The speed by which text travels is both a great fortune and a conundrum of our present days. As information and knowledge are transmitted in unthinkable immediacy, our capacity for receiving and comprehending worldly events is continuously challenged and reconstituted. It is, then, a great privilege to be able to sit down with a book that coherently and absorbingly sorts through the things that have happened. This month, we bring you two works that deal with the events of history with both clarity and intimacy. One a compelling, diaristic account of the devastating Beirut explosion of last year, and one a sensitive, sensual novel that delves into a woman’s life as she carries the trauma of Indian Partition. Read on to find out more.
Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse by Charif Majdalani, translated from French by Ruth Diver, Other Press, 2021
Review by Alex Tan, Assistant Editor
There’s a peculiar whiplash that comes from seeing the words “social distancing” in a newly published book, even if—as in the case of Charif Majdalani’s Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse—the reader is primed from the outset to anticipate an account of the pandemic’s devastations. For anyone to claim the discernment of hindsight feels all too premature—wrong, even, when there isn’t yet an aftermath to speak from.
But Majdalani’s testimony of disintegration, a compelling mélange of memoir and historical reckoning in Ruth Diver’s clear-eyed English translation, contains no such pretension. In the collective memory of 2020 as experienced by those in Beirut, Lebanon, the COVID-19 pandemic serves merely as stage lighting. It casts its eerie glow on the far deeper fractures within a country riven by “untrammelled liberalism” and “the endemic corruption of the ruling classes.”
Majdalani is great at conjuring an atmosphere of unease, the sense that something is about to give. And something, indeed, does; on August 4, 2020, a massive explosion of ammonium nitrate at the Port of Beirut shattered the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. A whole city collapsed, Majdalani repeatedly emphasises, in all of five seconds.
That cataclysmic event structures the diary’s chronology. Regardless of how much one knows of Lebanon’s troubled past, the succession of dates gathers an ominous velocity, hurtling toward its doomed end. Yet the text’s desultory form, delivering in poignant fragments day by elastic day, hour by ordinary hour, preserves an essential uncertainty—perhaps even a hope that the future might yet be otherwise.
Like the diary-writer, we intimate that the centre cannot hold, but cannot pinpoint exactly where or how. It is customary, in Lebanon, for things to be falling apart. Majdalani directs paranoia at opaque machinations first designated as mechanisms of “chance,” and later diagnosed as the “excessive factionalism” of a “caste of oligarchs in power.” Elsewhere, he christens them “warlords.” The two are practically synonymous in the book’s moral universe. Indeed, Beirut 2020’s lexicon frequently relies, for figures of powerlessness and governmental conspiracy, on a pantheon of supernatural beings. Soothsayers, Homeric gods, djinn, and ghosts make cameos in its metaphorical phantasmagoria. In the face of the indifferent quasi-divine, Lebanon’s lesser inhabitants can only speculate endlessly about the “shameless lies and pantomimes” produced with impunity.
At points, the heaving behemoth of the economy—deregulated and seething with corruption— seems like a character in itself. Weighty phrases like “institutional racketeering” and “the clientelization of local communities” are a dime a dozen in Majdalani’s writing. We might read this as a symptom of the utter banalisation of Lebanon’s “very banana republic” reality; conventional rules, scales of magnitude, and standards of measurement don’t apply here. Everywhere, one “get[s] used to it, it becomes part of the texture of darkness,” and “it” could be the upending of anything and everything—the mismanaged public coffers, the hyper-inflation, the faltering electricity sector, the ecological destruction, the civil war three-decades long. Against that white noise, generators hum; traffic lights flicker out; “ghostly dumpsters” burn through the night.
Walter Benjamin famously wrote, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” From within the Kafkaesque absurdity of one such state of emergency, Beirut 2020 seeks to expose anew—and so indict—the “ridiculous details of what is now our daily life.” But another challenge arises, which Majdalani gamely takes on: “[H]ow far back should I go, in those hundred years, to trace the genealogy of this disaster?”
It’s unclear, of the countless disasters that have unfolded, which one Majdalani is referring to exactly here, or if he’s simply alluding to disaster and mourning as a generalised condition. Rereading the diary, I find that ambiguity instructive; the present carries the past’s unresolved baggage. That nuance, unfortunately, seems lost in translation, where the purposefully unspecific “Un Effondrement” in the book’s title is rendered as “The Collapse.” While I see how it lends gravity to the deadly detonation of August 4, it detracts from its being but one manifestation of the precarity that is the lot of many in Lebanon.
Diver’s translation, otherwise, is smooth and readable, and does justice to the anxieties that lurk at the heart of Beirut 2020. Majdalani both poses and works out certain questions about form, narration, history, “the broken thread of time”. His strength is to occupy that nexus between the historical, the political, and the resolutely individual; he fluidly vacillates between these registers, grapples with the impossibility of their reconciliation and the inevitability of their collision. When that happens, the text itself breaks down; it must stall in muted incoherence and litany, unravel before it can start again.
How else to catalogue and memorialise pain? While Beirut burns, scenes of quotidian tenderness feel extraordinarily precious. A repairman’s visit, a building supervisor tending the rosebushes, a plumber who arrives to repair a leak, Majdalani’s wife’s attempt to self-therapise—what Beirut 2020 reassembles from the wreckage is a composite image of collective survival, exercises in making sense of incomprehensible suffering:
. . . and never had the devastated streets been so full, invaded by a tide of people carrying brooms, shovels, masks, helmets, offering food and drink as if they were in a rage to do something, to refuse to allow themselves to be beaten, in a kind of festival of despair.
In the diary’s tonal meanderings, its attentiveness to topography and landscape and “the slow, meticulous sedimentation of time,” I sense at times the spirit of W.G. Sebald—that patron saint of ruins, whose Austerlitz is referenced in a later entry. Majdalani the diarist glimpses, in the bareness of an “ancient mulberry tree,” a “trunk twisted like hands begging for forgiveness”; in “the mountains’ silence,” the “last witnesses of what must have been the planet’s eternal stasis before time and history burst in.” It seems like a posture of near-renunciation, an elegiac longing for the vanished. In Majdalani’s hands, you could call it hope.
Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, Tilted Axis Press, 2021
Review by Fairuza Hanun, Assistant Editor
Geetanjali Shree first debuted into English readership with Mai: Silently Mother (shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award), and soon established a strong voice braided with feminist discourses—rife with tales of motherhood and familial bonds. As Nita Kumar—Mai’s translator—notes in the afterword, within the character of a woman, the character of a mother is prevalent; despite contemporary representations of motherhood extending beyond the gender of woman, patriarchal hierarchical expectations and practices continue to frame women beneath “the idea of giving birth,” child-rearing, and housekeeping. Society constructs that once a woman becomes a mother, their multiplicity is lost to the identity; “mother” is a monolith and a certainty, an ascribed status that follows even after death.
In Tomb of Sand, Shree hardly entertains singular narratives of motherhood, exploring without confines what lies between the binaries of what qualifies a “good” mother or a “bad’’one. Within the family central to the plot, the characters live and breathe politics and socio-political discourses in the everyday—who needs to cook and clean, who gets to go out at certain times of the day, who is permitted to wear what, and how one should behave to another. The text probes and describes the prescribed attitudes in its script of household play. In Mai, Shree prompts the question: “What kind of person is this mother?”, maintaining the connection between the mother’s humanity—her past life which accounts for her present and future. She does it again in Tomb of Sand, this time with a maternal role that has become obsolete with age. The novel inspects how Amma—no longer mother, no longer girl—remains confined in the manipulations of social constructs and the trauma of her youth during the Partition.
The plot of Tomb of Sand is complicated, comparable to the wide-ranging appearances of light as it trickles and moves fluidly between spaces, reaching inward and branching off, yet faithful to its course. Witnessing the many different threads unspooling may confuse readers in their hierarchy, but that might be Shree’s intention—as if to say that each person and thing has importance, and not one story should be missing or unheard. In response to a query as to what makes a character important, the author responds: “The most important character in every person’s life is the thing that they lack.” Language and perspective-play are central elements to the novel, and Shree casts a third person eye over the landscape and the macro, never quite settling comfortably onto one character’s mind and reassessing aspects previously riddled with assumptions.
Peering into the lives of her vast cast, Shree spectates the actions of these people through an objective lens, but when nearing the conclusion, she holds the metaphorical mic to every character’s heart—daughter, son, daughter-in-law, grandson one, grandson two, maid one, two, three, numerous, a guard, an inspector . . . The one conspicuous exception is Rosie Bua, a hijra woman who becomes Amma’s companion and who, intriguingly, does not have passages exclusively “filmed” through her perspective. Rather, she is a recipient of Amma’s love, a giver of love, and an individual of speculation under Amma’s two children: Bade and Beti.
Rosie is regarded by society as a ghost—a “creature” who is neither here nor there, and whose existence is unacknowledged in identification documents and by the authorities. Shree cleverly affects this perception, keeping Rosie just visible enough in the story to disturb Bade and Beti, but enough in their periphery that Rosie seems interchangeable with any other character . . . until the discovery of her mangled, disfigured, dead body. The brutality of the scene shatters the children’s reluctance to accept her, and they, along with Amma, become engulfed in the reality of her existence, the tangibility of her presence, and the realisation that she was neither ghost nor wraith, but human all along.
Following her husband’s death, Amma’s grief binds her to both a metaphorical and a literal corner; she runs away, is eventually found, and relocated to be kept in Beti’s house for a change of pace. With Beti and Amma’s relationship redefined, Rosie becomes a form of escapism. When she passes away, we learn of her parting wish: that Amma would go to Pakistan to confront her teenage trauma, replete with the confusion of bloodbaths, betrayals, and a lifelong censorship of literature, art, and speech.
At its core, Tomb of Sand is interested in the identity politics entangled within the familial system. Shree interrogates the womanhood lost in motherhood, the longings and desires for self-reclamation after the obsolescence of maternal responsibility, depression in grief, the aging body considered as “crippled,” national and gender identity, femininity under the expectation of “parent-rearing,” and the tender role-reversals as a child adopts the manners of a mother. In a chapter depicting Bade’s longing for Amma, Shree writes:
[C]ustoms are not the invention of the Almighty, are they? In short, declared the orator, The Almighty crafted them one way, The Sun warmed them in another, and machismo then exploited them. Machismo is hidden in the layers of nearly every custom, and its repulsiveness makes it no less macho, explained the orator. Joyousness grew fearful, the dance collapsed, happiness faded, and from this mixture the next generation was born, which does not know the reason for the mixture but has already acquired its nature.
So nature became habit.
Habit is custom.
Shree’s prose exposes us to colourful sensations, spilling with visual depictions, tastes, scents, and sounds. It is a rich net capturing every ripple in the universe, with nothing escaping it. Every word is weighty. After an impactful sentence, Shree goes on to dismantle its meaning, serving fresh new expressions, metaphors, and surrealism that leaves the reader contemplating the language. Hindi words, such as quotes from celebrities and references to pop culture, emerge on the page occasionally in an original reinterpretation of how faithfulness should be defined in the writing’s translation from Hindi to English. Rhythmic choices become a rule-breaking playground for witty wordplay, intertwining the original and the translation. Though this playfulness comes across as humorous even amidst sombre topics, utmost care and sensitive social awareness constitute the underlying approach in Shree’s diligent criticisms of traditions, duties, roles, and social realities.
Culture, traditions, and predetermined societal scripts, memorised by heart—Tomb of Sand is steeped in the grief and the slow healing familiar to femininity. As we trace Amma’s present towards her reckoning, then onwards to the past she chooses to brave, we undergo the healing ourselves, finding partial closure in familiar scenes that resonate with beautiful intimacy. Above all, we are compelled to re-evaluate what it means to be a woman, a mother, and a feminist, through stories that “create meaning as they move along.”
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog:
What’s New in Translation: August 2021
New work this month from Lebanon and India!
The speed by which text travels is both a great fortune and a conundrum of our present days. As information and knowledge are transmitted in unthinkable immediacy, our capacity for receiving and comprehending worldly events is continuously challenged and reconstituted. It is, then, a great privilege to be able to sit down with a book that coherently and absorbingly sorts through the things that have happened. This month, we bring you two works that deal with the events of history with both clarity and intimacy. One a compelling, diaristic account of the devastating Beirut explosion of last year, and one a sensitive, sensual novel that delves into a woman’s life as she carries the trauma of Indian Partition. Read on to find out more.
Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse by Charif Majdalani, translated from French by Ruth Diver, Other Press, 2021
Review by Alex Tan, Assistant Editor
There’s a peculiar whiplash that comes from seeing the words “social distancing” in a newly published book, even if—as in the case of Charif Majdalani’s Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse—the reader is primed from the outset to anticipate an account of the pandemic’s devastations. For anyone to claim the discernment of hindsight feels all too premature—wrong, even, when there isn’t yet an aftermath to speak from.
But Majdalani’s testimony of disintegration, a compelling mélange of memoir and historical reckoning in Ruth Diver’s clear-eyed English translation, contains no such pretension. In the collective memory of 2020 as experienced by those in Beirut, Lebanon, the COVID-19 pandemic serves merely as stage lighting. It casts its eerie glow on the far deeper fractures within a country riven by “untrammelled liberalism” and “the endemic corruption of the ruling classes.”
Majdalani is great at conjuring an atmosphere of unease, the sense that something is about to give. And something, indeed, does; on August 4, 2020, a massive explosion of ammonium nitrate at the Port of Beirut shattered the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. A whole city collapsed, Majdalani repeatedly emphasises, in all of five seconds.
That cataclysmic event structures the diary’s chronology. Regardless of how much one knows of Lebanon’s troubled past, the succession of dates gathers an ominous velocity, hurtling toward its doomed end. Yet the text’s desultory form, delivering in poignant fragments day by elastic day, hour by ordinary hour, preserves an essential uncertainty—perhaps even a hope that the future might yet be otherwise.
Like the diary-writer, we intimate that the centre cannot hold, but cannot pinpoint exactly where or how. It is customary, in Lebanon, for things to be falling apart. Majdalani directs paranoia at opaque machinations first designated as mechanisms of “chance,” and later diagnosed as the “excessive factionalism” of a “caste of oligarchs in power.” Elsewhere, he christens them “warlords.” The two are practically synonymous in the book’s moral universe. Indeed, Beirut 2020’s lexicon frequently relies, for figures of powerlessness and governmental conspiracy, on a pantheon of supernatural beings. Soothsayers, Homeric gods, djinn, and ghosts make cameos in its metaphorical phantasmagoria. In the face of the indifferent quasi-divine, Lebanon’s lesser inhabitants can only speculate endlessly about the “shameless lies and pantomimes” produced with impunity.
At points, the heaving behemoth of the economy—deregulated and seething with corruption— seems like a character in itself. Weighty phrases like “institutional racketeering” and “the clientelization of local communities” are a dime a dozen in Majdalani’s writing. We might read this as a symptom of the utter banalisation of Lebanon’s “very banana republic” reality; conventional rules, scales of magnitude, and standards of measurement don’t apply here. Everywhere, one “get[s] used to it, it becomes part of the texture of darkness,” and “it” could be the upending of anything and everything—the mismanaged public coffers, the hyper-inflation, the faltering electricity sector, the ecological destruction, the civil war three-decades long. Against that white noise, generators hum; traffic lights flicker out; “ghostly dumpsters” burn through the night.
Walter Benjamin famously wrote, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” From within the Kafkaesque absurdity of one such state of emergency, Beirut 2020 seeks to expose anew—and so indict—the “ridiculous details of what is now our daily life.” But another challenge arises, which Majdalani gamely takes on: “[H]ow far back should I go, in those hundred years, to trace the genealogy of this disaster?”
It’s unclear, of the countless disasters that have unfolded, which one Majdalani is referring to exactly here, or if he’s simply alluding to disaster and mourning as a generalised condition. Rereading the diary, I find that ambiguity instructive; the present carries the past’s unresolved baggage. That nuance, unfortunately, seems lost in translation, where the purposefully unspecific “Un Effondrement” in the book’s title is rendered as “The Collapse.” While I see how it lends gravity to the deadly detonation of August 4, it detracts from its being but one manifestation of the precarity that is the lot of many in Lebanon.
Diver’s translation, otherwise, is smooth and readable, and does justice to the anxieties that lurk at the heart of Beirut 2020. Majdalani both poses and works out certain questions about form, narration, history, “the broken thread of time”. His strength is to occupy that nexus between the historical, the political, and the resolutely individual; he fluidly vacillates between these registers, grapples with the impossibility of their reconciliation and the inevitability of their collision. When that happens, the text itself breaks down; it must stall in muted incoherence and litany, unravel before it can start again.
How else to catalogue and memorialise pain? While Beirut burns, scenes of quotidian tenderness feel extraordinarily precious. A repairman’s visit, a building supervisor tending the rosebushes, a plumber who arrives to repair a leak, Majdalani’s wife’s attempt to self-therapise—what Beirut 2020 reassembles from the wreckage is a composite image of collective survival, exercises in making sense of incomprehensible suffering:
In the diary’s tonal meanderings, its attentiveness to topography and landscape and “the slow, meticulous sedimentation of time,” I sense at times the spirit of W.G. Sebald—that patron saint of ruins, whose Austerlitz is referenced in a later entry. Majdalani the diarist glimpses, in the bareness of an “ancient mulberry tree,” a “trunk twisted like hands begging for forgiveness”; in “the mountains’ silence,” the “last witnesses of what must have been the planet’s eternal stasis before time and history burst in.” It seems like a posture of near-renunciation, an elegiac longing for the vanished. In Majdalani’s hands, you could call it hope.
Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, Tilted Axis Press, 2021
Review by Fairuza Hanun, Assistant Editor
Geetanjali Shree first debuted into English readership with Mai: Silently Mother (shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award), and soon established a strong voice braided with feminist discourses—rife with tales of motherhood and familial bonds. As Nita Kumar—Mai’s translator—notes in the afterword, within the character of a woman, the character of a mother is prevalent; despite contemporary representations of motherhood extending beyond the gender of woman, patriarchal hierarchical expectations and practices continue to frame women beneath “the idea of giving birth,” child-rearing, and housekeeping. Society constructs that once a woman becomes a mother, their multiplicity is lost to the identity; “mother” is a monolith and a certainty, an ascribed status that follows even after death.
In Tomb of Sand, Shree hardly entertains singular narratives of motherhood, exploring without confines what lies between the binaries of what qualifies a “good” mother or a “bad’’one. Within the family central to the plot, the characters live and breathe politics and socio-political discourses in the everyday—who needs to cook and clean, who gets to go out at certain times of the day, who is permitted to wear what, and how one should behave to another. The text probes and describes the prescribed attitudes in its script of household play. In Mai, Shree prompts the question: “What kind of person is this mother?”, maintaining the connection between the mother’s humanity—her past life which accounts for her present and future. She does it again in Tomb of Sand, this time with a maternal role that has become obsolete with age. The novel inspects how Amma—no longer mother, no longer girl—remains confined in the manipulations of social constructs and the trauma of her youth during the Partition.
The plot of Tomb of Sand is complicated, comparable to the wide-ranging appearances of light as it trickles and moves fluidly between spaces, reaching inward and branching off, yet faithful to its course. Witnessing the many different threads unspooling may confuse readers in their hierarchy, but that might be Shree’s intention—as if to say that each person and thing has importance, and not one story should be missing or unheard. In response to a query as to what makes a character important, the author responds: “The most important character in every person’s life is the thing that they lack.” Language and perspective-play are central elements to the novel, and Shree casts a third person eye over the landscape and the macro, never quite settling comfortably onto one character’s mind and reassessing aspects previously riddled with assumptions.
Peering into the lives of her vast cast, Shree spectates the actions of these people through an objective lens, but when nearing the conclusion, she holds the metaphorical mic to every character’s heart—daughter, son, daughter-in-law, grandson one, grandson two, maid one, two, three, numerous, a guard, an inspector . . . The one conspicuous exception is Rosie Bua, a hijra woman who becomes Amma’s companion and who, intriguingly, does not have passages exclusively “filmed” through her perspective. Rather, she is a recipient of Amma’s love, a giver of love, and an individual of speculation under Amma’s two children: Bade and Beti.
Rosie is regarded by society as a ghost—a “creature” who is neither here nor there, and whose existence is unacknowledged in identification documents and by the authorities. Shree cleverly affects this perception, keeping Rosie just visible enough in the story to disturb Bade and Beti, but enough in their periphery that Rosie seems interchangeable with any other character . . . until the discovery of her mangled, disfigured, dead body. The brutality of the scene shatters the children’s reluctance to accept her, and they, along with Amma, become engulfed in the reality of her existence, the tangibility of her presence, and the realisation that she was neither ghost nor wraith, but human all along.
Following her husband’s death, Amma’s grief binds her to both a metaphorical and a literal corner; she runs away, is eventually found, and relocated to be kept in Beti’s house for a change of pace. With Beti and Amma’s relationship redefined, Rosie becomes a form of escapism. When she passes away, we learn of her parting wish: that Amma would go to Pakistan to confront her teenage trauma, replete with the confusion of bloodbaths, betrayals, and a lifelong censorship of literature, art, and speech.
At its core, Tomb of Sand is interested in the identity politics entangled within the familial system. Shree interrogates the womanhood lost in motherhood, the longings and desires for self-reclamation after the obsolescence of maternal responsibility, depression in grief, the aging body considered as “crippled,” national and gender identity, femininity under the expectation of “parent-rearing,” and the tender role-reversals as a child adopts the manners of a mother. In a chapter depicting Bade’s longing for Amma, Shree writes:
Shree’s prose exposes us to colourful sensations, spilling with visual depictions, tastes, scents, and sounds. It is a rich net capturing every ripple in the universe, with nothing escaping it. Every word is weighty. After an impactful sentence, Shree goes on to dismantle its meaning, serving fresh new expressions, metaphors, and surrealism that leaves the reader contemplating the language. Hindi words, such as quotes from celebrities and references to pop culture, emerge on the page occasionally in an original reinterpretation of how faithfulness should be defined in the writing’s translation from Hindi to English. Rhythmic choices become a rule-breaking playground for witty wordplay, intertwining the original and the translation. Though this playfulness comes across as humorous even amidst sombre topics, utmost care and sensitive social awareness constitute the underlying approach in Shree’s diligent criticisms of traditions, duties, roles, and social realities.
Culture, traditions, and predetermined societal scripts, memorised by heart—Tomb of Sand is steeped in the grief and the slow healing familiar to femininity. As we trace Amma’s present towards her reckoning, then onwards to the past she chooses to brave, we undergo the healing ourselves, finding partial closure in familiar scenes that resonate with beautiful intimacy. Above all, we are compelled to re-evaluate what it means to be a woman, a mother, and a feminist, through stories that “create meaning as they move along.”
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog:
Contributors:- Alex Tan
, - Fairuza Hanun
; Languages: - French
, - Hindi
; Places: - India
, - Lebanon
; Writers: - Charif Majdalani
, - Geetanjali Shree
; Tags: - Beirut 2020 explosion
, - diary
, - disaster
, - Indian Partition
, - motherhood
, - recovery
, - social commentary
, - trauma
, - womanhood