From The Stone of Laughter by Hoda Barakat (translated by Sophie Bennet, a novel set in wartime Beirut):
The auspicious bombing returns primal time to you and restores the city's first coherence. Death is the only spur to the city, for it is death that gathers the city's many little splinters and holds them to itself like iron filings.
Death is the only man in the city. When the city is plunged deep in her seductions and games he twists her arm and, in one swoop, holds it fast towards him and she leans on him and calms down and she beings to breathe regularly.
He gives the city her real flavor which she forgets, when the bombing starts. It is death who is the father of the city, who always reminds her that she must refrain from standing by the window … who chides her, holding her back from the dreams that tempt her to play outside the fence, to talk to strangers, that tempt her to the desire to be like the distant world that sends the city its disgusting pictures in magazines, in immoral books, and on television.
When the bombing becomes intense, death sits at his desk. He cleans his spectacles thoroughly before picking up the long rules and the pen to draw up a plan for the city as befits a great architect. Only those who have some connection go out into its streets: the fighters and the death squads. As for those who have no job, they loiter in his vaults, in his natural places. Things are not confused, the lion does not lie with the lamb, this is one of Nature's catastrophes, ones of its bitter peculiarities. There is no place for confusion, no place for you to wonder whether the shoeseller is a blood merchant, or sells plundered electrical goods. Even the petty thieves restrain themselves and take their family life seriously.
Death is the master of clarity and precision but, so precise and clear is he that he rises up from the city like a spirit and is tormented whenever he has to define his features or forms. In his buildings he suffers the torment of one concerned with God's incarnation in man and man's incarnation in God, buildings that perpetually fall a little short, that are always tight across his infinite shoulders.[…]
They lose their entrails and their limbs on the asphalt in the heat and rain because they are sensitive and because they are generous, as intelligent people are, because they know that it is better for them to rise to the jewel of martyrdom than to die just for nothing, by mistake, without becoming immortal […] Look at our disabled, victims of the enemy, whom the god death returned to us that they might bear witness to our innocence, that we might celebrate them with their eternal mutilations, that we might spit the poisons of anxiety from our weak consciences. Our lovely disabled lean on their sticks, their hands outstretched for our intercession, they are better than you are at making cane chairs and sitting us on them so we can find rest from you. They play with their severed limbs and their plucked out eyes to make us feel happy and to ease our consciences, to encourage to walk in the path of righteousness. They run around in their wheelchairs, happy as sandboys, urging on the fighters of our organization, crying out for joy and beating drums. They leave their mothers and wives and children to follow the organization which walks on the face of the water.
We shall whet society's appetite. We shall arrange classes for sewing and fitting, workshops for knitting and embroidery, markets to sell stuffed peppers and stews and pickles and preserves. We shall fill sandbags with the gravel from their kidneys, we shall clean the areas around the blockades and wash the pictures of the martyrs with the juices that run from our wounds, we shall polish the glass of the party headquarters with the waters that run from the corners of their eyes and we shall steep the bullet in mothers' milk so that it shines and glimmers in the dull light.
We shall put life in order, this whole dirty, short, wretched life, this life that does not deserve to die by a stray bullet but by a bullet shot true for the sake of the order, we shall put life in order along the same lines as death's eternal order, we shall reduce it for the confused and bewildered, we shall reduce it a great deal …