 4 August 2020, about 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate that had been stored unsafely at the port since 2014 exploded. The blast killed more than 200 people and gutted neighborhoods such as Gemmayzeh, Mar Mikhael and Achrafieh. The diary records both phases as they happened, so the gradual economic unravelling and the sudden physical catastrophe appear as one continuous event.

2. Negligence explosion as corruption made physical

   The port blast was not an accident separate from the financial collapse but its material expression. The same clientelist system that looted the banks and the state also left a known explosive stockpile untouched for years, because no official had an incentive to take responsibility. Chronic institutional rot stays abstract until it produces a single catastrophe that makes years of neglect visible at once.

3. Diary form as history in progress

   Majdalani's day-by-day entries capture how the collapse was lived before its outcome was known: dread building, ordinary life continuing beside disaster, and uncertainty about what would matter. The record is not pure unfiltered immediacy, though; he paused for about ten days after the explosion and deliberately wove daily events into historical explanation, so the diary mixes in-the-moment experience with reflection.

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