Jabbour Douaihy’s Firefly, translated by Paula Haydar and Nadine Sinno, paints a searing portrait of Beirut at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, as seen through the eyes of its simple yet perplexing protagonist, Nizam al-Alami. On Nizam’s national ID card, no religion is listed. Muslim by birth, he is Christian by baptism. As a young boy, he found his way into an orchard while playing, and its owners, Touma and Rakheema, instantly fell for him and raised him as their own, as a Christian, without much resistance from his Muslim parents. When he is grown, Nizam makes his way to Beirut to study law. When Beirut explodes, and the city is divided into a Christian East and a Muslim West, Nizam’s apartment turns into a hideout for armed militiamen, and Burj Square is emptied of everything except the Martyrs’ Statue that bears witness to the city’s most difficult moments. Nizam, too, bears witness, as he sees the corpses of the civil war’s victims pile up.

Jabbour Douaihy takes us through Nizam’s adventures and struggles as he faces stigmatization, homelessness, and violence in a society that considers him an outsider. Like the light-producing, charismatic fireflies that captured his imagination and eluded him as a child, Nizam is the glimmer of hope epitomized by those who reject binary identities in favor of the in-between. But how long, Douaihy asks, can this glimmer of hope truly last?

Discussion will be led by Nadine Sinno, Associate Professor of Arabic and Director of the Arabic Program at Virginia Tech.