1st Edition
Lebano-Pathography Converging Pathologies and Lived Narratives Since August 4, 2020
This book of autobiographical, autoethnographic illness narratives tackles the intersection between cultural and medical illnesses in present-day Lebanon, in relation to topical issues such as queer home, coming of age, dementia, expatriate trauma, and sexual blackmail, among others. The book’s essays are developed in the backdrop of Lebano-pathography – a dual, potentially adaptable and reusable, narrative intervention (form/method) that does not depoliticise the traumatic subject. Simultaneously, it is a body of writing (text) that seeks to illuminate the different ways one can be ill, and try to recover, in present-day Lebanon.
While somatic manifestations of illness and their concomitant patient accounts are central to previous research in narrative medicine and illness writing, Lebano-pathography underscores a more versatile interpretation of illness encompassing cultural practice and/or clinical disease, and exploring in critically informed autobiographical text the two illness categories’ causal interrelationship. In the backdrop of the cadaverous political grid and economic tensions rending the country since the national tragedy of the August 4, 2020 explosion of Beirut Port, this volume unpacks the following thematic clusters: (1) Rewriting Illness: Pathographies of Gender and Sex; (2) The Alzheimer Spectrum: Cognitive and/or Cultural Memory Failure; (3) Walking the City: Medical Malpractice, Pedestrian Injuries, and Claustophobia; (4) The Bones Within: Immigrant Narratives and Vicarious Trauma; and (5) Surviving Trauma: Coping and Mental Health.
The chapters in this book were originally published in Life Writing and are accompanied by a new conclusion.
Introduction - Theorising Lebano-Pathography: A Biographical Exploration of Medical-Cultural Pathologies
Sleiman El Hajj
Part I - Rewriting Illness: Pathographies of Gender and Sex
1. Narrating Sexual Blackmail in Lebanon: A Present-Day Pathography
Sleiman El Hajj
2. No Cure: Illness through a Lebanese Arab Queer Lens
Anthony El G.
Part II - The Alzheimer Spectrum: Cognitive and/or Cultural Memory Failure
3. On the Vulnerability of Memory and the Power of Storytelling, or How My Grandmothers Made Me a Historian
Sana Tannoury-Karam
4. Writing Pretty: On Self-Cannibalism and Disfigured Tongues
Natacha Yazbeck
5. The Man in the Mirror: Reflections on Dementia Caregiving in Lebanon
Nayiri Baboudjian Bouchakjian
Part III: Walking the City: Medical Malpractice, Pedestrian Injuries, and Claustophobia
6. Truman in Beirut: Journeying Through Fear and Immobility
Pia Maria Bou Doleh
7. Drink the Sea: Twenty Years of Walking and Falling in Beirut
Jehan Bseiso
8. Ta(l)king Back (to) the City—Fragments of Beirut and/in Me
Farah Aridi
Part IV: The Bones Within: Immigrant Narratives and Vicarious Trauma
9. Playing Tennis in Beirut: Sisterhood and Transnational Aches
Yasmine Shamma
10. Sickness of Separation: Reflections on Expatriation, Repatriation, and Motherhood
Nancy Falco Chedid
Part V: Surviving Trauma: Coping and Mental Health
11. Scarred Skin and Wiggling Worms: What I Learned from my Eating Disorder
Jinane El Khoury
12. Illnesses of Illusion and Disillusionment: From Euphoria to Aporia
George Sadaka
Conclusion – Countering Self-Erasure: Lebano-Pathography and Future Studies in Auto/Biography
Sleiman El Hajj
Biography
Sleiman El Hajj is Assistant Professor of Creative and Journalistic Writing at the Lebanese American University (LAU) in Beirut. He is the recipient of the LAU Faculty Research Excellence Award 2022-2023. His research interests include creative nonfiction, gender studies, narrative constructions of home, queer theory, and Middle Eastern literature.
This original and engaging volume offers a diagnosis of contemporary Lebanon in the aftermath of the devastating 2020 port blast in Beirut, bringing together a macro perspective on political-economic breakdown with highly personal and heartfelt life stories of personal illness amidst public pain. Lebanon's recent traumas are stark and specific, as the book attests, but they also resonate with how politics has become pathological in many parts of the world. In this context, the contributors' autobiographical narration across scales from the mind and body to the city and nation offers creative and intellectual paths towards a therapeutic reckoning with the deepening ills of our shared present.
Ruben Andersson, University of Oxford
Sleiman El Hajj brings together social and medical pathologies of illness which fill a lacuna in Arab Middle Eastern literature, in various ways reflecting, subverting, intoning, queering, and fragmenting ‘the dominant discourses in Lebanese patriarchy’ – along with its sexist, xenophobic, and ableist abominations of sexual blackmail, pathologised queerness, disordered memories, Alzheimer, medical malpractice, immigrant narratives, vicarious traumas, and mental health crises. This is defiant writing, persuasively putting the case for meaning making beyond the conventional diktats of verification through a lens of a reified objectivity. The book instead offers an authenticity that dares to subvert academic orthodoxies of knowledge production while bearing unflinching depictions of individual lives lived under dystopian conditions.
Maria Jaschok, University of Oxford
