At the beginning of Beirut's Hamra Street, Ali Aridi, 60, is busy preparing a cup of coffee for one of his casual customers.

He stands grieving after he was working in a publishing house, but economic circumstances forced him to become a worker who sold coffee, in return for a small income that was not sufficient for his medicine bill.

Uraydi looks at the streets and squares of Beirut a year after the start of the October 17 movement, and finds that the features of the city have changed, as well as its people "who cross without anyone laughing in the face of the other," as he put it.

He believes that those protests that swept Lebanon for weeks, only slogans printed on the walls remained, after the squares were empty of their people.

"The identity of Beirut has changed, and we no longer resemble ourselves in it, after most of us became poor in just one year that spent our lives and the future of our children," Uraydi told Al-Jazeera Net.

Ali Uraydi, economic conditions forced him to sell coffee for a small income (Al-Jazeera)

Hundreds of meters away from Ali, Jad, 40, is sitting with his companion, Karim, 36.

On the first anniversary of the October 17 movement, Jad likened the streets of Beirut to their scene during the civil war in 1975, but with a new template, explaining to Al Jazeera Net that the streets at that stage were invaded by dirt mounds, official centers were destroyed, and institutions closed their doors.

Nevertheless, Gad believes that Beirut in the days of the civil war was better off, and at that time "people were laying out their stalls for sale and staying up late on Hamra Street, which was the pulse of Beirut, before it became afflicted by the closure of its shops, and its visitors turned out to be unemployed."

As for Karim, and despite his support for the October 17 movement, he believes that Beirut's squares were blessed before that with the features of life and the aspects of the economic movement, but it entered into a clinical death until the explosion of the port on August 4 struck as a curse that fell on the city - according to his expression - " Beirut is afflicted, as if we were living in a war without armed proliferation. "

The October 17 thugs began spontaneously and were then penetrated by various political forces (Al-Jazeera)

The arenas of movement and the explosion


of those who knew the streets and squares of Beirut a year ago, realize that there has been a fundamental change in them.

From Martyrs' Square overlooking the Beirut port, two contrasting scenes emerge, the scene of the remnants of the movement printed on the walls and the fist of the "revolution" with all its defiance and popular anger, and the scene of the remnants of the explosion that destroyed a large part of Beirut with all its sorrow and disappointment.

Therefore, Downtown Beirut appears paralyzed, only the passage of cars and some people passing by, after its establishments, hotels and banks have been ironed or closed.

The Ring Bridge turned into a symbolic center for the demanding movement, and the Beirut markets, which were the city's economic and social artery, had a large share of the repercussions of the violent confrontations after October 17, until the port explosion destroyed them.

Even the slogans that printed the walls of the squares were varied in their content and backgrounds, which confirms that the movement that emerged spontaneously crystallized each group in its orientations and goals, ranging between Marxist and communist slogans, and others against the pillars of power, and slogans calling for the civil or secular state or to reject sectarianism, and other Radical or chaotic slogans, even insults invaded Beirut’s walls and squares.

The port explosion killed more than 190 people and destroyed parts of the capital (Anatolia)

However, how can one read these transformations that took place in Beirut after the October 17 movement?


The writer and researcher in socio-political science, Nahla al-Shahal, believes that the great transformation that occurred in Beirut, whether after the October 17 movement, or after the August 4, 2020 explosion, is that the capital has become "without human beings."

In her interview with Al-Jazeera Net, she considers that the large popular gathering that was witnessed in the squares, which included citizens of different ages, regions, sects and moods, was an emergency scene and astonishing in its aesthetics, but it no longer exists.

Al-Shahhal said that the absence of human gatherings from the city’s squares does not mean that they have ceased to exist, “rather, they are no longer manifested as a present mass, and have lost their momentum by virtue of time, the economic collapse, and then the repercussions of the outbreak of the epidemic and the explosion of the port.”

A year after the start of the popular movement, al-Shahal finds that Beirut's squares have become sad, and she indicates that there is a scene that affected her as she passed through central Beirut, where she found a solidarity slogan on one of the walls with Egyptian activists saying, "Freedom for Mahienour Al-Masry and Alaa Abdel-Fattah", which indicates - According to the speaker - on a communication between the uprising Arab squares.

The author considers that the explosion in the port embodied with its destruction a scene of the powerlessness and corruption of the authority, which was denouncing the slogans raised against it and outraged by the riots of the demonstrators.

As for the insults that invade some of the walls of Beirut, Shahhal believes that they reflect in their content the anger of people who are unable to embody their demands in an intellectual and political manner, "because their tools of change in the face of power have become limited."

The deteriorating economic situation was the cause of the October 17 movement (Al-Jazeera)

For his part, the Lebanese poet and writer Fadi Tufayli told Al-Jazeera Net that the Nejmeh Square, in which the parliament is in the center, has become like a security fortress, and has transformed from a civilian square into a space where movement is subject to security necessities, which also showed - according to Tufayli - two contradictory scenes, squares in central Beirut that are loose The protesters invade it whenever they want despite the security confrontations, and other squares have turned into a security fortress in which the confrontations are more severe.

Al-Tufayli notes that the demonstrations of October 17 brought people back to the spatial space in Beirut, and they began to contact it and draw through it a map of their movements, and if the confrontations intensified in one square they would resort to another.

He adds, that the squares in the spatial and geographical sense were not alive in Beirut, "but after October 17, people created their own squares to express their positions, which was evident in Hamra Street after its narrow area turned into a central arena for demonstrating against banks."

Therefore, Tufayli believes that the October 17 movement cannot be reformulated, and renewed outside these squares that formed an outlet for people to express themselves, their positions and demands.