4 ideas
Alexandre Najjar, born in Beirut in 1967, was a boy when the Lebanese Civil War began in 1975 and grew up through it. He recounts that childhood in short episodic chapters: shelters, shelling, a city divided by front lines, and schooling repeatedly interrupted. As an adult he returns to Beirut and measures the city he remembers against the one he finds.
For a child raised during a prolonged conflict, the war itself becomes the curriculum. It teaches fear management, reading danger, improvisation, and the value of ordinary routines, often more lastingly than the classroom it keeps interrupting. Seeing childhood this way turns attention from what was lost in formal education to what was learned in its place.
When conflict lasts long enough, extraordinary danger gets folded into ordinary life. Shelling, shelters and checkpoints become background conditions that people schedule around, not events that stop life. This adaptation makes survival and a semblance of normal childhood possible, but it also dulls perception of how abnormal the situation is.
Returning as an adult to a city known in childhood, especially one reshaped by destruction and rebuilding, shows that the remembered place survives only in memory. The physical city and the personal one have diverged, so return brings recognition and estrangement together. Writing becomes a way of preserving the version that can no longer be visited.