What struck me immediately in the form of Mroue's Beirut Survivors Anonymous is the way in which he uses the the minimal white space to provide shifts in focus, narrative and voice.

Initially we are in the midst of an attack, present to the flying of rockets and living in the dark of war so as not to provide any more targets. In this process the narrator talks about,

on the radio, putting faces to names,
scars to bodies, burns to flesh.

The war is personalized, taken out of the realm of the abstract and distant, faces receive names, scars are bodies, burns are flesh, it presents these victims as whole people not disconnected dead bodies as western media often portrays them. From the immediacy of that stanza the white space leaps us ahead a number of years. It now presents us with a remembered incidents, we are not in the war but in memories of war, a very different perspective. This stanza also contains the last instance of a singular voice for this narrative.

The lines,

I fly coach cross-continent
searching for someone
to recreate my childhood with.
We are walking to school. It is May.

with this moment of communal we is then disrupted by a return to I for the rest of the stanza; however it is a foreshadowing of the rest of the poem. The next white space involves the shifting of the voice from a singular personal experience to a shared one. The someone the narrator is searching for is found and merges into a seamless voice that nevertheless positions itself as multiple with We being the voices of many raised to say the same thing. Through the remaining stanzas the We is deepened and processed into a more clear identity for the reader.

The positionality continues to shift in the white space between the stanzas. In the third stanza we are back in America, wrapped in memories of war that are preferable to the place they find themselves now. Isn't this a function of memory, a yearning for times/places that the passage of years has rendered into a soft focus that erases the more negative aspects of the experience? I think so, and while I do see some of that there's also a fierce honesty in regards to the realities of war, evident in the fourth stanza.

We jump back in time, in memory, back to the war but the shelling is only the framing:

It is for nights of unrelenting shelling
we long, for the calm of corridors and neighbors
boiling coffee until dawn, for gunpowder seeping
through shut windows and the wails
of a single ambulance.

While the first and last lines of the stanza enclose it in the acts of war and the results the placement of the words we long puts it in an inbetween position. Is it longing for the shelling or for the things that follow, the community that forms through survival of war? When we keep in mind the We voice and the title of the piece it becomes an obvious call for connection. It is not actually the war that is missed but the personal connections and support that formed in opposition to it.

The next white space provides another switch back to the States, it also builds on the the search for community. The We tries to return to the memories of Beirut by links to arak, belly-dancers and hummous but the connection is false, in the end the last two lines of the stanza

longing for green plums and salt,
the ecstasy of Howitzers on a school night.

show us a longing for the reality of home not the falseness of American narratives of Arab culture that focus on the exotification of watered down pieces of the society taken completely out of context. It is a longing for the truth of home set against the facade of home that America presents for consumption.

The white space after that stanza gives another huge shift, this time from concrete to abstract. The focus on physical interactions of things, places and people is replaced by the psychic space and scars of those who've lived through the war and been transplanted into America. As opposed to previous stanzas when the communal we is connected to actions such as "lived", "long", "drink", "watch", "vomit" while in the final two stanzas the wes "are", "don't", "still", "can" positioning them in a space of being as opposed to doing.

The exploration of the identity of a Beirut Survivor happens in the white space where changes of voice, place and position happen silently and without fanfare.