Registers the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster (the fifteen-year Lebanese war); produces completed crossword puzzles with subsisting blank spaces in a country of shattered shop signs; exhibits the rise in 1992-Beirut of a sublime architecture of bricks in a period where it appears Arabs are being driven to the Stone Age (Palestinians throwing stones at the Israeli army in the Occupied Territories, etc) and uses fiction to document the eruption of psychotic effects in and outside mental hospitals.

Many people first became aware of the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon after the shocking and horrific Sabra-Shatila massacre that took place there in 1982. Located in Beirut's "belt of misery," the camp is home to 15,000 Palestinians and Lebanese who share a common experience of displacement, unemployment and poverty. Fifty years after the exile of their grandparents from Palestine, the children of Shatila attempt to come to terms with the reality of being refugees in a camp that has survived massacre, siege and starvation.