The explosion of a stockpile of 2,750 tons of highly volatile ammonium nitrate off-loaded into a warehouse in the port of Beirut on August 4, 2020, provided the catalyst for The Beirut Call, born from unimaginable tragedy. The explosion, perhaps the most powerful non-nuclear blast in history, ripped apart a city: It killed more than 200 people, injured more than 7,000, and displaced almost 300,000.

The Beirut Call represents a cooperative effort by publishers, journalists, translators, poets, musicians, choreographers, photographers, singer-songwriters, activists, and visual artists, all of whom share a love for Beirut and a belief that art can bring about change, agreeing with Mitri Raheb that

This may sound grandiose, but art can draw together people of divergent views to process collective grief as artists raise awareness about socioeconomic, political, and environmental concerns and develop a vision for the future.

Black and white illustrations and photographs showing scenes from the revolution of October 17, 2019, and the devastation caused by the explosion on August 4, together with sketches on paper and digital art, accompany the text. Footnotes provide references and web links to more detailed information.

In her introduction, Chrabieh writes about the Nabad program (heartbeat in Arabic), established by Bethlehem’s Dar al-Kalima University College of Arts and Culture, largely as a response to the port blasts. The program empowers artists, art organizations, and creative enterprises in the Middle East to implement their artistic ideas and market their artworks.

Rabih Rached informatively and accessibly charts the history of culture in Beirut from Roman times up to the twentieth century. Nada Raphael gives us a further glimpse of Beirut as it was before the tragedy struck. She describes it as a

Katia Aoun Hage’s poem “Beyond the screen in my palm” describes the anxiety experienced by so many who heard about the port explosion on hand-held devices: The camera zooms in on what actually happened in Linda Tamin’s eyewitness account. Loulou Malaeb reflects upon the random nature of death. Faten Yaacob’s poem “Bayrut” recalls that this Arabic name derived in turn from the Phoenician be’rut meaning “wells": The Beirut Call features Maha Nasrallah’s detailed watercolor sketches of abandoned houses in Beirut, mapping their locations, many of them almost completely destroyed, in the hope that preserving their memory will help with their eventual restoration. Art therapy workshops for nurses at Saint George’s Hospital University Medical Center have been specifically designed to help those heavily traumatized by the port blasts.

The positive messages in the book show it to be not about a people who feel defeated but one already looking to the future, who understand that “suffering creates creativity” and that “any destruction on the ground coincides with the construction of art.” In Nadia Wardeh’s words,