They were still pulling bodies out from under the rubble when the invitation arrived.

It was late August 2020, a couple of weeks after some vast tonnage of ammonium nitrate, left to deteriorate in a hangar in the Beirut port for nearly six years, had ignited – or perhaps had been ignited – producing an explosion so massive that the shockwaves had wiped out entire neighborhoods, swayed the building where I lived, and shattered its glass. Some said they had heard it as far away as Cyprus, across the sea. Two weeks later, I was still unable to manage more than an hour’s sleep a night, the roaring sound of the explosion still reverberating nauseatingly in my body every time I shut my eyes.

But here was the Edinburgh Literature Festival, which had hosted so many writers I admire, inviting me to prepare a reading for no less than the opening of the festival itself. The invitation was exceedingly apologetic about its last-minute arrival; the talk was only 10 days away. Still, the organisers insisted, “having your voice here is very important. Given what you’ve gone through.”

The theme for the opening event, I was told, would be Strange Times. “Strange times” because we were six or seven months into the pandemic, all of us locked up in our isolation bubbles, pontificating upon this profoundly “altered world”. My talk would take place on Zoom.

I knew that those who’d invited me had only good intentions. They wished to acknowledge that this huge and terrible thing had happened, and I wanted this huge and terrible thing to be acknowledged. But I also knew that I wasn’t being invited to represent my work. I was there to represent a tragedy: to be an ambassador of the exploded city, an emissary of its shellshock and wounds.

I had grown used to playing spokesperson for a broken place. It was a role that seemed almost natural for a writer from Lebanon, especially one like me, born and raised during the civil war. My entire generation came of age to an inheritance of rubble, with all of us left to pick through it and ponder what had happened, and what had been left out of the accounts of what happened. To be a writer from Lebanon inevitably meant deliberating over this past – along with all the ways it shaped the present.

But, in late 2020, that representative role I’d been seconded to play had become somewhat official. The Beirut port explosion had come after a relentless onslaught of momentous events in Lebanon: the outbreak of an antigovernment uprising in October 2019, which was eventually put down violently by the state; a collapse of the economy and entire banking system; a nearly 98% devaluation of the local currency; a failure of nearly the entire electricity grid; and shortages of everything from medicine to foodstuffs to water, both bottled and tap.

When The New York Times asked me to write an op-ed about the uprising, I expected it would be a one-off, but it turned out to be the first in a series, a chronicle of perpetually unfolding disaster, with commissions from other papers and magazines following, until I earned nearly my entire income – more than I’d ever made in my life – from Lebanon’s collapse.

I sat down to write my piece for Edinburgh, and didn’t mention the port explosion once. Instead, I did exactly as they’d asked: I wrote a reflection on the theme of ‘strange times’. Mostly about the fact that the designation itself seemed to assume some baseline of normalcy in which the present is supposed to unfold – while most of us, in most of the world, are living perpetually on the precipice of disaster, at the mercy of criminally negligent governments, as victims of economic systems that place profit above any other consideration, including people’s lives. Nobody got to hear this admonishment, however: less than a minute into my reading, my internet connection gave out. It was perhaps the most fitting commentary I could have offered. And that, I thought, was that.

But the next day, the festival wrote to me again. They were sorry to have lost me. Would I prepare another reading – prerecorded – for the closing session in a month’s time? The theme for this one would be ‘A Case for Hope’.

Like everyone raised in the shadow of American culture, I grew up with a media that hawked hope as a kind of miracle cure for every ailment: existential, political and financial alike. From bestselling books to graphic novels to films, hope was peddled not just as content but as form, with narrative structures always built around an epiphanic moment in which a desperate situation is resolved by individual pluck. Witness the American Dream fed into the meat grinder of culture, emerging as bland, easy-to-swallow pablum: that hope itself was a kind of individual moral obligation. Without it, the bad guys – from comic-book villains to vile racists and corporate lobbyists – would prevail.

It was a canon that not only promoted a reductionist view of the world, even when it pretended to embrace nuance and colour, but one that also specifically and implicitly privileged the individual over the collective. The individual could always – and in fact only – earn themselves an uplifting end by rising above and sometimes entirely out of collective circumstance, and this in itself was the final, ascendant note called hope.

This uplifting narrative was never applied to the Arab world. Both pop culture and the news media suggested that the people I knew and loved were simply part of a faceless collective. The only individuals who had actual names were the ‘terrorists’, notorious because they were nefarious. The city where I’d grown up, and which I loved (Beirut), and the cities in which my parents had been raised (Cairo and Baghdad), were always represented as chaotic, repressed, tribalist messes. Apparently, our collective grievances were due to ancient, unresolvable religious hatreds, rather than historical and political realities in which logical effect followed cause.

Still, Lebanon fares better than most Arab countries in the mainstream press, both in the amount of attention it is paid, and in the backhanded compliments strewn piteously its way, compliments akin to telling a fat girl, ‘Oh, what a shame, you have such a pretty face. If only!’ I wonder how much of that magnanimity has to do with the coddling lifestyle that Lebanon affords its Western expats: those foreign correspondents and diplomats and visiting professors and international NGO workers who get the choicest apartments with the choicest views of the Mediterranean, cheap labour to clean them, and a predominantly bilingual or even trilingual population, meaning that if they don’t want to make the effort – and a considerable number do not – they don’t have to learn a single word of Arabic beyond marhaba and shukran.

The expats agree: despite the ‘ancient religious hatreds’, there’s something ‘Western’ about Lebanon, and about Beirut in particular. Well-meaning Western reporters understand this appeal – while also falling for it themselves. I’ll never forget a passage written by Robert Fisk, the Anglo-Irish reporter who lived for more than 40 years in a handsome 1950s confection-pink apartment building on the seaside Corniche: about two weeks into the 2006 war, in which Israel viciously pounded Lebanon for 33 days with bombs both mechanical and chemical, Fisk wrote an article for The Independent clearly designed to rouse his audience to the same outrage he felt at the assault. “They look like us, the people of Beirut,” he pleaded. “They have light-coloured skin and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their food exquisite.”

There is no doubt a myth to Beirut, to Lebanon, reinforced by locals and foreigners alike, and that particular article by Fisk is a tourist map of some of its most prominent cliches. There is the romance of Beirut’s endless, undeserved suffering at the hands of others, as one of those “cities [that] seem forever doomed”. There is its constant resurrection, how it “die[s] and rises from the grave and dies again”. There are references to both Fairouz and Khalil Gibran, via evocations that are usually as uninspired and kitschy as the ‘rising phoenix’, which also makes an appearance in this article. Naturally, Lebanon is rising “from the ashes of the civil war”, though Fisk goes further here and endows it with a “plumage… so bright it blinded its own people”.

But the most fundamental – and beguiling – myth about Lebanon is that of its people’s resilience. Their ability to survive anything, to find a solution to every problem, to maintain an even keel no matter how the country shudders and shakes. “Beirutis are a tough people and are not easily moved,” Fisk writes – as if to say, if even these tough people are terrified and exhausted by the horror of Israel’s slaughter, how bad must it be?

To write of Lebanon in English is to always be working with these cliches at the edge of one’s awareness. You write towards them, or against them; you write to subvert them or mock them or indulge them or skirt them altogether, but they are always there.

It was November 2019 when I was tapped – to my great, hardly-able-to-believe-it thrill – to write an op-ed about the October uprising for The New York Times. Until then I’d mostly written longform essays, always in some way about language and translation, or even story structure, and always grounded in Lebanon. Journalism, or at least the op-ed format, was something I had to learn on the fly. It involved a very specific formula: to open, an appealing anecdotal ‘lede’, full of ‘colour’ that establishes the theme (think: the wisdom of taxi drivers), followed by a tight ‘nut graf’ (exactly what it sounds like: the in-a-nutshell background-explainer paragraph), followed by the body of the op-ed about the current event at hand, and climaxing with some kind of punchy, preferably optimistic closure. All crammed into 1,000 words or less – ideally less. The trick was not to make it sound formulaic, but to make it sound like a real person writing, rather than the gargantuan machine that is The New York Times. This is far more difficult than it might seem.

Of all the pieces I would write over the next year or so, the one I most enjoyed writing – though it was also the one through which I’d learn the agonies of the Times’ editing process – was this first one. It ended on a hopeful, rising note, mostly because that’s what I, and so much of the country, was feeling that November: a fierce and furious optimism in the wake of an uprising that, after years of despair and frustration building against a government that did nothing but enrich itself and its cronies, had brought most of the country together, and out into the streets. There was hope that this could finally bring the country’s ruling class – the oligarchs who had impoverished us all – to some kind of justice.

I wrote about the open-air classes and debates that were being held each night in the protest squares – people educating one another about the constitution, the economy and the law, and handing out the tools required to understand what had been done to us, and what we might then do about it in turn. And I wrote about the power of apprehending, collectively, that there was no shame in financial struggle within a system deliberately designed to keep people struggling. Though the piece contained a decidedly anticapitalist message, it also provided no real challenge to the status quo. While the uprising felt life-altering or at least perception-altering to so many of us on the ground, it was a feel-good story for the Western press at large because, save for rare instances, nobody took up arms against the state; instead, there was much talk of ‘reforming the system from within’”. In any case, it was the last time I would write about any kind of collective struggle, peaceful or otherwise, for the paper of record.

The first thing you learn when writing for an outlet like the Times is that the newspaper has its own voice, which is painted over yours, layer by layer. The piece runs a gauntlet of copyeditors, subeditors and top editors until, by the time it makes it to the page, you hardly recognise the piece as your own. Sometimes the way things were pared down and rearranged meant that errors in the logic and sequencing of events were introduced; I wrote long and involved emails, offered heavily annotated drafts, in hopes of convincing them that precision was important. Seeing my frustration, my direct editor, who also came from a part of the world that had to explain itself endlessly, once told me that I had to think of my op-eds as purely utilitarian, opportunities for me to use this massive platform to inform a largely insular and self-absorbed audience. “Save the stuff you really care about for your own book,” he said. “That's what I do.”

I struggled with how to best use that ‘massive platform’ to my advantage, or for what I thought would be best for Lebanon. I wrote perpetually from within that degrading carapace inside which we were locked; the one that first had to be shucked off before we could be perceived. Thus my nut grafs, which grew ever more bloated with every new disaster during those disastrous few years for Lebanon, had also to find room to explain that we were not ‘doomed’ from the outset by virtue of our tribalist natures, but that we were, like everyone else in the world, people entangled in various ways within larger global systems. Nor was our resilience something to be celebrated – even if stories of individuals finding private solutions to public problems, like neighbourhoods that improbably managed to secure electricity amid a collapsing grid, made for feel-good copy, for ‘colour’.

It grew increasingly clear, however, that the voice of the newspaper embodied a distinct view of the world, one that was blind to the idea of systematised subjugation. That is, systems, especially global systems, were never at fault, only individuals. Of course, blame could be ascribed to specific local ills: Lebanon’s sectarianism would take much of the blame for the country’s afflictions. The banking system, on the other hand, was more or less innocent, a mere victim of the same sectarian evil. And yet, in fact, Lebanon’s economic collapse was an engineered disaster, a deliberate collusion between a banking system set up like a giant Ponzi scheme and a political one set up to rake in all the profits. Sectarianism was merely the scaffolding that provided a global economic architecture – the neoliberal policies of privatisation and mass impoverishment – with its domestic character.

All of my op-eds, for the Times or otherwise, that tried to present the entanglement of these relationships were returned, at the final stage, with the nuance combed out. I was told more than once that what I had written was “too complicated”, that it was more important to “focus on the human toll”. In short: talk about the effect, forget the cause. De-politicise the inherently political, de-systematise the systemic.

This tendency to describe even the most engineered disasters as tragic events without a perpetrator is at its most grotesquely obvious in the Times’ coverage of the genocide in Gaza, in the way that Israel is excised from headlines so that people appear to simply spontaneously explode in the streets and buildings collapse of their own accord. From its position inside the cockpit of American power, which arms and funds the destruction of Palestinian life, the Times cannot see or describe the colonial impulse to overtake and dominate and expand. It cannot acknowledge the origins of these crimes.

It is this coverage of Gaza that led to my parting ways with the paper. I hadn’t heard from them since things in Lebanon had died down, its miseries reduced from the spectacular to the routine. But when, on 17 and 18 September 2024, pagers exploded across the country, killing dozens and maiming thousands, I received an email from a new editor wondering if I was willing to write “an honest and real account of what it feels like to be in Beirut just now”. Never mind that I wasn’t in Beirut just then; the issue was more that I had grown disgusted by the fact that I had ever written for the Times at all, that I had ever lent them my Arab name so they could use it, as they did other Arab names, to buy themselves some measure of plausible deniability with regards to the fundamental racism of their editorial line. The editor was sympathetic to the screed I sent back in response, but pushed back, telling me I would be given a platform to write “what you think is missing”, though of course she couldn’t promise ahead of time that the piece would actually be published, given that she needed a greenlight from her own boss. What I thought was missing, before anything else, was an entire accounting that would place the region and its people in a context articulated through our own self-understanding, and which would no longer present the Lebanese or Palestinians or Syrians or Iraqis or Sudanese or Iranians as people entirely unmoored from history, as irrational actors motivated by nothing except grievance and hatred, without a coherent past and thus entirely without lucid, self-determined visions for our own futures. There was no nut graf in the world long enough to contain all that they refused to learn about this part of the world. Nor would the piece have any closure – punchy, optimistic or otherwise – so long as the entire system of Western political, economic and military dominance remained – remains – as is.

I declined again.

Before the ravages of Gaza made utterly preposterous such an assertion, the Palestinians were deemed ‘resilient’, too. As were the Syrians, and every people forced to navigate their lives through conditions designed to extinguish them. I would be lying if I didn’t say that I was myself once beguiled by the idea of resilience. Who doesn’t want to think of themselves as tough and resourceful, and most importantly, able to overcome all odds, rising again and again from the ashes of one’s country, one’s life? I thought resilience was our superpower, the gift that all the hard-done-by of the world had been given as compensation for these lives perpetually suspended in ‘strange times’. It mapped over that story structure that felt so redemptive and redeeming, in which the only thing standing between a person and their realised future was simply a gritty commitment to self-betterment.

Knowing, too, how the West perceived resilience – as the one apparent compliment it could bestow upon non-Western peoples, as the thing that proved we were capable of practising the rugged individualism they seemed to so admire – made it an especially tempting idea to lean into. I struggled, in every piece I wrote about the region, with the ending. How to stick the landing? How to find some hopeful and yet still honest note upon which to end, in order to say: we are not to be pitied, we too are capable individuals. I found myself trying to somehow mirror the requirements that must be ticked off on an NGO’s progress evaluation report at the end of every fiscal year. I was aware that people’s attention is limited, and that they probably wished to know that the time they’d invested in reading about a part of the world they probably wrote off as hopelessly mired in forever violence – as though genetically predisposed to it – had not been wasted.

I grew to think of it as a tyranny – a tyranny of hope. Like all tyrannies, it is one that breeds complacency. If the very form of the stories we tell inevitably brings us to the expected outcome, if it lulls us into believing that the individual is the only relevant actor on the stage of history, and that all will ultimately turn out well so long as we stop thinking of the collective, then it also absolves us of our implication in the collective. And, perhaps most crucially of all, it keeps us blind to the potential power of the collective.

That the Edinburgh Literary Festival found it fitting to move from the theme of ‘Strange Times’ to making ‘A Case for Hope’ in the course of a single month, and that it left it to writers to create uplifting narratives, seems almost too perfect an encapsulation of the ubiquity of these politics. When it came time for me to record my piece, I maintained that I didn’t want to make a case for hope, but rather a case for despair. The sort of despair that eventually forces collective action: another way of saying ‘revolution’, without saying revolution, which seems an unpalatably naive word to so many people in the West.

Since the beginning of the Gaza genocide, it has been nearly impossible for me to write or think about anything else. I do not roll my eyes now when people talkabout reckoning with an “altered world”. I am trying to do the same. Against the glare of Gaza’s inferno, everything is cast back in monstrously distorted shadow, even language itself.

What writer, confronted with world-shattering disaster, doesn’t wish for an entirely new language in which to express it, and also to resist it? The late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish muses on this throughout Memory for Forgetfulness, his memoir of a single ferocious day during the 1982 Israeli siege and bombardment of West Beirut, which itself arrived in the middle of Lebanon’s civil war. “I want to find language that transforms language itself into steel for the spirit,” writes Darwish, “a language to use against these sparkling silver insects, these jets.” Later, he seems to imply that the war itself – its violence, its death – had brought about this transformation: “It seemed to me that these martyrs, this new language, and this great pile of ashes would create for us a sign at least.” He saw that “the transformation had begun, that the shell of regionalism had been broken”. But in the next and final lines of that passage – “So it seemed to me then. So it seemed” – we come to understand that this is not only an illusion, but a short-lived one at that.

An entirely new language is impossible. The only thing that can change language is a shift in our understanding, for language is both formed by, and represents, our collective consciousness of the world.

With Gaza as the battleground, it seems to me that the world is increasingly divided into those who understand our future as a collective one, and those who understand it as individual. How, then, to write as an ‘I’ that has the ‘we’ at its heart, that keeps the ‘we’ in its sights?

Is this a hopeful ending? Is this the rising note? “I don’t use the word ‘hope’,” an activist friend told me recently. “I use the word ‘faith’.” Faith suggests a kind of knowing, something that animates one in the present, acting toward a future that is unseen, perhaps unassured, but whose eventual arrival is implicit in the action itself.

Perhaps this is what writing is: an act of faith, even at its most despairing, because every word put to the page presumes a future reader. I have learnt this from the writers of Gaza, who continue to write under conditions of extermination, who even leave us words from beyond the grave. Their writing, their creation, is not an act of resilience. It is rather a purposeful belief in a collective future – but more so, in a present in which something can still be done.

As for the rest of us, witnessing aghast from without – it is impossible not to feel as though we are all, so long as the carnage proceeds, failing the moment.