WATER ON FIRE

A professor of Middle Eastern studies recounts his experiences during the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990.

El-Ariss, author of Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals, was born two years before war erupted in Beirut in 1975, blowing apart his young world, which resumed afterward under horrific conditions. In this poignant, thought-provoking memoir, thematic chapters often resonate with the multiple meanings of Arabic words—e.g., “khabissa (‘the jumbled one,’ a Jell-O-like dessert with walnuts and pomegranate) [or] mfattqa (‘the craved one’ or ‘the ripped one’—a sweet pudding made with turmeric and tahini).” The latter, he writes, perfectly “encapsulates the pain and wounds from the catastrophes of the past.” Beirut becomes the city “dedicated to the memory of Job,” encompassing his unholy suffering. The author vividly chronicles how the city was deeply divided as the bombs fell and people fled. His father, a prominent gynecologist, vowed to remain, despite the violence and disruptions at the author’s school. El-Ariss writes memorably about his suppression of fear, which caused psychological damage—though he did not realize the extent until years later, as a young man in New York City visiting a Freudian psychiatrist. Studying philosophy at the American University of Beirut when the war ceased in 1990, he finally found his “motley crew of questioning misfits and outrageous rebels.” The author’s prose is beautifully evocative and only occasionally overwrought: “The bullet of war lives in my head, inhabits my entrails.” El-Arris ends the narrative just after 9/11. “New York was my city, and those who attacked it were going to answer to me,” he writes. “Didn’t they realize what I had to endure to arrive here? Have they no idea what I experienced as I was escaping those skies that never stopped raining death and displacement?”

Abandonment and loss are at the heart of this deeply cerebral, literary memoir.