Rima Rantisi | Editor's Note

It was the turn of this year when the Lebanese lira exchange rate peaked against the almighty dollar. Abdullah Al-Saaei, a doe-eyed bushy-faced man, father of two, walked into a bank with a tank of gasoline in his final attempt to withdraw his money. In 2019, he had sold a piece of land and deposited $400,000 in his bank account only to soon unwittingly join the millions of others whose money was suddenly inaccessible due to the illegal capital controls set by the Central Bank of Lebanon. He opened a grocery store and an espresso kiosk having  recuperated some of that money by selling banker’s checks at a fraction of their value. This was one of the creative ways the bankers and hustlers could placate their customers while still stealing huge portions of their dollar deposits. The kiosk was soon robbed of $15,000 worth of merchandise, and his debt to suppliers and business partners had piled up in tandem with the escalating lira to dollar rate. Al-Saaei doused the bank with gasoline and forced the bank-tellers-come-hostages to give him $50,000 in cash, not a dollar less, not a dollar more, from his account – or else. He received his money, with a receipt, safely handed it to his family, and turned himself in. 

The pieces within this 10th issue of Rusted Radishes come together in a tapestry that tells the broader tale of Abdallah Al-Saaei. This tale includes central banks, the endless greed of capitalist vampires, gluttonous desire, markets, dreams and the subconscious, the paper-thin security of home, the imaginary of wealth, the futility of one’s labor, the imagining of a future that does not resemble the present, and one that couldn’t possibly repeat the past though sometimes does. The country was in awe of Al-Saeei. The collective dissolution of people’s wealth over these past few years in Lebanon at the hands of the confederacy of the parliamentarian warlord dunces prompted Al-Saaei to be hailed a hero. He did what so many imagined but could not do. He dared to write his own fate against the banks. He is one of my favorite writers.

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The journal opens with Randa Mirza’s photography series “Beirutopia: A True Gateway to Modern Life,” which illustrates the flimsy imagination of real estate developers whose vision of Beirut has always been for the rich. These images are dispersed throughout the issue as reminders of this utopian dream’s ubiquity  in Lebanon – and throughout the Arab world. Similarly, the interruption of Jacques Vertabedian’s paintings of the faces of dead U.S. presidents, the faces of American currency, appear throughout the issue, mimicking the dollar’s insistent presence in our lives. 

Omar el-Zeenni, the eccentric Beiruti poet of the 1920s, wrote poetry that draws parallels to present day Lebanon. Sana Tannoury-Karam writes a critical piece on El-Zeenni’s work, which does not hide his disgust for the nouveau riche nor for the inflation of prices as he employed Beiruti colloquialisms to express his anxieties over losing his city. This loss of money and home is also illustrated in an excerpt from Iraqi poet Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab’s poem “غريب عىل الخليج,” which features in English translation by Zahra Hankir and Mariam Antar; the speaker of the poem asks money when will he return to his homeland?

Contemporary poetry by Maha Ahmed and George Abraham take us to America in “Al-Musrifun” and “Of Nation,” respectively, in which we feel the tension of how money and might can leave traces of nothingness. Abraham writes about the hypocrisies of the woke “american poem” which will be published in “a journal named after stolen land, named / With stolen language, no one will own.” Ahmed writes about being young and indulgent in America, “I liked the clean breaks. I woke up / to nothing. America was a sink I could fill. / People clung to your arm so hard it almost broke off.”

Mai Serhan takes us to the seedy streets of Cairo in “Dust is Dead Skin” and “Red Dress” where desire for cash and luxury is sticky and sweaty and smells cheap in two biting epistolary poems. Filipinx author, Stefani J. Alvarez’s work is translated into English in “Three Dagli from Saudi Arabia” by Alton Melvar Dapanas. In three potent dagli – flash fiction or nonfiction pieces, or as Dapanas writes in his translation note “or neither” – we read how a Filipina sex worker in Saudi Arabia makes a living while concerned about how to send money back home. 

Every Arab country that has faced economic collapse has turned its eyes to its Central Bank. In her visual essay “Three Stories on the Tunisian Dinar,” Myriam Amri takes us into the Central Bank of Tunisia, showing us how the Tunisian dinar is destroyed and disposed of, transforming into nothing but ash or “a million fragments of shredded banknotes tightly wrapped in cellophane” to be gifted to foriegn dignitaries, stored away in the Central Bank, or displayed in museums. Back in Beirut, Adam Waterman dreams of money, describing its elusiveness, its “undead” quality, like that of the ancient empousai in “These Blasphemously Surviving Nightmares: Money and Other Bad Dreams.”

The scarcity of money first starts appearing at home. In the short stories “Here is My House, It is Not Mine,” by Amina Hassan and “Black Hole,” by Nur Turkmani, the reader visits the characters’ homes, which are in need of repair as are the relationships within and surrounding them. Sarah Richani’s paintings offer further scenes of home in sketches of Beirut’s streets. Tariq Keblaoui’s photograph depicts Beirut’s “Lamb House” as an eerie image of Hopper’s Nighthawks, telling a similar story of loneliness, but in this Beiruti version one that is infused with a prosperous time now lost. 

In fiction translation, we have “The Gilding” by Hajra Masroor translated by Jaideep Pandey, and pieces from the Book of Monsters by J. Rodolpho Wilcock translated by Nicholas A. B. Kahn. The unusual characters here highlight the moral contradictions that accompany wealth.

The swirling market exchange rates that control people’s lives are depicted in the graphic narratives of Tamara Nasr’s “At Market Rate” and Maya Chamseddine’s “Layover” as well as in graphic art by Noel Nasr and Cliff Makhoul in “DevaL.L.uation.” Meanwhile, Tatiana Bohsali’s graphic designs of money for the Arab World prompt viewers to think about the future of currency. In “Non-favorable Circumstances,” Omar El Fil looks at how art will take on a different form in the future of NFTs and cryptocurrency. 

Finally, an excerpt from Molly Rice’s Beirut-based “distance theater” The Birth of Paper, featuring our drama editor Milia Ayache, addresses material items made of paper – money, pencils – and the notion of imagining what one will become and how one can never fully know what the future will bring.

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What law could prosecute Abdullah Al-Saaei for taking his own money? He was let out on bail two weeks later for 200,000 liras, the equivalent of approximately $10 today. He was like anyone else: living inside the relentlessly increasing scarcity of electricity and gas, food, pleasure and leisure time –  inside the obscurity of a future. But unlike many of us who see our money in the Lebanese banks as imaginary numbers on a screen, Al-Saaei saw his future in those paper bills that were stained with his sweat and blood – and he did the impossible to take them back. 

As we noted in our call for submissions, money has come to be a fiction in the lives of people who live under capital controls, who have various exchange rates and currencies, whose money was stolen by the entities who claimed to protect it. Money is elusive and ever-changing, it makes no sense. We are constantly processing its power over the survival of that which we value most – and that’s why today it’s all we can talk about.