LT: In all of your work there’s a strong emphasis on nature and relationship to a sense of place. It’s as if to lose one’s place, to feel in exile or be in exile, focused you.
EA: You’re absolutely right. My relation to place is also a desire to know where I am. When I arrive somewhere, I want to know, where’s south? My partner, Simone, asks, “Why do you bother?” I like to be oriented. I grew up as an anguished child, partly because of not having brothers and sisters in a society where I was marginal. My father, an Arab from Damascus, living in Lebanon, I was born and raised in Lebanon, my mother was Greek. The French were ruling Lebanon, so we were also marginal in relation to a colonial power. And my parents were a mixed marriage, there were few. I think I compensated by trying to know always where I was.
LT: The Arab Apocalypse takes a unique approach to writing on the page, you use signs, lines, curves, symbols.
EA: The signs are there as an excess of emotion. The signs are the unsaid. More can be said, but you are stopped by your emotion.
LT: The word “stop” is in capital letters throughout. As in, “Stop This War.”
EA: I wrote The Arab Apocalypse when Tel al-Zaatar was under siege. Tel al-Zaatar is a neighborhood in Beirut, where 20,000 people, not all Palestinian but mostly Palestinian, lived basically underground. The Phalangists and their allies attacked in ’76. Maybe the fighters in the camp had some advance notice and left. But the women, children, and old people who remained were slaughtered. It was worse than Sabra and Shatila.
LT: Worse than Sabra and Shatila?
EA: It was as bad and worse. There was only one well, so women would go there for water. Maybe 20, to make sure one got back; they were surrounded by snipers. The Arab Apocalypse is about Tel al-Zaatar — the hill of thyme — but its subject is beyond this siege, which was the beginning of the undoing of the Arabs. This war was the sign of disaster coming, that by mismanagement and mistakes, the Arabs would undo themselves.
LT: The form and content of The Arab Apocalypse are imaginatively fused.
A sun and a belly full of vegetables, a system of fat tuberoses. A sun which is SOFT. The eucalyptus. The Arabs are under the ground. The Americans are on the moon. The sun has eaten its children. I myself was a morning blessed with bliss.
What’s produced is a sense of survival, even in the midst of atrocious conditions and behavior.
EA: I started this book when I lived in Beirut. It’s 59 poems, the same number as the days of the siege. I could hear the bombs from my balcony. For 59 days they didn’t let any food in, water, nothing. I saw a manifestation of pure evil. In metaphysics there is no word for that. I saw evil.
LT: In Paris When It’s Naked, you quote Delacroix, who said he had to satisfy “something black” in him. It relates to your saying that violence or evil has no one country.
EA: We have institutions, we try to control it. Or, we decide to unleash it. But there is evil in every person to different degrees; evil is part of being.
LT: I think of it as cruelty to other people, to life.
EA: And oneself. Power creates a temptation to be abusive. Nations who feel immune, or superior, sure to win, are not wise. Like the Bush administration, a folly of arrogance. In nature, there is danger too. Because the sun is dangerous. It can kill you, burn you. But the sun is also life.
LT: The Arab Apocalypse is a superb example of a poem that pays attention to poetics, and place, war, politics — literally, what happens in the city.
EA: There is the presence of war in almost everything I write. Beirut’s importance is because of war, it’s a child of WWI. In 1920 we had refugees from Armenia. WWII brought foreign armies, not bloodshed; Beirut profited, because when armies are around, there’s money. In ’58 a little civil war started. In ’67 another batch of refugees. In ’71 the Israelis bombed the airport. In ’75, the start of 15 years of civil war. In 1982, the Israelis entered Beirut. There were other Israeli incursions, constant bombing of the south. Beirut was done and almost undone by war.
LT: The Arab Apocalypse is like a Jeremiad.
EA: Yes. It’s pessimistic. I sometimes think I’m an optimist because I always advise myself to go on, overcome. But my vision of the world is pretty dark. I try not to forget the good of this world — not only good people, but the sunshine, the trees. There is also happiness in this world.
LT: In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country is written in paragraphs. You said you chose paragraphs, because the nuns gave your class a word from which to write a sentence, but you wrote a paragraph.
A person. People here to portray there is a person who loves me to death. Not to my death or hers, but to the death of the person I loved. I wonder who invented the ugly word punishment. It was probably God, who established the word and the deed.
From the word “person,” the paragraph leads to an unexpected end, to the possibility of people hurting each other.
EA: Not the possibility. My heart had been broken. It’s full of allusions to my biography.
LT: In the paragraph “Place,” you wrote:
I moved from city to city, traveled from person to person and then I tried to define myself through writing. But that doesn’t work. No, not at all. It adds fiction to the fiction I became. I’m in a disorienting wilderness.
I want to focus on fiction itself. I think you’re trying to make a place from writing.
EA: There is a sense of exile in everyone. We are exiled from each other, to a point. It’s what relationships are about — to close that gap as much as possible. Writing is a dialogue with that deep feeling. Some feel they came from somewhere. They have a strong illusion of belonging. Other people, or groups, have a special restlessness and understanding, a nomadic spirit. We’re so used to it, we don’t know how to be without it. Everything has its advantages. I don’t envy a French peasant in a village — I’m happy that she’s happy, but I can’t figure out that happiness.
LT: You’ve said history is incorporated in individuals.
EA: We are the result of history, more than we know, we think we are free from it. Nietzsche said, “If you believe in freedom, you are stupid, but if you don’t feel freedom, you’re doomed.” You function in relation to the entire moral code that is based on responsibility and, therefore, freedom of choice.