The Beirut explosion was devastating. However, for those living in Lebanon, the event was simply the tip of the iceberg. As the city grapples with the aftermath, a group of skaters are fighting to save their scene – because for them, it’s the only way to escape the pressures of everyday life.
Text: Victoria Schneider Photography: Dalia Khamissy
Nowadays, the Beirut explosion is all that people want to talk about. Bilal Hersh finds this frustrating. It’s almost as if his life has suddenly become more interesting to others – “just because there was a bomb”.
The 31-year-old skateboarder was right there when it rocked the city in early August. He was giving a skate lesson on the new seaside promenade that stretches from downtown, along the Mediterranean Sea and towards the port. They were only separated from the blast site by a few hundred metres of water.
The first explosion was loud. The second was silent – but towering. “It was larger than life,” he remembers. Momentarily paralysed, they could only watch as a massive mushroom cloud formed above them. The surreal colour reminded Bilal of Donald Trump’s hair. “It was like being on acid without taking acid.”
They ran, and survived. Others weren’t so lucky. The blast was the result of some 2,700 tonnes of ammonium nitrate exploding, after it had been stored unsafely at the port for six years. Officially, almost 200 people were killed, 6,000 others injured; unofficially, there are still dozens of people missing. The World Bank has calculated the housing and cultural damage to be somewhere → between $3.8 and $4.6 billion. As many as 300,000 Beirut citizens have lost their homes.
The event was traumatic, physically and mentally, but Bilal is able to talk about it clearly. He is a gentle person, with a warm, boyish laugh. His friends either refer to him by his surname, or a version of it, “AlHajj” – a play on the word used to describe those who make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Today, he’s dressed entirely in black, carefully curated tattoos visible on his arms: a skateboard, Pink Floyd’s iconic ‘screaming face’ artwork, a portrait of his mother.
Bilal is one of the key figures in the city’s skate community; he was nine when he first stepped on a penny board, twelve when he got hooked. He knows Beirut like the back of his hand, and he knows that the long-term fallout of the explosion is still to come. But talking about the incident in isolation irritates him. He feels it ignores the underlying factors that
