Snake Bites and Serpentine Symbolism
Earlier this morning, Sama ran into my room screaming “I’m going to faint”. Disoriented, I woke up, quickly got out of bed and found her holding her arm out to show it to me. I looked and found three small bumps with a sharp incision in each of them. They were arranged in the form of a triangle.
Between tears, she explained that she was climbing the rocks behind our house when she felt a very sharp pain in her arm but when she looked, she only saw the three bites and couldn’t tell what had caused them. Given the area Sama was playing in and the shape of the bites, we worried they might have been caused by snake fangs. We put her shoes on and rushed her to the hospital.
It is Saturday morning: people would usually be leaving Beirut for the weekend and not coming into the city. The COVID-19 lockdown is still under effect. Only cars with an odd registration number are allowed on the streets today. In other words, the roads should have been empty. Yet, we were stuck on the highway for two hours. TWO HOURS!
The morning hour of rain had flooded the roads bringing traffic to a standstill. Every winter, we witness this repeated failure: the rain causes the clogged waterways to overflow transforming our roads into lakes. Every winter, we complain about the 50-year-old unfit infrastructure and the poor maintenance of our highways. This winter, however, it hit too close to home. Sama was begging us to go faster because her arm was burning and swelling, asking if she could just walk to the hospital (or rather swim). Her pleas were drowned by the gut-wrenching sound of an ambulance stuck a couple of meters behind us. Mama, worried sick, exploded “someone needs to gather all of these snakes and drown them in this water”. She was referring to Lebanese politicians and their flagrant mismanagement of the country.
Perhaps the most famous snake symbol comes from the biblical story of Adam and Eve. The serpent tempted them into eating the forbidden fruit which resulted in “the fall of man”. In Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”, the serpent is connected to lies and vindictiveness following the Christian representation. However, in many cultures, snakes represent fertility, birth and regeneration due to their ability to shed their skin and be “reborn”. Interestingly, Lebanese politicians represent this duality perfectly. Over the past 35 years, their negligence and corruption have added misery and suffering to the country. From creating swamps every winter to a make-shift bomb at the center of their capital, they fit every description of the evil representation of serpents. On the other hand, they also embody the other symbolism of snakes: fertility and regeneration. Their names have punctuated my grandmother’s life, my mother’s life, my life and will continue to be present in my children’s lives. Since the civil war, they shed their skin and return with just as much power and authority. The recent return of Prime Minister Saad Hariri for his fourth premiership is the perfect example of this.
When waiting for Sama at the hospital, I tried doing some work and uploading the notes of a math class I am teaching. It was about the geometry of systems of differential equations. In the case of a non-diagonalizable matrix, the phase portrait is a serpentine looking flow (the snake references seem unending today!). We call this an improper or degenerate node. I thought to myself: Could there possibly be a better title for the Lebanese political leadership?
