In July 2024, a group of Ethiopian women in Beirut had their homes broken into and thousands of dollars of collective savings stolen. Because Ethiopians who have remained in Lebanon through the country’s economic collapse often work inside the private homes of those with stable incomes or family abroad, a new form of resentment has identified Ethiopians in Lebanon as having access to cash that most Lebanese do not. And although only two of those Ethiopian women had rented their own apartment, the home had served as a gathering spot for Ethiopian domestic workers around the city who had Sundays off, and who would spend afternoons taking turns cooking large meals, passing by before or after church, braiding hair, and sharing stories or playing music. As mostly undocumented domestic workers, these women lacked access to bank accounts even prior to the collapse of Lebanon’s banking system in 2019. The safest place to store their savings was in a trusted private space. The break-in thereby appeared premeditated, occurring as it did in a short weekday window of time when no one was home, in a quiet residential neighborhood where the women had lived for over ten years.

In the weeks that followed, the women pursued frantic conversations with police and lawyers, all to no avail. Just as we began a campaign to raise money amongst friends abroad, the theft was eclipsed by concerns over a new kind of loss. As the Israeli-American project of regional annihilation came close enough that everyone could feel the walls of the apartment shake—their apartment door still splintered from the forced entry—the group of women shrugged their hands and praised God. “I’ve been through so much here that they should give me the passport” grinned Gennet, indefatigable. “It’s not exactly funny but you have to laugh,” Tsenayish joked in a voice note a few weeks later, stuck next door in Achrafieh without a passport or a plan, having told the Madame for whom she works that if the family left to the mountains she would rather stay back in Beirut, where she at least has friends she can see on Sundays. Hagar, meanwhile, had lost the money she had been saving to buy a ticket back to Ethiopia. As I watched endless images of Beirut on fire, streets rubble and tents soaked in the rain, enemy drones audible in the background of my friends’ voice notes, I wondered: Where do you go if you have already left? What does displacement feel like if the place was never really yours?

Since the war came to Lebanon in September 2024, migrant communities have been systematically excluded from the already-minimal set of institutional responses by both state and nonstate actors. They have been denied entry into government-run shelters. Their embassies have mostly ignored them. They have been excluded from the National Emergency Plan, alongside the country’s many refugees. Both the Lebanese state and international organizations have failed to prioritize their needs. Alongside the many displaced, they have been forcibly evicted from public shelters, parks, and abandoned buildings, and made to sleep on the streets. Unlike citizens, however, they have no families’ homes to go to; no regional histories in which to take solace; no news cycle within which to recognize their political allegiances, their village intimacies, their loyalty to land or cause. It is not that they do not understand—for every migrant in Lebanon knows that Israel is a name for death—but that, like the country at large, it is not quite theirs. Although there were estimated to be 30,000 migrant workers in the south of Lebanon alone prior to the mass displacement, we do not know where they are now, nor how many have died.

There are approximately 300,000 African and Asian migrants living and working in Lebanon, most of them female domestic workers. Since the economic crisis of 2019, things have gotten progressively worse, amidst an already staggering set of conditions. The regional system of migrant governance that goes by the name “Kafala” effectively functions as a social contract organized around racial servitude. Migrant workers from across the world are expected to arrive in the country and submit to the supremacy of the Lebanese citizen. It is a hollow supremacy—weak state, weak economy, weak civic institutions—yet one sustained by what little force there is, in a convenient compact of society and state. And yet the social always exceeds its ugliest institutions. To bear witness to Lebanon today is to know that even under the bombs of globalization, there is life beyond racial capitalism.

Over the past two decades, the landscape of migrant labor essential to the social reproduction of life in Lebanon has seen the rise of what is referred to as the freelancer economy, or African and Asian women who work and live outside domestic servitude. Escaping the confines of their employer’s home (to whom their legal residence in the country is tied), migrants have joined the undocumented workforce of an economy that has long intertwined formal and informal. There, women from Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Kenya, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere have built a dense underground layer to Lebanon’s capital city that caters to migrant communities and their needs. In this world, one that I refer to as Black Beirut, Lebanon’s many marginalized—Syrian and Sudanese refugees, African and Asian migrant workers, and citizens of all backgrounds—have come together to offer an alternate geography to a Lebanon divided by sectarianism as a name for targeted assault.

“Dahiyeh is a place where we can make homes for ourselves, good homes, places to live. It is not too expensive and you can find what you need,” Beza, another Ethiopian friend from Beirut, tells me as we exchange inadequate messages of fear and care. I can hear her pleading, as if convincing me; insisting that I hear the way she loves the area, the way her heart too is breaking. As hundreds of mutual aid initiatives have arisen amidst a population so accustomed to crisis response that it should put every international NGO to shame, I see across my screens the images of Black Beirut. They are full of women. Women cooking, vats of rice and chicken curry, tables covered in foil containers forming mosaics of repetition. Women carrying, unloading trucks of rice and foam mattresses, parcels held upon their shoulders and lifted up flights of stairs. Women singing, braiding hair against concrete walls become sudden shelters, lined up with rows of patterned blankets and laughter. Women chopping meat in outdoor gardens as they feed each other morsels, intimate gestures, plastic tubs of tomatoes and bags of onions, rhythmic gestures of knives held by practiced hands.

In reports, the migrants describe walking for days. “Now that I’m broken, how can I help them?” asks Nasima Akter from a shelter in Jounieh, speaking of her three daughters in Bangladesh. “This is my first time in Lebanon to see sea,” says another woman from Sierra Leone, having been abandoned by her employers and who found her way to the coast. There, by the corniche, the segregation of Beirut collapses into itself. The very women who have been denied the city’s vestiges of public space so that they can be made to stand on their feet and clean private accumulations of dust and grease have now emerged from under war and arrived at the Mediterranean. Theirs is another city, one of fugitive refuge.