In the opening of his excellent book Bullet Paper Rock, Abbas El-Zein introduces the idea of a particular type of essay, a literary foray. These types of essays, writes the author, have a stronger sense of purpose than other kinds of essays. What follows, indeed, are some of the most purposeful essays on memory, loss and the human condition you’ll find, each arguably anchored by the purpose of understanding how memory creates meaning and how, in other cases, why we choose to forget certain other pivotal moments in one’s lifetime.
El Zein’s life is more interesting than most, having lived through the deaths of two family members and witnessing Lebanon breaking out into civil war. While these subjects are dramatic, El Zein’s writing is anything but; his words are poetic and profound, sometimes violent, but never verbose, unnecessarily intense, or exploitative. Indeed, he is one of Australia’s finest non-fiction writers ever. That assessment comes from having first been blown away by his earlier memoir, published in 2009, and now revisiting and relishing this later memoir, a more fragmented but no less rewarding recollection of the times and events that shaped the author.
Within, we find a young Abbas nearly drowning in the Mediterranean; we spend a brief moment of extended quiet in Beirut in 1979; we witness the author take flight in his literary endeavours in his new land, Australia; and we track the 2010 Arab Spring as it takes things from bad to worse. There are also countless other moments tracked within the forays within this book, from the personal to political to moments of both. And all the while, a deeper picture of both our world and the author, in that time, gently emerges.
Here, it’s likely worth examining the why and the effect of such an approach. The why is likely that it allows for the author to group such thoughts into manageable and accessible sections such as ‘Childhood’, ‘Youth,’ ‘The Reality Principle’ and ‘Annals of Lose and Hope’. The effect is beautifully cumulative, a kind of trust game with the reader and an encouragement to take meaning from the fragments and the whole. And, while ‘fragments’ is a fair term to use, ‘fabric’ might be a better term, as it’s a story woven rather than pieced together, like the women of his family, ‘weavers whose fabric of choice is hope,’ El-Zein stands defiant in the face of brutality, never afraid to discuss the damage done, but always willing to lead back into love, presence, and hope, whatever the loss or legacy he carries with him. Is this, then, a book about a man or his countries? Of course, it is both, and yet those echoes we find— El Zein writes that ‘The abiding shadow of every autobiography is the hazy sketch of what one has failed to become…much like the history of the would-be nations that are my homeland—lead us out into something more profound. In his examined life, the author leads us not just into his search for meaning but the universal space of myth-making, processing, and reimagining one’s life in retrospect.
While the very nature of autobiography is flawed, Bullet Paper Rock excels precisely because of its knowledge of why we write and an awareness of the limitations and preoccupations of memory. It is another outstanding contribution to our increasingly and necessarily multicultural literary Australia from a well-lived, deep-thinking life spent in letters, loss, humanity and brutality in countries near and far.