To Be in a State of War

In the wake of his wife’s death from a stray bullet in Beirut, a retired philosophy professor struggles to wrest meaning from his loss. Images of rubble and perennial plants recur in “To Be in a State of War,”  which conjures up a city around a grieving man — a city that hovers between wreckage and resilience, between East and West, while the philosopher loosens and turns over assumed truths in his mind.

Written by Alexei Perry Cox and appearing first in Rusted Radishes, this is a spatially-oriented story that reflects the place it portrays in its very diction. The English text is interspersed with Arabic words, conscious of the multiplicity of its audience.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights
 

Let’s go back to the beginning.
 

In those days, as the story goes, the world was at war; and when there’s war, things take on a different shape. The air was different, the people were different, and the smells were different. War smells like the absence of the things you once loved. I long for the smell of pine sap and the fragrance of incense that surrounded the Villa Gardenia. War becomes the ghost of, say, a construction worker that seeps into people’s clothes and walks among them. It becomes different but not uncommon. War itself doesn’t often resemble its own name. Everyone thought it would be like the war tales of their ancestors where mighty armies were defeated and victors went into bright, new offices. This was not to be. That’s why we’d left in the first place.

Because we were smarter than them. So we’d taken our studying to the Sorbonne and learned everything there was to know about Kafka and Akhmatova and Camus. Then we gave voice to the new works of Mahmoud Darwish and Najiba Ahmad when they came out as if they were our own. We even took them to Beirut and held conferences at the AUB on La terre nous est étroite and The Poetics of Politics — or had it been The Politics of Poetics? We had panel discussions and taught lectures. Then we had children and wine and more dialogue. Ghazala even planted gardenia on our balcony in Ashrafieh so she could pick petals for the girls’ bedsides in the mornings before they woke. So we had that too.

Everyone warned us not to return. In places like Barcelona and New York, former colleagues told us not to come back to this zone where we had always lived before we’d never wanted