This post starts with chemistry and ends with what matters.

On August 4th, 2020, an explosion rocked Beirut, the city where I was born.? If you were anywhere near a screen that day, you would have seen the now iconic videos: a white circular ring followed by a gigantic red orange plume that made chemists around the world jump from their seats and scream: NO2!

And they were right.? The blast originated at the Beirut port silos, where thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate were stored unsafely for the previous 7 years.

Ammonium nitrate, or NH4NO3, is one of those schizophrenic chemicals that humans make.

In one role, it is one of the most widely used fertilisers on the planet, readily water soluble, generously lending its nitrogens to plants so they can "fix" it, or incorporate it in biological material.?

Then we eat plants, or the animals that eat those plants, and the nitrogen that was once in the inorganic ammonium nitrate becomes a part of our muscles and even the hormones that swim in our blood.? See you can say that we are made of stardust, but a lot happens on the road from star to human.

In its other role, ammonium nitrate is an industrial explosive heavily used in the mining industry and other times when blowing up big stuff is necessary.?

?How can a benevolent molecule be so vicious you ask? Well, here's the beauty of chemistry.

In ammonium nitrate, Ammonia and nitrate are separate compounds that are held together by stable, yet fragile, forces.? When coaxed gently by water molecules, as in the case of fertiliser use, they separate from each other slowly and willingly. They are picked up by the plant’s roots, where they are expertly broken down and rearranged as building blocks of biological compounds.

But when prodded by a high energy external force, such as fire, the two compounds separate and then interact violently.? The nitrate acts as an oxidiser, and the ammonium as a reducing agent, resulting in an exothermic reaction (remember that’s a reaction where energy is released in the form of heat).? The molecules, now freed from their previous alliances, rearrange themselves as oxygen gas, nitrogen gas, water vapor, and nitrogen dioxide as a side product (red smoke).? The transformation from solid to gas causes a huge volume increase. The resulting gas is 1000 times larger than the starting material.? This happens so fast that the rapid pressure increase moves air molecules outwards at supersonic speed, resulting in a detonation.?

And that is what happened in the port of Beirut. Thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate were stored in a structure within a stone's throw of a dense population center and the city's most vibrant and artistic neighbourhood.? A mysterious fire was reported just before the explosion, possibly pushing the innocent fertiliser into evil explosive mode. The resulting rearrangements of covalent bonds released such energy to rival nuclear explosions. Devastation came into the city from the seaside at supersonic speed.? In a flash it killed hundreds and wounded thousands, eventually displacing hundreds of thousands.

Dozens of videos from all angles documented these few fateful seconds.?? The white water vapour cloud, the orange nitrogen dioxide plume, the pressure wave knocking the people filming off their feet. For the millions who watched around the world, the event was sudden, rapid, incomprehensible. It was over in supersonic speed.

For those in Beirut, the experience unfolded slowly and painstakingly in the minutes and hours and months beyond those few seconds.? Glass and hearts were broken. Stone and lives upended. Every human within the perimeter was forced to react to and interact with the aftermath.? There were no observers, only actors.? Each began a story, and each story forced its actors into a new unexpected, yet unavoidable plot.? The moment when we put our phones down, when the video was over, is the moment when the real stories began.

Two brilliant Lebanese writers who lived through the explosion themselves decided to collect these stories. They harvested them meticulously from those who lived them.? They wanted to share them with the world.? Instead of writing the stories themselves, they asked Lebanese (and lebanese curious) writers to retell them.? The result is an anthology of short stories, #Beyond Shattered Glass,? that was published in 2023.

Despite being one of those writers, I only received and read the book and its other stories when I visited Beirut in 2024. And I have to say I was shocked.?

I had expected a collection of short stories about hope and resilience, but the editors have somehow avoided the boring moral bend of rising from the ashes in the face of adversity.? Each story is a picture, unfiltered, unadulterated, of what went on in the minds and hearts of those who actually experienced the blast.? What they heard and smelled and tasted as they suddenly found themselves inside this surreal unscripted big budget action movie scene.? What were the second and third thought after “WTF just happened?!”

One short story after the other you relive that moment with the domestic worker, the yoga instructor, the first responder, the mother, the woman who sounds like you, the man who sounds like your father. You also experience how writers with very different styles try to honour the retelling of each story. They all seem to start with shattered glass, so much of it.? But then they take you beyond, how lives changed, how unusual pairings came about. You have an intimate look into how the brain tries to make sense of the unimaginable.?

So why was I shocked?

Because I found this to be the most honest and comprehensive portrayal of the Lebanese people that I have ever seen in print.? Not only does it endeavour to represent the myriad of diverse groups that live in this small country(Palestinian, Syrian, Ethiopian, Filipino, expats, rich, poor, young, old, deaf, and even dog) but also it is awesome in its transparency.? At a time when so many groups want to define Beirut in their image (the Paris of the East, the regional hub of political assassinations, etc…), this book lays the good, the bad, and the ugly for you to sample.? Story by story the book builds up an understanding of a makeshift community forged by the blast.? Somehow when you read them all together you see humans of global qualities: love, fear, compassion for strangers.? But you also see the true face of a city in the faces of all its people.??

And that, I am starting to believe, is what matters.?

It might be necessary to understand the formula of ammonium nitrate, that it is a good and dangerous thing that we manufacture millions of tons of each year to satisfy our needs for yum and boom. But stories, not science, is how our feeble human brains can make sense of supersonic speeds and understand how the rearrangement of chemical bonds can topple buildings and rearrange lives.? We have to make sense of the world we are rearranging so rapidly.? We have to.? We need the stories and the story tellers to preserve our history and inform our future.? This is what matters. Understanding matters.?

On this fourth anniversary of August fourth, we still don’t know how the fire was started, or why the ammonium nitrate was stored so precariously, or who was responsible for its storage there all these years.? But we can know how an Ethiopian maid who was pulled from the rubble is doing, and how a young entrepreneur made vases out of dirty shattered glass. I salute the two amazing editors, @NadiaTabbara and @eina Saab, who worked through their own trauma to lead an international collaboration of storytellers and make this book in English, to de-mystify and un-other, to stop time, rewind, and replay it to the speed of human minds. To show that love is love and hate is hate and fear is fear and kindness is the same kindness in everyone, everywhere.? To help us, all of us, understand each other.

In these confusing times, when I see hearts closing and eyes looking away, when we have all become either barbarians or civilised, either ally or foe, I think to myself maybe this is what will save us in the end.

Understanding is what truly matters.