Organised by Beatrice Gründler and Hanan Natour, project Magical Realisms and Speculative Literature, Research Area 3: "Future Perfect".

"I thought you were from Beirut.
Don’t you want to talk about the war?"

Known especially for his research on the Arabic Nahda (Renaissance), new media and Digital Humanities in the Arabic context, Professor Tarek El-Ariss, James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College, has recently completed a work of a different kind. Water on Fire: A Memoir of War (2024) recounts El-Ariss’s childhood in war-torn Beirut, following him and his family on their paths of migration from Lebanon over West-Africa and Europe to the United States. But above all, this memoir centers around the author’s life with trauma and the impact the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) had, and still has, on his perceptions of the world. Alternating between his perspective as a child and as an adult, El-Ariss offers the reader insights into intimate moments of his life, "journeying into the past to recover a feeling, an impression, a whisper."

Against the tragic backdrop of recurring scenes of devastation and flight reaching us from present-day Beirut, the Magical Realisms project team is especially grateful to welcome Professor El-Ariss in Berlin for a guest lecture and subsequent conversation about his work. In this event, we would like to approach the topics of war, trauma, and memory – tracing their manifestations throughout his memoir, while discussing it within the context of Lebanese diasporic writing. As Water on Fire: A Memoir of War evokes images of pain and re-traumatization and as his writing often blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy, memory and dream, this event also aims to situate his work within current trends of Arabic speculative fiction.