Mapped
De Niro's Game
Rawi Hage
Rawi Hage's Beirut is the Christian East of the 1980s civil war: the tight streets of Achrafieh, the militia checkpoints and rooftop gunners, the port and the coast road north to the casino, all pressed against the Green Line that split the city from downtown south to the National Museum. The map runs from that dividing line across East Beirut to the harbour, then follows Bassam's flight out of the country.
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Gate of the Sun
Elias Khoury
In the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, after the 1982 massacre, the makeshift doctor Khalil keeps vigil over the comatose old fighter Yunes, telling him the interwoven stories of the Palestinian catastrophe. The frame is the camp; the tales range back to the Galilee villages emptied in 1948, to the cave called Bab al-Shams where Yunes crossed the border to meet his wife, and to the long exile in Lebanon, holding a whole people's memory in one dying man's room.
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