Chapter 118: When the Story Comes at You

Journalists wrestle – or better said, should – with how much of themselves to include in their stories. It’s understood that from the inception of those stories that journalists choose to tell, they are present, if not necessarily seen; after all, it was their curiosity, their questions, that set the story in motion. 

Their explicit presence, meanwhile, has fallen in and out of fashion. Stories from, say, the late 19th and early 20th centuries had journalists often taking center stage, whether or not they belonged there. By the time I’d started out in the mid -1970s, the use of the first person was regarded as an act of journalistic solipsism. Better, I was taught, to dance around the words “I” and “me”, with “told a visitor” and “this reporter.” 

While it is now acceptable for journalists to announce their presence on the page, that can sometimes be a distraction when journalists make themselves a character in a drama in which they play no role.

There is, however, an entirely different sort of story, and it is a rare one: when the story sweeps up journalists, along with everyone around them. When that happens, journalists are caught between reporting the victims’ stories even as they too are experiencing the trauma of being a  victim. 

That is what happened to Tamara Saade on August 4, 2020. Tamara, a Lebanese journalist and photographer, was home in Beirut when an explosion ripped through the city’s port, killing 218 people and injuring over 7,000. Beirut had endured no end of agony – a deadly civil war, enduring religious divisions, rampant corruption, even as it tried to regain some of the magic that once made it one of the most enticing cities in the world. Then came the explosion – which contrary to initial suspicions was not caused by terrorism, or attack but by negligence. 

In many essential ways, Beirut has yet to recover. Neither has Tamara, which meant it was necessary to write.

Beirut had played a vital role in Tamara’s life. When she was 12 her father died and in the aftermath she found distraction and with it solace in wandering her city, camera in hand. She later wrote about Beirut – on the annual migration home of Lebanese expatriates, and more recently about the short-lived rebellion against the government in a graphic nonfiction novella, Waiting for Normal, that she produced with illustrator Eleanore Hamelin. 

But then came the explosion and with it the question of how to make sense of what happened to her city and to her. There was a contemporaneous record – the photographs she took when she went out in the street that night. There were also her memories that began with the sound and the smoke and the broken glass everywhere, but which did not stop there. 

In the weeks, months and eventually years that followed there remained the need to do more if she was going to come to terms with what she had seen, and still felt.

“I had thought that telling the stories of other people would make writing about August fourth easier for me,” she wrote in “Beirut, At Sunset,” which we’ve recently published at The Delacorte Review. “But I came to see that it was as hard, if not harder, to do justice to these people and their stories of that day. Almost three years have passed and in that time I  have tried to wrap my head around what happened on that August day. It feels as if a part of my life has been suspended. Dissociation is a known effect of post traumatic disorder, and for the past three  years, my goal has been to distance myself from what happened to all of us that day.”

I had been Tamara’s editor on that story and now that it was done I wanted to know what the experience had been like for her. So I asked if she might answer a few questions about reporting and writing a story unlike any other she had ever done.

Why, I asked, did you need to return to report a story that was a collective as well as personal trauma?

She replied: “I think revisiting this story on my own would have been too hard to stand, and maybe too raw and gory. I think I would have maybe gotten lost in my own trauma rather than focusing on the story itself. I first started working on the story from a collective memory point of view, which was rich in details, impressions, and feelings. The various people's stories intertwined and made sense together. Adding mine was simply a way to link it all together.” 

“What was most difficult,” I then asked, “about reliving this event through the interviews and stories of the people in your story?”

She wrote: “I think realizing how we all have such a personal connection to that day, to these few seconds, and that decisive minute was both relieving and haunting at the same time. How each person has their own version of the same truth, and ultimately they all result in the same emotions: fear, anger, confusion, apprehension. I had to put my own emotions aside, as well as my own experience with that day, to be able to fully understand the characters' own version of that day.”

Finally, I wanted to know: “Did writing about the explosion and looking again at your photos prove helpful, or did it exacerbate the memory and trauma?”

Tamara replied: “It ultimately proved helpful to go through these memories, to write them down, and to go through the pictures I took on that day and later on. But for it to result in a helpful outcome, for me to find a silver lining in reliving all these traumas, I had to inevitably go through a haunting trip down memory lane. Rehashing a not-so-old wound, that is still bleeding and healing, meant a lot of very vivid memories came back. As a journalist, as a writer, I'm lucky that I'm able to have space for my trauma to exist outside of my body, to let it grow outside of me, and I'm more than thankful for this chance. But the flip side of the coin means that I sometimes need to relive some events such as the explosion, to be able to truly let them exist on their own.” 

At the close of her story, Tamara wrote: After the explosion, I couldn’t quite understand what would become of Beirut. I naively had faith it would return to what it was, or become yet another version of itself where I could still grow. Was it the first phase of grief? The denial, the running away from reality. When I mourned my dad, I ran away from grief through the streets of the city. 

But now mourning my city, where do I run to? Who do I run to? It has taken me almost three years to accept that my city is gone, which leaves me to grieve for a life I won’t ever have again. I’ve entered the last stage of grief: the acceptance that home won’t ever feel like home again. 

The final word, however, she left to one of her characters in her story, who like so many Lebanese has felt the need to leave.

When Miguelle looks at the sunset from her newly adopted home in London, one thought comes to mind. “I wish I was looking at it from Beirut,” she says. “It’s sad but true.”

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every week. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.