Mere words, you say?

How many ways can you say the word ‘love’? In Arabic, Abbas El-Zein tells us in his memoir Bullet Paper Rock (2024), there are at least twenty-five, perhaps up to one hundred, words that express love in all its shades. The word jawa, for instance, refers to ‘alternating states of hope and despondency that a lover endures’. More than a word with a double meaning, it points to another kind of dynamic: the emotional tides typical of a lover’s conundrums about their beloved. Hope and despondency may initially strike us as incompatible, even oppositional, in meaning, yet they are less so than they appear. For El-Zein, expressions of love also contain ‘the possibility of [love’s] deficit, of a certain fragility inherent to the utterance’. In jawa, this four-letter container, we see mirrored back the tenuous fulfilment of love El-Zein describes. Just as love can be reciprocated and fulfilled, it can also be undercut and anguished by the prospect of its own defeat.  

In Bullet Paper Rock, El-Zein further maps the amatory pivoting between hope and its inversions (disappointment, failure, and defeat) onto the affective condition of the migrant. Negated forms of hope, El-Zein suggests throughout the memoir, become emblematic of his experiences of dislocation, from leaving his home country of Lebanon for Europe, before finally emigrating to Australia. These are separations from locations of love (as Omar Kasmani has characterised the intimate dynamics of migration), but, particularly in the case of El-Zein’s departure from his birthplace of Beirut in the 1980s, locations of love shadowed by his witnessing of ‘barely believable levels of violence over the last half century’. For El-Zein, the abiding economic and political conditions that inform the decision to emigrate – whether voluntary or coerced, and sometimes carried out to traumatic ends – reveal hope to be a structure of feeling shot through with internal tensions, rather than being impelled by banal optimism alone. ‘History is something you endure, and if you’re lucky, survive’, El-Zein writes; ‘escaping it is usually not on the menu’. The history in El-Zein’s memoir arises as an entwined record – of love wrought with violence. It is a record in which hope and its close cousins, faith and desire, make the endurance El-Zein speaks of possible. 

Bullet Paper Rock doesn’t directly pick up from where El-Zein’s first memoir, Leave to Remain (2009), ends so much as provide an addendum. In Leave to Remain, he chronicled his upbringing in Beirut amidst the Lebanese civil war, interspersing this with stories of his extended family and ancestors, including the ‘irreversible’ yet ‘irresistible’ decision he makes to leave Lebanon – first to Southampton to pursue postgraduate studies in engineering, and where he also began writing his novel Tell the Running Water (2001). In the mid-nineties, after short stints in Paris and back in Beirut, El-Zein, with the help of a skilled migrant visa, moved to Sydney and ‘a continent one does not return from’. He has lived there since, working currently as professor of environmental engineering at the University of Sydney. In Leave to Remain, El-Zein compared migration to ‘mutilation or amputation’, but of what exactly? Nothing less than the migrant’s very self, the book suggests. For El-Zein, the narrative of migration is fundamentally one of the self’s untimely foreclosure. It leads him to characterise his own emigration as a form of ‘symbolic death’: ‘my disappearance from my country’s mind’.  

Where Bullet Paper Rock differs is in El-Zein’s theorisation and adoption of a form he calls the ‘literary foray’. The book gathers over seventy of these ‘literary forays’: essentially autobiographical essays, some less than a page in length, others much longer, featuring photos from El-Zein’s family album and facsimiles of Arabic literary manuscripts, including Ibn Hazm’s eleventh-century treatise on love, The Ring of the Dove. While the foray shares a number of attributes with the essay, El-Zein explains that the former is ‘less meandering’, propelled instead by an ‘anxious urgency’. Echoing the terms he previously used to describe his experience of migration, the foray ‘expects difficulty, hostility, even possible defeat and symbolic death’. 

To speculate on the differences between the foray and the essay for a moment, we might say that one distinction lies in how each approaches endings. In ‘The Essay as Form’, Theodor Adorno argues the essay ‘stops where it feels itself complete – not where there is nothing left to say’. The foray, on the other hand, writes El-Zein, ‘desires […] above all, a homecoming’. In the archetypal migrant plot, driven by an often redemptive teleology, the idea of homecoming can be identified with a mode of completion, achieved by the migrant’s successful cultural assimilation into their host nation. But I think this weary cliché is undercut by El-Zein’s privileging of the plot of ‘desire’ over that of fulfilment. Perhaps this way of defining the foray puts pressure on the possibility of ever truly arriving at an ending, of ‘feeling [oneself] complete’. We might say this pressure is exerted throughout the memoir precisely because El-Zein temporalises structures of loss and separation, underlining migrancy as an interminable negotiation from one generation to the next.  

El-Zein’s autobiography of dislocation is also an account of finding a mode of expression expansive enough to tell the tale of ‘whether bonds of kith and kin, of culture and mother tongues, can survive distance’. He weaves the tale together by drawing on the knowledges held within his mother tongue, Arabic, alongside his experiences as a non-native speaker of English and, to a lesser extent, French. Several of the short essays – or rather forays – making up the memoir explore the etymologies and the often competing meanings of Arabic words and phrases. ​​For instance, while mona is an Arabic root word meaning ‘wish’, it also gives rise to mouni’ya, which has a radically different meaning (‘befall’). Like the dashed hopes of a lover, or the migrant’s desire for homecoming, we are reminded that a wish, too, is a kind of wager. Terms like ‘hope’, ‘desire’, and ‘wish’ certainly share a sentimental appeal for the author, to the extent that there can be a slippery interchangeability in how they are invoked. Melancholic suspension; the contrastive pathos of the paths a life takes and those rendered impossible because of circumstance, choice, chance – these seem to be these words’ common affective register. So much so that it seems more than a coincidence when El-Zein tells us Mona is also the name of his childhood ‘almost-friend’, a high-school classmate he met in Beirut in 1974. Out of touch for years, El-Zein finds out about her death from a mutual friend. In that word ‘almost’, there is a semblance of a wish befallen, without a direction to go. 

Later in the memoir, El-Zein’s descriptions of his ‘linguistic insecurity’ about his ‘non-native tongue’ English (‘a colonial language, true, but not my colonisers’, he adds) ostensibly provides a first-hand case of the anxieties of speaking what Rey Chow calls a ‘delegated’ language. Chow explains that it is precisely this delegated language’s ‘woeful approximation’ of the tongue of the ‘native speaker’ that signifies the non-native speaker’s ‘incomplete assimilation’. In Leave to Remain, El-Zein had written that the survival strategy of the migrant is to ‘[grow] body parts’ as ‘compensation’ for the losses incurred by displacement. New ears, new eyes, new tongues. But the latter, he concedes, ‘are harder to come by’. This metaphor is picked up again in Bullet Paper Rock, where English, as his second language, remains perpetually a ‘prosthetic’ rather than ‘a limb one is born with’ – an artificial addition that is never fully naturalised. (Prosthesis is also a linguistics term, referring to the sound or syllable that is added before a word without changing its meaning.) By characterising English as a ‘prosthetic’, El-Zein offers an oblique questioning of linguistic ownership: does being born into a language make one its rightful speaker? A less generous reader might wonder if El-Zein defers to these binary categories – language as ‘native’ or ‘non-native’; as ‘prosthetic’ or ‘limb’ – too easily. As Abdelkebir Khatibi wrote, ‘language belongs to no one […] In my mother tongue, didn’t I grow up as an adopted child?’ I am more inclined to suggest that El-Zein, like Khatibi, is gesturing to the idea that language, in any case, is never inherently ‘native’ to any speaker, culture, or nation to begin with – it is always prosthetic, delegated, an incomplete approximation. To go further, we might say that El-Zein’s mother tongue Arabic lives in the terrain of what Khatibi calls the ‘midground’ between languages. Indeed, how does the idea of the ‘native speaker’ hold up in light of the fact that Arabic, as El-Zein says, is already a hybrid language of ‘absorptive capacity’, taking in words from French, English, Italian, Turkish, and Persian?  

El-Zein’s fascination with etymology, which might also strike the reader as a search for an ever-illusory ground of meaning – a search that, at least at face value, parallels the foray’s (and the migrant’s) desire for homecoming – can also be read another way. If anything, he wants to direct our attention to the social, and especially racialised, vectors that shape and overwrite language. In a passage titled ‘Jihaad in Europe’, El-Zein recalls a 2012 incident at an airport where a Lebanese couple was violently attacked by security after the wife’s calling out of her husband’s first name, Jihaad, was misinterpreted as a ‘war cry’. El-Zein follows this passage by pointing out jihaad, far from its commonly held religious connotations, can be etymologically traced to juhd, the root of mujtahid, a word for a religious scholar, and thus ‘lends itself to non-violent interpretations’. These two passages would stand as bare counterpoints to each other, if not for a telling autobiographical detail a few pages later that brings them into dialectical relation. El-Zein describes his feelings of double consciousness, precisely because as an Arabic speaker in Australia, he is perceived to speak an ‘enemy language’. ‘My alien self can sometimes be heard’, he says. Yet in the same breath, El-Zein swiftly overturns, and in fact rejects, any suggestion that migrant self-recognition is entirely a process of self-estrangement. Speaking Arabic represents ‘double restitution’ – a personal defiance, in the first instance, of the ‘prejudice inflicted on the language by the world’ and secondly, of ‘[his] own self-consciousness when speaking it’. 

And there are more ways of expressing defiance. Words like imaan, ‘faith’, appeal to El-Zein not only because of their linguistic intricacies (it shares the same root as amaan, ‘safety’) but also because they double as metaphors of transformative action. Arabic serves as the ‘principal vehicle’ through which faith, as a social relation, is expressed and transformed into a ‘peculiar form of love’. El-Zein is undoubtedly alert to the lived, prejudicial consequences of racialisation and imperialism that undercut experiences of speaking Arabic in English-predominant countries. Yet he insists on underscoring the more compelling narrative of the intimate, often familial, lifeworlds created by Arabic’s circulation and generational transmission that make it, for El-Zein, the utmost expression and translation (from the Latin ferre, ‘to bear, carry, suffer, endure’) of love.  

But, as El-Zein reiterates, to talk about love is to talk about its ‘fragility’, ‘negation’, and ‘deficit’, which cannot be evacuated from the material grounds of historical reality. There is no greater and lasting shadow cast over his memoir than ‘the unloved century that has made [his] world’. It is a history that El-Zein weaves into Bullet Paper Rock through litanies of statistics and unadorned facts – dates and descriptions of wars and invasions; of injuries and fatalities; of ‘the world’s capacity for hubris and violence’ – effectively tracing the major geopolitical events in Lebanon and the broader Mediterranean over the past half century. In a section sharing the book’s title, El-Zein takes us through a condensed history of a one-hundred-kilometre stretch of Mediterranean coastline, from Tyre in south Lebanon up to the town of Zouk Mikael – a history bookended by the Israeli military raid on Beirut in April 1973 and the assassination of Lebanon’s prime minister Rafic Hariri in 2005. It was along this stretch of coastline that El-Zein, as a student at the American University of Beirut in the 1980s, witnessed ‘some of the most memorable spectacles of violence’ first-hand. It also provides a personal, affective map of the ‘incongruous’ ways history – for El-Zein, a ‘preordained’ process of persistent violence – coincides with daily life. These incongruities parallel the melancholic pivots throughout the memoir – love redirected by its deficit, desire superseded by loss – behind which lies El-Zein’s tacit mourning and longing for the ‘larger, richer selves one has nipped in the bud’ and what ‘one has failed to become’, that is, the foreclosures on a life in the wake of the violent, cyclical processes of history he describes. ‘How does one find hope amidst such devastation?’ he asks, reflecting on the scale of atrocities over the past two decades, events that now make the Lebanese civil war ‘look like a mere rehearsal’.  

Reading this section, I was reminded of the primary definition of a ‘foray’ as ‘a hostile or predatory incursion or inroad, a raid’. There is, then, a certain correspondence between the protracted imperial forays into Lebanon El-Zein meticulously narrates, and the narrative form he has chosen. Perhaps the literary foray reflexively gestures, in its name and modality, to ‘using one’s own life experience as the material evidence […] for one’s ideas about the world’, as El-Zein writes in the epilogue. Ostensibly, all autobiographical acts make this endeavour. Yet the material evidence El-Zein gathers from his life is a history that did not begin during his lifetime. Nor does it end at the memoir’s conclusion in December 2023, with his reports on Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine, scenes of pro-Palestine demonstrations across Europe, and students in American universities being doxxed. The unloved century continues well beyond its final pages. What El-Zein brings to bear on the foray is the necessary and not-small task of the memoirist as a witness to their own life in dialogue with the violent process of history; it’s in the context of such a dialogue – between singular and collective, inner and outer – that hope can be characterised as a ‘one-sided cessation of hostilities’.  

And there is another, intrinsically autobiographical, articulation of desire that is projected onto El-Zein’s foray. When, in the epilogue, El-Zein slips in the loaded question ‘What is the “I” made of?’, he appears to refute, by way of Merve Emre’s article on Western traditions of the personal essay, the genre’s enchanting ‘fiction of private individuality’. This is what my ‘I’ is made of instead, El-Zein suggests throughout the book: intimate relations engendered by desire, alongside hope, love, and faith as carried through his familial lineage. Amidst the devastations of the past century, consolation can still be found by El-Zein in the ‘faces of loved ones, near and far’ – in his mother and her sisters, Jameeleh and Safyeh, for instance, ‘whose fabric of choice was hope’ in weaving ‘viable lives’. When El-Zein recalls his childhood memory of a space made of ‘words, chandeliers, and the rustling sound of paper’, where he could ‘speak [to his father] about matters they otherwise did not know how to speak about’, I cannot help but think that the literary foray continues to extend this desire. What else is El-Zein’s own ‘fabric of choice’ but the literary foray itself, woven out of the material evidence gathered from his lifetime and beyond, and demanding to speak matters left unspoken? Such matters – ‘angst, and fear, and the violence of the world […] loss, desire, and hope’ – are difficult to speak about precisely because they cannot be shielded from historical and present-day catastrophes. Yet, however fragile in the face of genocidal war and dislocation, hope, love, desire, and faith are more than mere words – they are, El-Zein seems to say, the warp and weft of his own viable life.