Why I Write About Institutions
I was born on a Wednesday in July 1981, in Saint Joseph Hospital, a short drive from the shelter where I would spend much of my childhood. On paper, Lebanon's civil war was six years old that summer. Growing up, I learned it had been rehearsing its provocations long before its official date. My family likes to say I was born in a shelter. It is a metaphor, but only barely. The first nine years of my life kept making it true. The shelter was the minus-one of my grandparents' building: a warehouse of perhaps two hundred square meters, cleaned out and claimed by the families above it. It had two entries, one from the parking, and one from the lobby, where you stepped over a concrete lip and climbed down a ladder someone had built by hand. We strung electric lamps against the dark. When the battles intensified, bread could vanish for weeks at a time. During the worst sieges, it reached us only rationed, passed down through the militias that held the area. My grandmother Teta Victo...