The National Suffering Body: Arabic Articulations of Injury
Madonna Kalousian
05 August 2025

Lebanese poet and novelist Rachid al-Daif published his novel fusḥa mustahdafa bayn al-nuʿās wa al-nawm in 1986, a few years after he could have lost his life in the Mossad assassination of Fatah commander Ali Hassan Salameh in Beirut in 1979. The long Arabic title of the novel, which was later rendered into Passage to Dusk(2001), literally translates as ‘a targeted, open, and empty space between drowsiness and sleep’ and is described by Anton Shammas as “one of the most subtle, literary commentaries on that sixteen-year war.” (Shammas 2011, 1). A sense of a liminality does indeed permeate the novel, with the narrator either recalling or hallucinating a series of recurrent events which culminate in an assassination attempt he narrowly escapes, a haemorrhaging shoulder, and an amputated arm he manages to only loosely tie to his torso. The cover page of the English translation features an obscured body, but one that nevertheless appears divided, sectioned, demarcated, slashed. The novel is ultimately Al-Daif’s literary reimagination of Lebanon as a wounded, fractured, and dismembered body of a nation, here embodied in and mapped onto the figure of a protagonist who remains captivated within a permanent state of half-life, suspended between consciousness and unconsciousness, hallucination and waking, life and death.
Today, fifty years since the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in April 1975, Lebanon continues to live in permanently extraordinary times, stumbling between multiple and successive episodes of injury, suspended, as is the case with Al-Daif’s protagonist, in a liminal state of half-life. “lubnān ʿāyish ʿala jihāz al-tanafus al-ṣināʿi,” meaning ‘Lebanon is a patient on a ventilator’, as was described to me recently by a member of a family displaced from the southern village of Meis al-Jabal as a result of Israel’s ongoing war against Lebanon. Another interviewee tells me “al-muṣāb biḥajm al-waṭan,” Arabic phrase used to evoke the sense that a particular form of injury is not only hurting an entire nation, but is now so pervasive and so persistent it is past the point of healing. While al-muṣāb refers to a single injured body or a body admitted to hospital after having sustained physical harm, it can also be used, as in the case of the Arabic phrase above, to point to an injury or a wound that runs so deep it cannot but forever scar every body across an entire nation.
The Arabic literal equivalent of the word ‘injury’ often evokes the image of a hospitalised body, with the word ‘injury’ used almost exclusively in a medical context to refer to an illness or physical bodily harm, and particularly when accompanied by the word ṭakhṭīṭ, meaning to ‘draw a map’ or to ‘diagnose’. However, the Arabic linguistic construction of the corporeal reality of injury and its manifestations does not simply mean that the experience of the injured body itself is obliterated into a surface upon which larger social, political, and national economies are inscribed. The phrase “al-muṣāb biḥajm al-waṭan” rather seeks to emphasize that a particular form of injury is far more profound than the recovery which mechanisms of repair – themselves injured or injurious – are able to deliver.
Over a hundred interviews later, hardly any of the interviewees mention recovery or repair. The word ‘trauma’ is not even present in the Arabic language; my interlocutors would struggle to find near equivalents to describe the impact the ongoing war on Lebanon has had on their shared reality, opting instead for words denoting exhaustion or suffering, in an echoing of what Etel Adnan calls “the great suffering being, too mad, too overcharged, broken now.” (Adnan 1982, 21). They talk to me not of healing, but rather of how to live with and despite of injury as an everyday form of life; it is a “Lebanese gene,” an interviewee tells me as they describe wars which never really come to an end:
I often wonder how many generations it would take until my daughter’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren live a life that is cleansed of the past she inherited from me. I often contemplate her own share of trauma – and she is not even ten years old. Our children too have to accumulate multiple forms of trauma and carry these in their genes. Shrapnel from the past will always hurt. People resist, but so does trauma… a sound, a smell, a word, a dream of a missing person. The only way forward for our collective pain is not to heal, but to become dormant. It is always the most dormant symptoms of pain that weigh the heaviest and that last the longest. (interview, July 2025)
All references to the interviewees and their reflections quoted throughout this blogpost are shared and translated with their permission.