Illness Writing and Revolution, Converging Narratives: The Year in Lebanon

Abstract

Illness Writing and Revolution, Converging NarrativesThe Year in Lebanon Sleiman El Hajj (bio) Revolution: The Roots and Routes of Illness For over four centuries, Lebanon was shackled to the Ottoman Empire, whose later decline was described by nineteenth-century commentators as the "Sick Man of Europe." This epithet is one of many disease metaphors that may serve to gauge the social, even somatic damages inflicted by repressive political systems. A longstanding acquiescence in a corrupt, factional status quo, rooted in sectarian leaders' promises of protection—from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire to present-day Lebanon (Hamzeh)—festered into the unprecedented nationwide revolution that swept the country in October 2019. The year 2019–2020 therefore brimmed with new and established voices—Lebanese journalists, activists, essayists, writers, and translators calling for a paradigm shift from subservience to subversion. Overall, their ethnographic texts, cultural essays, memoirs, feature stories, and poetry write, rather than write about, the recent experiences of oppression, uprising, and defiance in a country on the tenterhooks of change. By assembling and apprising narratives that range from a gendered revolution to the crippling pandemic, this intersectional medical/cultural approach may enhance the understanding and development of lifewriting studies as a vehicle for addressing and redressing the ills that surround us. Cultural-Medical Ills Spur Activist Texts: Converging Pathologies Coming on the heels of a tanking economy, unprecedented inflation, and currency devaluation, the 2019–2020 taxes proposed by the Lebanese government created a seismic ripple in the Lebanese social fabric. Starting on October 17, 2019, irrespective of sect, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators were taking to the streets daily, asking for an eradication of sectarian patronage, and for systemic [End Page 98] accountability over the long-standing mismanagement of public services (Salloukh). Grievances included electricity, internet, gas and oil, reconstruction and development, and environmental issues, which "have been persistently hijacked by sectarian interests" (Fakhoury 2). These contentious issues constitute the daily challenges to be negotiated in Beirut, an overall disruptive situation Ghassan Moussawi describes as al-wad' in a seminal work of ethnography-as-biography that came out in June 2020: Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Situations in Beirut. Moussawi's al-wad' is a fluid term he theorizes to read the lived stories and oral histories of queer men and women in their fights against oppression and obscurantism in Lebanon. Later in the year, Moussawi and fellow sociologist Salvador Vidal-Ortiz called for repurposing the term queer to denote opposition, activism, or struggle, "as a verb, as a practice of unsettling, or spoiling […] and reshaping of social forces, and not [strictly] as a sexual identity marker" (1272). This combined intervention—the oppositional reframing of "queer" to both transcend the sexual and resist the structural debacles subsumed by the Lebanese al-wad'—allows for a nuanced reading of not only the revolution but also the life narratives it spawned. Indeed, according to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), "women in Lebanon are not just agitating for their rights, but for the rights of everyone." Lebanese women traumatized by the Civil War (1975–1990) have insisted this time around on national unity as people's driving force. Even as there are both Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, "within those two groups, a great amount of diversity exists in women, but their commonalities are what makes the women of this region such fierce samples of a strong culture" (Thomas 183). This subversive potentiality, actuated by Lebanon's gendered and inclusive revolution, has brought together women, migrant workers, refugees, and the LGBTQ+ community, coalescing around principles of secularism, liberalism, and human rights. The Lebanese historian Joelle Abi-Rached writes in an autoethnographic essay that the call to implement these principles, for which she joined the throngs in downtown Beirut, also threaded the lived experiences of those present into one concerted macronarrative of illness, of which cancer takes center stage. Through recourse to various statistics, Abi-Rached shows how epidemiologically evidenced cancer is an inevitable byproduct of a more pervasive and aggressive cancer: the postwar state-level corruption that has precipitated nationwide environmental degradation—air and water pollution and toxic waste disposal, as well as garbage and sewage mismanagement...