Illness Writing and Revolution, Converging Narratives: The Year in Lebanon

Abstract

For over four centuries, Lebanon was shackled to the Ottoman Empire, whose later decline was described by nineteenth-century commentators as the “Sick Man of Europe.” This epithet is one of many disease metaphors that may serve to gauge the social, even somatic damages inflicted by repressive political systems. A longstanding acquiescence in a corrupt, factional status quo, rooted in sectarian leaders’ promises of protection—from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire to present-day Lebanon (Hamzeh)—festered into the unprecedented nationwide revolution that swept the country in October 2019. The year 2019–2020 therefore brimmed with new and established voices— Lebanese journalists, activists, essayists, writers, and translators calling for a paradigm shift from subservience to subversion. Overall, their ethnographic texts, cultural essays, memoirs, feature stories, and poetry write, rather than write about, the recent experiences of oppression, uprising, and defiance in a country on the tenterhooks of change. By assembling and apprising narratives that range from a gendered revolution to the crippling pandemic, this intersectional medical/cultural approach may enhance the understanding and development of lifewriting studies as a vehicle for addressing and redressing the ills that surround us.