Hiba Tawaji Didn’t Lose; The Voice Lost Hiba Tawaji

I was walking around New York City yesterday, totally trying to mind my own business by checking Facebook and trying not to feel dwarfed by the high rises around me when my Lebanese friends broke some terribly heartbreaking news to me, as I stood there in Times Square.

It was one of those Facebook moments where you get bad news you’re supposed to get over a phone call via a status instead, sort of like when I learned that a relative died because someone decided to post a picture of her with a RIP caption before they had told everyone else. But this, this was worse.

For lack of better analogy, the news I received on Facebook yesterday was devastating, gut-wrenching and so haunting it might as well be my own version of 9/11. How could it be? It can’t be.

Hiba Tawaji, the Lebanese that showed France how it is to actually sing in French, was no more on the amateur talent show The Voice. But that didn’t make sense? How could Hiba Tawaji lose? How could the person that is now teaching the entire world what singing actually consists of end up with such a heinous outcome? How could the country that gave the world music, art and the alphabet be so terribly offended?

It must have been a conspiracy. Those French people are clearly obviously out there to get us, poor gullible Lebanese whose only fault in this world was being born in the most wonderful, most loved and most vied for country in the world.  Clearly, those French were jealous. Clearly, they had a thing against us. 4 Lebanese candidates on 4 seasons of France’s The Voice are now all martyrs to the Lebanese artistic cause of becoming nobodies in Western Europe. Clearly I wasn’t gonna sit down and be quiet about this.

There are two things that make me proud of Lebanon today: hummus and Hiba Tawaji. The latter losing was a stab in the heart of my nationalistic pride. How are we not protesting this serious violation of our basic and most fundamental right as Lebanese people to be the shit of the shit at every single location where a shit can be shat? This is unacceptable. No, scratch that. This is not only unacceptable, this is worthy of a UN tribunal, more pressing than the STL, to investigate the serious backwater works that are going into this serious breach of Lebanese sovereignty taking place inside the studios of TF1.

So because I’m a masochist, I decided to watch the video of Hiba losing. I swear, that was a worse experience to my mental health than seeing all the mutilated bodies of Syrian children. I am scarred for life. I wept for Hiba. I cut for Hiba. I hung a Lebanese flag around my neck and walked around Brooklyn for Hiba. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to bring back the pride I lost with Hiba being so wrongly targeted… #JeSuisIba.

TL;DR? Hiba Tawaji lost. The country is mourning. And this is all too heartbreaking and tough to process. Or maybe not. Shit happens in talent shows. It was fun while it lasted, now let’s look at more serious things, like being interested in drunk driving and Haifa Wehbe’s English career.