“Impossible departures and shattered bonds create a community of strangers who find each other along the way,” writes Dartmouth Professor Tarek El-Ariss in his memoir Water on Fire, out now from Other Press. El-Ariss grew up in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, a war that stretched on for 15 years, ending in 1990. The situations depicted in this book are real, and the reality of war is deeply troubling, particularly as our narrator is just a child for much of the book.
When El-Ariss creates a scene, he gives it rich details. His prose is poetic and gripping. He explains things that add subtle layers to the experiences he’s writing about. Here he uses his first pair of roller skates to help understand death, something beyond comprehension for a child, and yet, something he was forced to reckon with:
The roller skates that my parents bought me to convince me to stay in Beirut with Baheih that summer allowed me to perform a death ritual, moving to the rhythm of the fish gasping for air in the tank and the images of gore on TV.
Reading this book, I came away with a broader understanding of the cultural context that shaped Tarek El-Ariss. He has a gift for creating passages that go from informative to personal, like this one:
Mina is the word for port in Arabic. It’s an ancient word that harkens back to the seafaring history of the region, and to the Ottoman and Mediterranean world that connected Cyprus to Lebanon and Greek to Arabic and other languages from the 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.
For me, one of the most striking parts of this book comes when El-Ariss talks about going to the beach. When I think about Beirut, I don’t think of the beach, but of course it’s a major part of the lives of many Beirutis. El-Ariss writes:
The beach was no longer only a site of leisure and recreation but a space for inventing a reality adjacent to that of war. This new reality, however, came at a great price. How many times did we have to pack and rush home when the situation suddenly deteriorated? How many times did we endure the sounds of explosions, pretending they were too far away? Though we put on new skins and masks of courage, we were exposed, naked in our vulnerability, desperate to be together. So we played and gossiped and flirted in the sun.
Sometimes it hurt to read this book. I had to put it down a few times and do something to comfort myself before I could go back to it. Sometimes this meant making a nice cup of tea or wrapping myself up in a cozy blanket. It hurts to imagine yourself or your own cherished family in these situations, but the truth is that children are living this way today, right now.
Tarek El-Ariss is our neighbor, here in the Upper Valley. He’s taken a great deal of time to share his story. This book feels as though it were written as an act of love. Reading this book, you grow your notions of survival as well as your own capacity for empathy. Let yourself grieve with him. Take breaks if you need to, but please do not turn away. Reading this book is an act of love, just as writing it was. And an act of love is the opposite of an act of war.
Rena J. Mosteirin wrote Experiment 116 (Counterpath press, 2021), Half-Fabulous Whales (Little Dipper, 2019) and Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press, 2008). She is the co-author of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) an academic and poetic exploration of the Apollo 11 guidance computer code. Mosteirin is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine, teaches creative writing workshops at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire.