THIS ARAB LIFE

Community development specialist and author Ghandour reflects on her life growing up amid the political tumult of the Middle East and her generation’s response to it.

The author was born in Lebanon in 1962, but when she was only 5 months old, her family was compelled to flee the country for Jordan when her father, Ali, was sentenced to death by the Lebanese state for his alleged involvement in an attempted coup. She was raised in Amman and experienced a peculiar kind of stability in the wake of its civil war, which finally settled into an “ugly memory.” Still, there were always paroxysms of unrest—so many, in fact, that they became nearly indistinguishable from the normal rhythms of life and led to a kind of acquiescent “atrophy,” as the author puts it. Ghandour’s experience was colored by her own privilege, which provided her family with a means of escape and her with an education in the United States that afforded her a taste of “unencumbered aliveness.” However, the author also tells of being plagued by the “listlessness” of a generation that came of “political age” in the 1980s but had allowed itself to be silenced—a predicament that Ghandour affectingly portrays in these pages. Specifically, her account includes an astute interpretation of the uprisings that roiled the Arab world in 2011—the shock of their promise as well as their disappointments: “I don’t know if my generation understood the meaning of what we saw…or if we knew, were at a loss about our options, and so decided to sell out.” Over the course of this memoir, her prose is poetically precise and as sharp as her encounter with cultural and philosophical ambivalence permits. Overall, this is a disarmingly candid memoir in which Ghandour takes herself and her entire generation to task for the manner in which they may have been complicit in the Arab world’s political failures. As such, it’s a gripping remembrance and one that’s as clear as it is dramatic.

An unflinching depiction of an author’s complex international experiences.