“I wouldn’t be telling you anything new by declaring that wars create many casualties. Wars kill and amputate humans. This is a vérité de la palice. But there are other casualties: books stand first in line among them.” Mai Ghoussoub in the introduction to her play “Texterminators”
She goes on:
Literature is inseparable today from the books that carry their stories. If we want to save literature we have to save the rectangular objects that carry and spread their words. We have to respect the book for what it is: an art object that we should defend, defend against censors, narrow-minded educators and, most of all, the dangers of war.
The play highlights the dislocation and destruction inherent in civil war-torn areas. It begins; “It is a damp and windy night. November in Beirut. Or is it Sarajevo?” It could be anywhere, how about Baghdad, Mosul, or any other Iraqi or Afghan city that has been torn apart by the current Bush war.
In the play Bullet and his comrades try and make themselves comfortable in a house recently abandoned by its owners. To warm themselves they start a fire in the middle of the room using the books that line the walls as fuel. It takes a copy of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea to wake Bullet up to the power of books. He begins reading and then “Bullet had no time left for fighting and killing; he was now traveling in wider worlds, deeply enjoying his solitude as his mind roamed across times and continents.”
But alas, Bullet’s awakening was nothing but a fiction. The narrator acknowledges, after a prompting from the author, that Bullet’s affair with literature was simply a tale, “I have invented a posteriori a wishful tale to please you and to console myself. The end of the story in the real world of these fighters is less, so much less, enchanting.”
In the end they burned them all, leaving us cold, empty and dark.
The walls looked like gaping wounds after the shelves were torn down. They looked miserable without the infinite juxtaposition of spines that protected and comforted them. Before these terrible events occurred and turned their lives inside the house into a nightmare, the books didn’t mind a little incursion into their stillness. On the contrary, when a hand takes a book from the shelf and exposes a little strip on the surface of the wall, they welcome light and fresh air. But now look at the state they are left in. Ugly, defamed and shattered. Yes, even the walls are crying for all those lost volumes, for the softness of their presence and for the comfort they gave those who visited the room they protected.
The full text of the play is available on Words Without Borders.
Bio of Lebanese artist, author, publisher and critic, Mai Ghoussoub
Ghoussoub died suddenly in January 2007
Obit in the Guardian
Thanks to Shelf Awareness for the lead