Dr. Pamela Chrabieh

I am very grateful to Indelible Literary and Arts Journal and especially Dr. Roula-Maria Dib for publishing my text “What Ferments in the Ruins” together with two of my hybrid artworks in its remarkable tenth issue, devoted to “Fermentation” (July 2026).

Bringing together poetry, prose, and art, this issue approaches fermentation well beyond its literal meaning. It opens onto processes that are less visible and less immediate: what develops under pressure, what changes during periods of apparent stillness, what decomposes and recomposes, and what gradually takes another form.

My contribution enters this theme through the experience of war in Lebanon. “What Ferments in the Ruins” considers war not only as rupture or explosion, but as something that continues to work through bodies, memory, perception, and time long after, and often between, moments of direct violence.

The two accompanying hybrid works, created through drawing on paper and Procreate, approach this process visually. In one, human figures cross a fractured terrain, carrying different layers of memory and solitude. In the other, the figures disappear, and the marks themselves take over: lines collide, knot and accumulate, as if the surface had absorbed a prolonged state of tension.

What interested me in the theme of fermentation was precisely this possibility of thinking about survival without idealising it. War does not make people nobler, and wounds do not automatically become wisdom. Yet something can continue to develop in their aftermath: lucidity, tenderness, resistance, another language, another way of inhabiting the world…

I am thankful to the Indelible team for giving this work such a thoughtful space, and for placing it within an issue that allows literature and visual art to examine transformation in all its ambiguity, creative and destructive, intimate and collective.

*Issue #10: Fermentation is available in both digital and printed editions through Indelible. CLICK HERE.