Writing Pretty: On Self-Cannibalism and Disfigured Tongues

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay brings to the fore a condition that afflicts the tongues of those of us attempting to speak: through bearing witness so that history will not forget us, we consume ourselves beyond recognition or repair. Drawing on my interior life as Lebanese, Arab, Arab-American and a former journalist, I make the case that the near-universal framing of ongoing crises in Lebanon as unprecedented enables, and indeed makes necessary, witnessing outside history. This essay makes plain passions and superlatives, endemic to our language as writers in and of English, which amputate the very possibility of a collective. Nowhere is this more at play than in the plethora of first-person witnessing and personal essays following the 4 August 2020 port bombing of Beirut. Ultimately, this essay raises the question of how, and whether it is possible, to speak without consuming the self. As a means of redressing that question, this essay espouses the language of those doing the living, or ‘surviving.’ It does not feature translations. To borrow from Toni Morrison, this essay does not speak for, nor does it speak to. It speaks among.