Mika
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August 8, 2020 15h55
Updated at 16h49
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Mika takes the pen to Beirut
A native of Beirut, the singer-songwriter Mika has taken pen to paper to sign a letter in support of the city and its inhabitants, have been severely tested by the explosions of last Tuesday. The popular musician — who is also known as coach to the show The Voice in France, book a reflection with an open heart on the country where it was born, its resilience, and hope of better days. Here is the integral.
Here is the full text of the letter written by Mika
“My Lebanon, Beirut,
It is early this morning on the other side of the Mediterranean sea, and I feel at once so close and so far away from you. So close to you, devastated by the apocalypse, I kept looking at flabbergasted faces the martyrs of my brothers and sisters. In their eyes, I guess the fear, the tears. Chills arise when I see the wounded evacuated to the rear window of an old car, this girl in blood in the arms of his father, these people shattered who run in streets strewn with rubble, broken glass, furniture sprayed… So far away from you, haunted by the revelation, I never cease to imagine the deafening noise of the two outbreaks that did not leave the Beyrouthins. The cries of the bereaved families and victims hébétées mix with the howling sirens of ambulances at the heart of the night. I was also told on the phone that silence in the early morning, the odor of the smoking ruins.
In the Face of this chaos, I think back to the words of the lebanese poet Gibran Khalil Gibran : “none can reach dawn without going through the path of the night”. For months, you’re stuffed again on the path of the night. There are divisions, the echoes of the conflict on your borders, the corruption, the impotence of your leaders, the monetary crisis, which has plunged your families in misery, and then the outbreak of coronavirus always more virulent. The carefree lebanese, this remedy and the dramas of history gave way to anger and fear. The anxiety was rising each day a little more in me, as if thy wounds, my roots that I left at the age of a year and a half, I were to catch up.
And then suddenly, Tuesday, at 18: 10, a, tragic, gray cloud that is mounted to your port, mowing your people to the end of his strength. The thick smoke orange drowned the sky of Beirut. It has replaced the distant memory so many times told by my mother, of this yellow light which bathed our apartment on the fourth floor, on the corniche facing the sea. How not to see in these two explosions, the symbol of a system that broke out ? How not to hear the roar of the bombs that sowed death in your streets still marked by the scars of the war ? The lebanese prime minister, omar hassan Diab, promises that those responsible would be “accountable”. But the people in charge of that ? What ? The leaders of 30 years of agony that have made the country of the cedar, the countries of the ashes.
It is said of the disaster that it is a tragic ending. The end of a sequence of misfortunes. After the darkness will come the dawn. I know your resilience, your strength, your solidarity, which feed on the mixture of cultures, this place is so specific to the mid-point between the arab world and Europe. Tomorrow, you will rise again as you have always done. The music will resound again from your windows, the body will dance on your terraces, the perfume will escape from your kitchen. I’ll be there.
Mika
