Writing (from) the Rubble: Reflections on the August 4, 2020 Explosion in Beirut, Lebanon

ABSTRACT

This reflexive piece integrates its author’s experience of Beirut’s August 4, 2020 port explosion with those of other Lebanese citizens writing on the heels of the calamity. The overall narrative approximates a collective biography that apprises and appraises the emergent fears, concerns, and anxieties roiling the country at present. I explore a lived, critically informed, spectrum of post-traumatic behaviours and responses to the widespread destruction and its implications – whether that be the loss of limb, home, or the physical loci of emotional memories, including cultural and heritage sites. The narrative also makes a connection between the recent explosion and earlier iterations of warfare and/or terrorism to show how the long-standing inability to functionally articulate and process pain is now translating into retributive calls for violent justice in a country still recovering from civil war.

KEYWORDS:

• Port explosion
• pain narratives
• trauma
• PTSD
• Lebanon
• collective memoir

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Sleiman El Hajj is Assistant Professor of Creative and Journalistic Writing in the departments of English and Communication Arts at the Lebanese American University. Dr. El Hajj’s output spans creative and critical research and has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, such as Excursions, Life Writing, and Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. He was appointed Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of International Development, University of Oxford, in 2019. His research interests include creative nonfiction, gender studies, narrative constructions of home, queer theory, and Middle Eastern literature.

Notes

1 In the following order of appearance in-text, the names of Kristy, Nina, Samer, Nermine, and Tracy have been changed for reasons of privacy.

2 The temporality and implications of war are so prominent in Kristy’s academic and artistic practices, as well as mine, I have coined the term ‘post-postwar’ in a life writing study to designate a time frame following the latest full-on war in Lebanon, that of 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah (El Hajj 2018).

3 In the post-Civil-War years, cultural outputs, such as documentaries, movies, novels, television shows, or even newspaper articles that went beyond nugatory or idle distractions, were perceived as a breach of the status quo and a threat to the Lebanese state’s imaginary of national security, and were therefore censored (Seigneurie 2011, 100, 215; Traboulsi 2007).

4 728 protesters were wounded on August 8, by either live ammunition or rubber bullets (Uras and Najjar 2020).

5 By the time this memoir was peer reviewed, the number of dead had risen to 180. See United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA 2020) report.

6 For a discussion of the strategies used by LGBTQI people in Lebanon to navigate a spectrum of everyday violence in a precarious setup, see Ghassan Moussawi’s Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Situations in Beirut (2020).

7 Lady Cochrane subsequently died of her injuries on September 31, 2020.

8 Caruth describes Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as ‘basically biphasic, that is, consisting of alternating flashbacks and numbing,’ adding that this description of the experience has stayed the same over time ‘both in clinical and theoretical accounts and in survivor stories.’ See Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 130.