Nostalgia and Loss in My Grandmother's Home
Anthony Shadid
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(...) As a journalist in the Middle East, as an Arab-American, I am struck time and again by notions of nostalgia and loss. To me, they define this troubled region. In my time here, they have become its narrative. And sadly, they often dangerously intersect; nostalgia, it seems, is often an appreciation of loss, no more. I see that loss on Mutanabi Street, once an intellectual entrepot in the heart of Baghdad that I used to visit. It is gone today, parts of it buried in the rubble of bombings. With it has passed the spirit it represented. I see that nostalgia on Hamra Street, nestled in the heart of Ras Beirut, once the most sophisticated, open and pluralistic space in the Arab World. Like Mutanabi, it stands as a shadow today of its infectious, bygone glory. I once asked Mohammed Soueid, a filmmaker and critic, about its fate. I think of his words often: “It is nostalgia to me.” His voice was a little bitter. “But even nostalgia has lost its meaning.” And I think of what has passed as I rebuild my grandmother’s house, on the escarpment of Jebal al-Sheikh. In a way, I want to know if we can ever regain what was lost. (...) ANTHONY SHADID is the Middle East correspondent for the Washington Post. In 2002 he was wounded in the back while covering fighting in the West Bank. In March 2003, weeks before the U.S. invasion, he traveled to Baghdad where he remained during the invasion, the fall of Saddam Hussein and the war’s aftermath. In 2005, he moved to Beirut, covering the rest of the Arab World. Before the Post, Shadid worked for the Boston Globe in Washington, D.C., covering diplomacy and the State Department. He began his career at The Associated Press in Milwaukee, New York, Los Angeles and Cairo, where he worked as a Middle East correspondent from 1995 to 1999. He is a native of Oklahoma City, and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Shadid was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2007 for his coverage of the Israeli war on Lebanon a year earlier. In 2004, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches from Iraq, and he was also the recipient of the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ award for deadline writing and the Overseas Press Club’s Hal Boyle Award for best newspaper or wire service reporting from abroad. In 2003, Shadid was awarded the George Polk Award for foreign reporting for a series of dispatches from the Middle East while at the Globe. In 1997, he was awarded a citation by the Overseas Press Club for his work on “Islam’s Challenge.” The four-part series, published by the AP in December 1996, formed the basis of his book, Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats and the New Politics of Islam, published by Westview Press in December 2000. His second book, Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War, was published in September 2005 by Henry Holt. Shadid is currently at work on a third book, still untitled, set in his family’s ancestral village in southern Lebanon. |
