Book Club - Antoun Issa’s Rebirth

Antoun Issa is a Lebanese-Australian journalist and co-founder of Deepcut News.

Antoun has a new book out entitled Rebirth and with the byline a “Love Story from the depths of war.” Rebirth chronicles Antoun’s mothers experiences of the beginnings of the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and her subsequent migration to Australia.

The novel centers around the experience of the pseudonymously named Khalil family and their eldest daughter Laila. Laila works as a seamstress, supporting her father’s income for the family and giving her some small degree of autonomy in moving around Beirut between home and her work. Laila is of an age when her family would be seeking a match, and for her to marry, but Laila is jealous of her independence, her role as a support to her family, and is also secretly in love with the handsome hairdresser she sees coming to and from work.

Laila might reasonably worry about the approval of her family and the politics of relationships in a close knit community. When war breaks out and factions around the city close off territories she comes to understand that simple things such as living and dying can be easily overturned by desperate men with guns. In a short while she will see her life and her love transformed utterly.

Rebirth is a deeply personal and tremendously affecting novel. In crafting the book Antoun Issa meticulously crafted stories from locals in Beirut and his mother’s own reminiscences. He takes these interviews and transforms them into a vibrant narrative evoking both the history of the time, but also something of the community and what is being lost as it is felt by those who would come to mourn it eternally.

When I read the book it was against the backdrop of a new war unfolding in Lebanon, with invading Israeli forces uprooting town much as Rebirth describes the uprooting and displacement of the Khalil family. As that conflict escalates I turn again to Rebirth as a source for understanding what is at stake and the generational trauma visited on those who are driven from their lands.

Rebirth is a vessel for that memory. It is also a testament to the humanity of the people who are caught in the middle of conflict. Those who become casualties but often don’t get memorialised as the fighters do because they are poor, or not strategically important in the schemes of little men with big guns.

This is an incredible work of narrative non-fiction and a generous invitation to all readers to understand both the history and the personal consequence of a decades long conflict seared into the hearts of so many Lebanese diaspora across the world and in Australia.