Beirut, Imagining the City: Space and Place in Lebanese Literature 9780755608836, 9781784530150

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Dedicated to my family, with love and gratitude

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Mazen Kerbaj, ‘It’s so Hard to Part from Beirut’, ‘Kerblog’, p. 2 Figure 2: A panel from the autobiographical comic Mrabba w Laban (Jam and Yogurt) by Lena Merhej, p. 169 Figure 3: Mazen Kerbaj, ‘One War Leads to Another’ (‘The Lebanese Wars Chronicles’), 23 July 2006, p. 180 Figure 4: Exchanging stories about the Lebanese civil war, A‘taqid by Lena Merhej, p. 188 Figure 5: Lena Merhej ‘In the Sanayeh garden, I imagined the fountain erupting, as I had seen it at the Sukkars’ house/I solved the problem of the limited water supply at summer camp with my imagination as well/Since July 2006, I sometimes suddenly see the street transformed into the battlefield of a civil war: today, this ability to imagine makes me panic’, p. 197

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is a mixed blessing to write acknowledgements: on the one hand, they highlight the fact that writing, no matter how solitary it may feel, is always a social endeavour; on the other, as with all projects that have unfolded over long stretches of time, they are a bittersweet reminder of the separations of time and distance from friends and family. This project began as graduate work at Brown University, and owes a lot to the community of scholars there, and especially to Elliott Colla, Re´da Bensmaı¨a and Edward Ahearn, who first read it and saw its potential. At MIT, I had the gentle encouragement of James Buzard, and a postdoctoral fellowship that enabled me to carve ample time out for writing and revising. Since my arrival at Claremont McKenna College, I have found myself surrounded by a wonderful community. The Dean of Faculty, Nicholas Warner, provided much-appreciated support for this project. I am grateful to Marie-Denise Shelton and Bassam Frangieh for guiding me through the hurdles of my first year and early career in academia. I also owe a special thanks to my colleague Lee Skinner, who, in addition to welcoming us into her home and giving muchneeded advice about navigating everyday life in southern California, patiently and enthusiastically read my work and helped me navigate the transition from dissertation to manuscript.

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A big thank you to Azmina Siddique, Maria Marsh and Allison Walker at I.B.Tauris, who have been absolutely great every step of the way, and to Ian McDonald for his (literally!) much-needed copyediting skills. Jean-Pierre Watchi was generous enough to share his wonderful pictures of Beirut, and let us use one of them as the cover image – un grand merci! Parts of Chapter 4 were published as an article in the Journal of Arabic Literature, and parts of Chapter 2 appear in a forthcoming publication on teaching Arabic literature. My thanks to Muhsin alMusawi for his permission to reprint both pieces. A big thank you to Mazen Kerbaj and Lena Merhej for allowing me to use their beautiful images. My life in Claremont would be a lot less productive without Friday work sessions with Pey-Yi Chu and Seo Young Park. It would also be a lot less fun without their companionship and support – and, of course, dinner club. I have a ton of gratitude – and even more love – for Nada Moumtaz, Hiba Bou Akar and Ellen Rentz, for reading parts of this book and helping me improve it with their carefully considered remarks and their honest critiques. Hooray for group video-critique sessions! My decade of living in the United States has brought with it good and bad; I count my friendships with Teresa Villa-Ignacio, Kelley Krietz, Amy Vegari, Kathryn Chenoweth, Ariane Helou and Lara Deeb among the very, very good things that have happened along the way. Thank you all for the countless coffees, dinners and conversations. I write about Beirut because it perplexes and troubles me, and, as this book shows, I’m apparently not the only one. What is unequivocally great about Beirut are the people I love in it. There are too many to count, and all too many no longer live in Lebanon, but an especially big hug to Bana Bashour – all of the Bashours, in fact – Lina Mounzer, Sherine Shallah, George Nadda, Hatem Imam and Nisreen Salti. I would not be where I am today without the love, support and encouragement of my family, immediate and extended. My mom and dad, Najia and Nicolas Hayek, supported my decision to leave Lebanon for graduate school, knowing that it would mean long

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chunks of absence. The magic of technology has allowed some of that absence to be bridged; in person or online, they are a daily source of love and support. My sister Munya was my first and probably harshest critic, and continues to push me to be better. The Hayeks and the Saouds – both sides of my large, boisterous and deeply missed family in Lebanon – gave me my first example of how personal stories fashion deep social bonds, and enable and enforce belonging, cohesion and connection. I miss them every day, and will be forever grateful for the stories; I’m even more grateful, though, for their unconditional love. Last, but not least, to Rami Jabakhanji, for an adventure-filled seven years that have brought us one war, several rounds of urban warfare, five moves across three states, countless road trips, one wedding and two PhDs: bhibbak, w ba’rif laysh.

INTRODUCTION FROM MOUNT LEBANON TO BEIRUT: THE SHIFTING LANDSCAPES OF LEBANESE FICTION

In Lebanese artist Mazen Kerbaj’s graphic weblog of the 2006 July war in Lebanon, black broad brushstrokes form the background and shape for an abstracted pieta.1 The Arabic letters Ba-Ya-Ra-Waw and Ta cascade vertically along the length of the hollow white body of the mother clasping an infant: they are the content of this woman’s body, and together they form the word Beirut (Figure 1). In the top righthand corner is written, in colloquial Arabic, ‘It’s so hard to part from’, the text leading to the ‘Beirut’ inscribed upon the woman’s body.2 The difficulty of leaving Beirut is a preoccupation for much of the blog, as is the assertion of Beirut’s persistence, despite attempts to ‘erase’ it.3 In fact, as the blog develops, Beirut becomes as central a character as Mazen himself.4 The connection between the artist and the city is emphasized – and even day trips up to the mountains are represented as a challenge, the artist pining for the city down below. The city’s image in Kerbaj’s representations keeps shifting, from the symbolic mother to a rudimentary sketch of a skyline, to an abstracted blackness outside Mazen’s window. Yet, in all its manifestations, Mazen is connected to it not merely by the fact of his

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Figure 1

BEIRUT, IMAGINING THE CITY

Mazen Kerbaj, ‘It’s so Hard to Part from Beirut’, ‘Kerblog’

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physical presence or absence from it but because it is more than just an ordinary city: it is what gives him a sense of place. The cityscape of Beirut has, in the past four decades, undergone massive physical transformation: destruction, reconstruction, demolition and construction have ensured that it is a landscape in constant flux. Some of the events that have most severely impacted the urban landscape include several wars, the Lebanese civil war of 1975 –90 being one, and also the great migration of refugees from southern villages into the city’s perimeter, beginning during the 22-year Israeli occupation (1978– 2000) and continuing throughout the subsequent Israeli assaults and campaigns across southern Lebanon.5 Spaces that were used for one purpose before times of conflict were transformed and modified for other uses. During the summer war of 2006, abandoned shops in large retail complexes became makeshift apartments for refugees. Even more optimistic projects, such as the reconstruction of downtown Beirut in the 1990s – billed as one of the biggest urban reconstruction projects since World War II – have had an indelible, and not always welcome, effect on the landscape of the city.6 Today, the city and country are being changed in unpredictable ways by the massive influx of refugees from the violence in Syria.7 Throughout the country’s recent history, from at least the mid-1960s onwards, artists and writers have continued to use the cityscape to evoke, interrogate and sometimes resist dominant national and sectarian narratives; political divisions; and the intervention of capital, developers and investors in the urban space, and consequently, in the public sphere. Often, Lebanese artists and writers discuss the cityscape in the language and metaphors of dislocation and disorientation. For example, in the novel Tuyur Aylul, the figure of an individual at a crossroads is used repeatedly by Emily Nasrallah to evoke her protagonist Muna’s feeling that she does not belong anywhere – neither in her home village nor in the city. In Alexandre Najjar’s Le Roman de Beyrouth, which I discuss in the penultimate chapter, the two main characters – a very old man and a rather young one – both feel that they have lost their ‘points de repe`re’, their reference points, in the now-reconstructed Beirut downtown area. This rhetoric suggests

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a disturbance of what geographers term a ‘sense of place’, which is deeply connected to processes of making emotional and social meaning from relations to specific locations.8 In the novels discussed in this work, the spaces of the country, city and the urban landscape are undergoing rapid changes. These novels are not just a central part of the historical record of these changes. I argue that these changes were so traumatic that they compelled writers to take notice. The relationship between urban change and novels about Beirut has been dynamic and even dialectical. The transformation of the cityscape through modernization and growing urbanization, war and then reconstruction throws the characters of these novels off balance and exposes a deep layer of anxiety and tension about themselves and about the place they occupy. As I discuss in detail, this dislocation leads to an alienation from the changing physical, cultural and social landscape of the city. And, in the peculiar history of Lebanon, downtown Beirut has served as the only space unmarked by sectarian identity; consequently, the shift in imagining the spaces of the city has had profound significance for the nation. Recently, more scholarship has begun to focus on the critical relationship of space, in terms of both its production and consumption, to human culture and society. Such scholarship has built upon the pioneering work of French theorists like Henri Lefe`bvre and Michel de Certeau whose work – in particular, Lefe`bvre’s – insists upon the fact that space is neither empty nor neutral, but produced through similar processes of making meaning and signification as other social relations.9 Once this is understood, Michel de Certeau asserts, ‘everyday practices, “ways of operating” or doing things [of which, for example, walking around in an urban space is one manifestation, as de Certeau’s famous example of walking in New York City shows] no longer appear as merely the obscure background of social activity’.10 In fact, as Lefe`bvre expostulates in the introduction to his The Production of Space, it is inconceivable that ‘space be nothing more than the passive locus of social relations, the milieu in which their combination takes on body or the aggregate of the procedures employed in their removal’.11 In other words, as geographer Neil Smith explains, space, and particularly public space, ‘is socially

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produced, is a matter of intense political struggle, and an object of historical change’.12 In Lebanon, especially in recent years, when it comes to Beirut, the politics of space and place have been constantly at play and frequently in tension.13 This has been studied in urban ethnographies, such as the recent work by Aseel Sawalha, Reconstructing Beirut, in which she examines the interplay and struggles between political actors, real-estate developers, individual landholders and neighbourhood residents over defining and reclaiming the Beirut neighbourhood of ‘Ayn al-Mraysa. It also features in sociologist Samir Khalaf’s Heart of Beirut, a historical account of the Martyrs’ Square area, once the urban centre of the capital and now a key site of political protest – used, for example, in 2005 and 2008 by partisans of both major political factions at the time. In fact, Najib Hourani has argued that in Lebanon, the ‘urban is not to be understood as an outcome of a deeper logic, but rather an unstable field through which power operates and reproduces itself’.14 Yet, social spaces – as Lefe`bvre and de Certeau, as well as Michel Foucault, point out – are not only sites of hegemonic practices, such as the appropriation of land by eminent domain (compulsory purchase), but are also sites of everyday resistance by individuals.15 In short, space is a dynamic component of human cultural and social formation, in Lebanon and elsewhere. While literary criticism has been interested in cities and in such spatial issues as landscape for many decades – as can be seen from such foundational texts as Burton Pike’s The Image of the City in Modern Literature, Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory and even Walter Mitchell’s Landscape and Power – this has often focused on symbolic or metaphorical representations of urban space and/or landscape, and less on cities as actual places.16 As critics like Neil Smith and Nirvana Tanoukhi argue, however, such readings willfully suppress or ignore political, social and historical contexts while focusing on the abstract or metaphorical meanings of space.17 Subsequently, in her article ‘The Scale of World Literature’, Nirvana Tanoukhi argues for a move away from ‘metaphorical deployments of “space” toward concrete discussions about the materiality of literary landscapes’.18 According to Tanoukhi, this ‘would enable a more

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precise formulation of the role of literature, and literary analysis, in the history of the production of space’.19 In short, by advocating a reintroduction of geographic scale into criticism Tanoukhi makes a compelling argument for the reintegration of a specific historical, political and geographical context into literary analysis. She writes: What better program for a geographically enlarged literary history than to conceptualize the dialectic of lived time and lived space in and around literature – in order to understand the entanglement of literature in the history of the production of space?20 In the case of Lebanon, where space – particularly, in recent years, urban space – has been an especially combustible site of contestations over power, identity, memory and culture, Tanoukhi’s invitation to integrate literature and literary analysis into ‘the history of the production of space’ seems both timely and necessary. While it is certainly not the only factor in the cultural production of space in the Lebanese context, literature can unquestionably contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the historical and geographical contexts of Lebanese identity. Both Lebanese literature and popular culture have already played a major role in formulating and propagating a particular landscape of national imagery and identity. For example, a popular Beirut restaurant advertises itself through the image of a horse-drawn cart, and a sign that proclaims: ‘For the first time, the village is invading the city!’, appearing to resist the urbanization of the Lebanese countryside through a return to an imagined rusticity. The project’s architect explains his design influences in an interview: I was inspired by the books of Anis Freiha [a famous Lebanese novelist who has written extensively about Lebanese traditional village life]. I took all the descriptive elements from Freiha’s books and materialized them in built form, in architectural details, and through artifacts and objects. Here you have AbouAhmad [sic] house, and here you have Abou-Khalil [sic] house,

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this is the well of the village, this is the terrace (‘alliya), this is al-saha (the open space) [. . .] All the objects you see here are mentioned in his books. I want to show that Anis Freiha was right: the village life is the genuine true life that inspires good and generosity [. . .] This project is about the values of the Lebanese traditional village, and how these values will invade the city!21 Although Harb and Deeb point out that the architect’s project in fact hybridizes several different traditions from a number of sources – including Lebanese popular culture, which tends to privilege traditionally Christian representations of (Mount Lebanon) over others – it remains the case that the architect explicitly uses literary references in order to articulate and support the authenticity of his project, and to place it within a specific cultural context that he contrasts with the dense urban area where the site stands.22 Due to its concentration on the creation and articulation of the urban in Lebanese literature, each chapter of this book focuses on a different period in the nation’s and the city’s history: the rapid urbanization of the 1960s and 1970s, and the subsequent destruction of the city during the civil war, followed by the succeeding decades of reconstruction of central Beirut and the ensuing raging debate around the meanings of urbanity in Lebanon. In effect, it charts the rise to cultural prominence of the urban as a socially significant place in Lebanese culture, and its displacement of the rural paradigm that had previously dominated Lebanese cultural production. That said, such a literary and cultural history cannot ignore the role played by the rural – in the case of Lebanon, the mountain – in the cultural formation of Lebanese identity. As Raymond Williams testifies in The Country and the City, these two generic types of human dwelling – the country village and the city, or the rural and the urban – are dialectically entwined in a signifying process, and the work of the critic is to ‘not limit ourselves to their contrast but go on to see their interrelations’.23 Following Williams then, I assert that in Lebanon it is very difficult to begin to understand the emergent cultural resonance of the city in the 1960s without first understanding the historical role of the mountain as the signifier of

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(a certain kind of) nation and national identity. In fact, as I show later in this chapter, the rural paradigm – what has come to be known as ‘Mountain Romanticism’ – dominated the cultural landscape of Lebanon from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, and still has a considerable cultural impact, as demonstrated by the case of the architect above. Not only did mountain romanticism inform many of the ideological and canon-forming processes of the nascent Lebanese state, its influence upon popular culture, academia and other aspects of Lebanese social formation and formulations of national identity has been considerable. Nevertheless, the architect’s very assertion belies a shift in symbolic dominance: for him, traditional Lebanese village values must be reinserted into the contemporary urban discourse of Lebanon, as they are no longer culturally dominant. In fact, by the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, the city – and in particular, Beirut – had displaced the mountains as the symbolic anchor for Lebanese cultural identity: Beirut had become, in the words of Theodor Hanf, ‘the center stage in most acts’.24 My use of the terms ‘dominant’ and ‘emergent’ is of course, not accidental, and owes a great deal to another of Raymond Williams’ contributions – namely to his parsing of the changing, yet intertwined relations between dominant, emergent and residual in his seminal work, Marxism and Culture. For Williams, while traditional cultural studies has often focused on dominant paradigms – he gives the example of ‘bourgeois culture’ – to understand cultural phenomena, it is crucial that they be understood as dynamic processes rather than as monolithic facts.25 To avoid errors of generalization or the exclusion of what is perceived to be marginal to this culture, he introduces ‘terms which recognize not only “stages” and “variations” but the internal dynamic relations of any actual process’ – namely, what he calls the ‘residual’ and the ‘emergent’ – ‘which in any real process, and at any moment in the process, are significant both in themselves and in what they reveal of the characteristics of the “dominant”’.26 What is valuable about Williams’ concept is that it acknowledges the different, successive and perhaps non-monumental processes that go into making culture. In situations where historical, political and

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geographical change has been as rapid as it has been in Lebanon during the past 40 years, being able to see these changes as part of a dynamic process is crucial. Williams correlates the dominant to the culturally hegemonic, but he acknowledges that the emergent – that which is ‘substantially alternative or oppositional to [the dominant]’ – is trickier to identify.27 He does, however, suggest a method to distinguish between the three modes – an analysis of form: ‘what matters, finally, in understanding emergent culture, as distinct from both the dominant and the residual, is that it is never only a matter of immediate practice; indeed it depends crucially on finding new forms or adaptations of form.’28 As this project charts the emergence and eventual dominance of the urban over the rural in Lebanese literature and popular culture, it also maps out a changing formal landscape, from the realist novels of the pre-civil war period (1962– 73), to the memoirs and experimental fiction of the war years (1975– 90), to the historical fiction of the early years of the new millennium and the graphic novels of its second decade. Though all can be broadly understood as the emergence of a new urban paradigm that interrogates and complicates the formerly dominant rural, traditional, mountain nationalism of pre-1960s Lebanese culture, when examined separately they narrate a story of the process by which the city gained ascendency in Lebanese culture, as well as the forms used to articulate this throughout the last turbulent four decades of the country’s history. But, as I mentioned earlier, by paying close attention to these texts’ use of space a more complex understanding of the nuanced relationship between individual and city emerges. Even prior to its existence as an independent state, the political entity that became the nation state of Lebanon was entangled in a complex politics of space, place and geography – in which, in fact, it remains enmeshed to this day. In this, the mountain village and the city have been dialectically intertwined as synecdoches for a vast array of meanings. To return one final time to the architect: for him, the village represents tradition, piety, openness and an idyllic pastoral life that must not only be replicated but also must be reintroduced into the urban suburb, for commercial as well as social reasons.29 Moreover, as he sees it, this idyllic life is under

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threat, and must be upheld, architecturally and otherwise, in a nowurbanized Lebanon. He recognizes this, hence his nostalgic tone; his insistence upon the recreation of village life is, as I show above, a resistance to an already-existing dominance of the urban. In Williams’ terms, the architect longs for, and aims to revive, what is now ‘residual’.30 The pace of change has been so rapid in Lebanon that it is difficult to imagine that the mountain romanticism that the architect longs for and tries to replicate had been the dominant cultural paradigm only 30 years previously. Thus, in order to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of what I have characterized as the emergence of a new urban-centric discourse, it is necessary to begin with an examination of the rise and subsequent dominance of the earlier, mountain-centric discourse that influenced cultural politics in Lebanon from the large-scale – such as state-mandated educational curricula – to the small-scale identity politics that continue to play an important role in this multisectarian country. I therefore begin this introduction with a brief background of the literary and cultural origins of the discourse some have called ‘mountain nationalism’ and which others have termed ‘mountain romanticism’ – and, in particular, with a brief critical reading of one of the form’s earliest examples.31

Mountain Nation, Mountain Romance In 1898, a novella was serialized in the Beirut-based bi-monthly journal al-Machriq. The story, Kharidat Lubnan (The Unblemished Pearl of Lebanon), told the tale of the return of Hanna, a Lebanese emigrant, to his village after over 20 years spent abroad in Europe and South Africa. The first part of the story maps out Hanna’s journey through the village and key scenes with certain characters in his attempt to reunite with his betrothed, Anisa. Finally, he locates her, in the home of poor villagers who have taken her in after she has been blinded by an illness she contracted tending to their son. As they wait for her to return from a walk, Hanna learns of Anisa’s life since his departure; then he is finally reunited with her, and the two reaffirm their love for each other. The second part of the text revolves around

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two young writers arriving in the village on the day of Hanna and Anisa’s wedding. Their curiosity at the festivities leads them to Hanna’s home, where he recounts the story of his past in South Africa leading up to his return to the village. The story ends with the writers drawing straws to see who will get to recount Hanna’s story; the prose writer wins. At this point, the narrative ends, with a direct address to the reader: ‘and that’s why, dear Reader, you have before you the story of Anisa in prose, not poetry.’32 The novella’s tension is constructed around the fact that to the emigrant Hanna, the village is no longer knowable; its inhabitants do not recognize him, and their customs as well as the practice of everyday life have changed in the 25 years since he has been away. Initially, he is mistaken for a foreigner, specifically ‘an English wanderer’ ( jawwal inglizi), by the local innkeeper, the first person he meets upon his return. The villagers’ inability to recognize him and the changes that 20-plus years have wrought upon the village form the dramatic tension of the first half of the work, which involves a double search: for someone who will recognize him, and for his beloved Anisa, to whom he was betrothed before his emigration. ‘Is there no-one who recognizes me? Is there no-one who’s going to tell me about her?’, Hanna wonders to himself at several intervals throughout the narrative.33 Kharidat allegorizes emigration as a process of erasure from the collective memory of one’s community, a situation that causes Hanna extreme anguish. As noted, Hanna’s problem is that he is unknown to the rest of his fellow compatriots/villagers; another, equally pressing issue is that the village itself, after his 25-year absence, is unknown to him, in its landscape and its architecture as well as its inhabitants. In fact, the only immutable object in that entire village is the church, described as ‘kanisat al-watan’.34 Only the stability, steadfastness and immutability of the church – and that church’s inextricable link with the nation – manages to instill hope in Hanna, and enables him to recognize that this is still his village. In fact, upon recognizing the church, Hanna drops the map that he had carried with him from the moment of his arrival to the village.35 Thus, Kharidat creates a strong symbolic link between the Church, permanence, Mount Lebanon and

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the familiarity of home; more pointedly, it posits Mount Lebanon as a Christian nation-space, which ‘God has watered [. . .] and is indeed the source of utmost beauty and purity, the epitome of life and the purity of youth and joy’.36 Finally, when Hanna finds Anisa, the paragon of Christian virtue, the village becomes truly ‘known’ to him again, and vice versa. The novella registers Hanna’s transformation from an unknown being into a known one through a shift in the use of his name; prior to his marriage, he is described as al-gharib, the stranger, or al-musafir, the traveller. After his reunion with Anisa, he is finally referred to by his own name. It is his marriage to Anisa that makes him familiar, part of the village once more. This is the paradigm of the national romance: he whom ‘time has taken away from his lands (awtanihi)’ returns to his birthplace after many years of absence, and regains his identity through marriage.37 The tale of Hanna and Anisa bears some relation to the national romances studied in Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions. For Sommer, the mid- to late-nineteenth-century romances of South America ‘fueled a desire for domestic happiness that runs over into dreams of national prosperity’, and Kharidat seems to embody some of these very same qualities as Hanna and Anisa’s marriage ushers in good fortune for the entire village, which has already been identified as a nation-space.38 After all, in the logic of this novella, Hanna’s homecoming is as much an erotically motivated event as it is an emotional one. He returns to fulfil his promise to Anisa, whose very name evokes the notions of both companionship and unmarriedness; both the Arabic word anı¯sa – which means ‘companion’ – and a¯nisa – similar in meaning to ‘miss’ – invites metonymical readings: she is the unmarried female, par excellence; their marriage will be the symbolic joining of (female) village and (masculine) nation. Kharidat enables the union of village/woman and nation/man only through a return and a resettling in Mount Lebanon. Thus, through the marriage of Anisa and Hanna, the village is welded to the nation, and the foundational fiction is complete. Moreover, after the marriage, Hanna becomes the village benefactor, his personal wealth the trigger for a variety of projects.

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For example, he gives money to Sarkis the weaver, whose family has taken care of Anisa since her parents’ death, to start a silkproduction factory,39 and he establishes schools, so that Sarkis’ son, the first person to recognize him in the entire village, and daughters can attend. His personal wealth is invested back into the village, and this investment prospers, unlike another venture mentioned in the novel – that of Anisa’s brother, who loses the family’s money in a failed investment scheme with Beiruti traders.40 Thus, the novel locates both domestic happiness and communal prosperity in the mountain village. Perhaps the most surprising thing about this Arabic-language novella is neither its theme nor its content,41 nor the way in which it was disseminated through the Beiruti press at the time. By the late nineteenth century, the Beiruti press was thriving, and serialized fiction was so popular that al-Machriq’s editors, initially not very keen on publishing fiction, had been forced to do so in order to compete for the reading public.42 The most astonishing thing, perhaps, is that the village-centric Kharidat Lubnan, so deeply rooted in the specific place identity of Mount Lebanon, was written by a Flemish Jesuit priest, Henri Lammens. Moreover, as the remainder of this chapter shows, in terms of place identity and location, the story told in Kharidat Lubnan set the template for Lebanese fiction well into the middle of the following century. The contributions of the Jesuits in general, and of Henri Lammens in particular, in the formation of Lebanese nationalistic thinking has been very well documented elsewhere.43 The Jesuits used their academic institutions – including the Universite´ Saint-Joseph, established in 1848 – as well as publications such as al-Machriq as tools in the European colonial power struggle for the lands of the already-weakening Ottoman Empire. This is clear from the following excerpt of a letter sent from the Jesuits in Mount Lebanon to the French Foreign Ministry in 1858:44 [It is] humanitarian and prudent to maintain and develop the sympathies which she [France] already inspires in the Syrians, and to strive to establish among them a Catholic nationality

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which, growing as the Oriental Empire weakens, will find itself ripe for political existence on the day when the Empire, in crumbling, will open the door to the rival ambitions of the European powers. Of all the provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the one which could most easily be detached, without causing great injury to the Sultan, is doubtless Syria. The geographical position of this country cries for independence; enclosed within boundaries such as the Taurus, the Mediterranean and the desert [. . .] while there is not perfect homogeneity among all the sections of the Syrian population, there is, nevertheless, in its bosom an important core of nationality, and that is the population of Lebanon which, completely devoted to France,45 only awaits its advice and its guidance to enter on the path to regeneration.46 Notably, this letter explicitly relates the area’s geography to its people’s political potentiality and to French colonial interests in cultivating the ‘population of Lebanon’. The Jesuits were by no means the only ‘players’ in the fields of culture or politics – or indeed, cultural politics – in nineteenthcentury Lebanon. Yet, their impact was immediate and enduring on the cultural formation of the country decreed by French Mandate in 1920, which became the independent state of Lebanon in 1943.47 Their role in shaping the field of education cannot be denied, and it resonates with studies of imperialist education policies such as those detailed by Gauri Viswanathan in Masks of Conquest.48 As further support for such a view, Lammens’ attempt to translate his political vision and ideology – which was already being effectively disseminated in the classroom and his scholarly writing – through the medium of popular print culture into the novel form, suggests the strong link between ideology, education, politics and literature in his and his colleagues’ work. Literary populist ambitions aside, however, Lammens is best known for being a scholar of the Orient, a historian, and a profoundly influential teacher, whose:

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students were strongly influenced by his ideas, and among them was the generation of Christians, mainly Maronites, to whom the French, in many cases upon his personal recommendation, entrusted the government and administration of Lebanon after 1920 [the year of the declaration of the modern Lebanese state] [. . .] Lammens’ remarkable achievement was to secure for the Asile du Liban [literally, the Lebanese Refuge; figuratively the Lebanese mountain], a special political status as an autonomous principality within Syria.49 In his capacity as a teacher and influential member of the Jesuit educational system, Lammens came into direct and indirect contact with a young generation of intellectuals, thinkers and writers who would go on to play key roles not only in the formation of the Lebanese state after 1920, and later after independence from the French Mandate in 1943, but also in articulating and framing this state’s nationalist identity. In doing so, they often used tropes they had taken from Lammens, such as the idea of the asile du liban. Such ‘Francophone and -phile’ figures include Charles Corm, poet founder of the Re´vue Phe´nicienne; Bshara Khuri, the first president of an independent Lebanon; and Michel Chiha, who is often credited as one of the key founders and ideologues of the Lebanese state, and who interestingly enough was also a dynamic figure in the Lebanese press, through his French-language newspaper Le Jour.50 Given this network of influence, it is perhaps unsurprising that ‘after the First World War, ancient Mount Lebanon, not the modern provincial capital of Beirut, became the idealized historical template for a future as a Lebanese nation state’.51 In addition to its political influence, the notion of Mount Lebanon as a haven, a beacon and a source of inspiration predominated in the literature of the early twentieth century in Lebanon, and especially resonated with Lebanese emigrant writers in mahjar (exile) in North and South America. Authors such as Charles Corm in turn influenced a generation of other writers, including Amin Rihani, one of the key figures in the Lebanese mahjar literary movement and in the group

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known as the ‘Pen Association’.52 In fact, Amin Rihani’s book Qalb Lubnan (The Heart of Lebanon) was dedicated to Corm.53 The introduction of the collection, whose completion was interrupted by Rihani’s death, asks the reader to pause with its author, and contemplate a young man: Who, after spending half his life in the great city of New York, returned to his home land in Lebanon to sing the great Truths of Being, and found them in isolation, in nature, the clear and honest guide to them [. . .] He realized then that he was in the sacred mountain.54 Rihani eschews Lammens’ Christian-centric discourse for a more secular, new-age spirituality heavily informed by the Transcendentalism of Whitman and Emerson, as well as by English Romantics, such as Wordsworth; nevertheless, the spiritual anchor of nature is firmly lodged in ‘the sacred mountain’.55 In addition to emphasizing the spiritual dimension of the mountain, and the connection between home and the mountain, both Rihani’s and Lammens’ texts are also concerned with another experience: that of emigration and return. From the nineteenth century onward, Mount Lebanon saw vast waves of emigration, to such an extent that by 1900, 120,000 people had left – almost a third of the total population – much to the consternation of the Jesuits, among others.56 As Akram Khater’s historical study, Inventing Home, has emphasized, these emigrants, especially those who eventually returned to Mount Lebanon, played an important role in the formation of Lebanese modernity, in particular by bringing the ‘debates and tensions surrounding the definition and articulation of “modernity” into the hinterlands’, and out of the cities.57 Moreover, Khater points out, these returning emigrants – such as Rihani and Nu‘ayma – ‘returned to Mount Lebanon to create a middle class that was distinctly separate from the rural peasantry and the urban bourgeoisie’.58 Its writers also elaborated upon the template laid out a few decades earlier by such figures as Lammens and Corm in order to produce a nostalgic, romantic discourse that centred around

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Mount Lebanon and its perceived privileged status. In fact, Albert Hourani has explicitly linked the two phenomena, by suggesting that the romantic ‘image of a pure and natural way of living was carried by emigrants to the cities of the New World, strengthened and perhaps distorted there by nostalgia, and reflected back from them onto Lebanon itself’.59 Of course, this brief summary of the rise to cultural dominance of mountain romanticism barely scratches at the surface of the monumental and complex social and political phenomena underlying that era. These include the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire and its division among the Allied victors in the San Remo Agreement (1920) and the imposition of a French Mandate upon Lebanon, whose borders were now redrawn to include not only the semi-autonomous Mount Lebanon of the late Ottoman era, but also the coastal cites of Tripoli, Beirut, and Sidon – much to the chagrin of the local Muslim population, who were more inclined to being part of an Arab nation state and were not enthused by the prospect of a Christian-ruled country.60 And, of course, much has been written about the Lebanese experiment in sectarian democracy, and of the failure of Chiha’s brand of Lebanese nationalism to incorporate and unify the country; as such, ‘mountain nostalgia fostered crucial (and problematic) identifications for Lebanese identity’ due to its exclusion of the new country’s coastal communities.61 Although this experiment eventually failed it cannot be denied that there was an attempt to disseminate this perceived national identity through culture. As Jeff Shalan suggests, ‘whether it be language, territory, race, religion, ethnicity, the presumed historical continuity of a people, or any combination thereof, which serves as the organic and unifying principle of the nation, the idea itself typically takes shape in and is transmitted by way of a cultural system’.62 The work of Rihani and Jibran, and the short stories of Marun ‘Abbud, Mikhail Nuayma and others, which dealt with village life, were incorporated into the new educational curricula created after independence from the French. Thus, through a combination of press and print cultures and mass education, the invented tradition of

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mountain nationalism, of a specific set of traits particular to those inhabitants of Mount Lebanon, became the dominant cultural idiom in the country. The term ‘invented tradition’ is taken from Eric Hobsbawm’s and Terence Ranger’s influential book, The Invention of Tradition. In the introductory chapter, titled ‘Inventing Traditions’, Hobsbawm explains that an invented tradition is a: Set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition [. . .] where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past.63 As Hobsbawm’s definition suggests, any system that ‘seeks to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour’ is complicit in the dissemination of invented traditions. In Lebanon, academia has also been susceptible to the mountain nationalist paradigm. For example, Fu’ad Frem Bustani, a prominent Universite´ Saint-Joseph historian who held particularly Christian-nationalist views, used the imagery of the mountain to create a racialized mythology of the uniqueness and distinctiveness of mountain folk, as in the following paragraph: Lebanon’s mountain-folk [. . .] have always had to fight against rocks, dryness, nature and the mountain terraces. The Lebanese were individual property holders, while the nomads’ property belonged to their tribes. Those indolent nomads were always content with just taking their livestock out; they didn’t have the endurance of Lebanese peasants who, from the beginning, produced complete work.64 This mythology of the mountain was not only pervasive on the ultranationalist Right. In a famous, often-cited essay, titled ‘Ideologies of the Mountain and the City’, respected historian Albert Hourani suggests that one of the reasons for Lebanon’s continued strife is a fundamental difference between the contrasting ideologies of the

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mountain and the city. For Hourani, the mountain ideology is insular, superstitious, religious and populist, and ‘implicit in this mountain populism was a certain distrust of the city’, while the city ideology of Lebanon’s coastal inhabitants, Christian and Muslim alike, is pluralistic, one ‘in which communities, still different on the level of inherited religious loyalties and intimate family ties, co-existed within a common framework’.65 This argument has proven so compelling that it has frequently been used to ‘explain’ the reasons for the outbreak of the civil war, such as in Elizabeth Picard’s Lebanon: A Shattered Country, where she attributes part of the cause of the Lebanese war to a ‘mountain culture’ characterized by tribalism and violence.66 Moreover, in addition to the role played in propagating and disseminating this mountain romanticism by the state and its institutions – such as the Ministry of Education, which was in charge of setting educational curricula for Lebanon’s school system – Lebanese popular culture during the 1950s and 1960s was also dominated by a nostalgic, idyllic mountain-centred discourse. In Popular Culture and Nationalism, Christopher Stone studies the rise and impact of the Rahbani brothers and Fairouz, arguably the most successful and iconic Lebanese performers since independence. Stone examines how the Baalbek Festival committee and the Rahbanis not only ‘reflected a certain vision of Lebanese locality’, but actively produced an image of the Lebanese nation state that centred upon the imagined village life of an idealized Mount Lebanon.67 To some extent, by the early 1960s, the project launched by the Jesuits in the nineteenth century to create a national identity for the Lebanese people structured around the geographical site of Mount Lebanon had been quite successful. In fact, it had gained the status of fact, such that even its detractors were forced to take it into account in their attempts to articulate another version of Lebanon.68

The Mountain and the City Of course, while mountain nationalism and mountain romanticism may have been the most dominant cultural discourses of Lebanese nationalism, they were not the only ones, particularly since they so

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heavily depended upon the exclusion of a sizable – even majority – portion of Lebanon’s population from their narrative.69 After all, to return to Williams’ frame of reference, ‘no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention’.70 What Williams means by this is that even dominant paradigms are constantly shifting and, therefore, to varying degrees, unstable. Lebanon in the 1950s and 1960s was a particularly lively – and quite unstable – site of cultural and political exchange.71 The words of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who lived in Lebanon during the 1970s and 1980s, perhaps best capture this instability; Darwish writes that Lebanon was ‘transformed from a republic to a collection of positions’.72 Politically, the rise of Nasserist pan-Arab nationalism in the 1950s and the growing influence of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the 1960s, as well as local popular movements and parties, such as the Lebanese Communist Party and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party all began to chip away at the idealized notions of Chiha and his contemporaries. More importantly, as Beirut began to grow in both size and influence (thanks in part to the banking sector, in which both Chiha and Corm had influence),73 dominant political and cultural paradigms began to be challenged.74 Even earlier social relations were transformed, as in the example Akram Khater gives of the children of those middle-class emigrants who had returned to their mountain villages. For this generation, Khater writes, ‘the village dimmed as a point of social reference [. . .] It was, for them, a place to visit occasionally and perhaps a place for spending the summer away from the heat of the cities but not a place where they lived for the greatest part of their adult years.’75 Furthermore, in Lebanon in the 1960s, as I argue in the following chapter, a new literary mode was emergent, in the sense that ‘new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship’ were being produced.76 Since so much of the dominant idiom was intimately tied up with a particular type of place identity, i.e. with mountain nationalism or romanticism, it follows that this emergent literature, such as Tawfiq Yusuf ‘Awwad’s Tawahin Bayrut (The Mills of Beirut) or Emily Nasrallah’s Tuyur Aylul (September

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Birds), would deliberately distance itself from – and, in fact, interrogate – some of the basic premises of this dominant cultural idiom through an invocation and exploration of the other side of this place dialectic: the city. Thus, Chapter 1, ‘Inhospitable Spaces City and Village in Tawahin Bayrut and Tuyur Aylul’, explores the city/rural binary not as an opposition, as so many critics of Lebanese fiction have done, but as a dialectic. I argue in the chapter that both novels share an anxiety about the nation that is constructed as an anxiety about space and belonging. Specifically, the main characters in both these novels – significantly, both young women – cannot find themselves, cannot belong in either rural or urban Lebanon. Thus, in Emily Nasrallah’s Tuyur, the protagonist, Muna, frequently refers to herself as an ‘interrogation mark’. This symbol simultaneously configures both her confusion about her own identity and the interrogation, the challenge, that she and others like her pose to Lebanese society, both in its traditional village and modern urban forms. In this argument, a major point of departure from traditional critical readings of these novels is that I do not foreground gender differences as the main dynamo behind these changes, though of course I take into consideration both novels’ use of gender as a deliberate strategy to emphasize characters’ marginalization from traditional Lebanese society and their need to belong somewhere in this inhospitable space. I argue that a similar challenge to dominant narratives is also raised by Tawfiq Yusuf ‘Awwad’s Tawahin, which has often been read as one of the first examples of the urban novel in Lebanese literature. ‘Awwad’s protagonist, Tamima, a village girl from the Lebanese South, cannot find herself either in her village nor in Beirut; at pivotal moments in the novel, each space becomes a site of escape from the other. In the end, Tamima discovers that she cannot truly be happy in either, and chooses a different route after rejecting both. Read together, I argue, these novels point to an anxiety about belonging that transcends the village/city dialectic and becomes an anxiety about belonging to the nation itself. Written during a period where Lebanon – dubbed ‘The Switzerland of the Middle East’, due to its snow-capped mountains and its banking sector – and Beirut –

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‘the Paris of the Middle East’, in an interesting reinterpretation of European geography – were both booming, and the city especially was perceived as one of the freest, most open spaces in the Middle East (Mahmoud Darwish described it as ‘a workshop for freedom, busy sticking out its tongue at the sand and the repression on all sides of it’) and as a global city in its own right, these novels question both traditional mountain romanticism and the new narratives of urban modernity, and they pose interesting challenges about belonging.77 Unfortunately for Lebanon and for Beirut, a few years later the country and the city were caught up in civil war. In Chapter 2, ‘A City Divided: Beirut in the (1975–90) Civil War’, I cover the 15-year period of civil conflict, a historical moment marked by a paradoxical burst of literary and artistic activity. As I explain in detail in the chapter, the literary analysis of the Lebanese civil war has touched on various ‘breaks’ with tradition. First and foremost of these is this literature’s formal break with the narrative tradition of historical romance and realism, and its increased formal experimentation. Another often-discussed aspect of this war literature is its thematic break with mountain romanticism and with Lebanese nationalism, which has often been conflated by feminist critics with a break from traditional patriarchy. In short, this period is – accurately – read as one in which the war created an epistemic break with a number of previously dominant traditions. As I argue in the chapter, however, a close reading of these works, and in particular of the most canonical novels of this period, with attention paid to the local and global politics of geographical scale, illuminates a different series of issues. Such a reading allows one to look at the war ‘globally’, as a set of events that affected all Lebanese across the social spectrum, as opposed to privileging one social group’s experience (that of women, to give a common example) over the others. Such a reading highlights the collective experience of warfare as it shifted the boundaries of the urban space. As they came to terms with the spatial divides that war had imposed upon the city, some writers – for example, Mahmoud Darwish and Etel Adnan – often propagated them, while others – like Elias Khoury or Jean Said Makdisi – challenged them. I point to the way in which literature not only

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reflects, but also produces new spatial understandings and divisions of collective space. One such example of re-scaling occurs in Elias Khoury’s The Journey of Little Gandhi, in which the changes to Beirut’s landscape are mourned through a global metaphor. Over the course of the war, Beirut becomes a ‘Third World City’: ‘look at Beirut, transforming from the Switzerland of the East to Hong Kong, to Saigon, to Calcutta, to Sri Lanka. It’s as if we circled the world in ten or twenty years. We stayed where we were and the world circled around us.’78 Khoury’s spatial metaphor suggests two conflicting pulls. The first is the image of Beirut as the centre of the world, a substitution that evokes both a delusion of grandeur and the exaggerated importance of Beirut to the (unnamed) narrator of the novel. The war-torn city is re-conceived as the centre of the world; its geography is rewritten to emphasize this. The second metaphor of Beirut, however, is a more concrete geopolitical one, in which the city travels down the scale of global cities from the more desirable to the least. Significantly, human geographers use the concept of ‘scale’ most often to denote ‘place desirability’, in the context of residential areas;79 in Khoury’s transitional metaphor, Beirut is becoming a less desirable urban space. Unlike Sabah Ghandour, who in her introduction sees this as a sign of a ‘parodic confusing of metropolis and national space’, I would argue that Khoury’s extended metaphor is in fact more lament than parody, and revelatory of a fear of Beirut’s devolution into a different kind of global city, known not for its prosperity and comfort but for its crushing poverty, underdevelopment and sectarian strife.80 In this chapter, a connection is reinforced between the breakdown of everyday urban life and the breakdown of a heterogeneous, public community. Chapters 3 and 4 are written in the context of Beirut’s reconstruction during the two decades after the end of the civil war in 1990. Almost immediately after the war, a private real-estate development company with direct ties to the (soon-to-be) Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, la Societe´ Libanaise pour la De´veloppement et la Re´construction – referred to by its acronym Solidere – acquired the rights to develop and manage the reconstruction of central Beirut’s business and

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commercial district, an area of 1.8 million square metres, some of it reclaimed from the sea, which had been cordoned off from the rest of the city during the conflict.81 The project was controversial from the outset, and sparked a furious and impassioned public debate in the Lebanese press and at academic conferences in Lebanon and elsewhere.82 Originally billed (in the early 1990s) as an urban project that would ‘engender Lebanon’s national reconciliation, tempering the urge to the development of modern placelessness through small-scale architecture of community, and the valorization of a shared historical and cultural heritage’, the project eventually transformed, as both Najib Hourani and Saree Makdisi have pointed out, into: The creation of an enclave for the super-wealthy of the region. It does rely upon imported urbanism in the creation of what is a symbolic space within which thin representation and spectacle predominate. Further, it is a space of consumption oriented toward not the Lebanese but the expatriate and the tourist, centered upon the paradigmatic urban form of post-modernity: the heritage themed shoppertainment center.83 Given the context of the changing urban fabric and Solidere’s blatant attempts to rewrite the urban history of Beirut, which is well recorded in the literature, it is not surprising that so many novelists in the 1990s return to the site, and that it becomes a signifier of a series of social issues.84 Memory, in particular, becomes a recurrent theme in the chapters on postwar fiction, just as it has been a predominant part of scholarship on postwar Lebanon itself. In postwar Lebanon, Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz’s observation that the ‘current fascination – or even obsession – with memory is ineluctably associated with the idea of its absence, atrophy, collapse or demise’ has become especially resonant – particularly in Beirut, where much of this discourse is centred.85 The work on memory by scholars like Sune Haugbolle, Lucia Volk, Aseel Sawalha and Sara Fregonese has been both necessary and relevant to understanding the contemporary Lebanese political and social landscape. In this work, however, I also take seriously

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Radstone’s and Schwarz’s injunction that to think through memory, it may also be useful to not only think about the atrophy of memory but also the contrary. They write that, in the new millennium, ‘we are witnessing an unprecedented politicization of memory, such that public engagement with memory is taking on new and more complex forms’, and argue that, if we accept this argument, we need to move ‘from the general – the absence of memory – to the concrete: to historically specific formations of remembering and forgetting, in which each is articulated in the other’.86 After all, as the two scholars point out, ‘identities, individual and collective, are formed and reformed through narrative, in history, and through adversity’; thus, ‘the study of memory as politics requires critical engagement’.87 Parsing the changes in the dynamics of memory formation and memory making across several moments in Lebanon’s recent history enables a more complex understanding of how memory, commemoration and narrative work together to produce individual and collective identities. In Chapter 3, ‘Commemorative Countermemories: Beirut in 1990s Lebanese Fiction’, I examine the work of three Lebanese novelists of the 1990s. I link their particular emphasis on memory and recollection not only to a desire to find a language of memory distinct from the dominant recollective modes of Lebanese society – ‘between a critically probing discourse and nationalist nostalgia’, as recorded by Sune Haugbolle – but also as a way to memorialize the transforming centre of Beirut in a language that not only passively mourns, but also actively reconstructs the city as a historical site of everyday life, a life that is no longer a part of the new urban space being produced by Solidere.88 Thus, the fiction of Hoda Barakat, Rashid al-Daif and Hanan al-Shaykh confronts personal and public memory and the rewriting and revision of personal history while also emphasizing the alienation that their characters feel from the urban space being rebuilt. In the three novels, one from each of these authors, the characters return to the destroyed city centre, an encounter which propels in them memories of their various childhoods spent in the city. After the war, in the 1990s, the symbolic – and contested – heart of Lebanon shifted to Beirut’s centre – a claim that sociologist Samir Khalaf

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alludes to in his book about the area, Heart of Beirut. The site became a popular location for cultural productions involving and invoking memory, such as Nada Sehanoui’s installation piece, I Remember, a collection of paper documents of memories of the war strewn near the historic former major city square. While these are certainly acts of resistance of the erasure of the memory of war, and its impact upon individual Lebanese, the choice of location suggests that they are also acts of resistance against the erasure of a heterogeneous social, cultural and religious demographic from the urban space of central Beirut. Furthermore, since the Solidere project ‘effectively suppressed some ideas of national history and exploited others in order to launch a new nationalist unifying project’, the textual resistance in these novels is also a rejection of such selective nation-building schemes; hence, they are commemorative countermemories.89 While the generation to which al-Da‘if, al-Shaykh and Barakat belonged engaged with changes in the urban landscape by evoking personal memories of everyday life in the downtown area, a new generation that had no personal connection to that part of the city was emerging.90 Yet, they too, were drawn to the history of Beirut’s urban spaces, and in particular to the central part of this centre, Martyrs’ Square. The major traffic and commercial, entertainment and popular hub of pre-war Beirut, this square has many names – a testimony to its age. Kamal Salibi explains the origins of the site’s multiple designations in Crossroads to Civil War: The Burj (Citadel) square was so called after a medieval fortress which stood there until the early nineteenth century. In 1860, the French expedition which arrived in Beirut to intervene in the Druze-Christian civil war which raged in Mount Lebanon in that year placed its cannons in the Burj area, which was strictly outside the city; hence the name Place des Canons. In 1916, the Ottoman authorities hanged several Beirut nationalists who were co-operating with the Allies in World War I in the same area, which by then was already the central square of the city; hence the name Place des Martyrs,

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which has been the official name of the square since the time of the French Mandate.91 In my penultimate chapter, ‘Tracing Beirut in Contemporary Historical Novels: Postmemory and the Urban Imaginary in Rabee Jaber and Alexandre Najjar’, I examine the work of a new generation of Lebanese novelists, and undertake a comparative reading of the work of Rabee Jaber, in particular his trilogy Bayrut Madinat al‘Alam, and Alexandre Najjar’s Le Roman de Beyrouth. Both young novelists use the genre of historical fiction in order to recreate the downtown life of Beirut in and around Martyrs’ Square from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a commemoration of a cityscape and an urban lifestyle that they never knew. In the chapter, I use French historian Pierre Nora’s distinction between lieux de me´moire and milieux de me´moire to distinguish between the ways that each novel memorializes the city.92 Najjar, I argue, builds his novel around a memorial imagination that uses as its lieu de me´moire the central monument of the statue of the Lebanese martyrs in Martyrs’ Square. In contrast, by intertwining downtown Beirut’s past with its present, in a clever back-and-forth that superimposes the historical city upon the present one, as a site of capitalist consumption, Jaber’s novel maps out the old upon the new, and thus refuses the erasure of the ancient city by its newest urban planners, who proudly compare themselves to Paris’ Baron Haussmann.93 As Beirut and Lebanon continue to undergo significant, and sometimes troubling, changes, a new generation of artists has emerged, two of whom are the subjects of the concluding chapter, ‘Beirut: Past, Present, Future?’. In this final chapter, I discuss the rise of graphic narrative in Lebanon, and argue that it is the most recent manifestation of cultural resistance to the erasure of the past, attendant violence of the present and anxiety about the future. Using comics’ ability to contain ambiguity without resolving it, due to their formal qualities that juxtapose text and image with each other, young artists like Mazen Kerbaj and Lena Merhej produce work that examines and interrogates Beirut’s and Lebanon’s recent past without

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judgement. Comics become a way for these young artists to create empathic relationships with readers and also, crucially, with their parents’ generation. These works move away from a rhetoric of blame to one of understanding and empathy; this new relationship with the past in turn produces a different kind of anxiety about the future, and especially about the very real possibility of impending violence, which is often processed as an anxiety about the city. For example, the interrogation mark that haunts Emily Nasrallah’s Tuyur returns visually in Mazen Kerbaj’s ‘Suspended Time, Vol 1’, replacing the face of Mazen’s young son, Evan, before eventually fading into an urban blackness. Kerbaj’s choice to transition from the interrogation mark into blackness literally calls into question the young child’s future. As it draws to a close, the comic suggests that the rest of Evan’s life – which it traces in a narrative genealogy that includes his grandfather, father and the city of Beirut – is as unknown as the future of the city he has inherited.

Recording the Everyday City A final set of questions: what is at stake in the literary tradition of representing Beirut? What are the significances of the shifts in this tradition over time? The short answer is that literature is a practice wherein cultural norms are both expressed and resisted. Literary practice, like any other cultural practice, is an intersection where private reflection meets public engagement, an institution in which relative political weakness can be transformed into cultural capital and even power. In Reconstructing Beirut, Aseel Sawalha connects acts of bearing witness and commemoration to a lack of political agency: ‘City residents were incapable of protecting one of their childhood sites, but they insisted on witnessing, documenting and mourning its destruction.’94 Yet, despite their political weakness, Sawalha lists different sites of post-war resistance to Solidere’s project by the city’s inhabitants – from the Muslim sheikhs who issued fatwas forbidding trade in Solidere shares or participation in the project, to those who resorted to political jokes and gossip.95

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As a generative, productive political force, literature is capable of shaping and influencing cultural and social politics, and contributes a strong voice to the debate over the nature of the city and the right to public space. And, that, as David Harvey argues in his essay ‘The Right to the City’, is ‘one of our most precious yet most neglected of our human rights’, since ‘the right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city’.96 It is in this spirit and to these ends that the current work seeks to intervene in the conversation about the shape of Beirut as a city, and its place in the Lebanese polity. Showing how an increased privatization of urban space in global cities such as New York and Mexico City threatens ‘ideals of urban identity, citizenship and belonging’, Harvey calls for a reframing of our understandings of the collective right to the city.97 In the increasing privatization and homogenization of the once-public, heterogeneous places of Beirut, contemporary literature is both an intervention and a reminder that such contestations over urban space predate the civil war. This literature rejects pre-war selective romantic nationalisms that marginalized a vast portion of the population, and post-war privatization schemes that likewise monopolize the rights to public space. Reading it while paying attention to the space and place dynamics involved provides a new understanding of Lebanese identity in the new millennium.

CHAPTER 1 INHOSPITABLE SPACES: CITY AND VILLAGE IN TAWAHIN BAYRUT AND TUYUR AYLUL1

It has often been noted that nationalism depends upon the mobilization of certain narratives of authenticity, particularly rural authenticity, ‘finding in the “folk” the attitudes, beliefs, customs and language to create a sense of national unity among people who have other loyalties’.2 In an essay entitled ‘The Transformation of Reality and the Arabic Novel’s Aesthetic Response’, Sabry Hafez discusses how, in the period following World War II, as national independence movements sprang up across the Arab world, ‘a traditional rural or tribal vision dominated the scene, partly in reaction to the colonial incursion and as an assertion of continuity and national difference, and partly as the historical product of the state of social development prevalent in the Arab world at the turn of the century’.3 Throughout the Arab world, the figure of the peasant was utilized as the embodiment of nationalist ethics and ideals, particularly as a symbol of ‘authenticity’ and virtue against the double threats of colonial and urban infestation.4 While cultural historians like Akram Khater point out that Lebanon presented a slightly different case than the rest of the Arab world, mostly due to the large numbers of returning emigrants and their influence on its society, it is also true that in Lebanon, in much of the work that dominated the early twentieth

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century, the locus of national authenticity was firmly situated in the non-urban areas, specifically in Mount Lebanon.5 As I discussed in the introduction, after independence, mountain nationalism, of which Kharidat Lubnan is one of the earliest examples, became the dominant cultural paradigm not only of the new Lebanese state, but also of the popular Lebanese imagination. This nationalism privileged what Elise Salem has described as a ‘supposedly simple, rural lifestyle’ and is exemplified in literature by writers of the emigrant nahda movement, such as Jibran Khalil Jibran, Mikhail Nuayma and Amin Rihani, and in popular culture by the world – and work – of the Rahbani brothers and Fairouz.6 This writing frequently privileged the notion that the mountain – and the Lebanon for which it was a metonymic stand-in – was a historical site of refuge.7 Eric Hobsbawm’s work has famously drawn out the relationship between nationalism and the invention of traditions by the state. More recently, thinkers such as Benedict Anderson and Timothy Brennan argue that previously overlooked contributions by the producers of cultural capital were equally instrumental in constructing a nation’s image (and imagery) of itself. Lebanon proved no exception: the rise of mountain nationalism was enabled by the newly-independent Lebanese state. While hindsight affords Salem the ability to diagnose this state-sponsored national culture of post-independence Lebanon as ‘spotty’, the new state actively incorporated the short stories of Mikhail Nuayma, Jibran Khalil Jibran and other ‘Mountain Romantics’8 into its educational curricula.9 Lebanon was being consolidated as a community imagined as rural not only in the literary works that were incorporated by the postindependence state, but in popular culture as well. Christopher Stone’s work on the musical theatre of the Rahbani brothers expands on their use of folklore to promote the image of the idealized Lebanese mountain village that paradoxically was both specific and general enough to be both exclusive and inclusive of ‘different nationalities within and without Lebanon’.10 Stone’s thoughtful analysis claims that the Rahbanis ‘played a central, powerful and not unproblematic role in providing citizens of this nascent state with

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their new “Lebanese” identity’, since they also played into the exclusive, somewhat homogeneous image of a shared rural past among all Lebanese.11 In this considerable body of work, the city is often conspicuously and deliberately absent; it is almost completely left out of the local imaginary. Salem writes that, ‘as Lebanon entered a conscious period of folklorization, the popular depiction of Beirut remained relatively untainted or was bypassed for more focused depictions of the idealized rural villages’.12 Unsurprisingly, the dominant field of canonical – and canonforming – cultural production, to use a term from Pierre Bourdieu, that emphasized the predominance of the rural over the urban, openly encouraged work that replicated and reproduced what were perceived as rural values.13 For example, on the back pages of Emily Nasrallah’s 1962 novel Tuyur Aylul (September Birds) is a letter addressed to Nasrallah from Mikhail Nuayma.14 Nuayma, by then one of the grand old men of Lebanese letters, writes: Tuyur Aylul is an artistic exposition of the Lebanese village in all its facets. Because of the fact that you are formed from the earth of the village, and you have a vast repository of artistic sensibility, good taste, and sound observation, and a deep feeling for rhetorical, humanist and aesthetic values (al-qiyam al-kalamiyya, al-insaniyya wa-l-jamaliyya), you have been able to depict the village in such a marvelous way [. . .] what adds to the greatness of your portrayal of the village is your ability to get into its inhabitants’ minds and reactions, whether slow or fast, to the modern developments that are encroaching upon them from the city that they cannot prevent. Your book (kitabuki) is a bountiful gain to the story (li-lqissa) in Lebanon [. . .] Such praise for a first novel, coming from a well-established older writer and authoritative figure suggests what sort of writing in Lebanon was welcomed by those who were recognized as authorities in the field. Moreover, Nuayma’s choice of words, equating moral good with village life and rural origins, exemplifies the discourse of

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mountain romanticism. The letter ends on a fatalistic observation about the threat to this lifestyle posed by modern developments (al-tattawurat al-haditha) and by the encroachment of the urban upon this pastoral lifestyle. This, too, seems to suggest Nuayma’s understanding that his particular idealization of the rural over the urban, and the ontological dualism imposed by mountain romanticism between the two spaces, was by then beginning to rupture. Usually, as I will discuss, this rupture is linked causally with the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975 and the years immediately preceding it.15 Of course, like all attempts to set a fixed date on literary eras, these are arbitrary – for example, Tuyur, in which some of these tensions start to take form, was published in 1962. If nationalism is in some ways dependent on some cultural dissemination by the state, as much of the scholarship suggests, then by the early 1970s, Lebanon was in trouble. By then, the sociopolitical upheavals in the country – which included civil unrest in 1958 and several political crises in government, in addition to the stockpiling of weapons and an increased militarization across the political spectrum – had all but eroded the foundations of the state.16 And, as Mary Layoun observes in Wedded to the Land, ‘at times of national crises, people’s willingness to overlook contradictions and gaps in the nationalist narrative is often severely strained. The very premises on which the call of nationalism is based stand out as impossible or traitorous.’17 During this time, voices that challenged traditional textual representation on both the popular and more highbrow levels began to emerge. For example, in his work tracing the legacy of the Rahbani family, Christopher Stone describes how the second generation of Rahbanis, particularly Ziyad, who became active in the late 1960s and early 1970s, parodied his parents’ work in his plays and songs, and chose to focus on the plights of workers, students, intellectuals, dissidents and revolutionaries in urban contexts.18 This shift in representation has been analytically presented as a shift from village nationalism to a more modern, progressive and often urban cosmopolitanism, in Rahbani’s work and elsewhere.19 For example, writing of Tawahin Bayrut (The Mills of Beirut), Mona Amyuni claims that ‘[‘Awwad] diverges from an entire romantic literature that speaks

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of alienation in the city and upholds a nostalgia for a rustic and pure village lifestyle’; Amyuni points out that Tawahin makes this break even with the author’s own earlier work.20 As my discussion of ‘Awwad’s work intends to show, however, readings like Amyuni’s, while somewhat accurate, also repress very vivid textual moments in which what is a seemingly enthusiastic embrace of urban modernity is interrogated. In its attempt to articulate a new space for the individual within the nation, Tawahin takes up, then rejects, several models: the traditional rural environment, yes – but also the unfettered capitalism of the city. Ultimately – ironically – the ‘solution’ it offers – its heroine’s severance from all places – is echoed in Emily Nasrallah’s Tuyur, a much earlier novel that has also been read within the context of an urban/rural binary that privileges the modernity of Beirut over the backwardness and traditionalism of the mountain villages. Yet, by doing so, such readings ignore larger questions raised in both novels, about the place of the individual – and particularly marginalized individuals such as women – within Lebanese society and, therefore, within the nation, and the ways in which both these novels interrogate earlier foundational nationalist myths of the country, especially the idea of Lebanon as refuge. In addition to being read along the lines of an urban/rural dichotomy, Tawahin and Tuyur are often cited as an indictment of patriarchy and a call for female emancipation.21 Each reading has its merits, and affords interesting insights into the novels; however, this chapter is concerned with going beyond both of them by combining both a rural– urban reading with a gender-sensitive one, and by allowing aspects of each type of argument to evolve into a more spatio-political reading of the positions of individuals within the city and the nation-space in the novel. As the editors of Between Woman and Nation argue in that anthology’s introduction, there is an incontestable link between the figuration of women’s bodies and the imagined nation; yet, ‘the figure of “woman” participates in the imaginary of the nation state beyond the purview of patriarchies’.22 A similar claim is made by Evelyne Accad regarding Tawahin. Accad connects the female characters’ lives to the political events occurring

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in 1970s Lebanon. She writes that the novel ‘shows how women’s lives, delineated through oppressive patriarchal traditional customs, are closely connected to the violence and political events occurring in the country’.23 While a feminist reading such as Accad’s is a fruitful starting point, it is not enough; there is another dimension to this novel: the use and representations of the spaces that these characters, both male and female, occupy. This chapter moves away from a strictly gendered or a strictly spatial reading, in the understanding that both these aspects of the novels are connected as part of a larger concern – one that Tawahin tries to articulate about Lebanon and the ambiguous feelings towards it in the early 1970s. Nasrallah’s earlier novel, while unwilling to make the same sort of radical break with national form that ‘Awwad’s does, seems to foreshadow this later break. In both novels, special attention must be paid to the imagery of violence, and in particular, of violence done to women’s bodies. The violence in Tawahin has most frequently been read either in terms of a patriarchal power struggle, as the above quote by Accad indicates, or as an act of uncanny prescience on ‘Awwad’s part, foreshadowing the civil war that was to erupt a few years after the novel’s publication.24 But there is more to the matter than that. Textually, violence is not just done to women’s bodies, but also to the nation; in fact, these women’s bodies are linked to the land by common suffering. In particular, Tawahin is almost overwhelmingly fixated on violence; more than this, acts of violence are the catalysts that hasten change along in the novel. These violent moments of rupture connect the spatial discourse about country and city with the discourse about patriarchy and gender. Thus, instead of treating the issue of gender in the novel as independent from the issue of space, as critics have traditionally done – and which has led to certain contradictions in analysis and interpretations of this text – the two must be read in conjunction. Understood together, in relation to each other, the two articulate a commentary on the nature of the changing nation, and the role and place of the individual – in particular, the (marginal) female from the (peripheral) rural areas – within it. The treatment of the rural

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female’s body in these novels contests both traditional patriarchal politics and the dominant urban – rural polarization, and challenges these two foundational myths of the nation state.

Interrogating the Nation-space ‘Awwad’s novel, told in the third person, but rarely straying away from the character of Tamima, begins with a trip to the city by Tamima and her mother to visit her brother, who is ostensibly a university student in Beirut; her father is in Guinea. When they do not find her brother at his boarding house, she goes off to look for him at the university, gets injured in student protests and is saved by a young student, Hani.25 She returns to the village to complete her schooling, then comes to Beirut for her university studies, staying at the same boarding house as her brother; this also doubles as a brothel, and the madam who runs it, Rose Khuri, tries to recruit her. She is seduced by another boarder, a famous writer, Ramzi Raad, who writes polemical articles inciting the young to revolution, and begins a relationship with Hani, who is from a Christian village in the mountains. A client of her landlady’s, a deputy in Lebanon’s parliament, proposes to her, but she refuses him. Through him, however, she finds employment at the Port Worker’s Union, and continues her studies while becoming active in Hani’s ‘Party of Friends’, a student group influenced by the writing of Ramzi Raad. She moves out of the boarding house into her friend Miss Mary’s house, and things seem to be going well for her. But then, she is followed by Hussein Qammoui, a thug from the village who claims he is concerned about the shame she is bringing upon her family. Qammoui attacks her, leaving her disfigured and suicidal; eventually, he succeeds in convincing her brother to kill her. Instead, they kill Mary. Tamima, rejected by Hani for not being a virgin, eventually joins the Palestinian resistance alongside one of the porters from the union. Throughout the novel, political agitation rumbles along, often intersecting with and intervening in the lives and personal stories of the characters.26 Tuyur’s plot is less convoluted. Told in flashbacks by Muna, it comprises three anecdotes of village life from her past; with Muna’s

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own story, this brings the total up to four accounts of adolescent girls transitioning to adulthood. All four are stories of departure from the village, one of which happens through the girl’s death at the hands of her beloved, who has not been allowed to marry her. The other girls emigrate with their husbands or, as in the case of Muna, leave the village alone, seeking higher education. Muna writes from ‘the city’, where she is ‘permanently exiled’, where people remain ‘strangers, looking into strange faces’.27 The city in Nasrallah’s novel is never identified; nor are any of its inhabitants named. This is one way in which Nasrallah’s text represents its character’s alienation from the urban space where she finds herself. At first, Nasrallah’s work seems to fit very comfortably within the literary tradition that idealizes village life and rejects life in the city. For example, Muna’s first encounter with the city is represented as a sexual assault: The city crawled towards me, looking like an unkempt woman, her hair covering her naked breasts and her arms stretching out to hold me and then to throw me into one of its darkened crevices, one of the many points scattered over her acne-scarred body, an interrogation mark standing before many crossroads. I was young and inexperienced. The woman approached, rubbing my face, scratching my chest with icy kisses, marking me as a new branch among those other amputated branches, branches torn from mulberry and oak trees on those high mountains.28 In Nasrallah’s metaphor, the city is feminine, scarred, violent and bloodthirsty towards arrivals from the villages, who in turn are described not as human beings, but as branches, as parts of nature. The urban landscape is symbolized as sexually aggressive and predatory; paradoxically, as something feral – a wild woman – and unnatural. The fact that this depiction of the city is so negative and so gendered complicates readings of Nasrallah’s text as feminist. As the connection is drawn between the female body and the urban space,

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the subsuming of Muna’s body into the body of the city poses the first challenge to her identity. The second image framing this encounter between the village girl and the urban space is an ecological one: Muna, and those ‘branches’ like her, are ‘natural’ beings – amputated from their mountain roots, they can only wither and die. In this sense, Nasrallah’s work does indeed fit in with an earlier tradition of mountain romanticism that idealizes the mountain for its perceived closeness to a certain kind of soothing, domesticated, understandable nature – the novel’s recurring images of village life are of tilling the soil, farming and harvesting – contrasted with the city’s feral, undisciplined (female) nature. There is, however, a third figure of speech in this crucial encounter between the two female bodies – Muna and the city – that reveals a certain anxiety of belonging. It is a rhetorical metaphor, in which the young girl is described as ‘alamat istifham, ‘an interrogation mark’. The image recurs at the end of the novel. Seeking refuge from the city, where she can no longer bear her life, Muna returns to the village. She finds, however, that ‘the village was as I had left it, but I had changed a lot. Their welcome was like violent blows. Their faces confirmed rejection rather than acceptance. The village had rejected me the minute I had withdrawn from its presence, to sink my feet into soil that was not its soil.’29 In Tuyur, the village community that had seemed throughout to be so ‘knowable’, in Williams’ sense of the word,30 ruptures Muna’s assumptions of her ability to return and rejects her. Once more, the confrontation between individual and place is expressed through the figures of violence, in this case of physical ‘blows’. Tuyur articulates the anxiety of return, suggesting that the border between village and outside world, be it capital city or abroad, is impenetrable. As Muna’s friend Mirsal, who has emigrated to the United States with her husband, writes, ‘my love for Raji [who has also emigrated, and whom she has just seen at a dinner in the USA with his American wife] was born of those moments within the village borders. And it remains there [. . .] I was mistaken when I tried to drag these moments from their context [. . .] our love is a hostage of that place and time.’31 Writing towards the end of the

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mountain romantic tradition, Nasrallah still works within its binary of ‘village/city’; there is no middle choice in Tuyur, and no ability to cross borders back and forth, although Muna and her generation are being pulled from the village in search of different lives. Yet, the village is not a hospitable space; it is an area marked by the emigration of its youth, and rejects them when they return. Unlike the September birds of the title, the return of those who have left is unnatural, and their emigration – even to the city – means that they are never allowed back; in Mona’s own words, it is ‘permanent’.32 In a country whose foundational myth is that of the asile du Liban, which represents the mountain in particular as a refuge for persecuted minorities since time immemorial, this is also a repudiation of some of the more persistent tropes of mountain – village – nationalism.33 Interestingly, Tuyur represents alienation as a rhetorical problem, a metaphor that disembodies Muna. In her first encounter with the city, Muna describes herself as ‘an interrogation mark standing before many crossroads’.34 At the end of the novel, as she returns from her unhappy visit to the village, Muna is described as being at a literal crossroads, as a ‘ball between a city that crushes me and a village that disowns me [. . .] an interrogation mark on the face of the earth’.35 Unlike Henri Lammens’ hero Hanna, Muna, a woman, who does not wield Hanna’s authority or capital, cannot impose or restore her own order onto her village upon her return. As a result, her encounter with her native village is described in an identical manner to her encounter with the city: the effect of both on Muna is disembodiment and confusion; faced with multiple choices, she is ultimately turned into a rhetorical question of belonging – an interrogation mark – that Tuyur cannot answer. Displaced from the familiar and the traditional, but unable to acclimatize to the unfamiliar, the novel leaves its tragic heroine at the crossroads. Through Muna’s experience, the work suggests that the price of modernity is a displacement so intense that it strips one of identity. Without a strong sense of place-identity, of belonging to a place, and of public recognition of that belonging, Muna becomes nothing but a disembodied question, a destabilized identity that nevertheless cannot be articulated into an alternative assertive statement. The

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novel’s use of the imagery of the interrogation mark successfully captures the question that Muna-as-interrogation mark poses to the notion of identity, and to belonging to the nation in a form that transcends the urban/rural binary. Muna transforms into a question that confounds the earlier, dominant nationalist narrative of home and away, of exile and return, and of boundaries; she remains an enigmatic challenge that the novel cannot, or will not, answer. Tawahin’s Tamima more successfully crosses back and forth between village and city, but she too, like Muna, finds herself in a space that is neither by the end of ‘Awwad’s novel. Unlike Muna, however, who is the passive victim of these changes, Tamima actively chooses to reject her ties to country and city as they are in the present, in search of another space. The two novels, a decade apart, mark a change in literary bearings, which suddenly allows a different perspective – previously marginalized, and only timidly expressed – to be brought about. In other words, what appears as a rhetorical question in Nasrallah’s novel becomes an emphatic declaration in ‘Awwad’s.36

Gender and the City Mona Amyuni and Samira Aghacy, whose work charts the move in Lebanese writing from the romantic pastoral tradition of the short story and rural novel to a more realist novel form that consciously opposes the city to the country, both make the case that the great distinction between the rural (traditional; backwards) and the urban (modern; progressive, liberating) is often invoked with relation to gender. The struggle for female self-determination (and selfrepresentation) is often constructed in terms of a spatial move from the countryside to the city. In this new type of narrative, they claim, the village is always depicted as a repressive space, and the (usually female) protagonist escapes to the city, which welcomes her and allows her to develop. So, for example, Aghacy comments, ‘women see the nurturing city as a symbol of well-being, independence, and freedom from shackles’ and Amunyi writes of Tawahin that, in it, ‘woman flourishes in the City’.37

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This reading generally accepts that the village’s heterotopia is the city, the space where a patriarchal tradition can be contested and fought.38 The urban/rural dialectic dominates these works, and the positive emphasis is heavily skewed in favour of the urban. Samira Aghacy writes that in Lebanese women’s fiction, and in fiction about Lebanese women, ‘the city and the village [are] in ontological opposition between repression and freedom, backwardness and ignorance, and past and present’, adding that the city ‘gives them [female characters] the opportunity to escape the narrow confines of home, family and traditions that have relegated them into a corner and associated them with a nostalgic past’.39 Even novels that initially seem to be making the same argument, however, such as Emily Nasrallah’s Tuyur, which miriam cooke has described as a novel that portrays Lebanon as ‘a two-tiered entity neatly divided geographically and demographically between modern Beirut and rural Lebanon’,40 complicate this binary. Tuyur does not consciously challenge the opposition between modern city and traditional village, but Muna’s similar experiences of alienation in both imply that the break between the city and the village is not as clear-cut as critics suggest; moreover, the novel’s conclusion – as mentioned earlier – complicates this facile binary. In fact, both Nasrallah’s and ‘Awwad’s novels speak to the assertion made by the authors of the anthology Between Women and Nation, that ‘women are both of and not of the nation. Between women and nation is, perhaps, the space or zone where we can deconstruct these monoliths and render them more historically nuanced.’41 By combining metaphors of gendered sexual violence and space and place, the two novels emerge as critiques not only of gendered relationships, but also of nationalism and nationalist belonging through a critique of the place of bodies, female bodies in particular, in the national space. Initially, Tawahin does seem to be making a clear-cut distinction between the two spaces, rejecting one (the village) in favour of the other (the city), in a seemingly transparent narrative of teleological progress. Despite this, the novel then goes on to draw out the intricate relationships between the female body and national spaces, which complicates the rural/urban binary that characterizes most

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readings of the novel. As mentioned before, earlier Arabic fiction frequently embodied the national self within the figure of the rural peasant girl; but as Sabry Hafez points out, in the literature of what he calls the ‘second period’, from the 1960s onwards, ‘the symbol of the country ceased to be the beloved country girl, and became the controversial middle-class urban woman’.42 In Tawahin, Tamima and the other female characters embody both; the novel maps out the rural, village origins of each of its female characters, located in the novel’s present in Beirut. Tamima, the protagonist, is from a village called Mahdiyya in southern Lebanon;43 Madame Rose, her landlady, is from Maqlab in North Lebanon; and Zannoub, the servant girl, is from Akkar, in rural North Lebanon.44 At the beginning of the novel, all three women are busy with their new lives in the city. By the book’s end, however, all the women have been violated in one way or another by the male characters, and the novel, in its didactic manner, has unequivocally portrayed all the male characters – with the sole exception of the fida’i fighter Abu-Sharshur – as hypocritical towards women. This applies whether they are village thugs like Hussein Qammoui, who wants to punish Tamima for violating the honour code but has no qualms about living off his prostitute-girlfriend, or urban sophisticates like Ramzi Raad, who writes one thing and acts in opposition to it, and Hani, who rejects Tamima for not being a virgin despite his claims of being progressive.45 As the novel ends, Tamima has disappeared after having been the victim of two murder attempts and an unsuccessful suicide bid; Zannoub is dead, having committed suicide after being gang raped while trying to decide what to do with the child she is carrying (who is the result of another sexual violation by Jabir, Tamima’s brother); Miss Mary, Tamima’s friend, has been killed by accident while preparing for her wedding; and Rose Khuri has been felled by a debilitating stroke. Even Tamima’s mother, who has never left the village for the city, becomes hemiplegic after a violent argument with her son, Jabir.46 The novel visits so much unrelenting, excessive violence upon its female characters that it threatens to overwhelm the reader. In all cases, it must be examined more carefully than hitherto.

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The violence done to the women’s bodies – particularly Tamima’s – has a parallel in the violence done to the land, and particularly to the village; in fact, it is this parallel that troubles the facile binary of rural: bad/urban: good that at first seems to dominate this novel, and certainly dominates most readings of it. While it is true that Beirut initially emancipates and entrances Tamima, as Evelyne Accad points out, whenever she is confronted with an unsavoury event (her first sexual encounter, Qammoui’s attack on her and her attempted suicide), she goes to the village to recover.47 Beirut is a site of both pleasure and opportunity, but also of danger and pain; the village is always a space for recuperation. It remains a space of refuge from the violence and danger of the city, of the outside. As the novel progresses, and the violence against Tamima increases, her relationship with the village develops further. Essentially alienated from Mahdiyya at first, Tamima grows to love it as she begins to identify with it as a fellow wounded being after an Israeli raid on the village: The evil assault on Mahdiyya was like the slash of Hussein Qammoui’s razor. But it was more treacherous and more contemptible. And this time, just as before, the victim was silent and submissive. And in just the same way, the victims were human beings and their laws. For the first time, she loved Mahdiyya.48 Tamima’s place identity, her loyalty to the land, is created from a sense of shared victimhood; the Israelis are akin to the men whose traditions have inflicted harm upon these victims. This moment of common victimhood forges a bond between Tamima and Mahdiyya, and begins to sever her ties with the city that had initially represented an alternative to the village. The two victims, Tamima and the land, are described as ‘human beings and their laws’; thus, Tamima is textually linked with not only the land of the village, and the land itself is anthropomorphized, but also with legal codes. The place of refuge becomes a victim, just as the woman who seeks refuge in it does. Mahdiyya as a vulnerable site interrogates and

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problematizes the myth of the strong, proud mountain-refuge. Yet, it is its weakness and vulnerability that create the strongest bond between it and the novel’s heroine, its moral compass. Strangely, its insistence on Tamima’s new-found love for the village is ignored in most studies of this novel; in their insistence on placing the work as a clear break with an older tradition, much of what the novel eventually suggests about the tenuousness of this dualistic approach to rural and urban – and the alternate vision of nationalism – is elided. Tawahin49 is often read as the breaking point between the prewar literary model of the normative rural setting, which I describe in the introduction, and the ascendancy of the urban space in Lebanese literature.50 In doing so, as I have already alluded to earlier, these attempts usually impose a reading that functions within one of the terms of this binary (generally privileging the urban). As a result, they willfully ignore the fact that ‘Awwad’s novel, while having a problematic relationship with the rural areas that many of the novel’s characters come from, ultimately does not allow Beirut to emerge as an alternate space; in fact, its portrayal of Beirut is almost as harsh as its portrayal of Lebanon’s rural hinterlands. The novel’s anxieties about both the village and the city are most often embedded in descriptions of political economy, and are projected onto the body of Tamima, the female protagonist, as well as onto some of the other female bodies. These women are safe in neither space. In fact, by the end, Tamima can only come into herself by abandoning both spaces for a place ‘under any sky’, an undifferentiated zone where she can struggle ‘against all legal codes and traditions sanctioned by society’.51 ‘Awwad’s novel is a deconstruction, through the experience of the marginalized figures of all the females in it – whether rural immigrants, urban poor, students or even more entrepreneurial figures like Rose – of the myth of Lebanon as a safe haven. It exposes the harsh cruelty of patriarchal nationalism, and interrogates easy assumptions of emancipation and progress in cities; by rejecting both sides of the urban/rural binary, the novel calls the ideology of earlier Lebanese nationalism into question.

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The Grinding Mills with Nothing to Grind In Tawahin, particularly, the power dynamics between the male characters and the female characters seem at first to be an indictment of traditional patriarchal violence – and, on many levels they are. Adding a more spatial reading of the novel reveals another dimension of the text, however, in which some of the problems of post-colonial modernity and emigration are brought to light. Tawahin avoids representing the village as the site of authenticity, but it also refuses to place the city as a locus of positive modernity. As the novel progresses, both spaces are revealed, essentially, to be similarly bleak – as is their counterpoint, the other option afforded to Lebanese villagers that the novel has earlier suggested: Africa. The book’s only real hope is the offer of a non-defined, non-differentiated space beyond the codified norms of society: the ‘under any sky’ utopia of Tamima’s final letter.52 Writing specifically of Tawahin, Mona Amyuni states that by the novel’s conclusion, ‘Beirut shines with her thousand lures beyond the end of the story’.53 As Raymond Williams argues in The Country and the City, attention must be paid to the changing materialist contexts and conditions of landscapes described as either rural or urban. Williams explains that: The country and the city are changing historical realities, both in themselves and in their interrelations [. . .] Yet the ideas and the images of country and city retain their great force. This persistence has a significance matched only by the fact of the great actual variation, social and historical, of the ideas themselves. Clearly the contrast of country and city is one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society. But when this is so, the temptation is to reduce the historical variety of the forms of interpretation to what are loosely called symbols or archetypes.54 In other words, there is no such thing as ‘the’ city or ‘the’ country; the meanings of these terms and the spaces they convey fluctuate from

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one era to the other, but always in relation to each other and with the material conditions that they emerge from. In fact, the dominance accorded to the first term of the urban/rural binary in much Lebanese criticism – as in Amyuni’s and Aghacy’s work, and even to some extent in Salem’s – makes for a heavily one-handed reading of the novels that they claim best represent this new break with the pastoral romantic tradition, such as ‘Awwad’s Tawahin. From its beginning, Tawahin eschews nostalgia about the breakdown of ‘traditional’ rural culture and village life; its representations of village life are tinged with a seeming distaste that connects the village with an intolerant culture. In fact, the representatives of this traditional culture – Hussein Qammoui and Jabir in Mahdiyya, and the mukhtar (elected official) of Hani’s village who does not want a Muslim to be hired as the local school’s teacher – are described as ‘throwback[s] to the days of Hikmat Bey and the Ottomans. Back to 1860’.55 Of course, as the novel progresses, even Hani, whom Tamima initially sees as a paragon of revolutionary modernity, is revealed to be as reactionary as those he derides for their backwardness; when Tamima confesses to him that she is not a virgin, he slaps her and breaks off their engagement, sending her off into the night alone. Ultimately, ‘modern’ urban life proves as disappointing for Tamima as life in the ‘traditional’ village. At the beginning, the novel casts a scathing look at village life, particularly in its representation of Tamima’s village in southern Lebanon, Mahdiyya, which is described as ‘a nice cosy place – for humiliation and degradation. From floor to ceiling the gloomy old house was nothing but a tomb. Time had only made more repulsive that damp concrete room and the veranda with its blackened pillars.’56 The juxtaposition of images of cosiness against those of humiliation and degradation is powerful and effective. Indeed, the em dash dividing both sides of the sentence emphasizes the tension wrought between them. The beginning of the sentence is a model of the type of traditional writing about the village that the second part of the sentence deconstructs, and imposes itself onto. The rest of the passage strengthens this sense of bleakness further, when the description moves outside, from private to public space: ‘thirty

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houses or less, half of them in ruins, and the other half soon to be lamenting the deaths of those who built them.’57 Overall, the point is clearly made that the problem is not the problem of individual families, but that the village’s poverty and hardship is embedded in its entire social fabric. These images of death, decay and degradation mark the decrepitude of these villages and these communities. The evocation of humiliation, squalour and repulsiveness strongly contests idealized portrayals of pastoral life. In her book, Al-Dalala, Yumna ‘Id points out that colonial modernity in Lebanon tied the country’s economy to a Western system of capitalist production and severed the traditional relations of local production, without necessarily breaking down the essential structure of the rural landowner system and replacing it with a new capitalist structure. This led to a cohabitation between agrarian landowning economies and the new conditions of Western capitalist models under which they had to function.58 ‘Id describes a sort of socioeconomic limbo, in which the new imposition of Western capitalist production never fully displaced the old model. The empty mills and desolate villages of Tawahin seem to be a commentary on the post-colonial consequences of this situation, this between-ness that was never resolved one way or another, the inhabitants of which, like the villagers in Tawahin and Tuyur, were left with no option but to leave. After all, the novel makes clear that the neglect and abandonment of the villages are not the result of urban industrialization and a migration to the cities for work – indeed, the only industrial symbols attached to Beirut in the entire novel are the mills of the Arabic title, which, it becomes clear, do nothing but grind ‘and there is nothing to grind’.59 They are, rather, a consequence of the fact that ‘Africa had claimed the greater part of the population and Kuwait accounted for the rest with its offer of easy work and quick fortunes’.60 The novel confronts head-on the consequences of generations of emigration from Lebanon, and refuses to romanticize the spaces that are left behind. Tawahin emphasizes the private and public economies of those people and places left behind, who are dependent on the labour and output of those who have left and the

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mercy of those who disburse these funds in Lebanon, such as the unofficial moneylender, Hajj Fadlo. For example, the domestic economy of Tamima and her mother depends on the remittances sent from Guinea by her father; these funds are stolen by her brother Jabir, and spent on women and gambling in Beirut. The women have no agency over this money, a situation that leads Tamima to look for work in Beirut (she, like her mother, does not have the option of emigrating; at one point, as she and Hani speak of eloping, the hope is that she will travel with him to Boston, but that option is lost when he rejects her). The economy of Africa, fragile as it proves to be in the novel as Tamima’s father gets wrongfully accused and arrested in Guinea, sustains the economy of Lebanon’s villagers and their way of life. As so often is the case in Tawahin, the personal is projected onto the social, which is, in return, refracted back onto the bodies of the characters. So, like Tamima and her mother, Tamima’s village also depends on emigrant money; a new road is built, water pipes are installed and a school is planned by a villager who has returned wealthy from Africa, who is also constructing his home in the village. The narrative sarcastically describes these as the ‘activities and heroic exploits of’ the village’s ‘champion, Jamil Mawali’.61 That these basic amenities are dependent on the munificence of a private benefactor, and that this wealth is generated outside of Lebanon, poses a dilemma in the text that becomes embodied in Tamima. She learns that Mawali, whose exile has physically been imprinted onto him so that he is described as ‘really black, as if he was carrying Africa around on his face’, has asked for her hand in marriage, and while admitting that ‘his projects in Mahdiyya [. . .] were marvellous, he deserved a medal’, she also acknowledges that ‘she didn’t want to be the medal!’.62 Tamima’s body literally becomes the space through which the emigrant wants to try to regain his authenticity, by marrying a local woman. The fact that her family expects Tamima to offer herself to Mawali comprises the first in a series of attempted transactions in the novel involving the female body, a repetitive device that accumulates into a critique of both the social and economic conditions of pre-war Lebanon.

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In several ways, the text’s anxieties about Lebanon are often reinforced by comparisons with ‘Africa’, a term often used interchangeably with, and as a proxy for, Guinea, and one that weaves in and out of the text. In ‘Awwad’s novel, the textual economies also depend on the use and abuse of an Africa that exists in the background to Tawahin, an Africa whose women are also caught up in a similar patriarchal tyranny over their bodies. As Edward Said points out, ‘these signs of “abroad” include, even as they repress, a rich and complex history’.63 In the case of Tawahin, they shed light on the complex historical relationship of Lebanese emigration, to Africa and elsewhere, and the changing values and habits of an entire generation. As I have already mentioned, Tamima’s African halfsister, Aisha, is raped by their brother, Jabir, which Tamima learns of from a letter written to her by her father, Tamir. Upon learning of Aisha’s plight, Tamima’s instinct is to hide her father’s news from her mother: ‘All of them in Africa had their Aishas, wronged and illtreated, and they all had their scores of Fanta’s [Aisha’s mother] sisters.’64 The letter makes clear, however, that the scale of abuse is not confined to one bad apple. The father writes to Tamima of the gangs of diamond smugglers and their use of local women for their trade, explaining, ‘these women undertake tasks which are an exact equivalent to the work of whores; they hide the precious stones in the most intimate parts of their bodies and transport them across frontiers’.65 This wholescale plunder of the land as well as of the bodies of women resonates with the violence, rape and murder in Lebanon. In fact, the novel makes a direct correlation between both, using the voice of the defeated patriarch, Tamir, and his fear of Jabir’s rapacious behaviour and its consequences in Lebanon as well. Tamir tells Tamima, ‘my daughter, I don’t know what Jabir did with the fruit of the sweat and blood of his father in Africa. The only thing I am afraid of, as I told you, is what he may do to you and your mother over there, after what he has done here to Aisha and me and her grandfather.’66 What is articulated here is a sense of shared suffering; a concern that the plunder and rape in Africa could be repeated in Lebanon, that the distant will become actualized in the nation. In the sentence, the father’s labour and time in Africa is tied

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up in the body of Aisha, and Jabir’s act affects both the woman’s body and the father’s toil.67 The position of the (benevolent, though flawed) patriarch in all of this is also relevant to the events of the novel, and to the bleak portrayal of Lebanese society that it presents. As mentioned before, Tamir, Tamima’s father, is absent throughout the novel, discussed only with relation to the money he sends and to the letters he has stopped sending at first. His absence, the absence of the traditional father figure from Tamima’s life – and the absence of patriarchal figures from the country – allows Jabir and Hussein Qammoui to run amok, taking matters into their own hands as they see fit. In this novel, family ties have dissipated and families themselves are torn apart: the characters are all part of families broken apart by emigration, rural– urban migration to look for work – as in the case of Zannouba, whose father sells her to Madame Khuri – or divorce, like the politician who hires Ramzi Raad to write a series of flattering articles about his benevolence. This is a stark contrast with earlier mountain romances, which feature tight-knit, rural families with benevolent, wise fathers; kind, sacrificing mothers; and loving children.68 Additionally, unlike Lammens’ novella, which ends with a marriage and a return to a prosperous social and economic order in the village, the one marriage in Tawahin, between Tamima’s friend Miss Mary and the politician, never occurs because Mary is stabbed to death by Qammoui and Jabir. Thus, ‘Awwad’s novel portrays a collective foundering of families that belies a greater social malaise about the health of the nation as a whole. The connection in the novel between the breakdown of family and the unravelling of social values in Lebanon’s communities at home and abroad is made apparent in Tamir’s letter. Towards the end of the novel, Tamima receives the letter in which her half-sister’s rape is announced, and Jabir’s reputation as an evil force is consolidated. This document also delineates a larger, generational problem – one focused on the fact that the old ties of kinship and village relations have been severed; upon first arriving in Africa, Tamir is helped by ‘one of the old emigrants’, who puts him to work managing a banana plantation whose previous supervisor has died from sleeping

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sickness.69 At this point in his story, the ties of belonging remain solid, and there is still a relationship of mutual help that functions according to set norms. Tamir’s undoing, however, comes when in his words, ‘I showed hospitality to one of the [diamond smuggling] gang who is from our district in South Lebanon [. . .] I, in all innocence, gave a big party one night for him and his group.’70 Tamir is then arrested; his undoing comes from the fact that he has retained these old village values, but that they are not transmutable to the new Lebanese emigrant community abroad, whose lifestyle lands them ‘either in the depths of a prison or in the loftiest of villas they are building in Africa and Lebanon’.71 Of course, what Tamir does not know is that his values are no longer relevant in Lebanon either, as the novel portrays through his daughter’s experiences. The political unrest manifest in the novel is underscored by the material and economic conditions of the spaces depicted within it – whether rural or urban, in Lebanon or elsewhere, such as in Africa. On one level, then, the novel seems to represent a space in which economic factors and circumstances manifest themselves in struggles over female bodies. So, in the village, Tamima is perceived to be up for grabs by the wealthiest male, and in the city the only economic activity for women represented within the urban landscape is prostitution. The lifestyles of the younger generation, particularly Hussein Qammoui and Jabir, Tamima’s brother, are wasteful and literally rapacious; they both spend money they have stolen (or never had in the first place) on women, and they abuse other women, such as when Jabir rapes Aisha and Zannoub, the servant at Madame Rose’s boarding house, or Hussein’s two assaults on Tamima. The novel’s equation of the female body with the land, and its repeated representation of assaults on these bodies within the text, suggest that within Tawahin there is no site of escape from these overdetermined fates – not even in the city, which itself turns out to be a death trap for most of the novel’s female characters. As I have mentioned before, the novel’s Arabic title is more evocative of this empty production; the mills of the Arabic title are symbols, after all, of industry and production. The recurring statement that Beirut’s mills are grinding nothing, that they are in fact empty simulacra of ‘real’ useful mills,

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suggests a dejection and frustration with the city that the ‘death’ in Beirut of the English title cannot convey. It is these ominous mills that encapsulate the representation of the city space in the novel. It is through them that the novel foreshadows its dejection with the hollow signs of a false modernity. The novel’s critique of the mills of empty production has another textual echo in its depiction of writers and writing. In this respect, the figure of Ramzi Raad becomes especially relevant, since throughout the novel he produces and reproduces incendiary articles that are consumed by students who chant slogans but do not act; in fact, the only action comes from the disenfranchised Palestinian workers and freedom fighters at the novel’s end, and not from those who ‘had faith in the intellect and science, in development and evolution, in the principle of the revolution against the self, that is to say, faith in the organization and planning’.72 Initially entranced by Raad’s writing, Tamima later grows frustrated with him, as she becomes increasingly mobilized to act after each violent confrontation that happens to her in the novel. In parallel comes Tamima’s disenchantment with Beirut; what initially appears to her to be a truly modern city, throbbing with life, eventually, in a nightmarish episode, proves to be a disappointment as well. It is this transition and transformation that I will take up next.

From a Place of Promise to a City of Rats In many ways, Beirut is at first represented in terms that seem to compare it favourably with the rural spaces of ‘Awwad’s novel, and Tawahin appears to be an epistemic shift from earlier Lebanese pastoral writing. At the novel’s outset, the city is represented as literally ‘dazzling [Tamima] with its bursting life and color’ and intellectual activity, in stark contrast to Mahdiyya; the city seems to be a place of potential, of youth and energy.73 Such a vision is complicated in two ways by the novel. The first is that, simply, the village cannot be separated easily from the city; Tamima’s life – and the lives of the other female characters, such as Zannoub – is often disrupted by the encroachment of the village into the city. In fact,

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often in the novel, when the urban and the rural do meet, there is a violent clash. The second is the representation of the urban space as it unfolds throughout the novel; as Elise Salem points out, the text maps out an urban landscape that is ‘violent and fragmented, and it is fraught with political, social and sexual tensions’.74 Beirut, which Tamima at first considers a site for her liberation from the village, is often represented as a claustrophobic space precisely because Tamima cannot escape being followed by certain repressive elements from her village life, such as her brother and Hussein Qammoui. Her friend Mary, an independent working woman who lives happily in her ‘lovely’ apartment, is killed in her own home protecting Tamima from these village men who have come to exact their revenge on her for staining their ‘honour’, that the novel has already – heavy-handedly – exposed to be non-existent. The village encroaches further into Tamima’s urban lifestyle, following her more even more intimately into the private realm. In the scene where she loses her virginity, she feels that ‘the bed was in the main square of Mahdiyya, and she was in it, with eyes fixed on her from all directions. She started violently, like someone possessed, trying to escape’; however, she is literally pinned down by Ramzi Raad’s ‘erect manhood’, and prevented from doing so, incapable of anything except ‘scream[ing], like someone being murdered’.75 The violence of this scene, of a young woman essentially being raped by an older man, is exacerbated by the feeling that it is a public spectacle, one that Tamima’s village is privy to. Sexuality becomes a public act, the values that Tamima has grown up with internalized and made manifest in the image of the public bed. Of course, it is the fact that her sexual behaviour is not kept private that provokes Hussein Qammou‘i’s first attack on her. Until now, it would seem that the novel’s critique is not so much of the urban itself but of the presence of ‘rural’ elements of backwardness, intolerance, chauvinism and violence within the urban context of Beirut. This representation resonates with certain scholarship on the city; particularly that which represents the urban space as a privileged site with respect to the rural, and which insists on reading rural backwardness into what is represented as the more

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‘open’ space. For example, in From the Rural to the Urban, specifically in a lecture titled ‘Humanism and urbanism: a few propositions’, Henri Lefe`bvre declares that the real urban subject has not yet emerged, and that: Urban life has not yet started. We are taking inventory of the ruins of a millennial society in which the countryside has dominated the city, where ideas, ‘values’, taboos and proscribed behavior were for the most part agrarian in origin, predominantly rural and ‘natural’ [. . .] rural society was (and still is) that of non-abundance, of penury, of privation whether accepted or refused, of edicts fixing or regulating these privations.76 The adjectives which Lefe`bvre attaches to rural life, all connoting deprivation and miserliness, echo in ‘Awwad’s first descriptions of Mahdiyya as a desolate, abandoned place ruled by archaic ‘regulatory edicts that fix these privations’, particularly as related to the female body and the female self, and lend fodder to the claim that ‘Awwad is denigrating village life in favour of a more abundant, free, life in the city – the antonyms that Lefe`bvre’s adjectives suggest abound in a ‘true’ urban context. It is obvious, within this Lefe`bvrian binary, which space is privileged above the other; at first glance, this would also seem to be true of ‘Awwad’s text. As we have seen earlier, however, ‘Awward’s writing ruptures this initial, facile binary through its depiction of violence, particularly the violence done to women’s bodies by men, and the equation by the text of the female body with the wounded body of the village. Initially separated from Tamima by her disdain for it, the village ultimately becomes an intimate part of the girl, internalized within her in a complicity of shared victimhood after the Israeli attack. Concomitantly, Tawahin also makes it clear that the city space is not as alluring as it first appears to Tamima. I have already mentioned the ominous, repeated violence implied by the Arabic title – and the even more ominous end implied by the English one, which links the city directly with death. From the outset, the city is depicted as an

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exclusive space; Tamima’s mother, for example, has no place in it, since ‘what was left of her, at any rate, would not do for Beirut’.77 The city is not an open, welcoming or accommodating place; as we have already seen, hardly any of the novel’s women who arrive in it young and ambitious get out alive. It is far from being the site of liberation and emancipation for women that Amyuni and Aghacy see it as. Through this, the novel seems to suggest that true change involves more than a change of space, and that modernity consists of far more than just enjoying the superficial trappings of modern life. Jabir, here, becomes the ultimate proof of this debilitating contradiction for society. He is the character most conversant with the superficial manifestations of urban life, as they appear in the novel – restaurants nightclubs, prostitutes – yet, at the same time, he is also one of the most reactionary characters in the book. In Jabir, and in the other male characters, the novel suggests that urban modernity is more than just its surface manifestations; nowhere is this more clearly marked than in Tamima’s nightmare about Martyrs’ Square and the novel’s ending. Tawahin’s representation of Beirut as a nonproductive site of pure consumption – all real labour is placed on the city’s margins, such as at the port where Tamima and Abu-Sharshur both work – is an implicit, almost Marxist-inflected critique of commodity fetishism and consumption. In addition to the passage in which Tamima and the village become inexorably tied together through their shared experience of violence, there are two key scenes – one of which foreshadows the next – that mark the changing nature of Tamima’s relationship with the city and, particularly, with its inhabitants. In the first scene, Tamima has a nightmare. Significantly, it begins by her being disoriented as to where in the city she is: ‘Was she in the Hamra area, or Bab Idriss or Raouche?’78 She is being called by Madame Rose, who is offering her flowers that turn into rats. Swimming in and out of consciousness, she dreams that she is being followed by the rats from her work to a space that she infers is Downtown Beirut: ‘she must be in the suq at the Maarad. No doubt about that, otherwise what were these arches?’, the dream once more emphasizing her disorientation.79 The rats take over government offices, banks, and

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churches and mosques: the three pillars of government, capital and religion. Then, another symbol of death, crows, descends on Tamima, and the rats and crows converge on the square, which is: Emptied completely – there were no people, no cars, no horns sounding, no whistles blowing [. . .] the rats poured down from the mountain or rose, with their sharp teeth bared, from the direction of the sea. They came from the north, the south, spreading out around the feet of the Martyrs, slipping through their legs, on to their shoulders and heads, wrapping themselves around their necks, snapping and biting at their eyes [. . .] ‘The square is ours’, they squeaked.80 Tamima is only saved from a giant rat’s jaws by Abu-Sharshur, who ‘lifted his gigantic arm and met him with his baling-hook. Tamima stared. His rope had coiled itself around the Martyrs and on the horizon its shadow described an astonishing rainbow.’81 The central scene of this nightmare is set on a statue that symbolizes Lebanon’s struggle for independence from the Ottomans; in the dream, the ‘rats’ that invade the square have come from all over the country, and from all over the world; furthermore, the words they squeak embody the appropriation of public space for themselves, the denial of Tamima’s right to even the smallest bit of it. The literal centre of the city – of the nation – and Lebanon’s most symbolic public memorial, is overrun by a plague of self-serving vermin, and the only way that Tamima escapes is by being physically lifted out of the melee. This movement foreshadows the last scene in Tawahin, in which Tamima disappears with Abu-Sharshur as several mobs descend simultaneously upon Martyrs’ Square. At the novel’s end, marchers in a funeral procession for AbuSharshur’s martyred son converge with ‘a monster procession’ being held in Martyrs’ Square; this scene, in the novel’s final few pages, is cited as a sign of ‘Awwad’s prescience in predicting the war that would erupt a few years later. In the book, this sets off a metaphorical conflagration: ‘the effect was as if oil had been poured on a fire. Beirut was alight from one end of the city to the other.’82 The last action in

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the text sees Hani and his friends ‘rushing through the side streets to the burning heart of the city’.83 After all that has happened to her, Tamima disappears with Abu-Sharshur just as ‘Beirut turn[s] into a roaring sea’.84 The deliberate device of crowds rushing into the same space as in Tamima’s dream emphasizes the rather forced analogy that ‘Awwad is making between the rats in the nightmare and the masses of people with competing agendas also flooding into the square. At this moment, as Tamima’s violated body disappears from the action, her voice emerges on the page. On the very last page, the novel’s register shifts from the third-person omniscient narrator to Tamima’s diary, which she has left behind for Hani; the woman’s voice is finally heard. Lit up from end to end, burning, this closing vision of Beirut is far from being Amyuni’s ‘brightly illuminated and clearly outlined’ city.85 The novel’s solution to the encroaching, competing tides of oppressive nationalism is for its heroine, and her equally marginalized protector, to remove themselves from the nation. Far from being a tragic gesture, however, it is an emancipatory one, a rejection of traditionalist – patriarchal and nationalist – boundaries. If one reads the novel from Accad’s perspective, i.e. with an exclusively gendered reading, or from Amyuni’s, i.e. one in which the urban is privileged as a site of emancipation, the ending is problematic. Amyuni resolves this by resorting to an overdetermined stereotype that reduces Tamima to her sectarian identity and simultaneously undermines most of the author’s earlier argument about the city’s potential to liberate its inhabitants from their premodern, primitive lives. Amyuni explains Tamima’s choice by claiming that she has no other, as a ‘tragic daughter of the Lebanese South’, and insisting, without offering much explanation, that ‘woman blossoms in the city even as it crushes her under its mills’.86 Thus, the double resolution is that Tamima is a victim of her overdetermined rural origin and that she is ‘blossoming’ in Beirut despite being crushed by its grinding mills. Amyuni also inserts a bizarre reading of the novel’s ending, in which she asserts that Tamima ‘will take the city with her wherever she goes. She will certainly return if she survives the Israeli attack.’87 Accad, for her

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part, does not attempt to impose another ending upon the novel. She, does, however, express dissatisfaction with the novel’s conclusion, because ‘Awwad’s text returns violence with violence; she asks, ‘why not have her [Tamima] organize a peace march?’88 In Accad’s reading, ‘Awwad does not go far enough in his representation of this moment of female liberation; he gives Tamima a choice that is equal to that of a man’s (Abu-Sharshur, presumably), instead of creating a character who can bring about a radical change because of her gender. I would suggest that neither reading is able to fully encompass the complexity of ‘Awwad’s story because they do not accommodate the relationship between the body and space in Tawahin; a careful reading of the moments in which Tamima’s body is spatialized, and the ways in which the gendered violence is eventually tied to a violence against the land, makes the novel’s ending almost inevitable.

From Reader to Writer: Tamima’s Trajectory At the beginning of this chapter, I noted that ‘Awwad is often situated between two moments in the literary history of Lebanon, as the mediator between what had passed, i.e. the ‘mountain romanticism’ of an earlier time, and what was to come, i.e. the literature of the war. In this particular context, Amyuni describes ‘Awwad as one of the last formal classicists, before the advent of the post-modern formal textual rupture of writers like Elias Khoury, Rashid al-Daif and Hoda Barakat. Throughout this chapter, I have described how this tension between the two moments plays out in Tawahin; my contention has been that the novel rejects the nostalgia and pastoral emphasis of earlier works, but – contrary to what critics have said – does not succumb to a substitution of an urban nationalism for a rural one. In fact, by the novel’s end, the very identity of the nation as a social construct is brought into question by Tamima’s letter to Hani, in which she writes that she will ‘fight under any sky against all legal codes and traditions sanctioned by society’.89 The letter proceeds to justify this statement by stating, ‘because, in their name, under the sky of my own country, society has denied me the right to life’.90 She continues by saying, ‘and this is my

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way – different from yours in the end’.91 Tamima, the novel’s clear heroine, as a result of the culmination of violence upon her body and the bodies of her (female) friends, cannot see a solution within a nationalist model; as the novel enacts all these scenes of violence upon these women’s bodies and links this sexual violence to a nationalist violence, the only solution that it offers its heroine is to abandon nationalism altogether for a pan-national struggle against oppression, which, at the moment that Tamima is writing, was intimately connected with the Palestinian struggle. In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams points out that often ‘a change in literary bearings’ allows a previously unseen or neglected aspect of working class life to be seen for the first time.92 Tawahin literally maps this out in the evolution of Tamima’s literary habits and her growing exposure to, and awareness of, the greater world outside both village and city. Tamima’s letter also marks another important shift, this one textual: it is the first time that her writing voice emerges. Early on in the novel, Tamima is presented as an avid reader, who has memorized many poems.93 She is also a fan of Nuayma, who appeared earlier in this chapter, and Jibran;94 both, as we have already seen, are foundational reading within the Lebanese state-mandated educational system. As a schoolgirl, she also reads (the fictional) Ramzi Raad’s prose and poetry and she is described as ‘devouring the chapters’ of his book Masters and Slaves95 ‘in secret’.96 In addition to reading voraciously, Tamima also keeps a diary; it is described as a ‘notebook of jottings. What she put in it was only scribblings. She scribbled things down as they came to her, just like that, things with no meaning.’97 Her writing is of no value to her; moreover, she is so ashamed of putting her thoughts into writing that she refers to Hani in code, then berates herself: ‘why am I afraid to name him? I called out his name when we were in the sea together. The sea heard me and the earth and the sky.’98 The inability to write what has already been said aloud, to express herself, frustrates Tamima, and she denigrates her own work, preferring to read that of others – like Ramzi Raad, whose writing quite literally physically immobilizes her even before his body does. All that changes once the double attack on her body and on Mahdiyya takes place. At this pivotal moment in the text, which

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marks the beginning of Tamima’s severed ties with the city and all it represents – as well as the severance of the national myth from its geographical boundaries, and its rearticulation through the collective experience of violence – Tamima is frustrated by the fact that there is ‘not the slightest hint of resistance, by word or action’.99 In the new paradigm caused by the experience of almost simultaneous collective and personal violence, Tamima’s reading and writing habits are transformed. Convalescing, she sits in her room in Mahdiyya and ‘devour[s] newspapers, morning, noon and night’. The repetition of the word consolidates the shift from one type of reading to the other; previously, she devoured theoretical or literary works, but now she has been transformed into a ‘devourer’ of a very different kind of writing, in ‘Arabic, French and English’.100 She becomes the secretary of Hani’s student political group, ‘The Party of Friends’, and transcribes their meetings, but also begins to summarize newspaper editorials for them.101 This is the transitional step from her vision of writing as something purely personal to the emergence of her voice at the novel’s ending: Tamima reads her summaries to the group and is praised for this ability to translate the writing of others and her ‘excellent delivery’, at which she wonders, ‘was it true that she read aloud well?’102 Her letter, the only public piece of her writing that the reader sees, is, of course, not read aloud by her, but by Hani. With it, Tamima has finally become the author of her work – and, of course, of her destiny as a resistance fighter, free of all territorial constraints.

Conclusion Tawahin is frequently cited as one of the seminal texts in the Lebanese novel’s shift from a classical period, formally romantic and thematically focused on the village, to the predominantly urban contemporary literature. Critics further claim that it is also an indictment of traditional, patriarchal – and parochial – social behaviour. Its conclusion, however, in which there is a denunciation of all existing national spaces and a transcendence of national boundaries in favour of a universal, humanist cause, complicates these

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views. Its similarity to the ending of the much earlier Tuyur suggests a difficulty in conceptualizing the place of the individual in the modern Lebanese nation, torn between the decaying romantic imagery of the mountain and the unachieved potential of the city. Read together, these two novels problematize the totalization of the nation-space by figuratively imagining the disengagement of subaltern groups, namely women, through metaphors of deterritorialization. They both seem to conclude that if these marginalized characters cannot conceive of a sense of place in any of the country’s human settlements, then the outcome is violence of the sort that consumes the city in ‘Awwad’s novel. Thus, by negation, the two correlate a sense of belonging to a place and gesture to the identity crises of those dispossessed, who are left out of dominant cultural narratives and who do not feel that they belong anywhere. David Harvey has written of the seismic ‘shifts in systems of representation, cultural forms and philosophical sentiment’ that take place when disruptions occur within the Establishment.103 It would seem that the political and social build-up to the civil war in Lebanon created a cultural space for the interrogation of traditional representations of the space of the nation, and the place of the modern individual – particularly the female – within it. Mary Layoun’s hypothesis is that such ‘crises can generate exceptional insights into social and cultural organization and possibility’.104 In this particular case, an even bigger rupture of the national and social fabric was about to take place, leaving the two disembodied voices of Muna and Tamima far, far behind.

CHAPTER 2 A CITY DIVIDED:BEIRUT IN THE (1975—90) CIVIL WAR

The tensions that had been brewing for almost a decade in Lebanon finally erupted into systematic fighting in the spring of 1975.1 Most scholarship on the war subsequently divides it into three major phases: early (1975–6), middle (1977–82) and late (1983– 90).2 The early phase is generally characterized as being a war of Right against Left, with the Maronite Christian Kataeb (Phalangists) and their allies fighting a coalition of Leftist and Palestinian groups, known as the National Movement. Some of the bloodiest, and most memorable, battles of the war took place in this period, which was marked by mass ethnic killings of Muslims by Christian right-wing militias and revenge attacks on Christian villages in the areas controlled by the National Movement, among others. Also during this period, the centre of Beirut was sacked, and by the time the first ceasefire was enforced in November 1976 by an Arab League-formed peacekeeping force, much of the city centre had been heavily damaged.3 After the ceasefire brokered in 1976 fell apart, the fighting spread outwards from Beirut to the entire country. Summarizing the middle phase of the war, Elise Salem describes it as being marked by: More intermittent warfare, punctuated by major political and military events, such as the March 1977 assassination of Kamal Joumblatt, the March 1978 Israeli invasion of South Lebanon

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[power consolidation by the Kataeb through the systematic wiping out of rival Christian militias], 1978 Syrian and Kataeb warfare, and the 1979 – 82 Palestinian/Shi‘a confrontation.4 This period, despite the warfare, was calmer than the previous one, and many thought that the conflict had ended. In the summer of 1982, however, the Israeli government used the pretext of the assassination of its ambassador to London to launch a massive assault against Lebanon, aimed at terminating the activities of the Palestinian resistance movements and the Lebanese National Movement. This culminated in the siege of Beirut, which lasted 70 days, by the end of which 18,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians had been killed and over 30,000 wounded.5 After the Palestinian Liberation Organization fighters left Beirut in September 1982, following the declaration of a truce, the Israeli army and its Lebanese proxies, mostly members of the South Lebanon Army and the Lebanese Forces, entered West Beirut and perpetrated one of the bloodiest massacres of the entire war, against unarmed Palestinian civilians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.6 Most accounts, historical and otherwise, of the Lebanese war taper off at this juncture or very soon afterwards; unfortunately, the fighting in Lebanon continued, albeit in different form.7 What had once been clearly understood as an ideological battle between Right and Left, with the corresponding local, regional and international alliances that this invoked, became more chaotic, and less comprehensible, as erstwhile allies became enemies, and vice versa.8 As the 1980s went on, ‘most of the earlier combatants of the war resumed their battles – this time with a different set of enemies [. . .] Whatever reasons for fighting in the first place seemed altogether lost as the battles, like so many forest fires, continued to spurt haphazardly across the horizons.’9 In 1990, after 15 years of hostilities, a final ceasefire and agreement to end the fighting was brokered in the Saudi town of Taif. By then, the toll of the destruction on human lives was enormous: approximately 170,000 dead, twice as many wounded and almost two-thirds of the population had been displaced.

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The traumatic experiences of the civil war in the country and the city are registered in the artistic output of the era – in particular, in poetry and visual culture, where Beirut is frequently depicted as the beautiful young female victim of physical and psychological violence, such as theft, mutilation or rape.10 For example, in the poetry of Nizar Qabbani collected in Ila Beirut al-Untha Ma‘ Hubbi [To Beirut, the Woman, with my Love], many of which – for example, ‘Beirut ya sitt al-dunya’ – became popular songs during the 1980s, Beirut is a young woman whose jewellery has been stolen and whose hair, a symbol of femininity and beauty, has been cut off, causing the poet to ask a series of distressed rhetorical questions about the identity of the people who could have perpetrated such a heinous crime.11 In Naji al-Ali’s iconic series of caricatures, she is a beautiful, sad and wideeyed young girl, usually surrounded by destruction – in more than one image, she is consoled by Hinzala, the young boy in a kaffiya who has become an icon of Palestine and its resistance. Usually portrayed with his back to the reader, as a watcher of events, in these drawings, Hinzala is active; in one, he is handing Beirut a flower; in another, he is kissing her arm as she weeps, the text beneath him reading ‘I apologize to Beirut’.12 The fact that Qabbani is Syrian and al-Ali Palestinian only reinforces Elise Salem’s observation that during the Lebanese civil war, Beirut was no longer merely a Lebanese trope, but a pan-Arab one.13 In novels, too, such as in Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose, Beirut is feminized, a city ravaged by patriarchy: ‘the city is like a great suffering being, too mad, too overcharged, broken now, gutted, and raped like those girls raped by thirty or forty militia men, and are now mad and in asylums because their families, Mediterranean to the end, would rather hide than cure [. . .]’14 Yet, there is another side to this representation of the city: what miriam cooke refers to as the ‘whore’ side of the victim/whore binary, in which Beirut is represented as a threateningly hypersexual woman.15 As it was in Tuyur Aylul’ and Tawahin Bayrut, Beirut’s sexuality and femininity are depicted as being so dangerous that they have somehow provoked this destiny. In Mahmoud Darwish’s prose memoir of the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut, which is also a series of ‘reflections, analyses, and laments’ about the Lebanese capital, the

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author speculates on the city’s downfall, suggesting it was caused by the fact that ‘Beirut offers herself to a casual passerby’.16 In Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose, the city’s destruction is the result of her promiscuity. Beirut, Adnan writes, ‘was heedless to the point of folly. She gathered the manners and customs, the flaws and vengeance, the guilt and debauchery of the whole world into her own belly. Now she has thrown it all up, and that vomit fills all her spaces.’17 Even in other, less anthropomorphic metaphors, Adnan and Darwish repeat the same point: that the city was torn apart because of its openness. ‘The city is an electro-magnetic field into which everyone wants to plug himself. It is no longer a place of habitation, but a being which resembles a runaway train,’ Adnan writes;18 Darwish describes Beirut as ‘a global transformer station, that converted every deviation from the norm into a program of action’.19 In much of this writing, then, Beirut is characterized by a stream of superlatives that eventually led to its downfall: the city was too beautiful, too open, too alive, too accepting, these writers seem to suggest, and the price it had to pay was high. Beirut is a central character in these tragic accounts; anthropomorphizing metaphors support the key rhetorical images used to represent the imagined city. In War’s Other Voices, cooke argues that the contradictory and sometimes ambivalent representations of Beirut all coexisted simultaneously, that ‘writers often addressed this muse, sometimes as a queen, sometimes as a prostitute, sometimes as an ascetic’; in all these representations, Beirut is feminized.20 So, while a feminist reading of Lebanese literature is clearly called for, and, as I have already shown, is well established as a successful paradigm for approaching the subject, in this chapter I develop another aspect of the representation of Beirut in wartime novels; namely, the representation of the urban spaces and practices of everyday life in the divided city. By focusing on the urban dimension of the war, I aim to expand the debate beyond a dichotomized, reductive interpretation of the conflict, in which men fight and women suffer or resist. After all, the conflict affected the entire population of Lebanon, urban and rural; it follows then, that the writing about the war – and in particular, the war in the city – is as diverse as the urban population was during those 15 years.

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By 1991, following the Saudi-brokered ceasefire that brought the fighting to an end, the damage caused by the Lebanese civil war had spread to most of the country, from north to south. The conflict’s first – and most visible – victim, however, had been the cityscape, and this physical division had as much psychological and symbolic effect as it did physical. In another of Naji al-Ali’s drawings, Lebanon is being strangled by a scarf; one side says ‘East’, and the other ‘West’. To strangle its victim, the scarf’s ends criss-cross each other, but they are deadly nonetheless.21 As I have already indicated, Beirut’s urban configuration had been irreversibly modified as early as the first ceasefire of 1976. Writing soon after that, historian Kamal Salibi recounts the new divisions inscribed by the fighting: The city, to begin with, had lost its unity as an urban complex. It now consisted of two separate and distinct residential sectors – a Christian sector to the east and a predominantly Muslim sector to the west – between which regular communication had become difficult, and in some respects, hardly possible.22 The new logic of divided urban geography could not be not overcome by the brief intervals in fighting, and most of the merchants whose shops had been in the centre moved their businesses out of the nowdesolate area and into the districts controlled by their respective coreligionists. The physical and psychological division of the city into east and west was now complete; in fact, as the following passage from Samir Kassir’s Histoire de Beyrouth emphasizes, even the traffic was re-directed: Even during the most promising lulls in the fighting, the city would not stop living abnormally. In spite of the reunification attempts (in November 1976 and October 1982), the city could not be seen in its entirety. Instead of ‘Beirut’, there was East Beirut and West Beirut, two hemispheres with their backs turned to each other. Even if people ‘passed’ from one end to the other, when they could, and not without great personal risk,

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urban logic had replicated itself; with the relocation of businesses and administrative offices, even traffic directions went in opposite ways on each side of the city.23 In her 1989 memoir of the war, Beirut Fragments, Jean Makdisi isolates the moment of the city’s division as ‘the most traumatic of the many changes that the war produced in our environment’.24 Reflecting on the division of the city in his book on the Lebanese civil war between 1975 and 1982, La Guerre du Liban, Samir Kassir interprets the physical division of the city as a key break with the historical national past. He writes, ‘the transformation of the downtown area, traditional site of cross-exchange into a battle field marked the end of Islamic –Christian co-existence as it had been lived until that point’.25 The language of division and fragmentation dominates descriptions of Beirut during the war, and the fragment has been seen as the hermeneutic tool par excellence of the scholarship on the period.26 As Samir Khalaf notes in Heart of Beirut, during the 1980s ‘it became fashionable to depict Lebanon as a “precarious”, “improbable”, “fragmented”, “torn” society; so divided and fractured, in fact, that it was deemed impossible to piece together again’.27 In this chapter, I examine several texts from the period between 1976 and 1989 in order to tease out the changing relations between text and city during that time. Taking into consideration some traditional critical approaches to the subject of Lebanese civil-war writing, I argue that, read together, these novels chart a changing relationship towards the urban spaces of the war-torn city that is worth investigating. For example, while the novels that predate the 1982 Israeli war often replicate and reproduce the ideological and physical divisions of the period, and re-inscribe wartime urban divisions into their texts, later novels are less committed, more ambivalent about the war and its effect on the everyday lives of city dwellers. The shift from ideological narratives of the war to the more subjective, individualized experience of the conflict can be registered in this changing representation of Beirut. Another transition captured by the cross-section of books in this chapter is the new imagined space produced during this era. Within

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the broader context of Lebanon’s cultural history, the war marked a break with the rural mountain novel of an earlier time and the urban/ rural dialectic at play in novels such as Tuyur and Tawahin, discussed in the previous chapter, and a transition into an almost purely urban imagined environment. In Elise Salem’s words, ‘one saw the gradual shift from imagining Lebanon in terms of its villages to focusing on Beirut as the psychological center of the country’.28 The transition from national – sometimes international – to hyperlocalized, urban registers of belonging is captured by Hassan Sabra’s preface to the 1983 publication Beirut: Occupation of an Arab Capital, whose first paragraph begins: And in Beirut [. . .] in the shadow of the [1982 Israeli] siege, all standards and descriptions disappeared, such that there were no longer any leftists, rightists, nationalists, or internationalists, and everyone who remained in it was a Beiruti, a badge of honor earned by each person who had loved Beirut at peace, and remained loyal to her during war [. . .] The Southerner who remained became a ‘son of the country’ [ibn al-balad ], a title usually reserved for those born and bred in it; so did the Biqa‘i and the Arab from Palestine or Egypt, Syria, Libya, Tunis, Yemen, Sudan or Iraq [. . .] all became ‘sons of the place’.29 While this formulation of a new urban identity encapsulates the rearticulation of political, religious and place identity as an urban one, it is also an example of a certain, somewhat paradoxical, wartime spatial logic. The Beirut that the writer posits as a new transnational space is that (western) part of the city that was under siege during the summer of 1982, and not the entire city as it had been prior to the war. Sabra’s imagined Beirut collapses all former differences and distances between its inhabitants; however, simultaneously, it excludes the other half of the city, the eastern side. This is a gesture replicated in some of the texts I will be discussing in this chapter, in particular Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose and Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness.

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The texts that I discuss in this chapter were all written and published during the years of the civil war, between 1976 and 1989. My argument in this chapter depends on reading a number of wartime texts together, rather than performing a close reading of two novels. As a result, this chapter is a discussion of three central novels, and then three supplementary texts. Etel Adnan’s Marie Rose, Elias Khoury’s Al-Wujuh al-Bayda’ (White Masks) and Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory were written and published during (or exclusively about) the early years of the war.30 In addition, at various points in the chapter, I integrate three other texts – two novels, and a journal – from the late war period (between 1986 and 1989); these are Elias Khoury’s The Journey of Little Gandhi, Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra, and Jean Makdisi’s Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir.31 Since I have already spoken about the urban division brought forth by the conflict, at this point in the chapter it is perhaps worth mentioning that all the texts in this selection – and all the wartime prose from Lebanon that has had a critical impact in Lebanon and internationally – is centred around, and produced from, the western part of Beirut. While some practical explanations exist for why this may be the case, such as the fact that most of the publishing industry in Lebanon was historically based in what came to be the western part of the divided city, there are no truly satisfying answers to the question of why most of the war’s critically acclaimed and popular prose was produced in or about west Beirut.32 Further, as the considerable body of work on these texts attests, these six works are quasi-canonical in the study of Lebanese war literature. However, while much of the critical material on them gestures towards the city, and emphasizes the connection between the war in the city and the fragmentary nature of the texts – sometimes even describing the city as a major ‘character’ in these novels – it generally does not address the textual representations of the urban spaces within these novels beyond the surface level.33 One of the exceptions is Elise Salem, whose Constructing Lebanon has already been cited in this passage for her observation that the psychological centre of Lebanese cultural narrative moved from the mountain to Beirut.34 Yet, for Salem, the city is interesting merely because it is a symbol

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‘that warranted extensive commentary and lament’, and she does not really develop her argument about the relationship beyond insisting that the literature of the war played a reactive role in its depiction of Beirut.35 Following Nirvana Tanoukhi’s urging to move literary analysis away from ‘metaphorical deployments of “space” toward concrete discussions about the materiality of literary landscapes’, in this chapter I aim to move beyond symbolic descriptions of Beirut into a more in-depth discussion of the effects of the changing urban landscape on literature from wartime Beirut.36 Before proceeding with my argument, however, I will outline some of the basic ways in which Beirut has been covered in the critical literature on the war. One of the most dominant themes of critical writing on Lebanese novels during this period is the relationship between textual form and the perceived disintegration of earlier social patterns due to conflict. Earlier, I introduced the topic of urban and national fragmentation as a trope that characterizes descriptions of the city at war; often, breakdown of the urban fabric is correlated with a breakdown in normative, dominant textual modes. This viewpoint, of which the following passage from Sabah Ghandour is an example, argues that the fragmentation of Lebanese society, and the destruction of the city, mandated and brought about a new form of textuality: In Lebanon, this change in discursive practice can be linked to the disintegration of the social structure of the state. With the collapse of civil society and the emergence of various political and power entities, and hence the disappearance of a singular truth, writers have come to experience not only a frustration with the political structure and its mechanism operating in the state, but also a disbelief and doubt in everything that goes on around them, even a disbelief in their own identity and subjectivity. Writers are left with bits and pieces from which to draw, and around which to build their fictional worlds in their search to comprehend their continuously changing reality.37 In such readings, the deliberately fragmented, often dialogic, frequently self-reflexive and critical writing of the period is represented

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as a sort of textual resistance to ‘dominant’ narratives, whether these are patriarchal, socioeconomic or colonial. miriam cooke, for example, interprets the body of work produced by Lebanese novelists during the war by arguing that women writers’ work ‘seemed to preclude the possibility of arranging the chaos into a coherent narrative, whereas most men’s war stories lined up oppositions’.38 In her work on Elias Khoury, Samira Aghacy reads post-colonial power relations into his novel, Gandhi, and what she describes as its polyphonic voice, which ‘lacks a fixed center and lays no claim to a final irrevocable truth’.39 More recently, such assertions have been disputed by critics such as Elise Salem, who while admitting that, as a whole, a new form of fragmented textuality indeed emerged from the civil-war era, also point out that the old language of literary production endured, albeit in a transformed state.40 In general, however, this critical body of work views writing as a mechanism through which these fragmented identities are both represented and shared, and the wounds of war can therefore begin to be healed, as Shereen Abou el-Naga explains: ‘Writing, thus, had a therapeutic nature for a fragmented “I” that suffers from many fissures on different levels. Writing becomes synonymous with healing in such tragic contexts.’41 Yet, while writing may have been therapeutic in reconstituting the self as whole in these situations, it did not attempt a similar holistic approach to the urban spaces; instead, the logic of fragmentation, atomization and loss of cohesion permeates fictional accounts of Beirut at war. The conflict also imposed a new understanding of the city, and its spatial divisions played a role in forming new meanings for Beirut’s inhabitants. For, as Hashim Sarkis points out in his work on the reconstruction of Beirut, ‘space develops its own logic, its own practices which in turn reproduce other spaces. Space propels its inhabitation. It precedes, resists, yields to, and survives those who assume it to be a neutral site for their control.’42 In Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory, it is ironically the war that brings out the sense of Beirut as a material urban space, which the text contrasts with the cityas-symbol and the city-as-metaphor. ‘Movement, arguments, crowds, and the hubbub of commerce used to hide this prescription, transforming Beirut from a city to a concept, a meaning, an expression,

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a sign,’ Darwish observes. Now, however, at war, he notices the city as a city: ‘For the first time, I’m seeing the sidewalks: clear sidewalks. For the first time, I’m seeing the trees, visible trees with trunks, branches and perennially green leaves.’43 This new discovery of the urban context reframes his experience of the city, and leaves him wondering, ‘is Beirut beautiful in itself?’44 War, Darwish’s text seems to suggest, is responsible for a major conceptual reformulation of the relationship between the individual and the city. Furthermore, in Memory, the material reality of the Israeli siege of Beirut catalyses a new material relationship with a city that is difficult to represent spatially or rhetorically: Is it a city or a refugee camp of Arab streets laid out with no plan? Or is it something else altogether? A condition, a thought, a change in state, a flower born from a text, or a young woman who unsettles the imagination. Is it for this reason that no one has been able to compose a song for Beirut? How easy she seems! Yet how she resists the joining together of words, even those with similar meter and rhyme: Beirut, yaqoot, taboot – ‘Beirut, sapphire, coffin!’45 Notably, the passage rhetorically links spatial representation (the laying out of streets) with symbolic representation, in particular with metaphor in a rhetorical question about the difficulty of artistic representation (song) dealing with Beirut. Functioning on multiple, seemingly distinct levels of representation, Darwish’s text creates a link between them; and that link is Beirut. The material reality of war also causes Darwish to yearn for a new kind of language: I want to find a language that transforms language itself into steel for the spirit – a language to use against these sparkling silver insects, these jets. I want to sing. I want a language that I can lean on and that can lean on me.46

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Darwish’s emphatic ‘I want’, direct and clear, amplifies the materiality of the metaphors used to describe this desired language: he desires a language like steel, one that is a weapon, one that is solid enough to lean on. It is as if his realization of the new materiality of the city commands a new language, one that can only be expressed through metaphors of the raw materials of urban construction and solidity. Memory seems to suggest that this is the only language that can reclaim the city from the enemy warplanes. While it is often tricky to make claims about Memory’s language, due to its constantly shifting use of metaphor, oppositions, and paradox (such as the ‘memory’ and ‘forgetfulness’ of the title), nevertheless in this sequence, Darwish’s yearning for the support of a solid language is immediately related to his experience of war in the city. In her article, ‘Reconstituting Space’, Maha Yahya argues that there is a dialectical, rather than causal, relationship between the fragmentary urban space produced by the war and the spatial practices and representations of the city’s inhabitants. Like Sarkis, Yahya states that, due to (and during) the war: The unified image of Beirut is lost in a maze of boundaries carving through it. This destruction is both physical and spatial. It is a physical fragmentation which creates a change in the meaning and perception of boundaries and barriers between different spaces. It generates and is generated by a reorganization of Beirut’s urban landscape, the use of its spaces, access into and through various territories.47 It is this dialectical relation between the space of the city and its perceived and constructed meanings that I hope to develop in this chapter, which is why I choose to study a wide selection of texts that have not always been read together. As I did in the previous chapter, here I aim to reframe the existing critical debate about writing and the city towards an interpretation that is more space-oriented. The relationship between literature and Beirut at war is not merely a reactive, mimetic one, in which the role of the writer is to find a language to express the fragmentation of the

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nation and the death of the city. Although this argument is valid, compelling, and to a certain extent true, the relationship is also a dialectical one: by writing about the city at war, these novelists and their texts also contributed to producing a narrative of the city that reinforced its divisions and wartime topography, a point which can only be made when these texts are read as a body of work on the city, and not opposed to each other along binary oppositions such as gender. This link is self-consciously emphasized by Elias Khoury in his article ‘The unfolding of modern fiction and Arab memory’, when he describes how ‘writing in times of transition takes the form of a journey towards what we do not know and towards the shock of writing what we know, which will lead us to discover how writing changes things and does not only reflect them’.48 Whether by resorting to a discourse of otherness to describe the inhabitants of the adjoining neighbourhood, as the early novels do, or by atomizing the city into its smallest constituents – the house, the street – as the later ones do, the effect is the same: Beirut is divided and dissected into its three parts – East, West and centre – seemingly irreconcilable.

Taking Sides: Geographies of Otherness The changing urban landscape produced its own effects on the city’s inhabitants; in many cases, the new reality of division is initially rejected, then begrudgingly becomes absorbed into the language and practices of everyday life. In her account of the Lebanese civil war, Jean Makdisi attests to the imposition of a new urban logic onto the cityscape, and its subsequent internalization. She points out that, whereas the barriers ‘that divide the city, once entirely artificial, have only partly achieved the intention of those who erected them, there now is a difference between East and West Beirut that never existed before’.49 Makdisi’s point is interesting for several reasons, but mostly because it demonstrates that, while recognizing the artificiality of the war-imposed boundary, she also acknowledges the potency of intention in actually propagating and enforcing the division between both sides of the city. In fact, urban scholar Maha

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Yahya actually contends that this division was initially psychosocial and later became physical, ‘an invisible barrier between the inhabitants of the same city, [that] was rendered visibly present through its scenes of destruction, its snipers and numerous military personnel on either side’.50 Moreover, the division of Beirut into two distinct components – the shariyyeh (East) and gharbiyyeh (West) – outlasted the war, and endures today.51 In her novel Beirut Blues, written in the mid-1990s, Hanan al-Shaykh complains, while distancing herself rhetorically from those who do such things, that such divisions have been normalized, and ‘everyone says “the eastern sector” and “the western sector” and your divisions have become a fact of life’.52 Geographers make a distinction between physical distance and psychological or conceptual framings of distance in their definition of the term ‘scale’; certainly, this conceptual framework sheds considerable light on the practices and representations of urban division in these wartime novels. While the Dictionary of Human Geography defines scale as ‘levels of representation, experience and organization of geographical events and processes’, it makes a distinction between three kinds of scale: the cartographic, the methodological and the geographical.53 Expanding upon the third category, geographical scale, it adds, ‘geographical scale is in no sense natural or given. There is nothing inevitable about global, national or urban scales, for instance. These are specific to certain historical and geographical locations, they change over time, sometimes rapidly sometimes slowly.’54 Moreover, it continues, ‘specific events may embody destructions and reconstructions of various scales at the same time’.55 In short, scale can be used to relate physical space to literary (and other) modes of representation and to the production of space; as such, it has become of interest to literary scholars like Nirvana Tanoukhi, who argues that paying attention to issues of scale would ‘conceptualize the dialectic of lived time and lived space in and around literature – in order to understand the entanglement of literature in the history of the production of space’.56 One of the main aspects of such work would be, according to Tanoukhi, for literary scholars to pay special attention to ‘the

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articulation of distance within a particularly spatialized system of social relations’.57 Following such an understanding of the changing nature of scale, which is intimately connected to place, and the relationship of such spatial conceptualizations to representation – and, in particular, the organization and understanding of social patterns and networks in times of change – I believe that bringing a geographical sensibility to critical readings of the novels of the early Lebanese war sheds a new light on the ways that spaces were demarcated and divided. For example, in the work of Mahmoud Darwish and Etel Adnan, scale is used to emphasize ideological, religious and national difference within Beirut and Lebanon. In Marie Rose and Memory, the small physical distance between both sides of Beirut is scaled upwards, the distance exaggerated so it appears as large and unbridgeable as the ideological divide between Right (East Beirut) and Left (West Beirut); and also, a symbol in these texts of the divide between global East and West. Commenting on the fragmentation of Beirut, Darwish writes: And Beirut herself realized that she wasn’t one city, one homeland, or the meeting point of neighboring countries; that the distance between one window and another facing it could be greater than that between us and Washington; and that internecine fighting between one street and another parallel to it could be more intense than that between a Zionist and an Arab nationalist.58 By projecting the physical distance between one window and the other onto a complex geopolitical scale, Darwish’s imagery exaggerates the divisions of Beirut during wartime. Darwish further exacerbates the divide between neighbouring windows and adjacent streets by comparing it to the especially bitter struggle between Zionism and Arab nationalism; given the context and background for Memory, one can hardly read this particular comparison neutrally. In the passage, the urban landscape becomes a symbol for a social and political divide that is insurmountable; the city is too divided to be reconciled.

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Similarly, in Marie Rose, one side of the city is placed within a broader geopolitical context that literally distances it from the other side of the city. In the novel, East Beirut is represented as a site of both fascist sterility and of violence but also as an intrusion, as not belonging to the rest of Beirut. Marie Rose implies that the war is a clash of civilizations between the Westernized East Beirutis and the orientalized West ones. Marie-Rose, the novel’s tragic heroine, sacrificed for transgressing the boundaries between Christian and Muslim, but also for crossing the border and choosing to remain on the other side of the city, explains right before dying that, ‘this war is a fight between two powers, two powers and two conceptions of the world’.59 Although controversial, the novel’s authorial voice imposes a dominant reading of cultural binaries, which is often conveyed through spatial representation. In her article on Marie Rose, Lisa Suheir Majaj asserts that ‘[In the novel], Lebanese identity is predicated upon the establishment of clear boundaries between Christian and Muslim, East and West, Lebanese and Palestinian, “civilized” and “primitive” – and upon the implicit relocation of the Christian Lebanese to the “Western” side of the divide’, and that this is established by the strong authorial voice narrating the novel.60 Despite Amal Amireh’s assertion that the polyphonic voices of the novel make Adnan’s an ‘interrogative text’, ‘which therefore refuses the hierarchy of discourses of classic realism, and no authorial or authoritative discourse points to a single position which is the place of the coherence of meaning’, I find Majaj’s reading more accurate: there is an authorial voice, and it certainly imposes a dominant reading of certain binaries, which is often conveyed through spatial representation.61 For example, Adnan’s text detaches East Beirut from its Western counterpart, and metaphorically aligns it with Mediterranean – but, more importantly, Christian – Europe, hundreds of miles further away, suggesting that it does not belong in the Middle East: More westernized and efficient in war as in everything, the Christian quarters have a sort of austerity which links them to

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certain ‘pieds-noirs’ neighborhoods in Nice or Marseilles, or to little towns in Sicily and Greece. The Moslem [sic] enclaves still retain the disorder of the Orient which is still the last good in these essentially bastard countries which have no precise culture except for the one that developed from a pell-mell of values in a state of disintegration.62 Thus, the Christian areas of Beirut are given a Mediterranean identity, and the Christians are identified with the pieds-noirs, signalling that these Christian populations do not belong in this city just as the French colonial pieds-noirs did not belong in Algeria. Adnan uses this metaphor to emphasize both the historical links between the Christian Lebanese and the French and to exclude the Christian communities of Lebanon from any native authenticity. Furthermore, by describing the ‘disorder of the Orient’ in the western part of the city as ‘the last good’ that remains in ‘bastard countries’ like Lebanon, Adnan’s narrator is clearly setting up an opposition between the authentic, disordered Orient in the west of Beirut and the fascist, ordered, Westernized east that does not belong in the city, and is the effect of its absorption of other values. While Marie-Rose is punished by the Christians on the eastern side of the war for being Christian and for crossing over to the other side, in West Beirut, Christians are welcome and ‘it’s a beautiful day on the other side of the city, and the streets, even with bullets flying, are still lively’.63 In fact, in contrast to the deaf-mute witnesses to her suffering (her students) in East Beirut, whose voices are literally silenced and cannot tell of the murder they have witnessed, in West Beirut the news of Marie-Rose’s kidnapping brings together an improvised community whose voices rise in concern about Marie-Rose’s fate: Telephone calls became more numerous, people went out into the streets to question each other, stunned and carried to the point of rage. Everyone knew how horrible this war was, but this woman’s capture brought to light a feeling of revolt against the injustice of the war which up till then had been held clenched inside.64

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The image of a community forming together ‘in the various western quarters, in the sectors allied to the Palestinians’ around a shared grief, and a shared love for the alleged ‘outsider’ Lebanese Christian MarieRose exacerbates the isolationism, racism and obsession with purity that Adnan aligns with the eastern side of the city, where no remorse is shown for one of theirs who has crossed over.65 Adnan’s novel often contradicts itself: Marie-Rose and the unnamed narrator frequently criticize the Christian fighters for forgetting that they are Middle Eastern,66 yet it also seems to subscribe to this division itself through its representation of the spaces of the other side of the city as foreign. The exaggerated ideological difference between Christian East and Muslim West Beirut in both novels is also represented by another play on spatial metaphor, namely by inverting the older mountain/ city binary of early Lebanese nationalism. Where earlier canonical texts idealized the mountain as the site of purity and the placeholder for Lebanese identity, in these two novels the mountain constitutes a metonymy of otherness, and is clearly associated with menace and violence. In Memory, the mountains are figured as violent and aggressive, and Mahmoud the narrator has to tell himself while making his morning coffee, ‘Don’t look at the mountains spitting masses of fire in the direction of your hand. But alas, you can’t forget that over there, in Ashrafiya [sic], they’re dancing in ecstasy.’67 The mountain and Christian East Beirut are combined in violence, positioned in an elsewhere ‘over there’ that is very far from the actuality and presence of the narrator, in his apartment trying to accomplish the everyday task of making coffee.68 Similarly, in Marie Rose, the mountain is associated with the right-wing, isolationist Christian ideology of Marie-Rose’s killers – one of whom is her former love interest, Mounir, who thinks of himself as European because he is Christian – and of the priest Bouna (Father) Lias, who urges Marie-Rose, ‘come back to the community. You’ll inhale the aromas of baking bread and of the mountains’. The mountains here are contrasted with the death that awaits her if she remains on the ‘other side’.69 By representing the city as irreconcilably divided into two sides, the novels continuously reassert this urban division and reinforce the social divisions of Beirut and its inhabitants.

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In the novels of Darwish and Adnan, the ideological divides of the early war years, between Palestinian Left and Lebanese Christian Right emerge on the urban landscape and in the text. In Memory, Darwish claims that Beirut had a different identity to Lebanon, and that it was not part of the imagined, folkloric nation sung by Lebanese artists and poets (and described in the introductory chapter, above): ‘Beirut was excluded because it had ceased to be Lebanon’s Beirut. In the sectarian view, Beirut was not Lebanon; it had become Arab and was sung by the Arabs.’70 These writers, imbricated in the ideological struggle of the time, replicate the divisions of the physical city. In fact, they do more than this: they seem to suggest that the divide is inevitable, a result of the unbridgeable ideological differences between the warring factions. While Darwish’s text, to his credit, does attempt some perspective – especially in trying to understand the tension between Palestinians and Lebanese over Lebanon71 – Adnan’s does not. In the words of Elise Salem, therefore, the latter novel is reductive: ‘heavily ideological, it tends to simplify rather than capture complex Lebanon; and because it is accusative rather than participatory, it is set outside and beyond the Lebanese experience itself.’72 It is interesting that one of Salem’s critiques of Adnan’s text is that it is not inside what she describes as ‘the Lebanese experience’; this assertion gestures to one of the major accusations of the Lebanese conflict: that it was in fact, a war of others fought on Lebanon’s territory.73 It is true that to some extent both Darwish’s and Adnan’s novels globalize the Lebanese conflict. The first section of Adnan’s book compares Lebanon to Syria and Europe; as noted earlier, the Lebanese conflict is often represented as a struggle between global Christianity and Islam, or West and East. Darwish’s text, in contrast, places the city within the framework of the Arab – Israeli conflict.

Complicating the Division Whereas Beirut – and Lebanon – is divided along ideological lines in the work of Adnan and Darwish, in Elias Khoury’s Wujuh, a more complex relationship between individual and place emerges.74 The

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novel, as in much of Khoury’s writing about the Lebanese civil war, begins by denying its own form, its narrator, an amateur archivist who works in a travel office, insisting that ‘this is not a story’, and emphasizing that any reader of the text is wasting their time in reading it.75 Khoury creates a collage of story, in the guise of testimonies from a variety of different people into the death of Khalil Ahmad Jabir, a former post office employee who is found murdered on the five-year anniversary of the outbreak of the 1975 war, on 13 April 1980. Some of the narrative voices include Khalil’s wife; his daughter; his neighbour, Fatima; the widow of the murdered caretaker of a nearby building; an acquaintance who lives in that building; and a fighter at the office of the militia in charge of Khalil’s area.76 They all recount their memories of Khalil and his slow degeneration after his son’s death in the 1975 – 6 fighting, and through this telling, their own stories emerge. As in much of Khoury’s work, this narrative technique connects the characters, their stories and the city, since as the reader ‘pieces together the unconnected stories of his characters and reassembl[es] them, he creates a montage of a city going through war’.77 For example, one of the first signs of Khalil’s eventual breakdown is his retreat further into the home due to the inaccessibility of his former workplace, followed by that of his new work place, as recounted by his wife, Nuha: Khalil stopped going to the central post office in Riad al-Solh square. Then he began work at the post office in Mazra‘a, saying that he couldn’t stand working at home like women, then he was forced to stay home, bombs and death raining down, how could he go out? I begged him to stay and he accepted.78 Nuha’s account connects the spatial to the individual in a narrative of emasculation that is directly related to access to public space and to the workplace. In the novel, the division of the city disrupts other everyday spatial practices, particularly those associated with labour, whether it be manual or otherwise. In another story from the novel, Zayn, the

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municipal garbage collector and a refugee from East Beirut who finds Khalil’s body, complains that, with the city divided, the rubbish trucks in West Beirut no longer have access to the Karantina rubbish dump in the east, and now have to make do with an improvised dump in Shwayfat, to the south. He laments the loss of the municipal dump, and of the former professional aspect of his labour, now gone: This is not a job; Shwayfat has nothing on Karantina. In Karantina there’s a proper landfill. An entire area, with a name, where we throw sorted rubbish; mountains of garbage everywhere, but it is not harmful because it is organized, everything in place. It brought us great joy to see children dancing with joy as if the garbage truck was bringing them gifts.79 The stories of Zayn and Khalil suggest that there is a human, emotional and economic cost to the city’s division that has an impact on the everyday lives of people there beyond – though related to – the fact of war. These characters are not resistors, like Marie-Rose, and they are not fighters.80 The physical division of the city has affected their lives, but they have not been able to accept the ideological dimension of the division, and continue to pine for their earlier existence. Through its nuanced representation of the relationship between individual and place, Wujuh complicates the reductive, clean division of Beirut into east and west in different ways, and mostly through the figure of the refugee who has been forcibly thrown out of East Beirut but retains conflicting feelings towards it. The first such individual is the Kurdish caretaker’s widow, Fatima. As a child, she is brought to work in the home of a well-to-do family in Achrafieh, in East Beirut. Initially homesick, she longs to go back hunak (over there), where her family is; her father, who visits occasionally, promises her with each visit that he will take her back ‘over there’ next year. When she gets married, her husband also promises to take her ‘over there’ next year, but this trip is also deferred. At this point, Fatima’s imagined elsewhere, her home, is an un-named, ill-defined place that she has a vague recollection of,

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but which exists in opposition to her employer’s house in Beirut. When the war starts, and her family is forced to move to West Beirut, the referent shifts. The much longed-for ‘over there’ becomes Achrafieh – ‘it was better over there’, she complains, despite the fact that the move west is also a move towards upwards social mobility for Fatima, who for the first time ‘is at home, no-one demanding of her to work in his house’.81 The new urban logic of division forces a shift in Fatima’s projected desires and understanding of place belonging, even while she does not seem to recognize the fact of the war; it also calls into play a belonging that transcends an improvement in lifestyle. Fatima’s curious contradiction of displacement, and her shifting conceptualizations of longing and belonging are replicated in the case of Zayn, also a refugee from East Beirut – specifically from the extremely poor eastern suburb of Nabaa. He and his family have moved to West Beirut, to the middle-class Hamra district. Once more, despite the move towards an ostensibly more comfortable place, Zayn has contradictory feelings: Hamdilla, we left Nabaa during the war before they invaded it and all those atrocities happened, we went to the village, then came back to Beirut, and lived in Hamra, I mean [. . .] Nabaa is better than Hamra, no it’s not possible, yes in Nabaa it was our house and we paid rent, here we are refugees and don’t pay rent, but this is better [. . .] But Husayniyyah says that Nabaa is better, and that people there were more real. But what can we do, we can’t go back to Nabaa, and it’s impossible to live in the village.82 This short passage gestures to several aspects of the changing urban and national landscape: the dissociation from the rural village – Zayn and his family would prefer to be refugees in the city than live in their village; the displacement of Muslim Lebanese from the eastern side of the city; and the complicated emotional ties to these places, the inability to make the type of clean break so easy to achieve in Marie Rose.

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Khoury’s text, while acknowledging the impossibility of Fatima or Zayn’s return east, does not sever the emotional ties of that part of Beirut for the people on the other side: it is still a living place to them, a repository of memory, as much a part of their lives as their new homes and adopted neighbourhoods. Nevertheless, it is also represented as ‘hunak’, a faraway elsewhere that is discursively linked to a village that Fatima cannot even name, let alone remember, which reinforces the impossibility of her ever returning. As in Marie Rose and Memory, despite the short distance between districts, the scale of the imaginative space between West and East Beirut is enormous. Unlike its status in the other two texts, however, Khoury’s East Beirut retains an emotional significance for its former inhabitants. As such, Khoury’s text underlines, and does not simplify, the complicated relationships between individuals and place identity.

Shrinking Spaces In her work on the urban spatial practices formed as a result of prolonged life under warfare, Maha Yahya postulates that the physical division in the urban landscape precipitated a modified understanding of boundaries and limits, some of which are obvious from the representations of the divided urban space in the novels we have already seen. Yayha also shows how, in addition to the personal reordering of urban topography and the relationship to the city, the war also imposed its logic upon the spatial practices of everyday life in Beirut. The streets, for example, were no longer public spaces; in fact, Yahya points out, there were no longer many open public spaces, which forced Beirutis ‘inwards into their homes’.83 For Yahya, the problem this caused is twofold: ‘the city ceased to be everybody’s domain as one’s world shrunk to one’s immediate surroundings’, which leads to the fact that ‘the limitation of space turned into a radical separation’.84 It is therefore unsurprising that so much of the war literature, from early to late, takes up the issue of enclosure and entrapment. ‘Beirut is a port. Never has a port been so blockaded,’ Marie Rose’s narrator complains, the brevity and simplicity of the matter-of-fact statements forming an unexpressed, yet obvious,

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syllogism of confinement.85 In Fragments, Makdisi describes freedom of movement as a distinct element of the past, ‘every now and then, [we] remind ourselves of the old days when we would drive for hours to get somewhere far away. Now we are confined, not only each to our own city and town but even to our own quarter in the city,’ the distinction between the past and the narrated present direct and succinct.86 In Memory, the shrinking of space and place becomes an allegory of Palestinian dispossession from the Arab world, and then, finally, from Beirut, which gets broken down into increasingly smaller increments – by district, by refugee camp, by street – until finally it can no longer be partitioned into anything larger than a traffic circle: The names of places get narrower and narrower, and shrink. From the great Arab homeland, stretching from the ocean to the Gulf, to something more restricted: Sharm al-Sheikh, Mount Hermon, the West Bank of the River Jordan, the girl’s school in Nablus, the Shujaiya Quarter in Gaza, Gallerie Samaan, Asaad al-Asaad Street in Beirut, Taba hotel in Sinai, Bir al-Abed here, Shatila Refugee Camp, the airport traffic circle, to the final barricade beyond which is desert or sea.87 In all these texts, the language of diminishing space is used to emphasize alienation from and frustration with the changed urban landscape of the wartime city. Furthermore, this language is often spare, direct, unadorned – almost as if, along with the cityscape, the language that the authors used to convey this was narrowing down. As the novels’ spaces diminish and retreat inwards, a sense of social community forged by sharing common spaces is lost. Correlated to the shrinking spaces of these novels is the redrawing of the uses of public and private space. Earlier, I used an example from Elias Khoury’s Wujuh to describe a character’s (Khalil’s) increasing alienation from the workforce and, consequently, his pre-war everyday life due to the fact that he can no longer go to his former workplace in downtown Beirut. Khalil is finally ‘forced to’ stay at home, ‘like a woman’ because of the danger outside. While there has

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been some writing about the re-constitution of gendered spaces that this brought about, what is more interesting for me at this point is not so much the representation of domestic spaces in these wartime novels, but the representation of public ones, and in particular the representation of the street.88 In the following section, I will pay particular attention to the novels of Elias Khoury and to Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra. Contrary to miriam cooke’s assertion, dependent as it is on somewhat crude binary distinctions, that the war erased ‘any difference between the experiences of the home and the street. Private and public merged; more, they were wrenched into each other,’89 I follow Hashim Sarkis’ assertion that what the war did was ‘[render] visible the shades in the clear-cut distinction between public and private, between the state and individual property’.90 Thus, although cooke’s point about the destructiveness of the war upon people’s everyday life is valid, these novels draw quite a large distinction between the home and the street. cooke’s distinction between the ‘experiences of home’ and ‘experiences of the street’ imposes a gendered division between the two spaces; for example, her metonym of home is ‘the calm of the boudoir and the kitchen’, both feminized domestic ‘private’ spaces, which by implication suggests that the streets are masculine ‘public’ spaces. In these novels, the streets are shared public spaces, not necessarily exclusively male; therefore, the loss of the shared public space of the street is mourned not only as a form of emasculation, but also as a loss of a certain type of collective urbanity that transcends class, religious and social structures. In Gandhi, Wujuh and Zahra, the lost street life of Beirut becomes an allegory for the loss of community and sometimes the drawing of new boundaries. In Hanan al-Shaykh’s Zahra, as Joseph Zaydan points out, the war initially provides its protagonist, Zahra, temporary respite from the anxiety of her pre-war life, which was filled with physical and sexual abuse.91 At the start of the war, Zahra returns to her family home in Beirut from a terrible trip and a failed marriage in Africa. Her neighbourhood has been taken over by a sniper, who has imposed his presence onto its landscape, such that ‘our street, once ruled by the spirit of life, now has death for its overlord’.92 Al-Shaykh’s work

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provocatively erases the difference between the fighters on the eastern and western sides of the city;93 the following exchange between Zahra and her brother, Ahmad, a fighter, bragging about his newfound power, demonstrates this, as he tells her: The whole of Beirut is ours. We, on the western front, and they, our opponents on the eastern front, command between us the buildings and the streets. Nothing that moves or doesn’t move is outside our control. We are the force and power and everything.94 Through Ahmad’s words, al-Shaykh’s novel traces the new networks of power across the urban space, and clearly separates those who have access to the city from those who do not. Even while Ahmad distinguishes between ‘we’ on the western front and the ‘they’ on the eastern front, he asserts a collective ownership over the city, and a panoptical power over its inhabitants in the name of all the fighters.95 In contrast to Ahmad, Zahra represents herself as confined to ‘this apartment and [. . .] that window, my only link with the city and the war, and hence with life’.96 Yet, Zahra does leave the apartment, beginning an affair with the neighbourhood sniper. Walking along the streets and wondering why no one stops her from doing so, she muses on her new-found power by association, which gives her a feeling of immunity;97 in fact, when the sniper promises to marry her after she has told him she is pregnant, the street, though still empty, no longer feels aberrant: ‘it seems as if the war has suddenly come to a stop with his promise that we will marry. Everything seems normal.’98 Shereen Abou el-Naga argues that the war enables Zahra’s access to public space and modifies her relationship to private spaces. For Zahra, whose refuge of choice even prior to the war, in Beirut and elsewhere, has been the bathroom, the street is an exciting, tantalizing place; even the sniper is not as isolated from the community as it would appear due to his presence and guardianship over the street – he finds out information about Zahra from the neighbourhood men.99 Thus, even in war, the street functions as a gathering place of sorts for those

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who have power over it. Yet, Zahra’s sense of regained normality is illusory and short-lived, and she dies in the street, in public, shot by a sniper, who may or may not be her lover.100 Despite this, the war’s reorganization of public and private spaces allows her to see her home as a place of comfort, as opposed to the space of pain and abuse that it was prior to her trip to Africa and the war. In Elias Khoury’s two novels from this period, Gandhi and Wujuh, the street is a metonym for urban life; the expulsion or eradication of the civilian population of Beirut from public spaces, most frequently symbolized by the street, is a recurring theme in both these works. In Gandhi, an unnamed narrator collects a series of stories from a prostitute named Alice. She disappears after Gandhi’s death in an Israeli bombing raid in the summer of 1982. As in Wujuh, the narrative develops in a disjointed form, almost like a montage, which is linked in some critical writing to the city and to the nation.101 There is some evidence that Khoury himself, in the case of Gandhi, deliberately chose to focus upon a particular aspect of Beirut’s landscape, as a metaphor for both city and nation: The Ras Beirut of the novel, as Khoury described it in an interview with al-Ittihad, is ‘the area considered most cosmopolitan [. . .] a place where universities, intellectuals, political struggle, bars, conspiracies, churches, and mosques are concentrated. It is like a miniature model of a city which is, in turn, a mirror of the country’.102 In the novel, the streets of Ras Beirut, near the American University of Beirut, where Gandhi sets down his shoe-shining box and begins to work, having eliminated other parts of the city as potential sites for his establishment, are spaces of assembly, a feature that Henri Lefe`bvre argued was the most fundamental of all signs of the urban.103 And assembly there is: through his outdoors work, Gandhi meets professors, priests and prostitutes, and is given a new identity (his name is originally Abdul-Karim; he is renamed ‘Gandhi’ by an American professor).104 A new community is constructed, based on the sharing of public space, that seems to coexist in spite of class,

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gender, ethnic and religious differences. Despite the earlier fighting, this urban microcosm endures until the Israeli invasion of Beirut, when Gandhi is killed, Alice disappears, and the ‘stories died beneath [the narrator’s] pen’.105 Indeed, in the epilogue to Gandhi, the deaths and lives of Gandhi and the city are intertwined in a textual metaphor: He knew why he died, he knew the bullets weren’t aimed at him, but rather at the heart of a city that destroyed itself, because it was like Gandhi, it was trying to make a story out of its name. And the story is a game of names [. . .] When we knew the names, the story began, and when the names were extinguished, the story began.106 Although the concluding sentence of the novel can be read as an affirmation of the endurance of story-telling under any circumstances, it is also a stark contrast to the preceding sentence, in which the city and Gandhi are compared, as subjects attempting a reinvention, a self-motivated textual becoming that fails. When Gandhi dies, the community that populates his stories and the neighbourhood disappears; more specifically, it turns out to be fictional, a literally imagined community that cannot exist beyond Gandhi’s and Alice’s stories. It is unclear what Khoury seems to be suggesting in his link between Beirut and Gandhi: it is almost as if, in his text, he is suggesting that pre-1982 Beirut was nothing more than a collection of stories; a ‘Tower of Babel’, as the narrator describes it at one point, populated by speakers of many different languages, including Greek, classical Arabic, English, Assyrian and Kurdish.107 With the invasion, however, this bustle becomes emptiness, and there is nothing left but death on ‘the streets of an abandoned city’.108 The contrast between bustle and assembly and wartime emptiness and silence, and the recurring association of this with writing, with the ability to write stories, relates Khoury’s sense of loss of the city to an attempt to find an interpretation or an explanation. Similarly, in Wujuh, which predates both Gandhi and the Israeli invasion, the empty street is a symbol of the unease about the war,

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most notably the insistence that it has ended. Gary McDonogh’s work offers insight into the many constructions of emptiness in the urban context, and he points out that the designation of space as empty most often suggests conflict.109 Indeed, much of Wujuh is constructed around denial: the denial of the fact of war, the characters’ attempts to rationalize the violence outside the context of war; yet, the empty street punctures this narrative of denial, and gestures to an enduring conflict. For example, Nuha, Khalil’s wife, insists that the war had nothing to do with Khalil’s unemployment and his retreat into the home: ‘No no the war has nothing to do with this, nothing changed in the war, the war has nothing to do with it, it’s just that Khalil stopped going to the central post office in Riad al-Solh square,’ she repeats, almost like a litany of denial.110 But then, the streets of the city remain empty, contradicting Nuha, and contributing to the unease of Mahmoud Fakhru, Fatima’s husband, taking care of a building in the now-deserted, once-upscale Kantari district. Like Nuha, Mahmoud’s story contains repetition; the two most repeated phrases are ‘on his own’ and ‘desolate streets’ – the individual and the urban, connected by abandonment. Mahmoud is astonished, since he is alone, and ‘the streets are empty, but the war is over’.111 The emptiness and loneliness of the street – i.e. the complete absence of any return to normal, everyday life in the city – emphasize the absurdity of Mahmoud’s belief that the war is over. In fact, Mahmoud is later gunned down on another street, on suspicions that he has stolen some valuable jewellery from the house that he was ostensibly guarding. In Wujuh, the street, once a public space accessible to all, is transformed into a site of danger. The ‘normal’ everyday life of the city cannot happen without access to its shared public spaces; since these are dangerous – both Mahmoud and Khalil die on the street – it is obvious that the city is not normal. Khoury’s work defamiliarizes the urban space by emphasizing its abandonment and desolation. As the Lebanese war endured, and continued to redraw boundaries, the Lebanese were forced to inscribe and re-inscribe a new national and urban topography. However, new communities were also drawn

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and redrawn by forced migrations from other parts of the country or city – by death, as they are in both Elias Khoury novels, and by the changes in the cityscape. Maha Yahya describes this best, in her article on wartime Beirut: ‘the city ceased to be everybody’s domain as one’s world shrunk to one’s immediate surroundings. Thus, the limitation of space turned into a radical separation.’112 While the novels of this latter part of the war do not necessarily promulgate urban divisions with the same ideological fervour as do Marie Rose and Memory, their images and symbols speak to an already-inscribed division of the city whose urbanity is increasingly lost as the war continues, and whose individuals are ever more isolated from each other and from the traditional sites of community, such as the street, the marketplace, and the neighbourhood.

Writing the Wartime City Moreover, as the war continued, it became clearer that the radically altered cityscape not only demanded a new literary form – the fragmentary novel – but also mandated a new language, such as Darwish’s ‘language of steel’, that could resist the Israeli fighter jets. Jean Makdisi’s Fragments closes with a dictionary that directly links language to the city from its title, ‘Beirut: An Alphabet’. Remarking on the fact that one of the ‘greatest sources of pride in Beirut has been the frequently affirmed claim that the alphabet, which provides language with a controlling order, was invented here’, Makdisi asks, ‘is it possible to hope that from the rubble of the war [. . .] a new form might arise and permit future creativity?’113 She then launches into her new ‘alphabet’, which begins at z, for zbaleh (rubbish) and ends at B, for Beirut, for which Makdisi provides two entries. In the first, she writes, ‘Beirut: poor, ugly, stricken Beirut, broken Beirut, unloved city, lost Beirut, like the child in the tale, torn between two mothers, but no Solomon here, no true mother’, simultaneously invoking and inverting former descriptions of the city as a beautiful, wanton woman.114 In Makdisi’s text, Beirut is an unloved child, one which in the second ‘definition’ of the city, ‘pleads to be redeemed’.115

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Yet, often, the new language was used in order to navigate the changing landscape of the city and the entire country. As Jean Makdisi writes, ‘we had to draw up a new map of our world, and we had no instruments to assist us except our wits and our senses. And our lives often depended on the accuracy of our construction, so it was a serious business, drawing up this map.’116 The image of redrawing the urban topography out of necessity resurfaces in a later account of the war, discussed in the following chapter: Hanan al-Shaykh’s Beirut Blues. In the novel, as the protagonist Asmahan is being driven through Beirut she makes the following observation: The old names have faded in importance, names that seemed to have been there for all time: Jounieh, Jbeil, Al-Dawrah. New names have become prominent: Tariq al-Franciscan, Sudeco, the Museum with its mud and water, the smell of urine, and the people crossing from one sector to another with sorrow in their faces, a heavy weight on their shoulders, and the sense of frustration which escalates if this route is suddenly closed.117 It is interesting here that al-Shaykh gestures to the fading of memory, and the imposition of a new topography onto the landscape of Beirut, but also of Lebanon. The three places that she mentions, once taken for granted, are all in the east, to the east of the new divisions in Beirut, and since becoming inaccessible to those on the western side of the city and of the country they have become forgotten. The quote from al-Shaykh introduces a new element, memory, into the equation of the relationship between cityscape and language, which, as we shall see in the following chapters, becomes a major concern for postwar literature. As they navigate the changing cityscape and the trauma of war, the writers featured in this chapter certainly react to and produce new understandings of the divisions and everyday life of Beirut at war. One thing that distinguishes their work from the writing of both the previous and the following generation, however, is that whether at the beginning of the 15-year conflict or towards the end of it, these texts seem to accept the logic of a divided city, and adjust

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accordingly. Geographer May Davie observed in 1983 that Beirut’s civilians developed ‘a new mental geography, a very elaborate perception of space’, an observation validated by much of the literary work of that period in this chapter.118 Rather significantly, this new mental geography often omits Beirut’s centre. The space is neither commemorated nor mourned, as it would be in the novels published after the war, nor is it criticized, as it was in Tawahin, where it was a symbol of the destructive policies of the political and economic worlds. The centre is, in short, absent from these accounts of Beirut. No longer significant as a site of symbolic power, and not yet significant as a symbol of memory and of collective belonging or as a contested site of power, as it was to become, the city centre was, during that period, a physical and symbolic no-man’s-land.

CHAPTER 3 COMMEMORATIVE COUNTERMEMORIES: BEIRUT IN 1990S LEBANESE FICTION

The essential aspect of the urban phenomenon is its centrality (Henri Lefe`bvre) In 1994, the Lebanese singer Fairouz sang in Lebanon for the first time since the beginning of the civil war in 1975. The concert was sponsored by Solidere, which also chose its venue:1 Martyrs’ Square in downtown Beirut, a focal site of Solidere’s reconstruction effort and an extremely symbolic space in the Lebanese collective imaginary.2 Solidere heavily promoted the event’s symbolism: Fairouz’s status in Lebanon – and the rest of the Arab world – is quasi-mythological, and the company’s public relations arm deliberately correlated the concert with the end of the civil war. It promoted the event as the singer’s ‘first public appearance in the country since the outbreak of hostilities’, adding that it ‘marked the end of her long, personal campaign of silence against the war and its aftermath’.3 Angus Gavin and Ramez Maluf, who were commissioned by Solidere to produce the glossy coffee-table publication Beirut Reborn, also emphasize the event’s momentousness and monumentality in Lebanese national culture: a small caption under the photograph of the concert in Beirut Reborn proclaims, ‘Feyrouz [sic] sang in Beirut’s

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war-torn center, against a backdrop recalling the city’s maritime heritage. The event attracted crowds from all over Lebanon and began to re-establish Martyrs’ Square as the nation’s public arena.’4 On one hand, the caption highlights Solidere’s desire to mediate in the relationship between the re-appropriated city space and the public through a selective rewriting of Lebanese history. For example, the caption purposely refers to the city centre as ‘war-torn’, while gesturing towards one aspect of the city’s past as a port. While true that, after 15 years of civil war, the entire city was indeed ‘war-torn’, the adjective smoothly elides the fact that much of Martyrs’ Square had actually been demolished by Solidere’s bulldozers, and not by the hostilities.5 In fact, on this and several other occasions, Solidere had actively engaged in rewriting Beirut’s history to suit its own purposes.6 In short, the company – well connected to powerful figures in government and political circles7 – was attempting to create what Yael Zerubavel describes as a new master commemorative narrative of the city and nation, ‘a basic “story line” that is culturally constructed and provides the group members with a general notion of their shared past’.8 Solidere’s commemorative narrative, which underscores certain aspects of Beirut’s history, such as its maritime mercantilism, while omitting others, such as its Ottoman history, reproduces what Najib Hourani describes as an elite mythology of Lebanon as a ‘merchant republic’.9 Zerubavel notes that such commemorative narratives do not need to be historically or factually accurate, since ‘the power of collective memory does not lie in its accurate, systematic, or sophisticated mapping of the past, but in establishing basic images that articulate and reinforce a particular ideological stance’ – in this case, the neoliberal ideology of Solidere.10 The same Fairouz concert ends Hoda Barakat’s novel Harith alMiyah (The Tiller of Waters).11 In the final scene, the novel’s disorientated protagonist, Niqula, emerges from within the city’s destroyed centre, where he has lived since the beginning of the civil war, and makes his way through the now-unfamiliar downtown area towards the sea. As Niqula proceeds, instead of the familiar line on the horizon, he sees ‘a sea of empty chairs, arranged in lines that made up large squares, like block formations of infantry. In parallel lines,

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they all faced the shore.’12 They are there because there is a concert planned, a concert given by someone ‘bearing the likeness of the singer Fairouz’.13 The language of this passage is deliberately ambiguous, mirage-like; nothing is as it seems. A plastic sea has replaced the real one, and even the familiar image of the famous singer, the symbol of Lebanon and Lebanese nationalism, is a simulacrum, untrustworthy. Niqula sits down on a chair, among the many that remain empty, but the concert never starts, even as night falls. Despite the fanfare, and preparation for a major event, nothing happens, and no one comes. Niqula’s inability to participate in this collective act – his inability, in fact, to even perceive that it is taking place – emphasizes the disjunction between Solidere’s desire to monumentalize and artificially reinsert the space within a discourse that attempts to produce a clean break with the past, and the Lebanese individual, who cannot forget – and does not want to. In 1990s Lebanon, the debate over collective national identity frequently intersected with arguments over the future of the city centre. One such example, which both summarizes and encapsulates the intensity of the debate, follows, in an excerpt from Saree Makdisi’s 1997 article, ‘Laying Claim to Beirut’: Blank or not, the city center is a surface that will be inscribed in the coming years in ways that will help to determine the unfolding narrative of Lebanon’s national identity, which is now even more open to question. For it is in this highly contested space that various competing visions of that identity, as well as of Lebanon’s relationship to the region and to the rest of the Arab world, will be fought out. The battles this time will take the form of narratives written in space and time on the presently cleared-out blankness of the center of Beirut.14 Makdisi elegantly correlates national identity to a textual ability to inscribe narratives onto a specific place: the now-blank city centre. This quote simultaneously sketches out and underlines the momentum of this chapter: how Lebanese novelists in the 1990s participated in this narrative inscription, and therefore in the debate

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over the collective imagination. On one hand, I argue, these novelists struggle to find the appropriate commemorative language by which to remember the city. Furthermore, this multifaceted struggle is an essential component of a rising tide of countermemory, ‘essentially oppositional, [standing] in hostile and subversive relation to’ the master commemorative narrative.15 The struggle over the representation of downtown Beirut highlights its importance as a commemorative space, what Pierre Nora would describe as a lieu de me´moire.16 The mid-1990s novels of Hanan al-Shaykh, Rashid al-Daif and Hoda Barakat dramatize the relationship between citizenship and memory through writing about central Beirut, a place which had by that point, to quote Hashim Sarkis, become ‘overcoded with political and religious demarcations’.17 As I indicated in the preceding chapter, from the very beginning of the civil war in 1975, downtown Beirut was sealed off from the rest of the divided city and from the nation’s collective imagination as a site of everyday urban activity, becoming instead a symbol of the breakdown of society. Metaphors of Beirut’s and Lebanon’s death abound in the interdisciplinary discourse about the 1975– 90 civil war, which frequently singles out the downtown Beirut area as especially desolate, its destruction as particularly resonant.18 For example, Andre´ Bourgey describes the area as ‘inaccessible’, ‘completely circumscribed and excluded from the every day travels of Beirutis’.19 Another common description was of ‘no-man’s land’,20 such as in the following excerpt from Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation: Round the corner to our right was what we journalists like to refer to as ‘No Man’s Land’, into which no man had ventured for more than a year [. . .] what we saw was not a street in any real sense of the term. It was an avenue of crumbling, collapsed masonry.21 Fisk’s description strips the city centre of its urban qualities – the street ‘is not a street in any real sense of the term’, for example – and exacerbates the difference between a ‘real’ city and destroyed Beirut. Such thinking forces a complete break with Beirut’s past as an

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inhabited city; that past, Fisk’s writing seems to suggest, is gone, and everything must be re-imagined anew. To gauge the predominance of the cultural trope of Beirut’s death during the 1980s, one needs to look only as far as some radical feminist discourses that not only reproduce this trope but also elaborate on it by describing the destruction as a clean, epistemic break with a totalizing past. War’s Other Voices, by miriam cooke, is the paradigmatic work in the genre, and cooke’s term for the women she studies is almost-self explanatory: she calls these female writers ‘Beirut Decentrists’. Explaining that during wartime they ‘began to write about their particular experiences as women, and to recognize through articulation their previous oppression and marginalization’, cooke suggests that this led to them questioning ‘“the selfness of the “center”’, a process that, ‘intensified [. . .] became the first step in the deconstruction of a dominant discourse’.22 Thus cooke suggests that these women’s work, by being ‘decentrist’, resists this now-obsolete ‘centeredness’.23 As the reader makes their way through cooke’s argument, however, an elision of meaning arises at several junctures in her work between Beirut’s urban centre and patriarchal discourses. For example, for cooke, what joins these women writers is not only their subject matter but also their position: ‘voices in myriad forms [that] express similar themes – from Beirut but outside the expected, now dead, center [. . .]’24 Here, her deliberate ambiguity conflates the city space with patriarchal tradition.25 In her readings, cooke disregards the ‘outside’, particularly ‘the center’ completely, focusing instead on the domestic spaces and relationships that she associates with the female experience. In fact, her analysis is in several ways dependent upon this centre’s ‘death’, since it enables her to associate women’s writing with subaltern, once-marginalized resistance and the emergence of a previously stifled voice, and to create a distinction between masculine and feminine narratives of the Lebanese war, as I have shown in earlier chapters.26 cooke’s rhetorical use of the metaphor specifically points to the reductive consequences of decontextualization; after all, as much work has shown since, both men’s and women’s writing about the Lebanese conflict complicates cooke’s hermeneutic of gendered writing.27 More generally, it shows

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the pervasiveness of the urban death metaphor in all manner of discourses about Beirut and Lebanon. Indeed, recently, scholars have begun to critically interrogate the lexicon of the war. Samir Khalaf notes that the use and perpetuation of such metaphors, which at the very least were reductive and essentializing, were somewhat deliberate, and that ‘Lebanon was reduced in the global media to an ugly metaphor: a figure of speech that conjured up images of the grotesque and unspoken’.28 Khalaf seems to suggest that the city’s ‘death’ became shorthand for a number of tropes: barbarity, internecine violence, sectarianism and the vaguely threatening downfall of a once-cosmopolitan, vibrant city.29 Najib Hourani implicates academic discourse in this as well, and shows how academic accounts of the Lebanese conflict directly fed into the 1990s discussion over reconstruction: The association of violence, sectarianism and the chaos of war with the traditional, the rural and the poor – each often standing in for the other, all representing the pre-modern – had a profound influence upon the debates concerning the reconstruction of the city center.30 Unsurprisingly, images and descriptions of the city’s destruction were deliberately mobilized and disseminated by Solidere, the private company charged with the area’s reconstruction. For example, the Solidere publication Beirut Reborn, a coffee-table book filled with pictures and architectural diagrams of the projected city, describes the centre as an area ‘that had almost died while life went on all about it’, and writes that the challenge Solidere faced was ‘how to bring it back to life’.31 The language of revival gestures to Solidere’s constructed image as sole resuscitator of the morbid city, and posits the private company as a benevolent force, rather than as a profitmaking monopoly that had manoeuvred its way into sole ownership of a vast swathe of prized real estate.32 The tension between the privatization of urban space and the perceived public right to it was central to the debate about the future of Beirut and Lebanon during the 1990s. Frequently, this debate

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flared up over Solidere’s selective rewriting of urban history, and its changes to facts on the ground that would allow it to, in Saree Makdisi’s words, ‘claim to represent the past and the history and collective memory of the old Beirut souks in its own spatiality’.33 Academics, journalists and documentary- and feature-film-makers spoke out about what they saw as violations of cultural memory and collective history, which were often condensed into virulent arguments over the space of central Beirut.34 Given this, it is unsurprising that so much of Lebanon’s cultural and literary output in the mid-to-late 1990s addressed the intertwined relations between memory, commemoration and the city. In Al Jazeera’s hugely popular documentary series, Harb Lubnan, for example, the Lebanese flag is superimposed on a black-and-white image of Martyrs’ Square before the war. The documentary’s tagline is ‘so that history does not repeat itself’, and the tagline and credits work together to emphasize the link between urban space, collective memory and national identity.35 In each of the three novels discussed in this chapter – Hoda Barakat’s Tiller, Hanan al-Shaykh’s Beirut Blues and Rashid alDaif’s Dear Mr. Kawabata – the space of Beirut’s centre is a symbolic trigger for discussions of personal and collective memory and the role of the city – symbolized in these novels as the city centre – in the collective life of the nation.36

Commemorative Countermemories In one of the major texts on nationalism, Ernest Renan famously asserts that ‘forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality’.37 For Renan, as long as the different social components of any nation were unable to suppress their group memories for the sake of the whole, and also to forget traumatic events, then the nation could not survive. To this day, as if proving Renan right, many countries dealing with the legacy of civil conflict actively repress certain traumatic events; this is frequently attributed as a public good, a way of moving on past the collective trauma.38 In

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Lebanon, the state has played an active role in this repression, due to the fact that ‘those responsible for the war – for massacres, theft, war crimes, and displacement of civilians – became responsible for rebuilding the country’.39 As a result, Sune Haugbolle continues, ‘these people have had no great desire to shed further light on the past’, and have, in fact, actively promoted what he describes as an ‘infamous amnesia’.40 There is ample evidence that attempts to promote public amnesia have served the political interests of particular Lebanese stakeholders; however, these attempts have also met with considerable resistance.41 Haugbolle contends that, in fact, ‘the politics of remembering in postwar Lebanon emerged mainly through cultural production, by which various nonstate actors disputed the ethical, political and historical meaning of civil war’.42 While he notes that, in the absence of a hegemonic collective national memory, a ‘decentralization of memory’ occurred, in which ‘smaller narratives emerged’, Haugbolle nevertheless connects these disparate countermemories in a common concern with downtown Beirut: Silencing or at least downplaying the memory of the war was a conscious strategy in the reconstruction of downtown Beirut. For this reason, critics of state-sanctioned amnesia aimed much of their anger at the reconstruction project and the person of Rafiq al-Hariri. Because of downtown’s former symbolic and practical role as a mediating space for the Lebanese, the reconstruction process attained a symbolic meaning.43 Throughout this chapter, individual and collective memories of the downtown area confront and contest the present space of the city. In fact, the recurrent evocations of the site suggest that the visit to downtown Beirut itself became a commemorative ritual, through which groups ‘create, articulate, and negotiate their shared memories of particular events’.44 In postwar Lebanon’s complex environment, where no narrative dominated over others, a plethora of literary voices participated in the debate over downtown Beirut’s past and future. The question of memory is inextricable from this issue. The authors

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of the novels in this chapter all interrogate the relationships between individual and collective memory, and question certain processes of commemoration, while struggling with their roles, as writers, in producing collective memory. In Rashid al-Daif’s Kawabata, individual memory directly challenges certain collective acts of commemoration of the city’s downtown area. Al-Daif’s narrator, also named Rashid al-Daif, is a wounded leftist fighter relating his life to the dead Japanese Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata.45 Rashid’s most salient feature is his prodigal memory: he claims not to have forgotten a single detail of his life. Confidently, Rashid tells Kawabata that ‘my memory is a firm support for me, a support untouched by doubt’.46 Yet, despite his own uncanny ability to remember and his faith in his memories, Rashid is critical of certain practices of remembering.47 For example, he is critical of public or cultural discourses fashioned around nostalgia, asking, ‘Why is it that we, the ordinary people, or at least the ordinary elite, can only talk about the past with nostalgia? Why can’t we simply talk about it in a neutral way?’48 In the English translation of the novel, there is a rhetorical distinction drawn also between ‘memory’ – which is Rashid’s personal memory, accumulative and ineradicable – and ‘Memory’, which Rashid describes in the following manner: Then again, as you probably know, my fellow-Arabs’ lack of belief in me is not because they are convinced of the merits of forgetting, or of its necessity for the sake of progress. They are generally fed on memory, on Memory in fact – the Memory that we Arabs were once masters of the earth [. . .] My fellowArabs know the future well, because the image of it is already in their minds, it is the past as they like to see it, and as they would like it to be.49 Thus, this cultural memory only serves to reinforce a willfully nostalgic distortion that affects not only readings of the past, but also visions of the future. In the face of collective nostalgia and cultural fixation on one narrative of the past that is projected onto

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the future – recall that Solidere’s slogan for rebuilding Beirut was ‘Beirut: Ancient City for the Future’50 – Rashid insists upon the validity and the indelibility of his personal memory, the authority for him and the reader.51 Kawabata also critiques other, alternative commemorative practices and, much like earlier writers grappling with finding a language to describe the war, the novel struggles with the need to find a new lexicon of commemoration for downtown Beirut. In Kawabata, as in so many of the films and novels of the 1990s, visiting the area prompts the conflicting desires to share memories of the space with others, and the inability to do so. Rashid tries to articulate his dilemma: I wish I could speak to you at greater length about this square and the area around it, but I find myself extremely upset. Nor is this the first time that I find myself upset from speaking about this square [. . .] I have often tried and not been able to. I have often been asked and not been able to. And I always wonder about the reason! [. . .] What I am certain about is that something is upsetting me. It is not easy to explain.52 The English translation italicizes the inexpressive generality of what Rashid is trying to say. In fact, Elliott Colla describes how much of the fiction about the Lebanese war insists upon the ‘sublime inexpressiveness for the magnitude of violence and destruction’.53 In Kawabata, however, it is not the war that taxes Rashid’s abilities to articulate his memories, but it is the transformed space of Martyrs’ Square. By bringing attention to Rashid’s inability to express his feelings about the square, these feelings are put under pressure, and become themselves a statement of the tug between wanting to share, while also being unable to.54 After all, Rashid is telling us that he cannot speak about the space while he is speaking about it. The novel circumscribes and highlights the discursive, collective silence around the ruined centre by gesturing to Rashid’s inability to share, or speak about it. The character who cannot forget a single detail of the site and Lebanese contemporary history ironically cannot commemorate

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the space because something obstructs his ability to do so. This leaves the public space open to other commemorative discourses, not all of which are welcome. Kawabata highlights Rashid’s turmoil, his struggle between wanting to contribute his own personal narrative of Martyrs’ Square and his inability to do so, by contrasting it with other forms of collective commemorative practices. These forms of nostalgic commemorations are produced not only by Solidere, but also by the cultural elite. Elise Salem describes a ‘generally unspoken and insidious consequence of Lebanon’s wars: the capitalization of the tragedy by entrepreneurs. The numerous journalists’ accounts, artistic renditions, academic studies, and documentaries on Lebanon’s war are also saleable products inspired by Lebanon’s demise.’55 Writing from an observer’s perspective of this consumption, Rashid says, critically: I still feel extremely upset when Martyrs’ Square is being talked about. I don’t like it when a man tries to achieve greatness for himself too easily. Film-makers have taken shots there, photographers have taken pictures there, and journalists written articles about the place. Visitors pay visits, tourists travel there and there is now an improvised cafe´ at the feet of the statue of the martyrs in the middle of the square.56 Referring to both the above and the concerts that have taken place in Martyrs’ Square, Rashid tells Kawabata, ‘Reports of these events stirred in me a desire to disappear, I mean to melt away into nothingness, to become a thing forgotten’.57 The image of ultimate withdrawal – into nothingness – from participation in this public spectacle is striking. While disengaging from certain blatantly voyeuristic commemorative practices, Kawabata also simultaneously registers its uneasy complicity in them. For example, Rashid feels extremely guilty at acknowledging an aesthetic pleasure derived from the site of Beirut’s

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destroyed centre. When a French companion says ‘c’est beau, c’est poetique’, Rashid admonishes her for exoticizing the ruins, but then confesses to Kawabata that he agrees, that despite the fact that: I would now like the earth to swallow me up, Mr. Kawabata, as I write these words. C’est beau, c’est poe´tique! These words expressed exactly how I felt also!58 Rashid’s plight dramatizes the conundrum of representing the ruins, and the tug between aesthetic objectivity and subjective engagement with the site as a repository of cultural memory. Rashid’s guilt over participating in public acts of commemoration is echoed by Jawad, a writer and central character in Hanan al-Shaykh’s Beirut Blues. Jawad confesses to his girlfriend, Asmahan, that ‘I pick the bitter fruits of war and write in a Western language about the emotions which lie between my language and my conscience. The more successful I am, the more my conscience troubles me.’59 Al-Shaykh’s metaphor detaches commemorative language from subjective emotion, but also points to the struggle created by this almost impossible detachment. Together, these elements dramatize the writer’s rhetorical conundrum: how does one commemorate this public space in a manner that does not make one want to disengage from the collective? Moreover, it raises the related question: if the last generation of people to remember the area as it was before the war are reluctant to participate in the site’s commemoration, what will remain besides the commodification that repulses Rashid and Jawad as they self-loathingly participate in it? Hanan al-Shaykh’s Beirut Blues also dramatizes the challenges of retaining and sharing memories of downtown Beirut as a lived space, in light of its present reality. The novel is composed of a number of letters that its protagonist, Asmahan, writes to others; its longest letter is addressed ‘To my dear Beirut’. Asmahan and her lover, Jawad, enact the commemorative ritual of visiting the destroyed city centre.60 Standing at the site, Jawad, a Lebanese expatriate writer, is forced to adjust his lexical understanding of urban space. Prior to

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actually seeing the site, he referred to it as ‘downtown’; he remembers it as part of a bustling city, and repeated the word ‘downtown’ ‘constantly until he saw the ruins’.61 Faced with the new reality of the urban space, Jawad falls silent. Like Rashid, Asmahan and Jawad struggle not only with the incongruity of the city’s present form in relation to their memories of the past, but also with the problem of sharing these memories with others. In Beirut Blues, even as Jawad and Asmahan stand together looking over the ruins of Martyrs’ Square, each is lost in their own, private memories. For example, as Jawad reminisces about buying books with his father, Asmahan is thinking ‘of the Capitol Hotel and Omar Sharif’.62 Physically together, they are mentally separate as each relates to the demolished centre as a personal artefact of their own memory. Ann Marie Adams observes that the novel circumscribes ‘an intensely personal sense of “space” and of “nation”’, that is ‘moving beyond an essentialist notion of space as transparent which can and should be mimetically represented’ toward a refigured geography that not only addresses ‘the multiple and complex construction of subjectivity but also of space itself’.63 Adams suggests that such mapping is problematic for the ability to imagine a community; these memories are difficult to share, thus unable to function as collective narratives.64 But Adams’ point is undermined by the text itself, which emphasizes how the subject’s isolation is unavoidably penetrated by the Other, seemingly reinforcing Halbwachs’ notion that society plays an inevitable role in individual memory.65 As Asmahan and Jawad continue their journey around the ruined centre, Asmahan recounts, ‘Jawad is studying the roads again, no doubt trying to recognize them. His silence, punctuated by deep sighs, speaks clearly to me, his thoughts burn straight into my mind and interfere with my memories.’66 Thus, while the same sight/site carries different significations for each character, Jawad and Asmahan, there is no escaping the fact that the space engenders shared memories for them both. In other words, Beirut Blues seems to imply that there can be no isolated memories of a public space. The quote also emphasizes the role of the Other in rewriting an

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individual’s historical memory, and highlights the dynamic interplay between an individual’s and the group’s memory in the practice and articulation of collective commemoration. As in the other two novels, Hoda Barakat’s Tiller complicates the relationship between individual and collective memory, and the role that memory plays in commemoration. Additionally, however, Tiller articulates the process of formation of individual memory through the family and the wider social group. On one hand, the novel emphasizes the importance of the transmission of memory as the enabling device for a coherent sense of community, in which, ‘when the words of our grandfathers begin to be forgotten, the knots and threads in the weaving begin to come undone and the world ends in fragments, shapeless, a dust cloud in the nebula’.67 Yet, on the other hand, through a continuous play of dualities throughout the text, ‘between the real and the imaginary, past and present, life and death, illusion and reality, the everyday and luxury’ and between different kinds of historical narratives, Barakat complicates the relationship of the transmission of memory.68 The narrator of Barakat’s novel is a cloth trader, Niqula Mitri, who, through a series of events precipitated by the war, loses his home to squatters and winds up living in the middle of the ‘no-man’s-land’ of Beirut’s city centre, in his father’s old shop. The novel intertwines his lifestyle in the present, foraging for food and negotiating life with wild dogs, with his memories of his beloved servant-girl, Shamsa, and his family history. In Tiller, as in much postwar Lebanese fiction, memory – and indeed, identity – is intimately intertwined with the city. As the novel’s formal and thematic structures shift, so does the nature of Niqula’s relationship to the city. At the very outset of the novel, the two are welded together by ‘events’ that neither parent could have predicted.69 The war creates a vacuum, which in turn becomes a space for Niqula to thrive, away from ‘the land of the wars’ beyond it.70 Inside the abandoned space of downtown Beirut, Niqula finds his comfort and solace, which enables him – for the first time – to have a home separate from both his father and his mother; this, as he says, allows him to ‘live now as I always hoped to live’.71 Niqula’s life in

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this new space is simultaneously strange and familiar, nostalgic and generative; he orients himself in the newly changed city from memory, but also realizes that he must draw for himself ‘a new map of these sites that had changed so much, losing their original features’.72 As he delineates the boundaries of his city above ground, the violence forces him downwards, into Beirut’s catacombs. As he delves deeper into his family memory, Niqula also enters deeper into the bowels of ancient Beirut; the imagery of excavation and exploration serving to further bind the joint fates of the man and the city. Thus, the recipient of so much transmitted history becomes a creative agent, as passivity gives way to action and Niqula becomes the master of his own desires and imagination, finally allowed to come into his own, for at least a short while.73 In Tiller, the collective memory of the group overshadows and contains those of individuals. The novel articulates this dynamic chiefly through the binding figure of the relationship between Niqula and his parents. In How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton suggests that through the stories that are transmitted from one generation to the next, ‘images of the past and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained’, and in Tiller, Niqula receives this collected history from both parents.74 Not accidentally, his relationship to each parent resembles that of storyteller and audience. In this way, the novel creates a set of conceptual links between, on the one hand, memory, history and story-telling, and, on the other, (individual) artist and (collective) audience. Through this relationship, the narrative explores different techniques of remembering and retelling history, from family histories to more formalized ‘Histories’, while complicating this facile distinction.75 After all, as Maurice Halbwachs reminds us, family memories ‘not only reproduce [the group’s] history, but also define its nature and its qualities and weaknesses’.76 In addition, family memories are not only culturally significant because they situate the individual in relation to his or her family, but because they enable the family to situate itself vis-a`-vis society.77 In Barakat’s novel, competing historical narratives within the same family emphasize the social construction of human memory, and

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highlight the processes by which one commemorative narrative comes to dominate over others within the context of a family, but also within the framework of society. Niqula’s personal history is produced from the conflict between two competing forces, which Pierre Nora would describe as memory and history: his mother’s retelling of history as personal memory, and his father’s more analytic historiographies. For Nora, ‘memory accommodates only those facts that suit it’, like the ‘changeable’ stories told by Niqula’s mother.78 At first, Niqula resists his mother’s stories, but then he begins to accept them as historically valid: ‘Soon I began to listen to her stories in a different way,’ he writes, ‘questioning myself, skeptical of my own presuppositions [. . .] Who could say that her tales, as variable as they were now in her old age, were not for the most part true, that they did not record events that actually took place?’79 Niqula’s demand for absolute truth in history becomes less strident, and as he grows he realizes that there is a space for his mother’s stories. He becomes a more tolerant listener, not searching in them for truth necessarily, but able to tolerate her fictions – even enabling this process: ‘I helped her to create her fanciful roles, her changing narratives about herself and us, so that she could cross over into that world of the imagination peacefully and reside there, in the illusion of that world and its sweet lightness.’80 Yet, as it registers Niqula’s growing acceptance of his mother’s stories as a valid form of commemorative narrative, Tiller also seems to undermine them as building blocks for collective memory. Despite Niqula’s growing tolerance for his mother’s stories, he still distinguishes between the personal nature of her memories and the more social, collective memories of his patrilinear heritage. The mother’s tales are undermined by being the products of a troubled mind; as the novel progresses, we learn that the woman ‘goes into a state of delirium; she invents for herself lives and roles. Perhaps she is trying to escape this destiny that she appears to recognize.’81 Like Nora’s definition of memory as ‘a phenomenon of emotion and magic’, oblivious to all but the facts which suit it, the mother’s account is an inward-facing narrative of escape, a fantasy created by her need for fiction;82 but, to those on the outside (her audience, as it

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were), it is somewhat dangerous, out of control, something whose motivations can be understood, but which is socially and culturally insignificant. The patrilinear stories that Niqula learns from his father, however, link Niqula to his family and to Beirut, which features in all of these inter-generational tales. In an elaborate metaphor in which weaving cloth – recall that cloth trading is the family business – is compared with telling stories, we learn that ‘the weaver entrusted with the secret is a man’, and that this is ‘the secret of life and peace, a secret forever menaced by the victory of death and war’.83 Soon afterwards, the imagery of weaving becomes a metaphor for urban planning: ‘the techniques that go into cloth-making are in essence like the planning and construction of the city,’ Niqula tells Shamsa, in which human beings mark their spaces through cloth, and ‘the home grew by accumulation, its outer margins expanding’.84 Niqula’s family narrative emphasizes the link between city and collective memory, since what ties all these homes together is ‘the columnar memory of the grandfather, [which] expands the rings made by the homes of children and grandchildren, always held within the magnetic field of kinship and inheritance’.85 The metaphors connecting weaving, urban construction and story-telling all share an ordered, methodical quality, and compound the image that all three are essentially constructive and progressive forms, which build upon the past incrementally.86 Furthermore, by combining his family trade with urban history, Niqula’s family story locates its tellers and listeners firmly within the social group. As it continues to explore the subject of individual and collective memory formation, Tiller dramatizes the hold that a successful narrative has on its audience. Niqula’s attention is captivated by his father’s and grandfather’s stories; unlike his mother’s stories, in which he has to take an active, unwelcome, enabling role, he says, ‘the words of my father held me in their power’, leading him to passively ‘forget everything too’.87 The patrilinear story-telling tradition, powerful as it is, makes him into a passive listener, fully absorbed by the narrative, ‘bewitched by my memory of my paternal grandfather’s words’.88 What extends these stories’ relevance beyond the family

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unit is their power over others as well. For example, when Niqula tells Shamsa his father’s stories, she too physically succumbs to their power. She tells him, ‘the parts of my body relax, so I can forget them and so that I can train the alertness of my ears, my imagination, my understanding onto the thread of your long and lovely tale’.89 In fact, so powerful are these family histories that they displace official History: Niqula’s father’s stories are, according to him, ‘lessons [. . .] which took the place in my head of the lessons I learned in school’.90 For a while, then, it would appear that Tiller rejects female narrative modes and women’s histories in general in favour of the more social, nation-building Histories that men pass on to each other, and which serve a didactic function for the younger generation’s conception of itself and its place in the collective. This seems to be substantiated by the move that Niqula makes from the feminine surroundings of his mother’s home to the masculine environment of his father’s shop in the abandoned city centre, which is where he finds that he can ‘live in a state of happiness and ease’.91 But, just as this is a more complex move than first meets the eye – Niqula, after all, moves from a social environment into a completely solitary existence – Tiller does not allow the authority of the dominant narrative of patrilinear history to triumph. While Tiller teases out the complexity and power of master narratives such as the father’s and grandfather’s throughout, it ends with their complete disruption. As I have already indicated, one aspect of Niqula’s patrilinear family history places him and his family firmly within the collective history of downtown Beirut’s souk, or market-place. The other element of this narrative is its content: the father’s and grandfather’s stories are total narratives, which incorporate astrology, scientific information and historical fact in order to frame the history of Beirut as a ‘self-evident rhythm’ of glorious excess and then fantastic collapse.92 In short, the Mitris’ family stories create a mythology that presents the city’s history as a cycle of destruction and reconstruction, gesturing to one of the most common myths of the city – that of the phoenix rising from the ashes. As the novel progresses, it seemingly underscores the validity and power of this family mythology through Niqula’s faith in it.

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In a completely unexpected, violent rupture, the novel ultimately destabilizes the authority of this patrilinear narrative, thereby calling into question all possible forms of collective memory formation. As the novel’s form begins to abruptly unravel, we find out that Niqula is dead, and the unnaturalness of his death is placed in stark contrast to the ‘natural’ past cycles of life, death and rebirth in the city that the father’s stories insist upon. Barakat’s novel ends with the complete rupture of the cyclical, transmitted, shared (national) history and with the suggestion that this current phase calls for a new form of collective memory. The stories of the grandfather and father fail, because in this present context, they do not apply. They are: simply a matter of fine rhetoric shaped into the metaphorical vessel of wisdom sayings that the generations inherit and pass on without finding their own truth in them [. . .] it was futile to try to benefit from the lessons of the grandfathers. The advice was too remote for the coming days, and we draw on the lessons of experience only when it is too late.93 In present-day Beirut, Tiller implies, all historical memory is both obsolete and redundant. What finally undermines Niqula’s faith in history and memory is not forgetfulness – ‘I did not give in to forgetfulness, Papa’, he insists – but rather the changing nature of the city. Killed by Israeli soldiers, he wakes up in 1994.94 An out-of-body experience after his death awakes him, but he is lost in a place with ‘Nothing. No rock, no vegetation, no beast pawing at the ground.’95 He keeps moving in this ‘smooth desert without the sand’, looking for a landmark, insisting that from the sea ‘I will try to see where I am, pinpoint my location. And from there I will figure out the direction the shop lies in, or I’ll see some landmark, something to guide me, so I can reorient myself to go on.’96 He never does: the landscape has changed so drastically since the Israeli invasion that, in Soubhi Boustani’s words, Niqula loses all his reference points.97 For Dina Amin, this is the moment when all hope shatters for Niqula, whom she describes as

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initially ‘representing hope in the midst of a dying metropolis’.98 However, Amin writes that, by the end of the novel: As familiar spaces in his city are altered beyond recognition, their distorted forms cancel out his previous knowledge of physical space, and with the loss of his storytelling and of Shamsa, the last vestiges of his self-knowledge/recognition also dissipate.99 Crucially, though, it is not the war that disorients Niqula, but the postwar landscape of the city. Soubhi Boustani associates Niqula’s disorientation not only to the destruction of his past, but also with an anxiety about the future: ‘all the memory of a city reconstituted by the hero is suddenly irretrievably effaced forever. The future is completely unknown, and we have no idea what future Beirut will look like.’100 In her exploration of the dynamic processes involved in collective commemorations, Yael Zerubavel argues that historical transitions produce what she describes as ‘turning points’, moments ‘that changed the course of the group’s historical development and hence are commemorated in great emphasis and elaboration’.101 Yet, Zerubavel also posits that it is precisely during these liminal historical moments that countermemories emerge to contest previously unchallenged hegemonic narratives. Unsurprisingly then, the end of the Lebanese civil war and new phase of reconstruction precipitated many debates about memory and commemoration, each vying to impose its own narrative viewpoint upon the situation, producing a number of competing histories of the community. In Tiller, Solidere’s erasure of Beirut’s downtown, and its consequences for both individual and collective memory, symbolizes one such turning point. Like Rashid, and Jawad and Asmahan, Niqula’s historical and geographical markers are effaced by the city’s new reality. For Lebanese novelists in the 1990s, this debate was often framed in a series of questions about the forms such commemoration should or should not take, and a struggle between wanting to participate in this commemoration and an ambiguity towards some

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of its more public, commodified aspects. They engaged in it by attempting to find a new commemorative language that incorporates the personal, the collective and the urban.

The Language of (Collective) Commemoration When the object of commemoration is a site of loss – whether by defeat, death, or destruction – rather than victory, the language of commemoration tends towards the melancholic. Several critics pick up on this trend in Lebanese fiction. For example, Soubhi Boustani describes the post-1990s generation as ‘impotently participating in the disappearance of a capital’, while miriam cooke and Elliott Colla both write about the melancholy of Lebanese postwar fiction.102 And, in several ways, postwar Lebanese fiction seems to be melancholic. After all, as Freud defines it, melancholia, like mourning, is ‘the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country’, and, as I have already shown, these novels and their characters are reacting to the perceived loss of their city.103 Yet what separates one from the other is that the melancholic struggles with, and becomes absorbed by, the loss differently from the mourner. Turning inwards, ‘he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished’.104 In Kawabata, for example, Rashid seems to critique but also participate in a collective cultural, self-recriminatory melancholy: Why ‘can we only talk about the past with nostalgia?’ he asks, while wishing for cultural objectivity.105 While this is a compelling avenue for further research, it is unclear to me whether, so soon after the end of the civil war and the perceived collective loss of the city, one can successfully separate mourning from melancholy in Lebanese postwar fiction. After all, according to Freud, one of the greatest distinctions between the two is that the mourner can eventually recover and move on, whereas the melancholic is unable to. In short, the mourning process takes time, and without further investigation it is difficult to tell whether these late 1990s novels are working through the mourning process, or are in fact the artefacts of a pathologically melancholic generation.

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A more compelling framework for understanding the language of commemoration in these postwar novels can be found in the much older, classical Arabic poetic tradition.106 Again, both cooke and Colla gesture to this in their work on postwar Lebanese photography and film, respectively, although cooke does so indirectly, describing how these ‘poets, filmmakers and photographers are weeping at the traces’ of lost Beirut.107 In Standing by the Ruins, Ken Seigneurie takes this connection a step further, arguing that postwar Lebanese literature and cinema ‘couples the elegiac mood of the ancient topos [of standing by the ruins] to a contemporary political and moral problem’.108 Despite this, Seigneurie does not build on this or parse out the connections between this elegiac form and what he terms the ‘elegiac humanism’ of Lebanese literature; moreover, for Seigneurie this is a temporal rather than a spatial issue, one in which ‘the memory of the prewar past stands in contrast to the debased wartime present and the implausible utopic future’.109 While this assertion is certainly true, I believe that paying more careful attention to the ways in which this classical Arabic topos is incorporated into contemporary literature, and used to interrogate spatial practices and urban memory, can contribute to a deeper understanding of these urban counternarratives. In his article on postwar filmmaker Jalal Toufic, Elliott Colla directly correlates the postwar representation of loss to its classical Arabic counterpart, arguing that in this particular case, the latter is a more useful interpretative framework than a traditionally Western one that focuses on a ‘sublime inexpressiveness’ of loss, because it simultaneously gestures to the difficulty of representing what has been lost while also acknowledging a ‘generative notion of loss in representation’.110 Writing of Lebanese filmmaker Toufic specifically, Colla says: The problems addressed in his writing resonate with those that have been central to so many artists within the traditions of Arabic literature, especially poets: poets, whose lamentation of loss recognized the fragility of imaginative resurrections; and poets who, in recognizing the failure of those resurrections [. . .]

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allowed for loss itself to be registered as an image [. . .] Likewise the task of poetry for them was to make present that which is absent, a task which, even in the failing, somehow succeeds.111 To understand how Lebanese postwar novels develop this classical tradition in their representation of the city, I must digress to a brief summary of this poetic tradition. The predominant form of Arabic poetry for over 1,000 years has been the qasida, a ‘metered poem in monorhyme, usually of fifteen to eighty lines’, which traditionally incorporates three thematic units: the nasib, the rahil and the fakhr.112 Of the three main components of a traditional qasida, the one that is most relevant in this context is the nasib, which usually begins the poem. In the nasib, the poet and his travel companions stand at a distance from an abandoned encampment and the poet invites his companions to share in his commemoration of those who lived there, especially his nowdeparted beloved.113 Significantly for this chapter, Susan Stetkevych connects the nasib’s ritualized performance of commemoration with the poet’s separation from society, and in particular with his distance from ‘his past as lived in these [now-abandoned] dwellings’.114 As noted above, the novels connect the ruined city space with their past everyday lives by gesturing to the latter’s irretrievability. They also underscore their characters’ disdain for certain other forms of social, public commemoration. For example, in Tiller, before physically separating himself from ‘the land of the wars’ by moving into the city centre, Niqula distances himself from the other members of society by refusing to participate in their ritualistic consumption of the ruins, and their willingness to forget the city centre’s recent past:115 When the battles had stopped after what they came to call the Two-Year War, I had not gone to walk around the city center as so many others had. I had not strolled through the city as so many folk had, dressing their children in Sunday best, making sandwiches and packing cold drinks and roasted seeds, and going off to sightsee in the silent wreckage that so shortly

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before had been a scene of unceasing tumult and unbearable crowds. I found them appalling.116 Niqula’s solution is to separate himself from these collective rituals by isolating himself in his city centre and his memories. Poet and literary critic Adonis argues that the nasib also depends on a transition from the personal into the collective sphere of commemoration.117 In his description of the archetypal qasida, the mu‘allaqa of Umru’ al-Qays, Adonis writes: Umru’ al-Qays announces his presence by talking of an absence; i.e., through weeping-memory. And the weeping happens upon a stage where he asks his friends to share in his sorrow. And while the poem ostensibly evokes only two people, it embraces all who empathize with the poet in his experience, and all who have experienced something similar.118 As Adonis suggests, the classical tradition of interpellating the poet’s companions is a gesture of transition from the personal to the public; from a private memory to a shared, common one. In all these novels, a similar gesture is made, in which personal memory is shared, both with a textual other and – by extension – with a greater audience. In some cases, this happens out of necessity, such as in Barakat’s Tiller, where a collective effort goes into remembering the specific details of downtown Beirut’s landscape, and the novel’s acknowledgements (in the front of the Arabic version, the back of the English) thank ‘all of the friends in Paris and Beirut for their help in recalling places that no longer exist’ – which gestures to the collective, yet telescopic act of memorialization at stake for Barakat and writers of her generation. In Kawabata, Rashid brings Kawabata into his reminisces about Lebanon, then Martyrs’ Square, by addressing him directly, at various times throughout his evocation of central Beirut, as ‘Mr. Kawabata’ and ‘you’. Rashid shares his memories of Lebanon, Beirut and the war with Kawabata, who, like Beirut is absent, yet brought into presence by Rashid’s speech act. Likewise, in Beirut Blues, Asmahan’s visits to Martyrs’ Square are shared with Jawad, Hayat and another friend, the

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press photographer Simon.119 Moreover, the structure of al-Shaykh’s novel, as a series of letters to addressees, enacts the same process of reaching out textually to an outside other. Paul Connerton asserts that, often, the formation of collective social memory is simply ‘communication between individuals’, and the novels reduce this to the most basic relationship between a story-teller and his or her companion.120 The poet and his companions are at a distance in both time and space from the site; it can only be accessed again through the sharing of memories. In turn, these shared memories produce a new countermemory of the city’s history. As I have already shown, these commemorative processes are not simple; they are impeded not only by conflicted emotions, but also by the challenge of describing a completely transformed space. Consequently, these writers not only gesture to the classical tradition, they rewrite its paradigms for a contemporary city. If the language of the old nasib ‘is the language of what is tangible, the language of things. It is the language of the present, direct,’ the language of the new nasib, the prose nasib of postwar Beirut, is fantastical and figurative.121 In Beirut Blues, for example: Silence hung over the long grass and monstrous plants, which would have looked less strange had they been trees with thick roots, growing individually, but they were springing out of the floors and walls and up through the roofs of the melancholy shops and offices. Jawad closes his eyes, wanting to believe that things are as they were and that he’s merely gone deaf or has distorted vision. Images buried in the convolutions of his mind rise to the surface. The top floor of the building like an elephant lying on its side used to house an eye clinic.122 The improbable jungle imagery of wounded animals continues in another passage shortly following this one, in which ‘the collapsing buildings’ are ‘like spotted leopards crashing to the ground’.123 The imagery of these paragraphs transforms urban destruction into primordial jungle; ruined architecture is compared to wounded

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animals.124 Tiller also records the change between the city’s past and its present by using the imagery of overgrown nature overtaking and subsequently defamiliarizing the city landscape. Once Niqula has crossed over into the city, he enters a world where nature has taken root. He survives because of this newly feral landscape, which sustains him: I came upon the fruit of half a field of Indian figs in front of the Restaurant Ajami [. . .] If it had not been for the apricot tree in the Souq Bazarkan and the wild blackberry bushes at the Municipal Building whose fruits had grown to the size of the mulberries at the Mosque of Amin, the constipation would have poisoned my blood and finished me off.125 Together, these two novels reinforce the image that Beirut’s centre is no longer comprehensible as a part of its normal environment. Not only has nature overtaken culture, as in the classical tradition, it has completely transmogrified it, turning the city’s landscape into the landscape of a distant, unfamiliar environment. In the classical nasib, the ruins also symbolize ‘an intractable problem of culture, namely the interdependence of memory and forgetfulness, writing and erasing’.126 As we have already seen, in these novels, the ruins – temporary as they may be – prompt meditations on the role of the writer in commemorating this loss. However, the unnatural environment also challenges representation. In Beirut Blues, the ruins produce ‘strange colors for which people had no names, as they stood watching overwhelmed by the spectacle of the dismemberment of what had constituted everyday life’.127 Representation is completely shattered by the geographical reality of the new urban landscape and the postwar nature of Beirut, whose ruined landscape generates so much conflicted emotion and contested commemorations. It is to this ruined urban landscape that I now turn.

The Landscape of Commemoration In Realms of Memory, French historian Pierre Nora suggests that as memory becomes threatened, attachment to place increases. ‘Places,’

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he writes, ‘become important even as the vast funds of memories among which we used to live on terms of intimacy are depleted, only to be replaced by a reconstructed history.’128 In Lebanon, a country where history is literally being reconstructed onto the urban space, particular attention must be paid to cultural and literary representations of this space. After all, as Aldo Rossi observes, ‘the history of the city is always inseparable from its geography; without both we cannot understand [. . .] the physical sign of this “human thing”’.129 In the previous section, I referred to Beirut’s downtown area as a ‘ruined landscape’, and indeed, in some ways, the novels represent it as a site where the everyday has been ruptured and the urban dislodged by an unnatural nature. All these novels resist, challenge and undermine hegemonic histories of the area through the oppositional gesture of resisting dominant practices of commemoration and presenting their own memories, structured around the commemorative ritual of standing at the traces of the city centre. Nevertheless, they understand the cityscape and the urban space in different ways, with different implications for the discourse of urban memory in Lebanon. Whereas some, like Beirut Blues, mourn Beirut at a distance – ‘a stage’, as Adonis would describe it – inaccessible linguistically and physically, jarring in its unfamiliarity and from which they feel estranged due to inappropriate acts of public commemoration, others, such as Tiller, enter right into the heart of central Beirut. In Beirut Blues, the signs of the urban are necessarily the signs of everyday life; their absence from contemporary Beirut only undermines the city’s distance from its own past and from the past of its inhabitants. As they walk through the ruins, Jawad and Asmahan recall medical clinics and booksellers, dry-cleaners, bars and restaurants – an inventory of what al-Shaykh describes as ‘what had constituted everyday life’, which is evoked by the ‘temporary return’ of the signs of everyday life, including ‘hurrying pedestrians, blaring horns, and distinctive smells of coffee, grilled meat, garlic’.130 In fact, Ann Marie Adams directly links Asmahan’s sense of place to her personal past, to ‘memories of her grandparents, in remembrances of her friends and lovers, as well as in her experiences

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of the present and hopes for the future’.131 As Asmahan says, ‘It’s impossible not to have vivid memories of the past here’.132 In Beirut Blues’ present, however, the ruined landscape can only be apprehended from a distance, just as it is in a classical nasib. For example, when Asmahan first sees the ruins, it is from a rooftop: From the roof of the Azariyya building I saw the buildings collapsing like dominoes. The ones that resisted seemed to be waiting their turn, observing the splendid collapse of those around them; it was as if they preserved within them the memory of the past [. . .] An advertisement for a film surviving as a reminder of the city in the days when it used to swallow lights and spit them out like a fire-breathing dragon. The remains of a neon arrow pointing to Aazar coffee.133 The quote emphasizes the notion of surveying the area from afar both physically – from a height – and temporally. In other words, gazing down at the ruined landscape, Asmahan becomes like Michel de Certeau’s visitor to the World Trade Center, one whose ‘elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance.’134 Asmahan’s physical distance from the ruins creates a totalizing vision, one in which all that can be seen in the present are the ruins, which are understood in relation to the remains and traces of the bright, effervescent, transformative everyday of the past. Even when she comes down to street level, Asmahan still sees the present-day city in relation to its past, as is the case when she finds herself near her childhood home: ‘I have to strain to see Shari‘ Mohammad al-Hout, where I was born. It branches off Shari‘ al-Sabaq, where we are now. I look at it, and at Shari‘ Hiroshima, and see an image of myself walking along the sidewalk where the restaurant was, following my father.’135 The imagery of straining suggests that, even at ground level, physically seeing the street is difficult; and, immediately upon looking at it, all Asmahan can remember are childhood memories, which further exaggerates the distance between past and present. Life in Asmahan’s Beirut, like the landscape of Adonis’ poets, is nothing but ‘absence and memory’.136

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Tiller, in contrast, is marked by the action of walking, which Niqula does repetitively, circumscribing and claiming his space within the city. In Barakat’s work especially, the space of Beirut’s centre can be seen to embody a form of Foucauldian heterotopia, those spaces that are: [S]omething like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.137 Niqula’s Beirut is ‘outside of all places’ – distinct from the ‘land of the war’ outside; through its representation of central Beirut as not only habitable, but welcoming and sustaining, Tiller inverts the paradigm that insists upon seeing the ruins as ruins – distant, impenetrable, alien. Instead, the streets and neighbourhoods are reappropriated, and reinserted into an – albeit unusual – everyday life. Niqula’s first act of appropriation is an act of re-orientation that is also a commemorative cartography of the centre’s former landscape. When Niqula finds himself alone in his father’s shop in the heart of downtown Beirut after having been evicted from his own home by a squatter family, he begins to wander around the city centre: ‘standing in front of the chasms that had once been shops in Souq Tawile. It was not an easy matter to recollect their names or owners – even for me, who had grown up there.’138 The latter phrase is repeated more than once in the text; Niqula emphasizes that this is the city and place where he was raised, and that even he has trouble recognizing it now – at several points in the novel, for example, he gets lost, confused by the absence of any familiar landmarks. Slowly, however, Niqula begins to reconstitute his cartography of Beirut’s central district, by walking around in the city centre, from one site to the other. In the novel, there are not only references to these walks, but they are

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mapped out in painstaking detail. For example, ‘from Rue Allenby I will turn into Rue Abdallah Beyhum, not into the avenue where the City Hall sits, as I did last time’, and, ‘This evening, my route will take me by the facade of the Restaurant Ajami. I’ll walk down Rue Khan Fakhri Bek as far as the Majidiye Mosque, or south to the Samatiye cemetery’ and, ‘I took my departure from Souq Ayas, going out to Rue Allenby and then to Rue Weygand and on to the high end of Avenue Foch. I passed in front of the shawarma shops near the establishment of Theophile Khoury [. . .] I pressed on until I reached the Rivoli.’139 A verbal map of central Beirut is reconstructed on the pages of the novel, a network of roads, directions and alleys that archives these street names as well as reminding readers of the existence of these places. In his wanderings around the city, Niqula thus creates what Michel de Certeau described as ‘pedestrian speech acts’, which involve the ‘appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian’.140 Alone in the centre, Niqula begins to imagine the entire area as his: ‘I am its only sovereign. I preside over all that is above earth and what lies beneath the surface.’141 As the novel progresses and his (possibly imagined) struggle with the wild dogs begins, Niqula literally marks his territory by urinating every few steps, explaining that he is trying to reach ‘some sort of accord, a possible symbolic code by which we could begin our coexistence peacefully’.142 Following de Certeau’s idea that topographical acts are discursive, then the novel’s insistence on mapping out the streets of the city does more than set the scene for Barakat to create a realistic background for the fate of her character and the city, as Soubhi Boustani suggests. After all, de Certeau insists that as pedestrians walk across the city, their walking becomes an enunciative space, in which the relationships between different positions are drawn.143 As Niqula wanders about the city, he not only recalls the landmarks of street names but also highlights the shopkeepers’ and tradesmen who occupied these stores: I convinced myself to take a serious walk to the further end of the Place des Martyrs, as far as the Cafe´ Parisiana and, opposite,

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the shop of Qaysar Amir, king of fireworks [. . .] Then I made a turn at Zayn, the fresh juice seller [. . .] I passed in front of the Cafe´ Laronda, then the theater of Shushu the comedian, and went on to Gaumont Palace, the famous cinema I had not yet entered.144 Niqula’s remembered cartography of the city is also a cartography of the small businesses and entertainment venues that had made up the area, a nod to the city’s past as a mercantile centre. In fact, as has already been pointed out, one of Niqula’s first acts when he finds himself in the city centre is to stand in front of the ruined shops trying to remember their names and owners. Crucially, these novels do not display any nostalgia for a precapitalist era, which has sometimes been confused with the fact that they do not display any nostalgia at all.145 As I pointed out earlier, these works operate outside the urban/rural binary of earlier Lebanese novels. Their referential space is the city itself – even when the village is mentioned, as it is in Beirut Blues and Kawabata, it is a place that the protagonists have fled from, and reject. These novels are therefore not nostalgic for a pre-capitalist utopia, the small farming village of earlier Lebanese fiction, so much as for a small, mercantile capitalism in which shopkeepers helped each other, as did Niqula’s father and his neighbour, Hajj Abu Abd al-Karim.146 Niqula’s commemoration of the shops that used to line Beirut’s streets is a more detailed version of Rashid’s list of ‘markets, banks, cinemas, popular theatres, hotels and red-light district, and its bus stations and taxi ranks served by vehicles from every part of [the country]’ that characterized the ‘heart of Lebanon’.147 Moreover, during a period when these same owners and shopkeepers were being forced to sell by Solidere, this textual reminder of their history and location in the heart of the capital reinforces the novel’s critique of the present.148 Thus, while Boustani suggests that Barakat’s use of the fantastic is an instrument that enables her to express what otherwise cannot be spoken – that it is, in other words, her way of placing the present under erasure – I would argue that in her realist literary reconstruction as well, a critique of the present through the evocation of the past emerges.149

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Although at first Niqula’s arrangement is idealized as the best possible outcome of his situation, as the novel progresses, his contentment is destabilized. At the outset of the novel, Niqula is portrayed as living a Robinson Crusoe-like existence: he gathers food and water from different parts of the souk, makes blankets from the cloths he finds in his shop basement, and begins to scavenge for useful objects on his daily walks. He even begins to stake a topographical claim on the city; for example, he decides that ‘I will give new names to streets and markets that I did not recognize. In my head I would draw a new map of these sites that had changed so much, losing their original features.’150 Yet, while initially happily at a distance from the ‘land of the wars’, as the novel progresses, Niqula’s idyllic existence – and sanity – begins to disintegrate, mostly due to the encroachment of other creatures onto his space.151 He begins to get lost frequently, despite being able to remember the street names and the directions in which he wants to go. He becomes more anxious, wary of the dogs, doing his best to avoid them and to protect himself from them. Most relevantly, he begins to retreat deeper into the catacombs of the city and into his memory, and in particular to an interlocking series of narratives, in which he remembers how he shared his father’s – and grandfather’s – stories with Shamsa. Ultimately, the retreat inwards into personal history proves to be destabilizing for both Niqula’s character and the novel itself. As I have already mentioned, Tiller ends with the erasure of Niqula’s spatial memories of the city, and the loss of his sense of direction, in a place that is described as barren and empty, as a desert, with ‘Nothing. No rock, no vegetation, no beast pawing at the ground,’ in stark contrast with the wartime space that had been fertile enough to provide him with both sustenance and rich fodder for his reminiscences.152 At the Fairouz concert, the signs of the assembly – which Henri Lefe`bvre directly associates with urban life153 – are all there: the seats have been arranged, the stage has been set; however, a crucial element is absent: the crowd, the people who will turn empty, prepared space into an urban space. In a similar moment in Beirut Blues, Asmahan is in a club, where she remarks, ‘the people make a city, and these were strangers. Although they

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filled the room, I could only see empty space.’154 The imagery of the barren desert also appears in earlier critiques of the construction practices of Solidere in the city centre, such as Jad Tabet’s complaint that ‘there is nothing left of the plenty of the center. There is nothing but emptiness, punctuated by sparse islands. It is a desert, where a few preserved monuments float.’155 Recently, Aseel Sawalha has shown how the category of ‘emptiness’ defies Solidere’s attempts to represent the city centre as a vibrant community.156 Crucial to this defiance is the assertion that the opposition between former abundance and current scarcity is not between the pre-war and postwar city centre, but between the pre-1990 city, war-torn as it was, and the post-reconstruction city centre. These countermemories present this reconstructed city as a non-city, as an empty site lacking all the elements that would make it a true urban space. Earlier, I suggested that Beirut’s centre in Tiller is a heterotopic site, in the Foucauldian understanding of the term: an alternative site – paradoxically at the heart of the city, not at the peripheries like the mental hospitals and cemeteries that Foucault speaks of – through which the novel contests the postwar appropriation of space by private capital. The ambiguous ending of the novel, however, gestures to one of the critiques of Foucault, made by David Harvey in his Spaces of Hope. While acknowledging that Foucault’s notion of heterotopia is attractive, Harvey argues that it is based on the presumption that all sites of ‘Otherness’ are attractive, and he reminds the reader that concentration camps, factories, shopping centres and barracks ‘are all sites of alternative ways of doing things and therefore in some sense “heterotopic”’; yet none of these spaces can honestly be perceived as a site of resistance to official discourses of power.157 The ruined city centre in Tiller is definitely a heterotopic space, in which the individual’s past and memory of the city centre as a site for everyday life defies its present appropriation and use as a site of private urban planning and controlled monumentality. However, Niqula’s social isolation, descent into madness and subsequent unreliability as the custodian of the city, and his inability to engage in any of the public life of the reconstructed city, also push at the limits of Foucault’s optimistic conception of these sites. The new city

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is no longer a place for those with long memories, as Niqula and his father have, and there is something artificial in the ‘plastic sea’ of those who have forgotten too easily, yet Niqula can do nothing about either outcome. Tiller registers Niqula’s resignation towards the appropriation of Beirut’s past, and its regurgitation as simulacrum. Sitting alone on the chairs, facing the sea, for the final time, Niqula asks, ‘Have I not spent my entire life tilling the water?’, then connects his story to his history for one last time. ‘Isn’t that what we always did, father?,’ he asks.158 On that rhetorical question, which frames the uncertainty and hesitation of Niqula towards his present and the future of the city that he was so connected to, the novel ends.

The Right to the City For Aldo Rossi, ruined cityscapes evoke the inevitable dynamics of urban change, but also ‘the interrupted destiny of the individual, of his often sad and difficult participation in the destiny of the collective’.159 In these post-war Lebanese novels, characters resist some forms of collective being in public space while simultaneously yearning for others, as they try to find the balance between what to forget and what to remember. For example, Kawabata’s Rashid, who is incapable of expressing his thoughts about Beirut’s city centre in the present, proudly remembers its past: We called our capital’s main square Martyrs’ Square by official decree, but it was popularly known as ‘Downtown’ or ‘Burj Square’. Before the war it was the heart of the capital, with its markets, banks, cinemas, popular theatres, hotels and red-light district, and its bus stations and taxi ranks served by vehicles from every part of Lebanon. It was the heart of Lebanon.160 This passage from Kawabata establishes agency and involvement not only on the popular level, but also on the political – ‘we’ named the place ‘by official decree’. The passage evokes meeting-places and public spaces, the signs of assembly and symbols of urban life. In contrast, the language of the present in these novels, as I have pointed

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out, frequently utilizes the imagery of emptiness, of desert-like barrenness or jungle-like threat, to highlight the unreality of this urban space and the dislocated, disoriented and disenfranchised feelings of its inhabitants. As in the classical Arabic tradition, the ruins of Beirut’s centre – temporary though they may be – serve ‘as figures of memory, writing, and the possibility of culture’, thereby prompting alternative memories of the city space that oppose and resist Solidere’s new facts on the ground.161

CHAPTER 4 TRACING BEIRUT IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORICAL NOVELS: POSTMEMORY AND THE URBAN IMAGINARY IN RABEE JABER AND ALEXANDRE NAJJAR

In the preceding chapter, I showed how, for a generation of writers in the 1990s, Beirut’s destroyed centre became a site of commemorative countermemories that contested development company Solidere’s attempts to rewrite urban history. Novels written in the immediate aftermath of the civil war – like Beirut Blues, The Tiller of Waters and Dear Mr. Kawabata – attempted to come to grips with the changing urban landscape. Frequently, they invoked a remembered, personal, everyday geography of the city centre, in which the ruined landscape left behind by the war functioned as the enabling device for such mediated memories. By the early 2000s, central Beirut’s landscape had changed dramatically from its condition in the previous decade. Although slower than initially anticipated, Solidere’s development had picked up, and the city centre was less devastated than it had been a decade earlier.1 But, as critics like Saree Makdisi bemoaned, reconstruction had come with a hefty price, such that ‘lost in the

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development of central Beirut is a sense of history’.2 For Makdisi and others, this ‘authentic’ sense of history had been replaced by Solidere’s re-imagined history, which was seen as ‘an attempt to short-circuit the historical experience and the memory of the war itself’.3 As I have already discussed, the creation of a collective narrative is predicated on the selective rewriting of history; in Lebanon, Solidere’s narrative rewrote Beirut’s past to suit its purposes. Yael Zerubavel explains that: The construction of the master commemorative narrative exposes the dynamics of remembering and forgetting that underlie the construction of any commemorative narrative: by focusing attention on certain aspects of the past, it necessarily covers up others that are deemed irrelevant or disruptive to the flow of the narrative and ideological message.4 Solidere’s coffee-table publication, Beirut Reborn, often places the city within an almost utterly decontextualized, dehistoricized context. In a seven-page chapter on history, unironically titled ‘A Rich History’, only one page is assigned to the period 1850– 1975 (and this section is mis-labelled ‘The Last 100 Years’). The four centuries of Ottoman rule are hardly mentioned; there is no account of the 1860 war, which had played a major role in expanding and mixing the urban population of Beirut.5 In the same small section, the book’s authors state that ‘the first modern efforts to organize Beirut along civic lines, including policing, hygiene and quarantine laws, were also implemented in the 19th century, during the long reign of Bachir II (1789– 1840)’. This deliberately rewrites historical fact as nationalist myth, in order to attribute urban agency – in a nod to Lebanese mountain nationalism – to the symbolic ruler of Mount Lebanon, whose political power hardly extended beyond the mountain let alone reached a city that was not even a part of his dominion at the time.6 Moreover, in a gesture that is almost transparently an exculpatory nod to the contemporary practices in the area, Beirut Reborn triumphantly compares French Mandate-era ‘clearing of the medieval city fabric’ to Haussmann’s urban redesign of Paris.7 Finally, the

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recent history of post-Mandate Lebanon (1943– 75) gets one paragraph in the book’s history section.8 Solidere’s deliberate erasure of Beirut’s Ottoman history and the latter’s urban legacy is more than just a denial of historical complexity, or a reformulation of history as nationalist myth. It is also an attempt to wipe from the collective memory the agency of Beirut’s nineteenth-century inhabitants in – basically – transforming the city from a small town into a thriving provincial capital. Significantly, historian Jens Hanssen attributes Beirut’s ascendency as a premier port-city in the nineteenth century to ‘the acute sense of political geography of its intermediary bourgeoisie’. This class was able to avert ‘wholesale surrender to international capital, and by and large, managed to twist capitalist penetration to enhance their own vision for the city’, through a united effort by ‘Ottoman governors, the municipality and local merchants’.9 Since what Solidere had done effectively constituted a unilateral ‘surrender to international capital’, it follows that its narrative would prefer to forget this moment in Beirut’s past. As Zerubavel shows, ‘remembering and forgetting are thus closely interlinked in the construction of collective memory’; interestingly, then, as Solidere strove to efface memories of the nineteenth century from the urban fabric and collective memory, a new generation of Lebanese writers began to write about this era.10 The early 2000s saw a rise in historical novels set in nineteenth-century Beirut, such as the two works discussed in this chapter: Alexandre Najjar’s Le Roman de Beyrouth, and Rabee Jaber’s Bayrut Madinat al-‘Alam (Beirut, the City of the World).11 The uncanny contemporaneity of both novels to other works – such as Carole Dagher’s series on the silk trade in nineteenth-century Mount Lebanon, Le Couvent de la Lune (2002)12 – suggests an emergent interest in the fictionalization of Lebanon’s and Beirut’s history. Collectively, they seem to indicate the development of a new genre of contemporary Lebanese historical fiction. Following Raymond Williams, we could describe this as a ‘structure of feelings’ that ‘can be related to the evidence of forms and conventions – semantic figures – which, in art and literature, are often among the first indications that such a new structure is forming’.13 For

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Williams, recognizable changes in literary forms are the indications that a new cultural moment is emerging; in the case of Lebanese fiction, this would suggest a correlation between the new-found popularity of the historical novel and the great postwar social and cultural changes in the country.14 With memory discourses as fraught as they are in Lebanon, it is perhaps unsurprising that young writers like Najjar and Jaber engaged directly and actively with writing – and perhaps, rewriting – the nation’s and the city’s history. Unlike the writers of the previous generation, whose work is firmly situated in the postwar present and the immediate past, i.e. within the remembered past, the work of these young writers begins in the reconstructed city then leaps back in time, to the late nineteenth century. Both novels considered in this chapter begin at a moment when Beirut, emerging from an earlier civil war, began to self-consciously articulate its own form of urban modernity – the very moment that Solidere’s selective history suppresses. While these recent works do not ignore the 1975– 90 civil war, they do not dwell on it as much as the previous decade’s novels do. Rather, their focus is on a Beirut split by one century of historical time, which is nevertheless conjoined by its urban history. Reinforcing Tamsin Spargo’s diagnosis that ‘arguments about the past are often explicitly, and [. . .] always implicitly, interventions in debates about the present and the future’, in the early years of the new millennium, Jaber and Najjar both published historical novels that simultaneously situated themselves in the old and extremely new hearts of Beirut – and which actively strove to construct, as well as maintain, a connection between distant past and the present.15 As I argue in the previous chapter, the novels of 1990s Lebanon countered amnesiac discourses by invoking personal memory as countermemory, and by re-inscribing these personal memories onto the devastated space of central Beirut; for the following generation, such personal memory is impossible. This generation can only apprehend and contextualize the city through what Marianne Hirsch terms ‘postmemory’, i.e. through the mediated memories of others. In these novels, the choice to skip a generation and to introduce older, male authority figures suggests a distrust of the war generation,

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perhaps for its perceived involvement in the 1975 – 90 hostilities, but also, perhaps, from a desire to include other voices in the imaginary collective.16 Although these novels, perhaps problematically, seem to ignore, or repress, some memories of war – the same accusation is, of course, levelled at Solidere – they also perform a significant commemorative gesture of refusing to memorialize the war as a complete break with Beirut’s past. Furthermore, this generation of novelists distances itself from both dominant 1990s cultural voices: unlike Solidere, their novels present the war as a significant event in the lives of the main characters; yet, unlike the previous generation, they do not represent the 1975– 90 civil war as the singular event of Lebanon’s or Beirut’s history. Subsequently, these novels call into question both these historical narratives, and raise a new set of concerns about individual and collective belonging to the city and the nation.

Placing the Self in the City I have already discussed how a sense of place is not only intimately connected to an individual’s wellbeing, but also to that individual’s ability to situate him- or herself within the social sphere. In his extremely influential The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch describes this as ‘cognitive mapping’: In the process of way finding, the strategic link is the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual. This image is the product both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience, and it is used to interpret information and to guide action. The need to recognize and pattern our surroundings is so crucial, and has such long roots in the past, that this image has wide practical and emotional importance to the individual. (my italics)17 Importantly, Lynch connects successful mapping with memory as well as with the immediate present; the implications being that

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individuals without access to memory are unable to accurately situate themselves in their environments. This is significant because, in addition to its crucial role in the development of the individual’s relation to urban space, the recognizability of an urban landscape is also a social matter, since ‘a vivid and integrated physical setting, capable of producing a sharp image [. . .] can furnish the raw material for the symbols and collective memories of group communication’.18 While earlier generations of Lebanese could situate themselves with respect to Beirut’s centre through personal recollection, which also mediated collective memory, the younger generation, lacking both memory and immediate perception, simply cannot. Architect Robert Saliba’s work on cross-generational mental maps of postwar downtown Beirut shows the clear gaps between each generation’s ability to draw the urban space and its connection to the city. The generation that was aged 36– 45 in 1991 drew more elaborate mental maps of the city; Saliba found that they were the ones most invested in rebuilding the downtown area as it had been, since ‘they had greatly interacted with the city center during the 1960s and the 1970s, and the city center formed an integral part of their mindscape’; in short, their personal memories of the space motivated their desires to see it rebuilt as it had been. This is the generation that so eloquently resists Solidere’s intervention in the urban landscape through its commemorative countermemories, as discussed in the previous chapter. In contrast, the generation born immediately before or during 1975, to which both Najjar and Jaber belong, are in a curious, in-between predicament. They have no recollection of the city centre as it was before.19 They do, however, seem to understand that an inability to cognitively map their urban history is problematic, and is hampered by Solidere’s reconstruction, which has redesigned the urban space. Beyrouth’s young, anonymous narrator complains that nothing remains of the city to ground him to its past: This morning [. . .] I tried in vain to reconstitute la Place des Canons – also known as Martyrs’ Square, or Al-Bourj Square – to find vestiges, landmarks that could reconcile me with the

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past of my country [. . .] What became of that place that war – and the bulldozers of reconstruction – ravaged? Nothing. Nothing survived.20 This short quote lays out the crux of the problem at hand: because no recognizable urban landmark or monument exists to enable him to construct a sense of place in Beirut, the narrator simply cannot locate himself in the city or the nation. He is deprived of this crucial urban experience, so Beyrouth’s young narrator has no sense of place. The two novels’ different attempts to imaginatively reconstruct the urban practices demolished both by war and by the bulldozers are the main focus of this chapter. Each of the novels discussed in this chapter sets out to construct the map of downtown Beirut for the new generation. They rehistoricize the city space by delving into its distant past, and moving forward in time into its contemporary present. If, as miriam cooke suggests and Saree Makdisi implies, one of the projects of Solidere’s reconstruction of Beirut was ‘to tame this lieu de me´moire’, which process entails that ‘the traces must be eliminated or made to represent another kind of history’, then both Beyrouth and Bayrut appropriate this practice and rewrite it as their own.21 Moreover, by divorcing urban memory from exclusively personal memory, these young writers give their generation a participatory voice in the articulation of Beirut’s past and present. By reinserting the historical traces of old Beirut onto the contemporary city, the novels draw a new cognitive map of the capital that connects its past to its present, and resituates both the individual and the collective in the city centre, and in the national past. On one level then, these works attempt to counter the spatial and historical aporia of contemporary Lebanon by recovering the roots of an older Beirut. Yet, as Yael Zerubavel points out, the acts of recovering and re-covering are connected;22 in short, as this chapter proceeds, we must be sensitive to the histories being suppressed as well as to those being recovered.23 For example, Najjar’s Beyrouth uses the device of the authoritative historical voice of Phillipe to, problematically, present a singular vision of Lebanon’s and Beirut’s

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history from 1860 to 2000 that represses the voices of women as well as a considerable portion of the Lebanese population, namely its non-Francophone constituents. For his part, by telescoping back into the mid-1800s and abruptly discontinuing his seven-volume historical saga, Bayrut, in its third installment, which ends in the late 1800s – i.e. before Lebanon’s modern history began – Jaber omits many aspects of Lebanon’s troubled recent past, including the Mandate period and the twentieth-century civil war. Such omissions raise questions about the relationship between historical memory and fictional commemorations, which I address in the next section. But they also pose a greater set of questions. First, how does a generation without personal memory begin to grapple with its urban past in a nation that has silenced its memories? Second, how are symbolic sites of memory recovered and represented by such a generation? Lastly, is there any value to such historical representation – or is it always condemned to repeat the practices of other commemorative narratives?

Between Memory and History In Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch introduces the concept of postmemory to describe a particular sort of memory, ‘distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection’.24 Hirsch elaborates further, saying that ‘postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated’.25 Hirsch herself is particularly interested in the children of Holocaust survivors and their relationship to photographs of that experience, but admits that the term ‘may usefully describe other second-generation memories of cultural or collective traumatic events and experiences’.26 I believe that Hirsch’s notion of postmemory is a useful and productive one for thinking about the position of the young generation of Lebanese writers that emerged in the decade after the civil war’s end. After all, they grew up in the shadow of the

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collective trauma of war and the narratives of human and urban loss that it engendered. Yet, as I have already pointed out, they are separated from personal memories of the city by ‘generational distance’; still, they are invested in the urban space by more than a sense of history: they are interested in it as a heavily symbolic space in their nation’s collective imaginary. By far the most interesting thing about how Hirsch’s definition of postmemory relates to these second-generation novels is its relationship to acts of imaginative creation, such as fiction. For Hirsch, postmemory necessitates a creative intervention in history, since ‘its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation’.27 The relationship of Jaber’s and Najjar’s novels to the city of Beirut is constructed through an imaginative act that lies between history and personal memory, which blurs the relationships between fiction and history. In Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel, Elizabeth Wesseling argues that one of the focal ways in which the modernist and post-modernist historical novel differs from classical historical fiction is in the former’s disruption of traditional narrative patterns through the inclusion of ‘an additional narrative level, situated between the represented past and the primary narrator’.28 This produces what Wesseling describes as a ‘self-reflexive’ attitude towards the writing of history, in which a mediating figure – in this case, a young writer – is placed between the events and their narrator. Moreover, this young writer figure often expresses an anxiety about, and unease with, the practice of history.29 As a result, the transmission of historical memory is placed in a mise-en-abıˆme that allows the narrative to expose the multiple layers of knowledge that undergird history. Each of the novels in this chapter complicates the relationship between historical narrative and fiction by exposing the tenuous divide between historical and fictional narrative, what Wesseling describes as the ‘borderland between fiction and historiography’.30 To varying degrees, Najjar and Jaber ‘make the production process visible’ using ‘the now familiar ploys of the

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historian-like character or external narrator who comments upon his own endeavors as he goes along’.31 Beyrouth tells the story of Phillipe and his family, beginning with his grandfather, Roukouz, a translator for the French Embassy in nineteenth-century Beirut; continuing with his father, Elias, a doctor; and ending with himself, a journalist by profession, as the men live through the epochal moments of modern Lebanese history. Phillipe recounts his family history, from the Mount Lebanon war of 1860 until the present, to a young narrator who appears in the novel’s first and final chapters but whose voice is otherwise dominated by Phillipe’s authoritative narrative. It is during the moments that Beyrouth sets up its narrative frame, and dramatizes the exchange between Phillipe and the young anonymous narrator, i.e. between story-teller/historian and audience, that the novel’s anxiety about memory as history comes to light. At first, Beyrouth seems to suggest that social memory depends on the intergenerational transmission of stories, in which the identity of the individual is formed by his inclusion in the group’s narrative. Notably, the young narrator remains anonymous throughout Najjar’s novel, but he gains legitimacy through his participation in Phillipe’s story. As Paul Connerton writes, ‘the narrative of one life is part of an interconnecting set of narratives; it is embedded in the story of these groups from which individuals derive their identity’.32 Social memory is therefore passed on through a process of asking for, and receiving, stories, especially from those of the oldest generation. Compellingly, in Beyrouth, whereas Phillipe’s stories recount family histories, no kinship ties connect the narrator to the story-teller. The two are only brought together by a will to listen, and a need to tell; a symbiotic relationship wherein each side needs the other – the younger for the memories and the ability to connect with the past he does not know, and the older man so that his story will survive. To me, this suggests a desire to include an outsider’s voice in the young narrator’s conception of himself and his place in Lebanese society; in some ways, it marks a conscious split from the histories of the primary social group (the family) in favour of another authority.33

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Both socially and geographically, Beyrouth anchors itself with the symbols of centrality. Roukouz, the first member of his family to settle in Beirut, chooses a home literally at the heart of the city, which itself is represented as a midpoint, an ‘intermediary city between sea and mountain, between East and West, between tradition and modernity’.34 Moreover, Phillipe’s authoritative voice in the novel is literally and figuratively a central one. The narrative action of Beyrouth inserts itself and its characters squarely within a chronological nationalist narrative of Lebanon’s history, in which Phillipe’s family are the mediators, though rarely the agents, of national change. The narrative is divided between pivotal events in the history of modern Lebanon, such as independence, and everyday events like a football game played by a young Phillipe against a rival school. Yet, whether in aspects of their everyday lives or at pivotal moments, the three major male figures in Phillipe’s narrative – his grandfather, Roukouz; father, Elias; and himself – are always brought into contact with, and indirectly influence, prominent figures from actual Lebanese history. For example, Elias treats the future president of the Lebanese state, Bshara al-Khuri, on the eve of independence, thereby assuring his presence at a crucial juncture of Lebanon’s history, and Phillipe participates in a round-table meeting at the newspaper with future right-wing Christian militia leader, Bashir Gemayel. Moreover, their respective professions – translator, doctor, and reporter – are all mediating roles. Their professional positions ensure that the men are all respected authority figures in the community, and also that they are trustworthy narrators of national history, since they have experienced so much of it firsthand. Even as it posits Phillipe as an authoritative historical voice, Beyrouth seemingly undermines his status as historian by alluding to the delicate relationship between history and fiction. At first, the narrator insists that Phillipe ‘doesn’t invent’, claiming that he is merely ‘reconstructing in detail events he has witnessed, or which were experienced by those to whom he was closest’.35 Nevertheless, as old Phillipe begins to tell his story, he uses ‘the sacramental formula: “kane ya makane fi qadim el zamane”’,36 lapsing into one of the few uses of Arabic in an otherwise proudly Francophone novel but also

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alerting the reader to the fiction of history – that remembering is necessarily reconstructing, ‘filling in the blanks’, as Phillipe describes it, and that every history is also always a story, linked in this case to the oral story-telling tradition in Arabic literature. Significantly, Wesseling notes that such fictional ‘commentaries upon historiography in the making still represent the retrospective retrieval of the past as an endeavor worthy of serious consideration’.37 The novel also self-reflexively links commemoration to violence. Despite his authoritative presence, Beyrouth also posits Phillipe as an uneasy, self-conscious historian, mindful of the processes of erasure and repression, and the potential violence involved in narrating history. Flattered that the young narrator cares enough to listen to his stories, Phillipe nevertheless points out: Returning to one’s roots is never simple: forgetting [. . .] nostalgia, and moral queasiness transform memories. Narrating my own life presupposes that I empty my memory without fear of rekindling ancient pains, but narrating the lives of others requires the help of imagination. After all, how can one grasp the thoughts, feelings or secrets of someone else when one hasn’t shared them? How can one penetrate, rape, a lifetime’s sanctuary? How do you write in the blanks that our fellows have, knowingly or not, left behind them?38 Phillipe first expresses the difficulty of narrating history, and evokes the traditional binary between history and fiction, in which the latter often suffers at the expense of the former’s perceived accuracy and truthfulness. Notably, in addition to bringing up the formal problem of writing history – how to write authentically, untainted by nostalgia – Phillipe also expresses historical writing as an ethical dilemma. In the quote, the necessary fictionalization of others’ personal histories is described in violent sexual terms, as penetration, then as a rape, transforming the issue from one of mere technique or ability (being able to transcend forgetfulness and avoid nostalgia) into an ethical dilemma. By extension, both the narrator and the reader are projected as human beings willing and capable of forcing

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another person to commit an act of supreme violence against history. This statement is, then, both a condemnation of a certain failure by any written attempt to recover the lived pasts of others and also a realization of the inadequacy of commemoration. Unfortunately, despite the emphatic performance of resistance to history, this tension is not explored any further in Beyrouth. It merely surfaces for a moment before being subsumed by the rather straightforward narration of the events that follow. Nevertheless, even its temporary presence betrays Beyrouth’s anxious attitude towards knowing the past. It also – albeit temporarily – self-consciously gestures to the challenges of rewriting history. While Beyrouth quickly represses its anxieties about Phillipe’s narrative in favour of reproducing his authoritative voice, Rabee Jaber’s Bayrut openly exposes its anxieties about writing Beirut’s history from the standpoint of the present. Like Beyrouth, Jaber’s novel is built around a frame narrative, in which a young novelist, called Rabee Jaber, sets out to write the history of a notable Beirut family, the Barudis.39 Unlike Najjar’s novel, however, the boundaries between the frame and the story in Bayrut are fluid and collapsible: Bayrut ricochets back and forth between Rabee and the Barudis. The past, Jaber’s novel suggests, cannot be hermetically separated and contained; the relationship between (re-imagined) past and (imagining) present can only be dynamic. Bayrut’s acknowledgement of the inevitable rewriting of history emerges from its rewriting of the paradigm of the older authority figure. Initially, like Najjar’s protagonist, Rabee receives the help of an older man: the Barudis’ last surviving relative, Count de Bustrus. Almost immediately, however, the novel undermines Rabee’s mission by killing off the count, leaving Rabee completely flummoxed: ‘Now, I don’t know what to do,’ he confesses, unsure that the records of the interviews he has conducted with the old count will be enough from which to write a novel, and doubtful even where to begin now that the count can no longer guide him.40 Yet, he does pick a place to start his historical story, and launches into it; from this point, the historical tale of the Barudi family becomes Rabee’s to tell. The historical part of the novel – while intertwined with Rabee’s

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commentary and narrative – begins with the arrival of the Barudi family patriarch, ‘Abduljawad, in Beirut from Damascus in the early nineteenth century; it ends with ‘Abduljawad’s eldest son, Shahin, going off to fight in the Crimean War alongside the Ottomans. The second volume of Bayrut takes place after the Egyptian army leaves Beirut, in 1840, and ends in 1865 with Shahin’s death (of cholera, after his return to Beirut from the Crimea). The third volume is set between 1865 and the final years of the nineteenth century, and its protagonist is ‘Abduljawad’s third son, Salim. The self-awareness in Jaber’s novel operates not only on the thematic register but also on a formal one. Not as straightforwardly nostalgic as Beyrouth, Bayrut’s playful, yet serious tone resonates with Linda Hutcheon’s definition of a ‘postmodern nostalgia’, in which Nostalgia itself gets both called up, exploited and ironized. This is a complicated (and postmodernly paradoxical) move that is both an ironizing of nostalgia itself, of the very urge to look backward for authenticity, and, at the same moment, a sometimes shameless invoking of the visceral power that attends the fulfillment of that urge.41 Jaber’s text, an ambitious attempt to write a family saga that encompasses and mirrors Beirut’s history, is also self-reflexively and humorously aware of the pitfalls of such a project in reconstructed Beirut: How do you write about a mother living in Beirut before the Egyptian invasion [of 1834] while you’re staring at a woman with short orange hair eating pizza with a fork and knife? [. . .] your back hurts and you want to see that distant town buried in the obscurity of history, you want to see it. (my italics)42 The playful juxtaposition of the contemporary, orange-haired woman’s incongruous appearance and eating habits with the narrator’s desire to write about a very different kind of Beiruti woman calls attention to Rabee’s awareness of the difficulty of

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historical writing. And while the urge to capture this history is as yet – and perhaps will remain – unattainable, Rabee’s desire for it is as visceral as Hutcheon describes. The novel continues to play with the tensions between writing fiction and writing history, and it simultaneously ironizes and calls attention to the role of the author in historical fiction. For example, in the first volume of Bayrut, Jaber complains that, ‘if we were now reading a fictional tale’ he could have changed certain events in the narrative.43 Jaber here uses the plural na, joining the readers as one of them. Rabee does not present himself as a writer of fiction, but rather as a historian, rhetorically distancing himself from narrative agency: he is reading history, and not writing a story. Soon afterwards, however, Rabee is confronted by his friend Walid, who wants a happy ending that Rabee cannot provide for him because the latter is, he insists, ‘trying to be as accurate as I can’.44 Walid objects to this and points out that Rabee is ‘writing a novel, not history’.45 The exchange between both friends playfully, yet obviously, brings into question the role of the writer of historical fiction: is he a historian, with a responsibility to accurately represent the past, or is he a novelist, who can manipulate the story as he wishes? By mobilizing ‘the now familiar ploys of the historian-like character or external narrator who comments upon his own endeavors as he goes along’, Jaber calls attention to the textuality of all historical writing, and blurs the fictional boundaries between fiction and historiography.46 The blurring of boundaries between fiction and history in Bayrut occurs not only on the fictional, but also on the metafictional levels; namely, through the inclusion of historical documentation in the narrative.47 One of the distinctions that Paul Ricoeur makes between historical and fictional texts is the fact that historians have an ethical debt to the past, which they must fulfil by taking into account historical documents, whereas novelists do not need to deal with such issues. For Ricoeur, although one may dispute the methodologies or narrative forms of historiography, ‘the recourse to documents does indicate a dividing line between history and fiction’.48 This is one of the features of historiography that allows it to claim that it is the only field capable of reconstructing the past as it actually happened – as

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‘standing-for’ the past, in Ricoeur’s terminology – thereby distinguishing the field from fictional narratives, which are imaginary and are not necessarily inflected by a similar indebtedness to an ‘actual’ historical past. Ricoeur’s position, in fact, is dramatized in Bayrut in the exchange between Walid and Rabee discussed above. Bayrut’s self-aware inclusion of actual historical documentation further calls into question the validity of Riceour’s distinction between history and fiction. As Rabee begins to ask another series of rhetorical questions about everyday life in nineteenth-century Beirut, the text turns to the reader and addresses him directly: What was life like in Beirut in those faraway days? How did its people live, and who were they? The reader does not need to go searching in books to find the answers. The following list of books (and a handful of manuscripts) set down here can be ignored, can be overlooked, and not one thing will change in ‘Abduljawad Ahmad al-Barudi’s life, which is gone.49 Once more, questions about the lifestyles of people in the past, of being able to understand them, prey upon Rabee’s mind, and, he assumes, also upon the reader’s. As Elizabeth Wesseling argues, ‘selfreflexive historical fiction detracts from the claim to objectivity, but it still grants the possibility of authentic historical knowledge the benefit of a doubt’.50 The text of Bayrut, in fact, follows the passage quoted above with an eight-page detailed annotated bibliography containing memoirs, travel narratives, history books, missionaries’ journals and letters, with mention of their places and dates of publication.51 Ricoeur’s history, it seems, has invaded Jaber’s fiction. Jaber’s novel suggests that, although history and fiction may not blend, their coexistence is nonetheless necessary, and the text can neither privilege nor silence one at the expense of the other. The two sentences ‘The reader [. . .] The following [. . .]’ seem, upon multiple readings, to be juxtaposed, and not to follow one after the other in any sort of sequence. They are the borderline at which the fictional and metafictional parts of the novel intersect. The first sentence, coming after the series of questions about life in the past, at first

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appears to question the possibility of historical knowledge; it is followed, however, by the apparent implication that the reader’s questions have an answer, and that this answer will be furnished by the novel. That expectation, however, is almost immediately undermined: not only is the reader told that the narrator will not answer the question, but he or she is also told that the next eight pages of text are actually irrelevant to the plot. Jaber’s inclusion of the bibliography lays bare the historian’s tools not only to augment his authority, but also to challenge readers’ complacency and highlight the critical role played by the historical novelist in translating the raw material of history into story. Rabee issues a challenge to the reader (whom he has already directly addressed as ‘you’) who is merely seeking narrative details, how the plot will unfold, by admitting that the next pages have nothing to do with the story of ‘Abduljawad’s life, but that he has included them anyway. The academic, historical documents Rabee anchors into the text (they are described in Arabic as muthabbata, i.e. ‘placed in a fixed spot’) are, first, proof that documents about the everyday lives of Beirut’s nineteenth century inhabitants exist – that history, in fact, has not been completely erased – and, second, that these documents are available to whomever is willing to make the effort to find them. Jaber’s act, then, exposes an archive of Beirut’s history; he makes it visible.52 If there is indeed ‘no political power without control of the archive and of memory’, and one of the primary qualities of the archive is ‘to shelter itself, and sheltered, to conceal itself’, as Jacques Derrida explains in Archive Fever, then Rabee’s act reclaims power by exposing Beirut’s deliberately forgotten, archived memory.53 In addition to being an act of reclaiming power by exposing the bibliographic archive, Jaber’s decision to include the bibliography as is also underscores the role of the writer in creating commemorative narrative. Jaber exposes how, without his intervention as historical writer, flawed and anxious though he may be, the act of transforming this material into story could not happen. In this way, Jaber underscores the importance of historical fiction as a participant in the formation of collective memory; because he is the one who transforms

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the raw material of the archive into commemorative text, Jaber sketches out a role for himself in the dialogue over Beirut’s memory. While Bayrut seems to emphasize the writer’s singular role in creating collective history, it also insists that in Beirut the desire for historical knowledge is a collective one. As I have already pointed out, the novel frequently expresses the challenge of representing the past; however, just as frequently, this challenge is framed as a challenge for a group, not just the individual writer. ‘‘Abduljawad Ahmad al-Barudi’s “now” is difficult for us to imagine “now” in the twenty-first century,’ Rabee writes at one point, emphasizing the distinct difference, and possibly unbridgeable cognitive gap, between the ‘nows’ of the respective presents of the imagined community of the contemporary writer and his readers, whom he refers to using the first-person plural, na, and the present of the first volume’s nineteenth-century protagonist.54 This quote reveals a sense of shared contemporaneity between readers and the narrator; both are in the twenty-first century, and both are separated temporally from the novel’s events. It is hard for all of ‘us’ to imagine the Beirut that alBarudi saw in the 1820s. Rabee’s anxiety also resurfaces later on in the text, again intruding upon the Barudi clan’s story. ‘Can we imagine the lives of our ancestors in that long-ago, distant imaginary time?’, Rabee asks himself and all his readers a few pages later.55 These moments not only function to recall the ‘borderland’ between history and fiction but also contain an anxiety about knowing the past, which can neither be repressed nor suppressed. Jaber’s rhetorical questions about the possibility of commemoration are not just abstract musings about the challenge of capturing history; they have direct ramifications on the ability of contemporary Beirutis to situate themselves vis-a`-vis the historical past of their city. Rabee asks, ‘Can we today, 165 years after we hosted the British soldiers, imagine Beirut in the 1840s?’56 Here, like in the quotes above, the collective nun is used, referring to the collective challenge of people in the present imagining the past. The question is whether anyone in the present community can actually achieve an imaginary connection with the past. This is not just any past, however, it is the past of our ancestors – aslafina – and our city – madinatuna.

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Additionally, Jaber uses the possessive first-person plural ‘indana to forge a link between the city of the past and its inhabitants of the present. The same space belonged to all the inhabitants of nineteenth-century Beirut and the inhabitants of contemporary Beirut, the latter sharing with the former the responsibility of ‘hosting’ the invading British army, whose soldiers are described as guests, inverting the common paradigm of invasion whereby the invaders are represented as an imposition.57 The host/guest binary further underscores the idea that certain people have a binding connection to the city across time, while others are transitory. By linguistically reinforcing contemporary Beirutis’ investment in the past, Jaber’s novel creates an imagined community connected temporally, if not spatially, with its urban past. What is at stake in Jaber’s assertion that the city belongs to all, and in Bayrut’s insistence upon temporal and historical continuity between nineteenth-century and twenty-first century cities, becomes clear when read against the spatial practices of Solidere in Beirut. In the early 2000s, as the perceived ownership of the city passed from the people to a corporate oligarchy, a ‘deep-rooted middle class struggle[d] to retain Beirut and its “inherited space” against the capitalist projections of a new global city’.58 In fact, Saree Makdisi’s assertion that what is being ‘lost in the development of central Beirut is a sense of history’ relates the geographical and historical, and undergirds the historical project undertaken in both novels.59 In one way, re-historicizing Beirut and its inherited spaces is precisely what these novels are doing so self-consciously. It only remains to be seen what kind of city is being fantasized about, and how the space of the historical and contemporary Beirut is being imagined.

The City as Monument – Beyrouth’s Nostalgic Totality Alois Riegl’s classic early-twentieth-century text ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments’ (originally published in German in 1928) first brought to attention the social processes of signification involved in the designation of objects as monuments, and the latter’s intrinsic relationship with the collective imaginary. Riegl divorces a

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monument’s value from an objective aesthetic ideal, and correlates it with a cultural moment. Moreover, he diagnoses an increased interest in monuments as commemorative objects within a specific cultural trend of modernity: The interest in specific intentional monuments, an interest which typically tended to vanish with the disappearance of those who created them, now was revitalized, as an entire population began to regard the achievement of earlier generations as part and parcel of their own. Thus the past acquired a present-day value for modern life and work.60 Riegl’s approach is echoed in the work of historian Catherine Bishir, who correlates war monuments with national identity: ‘Once we start paying attention to monuments,’ Bishir writes, ‘we become increasingly aware of their defining power in civic places and national identity.’61 Beirut does not have many of what Riegl would call ‘intentional monuments’, structures built explicitly to commemorate an event in the life of the nation, even less does it have a monument to the civil war. In fact, as miriam cooke points out, the one public memorial of the civil war is outside Beirut, in the mountain town of Yarze.62 The most symbolic public monument in Beirut is the statue commemorating the men hanged for treason by the Ottomans in 1916, who in Lebanese history are represented as the first martyrs of national independence.63 The statue’s location in downtown Beirut ensured its centrality in the Lebanese imagination; this also, unfortunately, ensured that it was extensively damaged by the fighting during the civil war.64 Since Solidere took over Beirut’s reconstruction, the memorial’s history has been caught up in the current politics of memory: while it was not completely renovated, as was feared would happen in the early 1990s, and remains marked with bullets, as Saree Makdisi points out, it no longer has ‘an inscription, or even a passing record of its origins’.65 In short, like other aspects of Beirut’s and Lebanon’s history, the monument became decontextualized from its earlier association with the heyday of Lebanon’s national project.

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I have already shown how Alexandre Najjar’s Beyrouth establishes, then imposes, an authoritative historical voice – Phillipe’s – as the spokesperson of urban and national memory. In the novel, Phillipe’s narrative totalizes Lebanon’s history, and encodes his personal history as national history. In short, Phillipe’s story is what Pierre Nora would call a lieu de me´moire: ‘A turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn – but torn in a such way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists.’66 Nora’s definition suggests both that a rupture has occurred and that, consequently, a memory-object has replaced organic memory itself. In Beyrouth, which situates itself in Lebanon’s amnesiac present, there are two such sites: one is Phillipe himself – Nora did not doubt that people, stories and events could be lieux de me´moire – and the other is the geographical site of Martyrs’ Square, which the novel monumentalizes as the physical embodiment of a national ideal, and as an anchor for Lebanon’s past and its future.67 The idea of a symbolic, monumental anchor for history is central to the very idea of monumentalization itself, and illuminates Najjar’s attempt to fix Phillipe’s story as national history.68 As Andreas Huyssen first points out, the rise of the monumental imagination in the nineteenth century was related to a search for a national identity that ‘created a deep national past that differentiated a culture from its [. . .] counterparts’. Second, Huyssen observed that the concept of the national monument ‘came to guarantee origin and stability as well as depth of time and space in a rapidly changing world that was experienced as transitory, uprooting and unstable’.69 I have already spoken of Beyrouth’s young narrator’s distress at the erasure of historical landmarks from the landscape of Beirut’s reconstructed downtown, in which the distress at disorientation is directly linked to an inability to imagine the national past. In a later segment of the novel, Phillipe visits downtown only to find that it has become emptied of content, and has become a site of pure consumption with no authenticity to it:

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Fashionable people occupy the restaurants and cafes, tourists wander down aseptic streets; the artisans from long-ago have been dislodged; the regulars have lost their bearings (repe`res), the sites of memories (lieux de me´moire) don’t exist anymore.70 The contrast between artisans/regulars and tourists – producers of authentic goods and consumers of the aseptic, plasticized world – is portrayed as a struggle of authenticity against emptiness, against the sign (the city) emptied of all its content (in this case, all its memories). The new city is nothing but a facade now that its spaces have lost all significance.71 Significantly, Beyrouth hungers for the geographical – and, by implication – national stability that such lieux de me´moire would provide. Phillipe reclaims the site of Martyrs’ Square by his final request to have his ashes strewn over the monument, and the novel reclaims it through its monumentalization of the urban space through Phillipe’s memory. In his writing about the architecture of the city, Aldo Rossi describes monuments as ‘the physical signs of the past’, and correlates a monument’s persistence with the ‘result of its capacity to constitute the city, its history and art, its being and memory’.72 In Beyrouth, Martyrs’ Square takes on this monumental quality. In fact, almost immediately, through Phillipe’s authoritative voice and the young narrator’s instant affirmation of what the older man has said (‘Mr. Phillipe is telling the truth’),73 the novel constructs the site as a synecdoche for Beirut and for Lebanon, as the following quote accentuates: [The Place des Canons ] was unique in the world; it symbolized the country. The Lebanese, all confessions and classes, mixed there: the Christians mingled with Muslims and Jews, the rich with the poor. Now, there’s nothing left: the Place des Canons has disappeared!74 Beyrouth reveals its nationalist fantasy through its representation of the centrality and symbolism of the square. By highlighting the

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space’s disappearance as a landmark, the novel stresses that the mixed community it imagines in its past is also now impossible. Furthermore, Beyrouth’s geography is clearly delineated by the confines of the square, and, aside from a few significant events in the mountains,75 all the action in the book takes place in Beirut’s central square, which the novel calls the Place des Canons, using the French name. The square is a reference point, the magnetic north vis-a`-vis around which everything else is situated – either to the east or, much more rarely, to the west. The narrative maps out its characters’ urban lives using the square as a compass. Thus, the Cafe´ de la Republique, where Phillipe and his friends love to spend their afternoons, is located ‘East of the Place des canons’; Pierre Gemayel’s pharmacy is ‘situated at no. 86, Place des canons’; and the Cafe´ des Verres, a traditional teashop, lies ‘to the west of the Place des canons’.76 There are more examples of this orientation, such as the cinema south of the square where Phillipe gets into his first fight, or the national art school in the Azariyeh building in the square at which Phillipe’s younger brother, Joe, matriculates.77 Notably, all of these places are also sites of entertainment and social aggregation, yet the novel represents them as more authentic than the new downtown cafes. The map of Beyrouth’s narrative action is centred by the square, which the novel intentionally monumentalizes as the symbol of Lebanon’s mixed, prosperous and peaceful imagined community. The novel itself, however, undermines its own nostalgia for this multi-sectarian mixture through its projection of a culturally dominant Francophone Lebanese community upon the national and urban landscape, and its marginalization of Lebanon’s non-French speaking majority.78 In Beyrouth, French is the common cultural denominator of those Lebanese whom Phillipe’s authoritative voice deems worthy of admiration. As I have already pointed out earlier in this section, the choice to describe the city’s central square as the Place des Canons already clearly imposes a lexical and cultural distinction from the local Arabic sahat al-burj. Moreover, the Arabic language in the text is used by marginalized characters: street urchins, villagers, strongmen (who are also referred to by the Arabic abaday), women and especially, to comic effect, by Phillipe’s

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mother.79 If the subaltern does speak in the novel, then her language is definitely proverbial Arabic. Violence, aggression and mistrust of the other are also all concentrated in the Arabic speakers, while education, tolerance and pacifism define the other characters. In fact, the narrative indicates that even the uneducated Egyptian concierge in the central building on the Place des Canons uses ‘la langue de Molie`re’ in order to communicate with the building’s residents.80 The novel thus presents French culture and the French language as the glue that holds Lebanese society together. At the school and university run by the French Jesuits that both Elias and Phillipe attend, the benevolent fathers teach their Lebanese charges to unite as a (Francophone) nation despite their sectarian differences. At an interschool football game between Phillipe’s university – the Jesuit, Francophone Universite´ Saint Joseph – and the rival American University of Beirut’s varsity team, the winning goal (for Phillipe’s side) is scored by Phillipe’s Muslim friend, Ziad, and the chant goes up that ‘Ziad is one of us!’81 The novel’s fantasy of imagined community through Francophone culture and values is further elaborated in the romance embedded into the story. The Muslim girl-next-door, Nour, marries Phillipe, falling in love with him after he tutors her in French literature and philosophy, the French cultural legacy enabling their cross-sectarian love – and eventual marriage. Their marriage sours briefly when Nour begins to sympathize with the leftist Palestinian cause at the beginning of the civil war, but then, on the eve of the Israeli invasion in 1982, she comes back to her senses, and to her husband, abandoning all her ‘extremist’ views and sympathies and living with him into their old age. The novel therefore suggests, the Lebanese nation could come together under the legacy of French culture, which contests the sectarian ideologies of Arab/Muslim nationalism by simply presenting the latter as unviable, a momentary lapse of judgment. Its nostalgia for the urban past is monumental, in the sense that it reduces the history of the city – and the nation that this city explicitly stands in for – to one space and, more importantly, to one cultural group, while mourning, apparently without irony, the loss of heterogeneity.

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The novel consolidates its monumental imagination in Phillipe’s final interaction with the present urban space. By the novel’s end, Phillipe begins to lose his eyesight. As his blindness develops, he visits the city one last time, and, standing on the roof of his family home, he takes in a panoramic vision of all the city’s suburbs and neighbourhoods in a symbolic gesture of appropriation. But, as Michel de Certeau reminds us, in every such act of voyeurism from above, there is also ‘an oblivion and a misunderstanding’ of the practices of everyday life.82 Rewriting the history of the city through the history of just one monumental space silences and represses all the other urban spaces and experiences of the city, both past and present. In Beyrouth, Phillipe’s desire for the city – compared to that for both his mother and his wife – which he describes as the ‘desire of a sponge to be impregnated with water’, gives away the intimacy of his perceived relationship with the city.83 Mapping urban memory through Phillipe’s authorial and authoritative voice is certainly one act of resistance to the act of de-memorialization being undertaken in the city centre, but despite the novel’s best efforts it remains a singular view and a singular opinion. The monumental act, as Adrian Forty and Susanne Ku¨chler point out in The Art of Forgetting, allows ‘only certain things to be remembered, and by exclusion cause[s] others to be forgotten’.84 Ultimately, Phillipe’s tale is his – as he himself admits to the narrator at the end, he has left many moments in the history of Lebanon undescribed, because ‘they did not mark me as much as other episodes’.85 Yet, the novel still insists on equating Phillipe’s story with Beirut’s and with the nation’s, glossing over the individual, the everyday in favour of the monumental. In trying too hard to capture and fix a lieu de me´moire, Najjar’s novel inadvertently empties the space of all significance outside of Phillipe and his limited imagined community. The centre becomes what Aldo Rossi would describe as a ‘pathological’ monument: intimately tied to the city, yet also isolated from the signs of urban life.86 Interestingly, in his distinction between history and genealogy, Michel Foucault describes the ‘true historical sense’ – by which he means the genealogical one – as one that ‘confirms our existence

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among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference’.87 By contrast, for Foucault, history’s ‘function is to compose the finally reduced diversity of time into a totality fully closed upon itself; a history that always encourages subjective recognitions and attributes a form of reconciliation to all the displacements of the past’.88 Following this definition, it becomes easy to read Najjar’s novel as one that Foucault would describe as historical; Beyrouth imagines and fixes the Place des Canons as the symbolic and literal heart of his representation of Beirut, and presents Phillipe’s family and individual history as a teleological link between national past and present. If Najjar’s monumental imagination creates a lieu de me´moire out of the central district, and in particular out of Martyrs’ Square, then what Jaber’s Bayrut attempts to do is to articulate the city as a milieu de me´moire, where the everyday present and everyday past are continually in dialogue with each other, nowhere more so than in the mapping of central Beirut’s landscape.

Beirut, Our Global City In contrast to Najjar’s monumental re-imagining of Beirut’s urban space and Lebanon’s history, Jaber’s novel brings Beirut’s past into its present through a different evocation of spatial relations and spatial memory – specifically, by imagining Beirut as an urban palimpsest. In his work on post-reconciliation Berlin, Andreas Huyssen invites his reader to read the city-space as a palimpsest: We have come to read cities and buildings as palimpsests of space [. . .] An urban imagery in its temporal reach may well put different things in one place: memories of what there was before, imagined alternatives to what there is. The strong marks of the present space merge in the imaginary with traces of the past, erasures, losses and heterotopias.89 Of course, one cannot bring up the idea of palimpsest, as Sarah Dillon remarks in her book of the same name, without necessarily evoking the key notions of writing, erasure, rewriting and making the traces

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of the past visible, i.e. producing a genealogical understanding of urban and national history.90 Conscious of this, Huyssen nevertheless argues that without reducing architectural space to text, ‘literary techniques of reading historically, intertextually, constructively and deconstructively at the same time can be woven into our understanding of urban spaces as lived spaces that shape collective imaginations’.91 I have already described the metafictional self-awareness of Jaber’s text, which puts into play the relationship between the historical and present-day narratives of the Barudi-Bustrus clan and Rabee, as he struggles to find a way to write about them. Bayrut also, however, imagines downtown Beirut as a palimpsestic text within its metafictional interplay. For example, present-day Rabee maps the historical city for his friends, Walid and Ibrahim, by locating it on top of the present city, which they are walking through during their lunch break: This street used to be called, in the nineteenth century, souk al-‘attarin [the perfumers’ souk]. The street near Parlamento [an Italian restaurant] was the entrance to al-Bazirkan. The alleyway near the mosque that now says George Acouri used to be souk al-sarami [the shoe souk ].92 While neither Ibrahim nor Walid is particularly interested in this information, each one caught up in his own concerns – Ibrahim in a discussion of classical Arabic music, and Walid in a list of the different cuisines they can eat – as they continue their walk, Rabee’s improvised lesson in urban geography triggers Ibrahim’s memory of working with his father on the calligraphy of a mosque that is currently being rebuilt in the area. Rabee then goes to see the inscription, and finds half of it faded away, illegible. When he returns to the construction site a few months later, he can see the entire inscription, the past being made legible again through restoration. Significantly, it is the act of walking around that leads to this serendipitous palimpsestic discovery of the past in the everyday life of a city where young lovers embrace, cars honk and hungry friends chatter into mobile phones during their lunch breaks.93

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Bayrut also makes the traces of the city manifest in other ways inside the text itself. One of these is visual; at various moments in the novel, some content is set aside in tables within the text.94 Inside the tables are plaques and signs for restaurants (‘IL PARLAMENTO’; ‘SCOOZI’; ‘SEATTLE’S BEST COFFEE’) that Rabee has read on the city’s walls. These plaques hold street names (‘Rue 58 de la Mosquee al-Omari’; ‘SECTEUR NAJMEH 11’), the dates of a buildings’ inaugurations (‘ASTRAL 1929’; ‘OPAL 1931’) and information laid out for the public – in accordance with Lebanese law – by contracting firms charged with the reconstruction of certain sites. The last-named category includes the project’s name, its donors, the chief engineer and his contact information, the contracting company and its address, and the names of the site engineers. Rabee reads all of these signs placed across the downtown cityscape, and Jaber brackets them, rendering visible what is passed by inattentively every day, calling attention to these sites and to the fact that the present cityscape is simultaneously a site of construction and re-construction. In another process of rendering visible the historical traces of the city within his text, Jaber literally juxtaposes and interchanges the present with the past. As Rabee and his friends traverse the city, the names of the streets they are walking on are placed side by side with the bracketed names of these same streets as they were in the nineteenth century. So, for example, as they try to find a restaurant to eat in: ‘I suggest we cross Weygand (that was souk al-fashkha in the nineteenth century) and go down Abdulmalak street (that was ‘Abduljawad street).’95 This palimpsestic act continues on the next page, but the names are inverted; instead of the old names being bracketed, this time, the new ones are: ‘I find myself before the Mansur ‘Assaf mosque (the Saray). I light a cigarette, then cross al-fashkha and make my way down the cotton souk (Foch).’96 In the following paragraph, the order is inverted once again, ‘I reach Siddiq mosque (this was the al-Dabbagha mosque)’.97 The act of bracketing these street names within the text not only implants the historical city beside the current one, it creates a mental map of Beirut that joins present to past without necessarily privileging one over the other.

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While these palimpsestic acts take place within the contemporary part of the narrative, they also – though less frequently – occur within the historical part as well. For example, as the narrative action reaches the point where Shahin, ‘Abduljawad’s son, is standing on a rooftop watching the Egyptian army march into Beirut, the narrative is once more broken by a bracketed note, which mentions that these rooftops will be the sites of ‘Dunkin’ Donuts and Scoozi in the dark and mysterious future’.98 Bayrut maps the downtown Beirut area through the everyday lives of its present and past characters. In fact, the novel makes the past city visible textually by a palimpsestic performance. Here, the temporal aspect is interesting: while palimpsests are usually thought of as being remnants of the past in the present – which they are – in Jaber’s text, they are used to reinscribe the past onto the present; in this sense, they are palimpsests-in-reverse, contesting the attempt to make Beirut’s future and the past seem ‘all but indistinguishable, the one a replication of the other’.99 The palimpsestic technique of placing the historical city in the contemporary landscape of the novel, however, also underscores a considerable distinction between Beirut-in-the-novel’s present and Beirut-in-the-novel’s past that is manifest in the tension described around the issue of consumerism. In mapping its way around the old and new city, the novel brings certain pairings into play: of the Italian restaurant, Parlamento, with the old Bazirkan souk, where ‘Abduljawad had his thriving business establishments; of the rooftops of the boys’ homes in the nineteenth century with Scoozi (another Italian restaurant, part of a regional chain) and Dunkin’ Donuts. More examples include the pairing of the al-fashkha souk with Grand Cafe´ (a chain of successful hookah lounges) and Caffe del Centro (yet another Italian restaurant) with the city’s old synagogue.100 The repetitive substitution of domestic and religious spaces by a different, more homogenized, space of consumption happens throughout Bayrut. In the twentieth century, the local is displaced by the global, the ancient souks replaced by international chains, the entire urban economy shifted towards contemporary consumption.

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Importantly, the historical part of Jaber’s novel is situated at the moment in Beirut’s history when it emerged onto the global stage as a port city directly enriched by the opening up of its economy to that of the world.101 The depiction of local agency over the changing cityscape, and the incorporation of the local into the urban context in the historical city, contrasts with present attempts to exclude the city’s lived past. The reminder, through the juxtaposition of historical sites with the contemporary ones, that Beirut used to be more than a series of chain restaurants and shops resists the erasure of historical memory from the cityscape that Saree Makdisi accuses Solidere of carrying out: This new shopping mall [the Solidere masterplan for the old souks] will claim to represent the past and the historical collective memory of the old Beirut souks in what will be a genuinely new space, a space that has been disemboweled literally and cleansed of its past. It will be marketed as a recreation of what was there before, rather than as something that is entirely novel, something that has no historical depth. It is, rather, part of a much broader process that has from the beginning stripped away the past and laid bare the surface of the city as sheer surface – spectacle – and nothing more.102 In his essay, Makdisi is concerned that once the generation with personal memory of Beirut dies, there will no longer be a record of the space that existed and the types of practices carried out there. What Makdisi holds against Solidere is not merely the erasure of history, but the denial that the erasure has even happened, such that ‘history itself has been fully absorbed in the visual field and it has become the spectacle par excellence’.103 For Makdisi, Solidere’s practices of historical erasure are particularly egregious because they ‘substitut[e] image for narrative and eras[e] the last traces of that messy, uneven, discordant lived life that the war itself destroyed’.104 It is here that Bayrut redeems itself, and becomes more than the literary counterpart to Solidere’s material acts: through undertaking the massively ambitious project of a multi-volume family epic based

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in Beirut, Bayrut is essentially creating a narrative – albeit a selective one – of a large group, and it is reinserting this narrative of lived life onto the existing surface of reconstructed Beirut. While Bayrut insists that the past can neither be completely repressed nor completely effaced, it seems to share Saree Makdisi’s concern about the future of Beirut’s cityscape. The commodification of the contemporary urban space depicted in Bayrut contrasts with the novel’s representation of the city’s past, and brings to light anxieties about the city’s future. In the novel, it is the latter that is more worrisome than the past. The past, after all, can be known through the transmission of generational tales and the palimpsestic mapping of historical and geographical knowledge. Furthermore, it is a shared past – a past with which all those who claim Beirut as their own can identify with. The future, however, is a different matter. As Rabee looks out at the horizon, he notices something in the landscape: I didn’t know at the time that I was looking at the infamous Normandy dump, which would become, in the obscure future, the sea front – with trees and towers – of Solidere’s reconstructed city.105 The quote begins with the same construction (lam akun a‘lam ‘inda’idhin/ ‘I didn’t know at the time’) as that used earlier whenever ‘Abduljawad’s, Rabee’s or the reader’s ignorance of a certain aspect of Beirut’s cityscape is brought up. What differentiates this ignorance from the earlier one, however, is temporality: this is not a space that was, and which can be brought into the present through the palimpsestic imagination, but a site that will become something in the future. Although the current dump site is projected to become a more pleasant space, the language used to describe this possibly verdant future is anxious. In fact, the metaphor of future obscurity (almustaqbal al-ghamid) contrasts heavily with the idyllic urban landscape projected by Solidere. Most significant, however, is what has happened to the identity of the city in this quote. No longer Beirut, and no longer belonging to

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the collective na, the city has lost its most basic identity and has become Solidere’s city. In this context of anxiety over the fate of the city, then, the novel’s title – Bayrut Madinat al-‘Alam – must be read as a double-sided act of resistance, due to its play on the double meaning of the Arabic word ‘alam. In standard Arabic, the word literally means ‘world’, and so the title could be translated as ‘Beirut, the City of the World’. In many ways, the novel recounts the story of Beirut opening up to the world, going from a small town in the first volume, which begins in 1812, to a proper city by the end of the second, which breaks off at the start of the Crimean War in 1853. The world also flows into Beirut, where even military occupation is transformed into a local success, such as when the Egyptian army brings in fava beans and the Lebanese, including the Barudi family, add lemon, garlic and oil and make a fortune selling ful to the soldiers – making a culinary delicacy and several fortunes in the process. Throughout the novel, new objects arrive in Beirut and become appropriated by the local culture, which adapts them to its purpose. In one sense, therefore, Beirut is the world’s city, the portcity of Bilad al-Sham (the Syrian hinterland), where everything new arrives first.106 Opening up to the world transforms Beirut from a tiny town into a city present on the global map, and the novel celebrates this as ebullience – the word fawra, or ebullience, is used often to describe the nineteenth-century city’s development.107 There is also another meaning to the term ‘alam: the word also means ‘people’, in the sense of ‘the masses’. Read in this way, the title would imply that Beirut is the people’s city, a popular space in the full meaning of the word. In fact, in the novel, the nineteenthcentury city is often represented as such: as the city of the people who live in it and call it their own. While invading armies and foreign dignitaries bring innovative items with them, these are rapidly appropriated and modified to fit local interests by the city’s inhabitants. It is the local population that is responsible for the city’s expansion, forming committees and pressure groups to lobby the Egyptian or Ottoman governments, and undertaking construction projects such as that of the port.108 Thanks to these local groups acting in the public interest, Beirut becomes a site of modernization

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and urbanization, due to local initiative working with the outside world.109 The locals also expand Beirut’s limits, and turn it into a city, as they venture outside its walls in search of commercial and residential space. In fact, they transform the city.110 Yet, that city remains theirs, and ours in the present (madinatuna). Bayrut contrasts this episode in Beirut’s urbanization with the present-day appropriation of the urban landscape by a for-profit private company owned by a handful of investors. Through the superposition of the old and the new cities, the novel performs an act of resistance to the erasure of Beirut’s popular history.

Becoming Beiruti In both novels, the anxiety about beginning to comprehend and appropriate Beirut’s imagined past and the collection of ancestral histories converge in one major issue: the process of becoming Beiruti, which itself is intricately connected with issues of belonging. The historical parts of both novels begin when the protagonist seeks refuge in the capital; in Bayrut, ‘Abduljawad al-Barudi escapes from a heinous act committed in Damascus and re-establishes himself successfully in Beirut, while in Beyrouth, Phillipe’s grandfather, Roukouz, flees Mount Lebanon after his involvement in a failed republican insurgency, arriving in Beirut. Here, both texts channel into a well-established stereotype of the city as a haven; which itself is a re-imagination of the earlier notion of the mountain refuge.111 Yet, although both novels mobilize earlier images of the city as a refuge, their explorations of the subject matter reveal contemporary, competing ideologies of belonging, nationalism and contesting visions of the function of urban space. Jaber’s trilogy uses the image of refuge to emphasize the possibility that even if one is not born in the city, it is possible to become Beiruti. Bayrut depicts waves of immigration into the city, and although these new arrivals are not familiar with Beirut at first, they eventually come to know it. The novel, however, represents the relationship between the immigrants and the city as more complex than this; in fact, Bayrut suggests, it is a dialectical one. Through

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their participation in urban life, these immigrants transform the city’s landscape, and, in time, the city transforms them as well – into Beirutis. The phrase ‘he did not know at the time’ is repeated verbatim more than once regarding ‘Abduljawad’s ignorance of the city; but the temporality of the term is significant, because it indicates a learning process: what he may not have known at the time, he eventually learned as his knowledge of the city increased.112 It is this knowledge, added to the time he lived in Beirut, that eventually makes him Beiruti. The implied link is thus made between contemporary young Lebanese who are being introduced to a cityscape that they do not know and the strangers to Beirut, who rushed to it in droves in the late nineteenth century and helped make it into a city: ‘Quickly they all became sons of Beirut. They didn’t turn Beiruti overnight, they became it with the passing of the years.’113 Becoming part of the city is not the result of birthright or coincidence, it is the result of will, just as it is for ‘Abduljawad, who ‘like many others before him became a Beiruti once he decided to live in Beirut and die in it’, and as he grew ever more familiar with it.114 As the centre of the city entered into private ownership and development in reality, the fiction adjusts, and belonging shifts away from owning land or real estate to attachment to a sentiment or the practice of everyday life in the city. In Bayrut, the city is rendered as a welcoming, international, cosmopolitan space that transcends birth or nationalist belonging for a more inclusive, trans-historical geographical loyalty, which is willed by the individual and not imposed by outside authority. Belonging is fluid, but strong, ‘Abduljawad grows to love the city and to be an influential and integral part of it – becoming a wealthy businessman, and eventually a member of the municipal council – through his actions and with his growing knowledge of it. The link between the narrated past and the narrative present in Jaber’s text is further effected in the first volume of the novel by the analogy between a present-day reader and the main character of the first volume, not a local but an adopted Beiruti originally from Damascus:

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The reader of these words (yes, you) is like ‘Abduljawad Ahmad al-Barudi. Both don’t know old Beirut: A town of five thousand inhabitants, surrounded by a wall, looking out onto the sea in one direction and onto fields, hills and plains in the other three.115 The reader is redeemed because, just as Barudi learnt about the city and eventually became Beiruti, they can also learn to know and belong to the ‘old’ city through the novel’s textual mediation. Najjar’s text, which is ideologically nationalist from the beginning (even the mid-nineteenth century characters speak proudly of Lebanon and their Lebanese identity, technically inaccurate at the time), takes a different approach both to the concept of belonging and to the city itself. ‘If we are born somewhere, then it is to belong to that place,’ Phillipe tells his young listener, after a short conversation about the emigration of Lebanese youth.116 Belonging here is directly tied to birth, the italics emphasizing this formally, implying that this is an incontrovertible action unrelated to choice or desire. The theme of being born into a fixed identity that one cannot lose, despite leaving, is a leitmotif throughout Beyrouth. Earlier on in the text, Phillipe describes himself as being inhabited by Beirut.117 The sentence plays on the French verb ‘to inhabit’ or ‘to live’, habiter, and so instead of the expected, ‘j’habite Beyrouth/I live in Beirut’, one reads the inverted ‘Beyrouth m’habite/ Beirut lives in me’. The narrator is metaphorically inhabited by the city; he is therefore the passive agent, while it is the active one. By extension, then, Beyrouth seems to suggest that belonging is not an individual’s choice; it is rather, a birthright. While Beyrouth takes the view of national identity as birthright and Bayrut prefers to figure identity as fluid, urban and localized, the discussions of identity in both novels dramatize the anxiety of the contemporary urban Lebanese. Beyrouth barely represses this anxiety: ‘They will not take Beirut away from me!’ Phillipe cries out at the very beginning of the novel.118 The statement belies a multifaceted paranoia. First, that there is a group of people who intend to take Beirut/Lebanon away from its true sons, those who were born in it. The second anxiety is one of powerlessness, of not being able to stop

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these plural Others from their nefarious task. The novel’s assertions of personal identity as ineradicably tied to a birthplace is therefore a textual act of resistance in the face of this potential threat. It is an assertion of Phillipe’s place in the city despite his presence elsewhere. In Bayrut, the repeated assertion that belonging to a space is about the acquisition of knowledge relating to its history and geography, and not about ownership or state acknowledgement, also with repetition, builds up into a rejection of the contemporary marginalization of Beirut’s current residents from everyday practices in the city. The reconstruction of postwar Beirut is interesting, not only for its specific nature but also because it offers an extreme example of a global anxiety about the future and fate of urban spaces. In his foreword to Henri Lefe`bvre’s Urban Revolution, Neil Smith links Beirut’s reconstruction to a global phenomenon of urban change: ‘From Shanghai to Beirut, Kuala Lumpur to Bogota, the reconstruction of urban centers has become the means of embedding the logics, threads and assumptions of capital accumulation more deeply than ever in the urban landscape.’119 As he concludes the article ‘Laying Claim to Beirut’, Saree Makdisi makes a similar point: Lebanon may be seen as a kind of laboratory for the most extreme form of laissez-faire economics that the world has ever known. And moreover, Beirut itself, especially in view of the reconstruction project, can be seen as a laboratory for the current and future elaborations of global capitalism.120 The Beirut novels in this chapter dramatize this encroachment of a new form of global capital, implicitly and explicitly, and position the individual vis-a`-vis these practices. Perhaps, then, it is understandable that they so often evoke and explore memory. Yet here, too, they also speak to a contemporary, late-capitalist phenomenon of (possibly futile, yet nonetheless evident) resistance. In his introduction to the anthology, War and Memory in the Twentieth Century, after contending that ‘the 1990s have seen a boom in memory’, Geoff Eley suggests that this represents:

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An anxiety about the loss of bearings and the speed and extent of change, in which representations of the past, the narration and visualizing of history, personal and collective, private and public, spell the desire for holding onto the familiar, for fixing and retaining the lineaments of worlds in motion, of landmarks that are disappearing and securities that are unsettled. In this understanding, ‘memory’ becomes the crucial site of identity formation in the late 20th century.121 Eley’s rhetoric gestures to a metaphorical cartography that is made manifest, and literal, in these novels, as Beirut’s urban landscape, and with it questions of Lebanon’s identity and character, entered into a new phase.

CHAPTER 5 BEIRUT: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE? MEMORY AND ANXIETY IN CONTEMPORARY LEBANESE COMICS

In the opening paragraphs of this book, I introduced Mazen Kerbaj’s webcomic from the July 2006 war, and discussed the different depictions of the city of Beirut across the 33 days of Kerbaj’s blog. I showed how, over the course of the month-long war, Mazen’s relationship to Beirut is depicted in several ways – the city is a symbolic mother, the abstract blackness outside Mazen’s window and sometimes a skyline – and argued that what connects all of these images is the fact that Beirut is what gives Mazen his sense of place. The imagery of Beirut as a protective, embracing mother is an enduring one from Kerbaj’s online war memoir, ‘Kerblog’. The Lebanese capital continues to feature prominently in Kerbaj’s most recent work, Lettre a` la Me`re (Letter to the Mother), albeit in a far more ambivalent manner than hitherto. As in ‘Kerblog’, the relationship between the author and the city in Lettre is highlighted from the outset. On the front cover, accompanying the text of the title, is an image of one of Beirut’s most iconic buildings, Burj al-Murr. In other words, the title and the cover image work together to affirm the art critic Roy Dib’s declaration that ‘the mother in the text can only be Beirut’.1

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This seems to build on Kerbaj’s earlier work, which also drew a connection between Beirut and motherhood; read together, however, the image and the text in this more recent work collaborate to produce a feeling of ambivalence in the reader. First, the language of the title jarringly mentions la, ‘the’, mother. This is an unusual choice, eschewing both the possessive ma, ‘my’, which would have underlined a more intimate filial relationship between author and mother, and the more objective une, ‘a’, which would suggest that the city is a mother. Instead, the book’s title strikes a middle ground: the city becomes ‘the’ mother, but it is unclear whose mother it is. Already, this textual choice destabilizes its reader. Further adding to the defamiliarizing experience of the text is the image Kerbaj juxtaposes with it. Along with this ambivalent textual description of motherhood and attachment sits the image of Burj al-Murr, the concrete 40-storey monolith whose history encompasses so much of Beirut’s modern urban past. Construction on the project, named after Michel el-Murr,2 began in 1974, just before the war started. From its outset, and 20 years before Solidere, the building was imbricated in political machinations for the profit of the political-capitalist elite.3 The civil war broke out when only 26 of its 40 storeys had been completed, but construction continued through the early years of the conflict before finally coming to a standstill. Today, the shell of the building lies at the edge of downtown Beirut, between the area now commonly described as ‘Solidere’ or ‘downtown’ (the central district) and Hamra – the garishly new and the fetishistically modern (and rapidly urbanizing).4 The building is a visual reminder of a relatively obscure moment in Beirut’s urban past – the introduction of new building laws – that nevertheless continues to resonate in the present, its very existence a marker of a specific moment in Lebanon’s modern history. More significantly, however, its incompleteness serves as a reminder of all that was cut off by the civil war, and as a visual testament to the fact that Lebanon’s urban landscape cannot erase the conflict, nor can it seem to move past it. It is a physical interjection in Beirut’s urban memory, an intrusion that affirms the continuity of certain unsavoury practices from the past, invokes the civil war and continues to affirm

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its ongoing existence in the urban fabric and the memory of the city and its people. This combination of significations makes the building a deeply troubled and troubling metaphor for motherhood, and emphasizes the title’s uneasy refusal to claim an attachment to this mother. Together, image and text suggest an alienation from the urban fabric that was not there in Kerbaj’s 2006 work. In their recent edited volume, Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence, Jo¨rn Ahrens and Arno Meteling speak to the relationship between the medium of comics and the city, and argue that comics provide a particularly ‘interesting mode of reflection about the meaning of history and the contemporary as well as the role of the city as a life-world’.5 The two scholars argue that comics’ hybrid nature, ‘combin[ing] words and pictures in a spatial sequence’, privileges the comic form as a way of thinking about urban space, and particularly about how that space changes through time.6 In Lebanon, where urban space is so intricately entangled with issues of memory and identity, graphic narratives have become a new mode for defining, producing and contesting the relationship between the individual and the city, especially as the physical, social, political and emotional contours of Beirut and Lebanon continue to be negotiated and re-negotiated. In a panel from her award-winning autobiographical comic, Mrabba w Laban (Jam and Yogurt), Lena Merhej foregrounds a park, filled with public art and people. In the background are bullet-scarred buildings, including Burj al-Murr, which towers over the others (Figure 2). The text self-reflexively notes, ‘since I began to draw, the subject of memory has appeared in my work. Lebanese artists were absorbed with the topic during the 1990s, when I was in university.’7 Together then, words and images seem to be describing the commemorative practices of this 1990s generation, and acknowledging their role in Lena’s formation as an artist. A closer look at the faces of the people in the park, however, reveals perplexity and surprise. Save one person, all the others are looking awry at this commemorative art, mouths agape. By posing this image against the text, Merhej’s matter-of-fact words come to embody a critique of that earlier generation of urban artists whose work seems to be cut off from the people meant to consume it, as well

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Figure 2 A panel from the autobiographical comic Mrabba w Laban (Jam and Yogurt) by Lena Merhej

as a more pressing critique of urban practices, in which developing and funding these projects took precedence over restoring the buildings that loom ominously in the distance. Significantly, while this public space seems to be downtown Beirut, the site of so many of

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these commemorative practices, the Martyrs’ Square area and other recognizable monuments to Solidere’s reconstruction project are absent. Merhej’s panel, drawn in her deceptively simple cartoon-like style, uses the graphic medium to slyly, yet implicitly, critique these various urban and cultural practices. Whether through indirect critique, as in Merhej’s panel, or through focusing on peripheral buildings like Burj al-Murr or on the everyday spaces of Ras Beirut, Mazen Kerbaj and Lena Merhej disengage from the debate over downtown Beirut as the city’s heart, contesting the narratives of an older generation and carving out a new, albeit troubled and troubling, urban imaginary for themselves and their readers. In this chapter, I argue that they have been led to do so by the turbulent, sometimes violent, ruptures occurring in Beirut and Lebanon from 2005 onwards. Since 2005, the political, social and urban landscape of Lebanon has continued to change, in noticeable and jarring ways that have altered the country and its residents. In February 2005, Rafiq alHariri, the influential prime minister and ‘architect’ of Solidere, as well as much of the post-war Lebanese landscape, was assassinated by an enormous car bomb on Beirut’s seaside corniche.8 Following Hariri’s death, a massive popular movement descended into Martyrs’ Square, demanding the withdrawal of the Syrian army from Lebanon. With the pro- and anti-Syrian occupation demonstrations in February and March 2005, Martyrs’ Square became ‘the focal point of a massive mobilization of Lebanese society’, and was occupied by a makeshift campsite of people who refused to disperse until the Syrian army left the country, and who – unsuccessfully, in the long run – tried to rename the site sahet al-hurriyyeh, or Freedom Square.9 That year, the visit to Rafiq al-Hariri’s resting place – the darih, as it is referred to locally, prominently located across the street from Martyrs’ Square – was compulsory for visiting politicians and dignitaries. As Lucia Volk points out, Hariri’s ‘death would add another layer of meaning to Beirut’s Martyrs’ Memorial [as well as to Martyrs’ Square]; it also transformed Beirut’s commercial downtown, an area Hariri had worked hard to bring back to life [. . .] into the home of a prominent graveyard memorial’.10 The site of celebration and public gathering

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became a site of mourning and was then incorporated into the political landscape: several high-profile rallies and political events were organized in the area. Despite this, it continued to be a place to which people flock, rather than a place where people are – a monumental lieu de me´moire rather than an everyday milieu de me´moire, to use historian Pierre Nora’s terminology (see Chapter 4).11 Recently, even as sites of commemoration, the darih and Martyrs’ Square seem to have receded in cultural meaning – in 2013, the only organized political event that took place there was a sparsely attended protest led by the salafist Sidonian sheikh, Ahmad al-Assir.12 Despite its sombre beginnings, 2005 was also a year of great hope and optimism for Lebanon – and a moment of genuine communal sentiments of national belonging for a large, previously divided, swathe of the country. A year after Hariri’s death, however, came the Israeli war of July– August 2006; the ramifications from that conflict continue to have implications on everyday life in Beirut and Lebanon today. I have already described some of the social and political consequences of that conflict, including the 1 million internally displaced individuals; moreover, even in the urban areas that were not targeted by the bombings, the war has continued to have an impact. During the conflict, many buildings and previously publicly accessible areas in downtown Beirut were cordoned off with barbed wire – including the gardens in the Roman baths, the United Nations building and the exit to the airport road – and most of these sites remain closed off today. In their online work mapping the new security infrastructure in Beirut, titled Beirut: Mapping Security,13 Ahmad Gharbieh, Mona Harb and Mona Fawaz argue that, while the security associated with protecting political figures and/or keeping communities apart from each other has always ‘been a latent aspect of [Beirut’s] cityscape which heavily affects people’s everyday practices and movements’, nowadays, with the ‘normalization of security as an element of urban governance, a new narrative of threats and fears’ has profoundly affected the practice of everyday life in the city.14 Politically, the war of 2006 marked a growing rift in Lebanese society. In Lena Merhej’s comic from that war, A‘taqid anna sanakunu hadi’in bil harb al-muqbila (I Think We will be Calm in the Next

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War), she draws a group of people tugging at a rope from either end, shouting phrases at each other; notably, the two people facing each other at the top of each of the lines are each screaming ‘traitors!’ to their opponents as they strain to pull the rope. The panel’s depiction of the growing rift in the political and social establishment is humorous; its actual effect on Lebanese society since 2005 along political and sectarian lines has been anything but. This increasing political tension and polarization erupted into urban violence on 7 May 2008 – a violence that has not been fully resolved, and which continues to break out all over Lebanon. Previously peripheral urban neighbourhoods became front lines for a new Sunni – Shi‘ite warfare that, in some ways, has redrawn the map of Beirut.15 Moreover, since the global financial crisis of 2008, which affected capital investment in the Arabian Gulf, and with the ensuing political and civil instability of the ongoing conflict in Syria, work on many of the construction sites in downtown Beirut – and elsewhere – has ground to a halt. In other parts of the city, the influx of refugees from that civil conflict has placed pressures on housing availability and the already-sagging infrastructure; in short, a remarkable amount of social, political and urban pressure has been added to an already volatile landscape. For a variety of reasons, then, since 2006, the visitor to downtown Beirut does not experience a functioning, dynamic city – as Solidere’s planners had promised – so much as a polarized, divided and difficult-tonavigate space. Meanwhile, the neoliberal ‘lifestyle’ construction projects of luxury housing and consumerist retail spaces, associated almost exclusively with Solidere in the 1990s, have reached into other parts of the capital, including Ras Beirut. This development drives prices beyond the reach of most Lebanese, and further contributes to an alienation from the urban landscape often expressed in phrases like bayrut battalit la ilna, ‘Beirut is no longer ours’, or di’ana beirut, ‘what a pity, or what a shame, Beirut’.16 This alienation from the urban and national landscape is reproduced in Kerbaj’s most recent graphic narratives. The transition between 2006’s representation of Beirut as mother, no matter how abstracted, and the intimate attachment of Mazen in ‘Kerblog’ to the

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juxtaposition of the image of the brutal, concrete unfinished structure with ambivalent textual assertions of maternal links underlines the shift in the relationship between city and artist that Kerbaj’s work captures through the medium of the comic. For Ahrens and Meteling, ‘the comic, as an inherently modern and urban medium, situates itself within that very tension, as a juxtaposition of incompatible, mass-produced signs in which entangled images and texts both disturb and complement each other’.17 The opening comic sequence in Kerbaj’s recent book, also titled Lettre a` la Me`re, continues to emphasize this alienation by borrowing the first line from Camus’ The Stranger, ‘mother died today’. This direct quote from one of the most famous texts of alienation is superimposed over an image of another of Beirut’s iconic buildings: the Beirut City Dome, or ‘Egg’, a modernist entertainment complex in downtown Beirut that, like Burj al-Murr, survived the civil war more or less intact. It also, like Burj al-Murr, remains a part of the urban landscape that inarguably carries within itself a reminder of Beirut’s pre-war utopian architectural past and the scars of the civil war as well as the unresolved question of what to do with it, and with Beirut’s urban space, in the present.18 As they do on the cover, the text and the images work together here to draw the reader towards Kerbaj’s increased alienation from, and seeming ambivalence towards, the city. As the sequential narrative unfolds, however, a more complicated tale emerges. The final image in the comic, which lends the book its title, is of a messy urban landscape filled with the silhouettes of rooftops contrasted against an unnaturally orange sky. The narrative text at the top of the panel says, in type, ‘I love you like one would love a woman, a girl, a [female] friend or a sister. I love you as one would love his mother.’ A text bubble emerges out of the middle of the blackness, however, that, in handwriting rather than type, continues this phrase by adding, ‘and I hate you more than satan hates god, my Beirut’. With its strong declarative statement of loathing, the punchline at once detaches Mazen, the comic’s narrator, from any intimate, familial relationship with the city expressed in the top panel, but it retains the possessive ‘my’, underscoring an

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abiding attachment to the city. Returning to the idea of the mother, the text highlights the tension between repulsion from and attachment to the city that inhabits so much of Kerbaj’s recent work. As this is a comic, it is not only image and text that work together to emphasize Mazen’s ambiguous feelings towards the city, but also text-as-image, in the form of type. Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven write, in their introduction to Modern Fiction Studies’ special issue on comics, that ‘the mark of handwriting is an important part of the rich extra-semantic information a reader receives’.19 In Lettre, the declarative statement of love is typed, but the statement of hatred is in a text bubble. In this case, the extra-semantic information interrupts and supersedes the type with its emphatic statement of displeasure and hatred, and works to emphasize the internal contradictions that the narrator feels towards the city. By manipulating comics’ ability to produce meaning through the collaboration and competition between image and text, or what comics scholar Hillary Chute calls its ‘intricately layered narrative language’, Kerbaj’s work highlights the shifts and tensions underlying the relationship between author and city without necessarily needing to resolve this tension one way or the other. Both love and hatred towards the city can coexist in the same panel, one on top of the other, as the silhouetted urban landscape appears as both backdrop and frame for this emotional tumult. My argument throughout this book has been that changes in urban landscapes affect and alter – and, in turn, are affected and altered by – not only the social and political practices of everyday life, but by cultural ones as well. Such a shift is captured in the transition from Mazen Kerbaj’s initial portrayals of Beirut as a loving parent in 2006 to the dismissive, alienated relationship he describes in his latest work. If Raymond Williams’ hypothesis that social tension is ‘at once lived and articulated in radically new semantic figures’ in emergent forms in art and literature holds,20 then it is probably not a coincidence that since the great tumult and upheaval of 2005, the Lebanese comics scene has thrived, both in print and online. In serialized publications like the comics journal Samandal, book series like Joumana Medlej’s Malaak, Angel of Peace and graphic

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novels like Zeina Abirached’s Un Jeu D’Hirondelles (A Game for Swallows), a new generation of graphic artists has emerged.21 While graphic expression had been common in Lebanon in such forms as political cartoons and posters,22 these texts are different in that they focus on the production of graphic sequential art, i.e. they tell stories through comics, rather than merely using them to comment on the day’s events. In other words, this is the emergent moment of a new structure of feelings, one that finds its expression in the formal properties and potential of graphic narrative. For a variety of reasons – including a readership that is more primed to consume these comics, their availability online and a growing global interest in graphic narrative – the genre has, in a short period of time, become a significant form of cultural production in Lebanon, one that deserves greater scholarly attention. It is always tricky to attempt to generalize about the present;23 however, what is clear is that the changes captured in graphic narratives are not only personal but social ones as well. Trying to explain structures of feelings, Williams writes, is a difficult undertaking; however, he argues that what is clear from the beginning is that they are ‘taken as social experience, rather than as “personal” experience or as the merely superficial or incidental “small change” of society’.24 Using the comic medium’s ability to contain ambiguity without resolving it, as Lettre does, but also its quality of transmitting and producing empathy in its readers and characters alike, authors like Mazen Kerbaj and Lena Merhej confront Beirut’s present, past and future differently from the way in which their predecessors have. The volatility and instability of post-2006 Beirut and Lebanon, coupled with the city’s altered landscape, compels the young protagonists of the graphic narratives I discuss in these chapters to delve into their personal memories of growing up during the war, and pushes them towards a greater empathy and understanding with their parents’ generation. Furthermore, by utilizing some of the autobiographical comic’s central features – namely, the narrative intimacy it produces between subject and reader, and the ability it has to work through both the past and the present – Merhej and Kerbaj use the form of comics to bring about a distinctly new engagement with, and mediation

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between, the individual and the collective, as well as between the urban and the national.

Talking about Comics The field of comics scholarship has expanded radically in the past decade as the medium has entered into the realm of mainstream academic discourse, thanks to the contributions of scholars who are themselves comic artists, like Will Eisner and Scott McCloud, and others, notably Hillary Chute and Jared Gardner.25 Comics are now ‘understood as one of the decisive pictorial elements of popular culture’, alongside film and television, and an integral part of modern culture, ‘since they enduringly form people’s perceptions of cultural, social and political patterns’.26 In the Middle East, some attention has been paid to the growing trend and popularity of graphic narratives.27 Much of the attention, however, has been about censorship and novelty: what can and cannot be drawn, and what is considered provocative or not in some markets,28 or on the relationship between Islam and comics, as depicted in Naif al-Mutawa’s The 99.29 The Lebanese comics I discuss in this chapter do not fall into either of these categories. In comics, image and text collaborate to produce meanings. Originally dismissed for its perceived lack of depth and its populism, this form has ‘been increasingly recognized as a genre capable of subtlety and complexity’,30 and has been used to address complex social, political, historical and personal topics. Even as they disagree on the nomenclature of this particular genre, all scholars who work on comics agree that it is a sequential art form that merges image and text, without subsuming one to the other.31 Comic artist and theorist Will Eisner writes that: The format of the comic book presents a montage of both word and image, and the reader is thus required to exercise both visual and verbal interpretive skills. The regimens of art and the regimens of literature become superimposed upon each other.32

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Formally then, comics combine image and text to produce meaning; however, it is important to note that these visual and verbal narratives ‘do not simply blend together, creating a unified whole, but rather remain distinct’.33 In other words, in graphic narratives, meaning is produced from text and image working together, as they did, for example, in the panels I have already described above. Both the acts of producing and of reading graphic narrative are inherently social, constantly engaged in a dialogue between artist and reader, since they ‘communicate in a language that relies on a visual experience common to both creator and audience’.34 These narratives are always calling their readers’ ‘attention visually and spatially to the act, process, and duration of interpretation’, making them ‘a deliberate form of communication that aims to involve readers and produce some kind of response in them, be it compassion, understanding, respect, or simply entertainment’.35 In fact, in order for comics or graphic narratives to work, the sequential artist must have ‘an understanding of the reader’s life experience [. . .] An interaction has to develop because the artist is evoking images stored in the minds of both parties.’36 In Lettre, Burj al-Murr is an iconic image that evokes a specific historical and cultural resonance in Kerbaj’s readers; the juxtaposed text functions with the image to reproduce the same feeling of alienation in the reader that it does in the author. For comics scholars, comics not only passively imagine communities, but they also actively form them through the very medium itself. Using shared cultural references and enforcing narrative perspective textually and visually, comics engage readers in a distinct manner.37 Influenced by the French bandes dessine´es tradition and Japanese anime as much as by the work of contemporary US comic artists like Art Spiegelman, Harvey Pekar or Chris Ware, recent Lebanese comics have developed their own identity, which combines the former’s interest in politics, history and cultural identity with the latter’s deeply idiosyncratic, often autobiographical, narrative techniques.38 With the exception of Joumana Medlej’s ongoing Malaak, Angel of Peace, a project that its author describes as ‘Lebanon’s first superhero comic’, and Samandal, which curates and

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publishes the work of a number of Lebanese and international artists in different genres – and, hence, cannot be described as having one specific comic identity – most of these recent graphic narratives can be described as ‘autographics’.39 In this chapter, I will pair two texts from the immediate aftermath of the 2006 conflict: Merhej’s A‘taqid and excerpts from Kerbaj’s ‘Kerblog’. Written during or immediately following the July 2006 war in Lebanon, Kerbaj’s and Merhej’s autographic works address issues of trauma and generational memory that are particular to their generation; these texts also express an anxiety about the future that emerges from the sense of the cyclical nature of conflict in Lebanon, and continues to resonate into the present. Merhej’s work is probably more in line with the traditional format of graphic narrative in general, and autographics in particular. Her first book, published only a few months after the conflict’s end in August 2006, recounts her experience of living through the 33 days of war, and contains all the visual elements of traditional comics: illustrations, speech bubbles, gutters40 and sequential images. As it is part of a blog, rather than on a page, ‘Kerblog’ is a less traditional form of comic.41 While it certainly narrates the day-today life of Mazen Kerbaj, its autographic hero, during the war in a visual and verbal manner, and its narrative is often sequential – for example, there is an ongoing account, which takes place over several days, about whether or not Mazen’s ex-wife will flee Lebanon with their son – its pacing and the manner in which it mediates time are virtual, rather than physical. To read it, the reader must first go to the website and scroll down or click through the images in sequence. In other words, its gutters – the empty spaces in which, as Scott McCloud argues, much of the relationship between a comic’s reader and the comic’s author occurs – take place in time, through the click of the reader’s mouse, and not on the page, between one panel and the next.42 Nevertheless, following Jared Gardner, I argue that the comic genre is defined ‘less by its formal properties – speech balloons, gutters, even sequential images – than by its formal invitation to the reader to project herself into the narrative and to project the narrative beyond the page’.43 This narrative relationship depends on a sort of

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social contract, which in the ‘Kerblog’ case is the reader’s volition to keep on clicking. What sets the autographic medium apart from the purely autobiographical form is that comic artists not only use autobiography to ‘represent their sense of self, convey their memories of past events and dreams for the future, create a sense of authenticity and engage their readers’, as all autobiographers must, but they also use the particularities of the comic form in order to engage in what Elisabeth El Refaie describes as a process of ‘commemoration’, in which ‘private memories are shaped into a narrative for public consumption’.44 In other words, comic artists use the form to communicate with their audiences in ways that other autobiographers cannot. For example, in the top-left corner of the ‘Kerblog’ entry titled ‘One War Leads to Another’ (and subtitled, ‘The Lebanese Wars Chronicles’) from 23 July 2006, the text reads, ‘what we knew from the civil war (1975– 1990)’, (Figure 3). This text, like all the other images and labels in the panel, is enclosed in a spiked bubble. Inside each bubble is an image and a caption; these include mundane statements like ‘a lot of whiskey’, ‘no work’, ‘no electricity’, ‘a lot of cigarettes’ and ‘a lot of sounds’, but also more existential ones, like ‘a lot of questions’ and, in a bigger caption, ‘a lot of nothing and nothing to do’. The panel works its way visually and textually from left to right, finally leading the eye to the large speech bubble in the bottom-right corner, which reads, ‘What is new in this “new” war?’; the final spiked bubble, in the very bottom-right of the panel shows a small Mazen answering that question with, ‘I am not young anymore.’ Visually, the bulk of the panel is filled with the shared wartime experiences of a Lebanese imagined community – the ‘we’ of the top-left caption. These shared memories of past war fill up the page, their spiked enclosures emphasizing the barbed nature of these recollections. Together, these communal memories simultaneously push Mazen’s concern to one side, but they also emphasize just how many of his memories are shared by this communal ‘we’. Mazen Kerbaj’s war blog uses the form to engage with his readership in a manner that retains these dual tensions between the writer and the collective, and between the realization that the work is

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Figure 3 Mazen Kerbaj, ‘One War Leads to Another’ (‘The Lebanese Wars Chronicles’), 23 July 2006

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a produced work and its retention of an authentic immediacy, without resolving them; this, Jared Gardner argues, is a quality particular to comics. Gardner writes that autographic comics, which he also calls graphic memoirs, make: A simultaneous claim of autobiography and fiction, and [a] simultaneous demand on the reader for both distance and identification. If fiction is an ideal form for identification and affective attachment and autobiography is an ideal form for auratic distance and contemplation (including the transformative silences of testimony), autography is the narrative form that allows both to share the frame.45 A panel from ‘Kerblog’ dated 15 – 16 July 2006 addresses this issue head on. As bomb flashes go off around him, Mazen is looking at the computer screen, from which disembodied eyes stare back at him. The expression on his face is one of happiness, and the text in the speech bubble reads, in Arabic, ‘Thank god for this window!’ In this panel, the author is acknowledging that his autographic blog is a public artifact, shared by all those who read it. He derives joy and pleasure from this, and is able to forge a relationship with his readers through placing himself in his work. By exposing his vulnerability in this way, Kerbaj forms a more empathic relationship with his readership, which in turn highlights the authenticity of his experience. Elisabeth El Refaie writes that: The resulting increased awareness of the mediating role of the author/artist on the part of readers does not necessarily affect the perceived authenticity of a particular autobiographical work. In fact, artists who draw attention to their own interpretative practices and to the artificiality of all representation may, paradoxically, strike the reader as more, rather than less authentic.46 In Lena Merhej’s memoir of the 2006 war, as soon as the character Lena hears the news, she reacts to it in a specific way. The image

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shows Lena, eyes looking down in concern at a knot – or perhaps a hole, as if caused by shrapnel or a bullet – while the text says, ‘I felt sick to my stomach. I had to take care of myself [. . .] I decided to do something for myself that I had ached to do for a while.’ The following panels on the page depict Lena drawing a portrait of her friend. This selfish admission that the author’s first reaction was to think of herself, and to do something for herself, elicits the reader’s sympathy through Lena’s expressive images, which work along with the text, and, in particular, through the eye contact that the character maintains with her readers. This sense of collaboration and engagement between reader and artist is reinforced visually in both comics, and used to draw the reader into an ethical stance vis-a`-vis the character in question. In Lena Merhej’s work, Lena is always facing the reader, her eyes drawn slightly larger than life-size. In comics, the ways in which the face and the body are drawn are particularly relevant. Elisabeth El Refaie explains: Where there is apparent ‘eye-contact’ between a depicted character and the viewer, the former seems to be ‘demanding’ something of the latter, whereas lack of eye contact invites detached scrutiny [. . .] an eye-level view suggests and equal relationship [. . .] finally, [a horizontal angle] is thought to indicate the degree of involvement a viewer is invited to feel with a person in an image, with a full frontal view indicating a maximum degree of involvement.47 While Kerbaj most often depicts himself in profile, he nevertheless draws both his eyes on the same side of his face, thereby always interpellating his reader into the frame.48 Rather than inviting a passive, external gaze onto the events of the war and the ways in which they are playing out these autographic texts force the reader into face-to-face contact with the artist. And, as this face grows increasingly more haggard as the war drags on, the reader is forced into an empathetic relationship with the artist’s autographic self. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud expands on the amplificatory

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effect that the simplified drawings in cartoons and comics have on the reader’s emotions and engagement with the text. McCloud explains that the simple cartoon forces the reader to transition from a detached to an involved relationship, in which instead of simply observing the cartoon figure, he or she becomes the cartoon.49 It is comics’ ability to represent and produce meaning in a medium other than the purely textual language of literature or the purely visual language of the image, that makes it a privileged medium for communicating the precariousness of life at those limits of representation and imagination. Kerbaj and Merhej use the form’s qualities to draw their readers in, and to attempt to position themselves and their readers within their country’s violent past and present.50 For example, after describing the conflicts that the 2006 war was producing inside Lebanon and among her acquaintances, Lena writes, ‘I preferred to resist in the best way I knew. So, I drew.’ The entire page on which this occurs – save for the initial panel, in which we see Lena smiling, waving and drawing, her eyes looking outwards from the page – is borderless and lists the items that she has drawn for the children displaced by the hostilities. From her panel, Lena is both producing these items and engaging with these productions; the text places these images of drawing and writing side by side. The comic directs the reader’s attention to the precariousness of childhood in war through its childlike imagery and the text. A‘taqid, like all comics, brings together the personal and the collective, the individual and the political; it draws attention to its own artificiality without condemning it; most significantly, in its direct engagement between artist and audience, it creates an ethical, commemorative relationship. The relationship between empathic representation, the kind in these autographics, and the ethics of representation is one that becomes particularly pertinent in wartime. In her celebrated work on photographic representations of war and suffering, Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag argues that the photographic image has become a compromised form for communicating suffering, since it makes the viewer both passive and complicit in the consumption of this suffering: ‘when we look at photos of great pain, we are

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complicit, we become voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be’.51 Building on Sontag’s argument, Judith Butler outlines how, in the contemporary over-mediated landscape of representation, media consumers have become almost inured to human suffering, and, therefore, to an ability to ethically connect with and respond to it.52 Butler asks, ‘what media will let us know and feel that frailty, know and feel at the limits of representation as it is currently cultivated and maintained?’53 Butler’s question is intended to remain rhetorical; however, in their ability to produce and reproduce empathy, comics like Kerbaj’s and Merhej’s may contain a tentative answer. In the empathic relationships that they construct between reader and viewer, comics undermine Sontag’s emphasis on voyeuristic complicity in a manner that disengages the viewing of an image from passivity. In fact, as the scholarship around comics has shown, the combination of text and image that constitutes the genre makes this relationship an active, mutually engaged one, rather than a merely passive one. In some ways then, the empathic relationship constituted between reader and artist through the unique relationship of text and image in comics becomes a means of overcoming the problem of representing suffering. Particularly in Lebanon, where images of combat are omnipresent and have been since the early days of the civil war, the search for alternative modes of representing conflict in an ethical manner continues to occupy artists and writers. In comics, one of the ways in which trauma and suffering has been represented is through what Elisabeth El Refaie describes as ‘silent panels’, which are ‘ways of depicting horrible memories of that which cannot be drawn or spoken’.54 Silence, for El Refaie, becomes a way to engage directly with the issue of representation, and the impossibility of representation in certain situations – a problem that occupies several panels in ‘Kerblog’. In one, posted midway through the war on 27 July 2006 and titled ‘Black’, Kerbaj inserts a panel that occupies an entire page which has been coloured black. Two text bubbles, in white, puncture the blackness of the page. The first, in the centre of the page asks, ‘How can I show what I am feeling?’ The second, at the bottom of the page, asks, ‘How can

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I understand what I am feeling?’ The questions puncture the darkness around them, thereby puncturing the silence, but the blackness remains overwhelming. In another example, posted soon after the 2006 Israeli bombing of the southern Lebanese village of Qana, there are no images in the panel, just three speech bubbles. Unlike the smooth exterior of regular speech bubbles, these text bubbles are spiky, which emphasizes them but also makes them seem prickly. The first reads, ‘2000 years ago, in Qana, Christ turned water into wine.’ Below it, the second bubble reads, ‘Today, in Qana, the Israeli Air Force turned children into ashes’. Finally, the third bubble reads, ‘Today, in Beirut, I cannot turn this page into a drawing’.55 Kerbaj’s panel, visually filled with three distinct pieces of text, nevertheless gestures to the author’s inability to draw; the page is empty, despite being full, because it is only filled with text and not with its counterpart, the image. As a result, like the panel described above, it is presented as a silent panel. Even silence in graphic narratives is communal and empathetic, however, El Refaie argues, ‘invit[ing] readers to project their own imagined version of this scene onto the blank space, which encourages them to engage emotionally’ with the artist and their emotional intensity.56 In the moments in which visual representation is impossible, the text works visually to connect the artist to his or her reader and to continue to build the relationship of empathy and trust between reader and autographic artist.

History on Repeat In their war comics, Kerbaj and Merhej use comics’ unique ability to produce empathy in an audience as a way of reaching out to a readership that is perhaps jaded by conflict in the Middle East, and connecting with it in a new way. Kerbaj’s online posts translate the artist’s French or Arabic language panels into English, and he encourages his readers to print cartoons and distribute them, ‘so with a little bit of luck, it will end up on condoleeza [sic] rice’s desktop’.57 Kerbaj’s words suggest that he is aware of the impact that his blog is having on his readers, and sees it as a way to ‘help the lebanese cause’.58 Introducing Merhej’s war book, in her foreword to A‘taqid,

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Sahar Mandour writes, in an eerie echo of an earlier generation of war writers and critics that I discussed in Chapter 2, that ‘there is no distinction between “inside” and “outside” in the war [. . .] what you feel, everyone feels. You cannot feel anything else.’ The engagement and dissolution of borders between ‘inside’, the space of the personal, and ‘outside’, public space, is emphasized in the war comics that reach outwards to a public and a readership outside the conflict. Yet, simultaneously, as they reach outwards to their readership, the authors of these texts also reach backwards, into Lebanon’s recent past – especially to their personal memories of childhood and of growing up during Lebanon’s long civil war. The ambiguous relationship to the country’s history of civil conflict and the violence of war is a recurrent motif in these texts, and it is one that is often mediated through personal remembrance; childhood memory; and a troubled, sometimes guilty, nostalgia. In autographic comics, Jared Gardner argues, the past frequently ‘bleeds’ into the present, and these texts seem to concur, taking this process one step further by also projecting it into the future.59 Experiencing this new war as adults triggers personal memories of childhood in the authors – and characters – of both texts. For example, in the panel ‘War Blues’, Mazen speaks alongside a younger version of himself, telling us that he never drew aeroplanes as a child, focusing on ‘only soldiers and tanks and cannons and bombs’. As the sequence continues, adult Mazen addresses the soldiers directly, saying, ‘I miss you guys, you were so cool’. The two texts depict the experience of war and childhood in a sentimental, nostalgic way that does not allow the reader to perceive of the children as victims; however, it does highlight the particularly strange experience of that generation of Lebanese children. In the collaborative intimacy between reader and author, and the effort and affective response that comics demand, these texts become a new way of mediation between the individual and the collective, and hence, a new medium for, to paraphrase Benedict Anderson, imagining communities – past, present and future. In a post dated 21 July 2006, Mazen Kerbaj addresses this issue head on, posting to fellow bloggers who, like him, are blogging about the conflict,

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‘encourage everybody you know to start a blog. your mom, dad, friends, family. everybody. we are writing our future’s collective memory.’60 This statement is especially resonant in Lebanon, with its fraught relationship to history and memory. What sets comics apart as a medium is their ability to directly engage their readers formally and textually; since comics ‘bring together different semantic systems (figural, textual, symbolic) into a crowded field where meaning is both collaborative and competitive – between images, between frames, and between reader and writer’, they enable the creation of a community across time.61 Their duality of form and the manner in which they can contain contradictions without needing to resolve them means that comics seem to be the medium most suited to addressing these contradictions in all their ambivalence.62 In A‘taqid, for example, Lena draws a night out with friends in 2006, in the course of which they exchange stories and memories from their own childhoods growing up during the Lebanese civil war (Figure 4). Framed in one blackened panel, the characters are illuminated in semicircles of light, which gives the reader the effect of windowing or telescoping into the scene; in fact, the reader almost becomes a voyeur into these memories – and significantly, unlike the rest of the comic, none of the eyes are looking directly at the reader. Even more significantly, the characters appear to be acting furtively; in each of the three semi-circles, they whisper to each other conspiratorially, sharing childhood recollections of war. The memories are shared, the panel implies, yet they are illicit, to be whispered and snatched at from afar. The distance between viewer and character, and the fact that there is no eye contact between the characters inside the panel or between them and the reader, seemingly suggests the narrator’s detachment from these events.63 Coupled together, the text in that panel works with the images to simultaneously shed light on these snatched recollections, but also to distance itself from them, as if drawing readers into a complicity between them and the author as they both zoom into these conversations. This technique also serves to complicate these memories’ truthfulness: the reader is not being told this by Lena, with whom he or she already has a relationship

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Figure 4 Exchanging stories about the Lebanese civil war, A‘taqid by Lena Merhej

based on trust and empathy, but rather by these shaded (thus, literally ‘shady’) characters. However, commenting on them, the text sets in relief a small panel matter-of-factly stating, in Lena’s disembodied authorial voice, that ‘the memories were the best’. The unassuming, stark monochrome of

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the panel contrasts sharply with the furtive, sneaky, darkened and illicit behaviour of these characters; together, they reveal a guilty tension regarding the war, an abiding guilt not at having survived, but at having enjoyed some aspects of it, and the difficulty of being forced to acknowledge this. The text does not make explicit whom these characters may be ashamed of/for: their readers? Each other?; nor does it venture to explain why they may be ashamed. In fact, it produces this tension and refuses to resolve it. Even if these stories are all made up and could not possibly have happened (most of these young people were children during the period in question), the text seems to suggest that it does not matter: these are the memories that are sustaining them, even if they are guilty ones; these are also the memories that they are using to connect with their present. In some ways, the 2006 violence becomes the catalyst for the outpouring of the recollections of a new generation – one whose childhood is inexorably bound up with the period of silence in Lebanon’s recent past corresponding to the 1975 –90 civil war, but for whom the 2006 war is the trigger for an unleashing of these personal, familial memories. Perhaps the most famous work of autographics and memory is Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel in which Art interviews his father, Vladek, a Holocaust survivor and interweaves the narrative present with the narrated past. Maus’ exploration of the themes of memory, survivor’s guilt and representation through comics has brought forth a wave of academic interest, including from outside the field of comics studies. In fact, postmemory, the key idea in literary scholar Marianne Hirsch’s Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, emerged from that author’s reading of Maus. As I mention in the previous chapter, postmemory is a significant concept in understanding young Lebanese artists’ interest in re-imagining and reconstituting the narratives of an older generation of Beirutis. For Hirsch: Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose [stories] are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.64

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In Hirsch’s account of the specific historical trauma of the Holocaust, these children will – thankfully – never experience their parents’ suffering, and any connection to this horrific experience can only happen through an act of creativity, such as Maus. The 2006 war in Lebanon, however, not only triggers memories of childhood for that particular generation, but also provokes a new connection with their parents’ generation that, like the relationship between audience and artist, involves empathy. It is as if living through the experiences of the present and the formal expression of this through comics enables these young writers not only to produce empathy with their readership, but also forces upon them an empathic relationship with their parents’ generation. In these autographic texts, the 2006 war forges a new relationship between these adults and their parents, and a new-found connection with that older generation that is absent in the work of earlier Lebanese writers and artists, who distanced themselves from older generations – possibly blaming them for, actively or passively, being complicit in the events of the war. In their autobiographical comics, however, the young adults of the present are forced by the ongoing conflict to come to terms with the experiences of their parents’ generation, which in turn brings about an empathy and understanding rendered as physical similarity. In a sequence of panels from 27 July 2006, we see Mazen transforming physically into his own father. First, we see Mazen, telling us that he remains functional, then asking, ‘until when?’; next, we see his father, Antoine, described as ‘the voice of wisdom’, wondering about international politics. The final sketch in this sequence, drawn and uploaded on the same day as the other two, shows Mazen with a caption that says, ‘I am starting to change’. Significantly, Mazen’s face now looks a lot more like his father’s than his earlier one. The eyes are unaligned sideways, the nose is now closer to Antoine’s; in short, the experience of war seems to be physically changing the young man into a copy of his father. Similarly, Lena Merhej’s autographic work deals with this newfound empathy, and suggests that it is the fact of writing comics that brings it about. A‘taqid emphasizes the physical resemblance between Lena and her mother, down to their similar haircuts. It is in her work

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since 2006, most notably in Mrabba, however, that Merhej fleshes out this new relationship with her mother and, significantly, ties it to the process and act of making comics. The book, which began as serialized sections in Samandal, tells the story of Lena’s mother, Vali, a Germanborn medical doctor who settles in Beirut and remains in the city throughout the civil war, through her daughter’s eyes; Lena’s voice is the authorial and narrative ‘I’. The middle sections of the work are, in fact, a meditation on the creative process. In the section titled ‘How my Mother Tells Stories’, the text transitions from Lena and Vali standing on the balcony as Vali invents stories about the neighbourhood cats, to Lena embarking on a new creative project that is going to be about imagination. Unlike her mother, who only tells her stories to amuse herself, Lena tells all her friends about this project, but then comes up dry. The main panel on the page shows copybooks, pens, pencils and coffee, flanked by two smaller panels embedded in diagonally opposite corners. The top-right one, the first an Arabic speaker would read, shows Lena excitedly telling everyone that she is about to start a new project, the text saying, ‘I spouted theories to my friends, my parents and my colleagues’.65 The creative process is stretched out in the large background panel, and at the very end of the page, Lena sits at her computer with a perplexed, vexed expression on her face. The text says, ‘but I don’t know what to ask about imagination’.66 On the following page, she begins to remember the imaginative games that she played in childhood, which lead her to her mother, and then to the drawings that she would complete in her mother’s German magazines. The text explicitly draws the link between Lena starting to draw and her mother; her recollections of her childhood enable this new project to begin, but also remind her of this connection between her and her parent. As she is drawn deeper into the research, she realizes that her comic has not only brought her closer to her mother but it has also allowed her siblings to do the same, and bonded them together. Each of Lena’s siblings is drawn in his or her own panel, sharing a story about their mother with her since they know that she is writing the comic. Through its self-reflexive commentary on the processes of its own production, and its inspiration, the text highlights the new closeness it

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has produced between the artist and her family – especially with her mother. This new closeness, which has developed as Lena grows to understand her mother as a complex human being, is described in a free, borderless panel. In comics, borders are frequently associated with order and time, so Merhej’s choice to keep this sequence unbounded suggests that it is timeless, that it contains a truth that transcends the margins of the page.67 In it, we see Lena, who has just told her four siblings that she will be accompanying their mother to Canada, much to their seeming consternation. Segueing from their concerned faces, the next image is Lena, looking angelic and shadowed by a giant monster. Above her the text reads, ‘It was as if I had suddenly become a monster’.68 As Lena separates from the monster and assumes various poses of escape, the text continues, ‘In truth, this research was difficult, but it brought me closer to my mother, who transformed from a stern, mysterious mother to a funny, fun mother’.69 The act of producing the comic softens and humanizes her mother to Lena, bringing the two closer. Not only do comics bring audiences and artists closer together, they also enable a closer relationship between the artists and their families – especially their parents.

Beirut, Bukra?70 As they begin to identify more closely with their parents, these young artists are forced to reconcile themselves with – and, perhaps, resign themselves to – the reality of Lebanon’s violent past and, more troublingly, its wars yet to come. I borrow the term ‘the war yet to come’ from the work of Hiba Bou Akar, in which she describes how, in present-day Lebanon, ‘the future can only be imagined as one of contestation and war’.71 Recent ethnographic work by Sami Hermez builds on Bou Akar’s assertion, arguing that ‘the constant anticipation of violence [. . .] runs deep within society in Lebanon’.72 From his experiences in Beirut, Hermez concludes that political life in Lebanon is structured by war, which: [s]uggests a recollection of past violence and an imagination of future violence. Whereas the physicality and perpetration of

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war is often absent, talking of war; imagining it; sensing it; being tense and frustrated by it; feeling despair, resignation, fear, and hope by it; this is how war remains constantly present as a structuring force in social life.73 In the war comics written during and after the 2006 war, this feeling of dread is exacerbated. In one of the darkest panels of ‘Kerblog’, Mazen states matter-of-factly that ‘We are tomorrow’s dead’. While the bleak pessimism of this panel is not sustained across ‘Kerblog’, the work nevertheless frequently makes reference to the dreadful realization that this war will not be the last in Lebanon’s history. In the sequence ‘My mother is/my son is’, Mazen contrasts his mother and his son. Laure, the panel tells us, is 75 and has lived through several wars; the next panel that we click to tells us that this is five-year-old Evan’s first. In addition to measuring her life by war, the most telling indication of this anxiety over the future is the question Laure asks at the end of her panel. Following the list of global and local wars that she has endured – from World War II to the Lebanese civil war to the most recent, 2006, one – the question that the elderly woman asks is not will there never be another war, but ‘do you think I’ll catch another one?’ Her identity has become inextricably tied up with conflict, and the fear of mortality embedded in the question is one that becomes especially poignant in the given context. The juxtaposition of the young child and the elderly woman, with her conflict-marked life, leaves an open-ended question that captures all the anxiety and worry of the future. Laure’s rhetorical question, asked straight at the reader, stretches over the virtual gutter between the two panels, and casts a symbolic shadow over Evan. The same anxiety over the future when mediated through the past is underscored by the ironic title of Lena Merhej’s work, and the sequence from which it takes its name; it, too, is structured as a tension between one generation and the other. The book’s title emerges from the sequence that unfolds on the final two pages of the work. This enforces a circularity between beginning and end, but also a sense that the events of the book are all a lead-up to the final panel.

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This build-up begins with Lena describing her mother and father. Veterans of previous conflicts, they are both reported as being calm during the ongoing war; however, the visuals here complicate the text’s assertion by showing them both with the downcast eyes that the autographic has already established as the signifier of worry. Yet, despite the fact that they are visibly anxious, the parents remain capable of making decisions and taking charge. In short, they behave as adults; their grown-up children, in contrast, are a different story. Shaded in dark grey, they babble incessantly, are incoherent, have animal fangs, or weep or scream. Unlike their parents, they have lost the ability to be functional. While the memories of the civil war may have brought them guilty pleasures, the experience of this current war has brought them nothing but stress. By the final panel, however, the siblings are all sitting together at a table – albeit not meeting each others’ or the reader’s gaze. Visually and verbally invoking the earlier caption, the text reads, ‘I think we will be calm during the next war’. Set against each other, the anxious faces and the text’s assertion work, once again, to underscore the mismatch between them; but they also reinforce the fact that there will be a next war, and that the young adults will become like their parents: it is both empathy towards the past, and resignation in the face of an uncertain future. This new-found realization not only reinforces the bond between generations, and enables the sort of empathic relationship I described above; in present-day Lebanon, as anxiety mounts over the future and the potential of future violence, the cyclical nature of violence emerges in these artists’ work as an anxiety not only about the family, but also about the future of the city. As Hiba Bou Akar and Sami Hermez suggest, the continual anticipation of violence radically alters everyday practices, sometimes in ways that are not even comprehended by the actors themselves.74 Significantly, Bou Akar shows that the constant presence and fear of the war yet to come has profound implications on spatial practices in contemporary Beirut; she argues that: The geographies of the war yet to come are continuously shifting, momentarily solidifying through violence, only to be contested and reconfigured again [. . .] they are produced by

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continuously negotiated articulations of three main processes – urbanization, neoliberalization, and the construction of sectarian differences (commonly known as sectarianism).75 Although her work focuses on the urban-planning practices on Beirut’s peripheries, Bou Akar’s assertion that the war yet to come has a spatial logic resonates in the post-2006 work of Kerbaj and Merhej, which projects this anxiety – and, sometimes, especially in Kerbaj’s work, its ambivalence – onto the urban space. By using the narrative language of comics, which comprises ‘the verbal, the visual and the way these two representational modes interact on a page’, artists like Mazen Kerbaj and Lena Merhej position themselves within Lebanon’s – and Beirut’s – traumatic past and its anxious future in a particular way.76 In Mrabba, for example, on a page in which she traces her mother’s trajectory through the houses and cities that she has lived in from 1958 onwards, Merhej draws two versions of the same street – ‘Ardati Street – one in 1973, and one in 1996. This is the only street that is duplicated on the page, and the small panels are placed on top of each other. The 1973 one depicts a busy street that depicts, in order from left to right, a mechanic’s shop, a ful shop and a woman walking out of a store whose sign says ‘Sinno’, flanked by trees and bushes. Six years into what she elsewhere describes as the ‘post-war phase’, during the 1990s, the same street is depicted with cement blocks, barbed wire and a potbellied man standing guard.77 The comic registers the changed urban dynamic in its transition through time between panels. By dating the same street, and highlighting the differences in urban usage between the pre-war and the postwar, presumably also ‘peaceful’ era, it also places the heavy securitization of this once everyday space within what Bou Akar describes as ‘the anticipation logic and discourses of future violence’.78 The comic shows how the urban fabric has been inexorably altered by the experiences of the 23 years that have passed in the gutter between the two panels, and how that troubled past has created a present constantly fearful of violence yet to come. The anxiety produced by this anticipation of violence arises again at a later moment in Mrabba, and once again connects past, present and

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future. In the section ‘How my Mother Told Stories’, Lena, stuck with writer’s block, remembers how, in her childhood, she used to imagine her mother as a princess.79 A picture of her mother as a child jolts Lena’s memory, leading her to remember how, as a child, she would use her imagination to fill in the gaps in her reality. We see a page with six paired panels. In the first is an image of an empty fountain in a park; its pair shows the fountain, filled, and people enjoying the public park (Figure 5). The text says, ‘In the Sanayeh garden, I imagined the fountain erupting, as I had seen it at the Sukkars’ house’.80 The third image is of a half-filled pool, and its counterpart is of the same pool, filled, with children splashing about in it. The commentary below says, ‘I solved the problem of the limited water supply at summer camp with my imagination as well’.81 The final pair of images in the sequence is larger than the first four, and prefaced by the statement ‘Today, this ability to imagine makes me panic’.82 The first panel of this pair depicts a street corner, with a car passing by and plant pots in the windows. Its twin shows the same street, with a bloodied corpse in the middle, fire bursting from the shop windows and a barricade made of cement bags. Underneath, the text says, ‘Since July 2006, I sometimes suddenly see the street transformed into the battlefield of a civil war’.83 The page plays on contrasts between empty and full, between the greening of the park and the filling up of the pool, to finally reach its visual punchline. Lena’s wartime childhood forced her to imagine a peacetime verdancy and affluence; however, her experiences of the past and present also lead her to be unable to stop the intrusion of violence into her seemingly calm everyday life. If the past was represented by the smaller panels, the present and its seemingly inevitable counterpart, the violent urban future, loom large on the page. Lena cannot stop the encroachments of war onto how she perceives, and represents, the city. Three generations, past, present and future, are joined together and bound to Beirut in Mazen Kerbaj’s sequential narrative ‘Suspended Time, Vol. 1’, which appeared in the first volume of Samandal in 2008. The narrative is arranged as an entire piece formed of nine columns and 18 rows of equally sized, equally spaced panels. The comic starts with a newspaper announcement of a birth: Mazen

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Figure 5 Lena Merhej ‘In the Sanayeh garden, I imagined the fountain erupting, as I had seen it at the Sukkars’ house/I solved the problem of the limited water supply at summer camp with my imagination as well/Since July 2006, I sometimes suddenly see the street transformed into the battlefield of a civil war: today, this ability to imagine makes me panic’

Kerbaj has been born to Antoine Kerbaj and Laure Ghorayeb. The newspaper transforms into a man, easily recongnizable as Mazen’s father, the well-known actor Antoine Kerbaj. Antoine is smoking a

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cigarette, flanked by two columns of people – one each to his left and right. By the 27th panel, a date has appeared to his right: 1975. As the panels continue, the man becomes Burj al-Murr, his cigarette becoming smoke erupting from one of its floors. The same people continue to watch. Eventually, the burning building becomes a younger man, who also, like his father, stands with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. That man is Mazen, as a cut-out from the newspaper announcement of his birth tells us. Like his father before him, Mazen is also transformed into a building – an abstracted one, this time, surrounded by others. This urban scene eventually becomes the body of a woman, which bursts and brings forth a child. A new birth announcement tells us that this is Mazen’s son, Evan. Eventually, Evan begins to transform as well, into an interrogation mark, before the panels revert back to Mazen, the burning Burj al-Murr and, finally, Antoine, Mazen’s father. In the final sequence of 32 panels, Antoine becomes the interrogation mark again, which begins to fade into black panels, in which only the words ‘toot toot’ appear. The narrative goes from the familial scale to the urban, from the personal to the public to the historical, before looping back to the personal and ending on the urban. The family’s genealogy is intimately linked to the city; they become it, and it becomes them. Consequently, the same anxiety shrouds them both. If the child is the future, the interrogation mark poses the question not only of what he will become but also of what will become of the city. Both are shrouded in mystery; the future of neither is certain. In present-day Lebanon, comics connect past, present and future in the lives of these individuals and the city they inhabit. While the past and present produce conflicting emotions that these comics refuse to resolve, the future is always projected as anxiety. Perhaps the only redeeming feature of this anxiety is that, like shared memories of the past, it is an act that transcends the individual and becomes collective. In Lebanon today, the anticipation of future violence ‘has become a way for people [. . .] to relate to themselves, to others in society, and to the institutions around them’; perhaps this shared imaginary will endure where other ways of imagining and producing shared communities have failed.84

EPILOGUE

In the summer of 2012, I spent three months in Lebanon, something I had not done in over five years. Although I stayed mostly in Beirut, I would often visit my family in our village, Beit Chabab. Despite being only 20 km away from Beirut, the distance between the two had never seemed greater. Terrible traffic made trips to the city exasperating, so my relatives would only venture down when it was absolutely necessary, for a medical emergency or to pick someone up from the airport. There was, however, more to this perceived distance than traffic. Often, when we were discussing politics or social issues, members of my family would list a number of factors that alienated them from the city – ranging from how expensive everything had become to how difficult it was to get to Beirut, to how different and unfamiliar the cityscape now looked to them. The conclusion they drew from these myriad situations, however, was always the same: they would shake their heads and say, Bayrut battalit la-ilna, ‘Beirut is no longer for us’. My relatives were not the only people who expressed this alienation from the urban landscape to me that summer. In fact, as I rode in shared taxis across the city that year, drivers and passengers alike would repeat the same phrase. When asked about their place of birth or residence, they would name neighbourhoods firmly embedded into the urban landscape. Regardless, they seemed as

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alienated from the idea of the city as my family members in the mountains were. Lebanese across class, sectarian and place lines all unanimously felt detached from the city. The phrase ‘Beirut is no longer for us’ is resonant of so many intertwined issues, as complicated and complex as the meaning of urban space itself. As I have argued throughout this work, urban space is a complex, dynamic, multifaceted system that depends on multiple networks formed of a variety of interrelated social activities and agents, as well as economic and political factors. As such, the production of meaning from spaces is also sensitive to the fluctuations in the meaning of spaces. The sentiment ‘Beirut is no longer for us’ produces a new set of meanings about the city space. In the phrase, Beirut transforms from a place that people used to actively connect with, to a place that they can no longer even imagine as theirs. It is both nostalgic and elegiac, mourning the loss of a sense of belonging. It projects itself into the future as further alienation, further distance. It enfolds a sense of helplessness and desperation as well as deprivation, in its suggestion that something once precious has now been snatched away.1 By contrast, in its stubborn refusal to give in to this defeatism, despite all else, Lebanese literature is a form of cultural production that continues to fully insist upon its connection to, and engagement with, the city – and with the Lebanese polity. Just to take a few examples from this work: despite their brief, sometimes intense, moments of despair and alienation, both Rabee Jaber and Mazen Kerbaj insist that Beirut is theirs, and they both continue to produce work that entrenches them in the history, culture and social fabric of the city and of Lebanon itself. Literature remains a site in which communal spaces can be imagined for a wide swathe of the population, not merely its ultra-rich elite or its wealthy expatriates. It draws attention to those who have been excluded, and draws them in. Literary practice in Lebanon remains a means by which concepts of belonging, identity and the shifting contours of the city can be interrogated, critiqued and rendered problematic; by which anxiety over an unknown future can be expressed, and a lost past can be mourned; but in which the paralysis of despair can nevertheless be kept at bay.

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To return to Raymond Williams, whom I first cited in my Introduction: ‘It is useful to stop at certain points and take particular cross-sections: to ask not only what is happening, in a period, to ideas of the country and the city, but also with what other ideas, in a more general structure, such ideas are associated.’2 In examining how Lebanese literature has contributed to the imagining of the city of Beirut – past and present – this book has analysed some of these cross-sections across Lebanon’s modern history in light of Williams’ injunction; many, of course, still remain to be explored.

NOTES Introduction

From Mount Lebanon to Beirut: The Shifting Landscapes of Lebanese Fiction

1. www.warkerblog.blogspot.com/search?updated-max¼2006 – 07 – 20T13% 3A38%3A00 – 07%3A00&max-results¼500 (accessed 4 January 2014). 2. Kerbaj uses the image of the mother and child frequently throughout the sixweek-long blog that he maintained during the war (between 16 July and 27 August 2006); sometimes, he deliberately subverts its Christian iconography by replacing the Virgin Mary with a chador-clad Shi’ite woman from the South mourning over the dead body of her martyred son. www.flickr.com/photos/ 72795424@N00/203713475 (accessed 4 January 2014). 3. www.flickr.com/photos/72795424@N00/209463755 (accessed 4 January 2014). 4. I use ‘Mazen’ to refer to the character drawn in the autobiographical blog; the artist I refer to by his full name. 5. The most recent of which, in July 2006, caused the displacement of approximately 1 million people from southern Lebanese villages and towns. 6. ‘Introduction’, in Angus Gavin and Ramez Bahige Maluf, Beirut Reborn: The Restoration and Development of the Central District (London, 1996), p. 1. 7. A report from the Daily Star dated 26 October 2013 (‘UN Syrian Refugee Numbers Top 800,000’) places the official number of refugees – those registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) – to that date as 800,000; the UNHCR estimates that by December 2013, one quarter of Lebanon’s population will be Syrian refugees. www.dailystar.com.lb/News/ Lebanon-News/2013/Oct-26/235820-un-syrian-refugee-numbers-top-800000. ashx#axzz2j9RZ1jeg (accessed 4 January 2014). 8. R.J. Johnston (ed.), Dictionary of Human Geography (Oxford and Malden, MA, 2000), p. 732. 9. For a great summary of the indebtedness of contemporary human geography studies to Henri Lefe`bvre, see Neil Smith’s introduction to The Politics of Public Space (New York, NY, 2006).

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10. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1984), p. xi. 11. Henri Lefe`bvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991), p. 11. 12. Smith, Public Space, p. 7. 13. Sara Fregonese sums up this tension by describing it as ‘a double imaginary of openness and closure [which] is constantly reproduced and negotiated: Beirut is at once a city-refuge and a city-battleground’. In ‘Between a refuge and a battleground: Beirut’s discrepant cosmopolitanisms’, The Geographical Review, cii/3 (2012), p. 317. 14. Najib Hourani, ‘Capitalists in Conflict: A Political Economy of the Life, Death and Rebirth of Beirut’, unpublished dissertation, New York University (2005), pp. 38 – 9. 15. In a later chapter, I will discuss Foucault’s notion of a heterotopia as a space of resistance to dominant social practices and discourses (see Chapter 3). 16. A notable exception is Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City, about which more will be said later. 17. Tanoukhi, in particular, does a close reading of a close reading – Kwame Anthony Appiah’s text on a Nigerian sculpture, ‘Man on Bicycle’ – to expose what she sees as the contradiction behind contemporary literary analysis’ use of space in post-colonial literature, and especially its propensity ‘either to celebrate the reappropriation of a Western genre on the periphery or lament the perpetual struggle borne of cultural colonialism’. ‘The scale of world literature’, New Literary History, xxxix/2 (2008), p. 612. 18. Tanoukhi, ‘Scale’, p. 600. 19. Ibid., p. 600. 20. Ibid., p. 613. 21. Mona Harb, ‘Pious entertainment: al-Saha traditional village’, ISIM Review, xvii (2006), pp. 10 – 11. Restaurants that attempt to recreate the imagined spaces of traditional Lebanese village, a trend begun by al-Saha, have sprung up across Beirut and elsewhere, leading Deeb and Harb to argue that ‘in Lebanon, the village is valorized more than the city’ – a sentiment that is true for a large part of nostalgic popular culture, but which, as this book shows, is more complicated than that. See also Lara Deeb and Mona Harb, Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut (Princeton, NJ, 2013), p. 118. 22. Deeb and Harb, Leisurely Islam, p. 116. 23. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York, NY, 1973), p. 297. 24. Theodor Hanf, Co-Existence in Wartime Lebanon (London, 1993), p. 199. 25. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Culture (Oxford, 1977), p. 121. 26. Ibid., p. 121. 27. Ibid., p. 123. 28. Ibid., p. 126. 29. While he acknowledges that the restaurant is a tourist attraction that must compete for customers’ money and attention with other touristic sites, despite having neither mountains nor the sea, he also sees the mission of al-Saha to be

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32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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educational. By claiming the village as a non-Christian space, he is also, as Deeb and Harb point out, ‘claim[ing] membership in the Lebanese nation’. Deeb and Harb, Leisurely Islam, p. 119. For Williams, the residual is that which has remained from the past but is still culturally relevant to some degree, and he explicitly describes the idea of rural life as one of the aspects of residual culture. Williams, Marxism, p. 122. These terms are used – sometimes interchangeably – by several writers, including Jens Hanssen in Fin de Sie`cle Beirut (Oxford, 2005); Christopher Stone in Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon (London, 2008) and Elise Salem in Constructing Lebanon: A Century of Literary Narratives (Gainesville, FL, London, 2003); see also, Sune Haugbolle, War and Memory in Lebanon (New York, NY, 2010), p. 47. Throughout this work, the term ‘mountain nationalism’ will be used when describing the political ideology constructed upon a belief in the exceptionalism of the Lebanese mountain as a privileged space in the Middle East, and ‘mountain romanticism’ to describe the literature produced by a group of writers who, inadvertently sometimes, became associated with this nationalism. Henri Lammens, Kharidat Lubnan (Beirut, 1898), p. 332. Ibid., pp. 40, 41, 89. Lammens, Kharidat, p. 90. In The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, Sabry Hafez points out that the term ‘watan’, now synonymous with a territorial form of nationalism (in Egypt, especially), was a neologism coined in the midnineteenth century to distinguish the nascent Arab nation-space from the Ottoman, Islamic millah or ummah. Sabry Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse (London, 1993), p. 97. In ‘Imagined identities, imagined nationalisms’, Charles Smith points out that, in the case of Egypt, this in no way conflicted with a feeling of Egyptian cultural primacy. Charles Smith, ‘Imagined identities, imagined nationalisms: print culture and Egyptian nationalism in light of recent scholarship’, International Journal of Middle East Studies xxix/4 (1997), p. 612. Here, it is clear that Kharidat is imagining a nation-space within the strict territorial boundaries of Mount Lebanon, and Lammens uses the term watan as a marker of distinction; however, it is unclear whether he gave much thought to the wider Arab nation-space outside Mount Lebanon. Lammens, Kharidat, p. 89. Ibid., p. 326. Ibid., p. 41. Doris Sommers, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley, CA, 1991), p. 7. Silk production was the major Lebanese industry, and silk was the primary export in the nineteenth century; initially introduced into the country by the French, by the 1860s, silk cultivation and distribution were dominated by Lebanese merchants. By the early twentieth century, the industry had collapsed, mostly due to competition from Japan. There are several excellent historical works on the different aspects of the Lebanese silk trade, including Leila Fawaz,

NOTES TO PAGE 13

40. 41.

42.

43.

44.

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Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth Century Beirut (Cambridge, 1983); Hourani and Shehadi’s The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration (London, 1992) pp. 24 – 40; and Dominque Chevallier, Mont Liban (Paris, 1971), pp. 213– 21. For the early history of sericulture in the context of Christian Mount Lebanon, see Richard Van Leeuwen, Notables and Clergy in Mount Lebanon (Leiden, 1994), pp. 63 – 94. Lammens, Kharidat, p. 189. In Ruwwad al-Nahda al-Haditha (Beirut, 1966), p. 178, Marun ‘Abbud claims that Lammens’ text was translated from the French by Najib Hubayqa and Rashid Shartuni; however, there is no indication of this in al-Machriq, or in any of the other sources on Lammens. For more on the Arab press in the nineteenth century, see Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East (New York, NY, 1995), p. 62. The relationship between the press and its readers is further explored in Elizabeth Holt’s, ‘Narrative and the Reading Public in 1870s Beirut’, Journal of Arabic Literature, no. 40 (2009), pp. 37 – 70. For more on the Jesuits’ relatively belated decision to begin to publish fiction, see Abdel-Aziz Abdel-Meguid, The Modern Arabic Short Story (Cairo, n.d.), footnote, p.72; Constantin Georgescu, ‘A Forgotten Pioneer of the Lebanese ‘Nahda’: Salim Al-Bustani’, unpublished dissertation, New York University (1978), p. 59. A great bibliographic resource, with biographies of the founders of Arabic-language publishing in the nineteenth century, is Phillipe Tarazi’s Tarikh al-Sahafa al-‘Arabiyya (Beirut, 1913). Lammens is spotlighted in particular as an individual who ‘became inseparably associated with Universite´ Saint-Joseph and with the pro-Christian policy of France in Lebanon’ in Asher Kaufman, Reviving Phoenicia: The Search for Identity in Lebanon (London, 2004), p. 33. For a more extensive discussion on the role of the French in Lebanese national-identity formation, see Kais Firro, Inventing Lebanon Nationalism and the State under the Mandate (London, 2004), pp. 15 – 17; Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (London, 1962); Kamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (Berkeley, CA, 1988); Meir Zamir, The Formation of Modern Lebanon (London, 1985); and Carol Hakim’s recent The Origins of the Lebanese National Idea (Berkeley, CA, 2013). For more on the role of the Jesuits specifically, see Kaufman’s chapter ‘First Buds: 1860– 1916’, in Reviving Phoenicia, pp. 21 –55. In Artillery of Heaven, Ussama Makdisi makes an interesting intervention in the debate over French and American missionaries’ work in Lebanon. Without denying the role that these two missions played in the politics of Ottoman Mount Lebanon and Beirut in the nineteenth century – particularly in the latter half of the century – he also points out that ‘to reduce the missionaries in the Ottoman Empire to “mere cultural imperialists” is to misconstrue the resiliency of the Ottoman Arab world and the originality of cultural spaces created by the intersection of American and Ottoman histories’. Ussama Makdisi: Artillery of Heaven (Ithaca, NY, 2008), p. 9. Nevertheless, he does concur that the ‘cultural imperialist’ term ‘has resonated for the simple reason

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45. 46. 47.

48.

49. 50.

51. 52.

NOTES TO PAGES 13 –16 that Western, including American, missionaries did overwhelmingly justify the subordination, if not always the ethnic cleansing or extermination, of native peoples during a genocidal nineteenth century’. Makdisi, Artillery, p. 10. Makdisi’s call for more nuanced interpretation of Western missionaries’ work is certainly welcome, but in this case it is also clear that the Jesuits purposefully saw their cultural work as an extension of French colonial power in Mount Lebanon. This ‘devotion’ is dramatized in Kharidat through a passage in which a portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte, taken down when the novel’s hero emigrates, is put back up when he returns and sets the village to rights. Quoted in John Spagnolo, France and Ottoman Lebanon, 1861– 1914 (London, 1977), p. 20. The Jesuits were frequently challenged on the educational and cultural fields by the American Protestant missionaries, whose Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut) was – and remains – the Universite´ Saint-Joseph’s leading rival. For more on the competition for cultural dominance in Lebanon, see Ussama Makdisi, Artillery. Arguing that such histories, focusing as they do on the European Powers’ influence, erase local and Ottoman power players, a new generation of revisionist historians – including Engin Akarli and Jens Hanssen, and the scholars behind the collective The Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire (Wu¨rzburg, 2002) – has also contributed to a further deepening of the understanding of nineteenth-century modernity in Beirut and Mount Lebanon. Viswanathan’s work charts the process by which colonial Indian education curricula were shaped by the demands and requirements of British rulers and the interplay between Anglicist and Orientalist forces within the British colonial system, and how in turn these shaped the formation of the English literary canon. The French Jesuits and American missionaries in Lebanon have both, albeit separately, influenced Lebanese private education for over a century through their schools and universities. Kamal S. Salibi, The Modern History of Lebanon (Westport, CT, 1976), pp. 130, 134. Stone, Popular Culture, p. 23. For more on Corm, see Asher Kaufman’s ‘“Tell us our history”: Charles Corm, Mount Lebanon and Lebanese nationalism’, Middle Eastern Studies xl/3 (2004); a good introduction to Chiha is Hartmann and Olsaretti’s ‘“The first boat and the first oar”: inventions of Lebanon in the fiction of Michel Chiha’, Radical History Review, lxxxvi (2003); a detailed analysis of Chiha’s role in the formation of a particular kind of Lebanese nationalism can be found in Fawwaz Traboulsi’s Silat bila Wasl: Michel Chiha wa-l-Idiyulujiyya alLubnaniyya (Beirut, 1999). Hanssen, Fin de Sie`cle Beirut, footnote, p. 233. These men – ‘by a happy chance’, as R.C. Ostle puts it – met in New York, and quickly established a poetry society called the ‘Pen Association’, at ‘a vital stage in the development of romantic poetry in Arabic’. R.C. Ostle, ‘The Romantic Poets’, Studies in Modern Arabic Literature (Warminster, 1985), p. 95.

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53. Although Corm was undoubtedly an influence upon Rihani, it must also be said that, unlike Lammens and Corm, Rihani, Jibran and the others did not explicitly seek to produce an exclusively Lebanese literature or identity; rather, in fact, they saw themselves as part of the nahda movement, the renaissance of the Arabic language. For more on this, see Jihad Fadil’s introduction in Al-Adab al-Hadith fi-Lubnan (London, 1996), pp. 11 – 14. Rihani, in particular, was an Arab nationalist, as Akl Keyrouz points out in ‘Ameen Rihani: Promoter of Arab Unity’, in Naji B. Oueijan, Khalil Gibran and Amin Rihani Prophets of Lebanese-American Literature (Louaize, 1999) pp. 197– 213. 54. Amin Rihani, Qalb Lubnan (Beirut, 1947), p. 2. 55. For more on this, see Khalil Hawi, Khalil Gibran, His Background, Character and Works (Beirut, 1972), pp. 112–13. The published proceedings from the 1998 International Conference on Lebanese-American Literary Figures, Khalil Gibran and Amin Rihani Prophets of Lebanese-American Literature (Louaize, 1998) contains several essays that highlight the connection between Amin Rihani, Khalil Gibran and Western Romantic poets, including Abdul Aziz Said’s ‘Ameen Rihani’s Spirituality: Unity in Diversity’, pp. 222–7; and James E. Barcus’ ‘Wordsworth, Gibran and the Moral Landscapes of Romanticism’, pp. 228–42. See also Yumna ‘Id’s Al-Dalala al-Ijtima‘iyya li-l-Adab al-Rumantiqi fi-Lubnan (Beirut, 1988); and Najib Zakka’s section ‘Sens poe´tique et nature’ in Najib Mansur Zakka, Litte´rature Libanaise Contemporaine: Aspects The´matiques (Kaslik, Lebanon, 2000), pp. 379–91 56. Albert Habib Hourani and Nadim Shehadi, The Lebanese in the World, p. 31. 57. Akram Fouad Khater, Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870– 1920 (Berkeley, CA, 2001), p. 109. 58. Ibid., p. 188. Avoiding claims of Lebanese exceptionalism, Khater nonetheless points out that these dual trends of a mountain-based affluent middle class that brought its emigrant experience back to Mount Lebanon set Lebanese modernity apart from that in other Arab countries, where modernity was more cleanly divided along urban–rural lines, and where an educated native bourgeoisie set itself apart from the rural peasantry. Ibid., p. 109; see also Introduction. 59. Albert Hourani, ‘Ideologies of the city and the mountain’, in Roger Owen, Essays on the Crisis in Lebanon (London, 1978), pp. 37 – 8. 60. There are several excellent general histories of this period, including Fawwaz Traboulsi’s A History of Modern Lebanon (London, 2007), and Kamal Salibi’s A House of Many Mansions, as well as his earlier The Modern History of Lebanon. 61. Haugbolle, War and Memory, p. 47. 62. Jeff Shalan, ‘Writing the Nation: the Emergence of Egypt in the Modern Arabic Novel’, in Yasir Suleiman and Ibrahim Muhawi (eds), Literature and Nation in the Middle East (Edinburgh, 2004) p. 128. 63. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), p. 1. 64. Quoted in Georgescu, ‘Forgotten Pioneer’, p. 56. 65. Albert Hourani, ‘Ideologies’, pp. 36, 38. 66. Elizabeth Picard, Lebanon: A Shattered Country (New York, NY, 1996), p. 128.

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67. Stone, Popular Culture, pp. 37 – 8. 68. Fawwaz Traboulsi writes of how Chiha’s influence has impacted even his ideological opponents in the leftist, pan-Arab national movement. Traboulsi, Silat, p. 13. 69. Stone, Popular Culture, p. 38. 70. Williams, Marxism, p. 125. 71. Not all of this exchange was non-violent; for example in 1958, considerable civil unrest led to President Kamil Chamoun calling in the US Marines to help shore up his presidency. 72. Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness (Berkeley, CA, 1995), p. 134. 73. Chiha was related to the Pharaons, an influential banking family since Ottoman times (to this day, their family bank is called Banque Pharaon-Chiha); Corm was the son of a wealthy family who stopped his writing activities in order to found a very successful financial empire. Michelle Hartman and Alessandro Olsaretti, ‘“The first boat and the first oar”’: Asher Kaufman, ‘“Tell us our history”’, pp. 1 – 28. 74. Samir Khalaf has written extensively on the rapid urbanization of Beirut, especially in Hamra of Beirut; a Case of Rapid Urbanization (Leiden, 1973) (with Per Kongstad), and Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon: A History of the Internalization of Communal Conflict (New York, NY, 2002). For an interesting firsthand ethnography of the rapid urbanization of Beirut in the 1960s and 1970s, see Fuad Khuri, From Village to Suburb: Order and Change in Greater Beirut (Chicago, IL, 1975). 75. Khater, Inventing Home, p. 184. 76. Ibid. While this was not, of course, confined to literary work per se, or to prose fiction in particular, the need to limit the scope of this project foreclosed a deeper discussion of film, theatre or poetry. 77. Darwish, Memory, p. 52. 78. Elias Khoury, The Journey of Little Gandhi (Minneapolis, MN, 1994), p. 4. 79. Johnston, Dictionary of Human Geography, pp. 214– 15. 80. Sabah Ghandour, ‘Introduction’ to Khoury, Gandhi, p. xvii. 81. Aseel Sawalha, Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City, (Austin, TX, 2010), p. 28. In his ‘Capitalists in Conflict’, Najib Hourani discusses how this was achieved, and how the ‘properties of former residents, shopkeepers and craftsmen were appropriated and demolished between 1992 and 1994, [as] the company hired a host of young, western-trained Lebanese architects and urban planners to design the new city center under the direction [of] high powered American, British and French consulting firms’. Najib Hourani, ‘Capitalists’, p. 9. 82. The books Projecting Beirut, edited by Peter Rowe and Hashim Sarkis (Munich, 1998) and Recovering Beirut, edited by Samir Khalaf and Philip Khoury (Leiden, 1993), as well as Memory for the Future, edited by Jad Tabet (Beirut, 2002), emerged out of the proceedings of conferences on the city. In them, critics of Solidere’s project, such as US-trained architect Hashim Sarkis and French-

NOTES TO PAGES 24 –30

83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90.

91. 92.

93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

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trained architect Jad Tabet present several arguments against the method, the intention and the effect of Solidere’s activities. Najib Hourani, ‘Capitalists’, p. 346. See, for example, Saree Makdisi’s article ‘Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial identity in the Age of Solidere’, Middle East Report, cciii (1997), pp. 5 – 11 and his essay ‘Beirut, a City without History?’ in Ussama Makdisi and Paul Silverstein (eds), Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (Bloomington, IN, 2006), pp. 201– 14. ‘Introduction: Mapping Memory’, in Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (eds), Memory: History, Theory, Debates (New York, NY, 2010), pp. 1 – 9, p. 1. Radstone and Schwarz, ‘Introduction’, History, Theory, Debates, p. 2. Ibid., p. 3. Haugbolle, War and Memory, p. 31. Sawalha, Reconstructing, p. 28. For example, the Solidere publication Beirut Reborn pays homage to Beirut’s cultural past by talking about the Phoenician and Roman cities at length, but only dedicates a paragraph to the almost 500year Ottoman history of the city. Sawalha quotes one of her sources as saying ‘people have not yet forgotten the city center [. . .] [they] are attached emotionally to their previous places’. Sawalha, Reconstructing, p. 29. Unfortunately, an entire generation of people born after the late 1960s has no such memories to fall back on. Kamal Salibi, Cross Roads to Civil War: Lebanon 1958– 1976 (Delmar, NY, 1976). For Nora, the distinction between a lieu de me´moire and a milieu de me´moire is that while lieux de me´moire are the sites in which ‘memory is crystallized [. . .] in which a residual sense of continuity remains’ – i.e. monumental sites – milieux de me´moire are ‘settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience’. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York, NY, 1996), p. 1. See, for example, Gavin and Maluf, Beirut Reborn, p. 27. Sawalha, Reconstructing, p. 30. Ibid., p. 38. David Harvey, ‘The Right to the City’, New Left Review 52 (2008), pp. 1– 10 (p. 1). Ibid., p. 6.

Chapter 1 Inhospitable Spaces: City and Village in Tawahin Bayrut and Tuyur Aylul 1. After the first mention of each novel in the chapter, I will revert to using the shortened titles of each.

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NOTES TO PAGES 30 –31

2. Timothy Brennan, ‘The national longing for form’, in Homi Bhabha (ed), Nation and Narration (London, 1990), p. 53. There is a well-known body of work on the relationship between nationalism and the ‘folk’; Stephen Sheehi provides a list of this scholarship in the Arab world in Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (Gainesville, FL, 2004), p. 96. 3. Sabry Hafez, ‘Transformation’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 57.1 (1994), p. 94. 4. This has been extensively discussed in much work on Egypt; for example, Sabry Hafez writes that ‘the “self” was identified with the country, often represented in literature as a beloved peasant girl [. . .] with her familiar attributes, beauty and good nature; on the rare occasions when she was presented as an urban woman, she was still an idealized girl from the popular quarter of the city in which the rural ethos was very much alive’. Hafez, ‘Transformation’, p. 94. See also, Samah Selim’s The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880– 1985 (New York, NY, 2004). 5. Akram Fouad Khater, Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870– 1920 (Berkeley, CA, 2001), p. 109: ‘While in other parts of the Middle East the middle classes remained a small percentage in comparison with the overwhelming peasant and laboring classes, in Lebanon returning emigrants swelled the ranks of the middle class to make it far more visible and potent in the making of a “modern” Lebanon. Moreover, while this process remained centered in the major cities of most of the region, in Lebanon emigrants brought the debates and tensions surrounding the definition and articulation of “modernity” into the hinterlands.’ 6. Elise Salem, Constructing Lebanon: A Century of Literary Narratives (Gainesville, FL, London, 2003), p. 55. 7. For many e´migre´s to North America, ‘Lebanon’ became a compensatory image of all things that they – as immigrants – did not have. See Khater, Inventing, introduction. 8. See Yumna ‘Id, Al-Dalala al-Ijtima‘iyya li-Harakat al-Adab al-Rumantiqi fi-Lubnan (Beirut, 1988). 9. The link between this focus upon the mountain and the village as loci for nationalist sentiment produced by predominantly Christian writers during the early days of the Lebanese state in the 1950s and 1960s has been discussed in more detail in Stone’s introduction. Christopher Stone, Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon: The Fairouz and Rahbani Nation (London, 2008). Hanssen also speaks of this in Fin de Sie`cle Beirut, when he asserts that it was ‘Mountain Romanticism [. . .] which formed the basis of a new Lebanese national idea formulated more systematically by the self-proclaimed “New Pheonicians” after the First World War’, adding in the corresponding footnote that ‘after the First World War, ancient Mount-Lebanon [as exemplified by the work of Charles Corm, such as La Montagne Inspire´e and L’Humanisme de la Montagne ], not the modern provincial capital of Beirut, became the idealized historical template for a future as a Lebanese nation state’. Jens Hanssen, Fin de

NOTES TO PAGES 31 –33

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

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Sie`cle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital (Oxford, 2005), pp. 232– 3. Stone, Popular Culture, p. 166. Ibid., p. 22. Salem, Constructing Lebanon, p. 22. To extrapolate Bourdieu’s hypothesis for the Lebanese context is beyond the scope of this work; however, Bourdieu describes the relationships between the representatives of the ‘dominant’ in the literary field and the mechanisms by which they resist or welcome new interventions in the field in The Field of Cultural Production (New York, NY, 1993), pp. 161–75. In this specific case, the newcomer, Nasrallah, is welcomed by the older, more established Nuayma since her writing appears to continue within the tradition in which his writing sits; in other words, her writing is not perceived as threatening to the dominant cultural paradigm. A formidable literary figure in Lebanon, Nuayma is among the generation of writers that ’Id describes as ‘Romantics’; in addition to writing several volumes of short stories in the ‘mountain nationalist’ tradition, he is also famous for being the biographer of Jibran Khalil Jibran, which adds to his symbolic worth as an authoritative cultural figure within the Lebanese canon. Nuayma is generally grouped along with the writers of the mahjar, such as Jibran and Amin Rihani; for more on Nuayma in particular and his role in mahjar literature, see M.M. Badawi’s Modern Arabic Literature (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 98 – 101; and Robin Ostle’s ‘The Literature of the mahjar’ in Hourani and Shehadi’s The Lebanese in the World (London, 1992), pp. 209– 26. One such example is miriam cooke, who argues that war is the ‘context’ that ensures ‘traditional order’ gives way ‘to a new system that would accommodate the new people and new expectations’. miriam cooke, ‘Women write war: the feminization of society in the fiction of Emily Nasrallah’, Bulletin 14.1 (1987), p. 54. While the Lebanese civil war was perhaps the final death knell for mountain nationalism, its demise, as this chapter shows, had started before then. While several books on the civil war chronicle this period, one of the most timely is perhaps Kamal Salibi’s Cross Roads to Civil War: Lebanon, 1958– 1976 (Delmar, NY, 1976), written at the end of what was then thought to be the Lebanese civil war of 1975– 6. Another good background source is Samir Kassir’s La Guerre du Liban: De La Dissension Nationale Au Conflit Re´gional 1975– 1982 (Paris, 1994). See also Farid el-Khazen’s The Breakdown of the State in Lebanon, 1967– 1976 (London, 2000). Mary Layoun, Wedded to the Land (Durham, NC, 2001), p. 11. This observation has not been confined to Stone; Salem notes the destabilization of the Rahbani myth as well. Salem, Constructing Lebanon, p. 139. See Mona Amyuni, La Ville, Source D’Inspiration: Le Caire, Khartoum, Beyrouth, Paola Scala Chez Quelques E´crivains Arabes Contemporains (Beirut, 1998); and

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20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

NOTES TO PAGES 33 – 37 Samira Aghacy, ‘Lebanese women’s fiction: urban identity and the tyrany of the past’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 33.4 (2001), p. 503. As another example, see Stone’s reading of Ziyad Rahbani’s play Nazl al-Surur (Hotel of Happiness), which parodies what Stone describes as the ‘numbing effects of Rahbani-esque “folklore”’ in a play set in Beirut, ‘the very seat of government’ – albeit a Beirut of ‘widespread strikes, demonstrations [and] intermittent water service’ Stone: Popular Culture, pp. 99 –107. Amyuni, La Ville (Beirut, 1998), p. 110. ‘Awwad published Tawahin after a considerable hiatus from writing – of more than 30 years. Prior to that, he had published two short-story collections – al-Sabi al-A‘raj and Qamis al-Suf (both 1937) – and a historical novel, al-Raghif (1939). Paul Starkey, Modern Arabic Literature (Washington, WA, 2006), p. 130: ‘Aylul explores the fate of women seeking to tread an independent path in the modern world’; see also, miriam cooke, ‘Women write war’, pp. 58– 60. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alcaro´n and Minoo Moallem (eds), Between Woman and Nation: Transnationalisms, Feminisms, and the State (Durham, NC, 1999), p. 12. Evelyne Accad, Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East (New York, NY, 1990), p. 100. Some of those who have read this novel as an indictment of patriarchal tradition include Mona Amyuni in La Ville and Eveylne Accad, who has already been mentioned. There is a brief acknowledgement of the novel’s sterotype-shattering female characters in Joseph Zaydan, Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (Albany, NY, 1995) as well as in Salem, Constructing Lebanon. Amyuni, La Ville, pp. 105, 107, says that ‘son oeil prophe´tique avait deja percu le cataclysme a` venir’ (‘his prophetic eye foretold the coming disaster’) and she recounts an anecdote about meeting the author, who told her that he had observed Beirut bubbling away like a casserole; Accad attributes some of the novel’s original acclaim to its ‘prescience in the author’s forewarning of his country’s troubles to come’. Accad, Sexuality, p. 100. The backdrop of the student protests is an interesting choice for ‘Awwad. During the 1960s and 1970s, Lebanon’s universities were often the places where civil unrest – and civic protest – ignited. In his study of student unrest in Lebanon, Halim Barakat directly correlates the protests with issues of national identity: ‘In Lebanon, student strikes have occurred most often in times of fermentation of national movements, national struggle for independence, and national calamities.’ Halim Barakat, Lebanon in Strife: Student Preludes to the Civil War (Austin, TX, 1977), p. 181. Mona Amyuni has described ‘Awwad’s writing in the novel as ‘nervous and dense’; the novel is packed with subplots featuring one or more of the characters, as well as with written material from other sources, such as newspaper articles from the period, which are often copied and repeated verbatim. Amyuni, La Ville, p. 107. Emily Nasrallah, Tuyur Aylul (Beirut, 1998), pp. 25, 51. The translations from Tuyur are my own, but the quotes from Tawahin are taken from the English

NOTES TO PAGES 37 –42

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

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translation, titled Death in Beirut, by Leslie McLoughlin. I use the Arabic title throughout this chapter because I believe certain elements are lost in the translation (I will explain these later on). Nasrallah, Tuyur, pp. 171– 2. Ibid., p. 185. Williams describes country fiction as an ‘epitome of direct relationships, of face-to-face contacts within which we can find and value the real substance of personal relationships’. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York, NY, 1973), p. 165. Nasrallah, Tuyur, p. 178. Ibid., p. 25. The notion of the ‘asile’, refuge, as we have previously seen, was promoted heavily by Henri Lammens and his students, who were also – not coincidentally – among the first articulators of Lebanese mountain nationalism. Nasrallah, Tuyur, p. 171. Ibid., p. 186. The female protagonists’ displacement could perhaps be understood as a Deleuzian deterritorialization from Lebanon as a nation; however, the countermovement of re-territorialization does not happen in either novel, which pushes the limits of a Deleuzian interpretation. See Kafka for a discussion of deterritorialization. Furthermore, while Muna’s transformation into an interrogation mark could potentially be conceived as a deterritorialization from the major language, as I indicate in the body of the text, neither novel offers a solution – nor are these novels particularly linguistically experimental, in the way that Deleuze and Guattari show Kafka being. Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a New Minor Literature (Minneapolis, MN, 1986). Aghacy, ‘Lebanese Women’, p. 503; Amyuni, La Ville, p. 113. Here, I am using the term heterotopia not as it is most often used, in relation to Michel Foucault’s and Jay Miskowiec’s article ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986), pp. 22 – 7, but as it appears in Henri Lefe`bvre’s The Urban Revolution, in which he proposes that, more simply, the heterotopic space is ‘the other place, the place of the other, simultaneously excluded and interwoven’. Henri Lefe`bvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis, MN, 2003), p. 130. Aghacy, ‘Lebanese Women’, p. 504. cooke, ‘Women write war’, p. 58. Kaplan, Alcaro´n and Moallem, Between, p. 12. Hafez, ‘Transformation’, p. 95. Amyuni enthuses, ‘Tamima’s Southern Shiite identity is a great choice on the author’s part, since she embodies the oppression of women, community, class and region in Lebanon’. Amyuni, La Ville, p. 109. Lebanon’s Shi’ites had become, by the 1970s, the country’s largest religious community, as well as its

214

44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

NOTES TO PAGES 42 –46 most socially deprived. For more on the Shi’ites in the country, in particular South Lebanon, see Salibi, Cross Roads, pp. 62–3; Khazen, Breakdown, pp. 40–5. For even more detail, see Rodger Shanahan, The Shi’a of Lebanon: Clans, Parties and Clerics (London, 2005). The book’s male characters’ origins are not highlighted in the same way as those of the female ones are, aside from Hani, whose position as Tamima’s problematic love interest requires the novel to reveal that he is from a Maronite Christian village in the Metn region, and who is deeply attached to his village of origin. We are told that his ‘home was in the village [. . .] but at the moment he was living in Beirut’. Tawfiq Yusuf ‘Awwad: Tawahin Bayrut (Beirut, 1978), p. 14. (Of course, we also know that Jabir and Hussein are from the same village as Tamima.) ‘Awwad, Tawahin, pp. 180– 2 and 134, respectively. Even Tamima’s half-sister in Guinea, Aisha, has not been spared; she is raped by Jabir, and is described as ‘a creature who had been insulted, scorned and wounded in a way for which she had no name, no balm, no consolation’. This is the distinction that the novel makes between Aisha and Tamima, who will eventually be able to both identify the problem and find a way to overcome it: the novel cannot grant Aisha even the articulation of her suffering, unlike Tamima. Ibid., p. 159. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 120. Technically, ‘The Mills of Beirut’, but this has been translated in English as Death in Beirut. I believe that this omits a certain dimension from the novel that, while perhaps not crucial, is still significant. See Amyuni, La Ville; see also Accad, Sexuality. ‘Awwad, Tawahin, p. 184. Ibid. Mona Amyuni, ‘The image of the city: wounded Beirut’, Alif (1987), p. 30. To some extent, by the end of her article, Aghacy is forced to re-evaluate her introductory claims and conclude by saying ‘the past and present, traditional and modernization, and country and city are not separate entities [. . . and . . .] the lines of division – whether spatial, mental or psychological – are artificial and permeable’. Aghacy, ‘Lebanese’, p. 520. Mona Amyuni’s work, however, continues to reproduce this dichotomy, and in fact takes it further – such as when she asserts that it is the ‘dialectic of Man and the City that pushes history forward’. Amyuni: La Ville, p. 108. Williams, Country, p. 289. ‘Awwad, Tawahin, p. 77. The year 1860 is the Christian date of the first sectarian war in (then Mount) Lebanon’s history, between the mountain’s Druze and Christian communities. This date was catalytic in the growth and development of Beirut. See Hanssen, Fin de Sie`cle Beirut; and also Leila Fawaz, ‘The city and the mountain: Beirut’s political radius in the nineteenth century

NOTES TO PAGES 46 –56

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

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as revealed by the crisis of 1860’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 16.4 (1984), pp. 489– 95. ‘Awwad, Tawahin, p. 2. Ibid., p. 3. ‘Id, Al-Dalala, p. 25. ‘Awwad, Tawahin, p. 116. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 33. While the scope of this chapter does not allow for further investigation of this, the novel’s representation of race, and particularly of Africa and Africans, is frequently problematic. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, NY, 1993), p. 93. For more on Lebanese emigration to West Africa, see Didier Bigo, ‘The Lebanese Community in the Ivory Coast: a Non-native Network at the Heart of Power?’, in Hourani and Shehadi, Lebanese in the World, pp. 509– 30; and H. Laurens Van der Laan, ‘Migration, Mobility and Settlement of the Lebanese in West Africa’ in ibid., pp. 531– 47. ‘Awwad, Tawahin, p. 135. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 134. Before continuing, it is important to stress that, despite this ‘shared’ concern over the fates of both sets of women, the patriarch clearly states that an attack by Jabir on the bodies of Tamima and her mother, would be ‘still worse and more cunning’ than ‘what he has done here [to Aisha]’; the Lebanese female body is privileged over the African body. ‘Awwad, Tawahin, p. 133. For more on this from an anthropological perspective, see Bigo, ‘Lebanese community’. There are many examples of such fiction, such as Anis Freiha’s Isma‘ ya Rida, a collection of stories about father – son conversations, and Mikhail Nuayma’s short-story collections about village life. ‘Awwad, Tawahin, p. 129. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p.139. Aghacy, ‘Lebanese Women’, p. 5. Salem, Constructing Lebanon, p. 85. ‘Awwad, Tawahin, p. 29. Henri Lefe`bvre, From the Rural to the Urban (Paris, 1970), pp. 154–5 (my translation). ‘Awwad, Tawahin, p. 4. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 107. Ibid. Ibid., p. 182.

216 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101.

102. 103. 104.

NOTES TO PAGES 57 –62 Ibid., p. 183. Ibid., p. 182. Amyuni, ‘Image’, p. 28. Amyuni, La Ville, p. 112. Ibid. Accad, Sexuality, p. 109. ‘Awwad, Tawahin, p. 184. Ibid. Ibid. Williams, Country, p. 166. ‘Awwad, Tawahin, p. 2. Ibid., p. 106. The obvious Hegelian reference, and Raad’s subsequent exposure as a hypocritical figure, is perhaps a sly rejection of the dialectical thinking that ironically characterizes critical readings of ‘Awwad’s work. ‘Awwad, Tawahin, p. 16. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid., pp. 108– 9. It is interesting to note, in this context, the argument that Benedict Anderson makes about the relationship between a print culture and nationalism; of course, Lebanon in the 1970s had a century-old newspaper tradition, but the emergence of Tamima’s new ideas is very much related in the novel to her increased consumption of newspapers. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 1991). ‘Awwad uses actual newspaper articles from the period (December 1968– February 1969) in his novel, for different purposes. He also incorporates articles from student publications, such as the American University of Beirut’s Outlook. ‘Awwad, Tawahin, p. 139. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (London, 1989). Layoun, Wedded, p. 12.

Chapter 2 A City Divided: Beirut in the (1975– 90) Civil War 1. The date generally taken to be the starting point of the civil war is 13 April 1975. Historians often point out that there had been clashes in the city and the south leading up to this; one explanation, offered by Samir Kassir and Elizabeth Picard is that these events had been collectively thought of as

NOTES TO PAGES 62 –63

2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

217

skirmishes, or incidents – hawadith, ahdath – and not as the prelude to war. For more, see Kamal Salibi, Cross Roads to Civil War: Lebanon 1958– 1976 (Delmar, NY, 1976), p. 97; Elizabeth Picard, Lebanon: A Shattered Country (New York, NY, 1996), p. 105; and Samir Kassir, La Guerre du Liban: De La Dissension Nationale Au Conflit Re´gional 1975– 1982 (Paris, 1994), p. 103. There are several very good sources on the early and middle stages of the war (1975– 82), including Salibi, Cross Roads, which was followed by his A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (Berkeley, CA, 1988). Another good source on this period is Walid Khalidi, Conflict and Violence in Lebanon: Confrontation in the Middle East (Cambridge, 1979). More recent scholarship on the period between 1975 and 1982 includes Samir Kassir’s Guerre. One of the most comprehensive sources on the entire 15-year war is Theodor Hanf’s Co-Existence in Wartime Lebanon (London, 1993); Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation (Oxford, 1991) is one of the most well-written overviews of the entire war for a general audience, although it, too, emphasizes the earlier phase rather than the remaining eight years of conflict (1982– 90). Although it was commonly thought to have been destroyed completely during this period, this was not the case, as Samir Kassir shows in Guerre, p. 418; this is confirmed by Saree Makdisi, ‘Reconstructing history in downtown Beirut’, Middle East Report, 203 (1997), pp. 23 – 4. In fact, Makdisi points out that after 1976, the old souks ‘were damaged, but salvageable’ before succumbing to ‘mysterious demolitions in 1983, 1986 and then a final wave of demolitions’ in 1994 (Reconstructing’, pp. 23 – 4). Nevertheless, as early as 1976, the souks were no longer accessible to civilians, and, after the shops had been sacked, were no longer very interesting to militia fighters either. Elise Salem, Constructing Lebanon: A Century of Literary Narratives (Gainesville, FL, London, 2003), p. 124. Ibid., p. 134. For an eyewitness report of the events at Sabra and Shatila, see Fisk, Pity. For a collection of testimonials and analysis, see Bayan Nuwayhid al-Hut’s Sabra and Shatila: September 1982 (London, 2004). For example, one of the most popularly accessible sources for information on the Lebanese civil war, the Al Jazeera production Harb Lubnan (War of Lebanon), devotes the bulk of its 15-episodes (12) to the events leading up to 1982. One notable exception is the exhaustive Hanf, Co-Existence. Even the explanation proffered by Khalaf that ideological affiliation was supplanted by confessional identity, with the younger generation taking up arms in defence of a sect, cannot, for example, address the various intrasectarian battles that raged during the mid-1980s between Shi’ite coreligionists Amal and Hizbullah, or the Maronite – Maronite warfare between Michel Aoun’s supporters and the Lebanese forces. Samir Khalaf, Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon: A History of the Internalization of Communal Conflict (New York, NY, 2002), pp. 23 – 7. For an interesting critical interpretation of the limits of structural understandings of the civil war, see Najib Hourani’s

218

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

NOTES TO PAGES 63 –69 ‘The militiaman icon: cinema, memory and the Lebanese civil wars’, The New Centennial Review 8.2 (2008), pp. 287– 307. Salem, Constructing Lebanon, p. 151. For more on some of the writers, mostly poets, on this theme, see Mona Amyuni, ‘The image of the city: wounded Beirut’, Alif (1987). For a more detailed reading of Qabbani’s Beirut poems, see Salem, who describes Qabbani’s Beirut in the following way: ‘Beirut is Ishtar, the Phoenician goddess, as much mystified in her fall as she was in her supposed days of glory.’ Salem, Constructing Lebanon, p. 132. http://electronicintifada.net/content/good-morning-beirut/6124 (accessed 16 January 2014). ‘Poets from around the Arab world competed to lament the tragedy of Beirut. From the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish to the Syrian/Lebanese Adonis, works were composed on Beirut, the new symbol of the Arab tragedy.’ Salem, Constructing Lebanon, p. 137. Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose (Sausalito, CA, 1992), p. 20. miriam cooke, War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (New York, NY, 1996), p. 16. Salem, Constructing Lebanon, p. 261; Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness (Berkeley, CA, 1995), p. 91. Adnan, Marie Rose, p. 20. Ibid., p. 13. Darwish, Memory, p. 54. cooke, Other Voices, p. 16. http://najialali.com/drawings/displayimage.php?album¼3&pos¼45 (accessed 19 September 2010). Salibi, Cross Roads, p. 136. Samir Kassir, Histoire de Beyrouth (Paris, 2003), p. 33. Jean Said Makdisi, Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir (New York, NY, 1989), p. 74. Kassir, Guerre, p. 135. Two examples from the literature on the civil war come from Maha Yahya and Elizabeth Picard. The former describes Beirut as ‘a fragmented city’. Maha Yahya, ‘Reconstituting Space: The Aberration of the Urban in Beirut’, in Samir Khalaf and Philip S. Khoury (eds), Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and Post-war Reconstruction (Leiden, 1993), pp. 128–66, 128. In her work, Elizabeth Picard describes the war as dividing the country into ‘cantons’. Picard, Lebanon, p. 148. Khalaf: Heart of Beirut, p. 14. Salem, Constructing Lebanon, p. 131. Hassan Sabra, Beirut: Occupation of an Arab Capital (Beirut, 1983), p. 6, my translation; unless otherwise noted, all translations in this chapter are mine. When referring to Adnan and Darwish’s texts, I will be referring to their respective translations into English by Georgina Kleege (Marie Rose), and by Ibrahim Muhawi (Memory for Forgetfulness). Khoury’s Wujuh was recently

NOTES TO PAGES 69 –70

31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

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translated; however, all references to this text in this chapter are my own translations, and I refer to the page numbers in the original Arabic version. Although Darwish is not Lebanese, and his text was written and published after 1982, Memory is a completely appropriate text in the context of trying to understand representations of Beirut during that time, a point on which I elaborate further in the chapter. I will use the English translations of Khoury’s novel, Gandhi (trans. Paula Haydar) and al-Shaykh’s, Zahra (trans. Peter Ford, with Hanan al-Shaykh). Both sides of the political spectrum were active in other forms of cultural production; recently, some work has been done by Zeina Maasri on political posters produced during the war (Zeina Maasri, Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War [London, 2009]), and Yumna ‘Id mentions the proliferation of alternative media (songs, posters, theatre) on both sides of the conflict in the context of the 1982 war, in her Al-Kitaba; Tahawwul fi-lTahawwul: Muqaraba li-l-Kitaba al-Adabiyya fi-Zaman al-Harb al-Lubnaniyya ˙ (Beirut, 1993), p. 29. Elise Salem mentions the newspaper Lubnan, produced by poet Sa‘id ‘Aql and written in transliterated Arabic, as one example of cultural production from the eastern side of the country. Salem, Constructing Lebanon, p. 131. For more on Beirut as a central character, see Sabah Ghandour’s introduction to Elias Khoury’s The Journey of Little Gandhi, p. xvii; see also Mona Amyuni, La Ville, Source D’Inspiration: Le Caire, Khartoum, Beyrouth, Paola Scala Chez Quelques E´crivains Arabes Contemporains (Beirut, 1998) and Amyuni, ‘Wounded Beirut’. Although this will be developed later, it may be worth noting here some of the major critical currents in discussions of these texts. Marie Rose and Memory are often read as testimonials. See, for example, Amal Amireh, ‘Bearing witness: the politics of form in Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose’, Middle East Critique 14.3 (2005), pp. 251– 63; Thomas Foster, ‘Circles of oppression, circles of repression: Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose’, PMLA 110 (1995), p. 1; Cooke, Other Voices; for Darwish, see Abdul Fattah Shakir, Mahmoud Darwish, Nathiran (Mahmoud Darwish, Prose Writer) (Beirut, 2004), and ’Id, Writing. Zahra, Marie Rose and Beirut Fragments have been discussed as feminist texts, presented as evidence of a new kind of women’s writing engendered by the war: Cooke, Other Voices; Evelyne Accad, Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East (New York, NY, 1990). Salem, Constructing Lebanon, p. 131. Ibid., p. 138. In fairness to Salem, representations of Beirut do not form the crux of the point that she is arguing in Constructing Lebanon, which is namely that Lebanese literature played an integral role in forming national identity, and that the novels of the war and postwar period ‘offer new ways of perceiving Lebanon and can be hence be useful in constructing Lebanon now’. Salem, Constructing Lebanon, p. 102. Nirvana Tanoukhi, ‘The scale of world literature’, New Literary History, 39.3 (2008), p. 135.

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NOTES TO PAGES 70 –77

37. Ghandour, ‘Introduction’, Gandhi, p. ii. 38. miriam cooke, Women and the War Story (Berkeley, CA, 1996), p. 16. Other critics who have also read these novels from a gendered perspective include Accad (Sexuality) and Joseph Zaydan (Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond [Albany, NY, 1995]). 39. Samira Aghacy, ‘Elias Khoury’s The Journey of Little Gandhi: fiction and ideology’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 28.2 (1996), pp. 163– 4. Aghacy claims that imperialistic power relations permeate the novel, and points to the example of the American professor renaming the main character Gandhi: ‘Americans were and still are giving us names, which means that they possess the knowledge and the power.’ Aghacy, ‘Gandhi’, p. 166). 40. Salem, Constructing Lebanon, p. 9. 41. Shereen Abou el-Naga, ‘Makdisi’s war memoir: fragments of self and place’, Alif 22 (2002), p. 89. 42. Hashim Sarkis, ‘Territorial Claims: Architecture and Post-war Attitudes to the Built Environment’, in Khalaf and Khoury, Recovering Beirut, p. 104. 43. Darwish, Memory, p. 52. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., p. 91. 46. Ibid., p. 52. 47. Yahya, ‘Reconstituting’, p. 128. 48. Elias Khoury, ‘The unfolding of modern fiction and Arab memory’, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 23.1 (Spring 1990), p. 8. 49. Jean Makdisi, Fragments, pp. 76 – 7. 50. Yahya, ‘Reconstituting’, p. 132. 51. For example, a cab ride from Hamra in West Beirut to Sassine in the East costs twice as much as a similar, more congested and therefore more timeconsuming trip from Hamra to Mar Elias, which is in West Beirut. While this was more prevalent during the 1990s than it is today, one occasionally rides with a cab driver who will not ‘cross’ into the East or vice versa. 52. Hanan al-Shaykh, Beirut Blues (New York, NY, 1995), p. 274. 53. R.J. Johnston (ed.), Dictionary of Human Geography (Oxford and Malden, MA, 2000), p. 724. 54. Ibid., p. 725. 55. Ibid., p. 726. 56. Tanoukhi, ‘Scale’, p. 613. 57. Ibid., p. 605. 58. Darwish, Memory, p. 93. 59. Adnan, Marie Rose, p. 63. In the novel, this dualistic interpretation is frequently linked to what Amal Amireh describes as a ‘psychosexual interpretation that views the war in terms of an opposition between men and women, the masculine and the feminine’. Amireh, ‘Bearing’, p. 261. While this is true – for example, Adnan’s novel suggests that both the right-wing Christian militants who murder Marie-Rose and the Palestinian fighters on

NOTES TO PAGES 77 –80

60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

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the other side, as Arabs, ‘see greater virtue in their cars than in their women’ and ‘have to bring women back to order, in this Orient at once nomadic and immobile’, it nevertheless is also the case that the novel in all its voices – whether Marie-Rose, the unnamed narrator or the children – contrasts East with West Beirut, the division transcending all interpretations. Adnan, Marie Rose, pp. 66, 100. Lisa Suhair Majaj, ‘Voice, Representation and Resistance’, in Majaj and Amal Amireh (eds), Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (Jefferson, NC, 2002), p. 214. Amireh, ‘Bearing’, p. 262. Adnan, Marie Rose, p. 21. Ibid., p. 85. There is a certain amount of historical accuracy to this; while East Beirut became homogenously Christian with the expulsion of its Muslim residents, parts of West Beirut remained relatively mixed. See Picard, Lebanon, p. 150. Adnan, Marie Rose, p. 73. Ibid. ‘You don’t come from France or England,’ a young Marie-Rose objects to Mounir, who believes himself to be a Crusader. Adnan, Marie Rose, p. 48. Darwish, Memory, p. 18. Here, Darwish is referring sarcastically to the warm reception that the Israeli army received in East Beirut upon its arrival. In the body of the text, a footnote tells the reader of the English translation that ‘Recurring throughout, “there” and “here” represent two major poles of experience in the text’. Ibrahim Muhawi, ‘Introduction’ to Darwish, Memory (trans. Ibrahim Muhawi), footnote 4, p. 13. In his introduction to Memory, Ibrahim Muhawi points out that, for Darwish, ‘the effort to maintain the primacy of the quotidian becomes a challenge to the bombs’. Muhawi, ‘Introduction’, Memory, p. xv. Adnan, Marie Rose, p. 64. Darwish, Memory, p. 64. For example, early on in Memory, Darwish admits, ‘We saw in Lebanon only our own image in the polished stone – an imagination that re-creates the world in its shape, not because it is deluded, but because it needs a foothold for the vision’. Darwish, Memory, p. 45. Later on in the text, he states that those who came to Beirut and appropriated the city for themselves created a ‘standard which defined even for the Lebanese, and with their support, the degree of their right to their country, because their homeland had been transformed from a republic to a collection of positions’. Darwish, Memory, p. 134. Salem, Constructing Lebanon, p. 113. The phrase ‘la guerre des autres’ (the war of others) is thought to have been coined by the editor-in-chief of Lebanon’s most prestigious newspaper (anNahar), Ghassan Tueini, who first made this claim in a series of editorials collected as Kitab al-Harb 1975– 1976 (The Book of War 1975– 1976). Although a considerable number of historians have adopted it as an

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75.

76.

77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83.

NOTES TO PAGES 80 –84 interpretation and explanation of the civil war (see, for example, the introduction to Benassar’s Anatomie D’une Guerre et d’Une Occupation: E´ve´nements du Liban de 1975 a` 1978 [Anatomy of a War and an Occupation: Events in Lebanon from 1975 to 1978] [Paris, 1978]), many others, particularly from the Left, have criticized it for absolving the Lebanese of responsibility for the conflict. See Kassir, Guerre; Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon (London, 2007). The more convincing explanation is probably Theodor Hanf’s, who ascribes agency to both internal and external players. Hanf, CoExistence, p. 181. While politically Khoury is aligned with the Left, and is a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause, he makes a distinction between his political and literary writing, rejecting ‘commitment literature’ and arguing, ‘I write a political article as a citizen and I write it to the full, but literature is something else’ (quoted in Ken Seigneurie, Crisis and Memory: The Representation of Space in Modern Levantine Narrative [Wiesbaden, 2003], p. 15). In this chapter, then, I do not suggest that Khoury’s writing is not political, just that it is not ideological in the way that Adnan’s or Darwish’s is. Elias Khoury, Al-Wujuh al-Bayda’ (Beirut, 1986), p. 1. Similarly, Khoury’s Gandhi draws attention to its own unreliability as text by saying, ‘All stories are full of holes. We no longer know how to tell stories, we don’t know anything anymore.’ Khoury, Gandhi, p. 7. Khoury’s use of the polyphonic technique in his novels is discussed by Samira Aghacy, who writes of his insistence upon breaking ‘with the tradition of the single narrator and embrac[ing] a variety of discourses. He rejects the oppressive and dictatorial stance of the single narrator who dominates the scene and insists on writing novels with a variety of discourses.’ Aghacy, ‘Gandhi’, p. 166. Dalia Said Mostafa, ‘Re-cycling the Flaˆneur in Elias Khoury’s The Journey of Little Gandhi’, Middle East Critique 18.2 (2009), p. 103. Khoury, Wujuh, p. 20. Ibid., p. 171. As such, they complicate feminist readings of war literature such as cooke’s or Accad’s, which claim that men’s work celebrated the war and the fighting, unlike women’s. Khoury’s novels – besides his Little Mountain, which is an account of the siege of the Palestinian camp of Tal al-Zaatar in East Beirut – provide a perspective that cannot be ignored onto the lives of civilian men in the war, and makes a point that men were as victimized by the conflict as women. Khoury, Wujuh, p. 104. Ibid., p. 156. Yahya, ‘Reconstituting’, p. 136. In Fragments, Makdisi correlates the retreat inwards with a fear of dispossession: ‘crushed and pulled and pushed from all sides, we have a tendency today to retreat into our own houses. If there is a reigning symbol of the war, it must be the refugee, and those of us who have

NOTES TO PAGES 84 –88

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

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not – yet – lost our homes cling to them, self-consciously hanging on to what we recognize as the most elementary of human requirements.’ Jean Makdisi, Fragments, p. 213. Yahya, ‘Reconstituting’, p. 135. Adnan, Marie Rose, p. 85. Makdisi, Fragments, p. 212. Darwish, Memory, p. 49. For more on this, see cooke, Other Voices; Lamia Rustum Shehadeh, Women and War in Lebanon (Gainesville, FL, 1999). See also Zaydan, Women Novelists, pp. 206– 23. cooke, Other Voices, p. 54. Sarkis, ‘Claims’, p. 120. For example, both Makdisi and Khoury note the rise of the basta, the merchants who sell their wares on the street; these individuals had often been displaced from the burj area by the fighting, and had squatted in new areas of Beirut in order to continue their trade. Makdisi writes, ‘you can see people trying on clothing in the middle of the street as though they were in a private changing room’. Jean Makdisi, Fragments, p. 81. In Khoury’s Wujuh, these displaced shopkeepers infuriate Zayn with their complaints of their descent into poverty. Zaydan, Women Novelists, p. 212. However, as Zaydan also points out, when she becomes pregnant out of wedlock, Zahra is astute enough to realize that ‘the war has not eradicated the cultural mandates for women’. Hanan Al-Shaykh, The Story of Zahra (London and New York, NY, 1986), p. 113. In his work on Lebanese film, Najib Hourani argues that the figure of the sniper or militiaman often becomes the narrative ‘Other’ against which the postwar nation is constructed. These movies construct the fighters ‘as predators who thrive on the exercise of arbitrary power against the nation’, thereby producing an enemy who can be contrasted to the cosmopolitan protagonists of these films. Najib Hourani, ‘Icon’, p. 299. Al-Shaykh, Zahra, p. 139. ‘The militias thus became the new tools for urban integration and social reordering of the population, yielding a new urban geography.’ Yahya, ‘Reconstituting’, p. 136. Al-Shaykh, Zahra, p. 142. Zahra describes herself as ‘the Queen of Sheba amid their disquieted stares’. Ibid., p. 156. Ibid., p. 181. For example, he mistakenly believes that Zahra cannot get pregnant, and knows that she has been divorced. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., p. 182. Elise Salem argues that Khoury’s work is ‘wholly related in the Lebanese context’, and that he ‘provides new ways of conceiving Lebanon, now coincidentally engaged in war, and he does so primarily through structural and

NOTES TO PAGES 88 – 94

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102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

stylistic, not thematic, innovations’. Salem, Constructing Lebanon, p. 106. Dalia Said Mostafa claims that the fragmented structure of Khoury’s novels force the reader to ‘to link fragments of stories in order to imagine the city itself’. Mostafa, ‘Re-cycling’, p. 106. Aghacy, ‘Gandhi’, p. 164. Henri Lefe`bvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis, MN, 2003). Aghacy reads neo-imperial power relations into this renaming. Aghacy, ‘Gandhi’, p. 166. Khoury, Gandhi, p. 191. Ibid., p. 194. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 87. Gary McDonogh, ‘The Geography of Emptiness’ in Robert Rotenberg and Gary McDonogh (eds), The Cultural Meaning of Urban Space (Westport, CT, 1993), p. 4. Khoury, Wujuh, p. 20. Ibid., p. 120. Yahya, ‘Reconstituting’, p. 135. Jean Makdisi, Fragments, pp. 249– 50. Ibid., p. 252. miriam cooke has written of the mothering impulse towards the city and the nation in Lebanese women’s writing. cooke, Other Voices. Jean Makdisi, Fragments, p. 252. Ibid., p. 77. Al-Shaykh, Blues, p. 274. May Davie, ‘Comment fait-on la guerre a Beyrouth?’ (‘How do they make war in Beirut?’), Herodote (1983), p. 38.

Chapter 3

Commemorative Countermemories: Beirut in 1990s Lebanese Fiction

1. Solidere’s acquisition of much of the land of central Beirut, and subsequent development project was hardly uncontroversial. A (critical) summary of the processes of this acquisition can be found in miriam cooke’s ‘Beirut reborn: the political aesthetics of auto-destruction’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 15.2 (2002), pp. 393– 424 (pp. 408– 12). Some of the fiercest critical pieces can be found in Jad Tabet’s articles in Samir Khalaf and Phillip Khoury (eds), Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and Post-war Reconstruction (Leiden, 1993), pp. 81– 100 and Memory for the Future (Beirut, 2002), pp. 237 –43; Saree Makdisi’s ‘Laying claim to Beirut: urban narrative and spatial identity in the age of Solidere’, Critical Inquiry, 23/3 (1997), pp. 660– 705; and Albert Nacchache, ‘Beirut’s Memorycide: See No Evil, Hear No Evil’, in Lynn

NOTES TO PAGES 94 –95

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

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Meskell (ed), Archaeology under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East (London, 1998), pp. 140– 58. For a history of the symbolic importance of Martyrs’ Square, see Samir Khalaf, Heart of Beirut: Reclaiming the Bourj (London, 2006). Interestingly, however, Hashim Sarkis distances the space’s significance from the Lebanese state: ‘it is important to note that the old city center was not understood to be the symbol of the Lebanese state before the war. Iconographic thinking was not absent before the war. It just was not the way the state understood the territory.’ Hashim Sarkis, ‘Territorial Claims: Architecture and Post-war Attitudes to the Built Environment’, in Khalaf and Khoury, Recovering Beirut, p. 103. Angus Gavin and Ramez Bahige Maluf, Beirut Reborn: The Restoration and Development of the Central District (London, 1996), p. 35. For more on Fairouz in particular – and a brief discussion of the acrimonious debate around her 1994 concert – see Christopher Stone, Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon (London, 2008). Remarking on Fairouz’s almost mythological symbolic status in Lebanon, Stone says, ‘If the characters she plays in these works tend to take on male-oriented metonymic characteristics of the nation or community, the offstage Fairouz comes to be a metaphor for the nation.’ Stone, Popular Culture, p. 146. Stone understands the Fairouz phenomenon within the greater context of the post-colonial, nationalist era worldwide, and describes how female stars ‘were an integral part of national subject formation’, playing the symbolic role of national bride or national mother, depending on that performer’s age. Ibid., p. 139. Gavin and Maluf, Beirut Reborn, p. 35. Saree Makdisi points out that even as the Solidere project was being debated, and before it had been legally approved, bulldozers were demolishing space in Beirut’s downtown, and that ‘more irreparable damage has been done to the center of Beirut by those who claim to be interested in salvaging and rebuilding it than had been done during the course of the preceding fifteen years of shelling and house-to-house combat’. Saree Makdisi, ‘Laying’, p. 674. Jad Tabet’s ‘La me´moire des pierres’ (The memory of stones), in the Beirut, Memory for the Future anthology corroborates Makdisi’s claims. Tabet, ‘Me´moire’, pp. 237– 43. One such example is Beirut Reborn’s omission of approximately 400 years of Ottoman history from its narrative of the city’s development, thereby ignoring some of the most productive urban redesign efforts in Lebanon’s history, and the most collaborative (between Ottoman authorities and local Beirut merchants) – ignoring, in fact, the very moment at which Beirut emerged as a modern city. For more on this, see Jens Hanssen, Fin de Sie`cle Beirut (Oxford, 2005) and Engin Akarli, The Long Peace: Ottoman Lebanon, 1861– 1920 (Berkeley, CA, 1993). The company was, as has been mentioned, established by Lebanese businessman and three-term prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri; other stakeholders included the Lebanese banking sector. For more on this, see

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10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

NOTES TO PAGES 95 – 97 Najib Hourani’s New York University dissertation on Solidere and its Lebanese and international networks, ‘Capitalists in Conflict: A Political Economy of the Life, Death and Rebirth of Beirut’ (2005). Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, IL, 1995), p. 6. Najib Hourani, ‘Capitalists’, p. 199: ‘The national mythology of the elite holds that Lebanon is the exceptional product of an energetic and cosmopolitan merchant elite. Their efforts and Lebanon’s fortuitous location as the gateway “between east and west,” enabled the prosperity of the “Merchant Republic”.’ Zerubavel, Recovered, p. 8. Hoda Barakat and Marilyn Booth, The Tiller of Waters (Cairo, 2001). All quotes are from the English translation of the text. Barakat, Tiller, p. 175. Ibid. Saree Makdisi, ‘Laying’, p. 664. Zerubavel, Recovered, p. 10. For Nora, lieux de me´moire are ‘sites where a residual sense of continuity [with the past] remains’. The French ‘new history’ pioneer contrasts these sites with milieux de me´moire, ‘settings in which memory is part of everyday experience’. This definition draws out Nora’s important distinction between popular memory, which he seems to suggest is almost organic (he describes memory as ‘always embedded in living societies’), and history, ‘which is how modern societies organize a past they are condemned to forget because they are driven by change’ – about which more will be said later. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1 (New York, NY, 1996), pp. 1 – 3. Sarkis, ‘Claims’, p. 103. Sara Fregonese, for example, discusses the question of the ‘urbicide’ of the capital – Sara Fregonese, ‘The urbicide of Beirut? Geopolitics and the built environment in the Lebanese civil war (1975– 1976)’, Political Geography xxx (2009), pp. 1 – 10 – while another book’s subtitle announces, ‘The death of a state and the rise of a nation’ (Theodor Hanf, Co-Existence in Wartime Lebanon [London, 1993]). See also Farid el-Khazen, The Breakdown of the State in Lebanon, 1967 – 1976 (London, 2000) and Albert Naccache’s ‘Beirut’s Memorycide: See No Evil, Hear No Evil’, in Meskell, Archaeology under Fire. In French, the adjective e´clate´e, which evokes a centrifugal scattering away from a central core, is frequently used to describe the city, such as in Andre´ Bourgey’s article, ‘Beyrouth, ville e´clate´e’, Herodote 17.1 (1980), pp. 5– 30. Bourgey, ‘Beyrouth’, p. 25. For a further discussion of the social constructions of ‘no-man’s-land’, see Gary McDonogh, ‘The Geography of Emptiness’ in Robert Rotenberg and Gary McDonogh (eds), The Cultural Meaning of Urban Space (Westport, CT, 1993). Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation (Oxford, 1991), pp. 89 – 90.

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22. miriam cooke, War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (New York, NY, 1996), p. 11. 23. cooke’s telling of it, the death of this particular centre is due to the fact that men have either gone off to fight in the war, leaving a space for women’s writing to emerge, or that they may have taken ideological sides in the fighting and are therefore too involved to be able to produce non-committed art. 24. cooke, Other Voices, p. 11. 25. Recall that in the previous chapter the same space was, in ‘Awwad’s Tawahin, also targeted as the site of unappealing political, bureaucratic and economic practices, symbolized by the rats of Tamima’s dream. This suggests that the centre was very much linked to ‘centralized’ dominant social practices. As Khazen points out, however, state centralization was one of the key complaints of several influential figures on the Lebanese scene, and decentralization was a strategy actively promoted by the State in the late 1960s. Khazen, Breakdown. 26. As I have already pointed out, cooke’s reductive argument willfully ignores the work of central male writers, such as Elias Khoury and Rashid al-Daif, who were as concerned as female writers with the breakdown of language, form and tradition that cooke sees as a purely female concern. Mona Amyuni’s ‘Wounded Beirut’ offers up a reading of some of Elias Khoury’s work, and in Constructing Lebanon, Salem incorporates both al-Daif and Khoury’s work into her analysis of Lebanese war literature. Mona Amyuni, ‘The image of the city: wounded Beirut’, Alif (1987); Elise Salem, Constructing Lebanon: A Century of Literary Narratives (Gainesville, FL, London, 2003). 27. This has already been discussed in the previous chapter. In ‘Beirut: A City without History?’ Saree Makdisi implicitly disagrees with cooke’s assertion that this was an exclusively female experience, and points out that behind most Lebanese wartime and postwar fiction is a ‘restless series of experimentations with alternative forms and structures of narrative, of remembering, of temporality, of subjectivity and identity’. Saree Makdisi, ‘Beirut: A City without History?’, in U. Makdisi and P. Silverstein (eds), Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (Bloomington, IN, 2006), p. 209. 28. Khalaf, Heart, p. 14. 29. Samir Kassir notes somewhat cynically that the war in Lebanon was the first in which portable video-camera recorders could be used, and suggests that a morbid voyeurism, combined with the end of the Vietnam conflict, may have played a role in the hugely televised early years of the war. Samir Kassir, Histoire de Beyrouth (Paris, 2003), p. 17. miriam cooke echoes this, noting how ‘during the war and afterwards the urban violence was obsessively photographed and packaged in increasingly expensive and glossy formats’. cooke, ‘Reborn’, p. 393. 30. Najib Hourani, ‘Capitalists’, p. 192. 31. Gavin and Maluf, Beirut Reborn, p. 56.

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NOTES TO PAGES 99 –101

32. Or, as Saree Makdisi describes it, a neo-colonial power that practises the ‘decisive colonization of the former [public interests and the interest of the former property-holders in the center] by the latter [private capital]’. Saree Makdisi, ‘Laying’, p. 672. In fact, Solidere sometimes made no show of hiding this; in his foreword to Beirut Reborn, the company’s chairman, Nasser Chamaa, sums up the appeal of the Beirut reconstruction project: ‘The Central District enjoys a geographical location at the very heart of the city and a unique history as the seat of government, trade, culture and communal living. It also has the resource of substantial new reclamation land and the benefits of an innovative concept in private-sector regeneration that secures adequate finance for reconstruction and resolves complex property rights.’ Gavin and Maluf, Beirut Reborn, p. i. 33. Saree Makdisi, ‘Laying’, p. 687. 34. For a list of the types of public activities (academic conferences and publications, plays, etc.) on the topic of public memory and the city, see the section titled ‘Memory in art and culture’ in Sune Haugbolle, ‘Public and private memory of the Lebanese Civil War’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25/1 (2005), pp. 191– 203 (pp. 195– 6). 35. The documentary is based on footage and interviews with several actors in the Lebanese civil war, often juxtaposing different narratives of the same events. It was a major television phenomenon in Lebanon when it aired on Al Jazeera in 2000, and the DVD box set was a bestseller. Haugbolle, ‘Public’, fn. 16, p. 193. 36. All page numbers correspond to the translated works. I will also use the name spellings used in these translations. Rashid al-Daif, Dear Mr. Kawabata, trans. Paul Starkey (London, 1999). 37. Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’, in H. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London and New York, NY, 1990), pp. 8 – 21 (p. 11). Renan’s statement, in turn, aids Benedict Anderson’s assertion that a nation is an ‘imagined community’. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 1991), p. 6. Maurice Halbwachs echoes this, asserting that ‘society tends to erase from its memory all that might separate individuals, or that might distance groups from each other’. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory: The Heritage of Sociology (Chicago, IL, 1992), p. 182. 38. For more on the suppression of certain forms of historical memories in postconflict societies, see the introduction to the fourth section, ‘Marked and Unmarked’, in Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer’s Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space (Durham, NC, 2004). Of course, some countries, notably South Africa, have opted for the alternative route of meticulously recovering and recording the past, via such mechanisms as the Truth and Reconciliation Committees set up at the end of apartheid. 39. Haugbolle, ‘Public’, p. 192. 40. Ibid., pp. 192– 4.

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41. In addition to Haugbolle’s own work, War and Memory in Lebanon (New York, NY, 2010), other critics of Solidere have been vocal about such practices. cooke writes, ‘the new Downtown has been made to absorb the history of the war and in the process has emptied it of meaning’. cooke, ‘Reborn’, p. 412; see also Tabet, ‘Me´moire’ and Saree Makdisi, ‘Laying’. 42. Haugbolle, War, p. 4. 43. Ibid., p. 84. 44. Zerubavel, Recovered, p. 5. 45. From now on, when I refer to the author Rashid al-Daif, I will either use his full name or his surname; when I refer to the character, I shall use Rashid. 46. Daif, Kawabata, p. 12. 47. And, occasionally, like Renan, argues for the necessity of forgetting: ‘I am convinced of the merits of forgetting, of its necessity for the sake of progress.’ Ibid., p. 19. 48. Ibid., p. 13. 49. Ibid., p. 17. 50. More will be said about this in the next chapter; miriam cooke takes up and critiques Solidere’s re-imagining and reformulation of a Classical past for Beirut. cooke, ‘Reborn’, pp. 412– 21. 51. Saree Makdisi points out that, although we see ‘the stable narrative self of Azizi al-Sayyid Kawabata breaking down in the first lines of the novel’ this does not mean that Rashid is an unreliable narrator, just that ‘other forms of narrative and of chronology must be invented’. Saree Makdisi, ‘Without’, p. 209. 52. Daif, Kawabata, pp. 117– 18. 53. Elliott Colla, ‘The image of loss: Jalal Toufic’s filmic Beirut’, Visual Anthropology 10 (1998), pp. 305– 17 (p. 312). 54. This idea of testimonial silence itself being as meaningful as speech is very common in discussions of other traumatic events, most frequently the Holocaust; see, for example, Giorgio Agamben, ‘The archive and testimony’, in Charles Merewether, The Archive (London, 2006), pp. 38 – 41. 55. Salem, Constructing Lebanon, p. 214. 56. Daif, Kawabata, pp. 116– 17. 57. Ibid., p. 117. 58. Ibid., p. 118. 59. Hanan al-Shaykh, Beirut Blues (New York, NY, 1995), p. 359. Al-Shaykh claims that Jawad is the character she identifies with the most, in an interview with Yusra al-Amir. Hanan al-Shaykh, Interview, Yusra al-Amir, Al-Adab, 48 (7 August 2000), pp. 80 – 90 (p. 83). 60. Significantly, it is ‘through commemorative rituals [that] groups create, articulate and negotiate their shared memories of particular events’. Zerubavel, Recovered, p. 5. In this fiction, the visit to the ruined downtown is a ritualized act of commemoration.

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NOTES TO PAGES 106 –109

61. Al-Shaykh, Blues, p. 263. Hanan al-Shaykh has reportedly claimed that this section, in which ‘she attempted to capture the Beirut she remembered before the war altered it forever’, was originally over 300 pages long, but was trimmed in the editing so that it is ‘only marginally reminiscent’. Quoted in Salem, Constructing Lebanon, p. 218. 62. Al-Shaykh, Blues, p. 273. 63. Ann Marie Adams, ‘Writing self, writing nation: imagined geographies in the fiction of Hanan Al-Shaykh’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 20/2 (2001), pp. 201– 16 (p. 213). 64. Adams writes that ‘Asmahan’s new “imagined community” also tends to negate collectivity outside of an individualized voluntaristic desire. Asmahan’s vivid memories and colorful “pictures” may be able to construct an alternate nation, but the nation is hers alone [. . .] In her rejection of centralized and unifying causes, Asmahan seems to valorize the localized vision of the (privileged) individual.’ Adams,‘Writing’, p. 214. 65. Halbwachs writes that ‘the mind reconstructs its memories under the pressure of society’. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 51. 66. Al-Shaykh, Blues, p. 275. 67. Barakat, Tiller, p. 129. 68. Soubhi Boustani, ‘Re´alisme et fantastique dans le roman Harith al-Miyah de Hoda Barakat’, Middle Eastern Literatures 6/2 (2003), pp. 225– 35 (p. 234). 69. Barakat, Tiller, p. 9. 70. Ibid., p. 108. 71. Ibid., p. 9. 72. Ibid., p. 62. 73. Ibid., p. 35. 74. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 39 – 40. 75. The theoretical body of work on the false distinction between fiction and history can be traced back to the work of Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD, 1978). 76. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, p. 59. 77. Halbwachs explains that ‘During our entire life we are engaged at the same time both in our family and also in other groups. We extend our family memory in such a way as to encompass recollections of our worldly life, for example. Or we place our family recollections in the frameworks where our society retrieves its past.’ Ibid., p. 81. 78. To Nora, history on the other hand is ‘an intellectual, non-religious activity [that] calls for analysis and critical discourse’. Nora, Realms, p. 3. Niqula’s patrilinear histories are constructed not only from family memories, but also from intellectual or pseudo-intellectual artifacts like astrology and scientific hearsay. 79. Barakat, Tiller, pp. 3, 7. 80. Ibid., p. 165. 81. Ibid., p. 163.

NOTES TO PAGES 109 –115 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

103. 104.

105. 106.

107.

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Nora, Realms, p. 2. Barakat, Tiller, p. 129. Ibid., p. 131. Ibid., p. 132. Yael Zerubavel notes that frequently, nationalist narratives focus on a group’s historical development and its movement through history, which ‘often implies a linear conception of time’. Zerubavel, Recovered, p. 7. Barakat, Tiller, p. 25. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 130. Ibid., p. 9. In her work, Zerubavel also notes that collective memories formed in early childhood ‘might persist even in the face of a later exposure to history’. Zerubavel, Recovered, p. 6. Barakat, Tiller, p. 9. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 165. Ibid., p. 174. The Israeli presence in Beirut lasted from 1982 to 1984 (although their presence in southern Lebanon continued until 2000). Ibid. Ibid. Boustani: ‘Re´alisme’, p. 234. Dina Amin, ‘Disorientation and the metropolis in Huda Barakat’s Harith al-Miyah’, Journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010), pp. 108– 20 (p. 114). Ibid., p. 114. Boustani, ‘Re´alisme’, p. 234. Zerubavel, Recovered, p. 9. Boustani, ‘Re´alisme’, p. 234. In ‘Beirut Reborn’, miriam cooke writes, ‘Beirut is lost, and the poets, filmmakers, and photographers are weeping at the traces’. cooke, ‘Reborn’, p. 405. Writing on the work of several Lebanese filmmakers in that same period, Elliott Colla describes it as embodying a ‘melancholic sublime’. Colla, ‘Image’, p. 314. Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV (London, 1917), pp. 237– 58; p. 243. Ibid., p. 4. Freud explains the distinction as one lying between consciousness and unconsciousness, in that melancholia is in ‘some way related to an objectloss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious’. Daif, Kawabata, p. 13. Interestingly, Colla also describes how Islamic poetry informed by this preIslamic tradition uses the imagery of ruins and the poet’s melancholy to extract lessons (‘ibar). Elliot Colla, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham, NC, 2007), p. 82. cooke, ‘Reborn’, p. 405.

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NOTES TO PAGES 115 –120

108. Ken Seigneurie, Standing By the Ruins: Elegiac Humanism in Wartime and Postwar Lebanon (New York, NY, 2011), p. 38. 109. Ibid., p. 38 110. Colla, ‘Image’, pp. 313– 4. 111. Ibid., p. 314. 112. Susan Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual (Ithaca, NY, 1993), pp. 3 – 4. 113. The other two parts are the rahil, the poet’s description of a journey, and the fakhr, the poet’s praise of himself and his tribe. 114. Stetkevych, Immortals, p. 18. 115. The expression ‘the land of the wars’ is another classical allusion, refering to the distinction in classical Islamic jurisprudence between dar al-Islam, also known as dar al-salam, land of peace, and dar al-harb, land of war. In the text, the term is secularized: the fact that the area around Niqula’s sanctuary is part of the lands of war does not mean that it is inhabited by non-Muslims, but it does further underscore its lack of security. 116. Barakat, Tiller, p. 24. 117. Although Stetkevych sees the nasib as a moment of separation from the social group, she also notes that the qasida as a whole encapsulates a ritualistic rite of passage that enacts social separation (the nasib) – liminality (the rahil) – and social aggregation (the fakhr). Stetkevych, Immortals, p. 8. 118. Adonis, Kalam al-Bidayat (On Beginnings) (Beirut, 1989), p. 78. My translation. 119. Al-Shaykh, Blues, pp. 263– 6. However, Ann Marie Adams points out that these others ‘are included in this refigured Beirut because Asmahan’s desire demands that they be included. There is nothing to say, though, that this “community” exists outside of Asmahan’s imagination or that the various subjects of her national discourse would be content being placed together in such a way.’ Adams, ‘Writing’, p. 214. 120. Connerton, Societies, p. 38. 121. Adonis, Bidayat, p. 76. 122. Al-Shaykh, Blues, p. 263. 123. Ibid., p. 266. 124. In Immortals, Stetkevych shows how Labid’s muallaqa, an archetypal qasida raises the issue of the culture/nature dialectic; she argues that ‘essential to this dialectic is the ephemeral and transitory quality of all that is cultural or cultivated – that is, human – as opposed to the permanence and perpetuity of the natural’. Stetkevych, Immortals, p. 18. 125. Barakat, Tiller, p. 135. 126. Colla, Antiquities, p. 81. 127. Al-Shaykh, Blues, p. 266. 128. Nora, Realms, p. 6. 129. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, MA, 1982), p. 97. 130. Al-Shaykh, Blues, pp. 265– 6.

NOTES TO PAGES 121 –125 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146.

147. 148.

149. 150. 151.

152. 153.

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Adams, ‘Writing’, p. 212. Al-Shaykh, Blues, p. 265. Ibid., p. 266. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1984), p. 92. Al-Shaykh, Blues, p. 276. Ibid., p. 76. Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, ‘Of other species’, Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986), p. 4. Barakat, Tiller, p. 24. Ibid., pp. 35, 102. De Certeau, Practice, pp. 97 –8. Barakat, Tiller, p. 61. Ibid., p. 102. De Certeau, Practice, pp. 98. Barakat, Tiller, p. 43. Salem writes, for example, that in al-Shaykh’s work, ‘there is no time or place for nostalgia, for fixating on a past that never was, nor could have been, ideal’. Salem, Constructing Lebanon, p. 218. Leila Fawaz’s work has played an influential role in relating the rise of mercantile capitalism with the development of Beirut in the late nineteenth century. See for example, Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth Century Lebanon (Cambridge, MA, 1983). In Tiller, this nostalgia is figuratively expressed in metaphors of cloth, and the deterioration of this practice begins prior to the war, with what Niqula’s father describes as the ‘Age of Diolen’ (synthetic fabric). Daif, Kawabata, p. 115. Of course, this phenomenon is not confined to Beirut; David Harvey charts these changes in several towns and cities in North and South America, and concludes, ‘the right to the city, as it is now constituted, is too narrowly confined, restricted in most cases to a small political and economic elite who are in a position to shape cities more and more after their own desires’. David Harvey, ‘The Right to the City’, New Left Review 52 (2008), p. 9. Boustani, ‘Re´alisme’, p. 232. Barakat, Tiller, pp. 61 – 2. It is at this point, Soubhi Boustani argues, that realism gives way to the fantastical: ‘The narrator’s confrontation with these impositions upon his solitary life in downtown leads to a disintegration of his personality, as in fantastical novels.’ Boustani, ‘Re´alisme’, p. 232. Barakat, Tiller, p. 174. ‘The signs of the urban are the signs of assembly: the things that promote assembly (the street and its surface, stone, asphalt, sidewalks) and the requirements for assembly.’ Henri Lef e`bvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis, MN, 2003), p. 118.

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NOTES TO PAGES 126 –130

154. Al-Shaykh, Blues, p. 310. 155. Tabet, ‘Me´moire’, p. 239. 156. Sawalha records how images of downtown Beirut as an empty space persist, despite Solidere’s attempts to imagine the site as well populated in all its renderings and models. Aseel Sawalha, Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City, (Austin, TX, 2010), p. 11. 157. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh, 2000), p. 185. 158. Barakat, Tiller, p. 175. 159. Rossi, City, p. 22. 160. Daif, Kawabata, p. 115. 161. Colla, Antiquities, p. 81.

Chapter 4 Tracing Beirut in Contemporary Historical Novels: Postmemory and the Urban Imaginary in Rabee Jaber and Alexandre Najjar 1. Najib Hourani, ‘Capitalists in Conflict: A Political Economy of the Life, Death and Rebirth of Beirut’, unpublished dissertation, New York University (2005) contains extensive details on the actual pace and scope of reconstruction in the 2000s. 2. Saree Makdisi, ‘Reconstructing history in central Beirut’, Middle East Report, 203 (1997), pp. 5 –11 (p. 5). 3. Ibid., p. 5. 4. Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, IL, 1995), p. 8. 5. In ‘The city and the mountain’, Leila Fawaz describes the role played by emigrants from the mountains in not only swelling the city’s population, but also in creating a sectarian imbalance that was to remain persistent into the next century. Yet she also remarks that the ‘events of the [1860] civil war constituted a turning point: on the one hand, they illustrated dramatically Beirut’s political ascendancy and, on the other hand, they set into full motion the price the city paid for it’. Leila Fawaz, ‘The city and the mountain: Beirut’s political radius in the nineteenth century as revealed by the crisis of 1860’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 16.4 (1984), p. 491. 6. Angus Gavin and Ramez Bahige Maluf, Beirut Reborn: The Restoration and Development of the Central District (London, 1996), p. 26. The Ottomans granted vilayet (provincial) status to Beirut in 1888; prior to that, it had been part of the vilayet of Saida (Sidon). Mount Lebanon was run as a separate, semiautonomous region. The misrepresentation of the Ottoman history of Beirut is not unique to Solidere; in recent years, however, some revisionist historians – such as Engin Akarli, Jens Hanssen and Stefan Weber – have begun to

NOTES TO PAGES 130 –134

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

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question the Arab- and Lebanese-nationalist, anti-Ottoman narrative of Lebanese history. See, for example, Engin Akarli, The Long Peace: Ottoman Lebanon, 1861– 1920 (Berkeley, CA, 1993); Hanssen’s Fin de Sie`cle Beirut (Oxford, 2005); and Hanssen et al., The Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire (Beirut, 2002). Gavin and Maluf, Reborn, p. 27. Saree Makdisi pithily sums up the status of history education in modern Lebanon, which Beirut Reborn seems to fit into: ‘The Republic of Lebanon gained its independence in 1943; its history came to a sudden end in 1946.’ Saree Makdisi, ‘Beirut, a City without History?’ in Ussama Makdisi and Paul Silverstein (eds), Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (Bloomington, IN, 2006), p. 201. Hanssen, Fin de Sie`cle Beirut, p. 86. Zerubavel, Recovered, p. 8. Referred to henceforth as Beyrouth and Bayrut respectively. All the translations in this chapter are my own. This novel’s title is a translation of the Arabic Dayr al-Qamar, a village in the Shouf region that flourished during the nineteenth century due to the silk trade. It is noteworthy that Amin Maalouf had already been established as the Lebanese writer of historical fiction par excellence, his Le Rocher de Tanios having won the prestigious French-language Goncourt prize in 1993. However, Maalouf’s and Dagher’s work, while interesting as part of a growing trend of Lebanese Francophone historical fiction, is outside the scope of the present volume. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Culture (Oxford, 1977), p. 133. The rapid change in the political situation after 2005 seems to have hindered the development of this emergence; in fact, Najjar and Jaber have since both left behind the historical-novel form: Najjar has gone on to write a biography of Jibran, and Jaber has moved on to other genres. Tamsin Spargo, Reading the Past: Literature and History (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 2. The first volume of Jaber’s three-volume epic Bayrut Madinat al-‘Alam and Najjar’s Le Roman de Beyrouth appeared in 2003; the second and third volumes of Jaber’s Bayrut trilogy were published in 2005 and 2006 respectively. In the books, Jaber’s narrator (also called Rabee Jaber) claims that there will be seven volumes of the series, but to date only three have been published and Jaber appears to have moved on to other subjects. The successful transmission of social memory has been linked to the storytelling ability of the oldest members of a social group. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989), p. 39. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA, 1960), p. 4. Ibid. Lynch’s work has impacted other fields. In a short essay entitled ‘Cognitive Mapping’, Frederic Jameson takes the basic premises of Lynch’s argument and extrapolates them into the political realm, concluding that ‘the incapacity to map socially is as crippling to political experience as the

236

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

NOTES TO PAGES 134 –137 analogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban experience’. Frederic Jameson, ‘Cognitive mapping’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke, 1988), pp. 347– 57 (p. 353). Ironically, although those over 45 drew the most vivid mental maps of the city, they were not as nostalgic as the earlier generation, Saliba found. Robert Saliba, ‘“Deconstructing Beirut’s Reconstruction”, Coming to Terms with the Colonial Heritage’, Amman. Lecture, 19 April 2000, p. 3. Najjar, Beyrouth, p. 4. Cooke borrows this term – of course – from French historian Pierre Nora’s work of the same name. miriam cooke, ‘Beirut reborn: the political aesthetics of auto-destruction’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 15.2 (2002), pp. 393– 424 (p. 417). In fact, Zerubavel’s entire book hinges on exploring ‘the process of recovering and re-covering roots’ in modern Israeli society. Elsewhere in the same work, Zerubavel points out that ‘by focusing on one aspect of the past [any commemorative narrative] necessarily covers up others that are deemed irrelevant’. Zerubavel, Recovered, pp. 8–9. Andreas Huyssen gives a provocative reason for this, grounded in the epistemological consequences of a post-modern consciousness: ‘Once we acknowledge the constitutive gap between reality and its representation in language or image, we must in principle, be open to many different possibilities of representing the real and its memories.’ Huyssen modifies this somewhat alarming statement by reinserting a high-modernist critique of quality: ‘This is not to say that anything goes. The question of quality remains one to be decided case by case.’ Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA, 2003), p. 19. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA, 1997), p. 22. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Elizabeth Wesseling, Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel (Amsterdam, 1991), p. 84. The fact that these novels have both been read as history is compelling: it suggests, perhaps, that this revelatory gesture is not as obvious as Wesseling believes; see Hughes Saint-Fort’s review of Roman – ‘Najjar, Alexandre, le roman de Beyrouth’ The French Review 80.6 (2007), pp. 1,416 – 18 – and Kamal Salibi’s short monograph Bayrut wa-l-Zaman (Beirut, 2009). It also possibly gestures to the hunger for history in present-day Lebanon; for more on this, see Saree Makdisi, ‘Without’. Wesseling, Prophet, p. 120. Wesseling points out that many of the same issues have been discussed in critical works on the relationship between history and fiction. While she does not cite them as references explicitly, the work of

NOTES TO PAGES 137 –145

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

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Hayden White in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD, London, 1978) and Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative (Chicago, IL, London, 1988), vol. 3 is especially relevant to bringing into question the previously clear distinction between historiography and fiction. It does so by calling attention to the discursive nature of historiography and also to the ways in which both deal with the matter of time. Wesseling, Prophet, p. 119. Connerton, Societies, p. 21. Merely speculatively, this could be Najjar’s rejection of a particular form of family formation. In his work, Samir Khalaf has frequently correlated much of the present polarization and militarization of Lebanese society to deeply ingrained family and tribal loyalties. See also, Michael Gilsenen’s Lords of the Lebanese Marches (London, 1996) for an interesting discussion of tribal and familial loyalty in the rural villages of ‘Akkar. Najjar, Beyrouth, p. 51. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid. Wesseling, Prophet, p. 119. Najjar, Beyrouth, p. 15. From now on, when I refer to Rabee Jaber the novelist, I will either call him ‘Jaber’ or ‘Rabee Jaber’; when I refer to the character in Bayrut, I shall use ‘Rabee’. Also, unless I explicitly mention another volume of the novel, all references are taken from the first volume. Jaber, Bayrut, p. 16. Linda Hutcheon, ‘Irony, nostalgia and the postmodern’, Studies in Comparative Literature 30 (2000), pp. 189– 207, 205. Jaber, Bayrut, p. 190. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 228. Ibid., pp. 228– 9. Wesseling, Prophet, p. 119. This is, in fact, common in contemporary historical fiction. See Wesseling and also Olga Steimberg de Kaplan, who argues that ‘in contemporary historical novels, fiction and metafiction combine to varying degrees: the author integrates the recounted history with commentaries on the role of the artist, and of his doubts and objectives as a creator’. Olga Steimberg de Kaplan, Le roman historique: interpretation et connaissance (Genres as Repositories of Cultural Memory) (Leiden, 1997), p. 13. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3 (Chicago, IL, 1988), p. 142. Jaber, Bayrut, pp. 39 – 40. Wesseling, Prophet, p. 119. The annotated bibliography is genuine, in that the texts and manuscripts mentioned in it exist.

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NOTES TO PAGES 145 –149

52. Writing of the art world in the early 2000s, Hal Foster describes the resurgence of an archival impulse in contemporary art, through which ‘artists seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present’. Hal Foster, ‘An archival impulse’, October 110 Fall 2004 (2004), pp. 3 – 22 (p. 4); Foster associates this art with a utopian impulse. 53. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago, IL, 1996), pp. 3 – 4. Of course, the question of the archive in Lebanese memory and art is an interesting one; for a discussion of the fake archives created by the art collective known as the Atlas Group, see Saree Makdisi, ‘Without’. 54. Jaber, Bayrut, p. 24. 55. Ibid., p. 63. 56. Jaber, Bayrut, vol. 2, p. 123. 57. This passage in the novel could also be read as a joke about traditional Arab hospitality. 58. Hanssen, Fin de Sie`cle Beirut, p. 269. Throughout ‘Capitalists in Conflict’, Najib Hourani explicitly underlines the fact that all of the disputes over central Beirut’s reconstruction were, essentially, disputes between elite groups with considerable capital; it is just the identity and form of capital that is different. 59. Saree Makdisi, ‘Reconstructing History’, p. 5. 60. Alois Riegl, ‘The modern cult of monuments’, Oppositions 25 (1982), pp. 20 – 51 (p. 26). 61. Catherine Bishir, ‘Memorial observances’, Southern Cultures 15.2 (2009), pp. 61 – 85 (p. 62). 62. Even this, as cooke demonstrates, entails a rewriting of Beirut’s war; the memorial itself is ‘a ten story concrete edifice in which are embedded Soviet tanks. [. . .] Tanks are emblematic of wars fought at fronts, their trenches filled with men. But this was a war of skirmishes and sniper fire and car bombs.’ cooke, ‘Reborn’, p. 401. 63. The history of the statue itself is an interesting narrative of the colonial and post-colonial struggles in Lebanon since the turn of the last century; for a detailed history and analysis of the monument, see Lucia Volk, Memorials and Martyrs in Modern Lebanon (Bloomington, IN, 2010). 64. In fact, in several articles over the past decade, Saree Makdisi has suggested that it should be consecrated as a war memorial; see Saree Makdisi, ‘Reconstructing History’ and ‘Without’. 65. Saree Makdisi, ‘Without’, p. 204. 66. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York, NY, 1996), p. 7. 67. Recall that Nora describes lieux de me´moire as the sites in which ‘memory is crystallized’. Nora, Realms, p. 1. 68. Apparently quite successfully: Hugues Saint-Fort’s review of Najjar’s novel for French Review openly wonders whether the novel should even be called a roman,

NOTES TO PAGES 149 –155

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

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since ‘In fact, Najjar’s text is a history of the city of Beirut’. Saint-Fort, ‘Najjar’, p. 1,416. Huyssen, Palimpsests, p. 41. Najjar, Beyrouth, p. 351. Interestingly, Makdisi describes Solidere’s project, as ‘a corporate attempt to spectacularize history’. Saree Makdisi, ‘Reconstructing History’, p. 5. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, MA, 1982), p. 59. Najjar, Beyrouth, p. 14. Ibid. The mountains begin and end the novel. As noted earlier, Roukouz escapes the 1860 war by leaving Mount Lebanon and settling in Beirut. By the novel’s end, Phillipe has moved to Mount Lebanon, escaping the civil war in the capital. Najjar, Beyrouth, pp. 85, 145, 169. Pierre Gemayel was the founder of the right-wing Christian Kataeb (Phalangist) Party. In Beyrouth, he appears as a football coach ‘impressed by the order and discipline of young people in [1930s] Italy and Germany’ in addition to an independence-era leader. Ibid., p. 146. His son, Bashir, who founded the Lebanese Forces militia, also appears in Najjar’s novel, as a young, right-wing university student at a round-table discussion between leftist and rightist students hosted by Phillipe at the newspaper where he works. Ibid., pp. 278– 81. Ibid., pp. 136, 196. Ironically, in his review of the novel, Hugues Saint-Fort describes Najjar’s French as ‘classic, conservative and sometimes depreciated’. Saint-Fort, ‘Najjar’, p. 1,417. Najjar, Beyrouth, pp. 60, 105, 107, 174. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 157. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1984), p. 93. Najjar, Beyrouth, p. 361. Adrian Forty and Susanne Ku¨chler, The Art of Forgetting (Oxford, 1999), p. 9. Najjar, Beyrouth, p. 365. Rossi, City, p. 59. Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ in D. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Countermemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997), pp. 139–65 (p. 155). Ibid., p. 152. Huyssen, Palimpsests, p. 7. ‘[T]he palimpsest is thus an involuted phenomenon where otherwise unrelated texts are involved and entangled, intricately interwoven, interrupting and inhabiting each other.’ Sarah Dillon, The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (London, 2007). It is also worth remembering that in its first appearance as a metaphor, in Thomas De Quincey’s ‘The Palimpsest of the Human Brain’, the palimpsest is intimately linked to memory.

240 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

NOTES TO PAGES 155 –165 Huyssen, Palimpsests, p. 7. Jaber, Bayrut, p. 67. Ibid., pp. 63 – 7. Ibid., pp. 64 – 70. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid. Ibid., p. 180. Ibrahim Pasha led the Egyptian army against the Ottomans and into Syria and Palestine in 1831, but it was forced out in 1840. Saree Makdisi, ‘Reconstructing History’, p. 5. Jaber, Bayrut, pp. 177, 185. Writing about the same period as that evoked when Bayrut’s historical narrative begins, Jens Hanssen also draws the connection between the local and the regional: ‘During that time [the period between 1830 and1840], Beirut changed from a tax farm of the regional overlords to a port-city that served the expanding Mediterranean economy.’ Hanssen, Fin de Sie`cle Beirut, p. 264. Saree Makdisi, ‘Reconstructing History’, p. 10. Saree Makdisi, ‘Without’, p. 212. Ibid. Jaber, Bayrut, vol. 2, p. 230. Ibid., p. 256. Ibid., pp. 183, 189. Ibid., p. 267. Ibid., p. 344; also, see Hanssen, Fin de Sie`cle Beirut. Jaber, Bayrut, vol. 2, p. 344. This has already been discussed in the chapter on ‘Awwad and Nasrallah; it is a meme that war novelists exploit to great effect, as they often represent the former refuge as no longer safe. Jaber, Bayrut, p. 39. Jaber, Bayrut, vol. 2, p. 174. Jaber, Bayrut, p. 85. Ibid., p. 39. Najjar, Beyrouth, p. 366. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 13. Neil Smith, ‘Foreword’ to Henri Lefe`bvre, Urban Revolution (Minneapolis, MN, 2003), pp. vii– xxiv; p. xxi. Saree Makdisi, ‘Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial identity in the Age of Solidere’, Middle East Report, 203 (1997), p. 695. Geoff Eley, ‘Introduction’, in K. Lunn and Martin Evans (eds), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1997), pp. vii – xv (p. vii).

NOTES TO PAGES 166 –168

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Chapter 5 Beirut: Past, Present, Future? Memory and Anxiety in Contemporary Lebanese Comics 1. Roy Dib, ‘Mazen Kerbaj: zujaja fi bahr bayrut’ (Mazen Kerbaj: a Bottle in Beirut’s Sea), al-Akhbar, 1 August 2013. www.al-akhbar.com/node/188072 (accessed 4 January 2014). 2. At the time, Michel el-Murr was a wealthy contractor turned MP and, briefly, government minister. In the post-civil war era, due to his strong ties with the Syrian regime, and as minister of the interior in several successive administrations, he was able to build ‘a power base resting on fear and corruption, as he controlled the majority of the state’s security agencies [. . .] and his position in the state agencies allowed him to co-opt people through jobs’. Rola el-Husseini, ‘Lebanon: Building Political Dynasties’, in V. Perthes (ed.), Arab Elites: Negotiating the Politics of Change (Boulder, CO, 2004), pp. 239– 66 (p. 249). 3. In Lebanese urban planning, Murr is notorious for manipulating the building code for electoral and commercial benefit, allowing the addition of an extra floor to any extant or future residential building. This phenomenon became known as tabiʾ al-murr, the ‘Murr floor’. The Murr floor law was brought back into the Lebanese cultural conversation in 2012, when MP Robert Ghanem, as chair of the Parliamentary Management and Justice Commission, proposed a new law to allow construction of between 6 and 50 per cent additional floor area on top of extant building structures as well as construction in sites not designated as viable by the Lebanese Order of Engineers. This new proposal was nicknamed tabiʾ al-miqati for Prime Minister Najib Mikati. For more on this, see www.alakhbar.com/node/23945 and www.al-akhbar.com/node/167285 (both accessed 4 January 2014). 4. The now-common epithets ‘Solidere’ or ‘downtown’ (in English) used to describe central Beirut are reminiscent of Jaber’s choice to describe the site as ‘Solidere’s city’ in the previous chapter. In their foreignness, both words highlight the conceptual distance between these sites and the rest of the city, and serve to underline how separate these sites are from the urban imaginary. 5. Jo¨rn Ahrens and Arno Meteling (eds), Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence (New York, NY, 2010), p. 8. 6. Hillary Chute describes the relationship between space and time in comics, arguing that comics’ ‘fundamental syntactical operation [is] the representation of time as space on the page’. Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven, ‘Introduction: graphic narrative’, Modern Fiction Studies 52 (2006), pp. 767– 782 (p. 769). 7. Lena Merhej, Mrabba w Laban (Beirut, 2012), p. 51. In October 2013, the book won the best foreign-language prize at the Festival Inte´rnational de la Bande Dessine´e d’Algers (FIBDA).

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8. Nicolas Blanford’s Killing Mr. Lebanon: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and its Impact on the Middle East (London, 2006) is a comprehensive, albeit hagiographic, biography. 9. Sune Haugbolle, War and Memory in Lebanon (New York, NY, 2010), p. 206. 10. Lucia Volk, Memorials and Martyrs in Modern Lebanon (Bloomington, IN, 2010), p. 158. 11. In her work, Volk also explains the different commemorative logics of the two events, which contribute to a growing political and social polarization in the country. See the chapter titled ‘Revisiting Independence and Mobilizing Resistance’ in ibid., pp. 154– 89. 12. An example of the dizzying pace of current ongoing events in Lebanon is the fact that, a few months after this protest in Beirut, Ahmad al-Assir became the focus of national attention when he and members of his armed gang attacked a Lebanese army checkpoint, leading to a three-day stand-off with the country’s armed forces. At the time of writing, he remains at large. 13. Detailed infographic maps and a description of the project are available online at: www.backspace.com/notes/2010/09/beirut-mapping-security.php (accessed 4 January 2014). 14. An increased lack of security has not been confined to Beirut – in fact, in other less-controlled parts of the country, especially North Lebanon, armed violence has been a near constant since 2007. In the summer of 2007, the Lebanese army fought the Islamist group Fath al-Islam in the Nahr al-Bared camp, shelling the camp mercilessly for several months and displacing thousands of Palestinian civilians from their homes. Since the outbreak of war in Syria, in 2011, the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli has also been the site of ongoing violence between anti-Syrian-regime Sunni residents of Bab al-Tabbaneh and pro-Syrian regime ‘Alawite residents of Jabal Mohsen, which has profoundly affected the everyday life of that city, Lebanon’s second-largest city. By January 2014, there had been 19 different rounds of fighting in Tripoli since 2011. 15. While peripheral, as urbanist Hiba Bou Akar’s work shows, these areas are central to how the geographies of future violence in Beirut ‘are produced by continuously negotiated articulations of three main processes: urbanization, neoliberalization, and spatial production and reproduction of sectarian differences’. Hiba Bou Akar, ‘Planning Beirut: For The War Yet to Come’, dissertation, University of California, Berkeley (2012), p. 4. 16. For more on this, see Sami Hermez, ‘“The war is going to ignite”: on the anticipation of violence in Lebanon’, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 35/2 (2012), pp. 327– 44. 17. Ahrens and Meteling, City, p. 12. 18. Discussion around the ‘Egg’, officially known as the Beirut City Dome, also serves to highlight the manner in which debates about preservation are being articulated in contemporary Beirut. For example, a few years ago, a group called Save Beirut Heritage spread an online rumour that the Egg was about to be demolished, which sparked several demonstrations by what one online

NOTES TO PAGE 173 –176

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

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publication called ‘heritage activists’. Eventually, the rumors were exposed as such by a group of bloggers who followed the issue up with Solidere. In short, issues of urban planning continue to be deeply contentious in Beirut. Chute and DeKoven, ‘Introduction’, p. 767. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Culture (Oxford, 1977), p. 135. Sometimes, in fact, the boundaries between the two are blurred: many of the comic books that have been released in print originated online, and others, like Samandal and Malaak are published via both media. Special mention must also be made of Lebanese expatriate comic artist Zina Mufarrij, whose ‘Zina Comics’ blog ‘highlights with humor the love-hate relationship expats have with Lebanon’. It recently came out in print in Beirut, and is available at: www.zinacomics.com/blog (accessed 4 January 2014). For example, see Zeina Maasri’s excellent collection of posters from the Lebanese civil war, Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War (London, 2009). ‘What we are defining,’ Raymond Williams writes about such changes in the present, ‘is a particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or of a period.’ Williams, Marxism p. 131. Ibid. A special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on comics (Winter 2006) offers a good starting point. Ahrens and Meteling, City, pp. 2, 6. See, for example, Chip Rossetti’s two-part series of articles, ‘Undiscovered art: comics and graphic novels emerge in the Middle East’ and ‘Middle East graphic novels push boundaries, challenge taboos and pay a price’ in Publishing Perspectives, 13 and 20 July 2010. www.publishingperspectives.com/2010/07/ undiscovered-art-comics-and-graphic-novels-emerge-in-the-middle-east (accessed 4 January 2014); www.publishingperspectives.com/2010/07/middleeast-graphic-novelists-push-boundaries-challenge-taboos-and-pay-a-price (accessed 4 January 2014). One such example is the amount of media attention – in Egypt, but also abroad – given to Magdy El Shafee’s Metro, which was censored by the Mubarak government. www.the99.org (accessed 4 January 2014). Mutawa has been invited to give TED talks, and has been featured in the mainstream US press, including being referenced by President Obama. Mary Layoun, ‘Telling stories in Palestine: Comix Understanding and Narratives of Palestine-Israel’, in T. Swedenborg and R. Stein (eds), Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham, 2005), pp. 313–37 (p. 314). Some scholars use ‘comics’ or ‘sequential art’, others prefer the term ‘graphic narratives’. See Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (New York, NY, 1994); Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art (New York, NY, 1994); and Chute and DeKoven, ‘Introduction’. In this chapter, taking my cue from Chute and

244

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

NOTES TO PAGE 176 –185 DeKoven, I will use both ‘comics’ and ‘graphic narratives’ interchangeably when referring to these works. In addition, I will also use the the term ‘autographics’, which I explain later. Eisner, Sequential, p. 8. Chute and DeKoven, ‘Introduction’, p. 769. Eisner, Sequential, p. 7; see also Chute and DeKoven, ‘Introduction’. Elisabeth El Refaie, Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (Jackson, MS, 2012), p. 179; Chute and DeKoven, ‘Introduction’, p. 767. Eisner, Sequential, p. 13. For how comics create and enforce narrative perspective, see El Refaie, Autobiographical, pp. 192– 5. Mark McKinney describes the bandes dessinee´s tradition’s strong ties to identity (particularly cultural identity), and the form’s powerful inclination to engage with history and politics since its earliest moments. Mark McKinney, History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels (Jackson, MS, 2008). The term was coined by Gillian Whitlock to describe autobiographical comics, which draw ‘attention to the specific conjunctions of visual and verbal text in this genre of autobiography’. Gillian Whitlock, ‘Autographics: the seeing “I” of the comics’, Modern Fiction Studies, 52/4 (2006), pp. 695– 79 (p. 966). The term ‘gutters’ refers to the spaces between two sequential images in a graphic narrative. Gutters are extremely important for comic scholars, since they are often taken to represent time. A good explanation of how gutters work is to be found in McCloud, Understanding Comics, pp. 60 – 93. Physical copies of Merhej’s I Think We Will Be Calm in the Next War no longer exist; it has been moved online. Regardless, it was originally drawn as a formal comic, unlike Kerbaj’s war blog. McCloud, Scott, Understanding, pp. 60–93. Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling (Stanford, CA, 2012), p. 193. El Refaie, Autobiographical, pp. 7 – 8. Gardner, Projections, p. 147. El Refaie, Autobiographical, p. 166. Ibid., p. 193. He also addresses the fact that, to most of his readers, this evokes Picasso’s cubism; however, he dismisses this quickly and says that this style is borrowed from his mother’s, Laure Ghorayeb’s, work. McCloud, Understanding, pp. 28 – 37. McCloud, Understanding Comics, p. 151. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York, NY, 2003), p. 42. Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London, 2004). Ibid., p. 151. El Refaie, Autobiographical, p. 115. www.mazenkerblog.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html (accessed 31 January 2014).

NOTES TO PAGES 185 –196

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56. El Refaie, Autobiographical, p. 115. 57. www.mazenkerblog.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html (accessed 4 January 2014). In a blogpost from 1 August 2006, he writes, ‘by the way, i repeat here for those who didn’t look at all the archives: you can use the drawings/music on my blog for any non-commercial printing (posters, flyers, emails, etc.) or airing (for the music) to help promoting the blog and thus to help the lebanese cause. for those interested also, you can find ready to print and stick on your neighborhood wall’ www.mazenkerblog.blogspot.com/ 2006_08_01_archive.html (accessed 4 January 2014). 58. www.mazenkerblog.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_archive.html (accessed 4 January 2014). 59. Gardner, Projections, p. 139. 60. http://www.mazenkerblog.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html. (accessed 4 January 2014). 61. Gardner, Projections, p. xi. 62. Chute and DeKoven, ‘Introduction’, p. 769. 63. ‘Depending on how far away the depicted person appears to be from the viewer,’ Elisabeth El Refaie writes, ‘a long shot may suggest either an impersonal or a completely distant relationship.’ El Refaie, Autobiographical, p. 193. 64. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA, 1997), p. 22. 65. Lena Merhej, Mrabba w Laban, aw Kayfa Asbahat Ummi Lubnaniyya (Beirut, 2012), p. 69. 66. Ibid. 67. For more on the relationship between the panel’s border and sequential time, see McCloud, Understanding Comics; and Chute and DeKoven, ‘Introduction’. 68. Merhej, Mrabba, p. 83. 69. Ibid. 70. Bukra simultaneously denotes both the immediate and the more distant future. 71. Bou Akar, ‘Planning’, p. 3. 72. Hermez, ‘Anticipation’, p. 329. 73. Ibid., p. 330. 74. Hermez gives the example of a woman in her 30s whose personal experiences of the 1975 –90 war, and her anticipation of future violence, affect the areas of the city and country that she feels comfortable about sending her son to. Hermez, ‘Anticipation’, pp. 331– 2. 75. Bou Akar, ‘Planning’, p. 16. 76. Chute and DeKoven, ‘Introduction’, p. 767. 77. Merhej, Mrabba, pp. 17, 51. 78. Bou Akar, ‘Planning’, p. 3. 79. Merhej, Mrabba, p. 74. 80. Ibid., p. 77. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid.

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83. Ibid. 84. Hermez, ‘Anticipation’, p. 331.

Epilogue 1. Anthropologist Sami Hermez reports that, during the spate of frequent car bombings used to assassinate various politicians in 2007, the phrase di’ana Beirut (‘Pity Beirut, what a shame’) was frequently invoked as ‘places were emptied, and emptiness began to take on its own meaning of loss, of potential, of a dark anticipation for the next bomb’. Hermez, Sami ‘“The war is going to ignite”: on the anticipation of violence in Lebanon’, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 35:2 (November 2012), p. 338. 2. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York, NY, 1973), p. 290.

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Wolk, Douglas, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2007). Yahya, Maha, ‘Reconstituting Space: The Aberration of the Urban in Beirut’, in S. Khalaf and P. Khoury (eds). Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and Post-War Reconstruction (Leiden; New York, NY: Brill, 1993), pp. 128– 66. Young, Barbara, This Man from Lebanon, a Study of Kahlil Gibran (New York, NY: A.A. Knopf, 1945). Zakka, Najib Mansur, Litte´rature Libanaise Contemporaine: Aspects The´matiques (Kaslik, Lebanon: Universite´ Saint-Esprit de Kaslik, Faculte´ des Lettres, De´partement de Langue et Litte´rature Francaises, 2000). Zamir, Meir, The Formation of Modern Lebanon (London; Dover, NH: Croom Helm, 1985). Zaydan, Joseph, Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995). Zerubavel, Yael, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

INDEX

Abou el-Naga, Shereen, 71, 87 Accad, Evelyne, 34 – 35, 43, 57 – 58 Adams, Ann Marie, 106, 120– 21 Adnan, Etel, 64, 65, 69, 76, 77 – 80, 84 – 85 Adonis, 117 Africa, 47, 48, 49 –51 Aghacy, Samira, 40 – 41, 71 Ahrens, Jo¨rn, 168, 173 Alcaro´n, Norma see Between Woman and Nation al-Ali, Naji, 64, 66 alienation, 37 – 40, 172– 74, 199– 200 see also belonging alphabet (Makdisi’s Beirut Fragments), 91 Amin, Dina, 112– 13 Amireh, Amal, 77 amnesia, promotion of public, 100–101 Amyuni, Mona, 33 – 34, 40 – 41, 45, 57, 58 Anderson, Benedict, 31, 186 archives, 145– 46 asile du Liban (Mount Lebanon as refuge), 15, 31, 39, 43 – 44, 161 al-Assir, Ahmad, 171 A‘taqid anna sanakunu hadi’in bil harb al-muqbila (I Think We will be

Calm in the Next War) (Merhej), 171–72, 178, 181– 82, 183, 185–86, 187 –89, 190, 193– 94 ‘Awwad, Tawfiq Yusuf: Tawahin Bayrut (The Mills of Beirut), 20– 22, 33 – 36, 60 – 61 city as promise or nightmare, 52 –58 economic consequences of colonialism and emigration, 45 –52 gender and the city, 40 – 44 Tamima’s trajectory from reader to writer, 58 – 60 Bachir II, 130 Barakat, Hoda: The Tiller of Waters, 25– 26, 95 – 96, 97, 100 commemorative countermemories, 107– 14 landscape of commemoration, 122–27 language of commemoration, 116–17, 119 Bayrut Madinat al-‘Alam (Beirut, the City of the World) (Jaber), 27, 131–33 becoming Beiruti, 161– 63 Beirut as palimpsest, 154– 61 placing the self in the city, 135, 137– 38, 141– 47

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Beirut, metaphors for mother, 1 – 3, 166– 68, 172– 74 sexual victim or predator, 37 – 38, 64 –65 Third World City, 23 Beirut Blues (al-Shaykh), 75, 92, 100 commemorative countermemories, 105– 7 landscape of commemoration, 120– 21, 124, 125– 26 language of commemoration, 117– 19 Beirut City Dome, 173 Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir (Makdisi), 67, 69, 74, 85, 91 –92 Beirut Reborn (Solidere), 94 –95, 99, 130– 31 Beiruti, becoming, 161– 65 belonging, 21– 22, 37 – 40, 55, 68, 82 – 83, 161– 65, 199–200 see also alienation Berlin, 154 Between Woman and Nation (Kaplan, Alcaro´n, and Moallem), 34, 41 Beyrouth see Le Roman de Beyrouth Bishir, Catherine, 148 blogging, 185, 186– 87 see also Kerblog body, female, 34 – 38, 41 – 44, 48 – 50, 51, 53, 54, 58, 59 – 60, 64 Bou Akar, Hiba, 192, 194– 95 boundaries, 84 – 91 Bourdieu, Pierre, 32 Bourgey, Andre´, 97 Boustani, Soubhi, 112, 113, 114, 123, 124 Brennan, Timothy, 31 Burj al-Murr, 166, 167– 68, 198 Bustani, Fu’ad Frem, 18 Butler, Judith, 184 Camus, Albert, 173 central Beirut see downtown Beirut Certeau, Michel de, 4, 121, 123, 153 Chiha, Michel, 15, 17, 20

childhood memories, 186, 187– 89, 191, 196 child – parent relationships, 190–92, 194 Christians, 11 – 12, 77 – 78, 79 see also Jesuits Church, 11 – 12 Chute, Hillary, 174 city centre see downtown Beirut civil war (1975 – 90), 22 – 23, 62– 63, 80 artistic and literary response, 64 – 65, 67 – 70, 92 – 93 in contemporary historical novels, 133 critical literature, 22, 69 – 74 division of the city, 66 – 67, 68, 69, 92 – 93 monuments, 148 role of ‘mountain culture’, 19 cognitive mapping, 92, 122– 24, 133–35, 155, 156– 57 Colla, Elliott, 103, 114, 115– 16 comics, 27 – 28, 168– 70, 172– 76 artist – audience relationship, 185– 87 artist – family relationship, 189– 92, 193– 94 autographic, 178– 82, 186, 189 empathic representation, 183– 84, 185 faces and bodies in, 182– 83, 194 interaction of text and image, 168, 173– 74, 176– 77, 184– 85 silent panels, 184– 85 commemoration landscape of, 119– 27 language of collective, 114– 19 commemorative countermemories, 100–114 confinement, 84 – 85, 87 Connerton, Paul, 108, 118, 138 consumption, 24, 55, 104, 116– 17, 149–50, 157

INDEX cooke, miriam, 41, 64, 65, 71, 86, 98 – 99, 114, 115, 135, 148 Corm, Charles, 15 – 16, 20 countermemory, 26, 97, 100– 114 al-Daif, Rashid: Dear Mr. Kawabata, 25 – 26, 97, 100 commemorative countermemories, 102– 5 landscape of commemoration, 124 language of commemoration, 114, 117 the right to the city, 127– 28 darih, 170, 171 Darwish, Mahmoud, 20, 91 Memory for Forgetfulness, 64 – 65, 69, 71 –73, 76, 79 – 80, 85 Davie, May, 93 Dear Mr. Kawabata (al-Daif), 25 –26, 97, 100 commemorative countermemories, 102– 5 landscape of commemoration, 124 language of commemoration, 114, 117 the right to the city, 127– 28 death of Beirut/Lebanon, 97 – 99 Deeb, Lara, 7 DeKoven, Marianne, 174 Derrida, Jacques, 145 desert imagery, 125– 26 Dib, Roy, 166 Dillon, Sarah, 154– 55 disorientation, 3 – 4, 39 – 40, 55 – 56, 82 – 83, 112– 13 divided Beirut, 66 – 67, 68, 74, 92 – 93 disruption of everyday life, 81 – 84 ideological division, 74– 75, 76 – 80 perception of boundaries and limits, 84 –91 Dome, Beirut City, 173 domestic spaces, 85 – 86, 87 – 88 dominant vs. emergent culture, 7 –9, 19 – 21

263

downtown (central) Beirut, 94 – 98, 99, 100 absence from wartime texts, 93 countermemories in postwar fiction, 101, 102, 103 –6, 107– 8 as palimpsestic text, 155, 156– 57 post-2006, 172 taken over by nature, 119 understanding the ruined landscape in postwar fiction, 120– 27 see also Martyrs’ Square East Beirut, 66 – 67, 68, 77 – 78, 79, 82– 83, 84, 92 economy, 47 – 48, 51 – 52 The Egg, 173 Eisner, Will, 176 El Refaie, Elisabeth, 179, 181, 182, 184, 185 Eley, Geoff, 164– 65 emergent vs. dominant culture, 7 – 9, 19– 21 emigration, 11, 16 – 17, 20, 30 – 31, 38– 39, 47 – 48, 49 – 51 empathy, 183– 84, 185, 190– 92 empty spaces, 89 – 90, 125– 26, 196 ethics of representation, 183– 84 exclusion, 55 see also alienation; belonging exile, 15 –16, 37 see also emigration Fairouz, 19, 94 – 95, 125 families, 50, 107– 13, 138, 189–92, 193 Fawaz, Mona, 171 feminist issues, 34–38, 40–44, 57–58, 98–99 see also gender issues; women filmakers, 115– 16 Fisk, Robert, 97 – 98 Forty, Adrian, 153 Foucault, Michel, 122, 126, 153– 54 fragment, as hermeneutic tool, 67 fragmentation, 70 – 71, 73 – 74, 76, 85

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Fragments see Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir France, 13 – 14 Francophone Lebanese, 151– 52 Freiha, Anis, 6 – 7 French Mandate, 17 Freud, Sigmund, 114 future, anticipated, 192– 98 Gandhi see The Journey of Little Gandhi Gardner, Jared, 178, 181, 186 Gavin, Angus, 94 – 95 gender issues, 34 – 38, 40 – 44, 57 – 58 memories and histories, 109– 11 use of space, 85 – 86 wartime writing, 71, 98 – 99 see also women geographical scale, 23, 75 –76 Ghandour, Sabah, 23, 70 Gharbieh, Ahmad, 171 global city, Beirut as, 157– 58, 160– 61 graphic narratives see comics guilt, 104– 5, 187– 89 Guinea, 49 Hafez, Sabry, 30, 42 Halbwachs, Maurice, 106, 108 Hanf, Theodor, 8 Hanssen, Jens, 131 Harb, Mona, 7, 171 Harb Lubnan (Al Jazeera documentary series), 100 al-Hariri, Rafiq, 170 Harith al-Miyah (Barakat) see The Tiller of Waters Harvey, David, 29, 61, 126 Haugbolle, Sune, 25, 101 Hermez, Sami, 192– 93, 194 heterotopias, 122, 126 Hirsch, Marianne, 132, 136– 37, 189– 90 historical novels, 131–33, 137–38, 144, 145–46, 154 see also Bayrut Madinat al-‘Alam; Le Roman de Beyrouth

history, 153– 54 erasure and rewriting, 95, 129– 31, 158 family, vs. official, 111 vs. fiction, 139– 40, 143–45 vs. memory, 95, 108– 9 see also historical novels; memory Hobsbawm, Eric, 18, 31 Holocaust, 189– 90 hospitality, 51 host – guest metaphor for invasion, 146, 147 Hourani, Albert, 17, 18 – 19 Hourani, Najib, 5, 24, 95, 99 Hutcheon, Linda, 142 Huyssen, Andreas, 149, 154– 55 I Think We will be Calm in the Next War (Merhej) see A‘taqid anna sanakunu hadi’in bil harb al-muqbila ‘Id, Yumna, 47 identity, 25, 39 – 40 of Beirut, 68, 159– 61 Beirut vs. Lebanon, 80 memory and, 25, 138, 164– 65 national, 6 –8, 96 – 97, 148, 149, 151– 52, 163 see also belonging; mountain romanticism Ila Beirut al-Untha Ma‘ Hubbi (To Beirut, the Woman, with my Love) (Qabbani), 64 immigration, 161– 62 individual and place, 80 – 84, 133– 36 see also alienation; belonging industry, 47 – 48, 51 – 52 inter-generational relationships, 107–13, 189 –92, 193 –94 interrogation mark metaphor, 38, 39– 40, 198 invaders as ‘guests’, 146, 147 invented traditions, 18 Israel, 3, 62– 63, 68, 72, 185

INDEX Italian restaurants, 157 Jaber, Rabee: Bayrut Madinat al-‘Alam (Beirut, the City of the World), 27, 131– 33, 134, 200 becoming Beiruti, 161–63 Beirut as palimpsest, 154– 61 placing the self in the city, 135, 137– 38, 141– 47 Jam and Yogurt (Merhej) see Mrabba w Laban Al Jazeera, 100 Jesuits, 13 – 15, 19 Jibran, Jibran Khalil, 31 The Journey of Little Gandhi (Khoury), 23, 69, 71, 86, 88 – 89 jungle, urban destruction as, 118– 19 Kaplan, Caren see Between Woman and Nation Kassir, Samir, 66 –67 Kawabata see Dear Mr. Kawabata Kerbaj, Mazen, 27 – 28, 195, 200 Kerblog, 1 – 3, 178– 81, 182, 183, 184– 85, 186– 87, 190, 193 Lettre a` la Me`re, 166– 68, 170, 172– 74, 175– 76, 177 Suspended Time, Vol., 1, 196– 98 Kerblog (Kerbaj), 1 – 3, 178– 81, 182, 183, 184– 85, 186– 87, 190, 193 Khalaf, Samir, 5, 25 – 26, 67, 99 Kharidat Lubnan (The Unblemished Pearl of Lebanon) (Lammens), 10–13 Khater, Akram, 16, 20, 30 Khoury, Elias, 74 The Journey of Little Gandhi, 23, 69, 71, 86, 88 – 89 Al-Wujuh al-Bayda’ (White Masks), 69, 80 – 84, 85 – 86, 88, 89 – 90 Ku¨chler, Susanne, 153 Lammens, Henri, 13, 14 – 15, 16 Kharidat Lubnan (The Unblemished Pearl of Lebanon), 10 –13

265

language, 72– 73, 91 – 92, 114– 19, 151–52 Layoun, Mary, 33, 61 Lefe`bvre, Henri, 4, 54, 88, 125 Lettre a` la Me`re (Kerbaj), 166– 68, 170, 172–74, 175 –76, 177 lieux de me´moire, 27, 97, 135, 149, 150, 153 loss, commemorating, 114– 19 love and hatred for Beirut, 173– 74 Lynch, Kevin, 133– 34 al-Machriq (journal), 10, 13 mahjar writers, 15 – 16 see also nahda movement Majaj, Lisa Suheir, 77 Makdisi, Jean: Beirut Fragments, 67, 69, 74, 85, 91 – 92 Makdisi, Saree, 24, 96, 100, 129– 30, 135, 147, 148, 158, 164 Malaak, Angel of Peace (Medlej), 174–75, 177 Maluf, Ramez, 94 – 95 Mandour, Sahar, 186 mapping, 92, 122– 24, 133– 35, 155, 156–57, 171 Marie Rose see Sitt Marie Rose Martyrs’ Memorial, 148, 170– 71 Martyrs’ Square, 5, 26 – 27, 55 – 57, 94– 95, 100, 103–4, 149, 150–51, 170 –71 Maus (Spiegelman), 189–90 McCloud, Scott, 178, 182– 83 McDonogh, Gary, 90 Medlej, Joumana, 174– 75, 177 melancholy, 114 memory, 24 – 26, 92 childhood, 186, 187– 89, 191, 196 and cognitive mapping, 133– 35 countermemory, 26, 97, 100– 114 formation and transmission, 107–13, 138 generational differences, 134–37, 189– 92

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and identity, 25, 138, 164–65 inability to share, 103– 4, 106 individual vs. collective, 101– 3, 106– 7, 108–13 repression, 100– 101, 135– 36 transition from personal to collective, 117– 18 vs. history, 95, 108– 9 see also history; postmemory Memory for Forgetfulness (Darwish), 64 – 65, 69, 71 – 73, 76, 79 – 80, 85 Merhej, Lena, 27 – 28, 175– 76, 190– 92 A‘taqid, 171– 72, 178, 181–82, 183, 185– 86, 187– 89, 190, 193– 94 Mrabba w Laban, 168– 70, 191– 92, 195– 96 Meteling, Arno, 168, 173 milieux de me´moire, 27, 154 mills, 47, 51 – 52 The Mills of Beirut (‘Awwad) see Tawahin Bayrut Mitchell, Walter, 5 Moallem, Minoo see Between Woman and Nation monument, city as, 147– 54 monuments, 147– 48, 150– 51 mother, Beirut as, 1 – 3, 166– 68, 172– 74 mountain romanticism (mountain nationalism), 8, 10 – 19, 30 –33, 38, 39, 130 inversion of, in wartime texts, 79 mourning, 114 Mrabba w Laban (Jam and Yogurt) (Merhej), 168– 70, 191– 92, 195– 96 Muslims, 79

becoming Beiruti, 161, 163– 65 between memory and history, 137– 41 the city as monument, 149–54 placing the self in the city, 134– 36 nasib, 116, 117, 118, 119 Nasrallah, Emily: Tuyur Aylul, 3, 20– 22, 32 – 33, 34, 35, 36 –40, 41, 61 nationalism, 30 – 32, 33 – 34, 41, 42, 44, 57, 58 – 59, 100 see also mountain romanticism Nora, Pierre, 27, 97, 109, 119–20, 149 nostalgia, 102– 3, 104, 124, 186 postmodern, 142–43 Nuayma, Mikhail, 31, 32 – 33

nahda movement, 31 see also mahjar writers Najjar, Alexandre: Le Roman de Beyrouth, 3 – 4, 27, 131– 33

Qabbani, Nizar, 64 qasida, 116, 117 question mark metaphor, 38, 39– 40, 198

Ottoman Empire, 13 – 14, 17, 130, 131, 148 Palestinians, 79, 85 palimpsest, city-space as, 154– 55, 156–57 parent– child relationships, 190– 92, 194 patriarchy, 34 – 36, 41, 49 – 50, 64, 98 Pen Association, 16 Picard, Elizabeth, 19 Pike, Burton, 5 place names, 92, 156 plaques and signs, 156 poetic tradition, classical Arabic, 115–19 popular culture, 6 – 7, 19, 31 – 32, 33, 64 post-colonial economy, 47 – 48, 51 – 52 postmemory, 132– 33, 136– 37, 189–90 public space, 29, 56, 81, 84, 85– 91

INDEX Radstone, Susannah, 24 – 25 Rahbani family, 19, 31 –32, 33 Ranger, Terence, 18 Ras Beirut, 88 – 89 rats, city of, 55 – 57 reconstruction, 23 – 24, 99, 101, 126– 27, 129– 30, 135, 148, 158– 59, 164 refuge, Mount Lebanon as (asile du Liban), 15, 31, 39, 43 – 44, 161 refugees, 3, 82 – 83, 172 Renan, Ernest, 100 restaurants, 6 –7, 157 Ricoeur, Paul, 143– 44 Riegl, Alois, 147– 48 Rihani, Amin, 15 – 16, 31 Le Roman de Beyrouth (Najjar), 3– 4, 27, 131– 33 becoming Beiruti, 161, 163– 65 between memory and history, 137– 41 the city as monument, 149– 54 placing the self in the city, 134– 36 Rossi, Aldo, 120, 127, 150, 153 ruins, 104–5, 119, 120–24, 125–26 rural life see mountain romanticism; village vs. city life Sabra, Hassan, 68 Said, Edward, 49 Salem, Elise, 31, 32, 53, 62 – 63, 64, 68, 69 – 70, 71, 80, 104 Saliba, Robert, 134 Salibi, Kamal, 26 – 27, 66 Samandal (comics journal), 174– 75, 177– 78, 191 Sarkis, Hashim, 71, 86, 97 Sawalha, Aseel, 5, 28, 126 scale, geographical, 23, 75 – 76 Schama, Simon, 5 Schwarz, Bill, 24 – 25 security, 171 Sehanoui, Nada, 26 Seigneurie, Ken, 115

267

sense of place, 4, 133– 36 separation from society, 116– 17 September Birds (Nasrallah) see Tuyur Aylul sexual violence against female bodies, 35 – 38, 41 – 44, 48 – 50, 51, 53, 54, 58, 59 – 60, 64 metaphor for fictionalization of history, 140– 41 sexuality, Beirut as hypersexual woman, 64– 65 Shalan, Jeff, 17 al-Shaykh, Hanan, 25 – 26, 97 Beirut Blues, 75, 92, 100, 105–7, 117– 19, 120– 21, 124, 125– 26 The Story of Zahra, 69, 86 – 88 siege of Beirut, 63, 68, 72 signs and plaques, 156 silent panels, in comics, 184– 85 Sitt Marie Rose (Adnan), 64, 65, 69, 76, 77– 80, 84 – 85 Smith, Neil, 4 – 5, 164 social values, breakdown of, 50 –51 Solidere, 23 – 24, 26, 28, 94 – 95, 96, 99– 100, 126, 129– 31, 135, 147, 158, 159– 60 Sommer, Doris, 12 Sontag, Susan, 183– 84 souks, 157, 158 space, 4– 6, 22 – 23, 35, 106 Beirut as transnational space, 68 domestic, 85 – 86, 87 – 88 effect of future anticipated violence, 194– 98 effect of war on perception of, 71 –73 empty, 89 – 90, 125– 26, 196 geographical scale, 75 – 76 and individual identity, 37 – 38 palimpsestic nature of city-space, 154– 55, 156– 57 public, 29, 56, 81, 84, 85 –91, 99 – 100 shrinking spaces, 84 –91 Spargo, Tamsin, 132

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Spiegelman, Art: Maus, 189 –90 Stetkevych, Susan, 116 Stone, Christopher, 19, 31 – 32, 33 The Story of Zahra (al-Shaykh), 69, 86 – 88 streets, 86 – 88, 89 – 90, 97, 156 suffering, representation in comics, 184– 85 Suspended Time, Vol., 1 (Kerbaj), 196– 98 Tabet, Jad, 126 Tanoukhi, Nirvana, 5 – 6, 70, 75 – 76 Tawahin Bayrut (The Mills of Beirut) (‘Awwad), 20 – 22, 33 –36, 60 – 61 city as promise or nightmare, 52 – 58 economic consequences of colonialism and emigration, 45–52 gender and the city, 40 – 44 Tamima’s trajectory from reader to writer, 58 – 60 The Tiller of Waters (Barakat), 25 – 26, 95 – 96, 97, 100 commemorative countermemories, 107– 14 landscape of commemoration, 122–27 language of commemoration, 116–17, 119 Toufic, Jalal, 115– 16 traditions, invented, 18 Tuyur Aylul (September Birds) (Nasrallah), 3, 20 – 22, 32 – 33, 34, 35, 36 – 40, 41, 61 Umru’ al-Qays, 117 urban death metaphor, 97– 99 urban space see space urbanization, resistance to, 6 – 7, 8, 9 – 10 village vs. city life, 6 – 8, 9 – 10, 20, 32 – 34, 37, 40 – 44, 45 – 47, 52 – 54, 57, 83 see also mountain romanticism

violence anticipation of future, 192– 98 against female bodies, 35 – 38, 41 – 44, 49 – 50, 51, 53, 54, 57 – 58, 59 – 60, 64 against history, 140– 41 urban violence from, 7 May, 2008, 172 see also civil war (1975 – 90); war (July, 2006) Viswanathan, Gauri, 14 voices, women’s, 57, 59 –60 Volk, Lucia, 170 walking the city, 122– 24 war (1975– 90) see civil war war (July, 2006), 1 – 3, 166, 171– 72, 190 see also A‘taqid anna sanakunu hadi’in bil harb al-muqbila; Kerblog war monuments, 148 war yet to come, 192– 98 Wesseling, Elizabeth, 137, 140, 144 West Beirut, 66 – 67, 68, 69, 79, 83 White Masks (Khoury) see Al-Wujuh al-Bayda’ Williams, Raymond, 7, 8 –9, 10, 20, 45, 59, 131– 32, 174, 175, 201 women, 34 – 38, 40 – 44 female body, 34 – 38, 41 – 44, 48 – 50, 51, 53, 54, 58, 59 –60, 64 voice of, 57, 59 – 60 writers, 71, 98 – 99 writers and writing, 52, 71, 98 – 99 Al-Wujuh al-Bayda’ (White Masks) (Khoury), 69, 80 – 84, 85 – 86, 88, 89– 90 Yahya, Maha, 73, 74 – 75, 84, 91 Yarze monument, 148 Zahra see The Story of Zahra Zaydan, Joseph, 86 Zerubavel, Yael, 95, 113, 130, 135