What would it be like to inhabit a ruined city, a city not only smashed but also abandoned? Think of your own city this way: burnt-out shells of civic palaces, depressions in the rubble marking streets, balconies hanging off apartment towers.
It is hard to imagine, of course, though writers have done it. Gutted European cities, together with their human remnants, feature in stories set in a war-torn or post-apocalyptic world. There is something irresistible about this trope. It unanswerably answers the question with which every story begins: how does the story end? No “happily ever after”. No false promise of immortality.
Of course, only stories end. Real life goes on; or rather, in real life there is no story. The hero, if that is the word, of Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat’s novel The Tiller of Waters, wanders the abandoned core of the city of Beirut as he looks for pieces of his past and tries to reinsert himself into it. (Published in Arabic in 1998, the book is now available in India in English, from Women Unlimited.) If there is a story it is in the glimpses of Niqula Mitri’s past — his gentle father’s cloth business, his high-strung mother’s fussiness about dress, his maid and lover Shamsa’s vibrant garments. These are sudden plunges into sensation, but they are memories; you can feel the motes circling in the light. And what of Niqula’s reality, the ruined city through which he moves, knowing his way because the place is intimately mapped in his memory? It seems even less real.
I was fortunate to meet Barakat recently, with her fellow writer Jean Said Makdisi, a memoirist of Palestinian birth married to a Lebanese professor. We talked about memory, Beirut, Palestine and the results of staying or going. Makdisi and her family stayed in Lebanon during the civil war, at one point (the Israeli invasion of 1982) rushing back from the West to be there. Barakat left for Paris in 1989 with her children, sick of the fighting and the erasure of the Lebanon in which she grew up. The centre of Beirut was never abandoned as it is in her novel, but it was certainly smashed up and is now being erased all over again by new building.
Makdisi has written two memoirs, in English. One, Beirut Fragments (1999), is about her experience of the civil war. The second, Teta, Mother, and Me (2007), is about three generations of women in the family, from Beirut back to Cairo and Syria. Makdisi was born in Jerusalem, which she calls Home (with a capital H) but hardly remembers. Her father, a cultured Christian Palestinian, took his family to Cairo and then Beirut, and she married an American, but lives in Lebanon. Her brother was Edward Said, author of Orientalism.
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Our conversation circles the question of staying or going. Staying, Makdisi taught English at university and writes in English. Barakat, who left, studied French but turned to Arabic in France. Staying, Makdisi is home, but not Home. Written in France, Barakat’s books are set in Lebanon. Both had their homes bombarded. One held on and another took her children to safety.
Where for Barakat Beirut is “destroyed”, for Makdisi it is “full of life and affirmation”. During the war, says Makdisi, “I felt always that my business in life was to keep civilisation on its path while the destruction was going on.” “It was about being victim or executioner,” says Barakat in halting English, “there was no between.”
Thinking of Lebanon, an Indian might mutter, “There but for the grace of…” Christians, Shias, Sunnis, Jews, Palestinians — this little country, too, has groups with bitter histories. Barakat says she was the first and last in her family to marry a Muslim. Makdisi says mixed marriages still happen. “There is a future but our future now is very very clouded,” says Makdisi. “I mean, it’s been a time of upheaval throughout the 20th century.”
“You need to write very beautiful stories from very painful stuff,” says Barakat.