In this talk, Tarek El-Ariss discuss his newly published book, Water on Fire: A Memoir of War, in which he reconstructs a personal and historical narrative shaped by conflict, displacement, and literature while engaging with the following questions: How do we remember war? Is war experience constitutive of memory itself? What is the role of theory in the production of the subject as both character and survivor of catastrophic events? The talk expounds on the entanglement of the self in interpretive frameworks that are shaped by a comparative practice drawing on a wide range of literary influences and intellectual traditions.