Beirut is Burning: Western Visual Culture and Online Representations of Disaster
Bibi Imre-Millei
September 12, 2020
Photo courtesy of Vox & Getty AFP Vox & Getty/AFP
On August 4th, on a balmy day in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, two explosions were caught on camera by multiple bystanders from multiple angels. The blasts, the second of which was larger, left an estimated 300,000 homeless, 6000 injured, and 171 dead, as of August 11th. The death count will likely climb as the rubble of the city is excavated. 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, confiscated from a Russian vessel in late 2013 are linked to the explosion, and the improper storage of the material has led to international attention on corruption in Lebanon. The videos, first posted on Twitter and then circulated on multiple web and social media sites caused an outpouring of intrigue, speculation, and then support.
Over the summer, as our activities have been limited and our interactions have been pushed online, information about global events has increasingly been shared in the form of Instagram graphics. Though this trend started long before lockdown, this quick and easy way to share information has exploded since, gaining momentum during the newest iteration of the Black Lives Matter movement. While explanatory graphics are often helpful to those just beginning to engage with complicated topics, they water down complexity in order to deliver a manicured message from a particular perspective. For example, many graphics circulated to inform about the “Challenge Accepted” trend of black and white photos sparked by the death of Kurdish student Pinar Gültekin in Turkey simplified the issue. Gültekin’s ethnicity and the long history of both state and interpersonal violence in Turkey against the Kurdish populations and Kurdish women in particular, were often left unexplored.
Instagram graphics are also meant to be aesthetically pleasing, and lend themselves to the visual culture of social media platforms. They attempt to make appealing and palatable issues that would normally be the realm of lengthy and difficult to read journal articles. The intrigue surrounding the blast shows our affinity for exciting videos which show outrageous images. Explosions and fire in particular, capture human imagination. The videos of the Beirut explosion were shared millions of times on multiple platforms. This was true too of the April 2019 Notre Dame Cathedral fire. The responses to both disasters paralleled each other, as global viewers moved from shock, to sympathy, to donation.
First, videos and pictures of the event circulated. Next, messages of mourning, thoughts and prayers were spread, largely by those most distant from the events. In both cases, people posted pictures of their experiences at the site, centering the conversation on themselves - “My trip to Paris,” “My exchange in Beirut.” Then came the donation links, in the case of Notre Dame, unnecessary, and in the case of Beirut, not always linked to reliable organizations.
One of the key differences between the responses was the framing of the Lebanese people as resilient sufferers, somehow uniquely attuned to surviving disaster due to their past experience of it. But the explosion in Beirut was not a simple accident. Though corruption was discussed in some of the Instagram graphics circulated, Lebanon was often positioned as an irreparably conflict-ridden place immersed in constant unavoidable tragedy. This frame shows how Western collective bias often seeps into our expressions of global mourning. Despite its supposed war-torn nature, Beirut has also been conceptualised as a cultural and Westernised hub in relation to the countries around it. At once dangerous and progressive, the narrative of Beirut as the exotic “Paris of the Middle East” creates a further connection with Notre Dame.
As many Lebanese Twitter users expressed, discussing Beirut as the “Paris of the Middle East” creates value only in relation to a Eurocentric idea of culture, sophistication and progress. Indeed, Paris would never be called the “Beirut of Europe.” This bias also extends to what we, as Westerners in Canada,pay attention to. During the Notre Dame fire, explicit links were made between the burning cathedral and the burning Amazon rainforest, sparking criticism of those who paid attention to one over the other. What is it that we don’t pay attention to today? Perhaps it is Yemen, which has been the subject of many explanatory Instagram graphics but has never had a global viral response which equals the response to the Beirut explosion. It is more difficult for people to pay attention to hundreds of pictures of the starving than to the visually exciting multi-angle blast video. There are topics that don’t make it onto Instagram at all, such as the sustained campaign of US targeted strikes (often called drone strikes) in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. For these types of explosions, videos of the blasts are impossible to find, and only a few pictures exist of the rubble after them. It is not easy to fit these stories into one single narrative of suffering in ten images on an Instagram slideshow.
As many others have claimed before me, social media can only be the starting point for learning. Of course, it is important to bring attention to disasters, and social media has provided us a unique and powerful way to do so. However, while consuming this information, we must be mindful of not only misinformation, disinformation, and simplification of complex issues, but of how our own biases might glamourise and distort disaster. On August 10th, the government of Lebanon resigned after pressures from mass protests in the capital. But these protests have barely been discussed on social media, and certainly haven’t gained as much as attention as the initial videos and donation links. We should react strongly and empathetically to disaster, but while doing so, we should put focus on how and where the people we discuss are asserting their agency, as opposed to portraying them in their most victimized and powerless form.