The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art, and Journalism

Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut

Caroline Rooney, Rita Sakr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135136529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Literary
• Index: Literature

This transnational collection of essays, interviews, and creative pieces on the 1982 Siege of Beirut explores literary representations of the siege by a diverse set of writers alongside journalism and other media including film and art. The book investigates and promotes an awareness of an ethics of representation on questions of extreme emotional investment, comparing representations of the siege to representations of other traumatic events, visiting responses from those of different cultural backgrounds to the same event and considering implications with respect to comparative approaches. Chapters explore how literature, journalism and art contribute to overcoming the dangers of forgetting and denial, memorial excess and fundamentalism, the radicalization of violence, and the complete breakdown of trust on international levels, asking how they challenge geopolitical, intellectual, and psychological states of siege and instead promote awareness, acknowledgement, mourning, and justice across divided communities. The book extends the use of postcolonial methodologies affiliated with history, international relations, and psychoanalysis (memory, trauma) to Middle-Eastern studies, and visits the siege's effect on different forms of memory and memorialization: selective memory, trauma, gaps and fissures in historical accounts, recording of eyewitness reports, and artistic re-imaginings and realizations of alternative archives.

Part I

Representing the Siege

1 ‘War Is Surrealism without Art’

‘Representing the Unrepresentable’ in Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness, Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game, and Robert Fisk's Pity the Nation

Rita Sakr

In his prose poem ‘War Stories’ Charles Bernstein writes: ‘War is surrealism without art.’¹ This line is particularly powerful as an epigrammatic reflection of–and on–the crisis of representing the Lebanese War, specifically the 1982 Siege of Beirut, whereby the ‘surreal’ emerges as either the enabling or disrupting narrative of the 1982 siege in literature, journalism, and art. In his 1987 memoir Thakira lil Nisyan, translated later as Memory for Forgetfulness, Mahmoud Darwish exposes the death of language, image, and representation as they are besieged by what he describes as the surreal terror of the summer months of 1982. Similarly, in his 2006 debut novel De Niro's Game, Rawi Hage reconfigures the raw everyday reality of the Lebanese War, including the siege and massacres of Sabra and Shatila, with surrealist stylistic energy while indirectly questioning the ethics of the representation of this war in several print and audiovisual mediums that have been frequently disoriented into a spectacular realism without life.

The implicit questions that Hage's novel and Darwish's memoir raise about the representation of the 1982 Siege of Beirut, especially in the contexts of literature and journalism, are strikingly similar to Robert Fisk's explicit in-depth analysis of the ethical crisis facing journalists as they grappled with censorship, the clichés and constraints of war and politics, and the reality of trauma in an apparently surreal war. In fact, an implicit literary-journalistic dialogue seems to overdetermine many of the outpourings on the siege by writers working in different media and genres. In this respect, several journalists (including Charles Glass in Tribes with Flags: A Dangerous Passage through the Chaos of the Middle East and Tim Llewellyn in Spirit of the Phoenix: Beirut and the Story of Lebanon)² have employed literary tropes and personal narrative in recounting the siege while novelists (including James Buchan in A Parish of Rich Women; Bahaa Taher in Love in Exile; Sonallah Ibrahim in Beirut, Beirut; Tony Hanania in Unreal City; Radwa Ashour in Specters; and Mischa Hiller in Sabra Zoo)³ have sometimes relied on journalistic reports as factual documentary references or instead have set their fiction as a more intimate and imaginatively positive counter-narrative to the dry and bleak reports. In an interview included in this volume, Mischa Hiller says that he read many factual accounts by journalists:

Although I wanted it to be real (i.e., to have a sense of reality) I certainly didn't want it to be constrained by the truth. Although everything of relevance historically is there, I wanted to bring in fictional characters and events that did not happen. Obviously, you can also create a more satisfying narrative with fiction; reality is not as neat, and there is a kind of upbeat ending that you probably would not get in reality, unfortunately.

Clearly, the difficulty of acknowledging the extreme brutality of the siege as ‘real’ and the complexity of defining ‘the truth’ within the ‘historical’ framework blur the distinction between the journalistic and the literary on the levels of content and style in either medium. In this context, Fisk's Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War stands out as one of the earliest and most important extended journalistic accounts that incorporate literary techniques in representing the siege, thus forming a creative attempt to reclaim the ‘historical’ text of the war from impersonal analysis while extensively engaging with the pressing yet often ambivalent nature of ‘truth’ at the heart of the siege and ensuing massacre. As a counterpart to Fisk's contribution, Hage's and Darwish's works comprise some of the most experimental and critical renderings of journalistic material.⁴ One important reason for bringing together Memory for Forgetfulness and De Niro's Game is the comparable treatment of the poetic in prose within these two works and the presentation of language as both disrupted by the surreal event and enabled by surrealist stylistic techniques.⁵ This chapter examines the implications of this literary-journalistic crossroads where purportedly divergent representational and ethical projects meet, specifically across the works of Darwish, Fisk, and Hage.

In an interview with Rawi Hage, I asked the Lebanese Canadian writer about the combination of historical precision and imaginative complexity in his representation of the atrocity of the 1982 Siege of Beirut. Specifically, my questions were related to this collection of essays: ‘What are the ethical parameters of representation for a writer in relation to a macro-historically significant traumatic event which he has personally experienced and which he reimagines in a fictionalized version? How does a novelist's rendering of such an event compare with a journalist's reportage?’ Rawi Hage answered:

Unlike a journalist, I have no contract with the reader to tell the exact truth. My representation of the Siege is not a documentary work. Still, De Niro's Game is engaged in the representation of a contested war and a contested history. When it was first published, I thought that it would get a harsher response in the Middle East and in my community in Lebanon specifically. With this work, I was faced with an ethical choice: either to take secularism to it s ultimate test and go beyond my communal belonging, or apply censorship to my narrative. I chose the first option and eventually wasn't criticized by the readership that would have normally condemned the novel. Ironically, I think that literary prizes sometimes contribute to lessening the anger of outraged readers and to forgiving a writer's ‘sins’ in representing the unrepresentable.⁶

Like Hage, Fisk ponders, at length, the price he paid for his ‘“sins” in representing the unrepresentable’ as he was falsely accused on different occasions of having an anti-Semitic agenda in his account of the siege. While Hage's rendering of the ethical conundrum in which many Christian militias found themselves in 1982 (Hage himself is Christian but describes himself as secular) is powerful; it follows a different trajectory from that of Mahmoud Darwish who absolutely condemns Lebanon's Christian militias for what he identifies as their responsibility with respect to the plight of the Palestinians at that historical juncture.

Hage's answer in the interview above highlights three closely related factors in his literary engagement with the war, the Israeli invasion, and the siege: truth, censorship, and the unrepresentable. These same factors recurrently emerge in Fisk's reflections on the difficulties that he encountered as he covered the siege for the Times and uncovered the event's material, moral, and political casualties. One of the major obstacles facing journalists during the Siege of Beirut was the official and unofficial, overt and covert censorship on their reportage. In four consecutive chapters of Pity the Nation and particularly Chapter 12 ‘Pandora's Box: Reporting Under Siege’, Fisk highlights the pressures exerted by various sides, but especially by the Israeli military, the Israeli government, and pro-Israeli organizations on reporters, journalists, and ultimately editors to restrict and sometimes prevent investigations of responsibilities for civilians' deaths during the invasion, the siege, and the bombings of West Beirut and hence to control and limit the scope of the representation of the Israeli ‘Operation Peace for Galilee’ in the Western media. In this respect, Fisk notes that ‘the foreign journalists in Beirut [had] … more freedom to tell the truth than their colleagues in Israel.’⁷ Defying military restrictions on their access to the truth was, for Fisk and other journalists, an ethical choice constantly overlain with multiple physical and professional dangers. In this respect, it is interesting to compare the direct and almost systematic restrictions on journalistic work in the Lebanese war zone to the implicit yet highly significant constraints proleptically anticipated by the novelist who faces not only a worldwide audience but also a very local and ideologically grounded readership with his imaginative reconstruction of wartime Beirut. This is clear in Hage's comment on his ethical choice not to apply censorship to his narrative and hence to defy the demands of collective belonging to a particular Christian community, a large portion of which approved, to various degrees, the Israeli intervention. Hage chose to break the taboos of this community and unearth its buried moral and political victims. However, he also portrayed the more intricate details and complexity of wartime everyday life that absurdly led to some of the monstrous crimes that were committed by several sides of the conflict.

Censorship was only one of many ethical constraints in the representational space of the war and the siege. In this context, Fisk writes:

It would, however, be unfair to suggest that dishonest governments and brutal armies, historical bias and editorial timidity, as well as the actual physical danger, were solely responsible for the problems of reporting Lebanon, or of covering other Middle East nations. Journalists have contributed to their own difficulties.

Over the years in Beirut, my colleagues and I often felt a sense of anger, even disgust, at the way in which the events we witnessed were recorded, at the matrix of words–finite and often inappropriate–within which journalists chose to limit their reports. We would ask ourselves why the events we witnessed, the city we lived in, the culture of the place, its beauty and squalor–even the smell of Beirut, were all too frequently homogenized into sterile, overused nomenclature.⁸

For Fisk, a major risk in reporting the Lebanese War was the swamp of empty clichés in which the writings of some Arab and Western journalists were submerged, thus betraying the historical events and the personal traumas that they were witnessing. Similarly, the barren and sometimes callously prosaic language used in some reports on the siege is parodied in De Niro's Game. Just before the invasion, Bassam, the narrator of Hage's novel, passes by a magazine store, picks up a newspaper, and reads the headlines: ‘Israel moving on the southern borders. Fighting in the mountains between the Christian forces, the Muslims, and the socialist forces. Long, empty speeches by ministers and clergymen. A model or Hollywood actress marries a Saudi millionaire. Woody Allen plays the clarinet. Saheeb Hamemeh declares his love to an Egyptian actress.’⁹ The italicized juxtaposition of the exceptionally ominous and the banal, the news of military events and those of the entertainment industry, ironically highlights the paradoxical trivialization and spectacularization of the war. A comparable process is expressed in another instance when the narrator reads the headlines at the beginning of the Israeli invasion. But in this case Hage's text juxtaposes two different representations of the siege, one literary and the other journalistic. This is the first paragraph of the twelfth chapter of De Niro's Game:

ISRAELI SOLDIERS ENTERED OUR LAND, SPLITTING RIVERS and olive trees.

Vartan and I were reading the newspaper on the edge of the sidewalk. The headlines blared: The Jews are in the south! The Syrians have...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Representing the Siege
• Part II Remembering and Reporting the Siege
• Contributors
• Index