Lebano-Pathography Converging Pathologies and Lived Narratives Since August 4, 2020

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