Early successful Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir, Jean Said Makdisi recounts a meal enactment successful Beirut during the nascent stages of Lebanon’s fifteen-year civilian war. The distant thud of shelling punctuates the evening, refuting 1 guest’s optimism that the latest ceasefire statement volition endure. The guests autumn silent, listening to a nighttime abruptly made percussive. “Someone should grounds this madness,” different impermanent murmurs aft a pause. “Someone should constitute each of this down.” The sounds of warring gully closer; the meal enactment disperses. Makdisi and her hubby cautiously marque their mode location to hold retired the information with their children.
Who is champion acceptable to archer the communicative of a war—of wars wrong wars? Who should beryllium granted the authorization to “write each of this down”? Makdisi’s Beirut Fragments, originally published successful 1990 and initially reissued successful 1999, is simultaneously a humble and a extremist effect to these questions. An Arab pistillate is acceptable to archer the story: a mother, a teacher, a “noncombatant” who is nary little enmeshed successful the beingness of the warfare for being connected the extracurricular of its machinations. Employing a hybrid signifier that weaves unneurotic poetry, essays, and much diaristic entries, Makdisi fashions a communicative of beingness amid those 15 years of unit that is astatine erstwhile intimate and expansive. Makdisi and her husband’s determination to stay successful Beirut done truthful galore seasons of uncertainty—despite their quality to expatriate with comparative ease—is the cardinal hostility that undergirds Beirut Fragments. The effect is some a chronicle of civilian beingness (and endurance) during wartime and a representation of a metropolis poised connected the borderline of obliteration: a enactment of witness, and an enactment of quiet, nonviolent dissent.
Beirut Fragments is little a memoir of endurance than 1 of endurance, arsenic endurance implies an intactness connected the acold broadside of catastrophe—a wholeness that often exists lone successful the eyes of others.
Beirut Fragments opens with a stark, factual timeline of events, from the “sparking incidental of the warfare successful a Beirut suburb” successful April 1975, done its large battles, to the archetypal lawsuit of Syrian intervention, the assorted meetings convened to broker peace, the Israeli penetration successful 1982 and consequent equipped absorption against it, the pivotal assassinations, and finally, a seemingly tenuous ceasefire. This chronology offers readers a consciousness of the long, winding roadworthy of suffering that those who remained successful Beirut were obliged to travel. The placement of the timeline astatine the memoir’s outset besides gestures toward Makdisi’s tendency to marque wide what has excessively often been willfully muddled successful Western understandings of the portion and clip period: this is not a struggle excessively complicated, excessively ample and hopeless, to beryllium made to adhere to chronology.
The communicative moves from the aboriginal days of the warfare to a glossary of Beiruti wartime phrases, past to Makdisi’s upbringing, and backmost to her memories of warfare and the radical mislaid to it. The operation of the publication belies its title: alternatively than fragmented, each conception feels inherently linked to others arsenic they enactment to overgarment a representation not lone of Makdisi herself but besides of Beirut—her city—as a living, changing secondary character.
In a 2023 speech astatine the American University of Beirut connected the bequest of her brother, the renowned student and nationalist intelligence Edward Said, Makdisi praised Said for his quality to “talk backmost to empire,” a rarity for his generation, she said. “There was not a hint of the colonized sycophant oregon the antheral who—quote unquote—‘knew his place.’” In her ain way, Makdisi does the aforesaid successful Beirut Fragments. One of the astir effectual ways of talking backmost to an oppressive unit is by speaking truthfully, by letting your acquisition emergence supra the sound of those who would flatten you and your benignant into casual categories. Through her descriptions of Beirut’s varied architecture, a heavy involvement successful the connection of the spot and its shifting idioms arsenic the years of warfare resistance on, arsenic good arsenic her absorption connected the idiosyncratic lives touched by the war, Makdisi makes circumstantial what others would alternatively support vague and flat. And again, determination is her prime to stay in the city, a rejoinder to the assumptions of Empire arsenic overmuch arsenic it is an enactment of self-determination. “Embracing beingness alternatively of death, conviviality and solidarity alternatively of part and hatred, ‘carrying on,’ has travel to mean not a unsighted and anserine clinging to a dormant and buried past,” Makdisi writes, “but a wide connection of a perceived aboriginal successful which the hostilities of the warfare person nary place.”
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At the opening of “Mirrors, oregon Contradictions: A Self-Portrait,” the astir autobiographical section of the memoir, Makdisi writes, “I was calved successful Jerusalem, grew up successful Cairo, aged successful America, and died successful Beirut.” It is simply a condemnation that she subsequently dissects for its seeming contradictions (“I americium the kid successful adjacent measurement of Christianity and Islam”) and for the ways that it makes her some a apt and an improbable idiosyncratic to recount a communicative of Lebanon’s wars.
Born into a Palestinian-Lebanese Protestant Christian household successful Jerusalem, Makdisi and her 4 siblings attended schoolhouse successful that metropolis until their father’s concern successful Cairo prompted the family’s relocation. The youngest of the archetypal 3 children, Makdisi recounts her British assemblage education, arsenic good arsenic her memories of relatives fleeing Palestine for Cairo aft the 1948 Palestine War and the Nakba, Israel’s dispossession of Arabs from their homes and land. Despite Makdisi’s aunts, uncles, and cousins being portion of immoderate 740,000 displaced, their stories impressment themselves connected her for their singularity:
Much later, 1948 assumed successful my consciousness the grandness of history, of justness and politics, of earthy destiny and planetary morality. In a small country of my mind, however, past volition ever mean the tragic smashing of idiosyncratic lives by its cruel hands and the scattering of bewildered radical reeling from its blows.
The Egyptian Revolution erupted 4 years later, followed by the Suez War erstwhile Makdisi was successful her last twelvemonth of precocious school. Memories of aerial raid sirens and searchlights unrecorded alongside her recollections of lighter moments during the extremity of her adolescence: marching to greeting assembly astatine school; playing hockey, netball, and cricket; and going to the theater, wherever she “absorbed the hilarious comic contented of Egypt.”
In the United States, wherever Makdisi enrolled successful college, she was repelled by American anti-Arab prejudices. “Instilled into the American imaginativeness [is] an representation of the Arab satellite that was, to accidental the least, hostile,” she writes. She recovered herself having to “defend a full civilization against inexact accusation.” Makdisi besides recovered the constrictive knowing of pistillate empowerment popularized by second-wave feminism frustrating, peculiarly the presumption that each women request the aforesaid genre of liberation. After completing her studies, she spent 10 pivotal years successful Washington, DC, successful the 1960s, a play marked by movements for equality and protests against the endless wars America waged abroad. Makdisi drew overmuch inspiration from the struggles toward advancement successful the state astatine the time, but was disheartened erstwhile the 1967 Arab-Israeli War showed her that “the aforesaid groups that vociferously supported the request for justness successful America often seemed oblivious to the parallel Arab demands for justice.”
The specified assertion of being unimpressed by beingness successful the United States, by rejecting not lone America’s prejudiced views of Arab beingness and civilization but a aboriginal beingness successful the state itself, is an enactment of refusal that helps the scholar amended recognize Makdisi’s choices during her years successful Beirut. In 1972, Makdisi and her household moved to Beirut, her husband’s hometown, wherever she hoped to “make a home, [to] settee down wholly and finally.” A specified 3 years aboriginal warfare broke out, and galore thousands began to emigrate. And yet the household remained. The powerfulness of Makdisi’s attack to this cardinal choice—one she and her hubby marque not once, but again and again—in Beirut Fragments is that she does not purport to beryllium braver than she felt astatine immoderate fixed time. Instead she is honorable astir her fear, the galore moments it overtakes her, and what mightiness prevarication connected the different broadside of being surrounded by truthful overmuch violence. “As each this happened, and arsenic I wrote, a caller pistillate grew up successful me, and my tegument molted,” she writes.
Beirut Fragments is little a memoir of endurance than 1 of endurance, arsenic endurance implies an intactness connected the acold broadside of catastrophe—a wholeness that often exists lone successful the eyes of others. It is simply a grounds of bearing the unbearable, of surviving for the quiescent days, erstwhile the truce mightiness hold, the taps mightiness proceed to flow, and the schools mightiness unfastened their doors. In the afterword that accompanies the 1999 reissue of the memoir, Makdisi explains that erstwhile she primitively sent the manuscript to her editor, it was unclear whether the latest intermission successful warring would last. The publication was written not from the harmless region of resolution, but with the past inactive ablaze successful the present.
Beneath the memoir runs a dependable defence of mundane Beirutis and, equally, a condemnation of the satellite that distances itself from their pain. “All my life, it seems, has been passed successful the shadiness of violence,” Makdisi writes. “And inactive I person nary defence but outright rejection, nary statement against it but to constituent astatine the desolation astir me.”
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By the clip the memoir was published successful 1990, the West had agelong grown accustomed to discussing Beirut arsenic an aberration, a spot wherever the radical simply could not halt fighting, conscionable 1 obstacle lasting successful the mode of the grabbag imagination for “peace successful the Middle East.” As if Western hands were not themselves implicated successful the region’s suffering. Makdisi, deft successful her usage of statement arsenic critique, offers her strongest rebuke of this distancing Western rhetoric erstwhile she details the unmatched ferocity and technological superiority of Israeli weaponry during the 1982 invasion—power made imaginable by the enactment of the United States and its allies:
There was a peculiar narration betwixt Beirutis and Israeli planes: If 1 dared, 1 mightiness astir telephone it romantic. In this cognition was a unusual commingling of repugnance and desire, alienation and belonging, intimacy and coldness. It was portion admiration for the breathtaking technology; for the sheer carnal quality of the gleaming, metallic streaks successful the wide bluish skies; for their seductive elegance.
Many of the events successful the section “Summer 1982: The Israeli Invasion” volition onslaught today’s readers arsenic eerily familiar. Leaflets urging evacuation dropped by Israeli planes moments earlier an aerial strike; humanitarian organizations’ requests for impermanent ceasefires ignored; and a devastating multitude of civilian casualties, their images—“babies and aged men, Palestinian and Lebanese, lying dormant oregon dying; bits of bodies, shops, and cars; houses reduced to unrecognizable rubble; an aged woman, wiping distant her tears”—printed successful ghastly profusion successful newspapers.
Beirut Fragments is a grounds of lived testimony. It is funny successful what it feels similar to beryllium trapped wrong a café arsenic a weapon conflict erupts retired beforehand and to instrumentality to mundane beingness afterward.
As I constitute this instauration successful the autumn of 2025, aft astir 2 years of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, galore millions of radical worldwide person witnessed, connected their smartphones, the regular quality toll of specified high-tech warfare. The transportation betwixt the shattered bodies and buildings and their ain governments’ complicity is present unmistakably clear. But successful 1982, the waters of nationalist sentiment were acold murkier—clouded by distance, by denial, and by the convenient story of neutrality.
When Beirut Fragments was archetypal released, immoderate reviewers described it arsenic a publication that steers wide of politics. But that is not what Makdisi is doing. In a warfare wherever determination are galore sides to beryllium taken up, Makdisi chooses to instrumentality the broadside of the metropolis itself. While she does walk clip earlier successful the memoir parsing the governmental logic of the bid of conflicts that leaves galore thousands dormant and displaced, she devotes the bulk of her attraction to chronicling what it felt similar to person lived her life, and to person seen truthful galore others effort to bash the same, amid layered crises.
Beirut Fragments is a grounds of lived testimony. It is funny successful what it feels similar to beryllium trapped wrong a café arsenic a weapon conflict erupts retired beforehand and to instrumentality to mundane beingness afterward. To telephone connected the aforesaid electrician for years and aboriginal larn that helium and his household person been murdered successful a massacre. War, Makdisi writes, “is a wide of contradictory and ambiguous experiences.” The memoir’s title, alternatively than reflecting the operation of the publication itself, seems alternatively to allude to the ways that unit disrupts, however it breaks isolated lives and memories and communities.
Much similar the American newspapers erstwhile Makdisi completed Beirut Fragments in 1990, today’s media is focused connected the Middle East. Again there’s speech of a tenuous ceasefire yet holding. And much than 3 decades connected from Lebanon’s wars, a peculiar refrain is inactive spoken by politicians who person ne'er lived done what Makdisi experienced: Bad things hap successful war. It is simply a mode to motion disconnected atrocity, the slain child, the besieged and starved city, yes, but it is not adjacent the full truth.
Good things hap successful the midst of war, too.
Makdisi shows galore of these bully things. The antheral who valiantly shuttles Beirutis crossed the city’s no-man’s-land. The assemblage bureau head who endeavors to decorate her abstraction contempt the seeming futility of coming to enactment astatine all. “In the underground shelter, I person sat with radical of each religions and nationalities,” Makdisi writes. “We person comforted each other, shared food, water, blankets, candles.” Human beings proceed to amusement 1 different kindness, immoderate until their past breaths. They proceed to disprove the lies heaped connected them by whoever stands down the gun, to condemn the gunman’s indifference with their ain humanity. And they bash hope, contempt grounds to the contrary, that their circumstances mightiness improve.
“It is not truthful casual to spot up the people,” Makdisi writes. “Some inactive slumber afloat clothed. Some inactive garbage to permission their homes, sitting indoors, waiting. Some leap up, shaking, astatine the slightest sound.” It is not easy, but the radical bash spot them-selves up, arsenic beingness necessitates 1 measurement to beryllium enactment successful beforehand of another. They spell distant imperfectly, yes, but admirably.
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From Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir by Jean Said Makdisi. Introduction copyright © 2025 by Angela Flournoy. Available from Outsider Editions, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a part of Penguin Random House, LLC.
English (US) ·