ABSTRACT
Like others in this book, this chapter investigates representing the nearly unrepresentable, or the wilfully misrecognized. Those who have lived through something that overwhelms the capacity to portray that experience in the usual ways must develop new strategies and tactics of representation, however fractured, hallucinatory, or ‘surreal,’ to use the term explored by Rita Sakr, 1 in order to bear witness to those events. Those who lived through the Lebanese Civil War and the Siege of Beirut suffered the effects of invasion, occupation, and grotesque military and paramilitary violence while also being caught up in a war of representations. In this chapter we will explore in James Buchan, and more briefly, Robert Fisk and Charles Glass, the efforts of three writers who were outsiders to the conflict and yet caught up in the need to bear witness. Readers seeking the immediacy of the most thorough eye-witness account by an overseas journalist of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila should turn to the chapter in this book by Tim Llewellyn and his 2010 retrospective book. 2 All four writers—Llewellyn, Buchan, Fisk, and Glass—reveal in their variously experimental approaches to representing the Siege and the massacres the deep complicity of ‘the West’, especially Britain and the USA, with the unfolding of events in Lebanon. We focus here on books by Buchan, Fisk, and Glass which appeared within eight years of the events: all prove particularly rich in their insistence that understanding the situation in Beirut requires grasping this complicity by means of its literary and documentary precedents, located in what we might call the domain of imperial textuality and its postimperial aftermaths. Complicity is revealed as itself an intertextual relation. Imperialism is the intertext the refuses to go away.
