Accompanying the launch of Decades of Fire: New Writing from the Middle East and North Africa, a special Spring issue of MQR dedicated to the documentation of political, social, and cultural transformations of the past three decades, MQR Online is featuring additional non-fiction, poetry, and fiction not available in the print issue. We have gathered work here that, as Guest Editor Huda Fakhreddine writes in her introduction to the print issue, confronts the Middle East and North Africa as a bind, one that the writing presented here and in print might “begin to unravel in the mind, by some rearrangement, some association or unexpected juxtaposition, some turn of phrase, some wild metaphor.”
“Poison In The Air” is a slightly adapted excerpt from Jabbour Douaihy’s novel of the same name, translated by Paula Haydar. A short note from Haydar appears before the excerpt published here.
I was absorbed in translating the last few pages of Jabbour Douaihy’s King of India (Interlink, 2022) last summer when an email popped up on my laptop with news of the author’s passing. It literally stopped me mid-sentence. I got completely choked up, filled with sorrow and disbelief. I had just seen Jabbour a few weeks earlier—on Zoom—as a guest of the Lebanese Book Club (Nādī al-kitāb al-Lubnānī), who had invited him to talk about Malik al-Hind, the book I was translating, published in 2019. Seeing him had given me an incentive to finish my work quickly. I wanted to surprise him with a note on Facebook Messenger, our usual means of communication, and tell him the good news that the translation was in press. I was so upset by the timing, selfishly regretting missing out on one more message exchange. There were a few questions I’d been saving to ask him, too. All these years that I’ve known Jabbour and translated five of his novels, I knew that in between my summer trips to Lebanon, which always included visits with him in Ehden, he was never more than a few clicks away. He always responded quickly and directly. I’ve still not come to terms with the sad truth that he’s no longer there, that Poison in the Air is his last novel, published in Arabic in 2021, shortly before his death.
In Poison in the Air, Jabbour Douaihy chronicles the decades of social, political, and economic turmoil leading up to and including the recent collapse of his beloved Lebanon, which reached a breaking point after the horrific explosion that occurred at the Port of Beirut on August 4, 2020. Douaihy’s final novel, in first-person narration by an unnamed male protagonist, is “filled with the poison of disappointments . . . the disappointments of a Lebanese generation that searched for meaning and did not find it” (Elias Khoury, L’Orient Litteraire, 2021).
Poison in the Air brings a multitude of bottled-up toxicity to the surface: domestic violence, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, opportunism, alienation, forced migration, mental illness, abject poverty, pollution, debilitating nostalgia, noxious politics, government corruption, inaccessibility to healthcare, joblessness, desperation. As though writing his last letter to the world, or a suicide note for Lebanon, Douaihy paints a picture of a society marching down a path to self-destruction.
The excerpt that follows takes place close to the end of the novel, when the narrator, having suffered the loss of everyone and everything he held dear in his troubled life, makes his final retreat to the mountains, to a village similar to one where he and his family had once found peace. He withdraws completely into a self-imposed quarantine, stripping himself of all his defenses, before witnessing the explosion that devastates Beirut.
When I try to describe my experience translating Poison in the Air, the word that comes to mind is painful. Painful because of Jabbour’s death, painful because of what he wrote about. It must have been painful for him to write it. Perhaps he wrote with a sense of urgency due to his own deteriorating health, which he suffered while witnessing and living through one of the most disastrous periods of Lebanese history, compounded in no small degree by the Covid-19 global pandemic. In all of his novels, but particularly in Poison in the Air, Douaihy does not shy away from taking a long, honest look in the mirror. He sees his Lebanese self and his Lebanese society with all its scars and imperfections. While on some level he might have held onto a hopeful metaphor of resilient Lebanon as a phoenix rising from the ashes, in writing Poison in the Air, his eyes were on the ashes. He was watching as the phoenix plummeted back into the fire.
Apart from the usual challenges Douaihy’s writing has presented to me as his translator—how to capture his style, his rhythm, his voice; how to convey unfamiliar cultural and historical references in the least obtrusive way; how to cast his wit and cynicism most effectively—perhaps what challenges me most about Poison in the Air is its brutal honesty. Not only does Douaihy bring the multitude of social and political ills plaguing Lebanese society out into the open, but he also describes the brutal experience of living through the pandemic these past two years and counting. We are only now beginning to come to terms with the detrimental effects resulting from that extended period of isolation and alienation. Only now are we beginning to gain enough distance from it to be able to reflect on it. I agree with Douaihy’s prediction in a June, 2020 interview in The Economic Times that Covid-19 “will become part of the general literary scene and the imagination of humanity, just like wars, the plague . . . and other pandemics in history.” With Poison in the Air, Douaihy has made his mark as one of the first contributors to this scene. Now that we are beginning to imagine life in a post-pandemic world, the immediacy of his narration, which flows primarily in present tense, puts us back inside those painful days of sheltering in place. As imagined by Douaihy, being cut off from others and absorbing an ethos of extreme individualism can bring out man’s destructive nature, fill him with a desire for self-effacement, while feeling torn between hating and loving his alienation from the world.
Poison in the Air might serve as a warning to us all, about the dangers of isolation and polarization, about what happens when we “sentence ourselves” to listening only to our own voices. Perhaps the lesson to be learned from the novel’s bleak portrayal is how essential it is now for us to break out of our self-contained bubbles and, like the butterfly he depicts striving toward the light, reunite with the outside world and reembrace each other in body and in spirit.
I hadn’t reached forty yet. I was thirty-nine and a few months, with some white creeping its way into my hairline, early graying I inherited from my father. One day I stood in front of the mirror in one of those hotel rooms and started talking to myself out loud, giving myself advice.
“That’s enough. The world has run its course with you. Whatever else will happen to you beyond this point will be merely a repeat of what already happened before. You played your music. Now it’s time to quietly bow out.”
When the sea swallowed up my young Kurdish friend, who’d believed that crossing the Mediterranean and making it to one of the Greek islands or to the shores of Italy would be his life’s dream, I got out my journal and wrote down the steps I must take to achieve the isolation I desired. I changed my whole agenda. Revenge was no longer an option. The only thing was to be rescued from this ruin.
I began by liquidating the joint bank account I shared with my aunt. I kept the cash at home, put it under my pillow. Stacks of American dollars, just as my aunt had advised years earlier. That had been her last bit of useful advice because the Lebanese lira ended up plummeting in value exactly as she had predicted all those decades ago. And so, those abundant dollars of hers saved me the trouble of having to work. At the bank they called me in to speak with the manager, who looked shocked by this decision of mine and argued that I would miss out on so much profitable interest, a number he calculated on the adding machine that was always within reach. He quit trying to persuade me when no reaction appeared on my face. He realized he was talking to himself while I looked out the window behind him at the goings on out in the street.
I went to the grocer in the village that I chose for my new residence. He sold everything under the sun, from cherries to local apricots, canned goods, hardware, goat milk yogurt. He even slaughtered a sheep himself every Saturday, turning into a butcher over the weekend, and kept a little notebook with a running tab for customers who couldn’t pay up until the end of the month. I introduced myself and told him I would be moving into the neighborhood. He was a sweet old man with a white moustache and was quick to tell me about his two sons who had gone to Europe where they were now working. He looked over my shopping list—grains, vegetables, a variety of cheeses, cleaning supplies, and other things—and assured me that he had everything in stock. He would send a delivery boy who would ring the doorbell twice to signal me before leaving the bags of groceries at the front door and going on his way. I paid him in advance. He tried to object but I insisted in accordance with my plan. I paid him in dollars which made his face light up with satisfaction and made him even more attentive to me.
I tossed my cell phone out the window of my newfound house that overlooked a valley so deep I didn’t even hear it land. At any rate, ever since I’d bought it, entire days would go by without hearing it ring. No one ever called me. I’d only given my number to very few people, and there weren’t more than ten names in my list of contacts. The truth is, pretty much my sole interlocutor had been my friend from Beirut Sur Mer hotel who was now lying in the Evangelical Cemetery. I left the radio behind at my last apartment where I’d lived with my two friends—my African cousin and the other guy, the homeless Kurd. They used to follow the news on their cell phones (each one on his own phone), and so the radio had turned into a useless decoration.
I didn’t own a television and didn’t tell anyone my new address. There wasn’t really anyone to tell except my father and my aunt—if she were to come back again from the Ivory Coast where she’s gone to look for her son. So far, she hasn’t returned. I think all word of her son has been lost. Taking hostages for ransom is a lucrative and dangerous business on the Ivory Coast. And the last time I bumped into my father on a side street near his house, he gave me a big kiss on the forehead to show how gratified he was to see me. He claimed he had been looking for me, wanted to know if I was doing okay. But then, as usual, there was nothing more for us to say to each other, so we stood there in silence watching the passersby until he came out with the news that he’d decided to join my aunt in Africa. She’d already rented a house for them there. He was getting ready for his trip and asked me, sort of by the way, if I wanted to move into the apartment since he was getting ready to move out. His moving out was an indication that his trip to Yamoussoukro was going to be long-term.
After my sudden departure from my last house—on the heels of the destruction I caused with the sniper rifle—and my migration to another refuge, I didn’t try to find out what the consequences of my actions were. I’d cut myself off from listening to the news and buying newspapers, and I stopped frequenting coffee shops. I wandered aimlessly a bit and then checked into a little hotel called Writers’ Inn. I was attracted by the name, which concealed the shabbiness of its furnishings, the lack of taste in the choice of colors for the curtains, and the morning breakfast that was difficult to swallow. I spent two weeks at that hotel, reminiscing about my time at Beirut Sur Mer and the proprietress there and comparing her with the young man with the thick glasses manning the reception desk here, who, forgetting the guests’ faces, would ask their names again every morning. Most of the guests were small business owners or Syrian laborers. The hotel had been given the name Writers’ Inn as a joke.
I would head out early, spend my day riding around in taxis, looking for a secluded place to rent, and wouldn’t come back until nightfall. My quest led me out of the city up to a mountain village where I found exactly what I was looking for: one big room sectioned off into a kitchen and a bathroom. The bay window overlooked the city, from a height of 700 meters above sea level, providing a view of Beirut draped in fog all hours of the day from the constant burning of trash heaps into the open air over the seashore and the spewing of carbon emissions from the tailpipes of all the cars—a gray cloud mixed with the colors of the sea in a gradual progression that stretched far into the azure horizon. The landlord expounded on the house’s merits as we toured through it. I wasn’t responsive to him despite my silent joy at having reached my destination, so he rested his case. I put down a full year’s rent and chose the comfortable seat I would sit in every day: a roomy leather couch, very close to the kind I had been dreaming of for our marital home and which my wife wouldn’t hear of. The landlord said the owners had left it behind, the same way the previous tenants at our apartment on Makhoul Street had left us the Yamaha piano.
I sit here dressed in an expensive black satin abaya that I bought when I was planning the minute details of this isolation of mine. I get up in the morning, hone my laundering and ironing skills, shave with extreme precision and care, bathe, and fix my hair before getting dressed up nicely as if heading out to meet someone at a nearby café. I keep my shoes on throughout the day and wear my suit jacket. Some days I even put on a tie. I found a papillon tie among my belongings that I didn’t hesitate to adorn my dress shirt with on Sundays back when I was still conscious of the sequence of weekdays. And I stand in front of the mirror, making sure I’m satisfied with my appearance and my choices, and then I throw on my abaya and sit. I read here on this couch, eat here, sleep here at night, and lie down here in the afternoon. Little dreams come to me during naps but not during the long sleep. I sit and ask myself if I am really here: “Who am I?”
Am I carrying the heavy burden of my birth, or am I merely an invention of my books and my readings? Am I softhearted or a simpleton? Someone whose heart aches at the sight of an intimate scene that no one else even notices? Or am I stone-cold, unable to back away from harm? Where does this cruel façade come from, when I feel deep in my soul that I am weak and loving and a captive to the compassion of others towards me? Both dwell inside—a relentless devil and an affectionate brother that can be counted on.
On the topic of books, I was worried in my newfangled solitude about the void, about going down the path to madness, about facing a confrontation in which I would be unarmed without words. So, I went to the bookshop I normally stock up from one last time before barricading myself inside this house, and I spent half a day among the shelves recreating my exemplary library. Twenty books, not more, to protect me and accompany me, that I can bury my head in whenever the challenges become difficult. Current affairs have disappeared from my life, even if they occur out there, because I’ve lost my ability to connect with them after cutting off all ties with the outside world. I wake up to the sound of an excavator or a power saw at a construction site in the background that I can’t see. The sky is blue and the sun is shining, despite the fact we are in the middle of winter, and the sycamore tree, whose tip peeks up at me as it sways in the gentle breeze, has started to lose the last of its golden leaves. I stand near the front window. The city is still there in its smog. I thought about getting binoculars but changed my mind because how could I, who am distancing myself from the world, turn around and bring it closer to my eyes? I stop to prepare some morning food for myself with the aim of reducing the size of my meals, because I read that the body can sustain itself on very little. Silence settles outside and is only pierced by the din of a military helicopter that hovers nearby and then recedes into the distance.
One day, around noon, I detect some movement behind the curtain of the window across from my room, shadows swaying. I say around noon because when I first took up residence here, I got rid of an expensive Patek Philippe watch my ex-wife had given me as a gift that I’d forgotten there on my wrist. I say I got rid of it but actually I smashed it with a hammer I found in a drawer, as an act of vengeance for the crime that my wife the philosophy teacher committed against the miniature model I built of my hometown and my books. From where I sit cross-legged all hours of the day and night, I can see a wall of chiseled stone with a window cut into it and a red tiled dormer over it. The wood of the window frame is red, and its sheer curtain is white. There’s just a small aperture for me to look through from where I sit. A little triangle I can peer through each day to see the color of the sky and predict whether it will be clear or rainy. The window has remained shut since I moved in here and no one has ever appeared in it. No shadow, no spirit, as though the owners of the house emigrated to some other country. But just now I sensed some movement there. I’m not sure if someone has come home or if what I saw was a reflection in the window of something that moved outside. I don’t like the idea of having a new neighbor. I’m afraid the tenants’ return home will muddy the tranquility I’ve been enjoying. Since their window is adjacent to my room, they could easily infiltrate my intimate circle with one glance.
The one movement I observe daily belongs to a flock of pigeons. Multicolored pigeons from the city and the public squares. Reddish green heads and feathers of various gradations of gray culminating in a black tail. A group of more than twenty birds that have made the red tiled roof across from me a rest stop for themselves. Sometimes there are even more due to the efforts of what is called the “Julep Pigeon,” who lures in birds from other winged flocks. The pigeons take off all at once. They flap their wings and fly away. And I wait until fatigue brings them back to their refuge. The process continues through all hours of the day until the sun starts to set. The pigeons meet up in one long line, incline their fragile little heads and go to sleep. Their comings and goings divide the day and their final return home in the evening is an indication that night has begun. They move in unison, perhaps by means of a secret signal from the leader of the flock that I have been unable to detect or figure out. All I know is that takeoff always happens the moment I’m not expecting it, without any movement or cooing sound in advance.
And then, suddenly appearing on the edge of the roof, is a dirty black tomcat in shabby condition, looking more wild than domesticated. An alley cat. He approaches the flock of resting pigeons and with a great deal of alacrity that doesn’t give the group the slightest chance to fly away, he clamps his mouth onto the neck of one of the pigeons, the last one on the right at the end of the tightly packed row. He takes off with her as the others fly off in unison to save themselves. I leap up from my couch. I open the window to scream at the cat to scare him off, but he has already captured his victim and snuck back into his hideout which is out of my view. I feel so discouraged over losing one of my friends that I keep a vigilant watch for the wily tomcat. I’m not going to let him do it again.
After that, I turn to my own self and start stripping it of all its defenses. I choose one of the twenty books that I have, finish reading it slowly over the course of a few days, and then go back to it once more before bidding it farewell. It takes me about a week to ten days to finish a book before tossing it into the fireplace. I contemplate the way James Joyce’s Dubliners burns as I tear the pages out one by one and feed them to the fire, slowly, entertained by their transformation to ashes and smoke. Everything I am doing is meant as a dare to my self, depriving it of every intrusion to test its resistance. I go on reading and burning. Pedro Palamo by Juan Rulfo, Journey to the End of the Night by Ferdinand Céline, which takes half a day to burn, al-Nuffari’s book Al-Mawāqif wa al-mukhāṭabāt (Attitudes and Correspondences). Each book has a different disgusting burning smell related to the quality of its paper and ink. All those luminous characters, comical and tragic, are melting away, but I am not going to back down until my entire arsenal is depleted. I always craved books, clung to them, and here I am tossing them into the fire. Man, as they say, is a deep dark well.
The last book I get rid of is entitled Illuminations: a small record of the chaos of emotions, a piece of writing that endeavored to refashion the world out of its own splinters, as experienced by a young Frenchman barely twenty years old who then tried to rid himself of this composition of his and turned to taking drugs and dealing in the weapons trade between the port of Aden and some cities in Ethiopia. As though he had suddenly returned to some sort of conventional maturity, he said that what he had written there was nothing but a series of ramblings of no importance whatsoever. However, his sister, who had faith in his brilliance, kept some copies that were reprinted and published all over the world in all languages. I don’t throw Illuminations away immediately after finishing it. I keep it in my pocket for a few days as ammunition. I repeat excerpts from it out loud while pacing the floor of my room lengthwise and crosswise, trying to dance without rhythm before succumbing to the idea of liberating my self from it. And so, I set it on fire in the hearth, and for reasons I don’t understand but possibly due to the wind that happened to pick up outside at just the right moment or due to some error in the setup of the fireplace, the smoke from Illuminations gets pushed back into the room and floods it, making me nauseous. I would have choked to death if I didn’t rush to open the windows and stand next to one breathing in cold air from outside while waving my arms to usher the smoke out the window. And just like that, I have nothing left to read, nothing from the language of others. I’ve been sentenced to listening to only my own voice. A voice unnourished by the pens of brilliant writers and possessors of fiery emotions, left to nothing but my own nearly depleted self.
Along with the season of bitter cold up in the mountain village, the pain in my leg has come back—the leg that got fractured when militiamen shot at me at the crossing separating the two Beiruts many years ago. It has come back in the form of successive bouts of pain that wake me up at night sometimes, stop suddenly, and then revisit me without cause when I’m not expecting it. It’s as though the pain was always there but had been stifled by the noise of the world and now, due to the quiet inundating my days, I’ve started to feel it. The pain reaches a climax accompanied by my screams. I will not ask for painkillers. I will not go out to the pharmacy. I will struggle against the pain on my own. With my will and my patience. I can almost take pleasure in it when it escalates and gobbles up all other emotions.
The butterfly imprisoned with me in the room . . . beautiful, blue with black spots . . . I’ve opened the windows for her several times to let her find a way to escape, but she never does. She keeps moving about the house instead. She lands on Abjar’s tail (in the painting of Antar riding on his horse), or on my face in the picture that brought me together with my aunt and the dog Fox and General De Gaulle, which I hung on the wall in front of the couch where I spend the course of my day. She brings me back to my hometown and my childhood, this butterfly. To that age when everything makes an impression, when maybe everything is formed, and also to the places that I’ve always carried with me in my literary imaginings. The majority of the scenes that I paused at in my storytelling took place on the riverbank or in the quarter adjacent to the church or in the area around the houses we lived in. Just as I pause now, all over again, at the look in my aunt’s eyes, unable to remember how I was feeling when the photographer prepped us in his usual way before lighting the flash in our faces. I forget the butterfly. She disappears for days among the things in the house and then suddenly reappears. She’s also puttering around near me and near the lantern in her constant effort to have a reunion with the light.
In addition to the picture, I also kept the rifle. It gave me a feeling of immunity and control. A last line of defense. But I was quick to dispose of the bullets so the idea of killing myself wouldn’t occur to me, or of choosing some targets in the area to shoot at from the window of my room again. I contented myself with assembling the rifle, oiling it, and bringing the scope to my eye. Then I’d take it apart again and put it back together once more until I finally got bored with it.
One evening, while observing the movements of the pigeons as they came home to the red-tiled roof, I realized that I was becoming like the characters of isolation that I had imagined and then abandoned. No doubt I, in the same vein as those characters whose destinies enticed me, was suffering from some innate impairment I couldn’t describe. It delighted me to think that rebellion flowed in my veins and that I was incapable of mending my self. If fate had an eye, it was my desire to put my eye up against his, like we used to do as neighborhood kids to challenge each other. Whoever blinks first loses the duel.
The days recurred one just like the other until they sank into the fog. I’ve lost track of the dates and the days of the week. The bells of the nearby church are my only guide for Sundays or holidays when they ring at odd times. The day they began broadcasting hymns from loudspeakers, I realized that Christmas was near, whereas Holy Friday hymns such as “The Bereaved Mother,” which I used to swoon to in my childhood, alerted me that it was almost Easter. I was swimming in a fog with no shape and no structure. I trembled when a knock came at the door with no warning, before I remembered the young delivery boy who brought me groceries and whom I’d never seen. My heart started beating fast when there was a knock at the door one time that had a different rhythm. It kept coming incessantly. I almost shouted that no one was home. The hard knocking on the door wouldn’t stop. It was dusk. I lay back on my couch and pulled the blankets over myself. The knocking kept coming. The world was calling me. I heard a voice ask me from behind the door, “Who’s in there? It’s the mayor.”
“What do you want?” I said, trembling.
“Just making sure you’re okay. No one has seen you since you came. We thought maybe you paid the rent and didn’t move in, until the storeowner told us that he’s been supplying you with food and other things.”
“Thank you. I’m fine.”
“Are you sure everything is okay? If you need anything don’t hesitate to call me.” He told me his cell phone number, which I didn’t write down.
I heard him say to whoever was with him as they were walking away, “The man is unhinged. He’d be better off locking himself up in one of the monasteries.”
The truth was that to me, the more I was alone, the more pleasurable it was. From time to time and for short periods, a wave of enthusiasm that I didn’t understand would creep over me and send me dancing in the middle of the room. I’d spin around to no rhythm, humming jubilantly, with my arms spread out like a swan getting ready to fly, even though a bout of excruciating pain in my injured leg would ensue. As evening started to fall, I would stand by the window. My shadow would stretch far into the distance in the direction of the city while I recited poems whose memory had been erased along with the poets who composed them but which I still knew by heart in every detail from my schooldays, such as “The Circassian War Song” or “The Death of the Eagle.” I still had one of my little treasures left, the letters that I’d written during a bygone summer to a woman who was seduced by words most of all. I’d take them out and start reading them aloud slowly. I’d kiss each one and then make it into a paper airplane, open the window, and send it flying on the wind and plunging into the little valley below the house. I’d become enthralled with the world just as it is, celebrate it for no reason, without actually experiencing anything that would make a person happy, and then I’d break. Like a swing carrying me high up and then hurling me back down. My voice cracked as I cried out. I’d scream at the sky, or resume that habit from my adolescence I used to have in our house that the mortar shells got to in the end—I’d pull the blankets over my head, pour out my sorrows, and cry for my mother to come and save me.
Light and darkness cascade over me in succession. Clear skies and rain. Sleep is mixed with waking. Life has lost its order and I’ve started forgetting words and the names of things though I persist in trying to remember them. When I retrieve the past, many of the details are gone from my memory. Faces come to me and scenes I never really cared about at the time. The connections between our numerous houses have all been severed in my mind and I can’t remember the reason we moved to Beirut or the places in its various neighborhoods where we lived. I am unable to revive the emotions that provoked me to beat up my wife or that made me cause harm to rich people despite never living poor myself. My ravenous desire for women has been obliterated. Nothing remains of it but the echo of sexual urges. I remember the women who loved me, but I forget their names. Nothing emerges from that fog but faces and momentary flashes, like when that young woman told me at sunset in that village where we spent a rare summer, “My soul is dead, my friend. Your kisses and your words bring it back to life.”
I was immersed in one of those moments when I felt a trembling like an earthquake. A tumultuous wave that came from the belly of the earth rising up from the city all the way to the mountain where I was living. Everything in the house shook. Nearly all the glass around me shattered. I got up and went to the window and saw what looked like an enormous mushroom over the city. The explosion was massive, a column ascending into the sky. A progression of colors. Thick. White and black and brown and yellow-orange. A concoction of poisons that made the city appear as if it were spewing everything in its guts out into the air. I stared at this strange cloud for a long time. Eventually I opened the window and in came a smell that burned the heart and I heard from outside a long, intermittent scream. I couldn’t understand what was being said, but the cry of distress overpowered all other sounds.
Death fell on the city, and the pigeons didn’t come home to roost on the red-tiled roof that day.
Excerpted and slightly adapted from Poison in the Air by Jabbour Douaihy, translated by Paula Haydar, copyright © Jabbour Douaihy, 2021, to be published by Interlink Books, an imprint of Interlink Publishing, Northampton, MA. Reprinted by permission.
