Firefly

A powerful novel of a young man living between Muslim and Christian worlds amid the Lebanese Civil War. Firefly paints a searing portrait of the city of Beirut at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in the early 1970s as seen through the eyes of its simple yet perplexing protagonist Nizam alAlami. On Nizams 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 agreed to raise 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. Unable to bear the confines of the classroom he abandons college to explore the city as he pleases. His apartment soon becomes a meeting place for his communist comrades and he falls in love with Janan the tormented artist whose dark paintings prophesy the citys bloody future. When Beirut explodes and the city is divided into a Christian East and a Muslim West Nizams apartment turns into a hideout for armed militiamen and Burj Square is emptied of everything except the Martyrs Statue that bears witness to the citys most difficult moments. Nizam too bears witness as he sees the corpses of the civil wars victims pile up. Jabbour Douaihy takes us through Nizams adventures and struggles as he faces stigmatization homelessness and violence in a society that considers him an outsider. Like the lightproducing 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 inbetween. But how long Douaihy asks can this glimmer of hope truly last