The Brooklyn Rail

War, like water, has been a constant in Tarek El-Ariss’s life. It has been the source of his emotional growth, the substance of his core identity. But unlike the reliable fluidity of water, time and time again, war and conflict have usurped the cadence of El-Ariss’s life in striking yet familiar ways. It hasn’t been until now that El-Ariss, born in Beirut and raised in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War, has acknowledged the deep-rooted reverberations from various crises, like his separation from his mother or the chaotic aftermath of 9/11. In his newly released memoir, Water on Fire: A Memoir of War, El-Ariss seeks to find the cornerstone of the political, the personal, and the historical as a form of healing. In the process, he reveals how loss and trauma have led him down an enlightening path of cultural queerness and independence, two characteristics among many that define his unabating devotion to truth and light.

Told in twelve chapters of his life, the memoir is at once a bildungsroman and a regional account of the biblical, mythical, and historical characters that have defined the Arab culture. Like patches from a battered quilt, El-Ariss reveals vivid memories set in the kitchen of his childhood home, the refuge of beach resorts, and the thuggish roads of Beirut. We get a sense of a curious boy in a French school in Beirut, a daring young adult exploring the edges of philosophy in Abidjan, West Africa and an academic looking to foster a community of intellectual curiosity. These stories are also reflective of personalities that have defined El-Ariss, like his tender relationship with his nanny, Bahieh, or his father and his self-assured attitudes, or the gangster-like lover he took on during college. Like photographs pulled from a dusty shoebox, in sepia and grainy texture, each is a beautiful snapshot of El-Ariss’s darkest and most turbulent experiences, told with an emotional and kind sincerity that appears forgiving towards a younger, more rattled El-Ariss just struggling to survive.

Indeed, survival is at the heart of El-Ariss and this new memoir. There’s a kind of precocious maturity with which El-Ariss carries himself as a boy. He’s aware of the bombings, the political insecurities, the ever-increasing diminishing of necessary goods and services. But he’s also incredibly cognizant of the struggle to survive as a Beiruti in a continuously war-torn country; a devotion so fervently anchored in cultural pride that for El-Ariss’s family and friends, to pretend the war doesn’t exist is symbolic of one’s (and perhaps, the country’s) own survival. In “Sediments,” El-Ariss explores the emotional complexity of water and its multidimensionality with which he regarded the life source growing up. “To this day, the very sight of water brings joy to my heart,” he writes. “Water, due to its scarcity perhaps, was the language of play and love, and the container of early memories and lasting desire.” In his building, El-Ariss took on the role of distributing water to his neighbors, creating a business-like operation of survival, assuring those he loved and respected that they would indeed be fine. It was a righteous form of rebellion and personal agency, as El-Ariss and those around him staked a claim against the heightening probability of deadly war. He draws from the biblical resonance of water and his own mother’s naturalistic habits of collecting it to portray a people clinging to the one thing they are entitled to: life and its source.

But if survival is at the heart of El-Ariss, then stories are at his soul. “Crisis mode is in my DNA,” he writes. As a boy, El-Ariss immersed himself in French literature and Arab films, while his father’s imaginative sense of humor provided the family with emotional refuge. As a family, they told stories to fragment their reality, to try to accept and acknowledge the darkness of their circumstances without looking directly into its frightful eyes. They told stories to survive. “Perhaps the only way we can talk about war is when we can write it as a spy novel and insert ourselves into its pages,” El-Ariss writes. When he was a young boy, El-Ariss was enrolled in Mission Laïque Française, a reputable French school in Beirut. (“My family, like many others, took pride in French education.”) Not seen as a colonist force, Western influence in Lebanon at the time was increasingly regarded as cultural, educational, and even maternal. “To many, France had given birth to modern Lebanon, to its borders and outlooks, even before the country became a French protectorate in 1920,” writes El-Ariss. With half his family being half-American and the totem pole-like presence of French culture, El-Ariss developed a dual identity, one that was anchored in the treachery of Middle Eastern conflict, the other in what was seen as the glamor and sophistication of the West. The latter always held a mystifying promise for El-Ariss, one that would carry well into the rest of his life.

The stories that El-Ariss shares are indicative not only of a young boy’s emotional truth, but also of the Middle East’s social and political disintegration. They lay bare the prickly texture of geographies at once in love and at war with each other—a region left uprooted by the fall of the Ottoman Empire and further unbalanced by the Arab Cold War and the birth of the state of Israel. In the chapter “My Syrian Mother,” El-Ariss explores the emotional consequences of being cared for by his Syrian nanny. In a scene in which his nanny cuts his cuticles, El-Ariss reflects, “The relation between Syria and Lebanon, involving ripping and trying to break free, carving up and cutting, was playing out in our household.” This moment of self-awareness, acknowledging the irony of the microcosm playing out in his home, becomes a thread throughout the memoir. “The cutting is about Lebanon and Syria, my nanny and me, and about love and violence and stories that explain relationships … from that golden village of my childhood.” Cutting, then, becomes a source of storytelling, a painful rite of passage for accessing “some leftover love or hatred or attachment that lingers, encroaches, erupts … Did I mention that ‘cutting’ and ‘storytelling’ are the same word in Arabic (qass)?”

This penchant for storytelling, magnetic symbolism, and its allegories have been a longtime interest for El-Ariss, but never a professional endeavor. Scholarship and academia have given him the foundation for a career rich in political literature, research, and teaching. In fact, Water on Fire’s language often oscillates between sentimentalism, nostalgia, and sober scholarship. But his work centers primarily on visual and cultural studies—language, arts, and the community are all examined under modernity. His books, such as Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political, and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age, have helped land him tenured gigs at the University of Texas and Dartmouth College, where he is now the Chair of Middle Eastern studies. While he had often dreamed of writing novels and even a memoir, it wasn’t until early 2019, when he was invited to give a lecture at the Sharjah Art Foundation on time and memory, that El-Ariss found himself looking inward and examining moments that revealed as much about his transformation as a person as they did about Lebanon’s transformation as a nation. The discussion, “Holding Time: History, Fiction, Experience” explored how memory and reflection can be a narrative portal for personal and historical conflict and was perhaps the first time he felt propelled to engage with the concept of memory in a way that wasn’t purely academic. He ended up writing a piece that examined how his family struggled to survive the immediacy of war in seventies Lebanon by living a blissfully ignorant life on the beaches of Beirut. “We defied the water, electricity, and fuel shortages and confronted the violence with illusory courage and obstinate joie de vivre.” This would become “The Beachcombers,” the second chapter in the memoir.

Still, the idea of writing a memoir felt far-fetched and deserved only when he was retired. But when the first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns happened, El-Ariss was brought back to his family sheltering during the Civil War, a time of deep uncertainty and great fear. “We didn’t know if we were going to survive this or not,” he told me over Zoom. “We didn’t know if we were going to have access to water, food, all the things that we relied on.” El-Ariss’s reflex against the media confusion and wave of polarizing restrictions was to write. He carved out memories rich with poignant scenes and scents that, upon reflecting, mirrored the crises playing out in the world. By the time he decided there was enough to pursue a memoir, he applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship and was given a one year leave of absence from Cornell. The period of time, a catalyst of energy and creativity for many artists around the world, was also emotionally fraught. Scientific and medical shortcomings were an incendiary for political power, economic restructuring, and social upheaval. Within the first six months of the pandemic, George Floyd was murdered and a global wildfire of rage and frustration was ignited. Locked within the confines of one’s own home, writing felt not only intuitive but also reactionary. Like the protests visible on streets and social media channels, writing became a form of reflection, frustration, and action. And though El-Ariss never drew directly from the events shaping that year, it’s clear that Water on Fire subtly nods at the structural injustices and the complex ways people choose to survive and affront those realities.

The trajectory of El-Ariss’s life has forced him to experience the crude vileness of Islamophobia and prejudice, perhaps heightened by his emotional and spiritual connection to the West and his own queerness. In “Hotel Ivoire,” El-Ariss writes with gentle vindictiveness about his pride in assuming his multiculturalism while in high school in Abidjan, West Africa. In the “Little Paris of Africa,” he found refuge among students like him who had American blood, or European parents, or Middle Eastern upbringings—young folks who were bound not by the cultural dictations of a single country, but by varying blends of different nationalities. Slowly but surely El-Ariss attempts to shed his most shameful and traumatizing parts by accepting the virtues he’s always admired. “I was also disowning the mother who had let go of me,” he confesses. Indeed, as a teenager struggling to survive the ramification of a life-fracturing war, El-Ariss admits himself to the world’s most enticing, illuminating, and even dangerous tides that test your love and devotion with “hallways that meander and lead to inner gardens where secrets and bodies are exposed.”

In “Thugs,” the language with which he accentuates early adulthood rebellion mirrors the angst, rage, and titillating anxiety so fervent in one’s early twenties. His college years in Beirut paralleled the years in which Lebanon confronted the uneasy aftermath of the war, a time in which both personal and structural changes were led by a restless energy to make sense of the last decade. El-Ariss, in his own words, adopts the personality of a rugged thug, constantly challenging social norms and provoking the citizen to think beyond. He takes on a like-minded lover and together, with the world at their fingertips, they set out on a philosophical journey drunk on idealism and sexual liberation. “We were purposefully seeking to violate public morality, to shock, tease, play. We were soldiers of philosophy, thugs from West Beirut, insisting on the heroic life, the authentic life that we had convinced ourselves of leading.”

It is only in 2001 that El-Ariss becomes the amalgamation of the pieces shattered across the world throughout his lifetime. In the spring of that year he began psychoanalysis, and in the fall experienced the polarizing confusion of post-9/11. As a professor and academic of Middle Eastern studies at NYU, El-Ariss knew immediately that the mission wasn’t to teach or explain or even defend. “The first time I came to class after 9/11,” he told me, “I sat with them and I was one of them. I was just a New Yorker like them. And the first important thing was to say, I identify with you, we’re here together, we’re in the same boat here.” “On 9/11” feels like the most tender and perhaps most recent chapter of all. It is at once vulnerable and proud, sensitive, and sensible. This kind of affinity for intellectual compassion has, in large part, carried him to where he is today, Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth, co-teaching a course with the Chair of Jewish Studies (“The Arab, The Jew, and the Construction of Modernity”). It is with a kind of emotional dexterity that El-Ariss has not only faced his thorny past but also that of his surroundings: the stories that not only helped him survive and evolve but also the stories that shape the fabric of our society, the conflicts that tear it up, and the communities that help stitch it back together.

There’s no doubt that El-Ariss is a child of war. “This experience of war is kind of a loop,” El-Ariss tells me. “It keeps playing. It takes different shapes and forms but you can’t step out of it and the region can’t step out of it either.” He’s been cradled, coddled, tormented, and brought up by its cyclicality. To read Water on Fire is to peek into the storied soul of a radically optimistic scholar whose skin has been toughened by scars of conflict. It’s as much his story as that of the countless war survivors of the world who continue to ground themselves with that similar mindset required of being a student of the world—the love for life emboldened by the darkness and light we see everyday. And for El-Ariss, it’s about the duality present in water. It burns and keeps you warm, but it nourishes and vitalizes.