ABSTRACT
Sonallah Ibrahim's Beirut, Beirut is a Deleuzian novel: a creative response to harrowing events that uses an immanent aesthetic to think through the war in Lebanon, 1 coupling as it does so the Lebanese war machine 2 with the narrator's line of flight from Cairo to Beirut and back. The plot is vintage Ibrahim: a lone hero confronts a monstrous assemblage that throws up surprises at every corner, a story told through cut-and-paste narration in which documentary material is woven directly into the body of the work to recount the wars that tore through Lebanon between 1975 and 1982. One sign of Ibrahim's genius is his skill at creating a sense of foreboding. Even though he does not narrate the massacre of Sabra and Shatila refugee camps—for many the war crime that stands for the Lebanon War, though certainly not the only one committed during that war—his synthesis of plot and documentary collage leaves the reader with the sensation that it, or something like it, is coming. 3 As Samia Mehrez explains, Ibrahim's strategy consists of a deliberate showing and telling that exhibits the text's inscription within its surrounding history of social production, synthesizing as he does so literary, testimonial, and archival functions:
Instead of treating the prevailing conditions of literary production in the Arab world as ‘extra-textual,? he has made them ‘intra-textual’ by using them as part of his stories over a period of more than twenty years. Thus Ibrahim has delivered to his readers not just stories but self-reflexive texts, unique examples of (hi)stories: stories which contain their own history as part of their very own signification and structure. 4
