Shattered truths

I write in fragments of narrative, mostly non-linear. It is not a conscious choice. I try to write a conventional narrative, but my mind rebels. I desperately want to prove to myself that I have the patience, and skill, to sit on my computer long enough to write a traditional narrative. But, other than a few short stories (longer vignettes?), I fail miserably. I might as well start writing in Swahili.

I am the product of two major disasters (three, if you count my allegedly romantic relationship with the one who shall remain nameless): the Lebanese civil war and the Aids epidemic in San Francisco. Friends and relatives were dying at a furious pace in San Francisco and Beirut. As an Aids emotional support volunteer, I listened to men desperately trying to tell me their life stories, and I heard it all in short pieces.

Every time I got together with a dying man, he would begin his life story again, from a different point of view, from a different time. I usually saw the whole picture, but received it piecemeal. I came to know them intimately in a short period of time. The way I heard those stories inspired me to write about Sarah, who tries to tell her story in I, The Divine, but doesn't get very far before abandoning every effort.

Everything I remember about the civil war comes in bits and pieces. I recall, for example, how I stood on the roof of a building watching militias fight a few neighbourhoods away. I remember being shot at. I remember cowering in bed, but having to pretend I was fine so my parents did not find out I had been on the roof. I do not remember how I left the roof. I remember practically nothing else from my 13th year (1973, two years before the war openly broke out). That incident overpowers the rest of my memories.

Those two catastrophes influenced my artistic style (both painting and writing); but were they the cause of my needing to write in vignettes? Contemporary Lebanese writers do not write in fragments, and most Aids writing takes the form of conventional memoirs, so causality cannot be deduced. In Lebanese writing, and most writing actually, the continuity of time is paramount. In mine, it isn't.

Here's what I think. Because of my experiences, my perception of time is altered (The French philosopher Simone Weil says that man's tragedy is that he submits to something that does not exist: time.) Time becomes both terribly important and irrelevant. In my mind's eye, I remember the sound of a missile before it hit, I remember the faces of my family, the trembling of the dog, the shaking of the ficus in its pot, and even the changing light. My memory believes the missile's flight lasted over three minutes, but logic dictates it couldn't have been more than a few seconds, if that. Edmund Husserl, a leader of the German phenomenological school of philosophy, writes about this effect, the difference between objective and subjective time.

But did all of us in the war zone experience time similarly? I think not. And more important, do only war or crisis survivors experience time as non-continuous? In fact, the Cuban-born, Italian writer Italo Calvino - who experienced a different set of wartime horrors - writes in If On A Winter's Night, A Traveler (a novel of first chapters): "Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can discover the continuity of time only in the novels of the period when time no longer stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years."

I believe I write the way I do because of my personal makeup. It is the combination of my experiences, my perception, and everything that I am that forces me to tell stories in pieces and not in conventional narrative. I don't think I can say that I write what I do because growing up in Beirut forced me to.

Now, I have to admit that I feel slightly threatened by the categorisations (diasporic, fragmented, Lebanese mind) because I see myself being pigeonholed as a gimmicky, postmodernist writer, and Lebanese to boot. In the cliches, I hear my work being filed away as microculturespecific, not universal, less relevant than traditional linear novels by writers whose cultures were never shattered.

I want to scream that I am a story-teller. I swear I am. I might be fragmented but I still tell stories. After all, I grew up on the tales of Scheherazade, long Egyptian movies, and racy novels (When I was a young teenager, I was infatuated with the books of Harold Robbins, a much-maligned oeuvre, whose value to sexually deprived teenagers is under-appreciated. The sweeping emotional dramas, the grand betrayals, the triumph of good, and such delightful sentences as: "She stroked his penis with two fingers", were perfect reading when I was 14.) I set out to tell a complete story within a set of smaller pieces.