Tripoli, the Morning After

Crisis Points gathers personal accounts of moments of turmoil around the world.

TRIPOLI, Libya — Wednesday, the day after Tripoli’s liberation, was special. That morning, the sun’s rays shone more intensely and the salty water of the Mediterranean turned into pure honey.

I overslept, rather like Libya had, got up, showered and returned the phone calls of my journalist friends, who, defying time and themselves, were clamoring to set up a printing press that spoke in Tripoli’s name.

We had a meeting at the home of a director on Shaykha Radya Street: four male journalists, two female ones, and a producer, and we agreed that we would publish something. We passed by a newspaper building, but it had been shelled the night before, hit either by tanks or by heavy artillery.

At 1 p.m., I went up to my office on the 10th floor, and remembered the books of poetry I had kept there, as well as my new Apple computer and the hard disk where I stored all my data. I wept at the unwarranted destruction. The targeting of that building was heartbreaking to me.

An hour later, we met up in the TV station’s recording studio, but we couldn’t broadcast live; yet we managed to set up a direct link with the Free Libya channels in Qatar and transmitted the voices of Tripoli’s free journalists to the world.

Then my father called me, his voice trembling, and told me that he and my mother had taken the car, loaded my eight siblings into it, and fled, he with tears in his eyes. The Qaddafi loyalists there were shooting civilian cars that were trying to escape, and my father told me how they had pulled a young woman and her husband to safety after their car had been blown up by a rocket-propelled grenade. “I slammed my foot on the gas, and we escaped,” he said.

There were mercenaries in the Qalaa hotel in the Abu Salim neighborhood, behind the buildings of Nasser Street, and in the Technical School there. They also fired their cannons from the garden behind the Rixos hotel, where Qaddafi’s son Saidi is training his lions and tigers. I hope that NATO will shell the mercenaries, and rid us of their evil.

Today is liberation day for journalists. I received three messages that made me extremely happy. The first was that the journalists held hostage by the Qaddafi forces in the Rixos Hotel had been freed. I was glad to hear it, because I knew that they had been in the iron clutches of those who clamped down on facts and directed them as they saw fit. Then Rana al-Uqbani, a journalist who had been captured by the Qaddafi forces, called to tell me that my beloved friend the poet Rabi Sharir had been rescued by the rebels after suffering through some bitter days. We had watched him being tortured and interrogated on TV.

At iftar time, I walked over to Tajoura, where some of the rebels were. Suddenly, my journalistic instinct kicked in, and I began to talk to them. A young, bearded man holding a howitzer told me that he was a transportation engineer, 24 years old, and that his companions were students, lawyers and merchants. They proudly pointed out the Misurata regiment, which they were hosting, and I took my camera out and snapped pictures of them with this trained regiment that had come to liberate them.

Cars were coming by to drop off food, drink, mint tea and cardamom-scented coffee. The rebels invited me to eat with them, and they carried boxes of dates, milk, sweets and chilled water and distributed them to the cars driving past. It was a wonderful sight, as the sun set over us.

Khaled Darwish is a poet and writer. This essay was translated by Ghenwa Hayek from the Arabic. It is an update to Mr. Darwish’s earlier Op-Ed essay from Tripoli.