On April 13, 1975, four Phalangists were murdered during the attempted assassination of Pierre Jumayyil. In a retaliation effort, the Phalangists attacked a bus filled with Palestinian passengers, killing twenty seven of the occupants. And so began a civil war in Lebanon that would last sixteen years and take more than one hundred thousand lives. In his posthumous collection of poetry, Haas Mroue offers deeply moving lyrical verse that details his traumatic experiences as the chaos of the war in Lebanon engulfed his childhood, as well as the experiences of the some nine hundred thousand who were forced to flee their homes. Recalling how he helplessly witnessed rockets flying over rooftops and listened for names of the dead on the radio, Haas relies on strong imagery as he shares how he lived through a war with no name and somehow managed to escape Beirut with nothing but his memories. Originally written some twenty years after he fled the war, the poetry in Beirut Seizures carefully examines difficult subjects and politically charged ideas with grace, emotion, and a strong voice, making it a powerful statement about the impact of war on ordinary people.
BEIRUT SEIZURES
By Haas H. MroueiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Haas H. Mroue Memorial Fund
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4620-5269-1Chapter One
Remembering HAAS MROUE
by Christine Hemp
Poet, travel writer, aviation enthusiast, culinary wizard, and friend-gatherer Haas Mroue died October 6 of a heart attack in Beirut, Lebanon. He was forty-one. A Port Townsend resident for nearly a decade, Haas had spent the spring and summer in Lebanon, preparing the launch of a new airline magazine. He was to have returned to Port Townsend in October.
Though he was reared in a region of conflict, Mroue was an ambassador of peace. He spoke French and Arabic and was a regular contributor to Frommer's Travel Guides, Berlitz, and the Lonely Planet. He wrote the current edition of Frommer's Memorable Walks in Paris. In fact, he spent most of his adult life boarding flights to such destinations as Bangkok, the Galapagos Islands, Abu Dhabi, and the French Riviera.
During a recent stint as editor at Airways Magazine, he hosted a gala banquet for international airline luminaries at Seattle's Museum of Flight. He always attracted people who admired his travel-savvy elegance and border-erasing spirit.
Born Haseeb Haseeb Mroueh in Beirut in 1965, Haas was raised by his mother, Najwa Mounla Mroueh, on the shores of the Mediterranean. Haas's father, Haseeb Hassan Mroueh, a professor at the American College in Beirut, died of cancer three months before his son was born. Haas attended schools in Beirut, Bahrain, and London, as well as the American College in Paris. After high school, he moved permanently to the United States and attended UCLA, where he received a BA in film and screenwriting. He later earned an MFA in creative writing at the University of Colorado–Boulder, where he wrote Beirut Seizures, a book of poems about his childhood during the occupation of Lebanon. The imagery is both intimate and universal: his mother's friend Mary, who disappeared; children in pajamas waiting for their mothers to come home; the making of tabbouli and lemonade while violence raged. One poem reads, "Children and birds suffer most in war ... children and birds are always running away."
When Haas landed in Port Townsend for a writing residency at Centrum in 1998, he said he knew this place was home. He brought sophistication and festivity to many local venues, from his astute advice on wines at the Wine Seller and delectable lunches at the Fountain Café, to his soft-spoken charm at myriad Port Townsend events. Ensconced in his beach cottage at Beckett Point, he clickety-clacked on his laptop to meet writing deadlines and prepared astonishing dinners for his friends—replete with spices only he could identify—before dashing off to catch another plane.
Those who knew Haas well were repeatedly impressed by his ability to tolerate people's failings while affirming their strengths. His intuition for knowing people stemmed from a poet's ability to embrace contradiction. In early October, for example, he wrote of his newfound relationship with Beirut: "The markets are overflowing with figs, grapes, avocados, and cactus pears. What a bountiful place. Fires are raging in the mountains. Sit-in and candle- light vigils downtown. Power cuts and water shortages and everything in between."
That "in between" place is where Haas lived, seizing paradox where others might take sides. And, after a lifetime of searching for a father he had never known, his season in Beirut among family and the landscape that spawned him seemed to have brought him full circle. Just hours before Haas's swift and unexpected death, a friend received an e-mail: "I have become my father's son ... something that has not happened before this trip. I am definitely my father's son." Several days later, he was buried next to the man he'd yearned for his whole life.
Haas is survived by his mother, Najwa Mounla, and his stepfather, Peter Orloff, of London, England, as well as numerous cousins and relations. He is also survived by an immense family of friends who will sorely miss his wild and generous heart, his impossibly expressive eyes, his yogurt soup, and those radiant arrivals at the front door—his outstretched hand bearing the ever-present bottle of chilled champagne.
Christine Hemp is a writer and poet, author of That Fall: Poems, Finishing Line Press, 2011.
Remembering HAAS MROUE
by Lisa Majjaj
The news of Haas Mroue's death came to me by e-mail, as does so much of the news that touches my life. Poet-friend Adele Ne Jame, who assumed I had already heard the bad news, wrote, "I just heard about the terrible loss of Haas. And I know you must be as brokenhearted and terribly shocked as I am." Brokenhearted was an understatement, as was shocked: I stared at the e-mail uncomprehendingly. Haas? Gone? It made no sense. In fact, I wondered whether I'd misread the e-mail—I was about to head out the door to the hospital, where my husband had just had his third surgery in eight months for a fractured spine, and for a moment I assumed that in my stressed and anxious state, I had made a mistake. Surely there could not be bad news about Haas, whom I'd seen vibrantly alive and radiantly happy only a few months earlier!
Haas had been on my mind that very week: I'd wondered whether he was still in Lebanon or back in the United States, or on a plane heading somewhere (he always seemed to be on a plane heading somewhere). I had just seen him in the summer, when he passed through Cyprus, my current place of residence, en route to and from Lebanon. It had been ten years since we'd connected in person, although e-mail had kept us in touch. That last time, he'd come to Boston, where I then lived, for a conference, and I'd walked through snowy city streets with my eight-month-old baby in a front pack to meet him. We'd sat in a coffee shop while I rocked my daughter back and forth, trying to soothe her restless cries so that we could extend the conversation as long as possible. With Haas, I always wanted to linger: he radiated an intensity and a warmth that were contagious, an inner light that shone out of those impossibly luminous eyes of his—clear evidence that I was in the presence of a beautiful, if often anguished, soul.
It's been exactly sixteen years since I first became friends with Haas. In the fall of 1991, I'd submitted some poems about Beirut, where I'd lived from 1978 to 1982, to Red Dirt, a literary journal published by Lorna Dee Cervantes. In November, Haas, who was the contributing editor for that issue and Cervante's mentee, replied, accepting my poems and initiating a conversation between us about Lebanon, Arab-American literature, poetry, and life that was to continue for over a decade and a half.
"How can we not write about [Beirut]?" he asked me in that very first letter. "It's the only way for us to make sense of it all. I'm sure there are more of us out there writing about Beirut, but where are they?"
With Beirut as our shared passion and Arab-American writing as our shared quest—I was deep into research for a dissertation on Arab-American literature at the time, and was in search not only of writers, but also of a sense of an Arab-American literary community—the sense of connection that sparked between us was immediate and wonderful and a foregone conclusion. In his second letter to me, Haas wrote, "So life is full of coincidence and chance. I too have been looking `so long for some echo of my own experience.' You've found a new friend."
Almost immediately we floated...
