Walid, who lost vision in one of his eyes on the day of the Port of Beirut explosion on August 4, 2020, asked for his name to be changed, and to limit the details that could identify him, his family, or any factor linked to his story. Every name in this story has been changed to respect his wishes. But he also asked not to figure in the pictures. How could I portray him and his visual experience without describing him or photographing him? I simply asked him, What is it like to lose half your sight?
“It’s not pitch black, it’s a mixture of gray, of lack of light, basically,” he explains. “Similar to when you close your eyes, you don’t really see black, and you don’t really see anything,” he added. Purple, dark blue, gray, or indigo. A combination of different hues that form a certain darkness. Dilated spots, elongated shapes, and colors merging with one another, mixing together. Walid was surprised at how incredible the human body is, when his left eye quickly took over and filled the gap by expanding his vision.
Through the following photographs, I sought to somehow see the world as Walid does. I wanted to represent both the strength of the human body, as well as its fragility. Its flimsiness and delicacy. Instant pictures are both very fragile and very sturdy. They can be cut and carved before being mended again, sewn together, to create new images. Like the human body, it can break, heal, and adapt to whatever challenges come its way.
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The instant photographs in this series were treated with a process called “emulsion lift” in which the picture is lifted from the plastic coat that supports and protects it. In the process, the photograph becomes both extremely flimsy and malleable, but also strong, durable, and transferrable on multiple surfaces. The right side of some of the emulsion lifts is distorted to somehow reflect Walid’s description of how his left eye expanded its field of vision while compensating for the loss of the right.
Walid completely lost vision in his right eye after the August 4 Port of Beirut explosion. He did not lose his eye, but the nerve linking the eye to the brain was severed. “I have traumatic neuropathic optic,” Walid calmly explained, sitting on his couch surrounded by children’s toys in a modern living room of the home he recently built with his wife Nayla, his toddler Marwan, and the baby girl they are expecting in the coming weeks. An AC compressor fell on his head, causing the nerve to rupture, resulting in the total loss of vision in that eye.
Plugging an HDMI cable to the back of the TV to play video games became mission impossible for Walid. Filling a glass with water took focus and a series of hits-and-misses. Lifting the glass to his mouth was just as hard. So was cleaning his beloved arguileh.
The first few days after the explosion were blurry for Walid, in every sense of the word.
“The doctors told me to be realistic. At first I didn’t accept the fact. The most basic things were difficult.” As Walid had to adjust to spatial dynamics differently, his left eye expanded its field of vision. Visiting multiple doctors for the glimpse of a possibility to see through his right eye again, the hint of a different diagnosis proved useless as all professionals unanimously declared that there was no way for Walid’s vision to come back in his eye.
“I wanted to be realistic, but I had to know for sure,” he said. “The nerve was cut. The eye can be replaced; the nerves cannot.” A few months after going back to work, where he was injured, he was unable to perform efficiently in his job as restaurant manager, so he quit. In the midst of an economic crisis, and following the explosion, Walid found himself starting a new chapter of his life, one where he had to learn to see again—in a different light.
A few minutes before the explosion, when fireworks started exploding in the hangar where the ammonium nitrate was stored, Walid stepped outside the restaurant with his team to have a look.
“I was working as a restaurant manager in an establishment in Gemmayze,” he explained, adding that he joined that restaurant a bit over a month before the explosion. “When the explosion happened, we were about to head inside the restaurant. I didn’t feel a thing. What I know is that the valet parking attendant took the AC compressor off my face, and hurried me inside the destroyed restaurant.
“When I got inside, I woke up a bit. I was covered in blood and could only hear screams around me, the screams of some staff members. I walked to the hospital with some of my coworkers, and all the way there, I kept telling them ‘I can’t see, I can’t see.’ A man grabbed my ankle while I was walking, asking me to help him, but I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see, I could only hear.”
Walid remembers wondering why he couldn’t see, why his vision was blurred. Was it because of the blood? Where was he injured? After a forty-five minute walk, he finally reached the hospital where he joined others in the waiting room as they were only taking in extreme cases. He remembers his wife calling him. As an aftershock of the trauma, Walid suffered from disorientation, telling his wife he was at work, as if nothing had happened.
Stranded between screams and wails, doctors and nurses prioritized patients with the most severe injuries. The waiting room was packed, crowded for the most part with agonizing patients bleeding, and a medical corps trying to tend to all patients by improvising treatment rooms in the parking lot. No one knew what had happened at the port by then, the priority was only to save as many people as possible. Amidst all the chaos, someone gave Walid a stapler.
“‘Keep it with you, you’ll need it’ that person told me. A bit later, doctors and nurses were stapling my face and head, but I didn’t feel a thing,” he recalls. The anguish, the incomprehension, and the turmoil numbed out Walid, to what was happening around him, and especially within him. After a short stay at the hospital, when the dust finally settled, doctors explained to him what the explosion did to his vision.
Small tasks, such as eating, driving, or drinking became immeasurably complex. Walid went back to his position as restaurant manager only a couple of months after the explosion, but the restrictions his new field of vision presented created multiple obstacles.
“I had some trouble with work,” he says. “As a restaurant manager I had to do table alignments, making sure they were all laid out correctly and in order, and I had to constantly check on waiters. But now I can't do it. Hospitality is great because you’re always communicating with people, but with the problem with my right eye, I couldn’t drive well at night.”
After the explosion, Walid and Nayla decided to start a family. The hospitality business in which Walid had been for a couple of years by then, with its extreme hours late into the night, wouldn’t allow him to be with his family as much, and could potentially be dangerous, driving late in the dark while he was still learning to see with only his left eye.
Walid eventually quit his position, and is now working as an Information Technology professional, and launching his own e-commerce with Nayla. This shift in careers allows him to be more present in his son’s and future daughter’s day-to-day life. It also requires him to be working mainly from a computer, and doesn’t involve many tasks that demand the same level of spatial awareness as hospitality did.
Around 800 to 1,000 people suffer from a disability after August 4, 2020, according to an interview with Sylvanna Lakkis, the president of the Lebanese Union for People with Physical Disabilities. No governmental entity has ever released the official number of victims from the explosion. The number of people suffering from a disability after August 4 is also approximate.
Walid never refers to himself as someone with a disability. “After all the doctors said the same thing, I realized I should stop obsessing, and move forward,” he says with a bitter chuckle. Walid is stoic about life’s difficulties and sees them as challenges to overcome. A motorcycle accident, injuries, and later on COVID, were all part of his story. Treating his injury as a handicap was not an option for him. It was another obstacle he would learn to overcome, to continue living his life as a father, husband, and active member of society, separate from labels.
Whether he acknowledges his total loss of vision in his right eye or not, whether the government recognizes it as an official disability or not, little changes in the eyes of Lebanese law. In theory, the law offers people with disabilities the same rights as any Lebanese, but in practice, similar to many Lebanese decrees, it’s not applied and respected.
Lebanon’s Law 220 stipulates that people with disabilities should have equal access to any basic right. The law was passed, signed, and ratified in 2000, but has been vastly ignored and dismissed, since both public and private institutions do not offer the basic amenities to people with disabilities to lead an independent life in Lebanon. Only modern buildings offer ramp access while most public buildings are completely inaccessible. TV stations do not propose audible descriptions for people with visual impairment, and sign language is not even available during presidential addresses.
In a country facing one of the worst financial, social, and economic crises in the world since the mid-nineteenth century, people with disabilities find themselves even more ostracized from society because of Lebanon’s collapsing social, medical, and economic system. After the 2020 explosion, the government would purportedly facilitate treatment for people injured from the explosion. The first announcement issued by the government claimed it would cover costs of all injured who were treated at the hospital that fateful day; the second circular stated that the Minister of Public Health would “cover the treatment cost of the injured”; and lastly, law 196 was issued in December 2020. This law referred those injured in the explosion to Lebanon’s crumbling model of public health insurance, the National Social Security Fund, and to be eligible for the rights and aid that Law 220 offers. A perfectly absurd and dystopian loop, sealed and approved, with no results.
“Absolutely no one from the government followed up,” Walid explains, practically laughing at the absurdity of the thought. “Some said I would maybe get lifelong insurance or monthly payment similar to the army’s, but not at all. Even with doctors, nothing was free. Nothing.”
Some media even asked Walid to talk to them and tell his story in exchange for money, but he refused, as he does not want his story and what he went through to be a transaction or another media buzz. “If someone would have offered treatment, I would have considered it, but otherwise, no.”
More than two years later, with support from his wife, family, and friends, Walid learned to adjust and adapt to this new life. Most importantly, it was through his constant effort in reminding himself of what matters in life, getting up in the morning to get to work or go for a walk, and not allowing himself to wallow in the past but move forward, that Walid managed to rebuild his life after August 4, 2020.
Now, as Nayla prepares dinner for their son, Daisy the dog manages to escape from the kitchen and jump to play with Walid, wildly wagging her tail. A couple of months after the explosion, in an effort to keep up a disciplined lifestyle in order not to dwell on his fate, Walid thought getting a dog might be a good idea. “Daisy has an eye of each color, so it reminded me of myself. I thought maybe she doesn’t see that well, like me. I got out of bed to walk her, and went on walks with her at night. And although my vision didn’t improve, I started feeling better.” Walid tried therapy for a few sessions, after some doctors and his loved ones encouraged him to seek help, but he never followed through. At the core of his values and his character is his desire to be independent, rely on no one but himself: “I don’t like the word haram.”
Tamara Saade
Tamara Saade is a journalist and photographer born and raised in Lebanon and is currently based in its capital, Beirut. She mainly covers Lebanon's social landscape, focusing on human rights, with a documentary approach, through photography, writing, and videography. Working with different photographic formats, she uses the intersectionality of the medium and the message to highlight her stories. She has worked with The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the UN, and has exhibited photographs in France, the UAE, Norway, and Lebanon.
