It’s set during the civil war in Lebanon from the middle 1970s through about 1990, a series of events which I think are as defining for our modern world as the events in Berlin just after WWII were for the Cold War period. Some example concepts include the role of the human body as a weapon at the same level of political and military effectiveness as the highest tech, the recasting of democracy away from U.S. client status, and if not the first appearance of political Islam by a long shot, certainly its most original and independent version.
I’m basing the whole endeavor on Lebanese and related fiction and non-fiction from the war period, just as Spione is framed and conceived through the lens of a special kind of spy fiction and non-fiction. Lebanese literature is fascinating, shattered and re-defined by the war just like the country was, especially Beirut – it’s surreal, rules-breaking, sexy, violent, and guts-exposing, all in colloquial and uncompromisingly street/slang Arabic, which until that time never saw print. The concept of the witness is absolutely central, because so much of the literature is unplanned: diaries which get published, poems which were not intended to be published, non-political writing which becomes political, and stuff like that.