Exile Below Zero

Description

And she says to her, “Goodbye, who says ‘I love you’?”… And in the space between the nights of her wound and the days of her collapse, that princess of sorrow, Beirut, slips away from her. Exile greets you with the warmth of a slap, embraces you to her breast studded with nails, and takes you through booby-trapped joys, then lets you settle in your quiet lair between the teeth of the saw of displacement… So you ask with anguish: Who will return my coffin to Beirut? She leaves it, and it haunts her. Those who have been intoxicated by Beirut and its love know that it will inhabit them the moment they cease to dwell there. I wake up in the morning at the station of oblivion, my head a blank slate. The train of the Princess of Sorrow passes me, washed clean by tearful rain, and through the windows, the faces of those she loved there stare at me, and those she hated, or imagined she hated… I reach out to touch their half-forgotten features, the dead and the living, but the train continues its mournful journey without a sound, as in nightmares. Before I can call out to one of my murdered loved ones, or respond to another waving his severed hand in an explosion, the train is gone. It melts into the morning European fog. I walk the streets, and Beirut appears before me from every crossroads… and longing cuts me like a withered ear of wheat.” This book is a profound sorrow; we read it as if we are reading the history of our own grief and alienation. We read it in the language of Ghada al-Samman, who speaks out and condemns with a style characterized by dark, satirical irony.