Winter 1992

einrt Fragments: A War Memoir

Jean Said Makdisi

New York: Persea Books, Inc., 1990. 253 pages. LC 89-26533. ISBN 0-89255-150-X $19.95.

Review by Andrew Clarke University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

eirut is situated on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, whose waters, blue most of the year in the temperate climate,

become a foamy gray-green during the winter storms.” That rolling line introduces the description (p. 69) of the site of this “war mem- oir.” But other famous lands and cities as well are part of this odyssey through extreme human experience.

In Beirut Fragments the author talks to us from Beirut, giving a fifteen-year survival report, while she also tells the story of her far- wandering destiny.

When the war began I belonged everywhere and nowhere, one of a breed of human beings so common in modern times, who have moved from place to place .... My family came originally from Palestine, but I grew up in Egypt as an outsider. I was educated by Englishmen and Americans, absorbing their culture and values along

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with those handed down by my own Arab ancestors.

Ancient ages echo in her tale. "In the middle of this vision the (pp. 20-21)

Nile itself, the great river, shimmers and glides, long and silent, a great brilliant streak of quietness, through the centuries and into my heart and my memory" (p. 103). And on to the modern, to the United States for a decade, then back to the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, to Lebanon, the land of Tyre and Sidon. And Beirut, through fifteen years of strife. "I wrote as a witness to the common experiences of common people, feeling that in the trial of history there should be a record, a vindication, of their pain" (p. 20). Ms. Makdisi tried to write secretly at first, but people kept coming to her saying Put this in, Tell what happened to us.

Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir weaves several stories and themes through the book: surviving in Beirut, being a woman, being a Palestinian, fighting to affirm the unity of her duality. Everything about the book is elemental, starting with the title: fragments of shrapnel, fragments of a city, fragments of lives, fragments of peace. If there is one epic theme, is it the author's agonized grappling with chaos, struggling to bring the horror and folly into some kind of comprehensible order. That happens only in her poetic telling.

The author is just as impatient, she says, with the world that watched the violence with indifference as she is with those who perpetrated it.

Of the nine sections of the book, the Chronology comes first. Full of significant dates and events, it nevertheless might have been better tucked away later in the book, where the reader could go to them as a reference by choice.

The Prologue, after that, is where the story really starts. "How can I write about Beirut?" the author asks the muse. What follows tells of horror, boredom, and fear with quiet eloquence. ["The street was suddenly deserted. Beirutis have broken all records for getting out of the way on time" (p. 86)].

Beiruf Fragments is the story of a woman, a teacher of English at the Beirut College who is also a wife and mother of children she has raised in two countries.

The crises of the war were often ones which fell into

The reader, however, is not left to sit in armchair innocence.

the traditional realm of women. We had to provide domestic supplies, deal with wrecked homes, create alternative shelters, cope with death .... Women grew in the war. (p. 21)

This theme is reiterated, as when later, for example, most

Winter 1992

intriguingly she discusses the ambiguities of bikinis and chadora’s.

native of Jerusalem whose family moved to Cairo. This theme evokes some of the most poignant passages. An incident that Ms. Makdisi recounts well into the book, a visit back to Jerusalem in 1966 with her father, who had not been there since 1948, reveals a foundation stone:

Beirut Fragments is also the story of a Palestinian in diaspora, a

We went up to the top of the YMCA Building near the Mandelbaum Gate, and he showed me ... the streets of his childhood .... But in passing his memories on to me, he passed also the burden of memory, central to the Palestinian experience. (pp. 101-2)

She says, ”We were in Cairo when the Palestine war broke out in 1948.“ Many family and friends would come; these tribal visits are her memory of those years of Palestinian history.

There was always a parade of them there at the large table. They would come from Jerusalem, from Safad, from Haifa .... All of them laughing and happy to see each other again.

One time, although no one explained, it was clear even to a small child that something awful had happened, and that it happened far away .... I came to dread the visits that I had once enjoyed. (pp.99-100)

She remembers bits of conversation from that time: ”’Just the clothes we were wearing, nothing else.”’ “‘What about the shop?”’ “’What about the olives?”’ “’The last time I saw him we were at my brother’s house.’” “She went to her cousin’s in Beirut”’ (pp. 99-101).

will always mean the tragic smashing of individual lives by its cruel hands and the scattering of bewildered people reeling from its blows” (p. 101).

In Cairo her family “lived well in the midst of vast poverty .... I remember Cairo, the Cairo of my childhood, bathed in the dazzling summer sun; a white, shining city” (p. 102). “My favorite excursions were to the Pyramids. Sometimes we would ride camels around them .... And we would run in the sand by the Sphinx” (p. 104). The author went to the English school in Cairo, learning the ridiculous (being taught to eat dates with a knife and fork) and the sublime (literature, intellectual analysis). She was eleven when the revolution happened and General Gamal Abdul Nasser came to power.

And in one corner of her mind, for all its grandness ”history

One of Ms. Makdisi’s life themes is her own embodiment of

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duality. A real symbol of this is the lifelong presence of the Arabic and English languages. She was born into an Arab family in Jerusalem who were Christian Baptists. Now, she feels both of these elements deeply and resents the world, especially the political world of Beirut, that forces upon her an unwelcome separation:

I am the child in equal measure of Christianity and Islam, but, to my great discomfort, the marriage made between them in my historical background is threatened .... The situation I find myself in is like that of watching the rape of my own past, two legs of one body being forced apart to the eternal shame of victim and violated. (pp. 137-8)

When she got to the United States for college (Vassar), America demanded an Arab indentity of her. She recounts a crucial scene when she innocently agreed to be on a panel about Middle East women; she was jolted into recognition of the forces at play. "Later, reeling from the bitterness of the experience, i went to the library and studied modern history from an altogether new viewpoint .... At last, I understood what had happened in Palestine: the dates, the names, the places'' (p. 125).

She and her Lebanese husband lived in Washington, D.C., during the Vietnam protests and the civil rights movement. in spite of good friends, she found "instilled into the American imagination an image of the Arab world ... of barbarism and cruelty" (p. 122). in 1972 they moved to Beirut. A beautiful city, with its markets full of fresh fruits, its souks of gold and silver, and its cafes mixed with a variety of peoples in a paradisial setting on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. In 1975 that beautiful city exploded.

She is surprised. Why did her husband move the piano to the middle of the room? Why did he cover the furniture with white sheets? She finds herself looking through a space that was a wall; policemen on the next roof are looking at her. She realizes: it is her floor and apartment that have been hit. "On the way out i pick up a piece of shrapnel from the rubble .... This jagged, heavy, twisted, hot piece of iron-this is shrapnel. Shrapnel is serious" (p. 25).

in those fifteen years. There had been a period of calm. She goes out on her balcony to watch the sun set into the Mediterranean. "To the east, the deep purple of the distant hills above Jounieh modulate into a serene blackness, and the sparkle of village and automobile lights reflect the stars in the night sky." She often stands like this,

One violent day the author goes up to her seventh-floor flat.

Another passage describes what was probably a typical night

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Winter I992

she says. But “suddenly the quiet catches my ear. With that sixth sense that Beirutis have developed, I go inside and turn on the radio.’’ Her heart sinks. Who’s fighting this time? She goes to the balcony on the other side and sees the red tracer bullets over the city. The drums “call to my mind drums in the jungle, a primitive, ritual warning of aggression and danger” (p. 36).

War is back now. “Dread and excitement churn in my stomach.” Waiting for the word from the radio, she takes stock of her household. A whistle and crash as a shell lands nearby. Should they take the children downstairs? Each family makes its own decision. Another crash. She runs around opening windows so they won‘t break. Her mother phones, hysterical: where is her sister? The line goes dead. The lights flicker. She clutches her flashlight. After the third crash, they go downstairs to the garage shelter.

One wry feature of the book is a ”Glossary of Terms Used in Times of Crisis.” For example, “khaleena nrhouh nundub,” words usually used for putting things away in a drawer, now mean it is dangerous and people had better get their bodies into the safest place.

In the chapter on Beirut’s “New Topography,” the ” f a kuthun tatha” is described, the lines of confrontation between eastern and western portions of the city (the Green Line). ”This division in itself was the most traumatic of the many changes that the war produced in our environment” (p. 74). In Beirut, the author’s and the city’s dualities reflect one another: Christian East Beirut, Muslim West Beirut. She lives in West Beirut. Of elegant Christian East Beirut she says that it is cleaner, yes, “the air redolent with Eau Sauvuge and Opium, not with the stink of rotting garbage as it was in the west.’’ But: “I was always relieved to get back to the smelly, bustling, overcrowded, ugly west side of the city. It is real and full of life .... There is a mixture of peoples, and it is the mixture that is beautiful and holy” (pp. 139-40).

the once-elegant Hamra district: Included is the journey to the limbo of war-maimed souls in

The present visitor to Hamra unavoidably confronts deformities of the body that call up a paralyzing reaction in which compassion is lost to an overwhelming revulsion .... In the midst of the vast crowd one is overwhelmed by the lonely agony of each of these desperate lives.

(pp. 82-83) Ms. Makdisi concludes with a poem, a coda, that climbs up the

alphabet, starting with a “z” word and ending with an ”a” word. It

Lebanon

brings the human story full circle, in a sense, tying the present with the place there on the shore where people invented signs to write words.

Beirut Fragments persists like scroll found in a cave, a haunting personal voice-When the war began I belonged eve ywhere and nowhere, my family wasfrom Palestine but we moved to Egypt. I died in Beirut-coming out of a jar from a civilization past, whose extinction began in a city of strife, once beautiful, on a sea whose waters, blue most of the year in the temperate climate, became a foamy gray-green during the winter storms.

A beautifully printed book, easy to hold and read, nevertheless

MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

Editors: BenJamln Arbel and Ron Barkal, Tel Aviv University, Israel

Meditemnean Historical Review seeks to encourage the study of issues, whose significance transcends a particular area or period. It integrates various problems in the ancient, medieval, early modern and contemporary history of the Mediterranean basin.

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