This is a conversation with Lina Mounzer. She’s a Beirut-based writer and translator who, like me, took part in the October and post-October protests. I wanted to catch up with her to talk about how she started preparing for the worst yet to come very early on.
This anticipation – of economic hardship, of violence – is a widespread phenomenon in Lebanon but not a lot of people are able to express it so accurately like Lina does. I know I’ve struggled to do so.
Lina experienced the ups and downs of the revolution. She wrote the moods and experiences and facts in her diaries as it was happening, and she has clearly deeply thought about what the past several months in Lebanon have meant, and even the past few decades.
We talked about Lebanon, about revolution as a ‘feeling greater than love’ (which is also the title of a Lebanese film), and why many people actually miss the civil war, or rather are so tired of the present’s uncertainty that the past’s certainties, however horrible, were easier to digest. And we even talked about the impact that the Italian Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s writings have had on her.
This is why I was really looking forward to having this chat with her, and I hope you also enjoy it.
Some of Lina’s previous writings and work:
- Letter From Beirut: From Revolution to Pandemic – Lithub (April 2020)
- War in Translation: Giving Voice to the Women of Syria – Lithub (October 2016)
- Talk: Hunger and Hallucination: Tales from the Great Famine, uploaded by Ashkal Alwan (February 2019)
- In Lebanon, a Pandemic of Hunger – NY Times (May 2020)
- The Great Lebanese Ponzi Scheme – NY Times (December 2019)
- A review of Mary Jirmanus Saba’s ‘A Feeling Greater Than Love‘ and the trailer
You can follow the podcast on Twitter @FireTheseTimes.
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Music by Tarabeat. The featured photo is a modified version of the featured photo on the April 2020 LitHub article.
Transcript prepared by Alice Bonfatti and Antidote Zine:
When the disaster first hits, there’s a membrane that has been pulled back, and I’m pressed up against the skin of the real world, the one that has been there all along, which is the world of disaster, of stress. Then it feels like everything else we’ve been doing, the everyday business of living our lives—you go to work, you do this, you do that, you chit chat with your friends—was just a veneer on whatever this is, which is real life.
Lina Mounzer: My name is Lina Mounzer, and I’m a writer first and a translator second. That’s it right now. Those are my two full-time jobs.
Elia J. Ayoub: We’ll start by talking about your essay “Letter from Beirut: From Revolution to Pandemic.” It was published last month, April 2020, which is roughly half a year since the October Revolution started in Lebanon.
You mention that early on in the uprising, you started planning on how to phase out your reliance on a mood-stabilizing medication. The thing that really caught my attention is how you were preparing in advance for the worst year to come, with this feeling that we are going into a state of collapse, which was turned into a meme—we made jokes about it and everything. This anticipation of violence is very widespread. Can you talk a bit about that feeling and your experience with it since October?
LM: It’s not a single feeling actually; if I look back on it, it’s something that happened in waves—or in phases. Back in November, when I started phasing out the medication, I had this logical knowledge that the economic crisis is coming. We were already feeling its effects. I knew very logically, as did everybody, that we are heading into an economic downturn and that things were going to be very difficult. I made the choice very logically to start phasing out the medication, because it was quite expensive on the one hand, and I really did have this fear that I wasn’t going to be able to find it anymore, and I didn’t want to have to get off of it cold turkey. At the same time, I was really, really high—all of us were so high—off of the energy of the thawra [revolution]. I felt like, I can face anything! and that included getting off the medication as well as the economic crisis that was coming.
It really felt like, Okay, we know what’s coming, and yes, it’s going to be difficult, but a revolution isn’t easy; this sea change that we’ve been waiting for decades to happen in Lebanon is not going to be easy; we know they’re not going to leave without a fight, but we’re here and we’re willing to fight. It was very much that feeling, which I’m sure you shared.
So I started phasing myself off of the medication, and little by little, things started to get worse. It crept up on me weirdly, even though I thought I knew what I was in for, in terms of both the side effects of phasing out the medication and the economic crisis itself. It was also the turn that the protests took when more and more people started leaving the streets.
There was a point, now looking back on it—on Twitter, I’m usually fairly sober; I don’t just say whatever it is that I’m feeling. But after one of the protests I had a complete freak-out on Twitter; I was so incredibly angry. It was when we were blocking the roads before the parliament session where they voted in the government. I wrote about that day in detail in my journal, and it was just such an awful day. I remember bone-cracking cold, waking up before dawn, going down to the streets. I looked around me at the people, and I’m always so moved by their incredible dedication—you really do see people from all walks of life, people of all ages, and everybody is standing there together. But that day also felt so incredibly futile. People would pass by as we were standing there and they would honk their horns; that used to be something that felt really exciting; it was an act of solidarity. It’s like, Okay, they’re in their cars, we’re standing on the street, but all of us are in this fight together. But that day I remember just feeling so angry, like, Don’t honk your horn! Either get the fuck out of the car, or just don’t honk your horn!
It wasn’t necessarily logical, but I was feeling this incredible sense of resentment, that was coming from exhaustion—on my own behalf and on everybody else’s behalf. That day, for me, marked a turning point. The turnout was not even that bad, considering the circumstances and considering how late it was in the protests. But parliament pushed through regardless, and they had the session, and they voted in the government despite the fact that they didn’t have a quorum.
If I look back, different things were happening at the same time, and it was hard for me to connect the two things, to say: Well, what I’m feeling now is a side effect of withdrawal off a psychiatric medication. Because it really was. I have rapid-cycle bipolar disorder, and for me, the thawra was exactly that: the high was this complete manic phase, and the low was this terrible depression. In a way, it was mirroring the whole country; the whole country was living on this up-down roller coaster.
How do you disentangle the workings of your own mind from what’s happening outside yourself? That’s where all of that came from. And I think everybody was feeling this. Throughout, there was this sense of collectivity, and it was that collective feeling that allowed me to feel so ecstatic, so connected to everybody—and also that was why the slow economic collapse felt so painful. Because all of us had connected together, and acknowledged the fact that we were all connected together. Now everybody having to suffer, and having to watch everybody suffer, just felt so much more painful, so much more awful.
EA: I was also there that day; I was at the top of the bridge. A bit of context for listeners: parliament was supposed to meet, and they did meet, and they ended up voting on these sets of laws despite not having quorum, as you said—but on the psychological side: when I read that sentence, that you were “planning ahead,” that really struck me, because I had been seeing a therapist up until October, and then I told the therapist I’m going to stop because I’m doing fine right now, and it was really the high of the protest, which you described beautifully. It was really a high. The energy I was feeling was not just mine; I was taking energy from people around me and I was giving some of it back; it was really a collective thing.
I don’t know personally when I started feeling the downturn. Maybe that day was when things started feeling like that for me as well. But there is this sentence that you wrote in the essay: “Everything had fallen apart by then, though, from my mind to the country to the thawra, so it was hard to identify the source of the disease. Was it coming from inside my rotten brain or from the rotten world?”
Do you have the diary entry from that specific day in front of you? It was January 12.
LM: Yes:
The first thing I did when I started to take the news seriously was to start weaning myself off of my “cray” pills. That was back in mid-November. Honestly, I’ve been looking for any sort of excuse. I hate paying for them. I hate having to remember to take them. I hate the idea of them. I hate forgetting to take them and then only realising it the next morning when I wonder why I feel so groggy and dizzy and like my head is stuffed full of shit. I think they helped in the beginning, but at this point, [not anymore]. So I started to taper off the dose, taking off 50mg at a time, the way they said to do it on the internet. When I got to the last 50, I tried doing 25mg a day, cutting the 50 pill in an approximated half, but then I tired of this very quickly. So here I am, off Lamictal since late December, I think, and my head is still groggy and thick and sludgy. I think I don’t know how to write anymore. I know I’ve said this at many points in my life, but now it feels real. I feel stupid. Straight-up dumb. Bad diction, bad thoughts, ugly perspective on everything—not that optimism is any stand-in for intelligence—but not enough imagination to think my way out of depression, let alone out of bed in the morning.
EA: Reading it now, a few months later, how do you see the situation changing?
LM: It’s funny—it’s such a simple question, but it also feels like such a big question. I don’t even know how to answer it. How is it changing? I mean, depression is a very up-and-down thing, even if a person is not straight-up bipolar. Depression itself is like you’re constantly riding a roller coaster; you’re going up and down and trying to figure out how to navigate your own mind. Frankly, it’s fucking exhausting.
But the way that it’s changed is—the only way I can describe it is visually. It’s like the light has been leached out of those memories. I look back and I see something that’s very, very dark. Part of it is the January cold, and it gets dark early. And I’ve always had this feeling, like: I don’t know where the boundaries of my skin are, where the boundary exists between myself and the world. Everything leaches in. Whether it’s the landscape or the colors or the weather, they just inhabit my mental state and they feed off of each other. When I look back on that, it’s a mix of all those things. It feels very sludgy, very dark, very cold—this inability to move. I feel like my entire body hurts.
It’s different now, because the whole world is different now. The entire collective mood now also feels very different. Now I have more of a sense of claustrophobia. Back then it wasn’t so much claustrophobia as much as it was just a complete lack of energy. It’s hard to explain. It was exhaustion.
It’s funny: reading these words back now, they’re just words somehow. This has always been the issue, and I think this is the issue for everybody: you can tap into the theoretical experience of a thing, like: Oh, I know what that feels like! Somebody tells you what pain is, and you’re like, Oh, I know what that feels like! I know what it’s like to have a headache. But you actually don’t. Something as simple as having a headache: you know theoretically what it is, but until you have a headache, you forget how completely all-consuming it is. It’s not that you can’t stop thinking about it, it’s that it inhabits you every moment. You’re getting a glass of water, your head is pounding. You’re trying to lie down, your head is pounding. You’re trying to think of something else, your head is pounding.
When you read about I have a headache, you’re like, Oh yeah, I know what a headache is like. But you forget the visceral experience of a thing. I think depression is very much like that as well.
EA: I also visualize everything. My memory is very visual. I see the experience of the revolution, and yeah, in the first five, six weeks or so, it’s almost like I had an out-of-body experience—and the body is the collective body. And as you said, those emotions I felt just a few months ago, those weren’t mine—I was part of them; I was contributing to them. I was part of the anger, the anxiety, the joy, the increased adrenaline when we had to run, all of those things. I was definitely part of it. I have visual evidence that was part of it: I filmed everything. I was live tweeting it, so I know that I was there! But it does feel like there is a disconnect.
Now I’m sitting in my room, not even in Lebanon. I am in Switzerland for my studies. As it happened, two weeks after I landed the pandemic hit. I came here and I’m sitting in the aftermath of the initial phase of the revolution, let’s call it that, and I’ve been ruminating over it, and I don’t have a direct connection because I’m not in Lebanon now. I don’t have the visual experience of seeing the currency depreciating. I’m seeing the photos and the headlines, and my friends are there and they’re telling me; I can sense it; obviously I know it’s bad. But it’s not the same.
Weirdly enough, it takes me to the next question, although it’s a very different context: the sense of trying to build something from indoors. I’m in this flat with my partner; we’ve been here for a few months now, and we are trying to build something indoors that is sort of a safe space. You wrote in your essay that one thing you ‘miss’ from the civil war era is this sense of building an internal world that can protect you from the exterior world. And that’s difficult with a situation like a pandemic (and the economic crisis adds to it). Have you managed to create an inner space despite what’s happening outdoors?
LM: The question you asked me earlier, Now when you read these words, how do you reflect on them? I was actually stumped, and I still can’t answer my relationship to the diary. But as time progresses, the feelings become sharper and they come more into relief. Like, Oh, that’s actually what I was feeling!
I was born and raised in the civil war, and at the beginning of my life, it was the reality that I knew. I wrote about this in the essay, and this is something that I always come back to: when I long for childhood, I’m always longing for the war. But I realize now, as we get used to the situation” of the pandemic, that there’s also a feeling that whenever there is a big disaster (a collective disaster, like the 2006 war, or there’s a car bomb—all the different upheavals that we’ve lived through here), everybody is in tune with one another. We’re like, Oh shit, the disaster is here!
Whenever this happens, I feel an incredible sense of relief. I can’t even tell you. It’s like [I put my feet in cold water]. I literally feel that. I feel my entire body relaxing, even if I’m panicking on some level. I feel so relaxed, because I realize that I’ve been waiting for the disaster the entire time, and now that it’s here, khalas! Okay, that’s it! I don’t have to anticipate it anymore, it’s here.
I realize that I live my life here consistently and constantly poised on the edge of anticipating disaster, of anticipating a collective upheaval that is going to take place, and that all of us are going to have to scurry back indoors and [close into ourselves] and make ourselves really small, go back into this squirrel nest and make your life in this tiny place.
What’s the word in English? It’s like it exempts you. Just surviving is enough. That’s it: you got to the end of the day; you’re intact, you’re healthy, you’re fine, that’s it. You’ve done exactly what you’re supposed to do; we can call this a successful day because you came to the end of it still breathing, still fine, and everything is good.
It’s a relief from the everyday drudgery of living—in the beginning, I’m saying. Now that it’s dragged on, it’s a different feeling. But when the disaster first hits, all of a sudden there’s a membrane that has been pulled back and I’m pressed up against the skin of the real world, the one that has been there all along, which is the world of the disaster or of stress. Then it feels like everything else we’ve been doing, the everyday business of living our lives—you go to work, you do this, you do that, you chit chat with your friends—was just a veneer on whatever this is, which is real life.
Like, Oh, I know that this is real life, and this is what I’ve been waiting for the entire time! The normal conception of time just stops. It’s always this feeling of incredible relief. Then I feel that I can retreat into myself the way that I’ve always wanted to, with complete abandon, and I don’t feel responsible toward anything or anyone outside my own mind. You sort of regress into this place. Obviously now I’m feeling very differently. But that’s definitely how I was feeling when I wrote that piece.
I’m sure you understand this. I mean, we’re not contemporaries in terms of our ages or the phases that we grew up in, but I think that largely the experience of living and growing up in this country is—there’s a sense that we understand each other and we understand these things very well.
EA: One of the purposes of doing this is trying to figure out if other people feel like me so I don’t feel like I’m crazy. I’ve had conversations with Andrew Arsan (a Lebanese scholar at Cambridge with a book called Lebanon: A Country in Fragments) and Fadi Bardawil (also a Lebanese academic). In that latter one, he’s talking about researching people who grew up in the forties and the fifties, in the post-Nakba era. They came of age in the sixties, and that was their whole world. He was reading about them as someone who grew up and experienced the civil war, and he was talking to me as someone who had experienced the ‘postwar’ era. And it was just incredible, the echoes.
Obviously, not everything is the same. Things change. But there are these common themes that seem to be repeating themselves. On the one hand, depending on my mood or state of mind, this realization can be very depressing. On the other hand, the realization can be a bit of a lightbulb moment. It’s like, Okay, well, this makes sense. At this point in my trying to understand Lebanon, my research has been more or less on the postwar era. I keep on saying that my PhD is about me; I’m just trying to understand myself.No one asked me to do this. To this day, I’m not one hundred percent sure why I ended up doing this. But it’s starting to produce answers—although the answers are always incomplete.
I’ll make a weird segue here. I am always very curious when people have a certain relationship with specific books. Saleem Haddad, a previous guest, talks about The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. In my case, I have a number of books by James Balwin that I end up reading time and time again. You mention in your essay a book by Primo Levi,The Drowned and the Saved. I haven’t read it myself yet. Can you talk about why you feel that this book was relevant to mention in this essay about the revolution and pandemic in the context of Lebanon?
LM: I read this book for the first time maybe two, three years ago, so re-reading it, it hadn’t been ages since I’d read it. I had certain parts of it that I could still see in my mind’s eye, but only the outlines of them.
My entire life, I’ve always written, and I’ve always known that I want to write. But I also keep coming back to the question of how to balance the urgency of writing, or the desire to write—which in many ways I experience as a very private interiority; you’re going inward; you connect with everything else by going inward—with living in this world, the Arab world, which is consistently beset by crisis and upheaval that I really feel the need to respond to and speak to, constantly. I might be interested in exploring other things, but there’s a feeling of: I need to be able to speak to this, to reconcile myself to this world where absolutely terrible, horrible things keep happening. Yesterday, I was reading the story about a gunman who went into a maternity ward in Afghanistan. It’s the kind of horror that defies imagination. So I always think about writers who experienced terrible things, or lived in terrible times, and were able not just to continue writing, but to speak to the times in which they lived, whether in direct or indirect ways.
When I first picked up The Drowned and The Saved, I don’t even know how to describe the feeling. It was just astounding. I felt like I had been picked up and turned upside down and shaken and then put back in my place, but nothing was in the same place that it had been before. If we want to talk about the absolute experience of the kind of evil that human beings are capable of doing to one another, it is the Holocaust. Primo Levi survived the Holocaust. He survived Auschwitz and lived to tell the tale. The book is a series of essays reflecting on a his experience of the Holocaust, and also reflecting on writing about having lived that. What I love about this book is that he never deals in broad categories. He is incredibly precise, even at the expense of his own pain.
In many ways, the story of the Holocaust (and I think maybe this is why it appeals to Americans so much) is a story of good and evil. It’s the closest you can come. Nazism and what the Germans did is pure evil. There’s absolutely no justification. You cannot come and say, Well, they were colonized and, you know, this happened to them. There is zero justification for what happened, and the scale of the evil is so massive. And yet, one of the essays in this book is called “The Gray Zone” and he talks about the different relationships of people in the Lagers, in the camps.
He examines the image of the “good Nazi,” and the “Jewish collaborator.” He shows you the spectrum of human behavior that actually exists even within this sphere of what we perceive as the absolute evil—but he never absolves anybody of the bad that they did. He doesn’t provide any easy answers. He doesn’t give you any opportunity to say, Oh yes, that’s the way things are! You walk away from every essay incredibly troubled, but in the most transformative way. He never lets you sit with any answer, so that you can feel good about having understood. You are just consistently troubled. As you should be!
The final essay in the book is one that I think is incredible. It’s called “Letters From Germans,” and he talks about publishing his memoir of surviving Auschwitz (which I think has two titles, but one of them is If This Is a Man), and about all the letters he received from Germans after the book was published. There were a couple of people with whom he had long correspondences, and other people who just wrote him one-off letters, and he responded to quite a few people. Of course, there were all kinds of Germans who wrote to him who were, to use a modern expression, virtue signaling: This is so terrible what happened! and We didn’t know what was happening!
I want to go back and just say one thing: he also talks about the experience of having had that book translated into German, before the Germans start writing to him. What does it mean for him to have this book translated into German? He wrote it in Italian, but now it’s being translated for the people that he didn’t know he was writing it for. It’s not like he was writing it as a polemic unto the German people. And now it was going to be translated! He was very afraid that things would be lost in translation, but he ended up having an excellent translator who was a dissenter and had left Germany and refused to live in Germany during the Holocaust and World War Two.
Anyway, just reading that essay, and seeing all of his mixed feelings around this, and seeing his long correspondence with one of his German interlocutors again—her name is Hety [Schmitt-Maas]—he never absolved anyone. He never gives you easy answers. It’s not some happy ending where She is German and I am a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust but we were able to meet in the middle and celebrate our humanity. That’s so facile. He doesn’t even go there. That’s not what he’s trying to write about or talk about.
I feel like I’m throwing a heap of words at you but I can’t qualify why this book is so sublime. If you are feeling depressed because you’re about to go through this terrible thing—this economic crisis, everybody losing their livelihoods, this incredible injustice, the state violence that is happening—you need to be able to look at how somebody dealt with the absolute worst atrocity and was able to write about it. And I feel like he paid a very high price for it: it was the last book that he wrote before he committed suicide, but he was able to illuminate things. He wasn’t writing theoretically. He lived this. He lived through this evil. This happened to him and to his body and to everybody surrounding him, and yet he’s able to offer such a vast understanding of everything that he went through, and what it meant to talk about, and what it meant to have it translated.
I could talk about it forever!
EA: There are certain authors for whom there’s something about them that separates them from others. Probably that’s a topic for a conversation itself. That’s how I feel about James Baldwin; that’s definitely how Saleem Haddad, from what he told me, feels towards Fernando Pessoa. Actually, since I talked with him, I ended up finishing The Book Of Disquiet, which I started just before having the conversation, and I definitely see where he’s coming from. It’s one of those books that you will revisit from time to time because it’s not meant to be read in one sitting anyway. There’s no timeline; there isn’t that kind of coherence.
But speaking of literature in general: you’re a translator, you work in that world and you translate between English and Arabic. You have two essays on Lithub—one was the topic of the first part of this conversation; in the other one you’re reflecting on what it meant for you to be translating Syrian women from Arabic into English, and living with the words and living with those experiences. Can you talk a bit about that?
And I’ll squeeze in an extra question: how would you describe your relationship with these two main languages that you have, Arabic and English?
LM: The way I’ve always thought about it is that I feel in Arabic, but I think in English. I actually have a diary entry about this! I wrote about it during that phase when I was thinking aloud and working on that journal (I keep journals off and on, when I feel unable to do anything else). Anyway, as I move forward in my life and my experiences, I realize that the visceral experience of the thing happens in Arabic, but I can’t express myself in writing in Arabic well enough to be able to write about it in that language. So all of my experience of writing is like an act of translation.
Every time I’m writing anything, I might not even be aware, but I’m translating this experience from the language in which I lived it and the language in which I feel most strongly into the language that I think in, the language in which I dissect things. I have a more sober-minded and objective take on things. It feels divorced enough from the experience that I can look at it with a dispassionate—or less passionate, let’s say—outlook.
By that same token, I also feel like when I’m writing in English, what I’m writing somehow feels fake to me. I don’t know how to express it, but it’s almost like…
EA: Is it because the audience wouldn’t be the same?
LM: Yes, absolutely. I’m looking for this thing I wrote [in the diary]: I was talking about one of the meetings I had in the revolution group when we were planning the night before. It starts:
Tomorrow, we must wake at six to ready ourselves and be down by the Monroe hotel at to form a human chain.
So I’m describing that, and describing the meeting; they were talking about what to do with phones, how to set it up so you can remote-erase your phone. And I wrote,
I won’t be doing anything with my phone. There’s nothing on it. Also none of this feels real to me. It’s hard to explain, but even in that room, hearing them talk like that about security measures and what to do about your phone, etcetera, it felt like little boy war games, even though I know it’s real. It just feels like it couldn’t possibly happen to me, maybe because I’m not real. I’m not sure I know even how to articulate this, though after typing the words, it just feels like I took my hands off the keyboard and sat there slack-jawed for a few minutes, because all I could think was, it’s not real in English.
In English, it feels fake. Like I’m just telling a story without real-world stakes. And for someone else’s benefit; also a performance of sorts. And I had all these rapid fire thoughts one after the other, which I guess I’ve already written about in the first translation essay, but as a child, the war happened to me in Arabic and I escaped into English books. And in those English books, there was nothing ever remotely resembling the war the way I lived it, because even if the books described hardship and difficulty, or rather discomfort, etcetera, these things were described and lived all in English. Divorced from the entire sensual context of the war, part of which—a huge part of which—was Arabic.
The sound of the newscasters voices, and the words they use. The sound of my father’s voice raised in laughter, or challenges as the adults dealt a new hand of cards and yell giddily at one another throughout the match. How it shocks me now to think that they were younger than I am now—or at least my dad was my age, I think, not more. Just the sound of Arabic as meaning and as music. And music, too, has its rhythms and lyrics. I had a language for reality and a language for fantasy, and somehow now, as a result, nothing ever feels fully real anymore, because I live things mostly in Arabic and then I process them in English.
And when I process and write them in English like this, taking the words outside of my head and putting them on paper, forcement—sorry, this word works only in French—there is an English language reader there, immediately, some anonymous person. But even so, because they are reading in English, they are indulging in a fantasy. They are headlong inside something not-real. And so my own experience being written instantly also becomes not-real. Not in the way that anything written becomes not-real, i.e. hyper-real, constructed, artfully rendered, structured art, etcetera, but just simply unlived and unlivable, divorced from a body and therefore no longer belonging to it.
I don’t know if that makes sense or is even true.
EA: That’s sort of an out-of-body experience as well.
LM: Yes, exactly. It’s an out-of-body experience in the sense that it is not anchored in the body. Yeah.
EA: This has been really, really interesting. I will definitely have you on again, if that’s okay with you.
LM: I love talking to you. I feel like we’ve had a conversation before. I don’t know how to explain it, but it just feels natural and easy.
EA: I’m glad to hear that. It’s one of the things that I’m trying to explore, because especially for those who were on the ground since October, there is something that has been shared. I guess I’m trying to flesh it out first in this format, and at some point when my brain is functioning again, I’ll try and write about it as well.
Is there anything we could have expanded upon? Or is there a final note that you want to end on?
LM: Yes, actually! It’s funny—[On the contrary], I feel like we covered so many intense things in such a short amount of time. But there is something I want to say, and it speaks to us talking about this collective experience that we shared separately and together, and can be sliced anywhere. A dear friend of mine, Mary Jirmanus, made this film about the labor movements of the sixties and seventies [here in Lebanon], the Ghandour factory worker strikes and the tobacco farmers uprising. It’s a really beautiful essayistic film about these labor movements, those early revolutions that afterwards were superseded by the civil war (I’m not going to say they led to the civil war). I hope I’m doing the film justice. The title of the film is taken from one of the things her character says. Its English translation is: A Feeling Greater Than Love. I haven’t told her this, but this title just kept coming back to me—Shour Akbar Min Hob—the whole time that I was down there.
I cannot write about or think about those early days now without getting really choked up. It’s very much like being in love, in the sense that all the clichés become true. It’s everything that everybody told you about. You hear about it, whatever, it’s a theory, but then you experience it and you’re like, Oh my god, it’s true! It does feel like lightning struck you! It does feel like the whole world is turned upside down! It imbues even clichés with meaning. Even the emptiest turn of phrase—it loads it with meaning. I just keep thinking of that.
Of course, there’s love that exists between you and another person, and it’s this transformative thing, and it alters your contours and their contours. But to have that happen on this massive scale, all these bodies and these people pressed together, and this sense of everybody being able to agree that whatever reality we want, it’s not this one in which we’re living—I think the problems start coming when everybody articulates what their version of utopia is; that’s when people start arguing. But at least everybody is united in: Whatever we want to live is not this. Enough with this shit.
That’s what I want to say, it’s just that the idea of a feeling greater than love is something that I read and understood, and I watched the film and love the film—but then all of a sudden I got to have that experience. I got to know what that feeling greater than love is, and I feel so incredibly grateful for it. Of all the experiences that I have lived, I wouldn’t trade this one for the world. Again, there’s no word that’s adequate. I’m just so grateful. In the full range of human experiences that a person can have in a human body, I don’t know that there’s anything that transcends this.
EA: That’s a wonderful way of ending it actually. Thanks a lot.
LM: Thank you. I really enjoyed this Elia.
EA: I did as well. Thanks a lot for your time.
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