Um Yumna was 14 years old when she moved from Beqaa to live in Beirut. She had married a young Berjaoui [1] man who worked at a company in the city, and they settled in one of the small homes of Ras Al Nabaa. That was in 1954 or 1955; she no longer remembers precisely. The following year she would give birth to the first of six children, then the second. A year or two later, the country would be shaken by a series of earthquakes. Six thousand houses were destroyed in the 1956 earthquake. Entire villages collapsed in Chouf Al Aala and Iklim, and Um Yumna’s house in Ras Al Nabaa came apart. In 1957, the young family packed up their belongings and moved. At the time, Um Yumna did not intend to spend the next 55 years of her life in that little three-room house atop Zreik Hill in Tarik Al Jadidah.

Today, from her home in Barja, Um Yumna reflects on her housing trajectory. She describes how her eviction from her house in Tarik Al Jadidah affected her, and how she tried, as an elderly woman, to oppose this eviction. With grief, she explains her struggles of belonging and adaptation in the face of the spatial, social, and economic changes she has gone through.

[1] Berjaoui e.i.Hailing originally from the town of Barja south of Beirut

Yumna, the only daughter of Um Yumna, tells today the story of her and her family’s eviction from that house. She recounts how circumstances led her parents to leave their first home and rent an apartment in Tarik Al Jadidah, in a building belonging to one of the first Lebanese families to settle and build in the neighborhood in the 1930s. That building no longer exists today. In 2015, in partnership with engineer Hammoud who has several projects in the area the plot’s heirs demolished the building and replaced it with a modern residential building of 11 floors with a locked metal gate. Today, it belongs to the heirs and the heirs’ heirs, and some of them live in the building’s apartments.

The home that Um Yumna and her family lived in was on the ground floor, and the building was no more than three floors high. Initially, the building was nothing more than a simple family home. The owners would add rooms around the main building whenever one of the children married. Before long, the family built upper floors and began to rent out the rooms on the ground floor, and later the upper floors, as Tarik Al Jadidah grew and with it the demand for housing in the 1940s and 1950s [2]. 

Twelve families rented in that building. “One big room, one small room, and amenities. They considered that a home and they would rent it out.” That was home for Um Yumna’s family of eight – six children, the father, and the mother. Everything took place in that one big room with the high ceiling. Next to it was the small room, and next to that was a small kitchen and a small bathroom. Altogether it was no more than 40 square meters.

[2] Rapid Social Research: Beirut and Its Suburbs, 2005

Several of Um Yumna’s children got married, and some of them lived in the area around Tarik Al Jadidah. They were unfamiliar with Barja. except by name. One of the sons married a girl from the family, who was from Barja. She did not want to live in Beirut, so there was nothing to do but to live in a house in Barja. Next to it was a house that was still just a skeletal frame. Its Syrian owners were offering it for sale for an attractive price because they were in urgent need of money, so the son tried to convince his family to buy it. The year was 2000 or 2001, i.e. during the period when the building in Tarik Al Jadidah had deteriorated. Even so, the family was reluctant to buy it because they never imagined that they would one day live in Barja. But in the end, the house represented a good investment opportunity, especially since three of Um Yumna’s sons were still unmarried. It contained four unfinished residential apartments and three shops at the street level. Um Yumna seized the opportunity and went to the house’s owners with an offer to buy it from them. They did not accept at first, because their relationship with her son next door had not been good. So she resorted to an intermediary, a contractor well-known among the people of Barja, and she succeeded in buying the house. Um Yumna sold an incomplete house in Beqaa that she had built when she returned to her family’s village during the war, and used the money to buy the house in Barja. She would not finish building it, and it would stay in its unfinished state for the next 10 years. This is where Um Yumna lives today with two of her children.

They were displaced during the Civil War. The PLO [3] took Tarik Al Jadidah as a military and popular base [4]. Whenever circumstances worsened, Um Yumna and her children fled. They spent the period of the war moving among Barja, Beqaa, and Beirut. But whenever the situation calmed and the roads to Beirut opened, they went back to Tarik Al Jadidah. At first, they stayed in Barja. They saw a glimmer of hope in Bachir Gemayel’s election as president, so they went back to Beirut. But then he was assassinated [5], and they fled to Um Yumna’s relatives in the Beqaa. That is when she would begin building a house on the Mushaa’ (Commons) near her parents’ house, leave it unfinished, and return to Beirut. The house in Tarik Al Jadidah was looted in their absence. Not a single thing remained.

The war came suddenly and lasted 15 years, during which they never fully abandoned the house. The eviction disputes lasted nearly five years. A warning came that the houses must be vacated – all of the tenants’ homes on the ground floor and the upper floors – with a notice from the court, but no financial compensation was offered to the tenants. The warning came as no surprise to the residents. They were aware that the heirs intended to sell the property because they needed the money, and also because of the building’s deteriorating state, and their inability to restore it ever since the reconstruction period and the urban boom that followed the war. Some of the heirs lived in two of the upper floors of the building. They did not have close relationships with the tenants, and in the period that preceded the warnings, the tenants felt that the heirs had been “predatory” in their efforts to complete the investment deal. They “inventoried the estate” and orally informed the tenants that the property would be sold and that they had to look for other housing options. The neighbours hired a lawyer to take their claims to trial for compensation that would allow them to secure alternative housing. The judicial proceedings and trials lasted nearly five years, ending in 2012 when the tenants were paid modest compensation.

[3] Palestinian Liberation Organization

[4] Public Works Studio, Mapping Beirut from its tenants’ stories: Tarik Al Jadidah.

[5] Bachir Gemayel, elected president on 25 August 1982, assassinated on 14 September 1982

Um Yumna’s family did not have any options for staying in Beirut. Her children made an offer to the investor to buy an apartment in the new building, but they were rejected definitively and without justification. They resorted to some of the real estate offices to search for an apartment in the same area, but after the 2006 War [6], the prices of apartments there had risen up to $250,000. The family saw that instead of taking out loans to buy an apartment in Beirut, it would be more appropriate to invest in rehabilitating the Barja house, with its four apartments and shops that they could profit from by renting them out. During that period, Um Yumna fell ill and was hospitalized more than once. In the end, there was nothing she could do but give in to the option available in Barja.

As for Um Yumna’s elderly neighbours, they did not have the same options. While the options that Um Yumna and her family had were essentially dependent on the children’s ability to obtain loans because some of them were employed, the eviction compensation was the only means that some of Um Yumna’s neighbours and their families had in order to manage a lease on another apartment. But it had to be outside the city in the farther suburbs where prices were cheaper, in order to benefit longer from the compensation which was no more than $20,000. As for other neighbours, they moved in with their sons or daughters.

[6] 33 days war with Israel in the month of July 2006 during which the biggest part of Beirut’s southern suburb was destroyed.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Tarik Al Jadidah attracted large numbers of people from the South, Sidon, and Iklim [7], seeking work and education in the city. As for today, these areas, especially Iklim, absorb the largest portion of the reversed flow of displacement from Tarik Al Jadidah resulting from the increase in housing prices there, especially after the 2006 War [8]. Um Yumna’s family is one of many that were forced to return to their grandparents’ villages after exhausting their options for staying in the city. Like Dibbiyeh, Shheem, Jieh, and Jadra, Barja became a semi-connected extension of Beirut’s southern suburbs, namely Choueifat, Bchamoun, Aramoun, and Damour, after waves of Beirut residents surged there in an escape from rising real estate prices in the capital upon the start of reconstruction, while benefiting from these areas’ proximity to Beirut [9].

Yumna, who has gone back to live in a dormitory in Tarik Al Jadidah, visits the house in Barja every weekend, often offering to take her mother on trips to Beirut “for a change of scenery.” Car trips have become tiring for Um Yumna, so she says no. She goes to the city only when making social visits to their acquaintances. Some holidays, Yumna takes her mother to Sidon to go for a walk, have lunch, and buy some essentials from the public market. Her strongest family relationships are with her relatives in the Beqaa. She and her children visit them from time to time, and they also visit her . Many of the village’s residents emigrated to Canada long ago, including some of her brothers and their children, but they visit her whenever they return to Lebanon.

[7] Rapid Social Research: Beirut and Its Suburbs, 2005

[8] An Urban Suburb with the Capacities of a Village: The Social Stability Context in the Coastal Chouf Area, Conflict Analysis Report, March 2017, UNDP: https://data2.unhcr.org/ar/documents/download/61645

[9] The Apprehensions of the Past in Building the Future: Do the Master Plans for Damour and Dibbiyeh Encourage Return? Public Works Studio, 2018