Book Launch: More Precious Than Birds
Author: Chadia Elhage
Date: 7 May 2023
Mabrouk Chadia.
Our friendship goes back to 1989 in Melbourne, when you first arrived in Australia.
Your fearless trilingual prose and poetry made heads turn. But beyond your intellect, I have grown to admire your compassionate heart.
Your short stories pick at a scab that yearns to heal. Our human scabs ooze a putrid pus, but a cedar tree scab oozes a precious liquid amber.
Perhaps all these scabs have another name: Trauma.
If you Google the most over-used word this decade, you will find Trauma.
But not in the 1970’s and 1980’s when this book is set.
The Lebanese who fled the war and arrived in Australia were given various labels and called all sorts of names – but not Trauma.
And because they arrived under the ‘Lebanon Concession’ program, not the refugee program, they became the sole responsibility of their sponsoring relatives.
As a social worker at that time, trauma and mental health were still taboo in our community. If I asked about PTSD, my clients were almost offended: shoo bti’sud?Anna majnoun! (what are you implying? Am I deranged?)
But if you apply today’s broader definition of Trauma to those Lebanese survivors, many would have ticked the boxes for complex PTSD.
Chadia’s short stories and personal memories testify to this:
Page 45: The state of Lebanon was fragmented into pieces;
Page 47: Mass displacement of half a million Lebanese;
Page 48: Who sold and who brought the souls of the martyrs?
Page 49: The ghosts multiplied around us;
Page 86: Each time she heard a missile, she cowered and covered both ears with her palms … children would wake up terrified
Those children are now adults. Some may be in this room right now, with callouses covering their own untold true stories.
Rich in metaphors, Chadia refers to this callous on page 56:
Being in a foreign land, wrapped him in a veil alien to him, leading to his … severing the umbilical cord.
For the last 5 years, I have been interviewing survivors of the Beirut bunkers for a new book: how did they survive without trauma therapy?
Many recount what still triggers their flashbacks today, more than 40 years later:
the smell of kerosene, the sound of a kettle whistling, the sight of canned food, the flash of lightning, cars backfiring, electricity blackouts.
Many have developed chronic stomach cramps because eating was futile without a toilet, and this morphed into eating disorders such as anorexia in later life.
In the 1980’s, I remember trying to be romantic with my wife by lighting candles, and she would say with her hand on her palpitating heart: dakheelak la! Bi-zakarooni bi iyam al harab! (I beg you – no! they remind me of the war years!)
Others lament the good old days when people prayed together and shared what they have: a sense of we not me.
But there is a twist to this story and Chadia’s resilience is a living testimony to this:
Perhaps we as social workers and therapists were asking the wrong questions.
Instead of asking survivors about their trauma and suggesting that they ‘let it out’, perhaps the right question was a humble question:
Instead of ‘please let me teach you some strategies to survive trauma’, perhaps we should now be asking ‘please teach us so we can learn – how did you survive all those years?’
And not just survived, but many of you actually thrived.
In one interview, I was told: ‘what’s the point of asking me to sit on a couch to talk, talk, talk? I don’t want to talk about it. That’s not my way.’
So how did some survivors of trauma, like those in Chadia’s stories, live to tell their tale?
Many of you would know more than anyone: just like the triggers of trauma may be multi-sensory, so is the healing: the fresh aroma of home-made coffee, the fragrance of a favourite meal, music from happier memories, flicking through old photo albums, praying rosaries together, telling jokes, heartfelt affection, reciting poetry.
These are sensory experiences that take you back to the bosom of safety.
Chadia writes as she speaks: rich with similes that connect events with nature:
Just from Page 20: like a vanishing dream … like dust … like a cloud … like a lonely arrow.
Chadia experienced this trauma first hand. But her callous oozes liquid amber that is indeed more precious than golden ink on pages.
More precious than birds in flight.