I hope you will forgive the delay in delivering my letter. I was stalled by COVID (and I am crossing my fingers that its lingering imprint will not stall the synaptic connections of my anxious nervous system).

When I received the invitation to address you a letter, I tried to recall our very first encounter. Somehow several “scenes” unraveled merging one into the other in my mind, each with different characters, but all were set in Beirut. I want to say it was 1992, but 1993 is more likely, perhaps even 1994. Those first few years after the War was ended, meld in my memory. The years of transitioning from Civil War to the “post”, or the aftermath, are impossible for me to describe with acuity. My recollection feels like rewinding through rushes of a big wave of contradictory emotions, in which I feel as if I were tumbling upside down. Today, given the implosion of all the covenants that held the post-war together, and the devolution of the country towards collapse, I associate the souvenir of these years with languorous and frivolous joie de vivre. Long, copious lunches that ended at sunset. Club rounds that ended at sunrise. I have come to think of these years of transition as a time of reinvention. The agreement that regimented the cessation of conflict also sanctioned the reinvention of the warlords into elected representatives in parliament. Like a national prompt, we were all instigated to reinvent ourselves—shedding the worn-out skin of survivors. Those who had left the country and emigrated returned, obviously and effortlessly reinvented—you were among them. Those of us who had stayed (or for whom immigration did not bring fortune and returned during the War) underwent a thorough, fortuitous (even merciful) reinvention.

Given that the political players put in place only two propellers for the transition, the amnesty law that absolved warlords of their morbid deeds, and the reconstruction of Beirut’s war-torn city center, they betted that the momentum would project the whole country into overcoming injuries, nagging anguish and gaps. In other words, we were neither handed a script, score nor orchestration to our reinvention. Looking back now, I think we were inventing the present, projecting our futures and mending shelled out pasts. The gaps became maladroit lapses in language or irritating slips of the tongue. Grievous ghosts became allegories with a sinister foreboding. In this turbulent, euphoric, dizzying, frightening masquerade, occurrences like timeslips were not uncommon. The past pierced through the present suddenly and briefly then vanished. We noted one by one the signals that we were in the aftermath, as if to reassure ourselves that we were there.

We oscillated between the real and the surreal; the credible invariably carried the faint possibility of the unbelievable. When the Atlas Group appeared, there were no reasons to doubt either its existence or its necessity. The Group’s compulsively thorough and systematic organization of the archive was novel, and the language of forensic investigation and factuality were mesmerizing. They were in such stark contrast with how reality was forged and construed in everyday life, namely from rumour, hearsay, inducement and speculation. I fetishized the images you produced, they portended towards an examination of the past that I yearned for and aspired to. The drawings, tables, and coding systems seemed like promissory notes for a lucid and definite overcoming. During those years, “conflict resolution” conferences funded by EU-based foundations abound. They were the theater for lamentation, grievance and condolence, almost like verbose group-therapy. In offering a visual ledger of the ruins of our War, detailing the provenance of bullets, shells and mortar rockets, the work of the Atlas Group offered the space for our own agency to confront the legacy of violence.

I recall distinctly the mesmerizing, vexing, but certainly lasting impact of the first lecture-performance you delivered in Beirut. Some thought you were a magnificent genius, others a dangerous trickster, playing with historical facts at a time when so much of it was at stake. I was, and remain, a front-row seat fan, the wild summons contained in your work were emancipating. You were the first to make me accept the myriad reinventions of myself, and for that, I shall remain eternally grateful.