Review: Water on Fire: A Memoir of War, by Tarek El-Ariss
New York: Other Press, 2024
“I can’t say I was traumatized by war,” says Tarek El-Ariss early in his layered, moving memoir of childhood during the Lebanese civil war, as he recalls a family friend who was shot during the conflict. “[P]erhaps I don’t allow myself this experience. I have accepted the fact that the bullet cannot be removed, that it’s there, alive in me as I hold on to it in my own way.”
El-Ariss’s excavation of his past immerses readers in his youth in war-torn Beirut and his subsequent journey across the world. El-Ariss, who chairs the Middle Eastern Studies program at Dartmouth, ranges through literature, language, mythology, religion, and history to illuminate his experience and the experience of his country as a whole. Thus, a vivid account of his family’s efforts to cope with wartime water shortages weaves in the Book of Job, the story of Hagar and the Zamzam Spring, the symbol of the cupbearer in Arabic and Persian poetry, and more. Later, in recalling a brief trip to Cyprus with his mother, he recounts his mother’s use of the Arabic word mina, port, to confirm their destination to the Cypriot taxi driver—a term that reflects the long seafaring history and linguistic ties between countries along the Mediterranean coast. “The exchange of the word mina between my mom and the driver was like the utterance of a magic word that suddenly reconnected a landscape and a people that were torn apart by a century of wars.”
Such instances give the book a rich and varied texture, providing vital glimpses into the region’s complex history, culture, and dynamics. Even more compelling, however, are the author’s intimate recollections of his family members and of everyday life in Lebanon: his family’s and friends’ frequent trips to the beach to grasp some semblance of normalcy amid the falling bombs; his father, the tough, competent physician and charming raconteur; his formidable grandmother and great aunt who came of age during World War I and “learned how to dress and love and cook against a backdrop of famine and genocide”; the beguiling smell of the sea and the stubborn beauty of the coastline.
In a similar vein, El-Ariss explores his own coming of age with candor and curiosity. Who did he become, he asks, as a result of the time and place and family in which he grew up? He offers poignant glimpses of his burgeoning teenage fascination with literature—a passion which “made [him] believe in a world that coexists with ours”—his search for belonging in high school and college, his intense loneliness upon moving to the U.S. for graduate school, and his body’s painful and bewildering response to the aftereffects of war.
In the process, he sheds light on the arbitrary nature of borders, geographical, sectarian, and otherwise—the way they work to limit and define us, and, in the case of wartime Lebanon, cost people their lives. Hence his devastation near the book’s closing when, in New York on 9/11, he watches the specter of war descend on his beloved adopted city. “It wasn’t just the violent attacks, the devastation downtown, or the dead and the missing, but that suddenly we all had to explain how we fit into a single algorithm of identity.”
Is there ever a possibility of escape? If not, how does one live with war and find a sense of home? As in any effective memoir, the power here lies in connecting and making meaning of the pieces one can gather, even as answers remain elusive. This is a book that grapples not only with loss but with the sustaining elements of life: family, friendship, art, music, shared meals, passions and pleasures great and small. The departed breathe again in its pages; language becomes one more means of survival. The result is a vibrant, memorable work that is resolutely alive.
