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Based on an ethnography carried out in a Beirut slum, this article focuses on pigeon-keeping ( kashsh ḥamām in Arabic). To explain its practice in this urban setting, the study applies Clifford Geertz’s conceptual framework related to social semantics to understand how the practice of pigeon-keeping is used to convey the narrative of their owners’ self-disclosure and to describe their semi-permanent existence as refugees. Nonetheless, the kashsh ḥamām cannot be reduced to a simple reflection of social reality; it also constitutes a space-time where men allow themselves to dream of a world other than the one in which they are “encaged”.