29 September 2006

Review

BEIRUT: "No poet has written on Dahiyeh," writes poet and critic Abbas Beydoun, in the English translation of "A Possible Poem for Dahiyeh," one of 50 contributions to the just-published anthology "Lebanon, Lebanon," from Saqi Books. "Can a poet say anything about ruined spaces that need topographers, astronomers, city-planners, cineastes, computers more than they need poets? The place consists of heaps upon heaps; of plains of ruined heaps. Can we be deviant and speak about beauty here? Or is the real ruin on our tongues?"

Beydoun's possible poem could be read as a possible counterpoint to an older, oft-quoted line from Theodor Adorno. What, after all, is the worth of a poet's work after unconscionable horror? It's a question that has been debated for years, decades, and centuries, if for no other reason than because such unconscionable horrors never ceases to exist. They always return, and Lebanon has seen too many of them.

What gives Beydoun's text its power and relevance, however, is the hand-wringing anxiety and discomfort it captures by tackling an issue - or rather a set of issues - that most Beirut-based artists and writers choose to ignore. It forces the question, what is the Dahiyeh to us? How has it come to be so stigmatized, separate, left to exist outside the words, images and sounds that make up Beirut's intellectual and cultural output? And what can be done about that now, outside half-hearted gestures that smack of nearly pornographic voyeurism? "The ruin on our tongues" is silence, aggravated by what Beydoun describes, metaphorically or otherwise, as an "impotent tenderness" and a "scorned manhood."

The publication of "Lebanon, Lebanon" was celebrated Wednesday night with readings, music, dance, theater and a video installation presented at the New Player's Theater in London. Edited by Anna Wilson, the book came together in a snap. For over 20 years, Saqi Books has published books of fiction and nonfiction related to Lebanon, among many other places and subjects, in part because the press was created by two childhood friends, Mai Ghoussoub and Andre Gaspard, who fled Beirut for London in the late 1970s. To this day, Saqi maintains offices in both cities, and many of its writers travel often from one to the other.

As such, Saqi had an extensive network in place from which to pull stories. Yet "Lebanon, Lebanon" also includes poems, artworks, essays, anecdotes and fragments of fiction by a number of writers from off the Saqi grid - including Harold Pinter, V. S. Naipaul, John Le Carre, Hanif Kureishi, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Orhan Pamuk, Toby Litt and Paul Auster. The twin legends of Arabic verse - Adonis and Mahmoud Darwiche - are represented, as are the novelists Hanan al-Shaykh and Hoda Barakat, and the young talents Mazen Kerbaj and Zena Khalil. Well more than half of the selections are new and previously unpublished.

The book came together in response to the war that erupted in Lebanon this summer, yet it holds together in ways that are better than reactive. Naipaul's short story "The Mourners," about a young man who pays a visit to a relative who has just lost her child, touches on all the themes that reverberate throughout the anthology - rage, grief, guilt and awkward silence.

"Lebanon, Lebanon" is as much a book about war as it is a sustained meditation on cities (Ghoussoub's contribution revisits some of the best parts of Italo Calvino's great novel of urban fascinations, "Invisible Cities"), images, ruins, memories, loves, deaths and the daily horror of watching the news, no matter where the reader or writer may be - Tobias Hill's poem "The Wave" winds down with the words, "This knowingness. Nobody knows what to do with it / but bear it, and it isn't finished yet. / There is much more that we could know, / and nobody can tell where it will stop, / or if it ever will. This is the news."

While there are moments of effective political invective - "So answer me this one, please," writes John le Carre, "If you kill a hundred innocent civilians and one terrorist, are you winning the war on terror?" - the anthology never becomes a book of apologies on the part of foreigners pitying a small distant country. Texts like Beydoun's make an intimate challenge, to which the most knowledgeable of readers should rise.

"Lebanon, Lebanon," published by Saqi Books, is out and available now. All proceeds go to children's charities working in Lebanon.