House of Stone: The Work of Anthony Shadid

Before this week begins in earnest, and my assumptions about Lebanon collapse in the face of direct experience, it’s worth taking stock of the little I think I know about this place. I have a rough sense of Lebanon’s recent history, of the turbulence that has engulfed it for the past four decades, but it’s difficult to really keep track of all the overlapping intrigues, plots, and wars that have played out here simultaneously since the 1970’s. My awareness of what’s happened here has been shaped largely by two formidable journalists who’ve had long and storied careers as foreign correspondents, Robert Fisk of the Independent and the late Anthony Shadid of the NYT and the Washington Post. They’re both truly inspiring journalists, with huge bodies of work, but neither is particularly objective when it comes to the Middle East. I’ll get to Fisk later in the week, but for the moment I’d like to share the passage below from Anthony Shadid, who passed away this year from an acute asthma attack while covering the current uprising in Syria. He was Lebanese by heritage, but born and raised in America, and had just recently published his latest book called House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East. I have not read it, but it’s a story of his attempt to rebuild his ancestral home in Lebanon. Hadani Ditmar at the Globe and Mail wrote this about it:

“Lebanese-American journalist Anthony Shadid’s House of Stone could easily have been subtitled maktoub. The Arabic word for destiny looms large in the subtext of the late New York Times correspondent’s writing. Not only does his drive to repair his ancestral house in Lebanon amid the political wake of Rafic Hariri’s assassination – the narrative thrust of the memoir – mirror his grandparents’ immigrant odyssey to the United States in a reverse voyage of return, but every passage lovingly describing a detail of Levantine architecture, or the olives in the garden he’s restoring that he hopes to harvest one day with his young daughter, aches with a premonitory sadness.”

Sounds like something worth picking up. Democracy Now published an excerpt from it after his death, which you can read in full here and which is quoted below:

"The Arabic language evolved slowly across the millennia, leaving little undefined, no nuance shaded. Bayt translates literally as house, but its connotations resonate beyond rooms and walls, summoning longings gathered about family and home. In the Middle East, bayt is sacred. Empires fall. Nations topple. Borders may shift or be realigned. Old loyalties may dissolve or, without warning, be altered. Home, whether it be structure or familiar ground, is, finally, the identity that does not fade."

Anthony Shadid
1968-2012

I’m a big fan of exiled writers detailing the inevitable decline of the forlorn and threadbare identities of their ancestors… Looks like I’ll have to pick this book up. Rest in peace Anthony Shadid.