Archiving the Political, Narrating the Personal: The Year in Lebanon

If home for Toufiq becomes Beirut, where the cycle of abuse concludes, Zena El-Khalil's6 relationship with the city is embittered by a series of haunting losses—a broken marriage and a dead soul mate—that she can only grieve, process, exorcise, and release during a trip to a deserted Shiva temple in India, a healing milieu far removed from the turbulence of her home country. Rantisi's attachment to the city, which she only got to know as a teenager returning to Lebanon from the United States, grows more visceral in 2015 when, thirty-three weeks into her first pregnancy, she finds herself on a work trip in South Africa, consumed by fears of impending threats of terrorist attacks in Cape Town: "You cannot protect your womb from a bomb; you cannot make another person see past your color; you cannot contain people's fear when they have been warned of the worst; and you cannot control the rage of a person who has set out to kill" (274). [...]in 2018, a number of packed LGBT-themed storytelling events emerged across Beirut, organized by civil-society groups, such as Proud Lebanon, Mosaic, and Cliffhangers (Khoury). Dr. El Hajj's output spans creative and critical research and has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, such as Excursions and Life Writing. Since July 2015, El Hajj has been Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a professional body that monitors and promotes teaching quality in universities across the UK.