Rebuilding in the field of springs

MEMOIR: House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East, By Anthony Shadid, Granta, 311pp. £14.99

THERE IS a small town in south-eastern Lebanon called Marjayoun, and in 2006 Anthony Shadid, a Lebanese-American war correspondent for the Washington Post, went there. Two years earlier, he had won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the war in Iraq. Now, however, he was not in very good shape. Daily exposure to the worst of the Iraq mess had, not surprisingly, taken a toll that an Arab-American understandably found especially exacting. Earlier, while reporting from Ramallah, an Israeli sniper’s bullet grazed him, and he was still suffering from its effects, physical and otherwise. And his marriage was on the rocks.

Although too worldly in outlook to say so – as well as possessing the good reporter’s aversion to large claims and also being temperamentally disinclined to self-dramatisation – it was as if he had reached a point where making a pilgrimage might well have struck him as a good idea. He needed to be in a different place. Marjayoun was just the spot, not only because of the restorative promise of its name (“field of springs” in English) but also because this was his people’s native place.

This was no journey in search of roots, though; or at least, it was not just that (the author had already been well schooled in family history handed down by the generations of Shadids who had made their way to Oklahoma City, his birthplace). It was also very much in Anthony Shadid’s mind to do something more fundamental than be a tourist in the town his family sprang from, something more intimately related to what he had lately seen of the world. He wanted to register his presence in a constructive way. And he was able to do this literally by making habitable again the house that his great-grandfather had built and which, though neglected, still held its ground.

With a year’s leave from the Post he would see through the twin restoration projects – his own, and that of the house of stone. The latter undertaking would nourish in him the concept of bayt – an Arabic word that is a cognate of sorts of our own dúchas, signifying a complex interaction between blood, soil, family heritage and local community. And his own well-being would enable him to inhabit with heart and head the house’s history, the difficulties and attainments of which not only possess a personal resonance but are emblematic of how problematic the region’s larger inheritances remain.

In one sense, there is an inevitably quixotic element in any attempt at reconstruction. This emerges here not only in Shadid’s accounts of the various frustrations arising out of the physical work itself. Local workmen prove to be a fractious, dilatory and prevaricating lot. And the men of the town, some of them Shadid’s relations, are not much better. Generous with advice and even more so with criticism, their disposition highlights the returnee’s admirable but, to the natives, alien sense of hope and display of purpose. Even the author’s search for building materials, such as his almost fetishistic pursuit of proper tiles in the yards of vendors living off the pickings of ruined Beirut, has an undertone of driven daftness about it. His pilgrimage walks a precarious line between futility and renewal.

And this uncertain path also points to Shadid’s other uncertainties as he negotiates Marjayoun’s daily life and historical legacies as both an insider and an outsider: his learning how to listen and how to speak, how to allow for communal differences even as he regrets them, how to relish those moments when, against the odds, he does feel at home. Managing for the most part to maintain an American can-do approach, Shadid is also sustained by what might be called an affirmative secularism, an outlook that helps him to see that “the craftsman, the artist, the cook, and the silversmith are peacemakers. They instill grace; they lull the world to calm.”

But the scene is Lebanon, and the world there is not calm. Not only does the shadow of civil war disturb and distress the country, but even when hostilities are in abeyance the extreme difficulty in reversing the conditions that will lead to further outbreaks of destruction is constantly on everybody’s mind. These conditions seem like an intentional contravention of the “earth’s yeast” – stone – the commonplace material in which Shadid reposes his faith in the future.

Indeed, his very interesting treatment of the origins of Lebanon’s misfortunes are in the earth, in geography, in the division by the French and British in the calamitous years immediately following the first World War of what had been the Ottoman Empire into states, demarcated by borders drawn in unnatural and unsympathetic straight lines. Marjayoun, for instance, is cut off from its natural hinterland, the Houran, the area where Shadid’s great-grandfather was born. And imaginatively delving into that founding father’s history, House of Stone constructs an attractive, if perhaps too brightly coloured, account of old, easy Ottoman ways, and of “the amalgamation of diversities” that is said to have been the Levant’s primary cultural characteristic. Yet, this imaginative quarrying supplies only one layer of the historical excavation that thoughtfully accompanies the rebuilding of the house. To it, Shadid carefully adds a course of his family’s American history; and on top of that he lays the somewhat thinner but no less essential level of his own story as a professional witness to history.

The final structure is flexible, illuminating and distinctive, a living blueprint of a work of rescue and commemoration, “a gesture to history and memory, in the name of an ideal”, that does its delineator proud.

More’s the pity, then, that Anthony Shadid did not live to savour to the full the home he created. Awarded a second Pulitzer in 2010, this time for reporting America’s withdrawal from Iraq, and having been beaten and jailed by government forces during the Libyan spring (and saved from worse by high-level diplomatic intervention), he died suddenly earlier this year while making his way out of Syria. The cause of death was an asthma attack apparently complicated by an allergy to horses. At the time, he had fallen foul of the Syrian authorities (as had relatives of his in Marjayoun) and evidently was unable to find any other means of securing a safe exit other than on horseback – a journey his great-grandfather would have known well.

George O’Brien’s memoirs include The Village of Longing. His latest book is The Irish Novel 1960-2010