126 Between Private and Public
not consciously reflect on these things. In the immediacy of the war, it is
hardly possible to make sense of the rapidly evolving events. Her memo-
ries respond to the ever-evolving conflict. Everything is adrift, nothing
is certain and new battles, treaties and information constantly bring the
author to new conclusions about the war. In the end, Tabbara and her
husband, he before her, give up and escape to Paris, where the book is
subsequently written.
abbara’s story resembles that of thousands of educated middle-T
class Lebanese who felt unsafe, but also marginalized by the new, ultra-
sectarian climate, and eventually left the country. Jean Makdisi, sister to
the late prominent academic Edward Said, belongs to the same group
of secular, liberal people, many of whom lived in the area close to the
American University at the tip of Beirut (Ras Beirut), yet she stayed and
lived through the whole war. Her memoirs from 1990 still represent one
of the best attempts to understand what the war did to people on a per-
sonal and societal level. Writing in 1990, she has the advantage of hind-
sight. Her account is at once intimate and sociological, and although she
is also driven by necessity and immediacy, she allows herself more reflec-
tion than Lina Tabbara.
Makdisi’s main concern is to understand how the war changed peo-
ple’s perception of themselves and their place in the world. She explores
this ontological makeover by listing a “Glossary of Terms Used in Times
of Crisis”: idioms that the war created and turned into common sense
for the Lebanese. For example, the expression māshῑ al-h.āl [everything is
going well] now came to signify that the person saying it had just barely
escaped death! Such cynical twists to normal-day language reflected the
perversion of normal life. Faced with the overwhelming memory of fif-
teen years of conflict, Makdisi concedes that she cannot hope to make
sense of it all—only to attempt to register it and express it as well as she
can. “All I can do is to set down what I have seen, my glimpses into the
heart of violence and madness, of a society being—dismembered? con-
structed? reconstructed? destroyed? resurrected?—changed.”^25
s preoccupation with the results and effects of the war is typical Thi
for Lebanon in the early 1990s, before reconstruction set in on a mass
scale. Beirut’s ruined urban landscape provided staggering evidence
that on all levels, the country had not yet recovered from civil conflict.