The counter-revolution in language; the beginning of virality
The crush of sensations that accompanied the revolution overwhelmed all norms of colloquial expression, all the gestures and expressions that constituted the texture and rhythm of everyday life. Things fell apart, as well they might, as well they must; as well they needed to. All the inelegant pantomimes and contrived speech acts, all the ungainly rituals of forced conviviality, all the linguistic games that held the country together, were transformed in the face of the thawra, as the country set about looking for new ways of speaking to itself about itself, improvising a new glossary for a new time. With the revolution, the rhyme scheme was lost, and all the old conventions of politesse and verse stumbled toward the awkwardness of prose, of a novel in the process of figuring out what it is about. As the form changed, so did the words, and with the words, the story. Unbound, in the earliest day of the thawra, the dialectic flashed and snapped and sometimes froze, but every day there was something new, some new way of making sense of what had been that was not already burdened with an engorged, flatulent history, all the necrophilic pieties of the long dead generations that had weighted down the children of the post-war era.
Long governed by the notional incipience of imminent chaos, the children of the post-war era were by no means silent, but the tones in which they spoke to themselves, their peers as much as their elders, were decidedly muted; and all of us who lived in Lebanon, during this time, would eventually learn to speak in low voices about certain subjects, when and how to be cynical, and where and with whom and upon which topics we had to speak in earnest. The post-war was a delicate formation, a time and place besotted and befuddled by the imagination of ever impending crises, a time in which the felt inevitability of every imagined, impending crisis drew upon the indurated tales–those lived and those unlived–of earlier crises, summoning about themselves all the Faulknerian ghosts of the war as part of their spellcraft, all the ghosts and all the jinn that crowded the streets of the towns and the villages, condemned to walk alone and eternally, speaking only to themselves in spurious bromides. Uttering the wrong words threatened the whole of the edifice. And this was the problem with mouths. In song there is sanctification, but the misapplication of words is an unpardonable offense.
In Lebanon, questions of language, of writing, of poetry, voice and form, are never far from mind. This was true before the war, it was true after the war, it is true still today. The Arab world, such as it is, is held together by its literature, less by a language that no two peoples speak in quite the same way than by the forms and conventions that are ancient and unassailable, by a sense of artistry and its importance that can be suppressed by never effaced. In Lebanon, during the war, the problem of art, of language, of expression, attached itself to the problem and progress of battle, to the notional unity of truth and the thickness of historical eventuality, to the understanding of how things were and what they were to become. “I know a researcher in Israeli affairs who kept denying the ‘rumor’ that Beirut was under siege simply because what he read was not the truth unless it was written in Hebrew. And since Israeli newspapers had not yet reached him, he wouldn’t acknowledge that Beirut was under siege…[T]his is not a madness I suffer from.”
Writing from the heart of the war, in Beirut, during and after the war, the world came undone and its language became corrupt. Meanings drifted further away from their words, and language–as it was, as it was becoming–groaned under the weight of many ponderously aspirational fantasies. “As the war progressed, there grew up a new language which Beirutis on all sides adapted to life-saving use. Most of the words are perfectly ordinary…but subtle nuances have changed their meaning entirely. With a touch of irony here, a metaphorical use there…these words came to represent a body of experiences, memories, and hopes for the future…”
Pressed into service to present descriptions less of what was, of what is, than to offer amoral gestures bent toward a host of vague transcendental principalities, language itself became a kind of lie, an elaborate lattice of signs obscuring many things that were inarguably true. A new grammar emerged in and after the war but it was insidious, a way of speaking around things as they were, a means of studiously dodging offense, while hewing to the pieties of party and sect. In her war memoir, Jean Said Makdisi explores this new vocabulary, treating it as so many fragments, just as much a part of the rubble left from the war as shattered glass or exploded concrete. “Shell follows exploding shell. We can hear glass shattering and falling, concrete rumbling, and the tinkle of shrapnel landing. A red glow from the cars burning in the street…the erratic light of from the gas lamp….A shell lands on the roof and the ceiling collapses…” (Makdisi, 46)
Beirut, in the end, in Makdisi’s telling, is abandoned; and being abandoned, takes leave of itself, lets itself fragment, fracture, shatter. The song of the people and the fighters becomes a comically inelegant dirge. Faced by the rubble of an exploded world, Makdisi sifts through among the fragments, searching for those pieces from which she might fashion an image of the world as it was, and the signs of the world as it will be. A collage, a bricolage, she writes with the rubble of the city and its desolation. “How can I write about Beirut?” Makdisi asks. “How can I collect it all into one volume: the years of pain; of watching a world collapse while trying to stave off that collapse; the layers of memories and hopes, tragedy and even sometimes comedy, of violence and kindness, of courage and fear?” (Makdisi, 49)
What arrangement of words is adequate description for such perilous, uncanny times? How do you propose to make sense from the words, when the words have long since stopped speaking of themselves? Taking account of this problem, Makdisi cites, among others, the ways in which the Arabic word al hawadith–“the events”–had drifted from itself as just one example of how thoroughly distended the common usage had become, how thoroughly distanced it has become from the circumstances of its articulation, how thoroughly language became wedded to a generalized defacement of its own context. “[Al hawadith] refers to the war that began in 1975, unless otherwise specified: That is, people will sometimes refer to the ‘events’ of 1958 or the ‘events’ of 1973. Perhaps nothing expresses so well the poverty of language in conveying experiences as this mild and faintly contemptuous understatement that, with its close relation to the Arabic word for ‘accident,’ summarizes a catastrophic national saga.” (Makdisi, 65)
Referring to the circumstances of the war as something so anodyne as “events,” the actual events of the war strangely go missing. Neatly enclosed within a narcotic euphemism, an idiomatic trace of their willful denial, we need not discuss the facts of these events, or attempt to reconcile sometimes competing accounts. These events have happened and we can leave them behind. Like the broken remains of exploded old buildings, we can leave them alone on the edge of the sea. We can pile rock upon rock, rubble upon rubble. We can make a new foundation. We can make a new beach.
After the war, such linguistic tomfoolery was part of the common weal, a way of evading history as well as culpability, any attribution of guilt, demands for recompense or justice. People learned of the war without speaking of it. Without thinking, without writing, the story of the war was left as an affective dispensation, a fearful concatenation of circumstances that could not be parsed or known; a name that could not be spoken for fear of calling the demon and soliciting his account, and thus something that was better left ignored. After the war, a vast silence blossomed at the heart of the world and this was the lesson that most people heard: Bite your tongue. Hold your piece. No good can come from discussing all that has been. Do not dwell on it. Do not think of it. It is best you not wonder. There are things we must not say. One day we might yet have our revenge, but for now, please just be nice.
Part of what was remarkable about the sequence of events that began on October 17, 2019, was that some measure of this quietism was swept away. The dams broke and the waters raged. People spoke openly about things that had once been verboten, delicate matters like family and religion and sex and class, and how certain procedures and norms of these were part of the underlying rot the revolution stood against, how the fear of confronting the facts of the past corrupted the present and closed down the future, which, in Lebanon, could only be imaged as something that happened elsewhere, never at home. Since the end of the civil war, so much of the political consensus in Lebanon, so much of what counts as political and social stability within the body politic, has rested upon an impending sense of doom, a sense that some horrible thing is always about to happen, and that the only thing standing between Lebanon and the abyss are those members of the annointed leadership class; that is, the criminals and warlords, or relatives of the same criminals and warlords, who drove Lebanon into civil war, and who did their damnedest to sustain the civil war for fifteen long and bloody years. This was a strategy for rule that kept the old guard in power through the containment of legitimate democratic aspirations, aspirations for the democratization of society and the economy, and, for the most part, it worked; at least, it worked as long as a large enough portion of the population had something like a living memory of the war, or hold onto the hope of emigration.
The revolution confronted the lie that lived near the heart of all of this, but in the end the lies themselves proved more durable than one would have hoped. This long adulteration of language was not, is not, without its consequences. If you have only ever spoken in lies, when it arrives, the truth is both unrecognizable and unbearable, so it is usually best to retreat. While I felt great sympathy for the revolution and was very deeply protective of it, for the most part, I tried to stay out of it, or–at the very least–to stay in my lane, to not stake any kind of claim to it or over it, any right to speak with it or for it. I hung out downtown, I talked to people, I spent time talking with friends and colleagues, I found myself in strangely luxurious apartments at weird tony addresses. None of this was all that unusual. But, in the months after October 2019, all of our discussions all bent, generally, in one direction, and the stakes of those discussions were generally heightened.
What I did not realize, at the time they were happening, was that, somewhere along the way, people were beginning to keep score, that some kind of actuarialism was starting to take hold. Accounts were being kept. People remembered what you had said, or they remembered what they thought you had said, or what they thought they had heard you say, or they remembered what someone had said and they remembered that you had once been standing near that person so therefore you might as well have said it. Gossip is the lifeblood of Lebanese society, an element of the social bond that also serves as a moderately leveling force. Nobody can get too big or too out of line, because there is always someone there to remind people about something you did or said when you were five years old, or when you were ten and you got a bad score on a math assignment, or how your father or your grandfather did something unspeakable to someone else fifty or seventy or one hundred years ago. This can be both amusing and trying; it can also be very dangerous. Falsehoods and rumors and innuendos can very quickly and easily become facts, always and everywhere; but in Lebanon people were particularly adept at the mercenary application of this point. In a place where there is no real consensus on even some of the most basic facts–where truth is so thoroughly relativized as to have become entirely a la carte–untruths, deliberate misapprehensions, or unfounded accusations–have a wicked social and political utility.
The counter-revolutionary force of the old vocabularies was far more than the revolution could itself bear, and far too much for those of us who stood with the hopes of the revolutionaries. In retrospect, I should have seen my own fragmentation looming; I should have known that the explosion was bound to happen, one way or another. While the manic depression was already there–as were the seeds the breakdown, the grind, the abrasions, the slow descent–having to listen to people lie so brazenly, so routinely, and so openly, to each other, if not also to themselves, and to see the civic impact of the lies unfold in real time, over time, became thoroughly intolerable. To have people I knew and believed to be generally decent continually strive to bend reality to the worst possible version of what it was, to insist that what it was and what it had been was what it should continue to be, was something I could not bear.
This was less like gaslighting than it was like Jonestown: decent people, intelligent people, people who understood that what they were doing and what they were saying was wrong, and stupid, and wildly disingenuous, went on to say things that were purposefully wrong, stupid, and disingenuous, quite wittingly committing themselves to counter-revolutionary business of strangling the baby of the revolution with its own bedclothes. For some portion of the middle class–particularly the older parts of the middle class–this perverse embrace was about following their material interests, as well. That they embraced a deeply impoverished version of what their material interest was, or what justice or abundance might mean in terms of a ethic of care that was not so willingly occluded by appeals to sectarian jealousy, these were things that no one wanted to talk about, at least openly, and when one might wander onto the plains of truthfulness, there were always plenty of people lying in wait, ready to jump out from behind a tree and take a shot. Rhetorical snipers were suddenly everywhere, and anyone who ventured to indicate their malicious influence were generally met with hearty declamations agonistic rejoinders: We are not doing anything, the potshots would say, it is you who are stirring things up, it is you who have the problem. It is you who are seeing things that are not there.
These are my notes from the heart of the counter-revolution, which was–not incidentally–the height of the lockdown, the earliest stirrings of Covid, the beginnings of the period I started to experience episodes of syncope. This is what I captured of this absence at the moment of its unfolding, the moment in which we were forced back into our homes and into ourselves, into a more studious encounter with the relationships in which we were enmeshed, into the silence that emerged from the shame of that encounter. This is the unconsidered, the unvarnished, the immediate trace of the affect and the illness, the things that were said before we knew what we were saying, the things that were noteworthy because of the times.
“The lira reached an all-time low yesterday, trading for fifteen thousand against the dollar on the black market. Subsidies are being ended for food and for fuel. By the end of the month we are to be plunged into perpetual dark. Meanwhile, streets and roads are being blocked all over the country. Hamra Street was blocked for maybe the first time yesterday, as were Corniche al-Mazzra, parts of Verdun, the al-Amin Mosque—that Hariri-sponsored architectural monstrosity—parts of Khalde and parts of the road to Dora. Some of the main thoroughfares of a country hardly able to bear the weight of its traffic under the best of conditions, a city where traffic can be brought to a halt under a winter rain.
“Rotouba: congestion: an early acquisition of the foreigner’s vocabulary: an apology from a disgruntled servees driver: a guarantee that you will be late to your destination.
“The country is congested. Nothing moves, nothing works, bank accounts are frozen, the robber barons refuse to agree to the compromises necessary to form a government. The air is deadly with diesel fumes. Perhaps Allah or maybe Shaytan might be able to tell us what we were breathing after the explosion. And still, the corona, the hideous demon crown that, being multiple, Legion, threatens to descent upon every head. Threatens to crush every skull.
“The road to Dora is blocked. Dora is a hysteric whose story has been blocked, who cannot recognize herself in her story. Lebanon is a hysteric who has no story, for whom memory has become disconnected from experience or history, for whom memory is a haunted house crawling with the ghosts of someone else’s past.
“The airport road and the old airport road have been blocked. The road to Tyre has been blocked. I really hope it has been blocked with burning tyres.
“Solecism and puns: this is how the mind talks to itself.
“The barriers that once protected Tyre from invaders did not preserve it from the armies of Alexander the Great, whose assault on the city walls and fabrication of a makeshift bridge gave that portion of the coast its peculiar geography.
“We have seen this before.
It is hardly an original thought, but today it struck me with peculiar force that we are being punished by the ruling class for having the audacity of conviction, of belief, the audacity to style ourselves revolutionaries, to make war on the robber barons who are the ruling class of this country. Punishment, or counter-revolution by different means.
Punishment: a child is being beaten, we are being beaten. Is a child being beaten? In what order of the fantastic do we now move, and what kinds of movements are we making, what kinds of movements have we already made?
I tell my students: There are some things that we can never forget. There is a remembering that lives in the body long after the memory has gone, long after the object goes missing, long after the illness has fled.
What happens to a society after illness? Is there society after illness? Is there a society without illness? Is society inherently ill?
What happens when everyone is sick?