Water on Fire: A Memoir of War

ACGIS Guest Lecture Tarek El-Ariss

Thursday, October 3, 2024 10:30 AM EDT
Fenwick Library, Main Reading Room, 2001

Alternating between his perspective as a child and as an adult, Tarek El-Ariss explores in this talk how we live with trauma, poignantly illustrating the profound impact of war on our perception of the world, intellectual development, and ability to imagine. The book tells a story of immigration that starts in a Beirut devastated by the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), continues with experiences of displacement in Europe and Africa, moves to northeastern American towns battered by lake-effect snow and economic woes, and ends in New York City on 9/11. Dealing with monsters, invisible creatures, skin outbreaks, and the sea, it is a book about objects and elements, like water and fire, and about how encountering these elements triggers associations, connecting present and past, time and space.

___________________________________________________________________

About Tarek El-Ariss

Tarek El-Ariss is an author, scholar, and the James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. In 2021, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete his war memoir, Water on Fire (Other Press, 2024). Born and raised in Beirut during the Civil War (1975-1990) and trained in philosophy and comparative literature, his work deals with questions of displacement, war, and desire. He has written about disoriented travelers, outcasts, queers, hackers, and characters with complicated relations to home and power. He is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (Fordham, 2013) and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (Princeton, 2019), and editor of The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (MLA, 2018). His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, and Choice.