“Some elements, such as iron and copper, were easy and direct, incapable of concealment . . .”

– Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

During one of our first meetings in the autumn of 2015, Harun, a Syrian waste picker, at the time between twelve and thirteen-years-old, puffed out his chest and said something along the lines of, gisme hadeed. “My body is iron.” I nodded but involuntarily raised an eyebrow. He tutted, “You don’t believe me, Liza.” I said, “but you’re a person like everyone else.” He looked puzzled and irritated. I hastily tried to explain myself, “There is nothing wrong with a body without iron . . . a body with iron is okay too.” He let out an exasperated sigh, as did another young waste picker sitting with us. I felt like an out-of-touch adult.

Harun also drew parallels between his body and the volatility of scrap iron’s price. On one occasion inside the small boura or scrapyard where he worked, Harun started talking about his body being made of iron. Another waste picker jokingly pointed out that the price of iron had dropped drastically. Harun was not dissuaded. “The price will go up again (return). Iron is iron. You need iron for everything.” The other young boys nodded in agreement.

Away from the scrapyard, Harun said to me that at first working in zbeleh (garbage) was hard for him. Before he toughened up, his body was sore from pushing his cart across the city and jumping in and out of rubbish skips. He had initially found the stench of rotten meat and the bags of used toilet paper and sanitary pads horrible. He whispered that he had thrown up several times. As if that wasn’t enough, Harun was regularly harassed by police who detained Syrian waste pickers until paperwork was brought in proving that the boy was under the legal age to work, otherwise they would require a work sponsor.^[1] The hardest part for Harun, however, was being away from his widowed mother who, at that time of our conversation, was still in Syria. He looked away when he said that he cried for her. He must have been fourteen at the time when he spoke to me about all this. By then, he had not seen his mum for about three years.

Harun was around 10 years old when he, and other boys of similar age, had left their village homes in rural Syria. Fighting had intensified, and the village took the decision to send their boys to work at a small scrapyard in Beirut, in the basement of an old building. At the small scrapyard, the muallim, or master, also in exile from the same village, became the de-facto carer for the boys. The community—they called themselves ‘ashira (clan or tribe)—had long worked in scrap metal and there existed a sort of “kin contract” underpinning work relations (Joseph 2005). Waste pickers often travelled across Beirut in pairs to salvage all kinds of scrap. Scrap metal was the most lucrative, and the muallim would sell it to larger scrapyards with transactions done so via the boursa: the financial market. For more than a decade, alongside the boursa, the rhythms of wars had punctuated work inside the small scrapyard.

Beirut’s scrap economies have in fact long followed the temporalities of war. In very material ways, the destructive forces of wars make metal readily available for salvaging amongst the rubble. Wars also create displaced people, some of whom, like Harun, find in the salvaging of scrap an important source of revenue. There is, on the one hand, a seemingly endless supply of scrap to be collected from the city’s trash. On the other, and depending on access to impacted sites, supplies can increase following explosions, such as the one at Beirut port in August 2020 and more recently, from September 2024, the Israeli airstrikes across the city.

Despite life’s uncertainties, Harun had found a source of stability in the metals he salvaged. In iron, he gathered his more-than-human strength to transform himself into the main provider for his mother and siblings. Iron was not the only metal whose properties and substances became a way to narrate life. Harun married in 2019. Before his marriage, he and I sat in a public garden in Beirut. Across from us was a fountain. Harun was admiring its copper pipes. Yellow copper is a precious and rare metal. It is hard to find but fetches a high price because it runs through the veins of electrical infrastructures across the world. As we sat staring at the fountain, Harun began to play with the Arabic word ghali, to awkwardly construct a poem that went along the lines of, “Copper is expensive (ghali) like my fiancée is my precious (ghalieh).”

After they married in 2019, Harun and his bride moved from a refugee camp in the Bekaa to a tiny bungalow made of concrete nearby. The bungalow was prone to flooding but offered a semblance of home. His mother, who had travelled to Lebanon in 2018, moved in to live with Harun and his wife. While wife and mother kept house and planted a vegetable patch, Harun worked at the scrapyard. For a short-lived moment, Harun seemed somewhat content with his lot. By mid-2020, following the COVID-19 pandemic and Lebanon’s descent into financial collapse, things had become uncertain once again

Harun’s life experiences are not dissimilar to those of other forced migrant Syrian men in Lebanon (e.g., Proudfoot 2022). There was a precarity to life that hinged, at least in part, on the wars that had driven them out of their homes in Syria. Over the years, Harun became resigned to a life in protracted displacement in a country where Syrians often bore the brunt of xenophobia. Although Harun could eventually visit his village, he never stayed for fear of army conscription. He preferred to work in his beloved scrapyard, scraping by and barely earning enough to keep his growing family.

By the time of the intensification of Israeli strikes in September 2024, Harun had become a father to three. When the landlord asked Harun and other Syrians to vacate their rooms above the scrapyard to make way for Lebanese displaced from the south, many of the Syrians decided to return to their village. Harun opted to stay in Lebanon: he still feared army conscription in Syria. I learnt about his decision during a phone call. At the time, he and the muallim were emptying out the scrapyard. The landlord would only allow the muallim to keep the scrapyard open for a hefty price—an unaffordable amount. I wanted to come help, but Harun thought it best I stay away—the situation had become tense. It seemed as if the scrapyard era were over. There was a tearful moment of silence during our call.

Harun soon travelled to Tripoli in a truck the muallim had acquired some years ago. There, they sold enough scrap to come to an agreement with the Beiruti landlord. Three weeks later, Harun and the muallim returned to the scrapyard and shared a small adjacent room. Not long after, an Israeli airstrike hit a building next to the scrapyard. Harun was safe but shaken. He and the muallim took shelter for the night at an empty car park. I had travelled out of Lebanon by then, tearfully promising Harun that my return would be imminent. He consoled me, asking if my parents needed anything in my absence.

When a deal with the landlord was struck, Harun called to ask me when I would return. His voice was tired, but he sounded less sad. There was something comforting when he asked if I could bring him rosemary oil for hair growth when I returned to Lebanon—such a request had a certain familiarity to it. Also familiar was our conversation about the boursa and the list of metal prices he had sent me to study. I noticed that the price of stainless steel had gone up. Harun took a loud drag from a cigarette, knowing full well that I was about to remind him of the disadvantages of smoking. Harun said, “You better bring it (the oil) soon or I will be bald.” I responded, “like stainless?” He sighed with exasperation at my constant inability to fully comprehend the splendor of the elements that remained stable despite all of life’s uncertainties. He said, “okay Liza, like stainless.” We both laughed so that we would not cry.

Notes

[1] Lebanon has ratified two ILO conventions relating to child labor: Convention No. 138 on minimum age , approved in 2003, and Convention No. 182 on the worst forms on child labor, approved in 2001. See for example: http://www.ilo.org/ipec/Regionsandcountries/arab-states/lebanon/WCMS_201535/lang--en/index.htm. Even so, police seemed less interested in the fact that the boys were working when under the legal age. They seemed to be more interested in fining, deporting, or using adult Syrians as informants. Since 2015, Syrians must provide proof a sponsor (kafeel) in order to legally work. Whereas the sponsorship policy is not always enforced when it comes to Syrians, it is nevertheless used as part of the country’s economy of favors.