CHRYSTÈLE KHODR

Rise and fall of Orient Swiss – Bedtime Stories

«Youssef Beidas made everything that the Lebanese are proud of … Every single thing. You name it. Anything that has value, Youssef made it and no one can deny it.»
 – Wadad Beidas

«Switzerland isn’t anything like Lebanon. Switzerland doesn’t have a port.»
 – Chrystèle Khodr

 

On the evening of August 4, 2020, a very large amount of ammonium nitrate exploded in the port of Beirut. The pressure wave of the explosion caused severe damage across kilometres to the buildings and the infrastructure of the city. Hundreds of people died, thousands were injured or became homeless. The food and economic crisis in Lebanon was exacerbated by the disaster. Pictures of the monumental ruin of the grain silos in the port of the destroyed city went around the world.

Almost exactly one year after the catastrophe, Chrystèle Khodr recorded the text for this listening piece in Beirut, for which she follows up the legend of the «Switzerland of the Orient». Because that is how Lebanon was called in the 1950s and 1960s. However, according to Chrystèle Khodr, the strange thing is that many people in Lebanon still rave about this «Switzerland of the Orient», which – despite banking secrecy – never really existed. Partly responsible for this may be the wellknown historical figure Youssef Beidas, a Palestinian- Lebanese businessman and banker whose endeavor it was throughout his life to develop Beirut as the Middle Eastern centre of trade and finance. In 1951, he founded Intra Bank – once the largest bank in Lebanon, whose controversial bankruptcy in 1966 casts a long shadow into the present and shapes collective memory (and forgetting) in Lebanon still today.

This listening piece traces the story of Youssef Beidas from the Beirut of the 1960s to his arrest in Switzerland and finally his grave in Lucerne. Sometimes tenderly, sometimes mockingly, and sometimes almost mechanically, Khodr tells episodes from past and present crises. She reports from her everyday life in a country where people wait in vain for hours in front of the bank to withdraw some money for rent and food, from conversations with friends in real Switzerland, which seems more far away than ever, or from the hours before the explosion on what seemed to be just an ordinary day in the midst of an ongoing collapse. At the end, her story returns to the crumbling remains of the grain silos in the port of Beirut – once devised by Youssef Beidas – half of which withstood the explosion wave and shielded part of the city from greater destruction.

 

Chrystèle Khodr is a theatre maker, actress and author. She lives in Beirut. Together with stage director Waël Ali, she developed the play «Temporary Stay», which was performed at Zürcher Theater Spektakel in 2019. Her latest stage production «Augurs» premiered in Beirut in May 2021.