How Beirut port explosion survivor Bachir Ramadan is turning trauma into testimony

August 4, 2020 started out, by all accounts, as a beautiful day.

Bachir Ramadan remembers helping a colleague secure a promotion by pleading his case to the boss at a lighting factory near Beirut Port. Afterwards, he popped home for a quick lunch with his former partner. They talked about the weekend’s plans before he walked back to the office.

A few hours later, the Beirut port district exploded – killing more than 200 people, injuring thousands, and devastating surrounding neighbourhoods.

Ramadan, a lighting technician and renowned drummer in Lebanon’s tight-knit heavy metal scene, was 800 metres from the epicentre. He recalls a casual conversation cut short by a blinding light, a thundering sound, and the four-storey office building partly caving in. Windows shattered. Somehow, he emerged from the wreckage dazed and bloodied.

He spent the next three days in hospital, where glass was removed from his face and eyes. Doctors treated him for several skull fractures and nerve damage to his hands.

“It was a beautiful day,” Ramadan recalls five years later. “Until it wasn't.”

In the months that followed, Ramadan, 36, forced himself behind the drum kit. First as rehabilitation to rebuild motor function in his damaged hands, then as survival.

But the recovery was never linear. It stopped and started, the pain lingering like a muted backbeat that never fully faded. Five years on, a few gentle scars remain on his cheekbones where glass was removed, and on his shoulders. The emotional healing, however, is still a work in progress.

“I feel like the healing stopped for a long time,” he says now, speaking from his apartment in Doha, Qatar, where he moved in October. “I think it was because I was too preoccupied with other things, like wanting to get out of Lebanon.”

Those feelings would rise each weekday morning in Beirut, when Ramadan drove past the mangled silos at the port on his way to work.

“It wore me down,” he says. “It was heavy, emotional, and negative every single time I saw it. I needed to take that out of the equation.”

Ramadan moved to Doha after landing a job in sales. It wasn’t a creative role, but it offered distance. And in that solitude – away from the bustle of Beirut’s social scene and bereft of his drum kit – Ramadan began scribbling notes and reflections that are now forming the basis of a memoir to be published later this year.

“I never meant to write a book,” Ramadan says. “But being away from the drums, I needed another outlet. So I started writing in April. And when I got to the chapter about August 4 … man, it hit me hard.”

The English-language memoir, Obsidian Tempo, will be released through a Lebanese publisher, with details to be announced soon, Ramadan says.

Named after volcanic rock, the book blends personal history with practical insight on navigating a music career in Lebanon. Given the trauma the writing unearthed, Ramadan sees its release as a kind of survival document.

“It was painful to write,” he says. “But it felt like therapy. Actually, better than therapy. The healing didn’t just restart, it went full throttle.”

Unlike drumming, which provided immediate physical catharsis, writing forced him to slow down and sit with the memories.” I had to really dig into those memories,” he says. “The smell, the grey smoke, the rubble of that day – it all came back and gave the writing its shape.”

The post-blast period marked not just a change in medium, but in sound. In place of the thunderous riffs and double-kick drums of heavy metal, he opted to listen to a more gentle soundtrack.

“My healing music became Nordic folk,” he says. “It grounds me. It makes me feel present. Metal never gave me that kind of calm.”

It's a striking shift from someone long associated with Beirut's underground scene – one that, even before the explosion, struggled with visibility and support. Gigs were largely self-funded, venues were limited and metal musicians often balanced multiple jobs to sustain their work.

The port blast scattered what little infrastructure there was. “It took a lot out of the scene,” Ramadan says. “People left. Bands paused. It will take some time to get back to where it was.”

Still, Ramadan kept playing for a time. He hasn't performed live since January, when he flew back to Beirut for one final show with his former band, Khavar. “I hadn't touched the drums at the time in four months. But the body remembered. One rehearsal and it all came back. That muscle memory was just magical.”

He no longer plays regularly as the drums remain in Beirut and his apartment in Doha too small for a kit.

“And that’s fine for me as I have a different focus now,” he says. “Writing is my way to get through the hard days and difficult moments.”

Memories of that day remain an open topic of conversation among some friends and colleagues in Beirut. “We don’t avoid it at all and I’ve found that talking about it actually helps,” Ramadan says. “You get to hear someone else’s take on what happened and sometimes that perspective can clear up some of the things in your own mind.”

One conversation, however, two days after the explosion still stays with him. “I remember a former bandmate telling me, quite frankly: ‘Just be thankful you’re alive.’ And you know what, that really stuck. I wear my scars, but I’m here. I can still do everything I love. I’m grateful.”

But gratitude doesn’t erase the anger he feels at the authorities, and the absence of official accountability.

“We still don’t know the truth about who caused this,” he says. “Those behind what happened should be held responsible in the worst way. They destroyed lives.”

Saeed Saeed is a 2024-25 Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow

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