Letters from Beirut: Of Paradigms and Cockroaches

BY ELLEN HARDY

In Beirut, August is the cruellest month. As Ramadan begins and strings of bright paper cut-out lamps light up the city, anyone who possibly can leave town, does – social lives and business meetings are put on hold, and those who remain (such as hapless journalists, for example) can only try and stay sane in 40 plus degrees Celsius and 60 per cent humidity – we lurch from air conditioning unit to air conditioning unit, mimicking the movement of the drugged cockroaches we share our apartments with. This is all very well until the 3-12 hour power cuts kick in and people start burning car tires on the roads in protest. The country’s civil war ended twenty years ago, but corruption, Israeli bombs and Syrian occupation have kept the infrastructure in a third-world state, and 2 million or so tourists in town this year only make more ridiculous the incapacitated service system.

Estella

But one thing that Beirutis have always been good at is carrying on regardless. Restaurants open, bougainvillea blooms expansively, books are launched, film festivals abound, and hapless journalists go about their business. Despite a friend telling me that Mein Kampf is on the Downtown Virgin Megastore’s bestseller list (It could be innocent. Could it?), the city is full of bright and beautiful ideas. Estella and I (my 1991 Kawasaki Estrella – she lost the ‘r’ in homage to the anti-heroine of Great Expectations) have had plenty to do sounding out bookish thoughts all over the city.

Just last month, local sweetheart Maya Zankoul launched her second volume of “sherbet lemon” cartoons on all things Beirut – sweet on the outside, with a sharp kick if you care to get any closer. And one sunny Sunday, Estella and I climbed up into the mountains above Beirut to Broumanna, to get a sneak peek at a Feminist writer’s retreat. The program grew out of the work being done to create a feminist webspace for the Middle East, with the aim of bypassing the agendas of mainstream news and comment, much as indynews and True/Slant have done elsewhere, though with a different focus. The workshop was a pilot for longer future programs aiming to cultivate stronger writing for the website, which has big plans to also become a print publication. Postcolonial literature and Arabic poetry was on the agenda – man-hating was not.

From the mountains to the dingy Beirut streets, and from feminists to transsexuals – paradigm-busting seems to be the order of the day. I met with the completely delightful Randa, fiercely brave author of Mouzakarat Randa al Trans, or The Memoirs of Randa the Trans. She fled Algeria last year under a death threat, finding some sort of security and possibility of progress in Lebanon. As we spoke, her voice was gentle and hesitant, but her sentiments strong and brave. For her, identity is a personal decision in which no state or religion has the right to interfere, and she is still fighting for that right against some of the world’s most repressive ideologies.

Another day, another trip, this time to Dar al-Saqi, Beirut branch of Saqi Books, where they surprised me with an interview with co-founder André Gaspard, childhood friend and publishing partner of Mai Ghoussoub. Chatty to the point of rambling, he was immensely positive about moving from publishing books in London to Beirut. Sales targets and e-readers leave him cold, and the Arab market is full of surprises and possibilities, like Joumana Haddad’s new book, I Killed Scheherazade, which is causing a stir before it’s even out. A rave (p)review in the Guardian sparked a long response from local “queer arab magazine” Bekhsoos. I’m looking forward to reviewing it, though not without the feeling that whatever I say will be wrong.

Finally, August commemorated the assassination of Naji al-Ali 23 years ago in London. The Palestinian cartoonist and creator of the “Handala” character was shot in the face by an unidentified youth outside the offices of a Kuwaiti newspaper and eventually died from his wounds, without regaining consciousness. A statue of him put up after his death at the entrance to a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon was twice damaged before finally disappearing – and so it goes. RIP.

Some of Ellen Hardy’s articles are available on www.timeoutbeirut.com.

Legends of the Front Lines: What Makes Great Reportage?

BY ELLEN HARDY

Sometimes, a book must be content with the dubious accolade that its shortcomings serve as a reminder of what one loves about a genre more generally. Finishing Roxana Saberi’s Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran, I immediately began to meditate on why it left me cold. It’s a vital project; Saberi’s account of her one hundred days’ imprisonment by Ahmadinejad’s regime in early 2009 on fatuous charges of espionage is a riveting account of the Kafkaesque posturing she was forced to undergo, a disarmingly honest tale of courage, and a delicately balanced description of the variety and challenges of daily Iranian lives. But it doesn’t tick any of my literary reportage boxes, though Saberi, a Japanese-Iranian-American and former Miss Dakota with Masters degrees from Northwestern and Cambridge, England, seems an ideal candidate to shake things up a little.

We can speculate on why – the rush to cash in while Iran still dominated the headlines? A clash between a journalist’s dispassionate eye and the need to tell her heartrending story? Perhaps we expect too much. More usefully, and enjoyably, we can turn to explore some of literature’s finest reportage, the stuff that thrills and inspires even as it documents humanity’s grittiest realities and history’s most critical events. Let’s consider these five for the sweaty, dust- and blood-spattered crown of reportage:

1. To the End of Hell by Denise Affonço

To go deeper than the headlines surrounding the thirty-five-year prison sentence given to notorious Cambodian Khmer Rouge leader Comrade Duch in July, turn to Affonço’s memoir. She spent almost four years in the regime’s camps, having turned down the opportunity to escape to France in order to keep her family together, convinced by her passionately Communist husband. How she survived and what she lost – including watching her daughter die from starvation – will stay with you forever.

2. Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War by Robert Fisk

Reporting out of Lebanon since 1976, Fisk lived and breathed every gruesome twist and turn of Lebanon’s convoluted civil war. To be sure, at the end of 700-odd pages, you’ll feel like you did too, but it’s a peerless testament to the single-minded devotion of a top war journalist to delivering as much of the truth as possible, and to the dreadful dance of history and power struggles in the region. Though more or less peaceful today, Lebanon has a worthy biographer should it wish to remind itself: ‘never again’.

3. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Romeo Dallaire

Dallaire is no journalist, and the urgent, painful drive to recount what he saw and experienced during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide rings out even truer as a result. Commander of the UN force charged with keeping the peace as events unfolded, his first response to his posting was ‘Rwanda? Isn’t that in Africa somewhere?’ He returned to Canada disillusioned and suicidal, haunted by the butchery and rape of Hutus and Tutsis that claimed around 800,000 lives in the space of approximately 100 days. Dallaire spares us no detail of the horrific events, nor of the obtuse, elephantine bureaucracy that left him almost powerless to help.

4. The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi

Auschwitz survivor Levi’s last literary will and testament; he committed suicide in 1987, shortly after completing it. His writings on the concentration camps are world-famous, and If This is a Man usually the first choice. But ‘The Drowned and the Saved’ is of crucial importance, not just for the well-known clarity and lyricism of his writing, but also for the unnerving contemplation of the role of memory for the witness, and how it can never be taken for granted. His contribution goes far beyond that of a survivor; he is relentlessly critical of the act of witnessing itself.

5. Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuściński

A timely reminder that reportage doesn’t have to be unrelentingly blood-soaked, and how a damn good book can make all the difference to your work. Famously, Polish international correspondent Kapuściński survived 40 revolutions and four death sentences; but for all that, he was as concerned to celebrate the countries and the people he encountered through literary endeavour as he was with the balder side of reporting. This alternative autobiography uses Herodotus’s The Histories as a frame for the story of Kapuściński’s work; a delight.

CanLit Book Review: More Good News by David Suzuki and Holly Dressel

BY JOHN COLEMAN

Environmentalist, activist, scientist, and super-Canadian David Suzuki has teamed up with best-selling author/environmentalist Holly Dressel for a new novel, More Good News: Real Solutions to the Global Eco-Crisis, released last month on Greystone Books. More Good News is the follow up to the writing team’s 2003 Good News For A Change: How Everyday People Are Helping The Planet.

As the two titles suggest, the books provide an optimistic vantage point on current world environmental issues. Instead of focusing on where environmental tactics go wrong, Suzuki and Dressel acknowledge the many people and organisations that promote and enact real green change everyday. Good News For A Change, which sold 35,000 copies, insists global sustainability and the technology needed to provide it is within reach. More Good News updates readers on new issues not covered in the 2003 book. For example, More Good News discusses how declining global economies have since halted governments from seeking major environmental solutions and how renewable energy sources have been thrust into the foreground of environmental debates. With these additions, Suzuki and Dressel keep with the overall theme that sustainability solutions are real and need to be accessed in the near future.

Suzuki and Dressel provide refreshing optimism for a change, proving that with a little promotion and hard work, future environmental crises can be successfully treated, or even avoided. But, the buck doesn’t stop with the book. Readers, voters, and the average citizens must lobby governments to take sustainability issues seriously before any widespread change takes effect.