The Markaz Review:

Joelle M. Abi-Rached reflects on the failures of psychiatry and psychiatric language in addressing the trauma arising from mass violence.

JM Abi-Rached

I must have been eighteen or nineteen when I first saw a production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Beirut. I remember very little about the play save for one moment: when Vladimir takes a pistol from his pocket and pulls the trigger. The round was of course a blank. But the shot startled me, and I immediately left the theatre. Interestingly, I wasn’t the only one; others followed.

Another common trigger in our part of the world is the sonic boom of Israeli warplanes. As long as I can remember, they have been part of our daily lives. When I first went to London in 2006 — after leaving Lebanon under catastrophic circumstances during Israel’s war with Hezbollah — it took me several months to rid my ears of the constant buzzing sound of warplanes. My friends would laugh whenever I looked up at the sky in anguish. It took me months, if not years, to tame my fear of the sky. And to be honest, I’m not sure I’ve ever fully overcome it. This became painfully clear after the heavy bombardment of Beirut in September 2024, at the resumption of Israel’s unfinished war with Hezbollah. I was consumed by panic and dread.

Like many Lebanese, I carry psychological scars that are deep, multilayered, unresolved, and often unspoken. They sediment and pile up from crisis to crisis, through political upheavals, wars, and other plagues. Some are personal, and others collective. Some lie in the past; others are still unfolding. Some endure through intergenerational stories; others I have experienced firsthand. Some I have learned through encounters with survivors or descendants of survivors, and others through documentaries and history books. Together, they mark the blows endured and the residue we live with.

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