“The Beasts,” the Beirut port explosion told by a survivor
Released on August 22 by Elyzad, “Les Bestioles” retraces the days following the explosion at the port of Beirut on August 4, 2020, through the inner monologue of a fictional survivor. This second novel by Lebanese Hala Moughanie, which shines with its sense of rhythm, has excited the Beirut daily “L'Orient-Le Jour.”
Five years after the explosion at the port of Beirut, the Lebanese are still demanding justice for the 253 deaths caused by one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in modern history, caused by the fire of tons of ammonium nitrate stored carelessly in a hangar. Justice also for all the survivors, including 6,500 injured. It is precisely a fictional injured person that the Lebanese Hala Moughanie chooses to give voice to in Les Bugs, “a novel that does not heal anything, does not console, but looks the tragedy in the face: that of a people who repress their pain and of a country which, by dint of being destroyed, no longer knows if it is still alive,” summarizes L'Orient-Le Jour .
Author of several plays and a first novel, Il faut venir (released in 2023, Éditions Project'îles, 2023), Hala Moughanie paints a vitriolic portrait of a hard-hit Lebanon in this second novel, released on August 22 by Éditions Elyzad, a publisher specializing in French-language literature by authors from countries of the South. Through the narrator's finely crafted interior monologue, the writer “offers a reflection on the condition of the disillusioned survivor, not dead but not really alive either.”
It all begins on August 4, 2020, when the narrator realizes he has an eye injury amidst the chaos of the city. Distraught and disoriented, this small shopkeeper from a working-class neighborhood, completely devastated by the port explosion, will try to understand what happened and how to support himself now that his shop has been destroyed. While wandering through the city, this ambivalent character interweaves his thoughts on today's Beirut (from corruption to social inequality, including discrimination against Syrians) with his memories of the civil war (1975-1990) , during which he took up arms.
“What makes this text so poignant is that it does not seek to arouse compassion. Death is neither heroic nor sacrificial: it is banal, reduced to negligence, according to the speech of the Prime Minister of the time,” Hassan Diab , judges L'Orient-Le Jour, which quotes an extract:
“Not even worn out by hate, just worn out by error. It’s not that hate is good, but at least there’s a feeling and a feeling, it’s a trace of humanity.”
Hala Moughanie demonstrates a great mastery of orality to reflect on the effects of violence and trauma on an entire people. “Overlaying the traumas that make any linear narrative difficult, the narrator places this collective catastrophe in the bloody continuity of the country’s recent history,” comments L’Orient-Le Jour. “The civil war, the Syrian occupation, the attacks and assassinations, the 2006 war [against Israel] , the pandemic; but also these nameless wars of economic collapse, devaluation, precariousness, shortages and contempt for leaders…”
Through fiction, the 45-year-old writer offers a catharsis, “a hard but necessary text,” like a feather in the wound.
