The Things That Can't Speak
Kerning Cultures
Kerning Cultures Network
4.9 • 529 Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2021
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ronnie Chatah started giving his walking tours of Beirut in 2008, during a period of stability for the city. He would guide tourists through the city, telling stories of Phoenician ruins, French architecture and Ottoman houses. He'd also talk about Lebanon's civil war, and the problems that came to follow it. These were always stories about other people, other eras and other lives, until December of 2013, when Ronnie's own life was sucked into the political unrest that he'd spent years talking about on his tour.
This episode originally aired in August 2018.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | and one story that always kind of captures my imagination |
| 0:07.8 | the street's going in the street's lost culture and you're listening to |
| 0:14.2 | kerning cultures |
| 0:14.9 | Hi this is Dana we won't be releasing any new episodes for the next couple of months. We're away producing and reporting our autumn season, which will be out in September. But in the meantime, we want to bring back a few of our favorite episodes from the past. And if you're new to Kernan cultures, you might not have heard them before. This week's episode is called The Things That Can't Speak, and it originally aired in 2018. |
| 0:43.6 | Ronnie Shattah started giving walking tours of Beirut in the late 2000s during a period of stability for Lebanon. |
| 0:50.1 | He would guide people through Beirut telling stories of Phoenician ruins, French architecture, |
| 0:54.6 | and Ottoman houses. He'd also talk about Lebanon's civil war and the political unrest that followed. |
| 1:01.5 | And a lot of these stories, there were stories about other people, other times, other eras, and other lives. |
| 1:07.9 | Until December of 2013, when Ronnie's own life was sucked into the political unrest that |
| 1:13.9 | he'd spent years talking about on his tour. I personally also remember that day really well. |
| 1:20.8 | Here's producer Alex A-Tack with this story. |
| 1:23.4 | It can get a bit louder to stop. If you can't hear what I'm saying, just tell me to project. |
| 1:27.4 | Can everyone hear me? Good. So we're standing in front of the Holiday Inn in downtown Beirut, which is basically seen as one of the city's most obvious reminders of the Civil War. It stands shelled out and dotted with bullet holes. It's this kind of gray hunk of tower. It's a monster right in the heart of the city. |
| 1:45.8 | This is Ronnie. |
| 1:46.7 | Ronnie Shattah. |
| 1:47.5 | I guess the best title for me is storyteller or narrator of the city's past. |
| 1:53.1 | And if you stand at the bottom of it and look up, you kind of see where all of the old |
| 1:56.9 | windows used to be and where all of the old balconies would have looked out over |
| 2:01.3 | the Mediterranean. But now they're just these empty black holes. And the cliched story that |
| 2:07.1 | kind of gets told again and again is that the hotel is this monument to the juxtaposition |
| 2:11.8 | of Beirut's past and present. But when I stood under it with Ronnie watching him give his |
| 2:16.6 | walking tour to about 40 people, |
... |
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