Anthony Shadid
House of Stone is both memoir and meditation and a distinctive contribution to Arab-American literature and Arab memoir generally.
The memoir is less about the author and more about his extended family members and their history in the village of Marjayoun and their diasporic travels and settling, primarily to the United States. It is also an informal reflection on the history and culture of Lebanon and the tragedy of its conflicts.House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East
Anthony Shadid
Many emotional currents feed the memoir’s narrative; the longing for home and sense of loss of villagers who left Marjayoun and settled in new and distant lands and faced a contradictory mixture of welcome and rejection, their eventual integration into American society and life and development of a firm sense of belonging, the hope and optimism and labor of love that is Shadid’s reconstruction of his family home which anchors the book’s narrative, the decline of Marjayoun and the sadness and despondency of many of its residents and the violence of Lebanon’s contemporary history and its relentless sectarianism.
Shadid is always generous and critical simultaneously in his writing. He brings a critical eye to his own profession of journalism, describing its flaws, particularly with regard to war reporting – so often an issue in Lebanon. “A long siege of death in progress; bombing prolonged over days or weeks of close battles and losses; fear unbroken: We can’t see the scars from these traumas or how far or where the impacts have penetrated. In the comfort of their living rooms, Americans see pictures of disaster but are routed toward new fronts before sympathies develop or questions become too complicated. Television and the craft I practice show us the drama, not the impact, particularly if the results are subtle and occur or become obvious after the cameras and reporters with their notebooks have left. Our tendency is to consider the resolution of the battle or the war or the conflict, not to take in the tragedies that outlast even the most final sort of conclusion. We never find out, or think to ask, whether the village is rebuilt, or what becomes of the dazed woman who, after one strange, endlessly extended moment, is no longer the mother of children.”
He romanticizes no one and nothing (including himself) except perhaps – the era of the Ottoman Empire before Lebanon won its sovereignty.
To his credit, he acknowledges the harsher aspects of the Ottoman Empire, including its forced conscription of soldiers. Still, there is a sense of wistful nostalgia for a past which – given Lebanon’s history since its independence with frequent paroxysms of violence and a lengthy and brutal civil war and a lack of political and social stability and common civic identity – is understandable.
Shadid describes the Levant as, “…more a culture than an expanse of land or group of nations or homelands. It was a way of living and thinking that bound Asia Minor to the Middle East and Egypt to Mesopotamia. It was, in essence, an amalgamation of diversities where many mingled, a realm of intersections, a crossroads of language, culture, religions, and traditions. All were welcome to pass through territories and homelands within its landscape, where differences were often celebrated. In idea at least the Levant was open-minded, cosmopolitan…”
It’s not evident that Marjayoun and Lebanon ever actually had such an idyllic moment in time, or, if it did, that it lasted very long. What is clear, however, is that in the past a greater sense of communal obligation informed Marjayoun and other villages like it in Lebanon.
Where once there was cooperation and coexistence between religions and ethnic groups there is now more likely to be tension, rejection, fear, hatred, and outright violence whose specter menaces Lebanon as an ever-present possibility haunting daily life.
Shadid makes clear that he is sympathetic to critiques of the impacts of nationalism on Lebanon and the Middle East which is why he looks back on the days of the Ottoman Empire with longing because however flawed and exploitative it was, it weaved together people of different backgrounds and tolerated and sometimes embraced difference.
On nationalism he comments, “Artificial and forced, instruments themselves of repression, the borders were the obstacle, having wiped away what was best of the Arab world. They hewed to no certain logic; a glimpse at any map suggests as much. The lines are too straight, too precise to embrace the ambiguities of geography and history… Myths had to be imagined to join a certain people to a certain land that was so long shared. Pasts were created and destines claimed. The borders reinforced the particulars of states with no ambition save the preservation of a petty despot’s power, or a people’s chauvinism, or a clan’s fear…”
Shadid’s writing is lyrical without being overwrought – bringing to life light and landscape, communicating beauty and horror, illuminating the weathered faces and personalities of Marjayoun’s villagers and the range of their emotions, hopes, and frustrations.
In recounting ruthless violence and sectarianism, chauvinism and crude ethno-centrism and feelings of religious superiority that characterize and feed much of Lebanon’s history and ongoing social conflicts, Shadid maintains his ethical integrity and writes with care.
He is emotionally indignant in response to injustice and violence against the innocent but utterly uninterested and unwilling to retreat to the false comforts of romanticizing his own or any other ethnic or religious group in Lebanon, aware of the fallibility and culpability that resides in the human heart and has long informed the actions of all of Lebanon’s ethnic and religious communities.
Respectful of his own Christian background and faith he is equally and vigorously so of the faiths of others.
His evocation of character and psychological perceptiveness is acute and often yields funny, sharp, and unforgiving portraits that have the accuracy of a photograph that is natural and has never been touched up, an unvarnished caustic truth communicated directly.
The details of his rebuilding of the home reveal the often dramatic personalities of the villagers and give energy and impetus to the book’s narrative arc. Interspersed throughout are extended commentaries on the experiences of Shadid’s relatives over the last century as they left Marjayoun to seek their fortune elsewhere.
All are sensitively and often beautifully rendered and add to the wholeness of the memoir which links Shadid to his larger family and community across generations. Some, however, become so detailed that the reader may lose interest or find hard to follow.
On the subject of war and its devastating consequences Shadid is particularly eloquent. Describing the tiles that once decorated his home and that he will now try to use as he rebuilds it, Shadid states, “The tiles returned one to a realm where imagination, artistry, and craftsmanship were not only appreciated but given free rein, where what was unique and striking, or small and perfect, or wrought with care was desired, where gazed-upon objects were the products of peaceful hearts, hands long practiced and trained. War ends the values and traditions that produce such treasures. Nothing is maintained. Cultures that may seem as durable as stone can break like glass, leaving all things that held them together unattended. I believe that the craftsman, the artist, the cook, and the silversmith are peacemakers. They instill grace; they lull the world to calm.”
This is a work that is achingly honest and characterized by empathy – based on the cathartic act of returning to the land of Shadid’s ancestors and the village from which they came and rebuilding a family home that had suffered the degradations of war, time, and abandonment.
In so doing it synthesizes the spatial and temporal, physical and spiritual, past and present, ideal and real. It contains sadness and tragedy, pain and loss and suffering – in no small measure. It is, in part, a lamentation for a lost Lebanon and a lost Levant.
The author, himself, tragically died of an asthma attack shortly after completing the book while reporting from Syria. But its ultimate message is one of resilience and rededication, of connection across distances real and imagined, about communicating across boundaries of hostility and fear and frustration and misunderstanding.
It is also generously laced with a lacerating and liberating sense of humor and wit that breathes fresh air and creates space where staleness and claustrophobia conspire.
House of Stone is a work of genuine joy and integration – joy that is imperfect, as the stones that make up his now completed home which Shadid writes of towards the end of the book with such love and grace for their very imperfections, distinctness, and the occasional coarseness accompanying their smoother parts.
In the act of building and of writing Shadid restored something in his heart and in his village and in this act of creativity the reader also finds himself renewed.
