Writing Beirut: Mappings of the City in the Modern Arabic Novel 9780748696253

Citation preview

Writing Beirut

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Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature Series Editor: Rasheed El-Enany Writing Beirut: Mappings of the City in the Modern Arabic Novel Samira Aghacy Autobiographical Identities in Contemporary Arab Literature Valerie Anishchenkova The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts Fabio Caiani and Catherine Cobham Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel Ziad Elmarsafy Gender, Nation, and the Arabic Novel: Egypt 1892–2008 Hoda Elsadda Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora Syrine Hout War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction Ikram Masmoudi The Arab Nah∂ah: The Making of the Intellectual and Humanist Movement Abdulrazzak Patel www.euppublishing.com/series/smal

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Writing Beirut Mappings of the City in the Modern Arabic Novel

Samira Aghacy

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Affectionately dedicated to the memory of Khalil Afif Husni

© Samira Aghacy, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/15 Adobe Garamond by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9624 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9625 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 0346 7 (epub) The right of Samira Aghacy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents Series Editor’s Foreword

vi

Acknowledgments

ix

Note on Transliteration

x

Introduction

1

1

The Rural–Urban Divide: Subverted Boundaries

31

2

The Rhetoric of Walking: Cartographic versus Nomadic Itineraries

60

3

Sexualizing the City: The Yoking of Flesh and Stone

93

4

Traffic between the Factual and the Imagined: Beirut Deferred

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5

Excavating the City: Exterior and Interior Relics

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Inconclusive Conclusion

202

Bibliography

207

Index

223

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Series Editor’s Foreword

T

he Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature is a new and unique series which will, it is hoped, fill in a glaring gap in scholarship in the field of modern Arabic literature. Its dedication to Arabic literature in the modern period, that is, from the nineteenth century onwards, is what makes it unique among series undertaken by academic publishers in the Englishspeaking world. Individual books on modern Arabic literature in general or aspects of it have been and continue to be published sporadically. Series on Islamic studies and Arab/Islamic thought and civilization are not in short supply either in the academic world, but these are far removed from the study of Arabic literature qua literature, that is, imaginative, creative literature as we understand the term when, for instance, we speak of English literature or French literature, etc. Even series labeled “Arabic/Middle Eastern Literature” make no period distinction, extending their purview from the sixth century to the present, and often including non-Arabic literatures of the region. This series aims to redress the situation by focusing on the Arabic literature and criticism of today, stretching its interest to the earliest beginnings of Arab modernity in the nineteenth century. The need for such a dedicated series, and generally for the redoubling of scholarly endeavor in researching and introducing modern Arabic literature to the Western reader has never been stronger. The significant growth in the last decades of the translation of contemporary Arab authors from all genres, especially fiction, into English; the higher profile of Arabic literature internationally since the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Naguib Mahfouz in 1988; the growing number of Arab authors living in the Western diaspora and writing both in English and Arabic; the adoption of such authors and others by mainstream, high-circulation publishers, as vi

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opposed to the academic publishers of the past; the establishment of prestigious prizes, such as the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Arabic Booker), run by the Man Booker Foundation, which brings huge publicity to the shortlist and winner every year, as well as translation contracts into English and other languages—all this and very recently the events of the Arab Spring have heightened public, let alone academic, interest in all things Arab, and not least Arabic literature. It is therefore part of the ambition of this series that it will increasingly address a wider reading public beyond its natural territory of students and researchers in Arabic and world literature. Nor indeed is the academic readership of the series expected to be confined to specialists in literature in the light of the growing trend for interdisciplinarity, which increasingly sees scholars crossing field boundaries in their research tools and coming up with findings that equally cross discipline borders in their appeal. Among Arab cities, few can match the fame of Beirut in modern times. A cosmopolitan city par excellence since the nineteenth century, it has enjoyed a unique cultural, ethnic and religious diversity. Situated on the eastern Mediterranean coast, it was open to European cultural and intellectual currents from early on and has consequently served as a major gateway to modernity in the entire Arab region. It was a major catalyst in the Arab nahda or renaissance of the nineteenth century and has produced many of the Arabic language’s best writers over generations, often exporting to the rest of the region the latest trends in writing. But Beirut’s history was not all sweetness and light; her very diversity and geographically strategic location that endowed her with her strength was also her weakness. Great powers, both international and regional, vied for influence over her and fought their proxy battles on its soil and Lebanon’s as a whole, culminating in the fifteen-year civil war of 1975 to 1990, whose wounds have yet to heal. But the city never lost its vitality or let go of her hold on the imagination of writers, both of her own children and the many other Arab intellectuals drawn by her unwaning magnetism over the decades. A city with such geography and history, such diversity and vibrancy, and such power of attraction over writers had to be “written” and “rewritten” time and again by generations of authors, only to re-emerge from each

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capture in words liberated and ready to be written again through another pair of beguiled eyes. Fiction where Beirut dominates as locale, where it serves as the background against which the fates of men and women are ordained and the human condition explored, are in abundance. Nor are studies that explore such fiction in short supply. But they are studies of author, oeuvre, theme, period and so forth; none of them makes Beirut the vantage point and focus. This is where it is hoped the current title will fill in a gap. Samira Aghacy’s approach to the city as a multiple construct—urban, rural, religious, secularist, liberal, conservative, Lebanese, Arab, Eastern, Western, male, female and so on—according to the identity lying behind the representation—is unique in bringing together a wide spectrum of sixteen important novels (written over the last fifty or sixty years by a varied constellation of Lebanese and other Arab writers) to explore the multifaceted, multilayered, at once real and imaginary, space known as Beirut. Readers with particular interest in Lebanese fiction may also find an earlier volume of this series relevant to their pursuits: Syrine Hout’s Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction. Rasheed El-Enany Emeritus Professor, University of Exeter

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Acknowledgments

I

would like to thank the Lebanese American University (LAU) for providing the academic atmosphere and support services for research and academic development. I wish to extend special thanks to the staff of the Riyad Nassar Library in Beirut and Byblos whose assistance was unbounded. I wish to thank Mrs Cinderella Habre, Aida Hajjar, Sawsan Habre and Saeed Kreidiyyeh for all assistance rendered. I am deeply indebted to Dr Maya Aghasi for reading the manuscript and for her constructive criticism and insightful comments and suggestions that have enriched this project on all fronts. I would like to thank my colleagues at the Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World (IWSAW), for their patience and understanding. In particular, I would like to thank Carol Khater for her invaluable assistance in copyediting the manuscript. I am particularly indebted to Professor Rasheed al-Enany for his astute remarks and for helping me understand transliteration in more depth. Finally, I wish to thank Dr Joseph Jabbra, the president of the LAU, for his untiring support for research at the university.

ix

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Note on Transliteration

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few features of the work need explanation. I have used transliteration in accordance with the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) guidelines. I have only transliterated the names of characters and places in the novels that have not been translated into English. As for the others, I have used the same spelling as in the translations; however, with the exception of Hoda Barakat’s novel where the quotations I have used correspond literally to the Arabic text, all other translations are mine. I have opted for a more literal translation of the Arabic in order to better convey the cartographic elements of the narratives. I have included some Arabic translations in the notes to help the reader establish the full meaning of the terms. Finally, I have used full transliteration in the Bibliography.

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Introduction [N]one of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993: 7) [T]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” (1986: 22) Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse. Calvino, Invisible Cities (1974: 14) Beirut. Who could point it out to me? Wåzin, “Bayrut” (2010: 390) Coffee is geography. Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness (1995: 20)

I

n an interview, the poet Adonis (ʿAl⁄ Aªmad Saʿ⁄d) describes Beirut as “an open project that is never complete” and refers to it as the city of “exploration” rather than “certainty” (1987: 45). What indeed is Beirut? Is it a village, a town, a city? Is it ancient, contemporary, traditional, modern? Is it feminine, masculine, androgynous? Is it secular, religious, sectarian? Is it flesh, stone, cadaver? What is more, where is Beirut located? In private spaces? In public spaces? In the street, the mind? Above ground, underground? Is it 1

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visual, aural, olfactory? Is it real or imagined? These are some of the questions that this study will explore in an attempt to navigate a volatile, ubiquitous and contradictory city. Beirut has been the focus of many academic and scholarly studies. Among such works are architectural studies, such as Peter Rowe and Hashim Sarkis’s Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the Construction and Reconstruction of a Modern City (1998) and Jad Tabet’s Beyrouth: La brulûre des rêves (2001); historical works, notably Samir Kassir’s Histoire de Beyrouth (2003); sociological studies, such as Samir Khalaf’s Heart of Beirut: Reclaiming the Bourj (2006) and Samir Khalaf and Philip Khoury’s Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and PostWar Reconstruction (1993); ethnographic studies, such as Aseel Sawalha’s Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City (2010) and Sune Haugbolle’s War and Memory in Lebanon (2010); as well as local conference proceedings on Beirut in poetry and the novel, with articles ranging predominantly from thematic to impressionistic approaches. This study is a spatial representation of Beirut in Arabic novels written since the 1950s, although some of the texts discussed are set in earlier times. It focuses on sixteen novels, some of which have not been translated despite their importance in the Arab world. The work accounts for the city in ways that go beyond thematic readings, which sets it apart from the majority of academic studies on Beirut in both Arabic and English where the emphasis has been on general themes related to the city, such as sexuality, gender, war and memory. Among such works are Miriam Cooke’s War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (1987), Evelyn Accad’s Sexuality and War (1990) and Crisis and Memory: The Representation of Space in Modern Levantine Narrative (2003), edited by Ken Seigneurie—a set of essays on social and political crises, memory and the homeland, and the use of space in some Arabic novels. Writing Beirut: Mappings of the City in the Modern Arabic Novel seeks to address the gaps in these works through a geographical/ spatial approach to Beirut that aims to understand how the city is imagined in fiction and how writers utilize the spaces of the city, conjoining the factual with the imaginary, to produce their own idiosyncratic perceptions of Beirut. Although many poems, essays and other texts deal with Beirut, I will focus exclusively on fictional narratives; unlike poetry that tends to provide a synchronic view of the city (or an idealized view in anthem-like manner), and

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non-fictional studies that focus on providing information, the novel mirrors the daily mundane life of the city. Relying predominantly on geographical studies that depart from the traditional emphasis on space as static and monolithic and read the city as performative and multifarious, Beirut will be dealt with as an active constituent of the action in the novels, shifting between the topographical and abstract, the quotidian and discursive, and the real and imagined. In many of these works, the city is a place created from the factuality of the street, building or monument, producing a strong reality effect through a mimetic mode of expression that produces verisimilitude through visual, auditory and tactile elements. Within the horizontal and contiguous spaces of the city, these narratives depict individuals experiencing the city through nomadic movements. Walking the streets of Beirut, the narrator of Egyptian Sonallah Ibrahim’s Bayr¨t Bayr¨t (1984) focuses on the simultaneous, what Foucault refers to in “Of Other Spaces” as the “near and far” and “sideby-side” (1986: 22). The narrator observes a military car carrying a rocket launcher, the remains of a butcher’s shop and a signboard carrying the name of what appears to have been a bar (32). One notes here the contiguous relation between a rocket launcher, a butcher’s shop and a bar. Simultaneously, Beirut is an interactive, dynamic and discursive formation that resists fixity— an imagined locale projecting the characters’ ideologies and states of mind. As a city in continual and recursive unrest, alive and shifting, it has inspired a rich variety of literary works by Lebanese, Arab and other writers from different times, places and backgrounds. I have chosen to proceed with close readings of novels written in Arabic by Lebanese as well as other Arab writers since the 1950s, keeping in mind that Beirut has played a pioneering role and served as a model to many Arabs who have represented themselves culturally, politically and socially in relation to the city. Beirut will be dealt with as a literary text, open to many different interpretations depending upon the viewers within the texts, without overlooking the position of the author in relation to the city, the time and the particular location. Accordingly, the actuality of the city itself is always deferred in a never-ending state of self-transformation, where the city exists as a manifold construct triggering a limitless chain of Beiruts that contest any simplification, unsettling generalizations and totalizing views.

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In dealing with the works, I make use of Blanche H. Gelfant’s three modes of representing the city in The American City Novel (1954): the portrait type where the city is focalized through a single character, such as in Sonallah Ibrahim’s Bayr¨t Bayr¨t; the synoptic type that concentrates on the city as protagonist, where the setting takes precedence over character and the city takes its place at the forefront of the action, as in Hoda Barakat’s Óårith al-miyåh (1998; English translation, The Tiller of Waters, 2001; Chapter 5);1 and, finally, the ecological type of novel that focuses on specific neighborhoods or districts of the city, as in Balq⁄s al-Óumån⁄’s Óayy al-lijå (1969; al-Lijå District; Chapter 1). In some works, emphasis is placed on the metonymic topography of the city, the naming of real neighborhoods, zones, streets, cafés and buildings that exist in the city as apparently passive locales meant to project a realistic mode. For instance, in Rashid al-Daif’s Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs (1989; Mechanisms of Wretchedness; Chapter 2) the narrator circulates between his flat and other factual places, such as the Café de Paris on Hamra Street, which is meant to produce a real and tangible effect. Similarly, Rab⁄ʿ Jåbir’s B⁄r⁄t¨s mad⁄nå taªtå al-ʾar∂ (2005; B⁄r⁄t¨s a City Underground; Chapter 5; hereafter cited as B⁄r⁄t¨s) refers to real places, such as the Virgin Megastore, al-ʿAzariyyå area, and the City Palace cinema. Another novel by Jåbir entitled Taqr⁄r M⁄l⁄s (2005; The Mehlis Report) speaks of real events, such as the assassination of writer and journalist Samir Kassir (1960–2005) in front of his house in La Rose Building, near al-Óåyik bakery in Ashrafiyya. The narrator of the latter novel also maintains that he had come across Kassir several times in the past month: twice on the sidewalk of Maʿra∂ street, once in front of Bank Lubnån wa-l-Mahjar and once in front of the Casper and Gambini restaurant (11). In Elias Khoury’s al-Wuj¨h al-bay∂åʾ (1981; English translation, White Masks, 1986; Chapter 2) the author himself figures as character, which is yet another way to project a realistic mode. Despite an apparently mimetic mode where the city is transparent and factual, Beirut is depicted in the texts as a polymorphous, unstable and isotropic locale that resists transparency and demarcation and will be read as such. In these texts, Beirut emerges as an agglomeration of contradictions, juxtapositions and inconsistencies, fluctuating between the cartographic and experiential. Rather than an “essentialist concept,” indulging in “the comfort of Being,” it moves “ahead with the (assumed progressive) project of

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Becoming” (Massey 1994: 119) where the difference between the material and the conceptual city reveals the intimate connectivity between them. In some novels, Beirut is shaped and reshaped through an amalgamation of discourses, such as newspapers, autobiographies, poetry, fiction, film, theatre and media that bring it to life. For instance, the narrator of Bayr¨t Bayr¨t gleans a great deal of information about a city at war from newspapers and films. He learns from newspapers that the naked bodies of three Christian young men were found in a well in the village of Óammånå; later, he derives information about the city from a documentary film on the Two-Year War (1975–6) that he is asked to comment upon. The study relies predominantly on works in the field of geography and space. Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991) distinguishes between officially organized “representations of space” or abstract space, which is coherent, rational, neutral and conceptual, and “representational” or “lived space,” which is passionate, “hot,” energetic and interactive (33, 31). This traffic between the real and imagined city, linking the physical, social and imagined, is an essential component of my study. Michel de Certeau builds on Lefebvre by distinguishing between the panoptic vision from above and the subversive quotidian view from below. The panoramic view reveals fascination with the city as an idea divorced from the hard-rock reality below. Significantly, in Hassan Daoud’s Sanat al-’¨t¨mat⁄k (1996; English translation, The Year of the Revolutionary New Bread-Making Machine, 2007; Chapter 3), the roof is a safe refuge where three young village men position themselves to watch their urban neighbors within their flats. On the street they are too shy to look these same neighbors in the eye. The view from above saves them from the pressures generated by the city and enables them to extricate themselves from it and gratify their desires on the roof where they assume voyeuristic control over women’s bodies. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau (1984: 97) focuses on what he refers to as “pedestrian speech acts,” which are loosely aligned with the use of syntax and grammar in human speech. This is a language comprising bodily movements and trajectories through the city that constitute an experiential understanding of Beirut rather than the holistic strategy of the panoptic view. The study centers on the pedestrian’s quotidian, differentiated

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and kaleidoscopic practices in Beirut where the city is articulated as characters make their way through it. In Rashid al-Daif’s al-Mustabidd (1983; The Obstinate Man; Chapter 4) the narrator’s nomadic movements within a limited configuration of streets, buildings and shops constitute his own “pedestrian enunciations and rhetorics” (de Certeau 1984: 116). Through his defiant itinerary the narrator articulates and shapes the city in accordance with his needs and desires, disrupting any planned cartography of the city. In Barakat’s Óårith al-miyåh, the narrator indulges in his “rhetoric of walking” (de Certeau 1984: 100) as he traverses the empty streets of deserted Downtown Beirut, while the protagonist of Rab⁄ʿ Jåbir’s B⁄r⁄t¨s speaks the underground city by charting his way through an archaic terrain haunted with apparitions that represent his own harrowing past experience. The study centers on Beirut as a multiple construct—urban and rural, sectarian and secular, liberal and conservative, Lebanese and Arab, and Eastern and Western. The publication of novels, poetry and other autobiographical accounts, what David Pillemer refers to as “idiosyncratic peripheral details of personal circumstance” (1998: 149, 52), allow for a variety of discourses to enter the public sphere and produce endless versions and representations of the city, thus challenging any conclusive view. The works show the city’s plurality, its permeable boundaries and its positionality at the forefront of change and disruptive activities in the Arab world: wars, revolts, uprisings, insurrections and so forth. Without abandoning the concepts of Western academia on modernity whose notions have shaped urban theory, this study engages critically with these concepts and theories and challenges the essentialist view of urban modernity as a Western model to be emulated by developing countries. In line with postcolonial studies and anthropological works that focus on plural modernisms formerly excluded from (the European) canon as derivative (Gilroy 1993; Appadurai 1996; Mitchell 2000; Gaonkar 2001) and therefore imitative, the study demonstrates that Beirut’s urban modernity accentuates the plurality of the urban experience. Beirut is a city with its own particular mode of urbanization and modernity intersected with historical, social and cultural factors, always in a state of becoming rather than being. The study also shows that modernity in Beirut is not new but old and incomplete, imagined and practiced differently in different times and places.

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The tropes discussed below permeate the novels, and sometimes overlap, shedding further light on the general argument. This Introduction also makes use of novels in addition to the selected ones in order to reinforce the argument and place the study within a broader framework and a more comprehensive perspective. The Country–City Polarity The country–city dichotomy has traditionally reviled the urban and privileged the rural. The rural has been associated with innocence and communal solidarity as opposed to the urban that is associated with corruption and an alienating individuality. Simultaneously, the former has been linked to tradition, intolerance, fanaticism and a narrowness of vision that suppresses differences among its members, as opposed to the urban that has been associated with tolerance, individual freedom and modernity. This dualistic approach favors two sealed and antagonistic communities with rigid boundaries. In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams underlines this dichotomy: On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved center: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. (Williams 1973: 9)

We see this dichotomy, for instance, in Halim Barakat’s novel ʿAwdat al-†åʾir ⁄la al-baªr (1969; English translation, Days of Dust, 1974) where the protagonist declares a penchant for a robust rural over a debilitating urban existence. He prefers rural solidarity, integrity and heroism to urban insularity, idleness and cowardice and views Beirut as an urbanized and complacent place that castrates men and keeps them stuck in the stalemate of unfulfilled desires. Compared to the unswerving commitment of Palestinian fighters, tough rural men who bravely face the enemy on the battleground, the protagonist sees his urban torpor, sedentary indulgence and general effeminacy as the reason for the occupation of Palestine, his homeland. Other works underline a general sense that the Lebanese village is losing its identity and is being swept away by urbanization. An⁄s Furayªå’s book

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titled Ismaʿ ya R⁄∂å (1971; Listen Rida), a collection of rural customs and Lebanese folkloric heritage, is the outcome of deep-seated anxieties about old traditions and practices that are vanishing and, thus, the dire need to record these old practices and folkloric traditions before they are forgotten under the sweeping influence of urban modernization (D⁄b 2010: 107). Al-Óumån⁄’s Óayy al-lijå challenges dualistic approaches to the country and the city that favor two sanitized and antagonistic communities with rigid boundaries. In the novel, Beirut is marked by a life dictated by rural elements that, in turn, leaves its marks on rural residents, urbanizing them without fully erasing the rural. Within this framework, critic Samir Kassir maintains in his Histoire de Beyrouth (2003: 158–91) that, historically, the ties between Beirut and the mountain have continued uninterrupted, and that the traditional boundaries between city and country have always been malleable. In Shawq⁄ ʿAbd-l-Óak⁄m’s novel al-Bukåʾ laylan (1985; Beirut, Crying at Night; Chapter 4) the protagonist sees no difference between the city and the village in the Middle East. For him, the Arab city (such as Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Tripoli and Carthage) is a revised and brushed up image of the village (44). He notes that Beirut is surrounded by mountain villages, revealing the strong link between them. Similarly, Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad’s ˝awåª⁄n Bayr¨t (1972; English translation, Death in Beirut, 1976; Chapter 1) emphasizes the inextricable bond between rural and urban, both being sites of violence and corruption. It also shows that rural values, particularly those related to women such as domestic confinement, the separation of spheres, and honor killings, are also widespread in the city. Kamål D⁄b talks of the heavy explosion, in the 1940s and 1950s, of migrants from rural areas in Beirut, who belonged to the Maronite, Druz and Shi’a communities (2010: 106). Likewise, in Hanan al-Shaykh’s Bar⁄d Bayr¨t (1992; English translation, Beirut Blues, 1995), the character Asmahan visits her village in South Lebanon and is surprised to find “A chocolate factory! A bank! Chicken farms . . . A bank. Another bank” (82). For Asmahan, banks, factories and restaurants belong to the city, and she does not expect to find them in her village. The proximity between Beirut and the surrounding countryside and the fact that the overwhelming majority of people living in Beirut actually come from the peripheries challenges any view of them as being in binary opposition. Other works go further and regard the village as an inextricable part

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of the city itself. Referring to Ashrafiyya, a district in Beirut, Elias Khoury maintains in an interview that “my childhood had two aspects: it took place in a big city and was protected by a village inside the big city . . . [that] had all the aspects of a village: the large olive orchard in Karm-al-Zayt¨n, the fields in Sy¨f⁄, and the old yellow Beiruti houses surrounded by trees” (cited in Mejcher 2001: 8–14). Khoury’s al-Jabal al-‚agh⁄r (1977; English translation, Little Mountain, 1989) laments the urbanization of a provincial town strongly aligned with the rural. Recalling his childhood in Ashrafiyya in the 1950s and 1960s, the narrator evokes the pulverization of the mountain by technology and tells us that bulldozers flattened the hills, and that the palm tree in front of his house collapsed “locked into the excavator’s jaws, its roots which bulged above ground, torn out and cast down, in a pool of gravel and sand” (16–17). Urbanization is described in violent terms where the narrator’s urban pastoral is compared to a body violated by the instruments of modern technology, where Syrian and Kurdish workers who lived in tin shacks in the Karantīnā area are seen dumping sand, gravel and water into the entrails of the mountain. The little mountain of Ashrafiyya was gradually catching up with civilization and the narrator regards the infiltration of technology as an act of rape “being penetrated from all sides” (16). Suhayl Idr⁄s’s al-Khandaq al-gham⁄q (1993) set in the First World War before the rise of Greater Lebanon in 1920 reveals that Beirut consisted of an agglomeration of insular sectarian zones. Such zones persisted after independence and surfaced at any political crisis within the country. L⁄nå Kraydiyyå’s novel Khån Zåda (2010; Chapter 1) reveals how three women recoil into their traditional sectarian communities in reaction to a civil war that has crushed all their dreams and aspirations for a modern brand of secular life in Lebanon and the region. The novel shows that the traditional village-like type of life was never eradicated, but rather awaited the right moment to come to the surface once again. The civil war transformed the city into sectarian warring zones deeply suspicious of casual observers who were generally viewed as spies and infiltrators. Such zones harbored sectarian/religious and ideological/ political/military identities incompatible with a unified nation. In Egyptian writer Ibrahim’s Bayr¨t Bayr¨t, the narrator observes that the streets of the war city are filled with posters of Saddam Hussein, Hafez al-Asaad, Ruhallah Khomeini, Muammar Gaddafi and Yasir Arafat as well as faces of martyrs,

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revealing a hotchpotch of conflicting ideologies that imprinted division and contradictions on the surface of the city.2 In a similar mode, in Bar⁄d Bayr¨t, the protagonist Asmahan observes “Iranian signs on the shop fronts, on the walls, posters of men of religion, of leaders” (31) and finds official maps unhelpful in guiding her through a city that is constantly changing and defying the legal cartography: “I tried to use a map as the street names and the recognizable landmarks began to change hour by hour” (31). The residential quarters of Beirut are seen as commanding a sectarian geography that embraces an undifferentiated political and sectarian identity that excludes outsiders. As early as the 1960s the Syrian defector in Óannå M⁄nå’s novel al-Thalj yaʾt⁄ minå al-nåfidha (1969; The Snow Comes from the Window) is told to be wary in the Karm al-Zayt¨n area where he is staying with relatives, a place exposed to visitors, gossipy women of the neighborhood and meddlesome by-passers. Contrary to traditional Karm al-Zayt¨n, Hamra is liberal and cosmopolitan, a place where a defector can vanish easily without a trace; for the character Umm Bash⁄r, however, who lives in Karm al-Zayt¨n, the Downtown B¨rj area is a threatening and evil place: “Men no longer marry. Why should they? Go down to the B¨rj area, God save us, women harass men in broad daylight . . . and at night? No one has any shame. We have become like cats in February” (127). In other works, the war city itself generates community bonds within shelters or building basements as seen in B⁄r⁄t¨s where the narrator’s family and neighbors gather in the shelter and establish bonds within the threatening atmosphere of the city. In Bar⁄d Bayr¨t, the character Asmahan depicts the war as a liberating force. The safest room in the house brings together males as well as females regardless of ideologies of segregation and separate spheres: “we became accustomed to our house turning into a shelter during the war. There was no longer any difference between male and female visitors. Everybody slept in my grandfather’s room” (187). Walking the City According to Walter Benjamin, the nineteenth-century flaneur embodies the spatial practices of walking, looking, “botanizing on the asphalt” (Benjamin 1983: 36), and observing the phantasmagorias of the performative spaces of the city. Beirut provides a narrow field for the promenading observations of

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the flaneur who roams the streets of metropolitan cities seeking pleasure. It is too small and provincial, and the distances between central Beirut and the peripheries are minimal. For instance, the liberal wife of a Lebanese publisher in Bayr¨t Bayr¨t yearns for Paris—away from a claustrophobic Beirut: “This city stands on my nerves. Small, small. One cannot move around freely without being seen by someone” (197). Similarly, Iraqi writer Shåker L¨ʿayb⁄ asserts ironically in his travel book titled Óasrat al-yåq¨t f⁄ ªi‚år Bayr¨t (2003; The Ruby’s Heartbreak at the Siege of Beirut) that “the distance between Hamra Street in ‘West Beirut’ and Ashrafiyya in ‘East Beirut’ does not exceed 2000 meters. Too long!” (26). Keeping in mind the smallness of Beirut, the flaneur and flaneuse can be construed in these texts as voyeurs, journalists, detectives, writers, bystanders, consumers, fugitives, activists, pleasure seekers and pedestrians. The Syrian character Farah in Ghada Samman’s Bayr¨t 75 (1975; English translation, Beirut 75, 1995; Chapter 4) is fascinated with streets of Beirut “filled with Parisian-looking young women exposing Parisian-looking legs. Never in his entire life had he seen as many bare legs as he’d seen in the past half hour . . . everyone walked with a dancing rhythm . . . The luxury cars, the women, the jewelry, the perfumes, and the pampered dogs” (17). As an underprivileged pedestrian observer, Farah enjoys the beauty and energy of the city as well as the different attires, fashions and commodities, but is soon struck by this same city turning monstrously against him. Other works emphasize the magnanimity of a city that despite its smallness embraces contradictory locations. In Muʾnis al-Razzåz’s Aªyåʾ f⁄ albaªr al-mayyit (1982; Alive in the Dead Sea; Chapter 4), the character ʿInåd maintains that “Hamra is Paris while Íabra is Hanoi” (172); unlike a stable, cultural and pleasurable Hamra, Íabrå, which is not very far away, is a place of resistance and struggle. The Fåkhån⁄ area in Íabrå is bombarded by Israeli planes, while Hamra, Rawsha and Verdun appear to belong to “another planet” where nothing happens (115) even though the distance between Hamra and Íabrå is “five minutes by car” (172). While some pre-war novels share features of the nineteenth-century flaneur who derives pleasure from looking at the city, other novels show that walkers through the street, especially in a war context, scrutinize places and faces and look for available “clues,” such as style of clothing, deportment,

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outward appearance and facial expression to try to ensure personal safety. Many of them observe the city through rapid glances rather than a fixating gaze3 in order to avoid any suspicions. In “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), Georg Simmel focuses on the effect of the metropolis on the mental life of the individuals who live there. For him, the urban individual’s exchanges with strangers are neutral and impersonal: “Instead of reacting emotionally, the metropolitan type reacts primarily in a rational manner, thus creating a mental predominance through the intensification of consciousness” (411). Simmel refers to the urban individual’s blasé attitude, guise of rationality, or the neutral exchanges among strangers in the city, a context of physical proximity and mental distance. However, in war Beirut, the characters strive for anonymity and isolation, not in the Simmelian sense of the alienation of the metropolitan type, but the estrangement of the individual caught up in an erratic and ferocious civil war where apparent disinterestedness is a defense mechanism of self-protection. In the dangerous zones of war Beirut, there are no aimless wanderers but rather individuals whose trips outdoors are planned, intentional and undertaken for specific purposes. In a post-war context, this attitude persists in an attempt by walkers to erase a haunting past. In René al-Óayik’s Bayr¨t 2002 (2003; Chapter 5), the Simmelian blasé attitude persists but within a different framework. Like the war pedestrians, the young university students Rajå and Rulå are alienated mentally and even hostile to the close proximity of strangers within the city. While the war pedestrians are cautious, averting their eyes in an attempt to avoid trouble, the post-war pedestrians distance themselves from other citizens in an effort to erase the past represented predominantly by older men or women who epitomize the bloody and traumatic past. In many of Rashid al-Daif’s novels, the war city is a threatening place beset with fears, anxiety and surveillance. In Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs, segmental relationships dominate where the citizen becomes accustomed to reacting to others as functions rather than complete human beings. The citizen reacts only to the relevant aspect of another’s personality, such as their profession, while the other deeper self remains hidden in order to avoid the menacing forces that control the city. While in Rashid al-Daif’s F¨sªa mustahdafa bayna- l-nuʿås wa-l-naum (1986; English translation, Passage to Dusk, 2001),

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the narrator seeks personal safety in the public spaces of the city by blending into crowds, which offer him safety and anonymity. In addition to walking the streets, flaneurie is metamorphosed into a scopophelic model where the flaneur takes position on the rooftop, the balcony or at the window where he is transformed into a voyeur assuming voyeuristic control of the scene and experiencing the city as a totalizing force,4 as seen in novels by Hassan Daoud. The proximity of buildings in Beirut enables the boy (from South Lebanon) in Daoud’s first novel titled Binåyat Mat⁄ld (1983; English translation, The House of Mathilde, 1999), to watch his female neighbors inside their flats where they remain bodies exuding a strong erotic attraction. Public and Private Spaces Just as the central and peripheral parts of the city are inextricable, one cannot deal exclusively with the outer spaces of the city without accounting for the private space. Far from being a sign of fixity, the home is not immune from history, which intrudes into the inner space and leaves its stamp upon it, underscoring the inseparability of public affairs from private life and their state of continual flux. Many of these novels have the effect of publicizing the home and domesticating the street where a great deal of the action takes place in spaces that fuse public and private. Even when the setting is the interior of a private home, for example, its dwellers are exposed to the outside gaze. The private space is more susceptible to unpredictable trespassers or invaders from outside and vice versa. In Daoud’s Binåyat Mat⁄ld, the male narrator describes his female neighbor in her flat, standing in front of the bookcase, in a language fused with erotic overtones: When Katia stopped to pick up a book, she spent a long time flipping through pages, notebooks, book covers . . . She ran her fingers along the wood of the shelves when she peered up on to the top shelf, she hesitated a little, then strained her body upward, her dress rising above her plump thighs. (Theroux 1999: 29)

In Jabb¨r al-D¨wayh⁄ Shar⁄d al-manåzil (2010; Drifting among the Houses), the character Ni∂ål’s apartment in Rawsha is invaded by militiamen who set up barricades on the balcony and “the living room is now outside the house, a

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public street, a passage for the militia of the Popular Nasserite Organization, to the balcony that overlooks the St. George Hotel and Phoenicia hotels” (199). In Alexandra Chreiteh’s Dåyman Coca-Cola (2009; English translation, Always Coca-Cola, 2012; Chapter 3), the ubiquitous image of the model Yana on the huge billboard is all over the city, leaving a strong impact on Abir, the protagonist, who focuses on Yana’s image in the mirror. Yana’s image from the outside fills the mirror, leaving no room for Abir to see her own image in the mirror inside her bedroom. Strongly aligned with voyeurism, this is an inescapable urban experience where the outside, public forces of the market invade the private space of the bedroom, a phenomenon that is not encountered in rural areas. In Jåbir’s B⁄r⁄t¨s, the private space suddenly becomes public where displaced Lebanese refugees settle down with their pots, pans and other culinary appliances in the streets in Downtown Beirut where they eat and cook their meals out in the open (Chapter 5). Similarly in Hoda Barakat’s Óajar al-∂aªik (1990a; English translation, The Stone of Laughter, 1994), an explosion causes the character Khalil to envisage his room “going out of its place as if it wanted to catch up with the street, or with the flats which had been hit . . . as if it had split away from him” (51).5 Aural and Olfactory Beirut If Beirut is a spectacle where the visual dominates, the war city is also a cacophonous soundscape that can overshadow the visual landscape.6 Living in a protracted period of war, people have learned to identify weapons being used in the fighting by their sounds; they are even able to locate where explosions and flare-ups take place. Hiding in their shelters, many characters navigate the city through jarring sounds that help them to protect themselves, as seen in al-Mustabidd, where the narrator pays close attention to the sounds of explosions in order to locate the safest place to hide in his apartment. The landscape is mapped by sound; the night city is navigated through rowdy noises that decode its indecipherable canyons in an atmosphere where an individual is transformed into “a single, huge ear,” as the narrator of al-Samman’s novel Kawåb⁄s Bayr¨t (1976; English translation, Beirut Nightmares, 1997) puts it (87). The acoustics of war Beirut have changed so radically that sound itself marks spaces. Edmund Carpenter describes how auditory space

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differs from visual: “Auditory space . . . [is] space made by the thing itself, not space containing the thing . . . The eye focuses, pinpoints, abstracts, locating each object . . . against a background,” while sound is part and parcel of the landscape itself (cited in Carpenter and Otto 1973: 35). In the streets of Beirut where people are immersed in darkness or huddled in shelters, vision is not the most useful sense. In B⁄r⁄t¨s, the protagonist’s neighbor prays to God to save them from “the mortar bombs, the 106 guns” (39) and other rocket launchers that she has learned to identify, determine their trajectories and locate the sources of their launching. Within this atmosphere, the citizens have no choice but to become aurally adept and learn how to identify missiles, guns and rockets to try to ensure their safety. Instead of earlier shop illuminations that light the city, it is the firelight of weapons that provides the city with an unnerving luminosity and nightmarish sound of gunfire and explosives. The war city is also dominated by the olfactory sense where the smell of garbage and gunpowder fill the space. Al-Daif’s Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs is rife with garbage piles that the protagonist smells and observes with outlandish fascination. In many works dealing with the civil war, garbage is a prime feature of Beirut. For instance, in Iman Humaydan’s novel titled Båʾ mithlå bayt . . . mithlå Beirut (1997; English translation, B as in Beirut, 2008), the protagonist alludes to “the smell of dirty streets mixed with the smell of blood and gunpowder” (121). Similarly, in his autobiography of the Israeli invasion of Beirut, Mahmoud Darwish describes war Beirut as a place assaulted by sounds and smells: “I’ve never before lived in a place for ten years. I have never before gotten used to vegetable smells, vendors’ calls, noises from the armed tavern . . . loud television sets and the smells of garlic and broiled meat” (1985: 178). Beirut as Imagined City In “Metropolis: The City as Text,” James Donald argues that like Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community,” the city “constitutes an imagined environment . . . the discourses, symbols, metaphors and fantasies through which we ascribe meaning to the modern experience of urban living” (1992: 422; emphasis in the original). In other words, one could say that Beirut is a locale open to countless and conflicting representations, alluring and abhorrent,

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menacing and protective, utopian and dystopian. While Beirut is geographically located in Lebanon, many Arab writers view the city as belonging to them rather than the Lebanese. In Aªyåʾ f⁄ al-baªr al-mayyit (1982) by Jordanian writer al-Razzåz, Beirut is a mirror of the aspirations and desires of Arab intellectuals and activists, the only Arab city of resistance against Israel. It is a place that is supposed to realize their dreams and grant them political, social as well as sexual freedoms, although in some cases, such as in Bayr¨t Bayr¨t, the city turns out to be a place of disenchantment and disillusionment. In dealing with nomadic engagements in the city, I make use of Fredric Jameson’s (1988) concept of cognitive mapping, an attempt to navigate a world that has suddenly become undecipherable. Jameson’s mapping is not about a factual, mimetic, neutral and totalizing representation of the city. Rather, it is a partial attempt to make sense of one’s world. Far from the cartographer’s neutral map that views the city as a totalizing force, the cognitive map represents the individual’s reading of the city within a particular locale as well as in spaces not necessarily on the map, and how each pedestrian/writer maps his own distinct individual city differently from the other, creating idiosyncratic understandings of space. This is done as Jonathan Raban maintains when the “hard city” of asphalt and stone goes “soft” and “awaits the imprint of an identity,” inviting the walker “to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape [that he] can live in” (1974: 17). For Raban, the soft city of illusion, myth, desire and nightmare is as real as the hard city that “one can locate in maps and statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture” (10). As a result, instead of the supposedly stable, transparent and knowable locale, the city7 loses its transparency and becomes opaque, impervious and indecipherable, “irritat[ing] us into metaphor” (32, 242, 92). It forces us to resort to metaphor in an attempt to fathom an unfathomable entity. In the context of war and violence, metaphors allow for grasping the incomprehensible violence of the city, and as a result many characters create their own mental maps of the city and perceive them in timeless allegorical qualities where they are regarded as real and conjectured, hellish and paradisiacal, primitive and civilized, rugged and stylish, military and civilian, wholesome and libidinous. For instance, the overwhelming and awesome garbage piles accumulating in the streets of warring Beirut in Taqaniyyåt

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al-buʾs incite the viewer to read it as a synecdoche for spiritual and moral squalor. The protracted fifteen-year civil war transformed Beirut into a dirty and ruinous locale, housing drunkards, thugs and militiamen. In Riªlat Gand⁄ al-‚agh⁄r, the emphasis is on the gradual proletarization of Beirut—the city that has gradually changed “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 . . . Everything around us has changed, and we have changed” (5). If the narrator of Riªlat Gånd⁄ al-‚agh⁄r is frustrated with the city, many other writers, particularly non-Lebanese Arabs, view it with enthusiasm as the capital of pleasure, revolutions and uprisings. For many, the Beirut that combines bohemian lifestyles, sexual indulgence, boisterous unruly actions, creative freedoms, cultural activity, robust modernity and surreal experiences is also the center of revolutionary politics and political activism, a safe sanctuary for political refugees8 as well as runaways from tribal wars like the Somali men who sleep within “the entrails of destroyed cars” in Iraqi novelist Jinån Jåssem Óalåw⁄’s Dur¨b wa ghubår (2003; Paths and Dust) (241). In Aªyaʾ f⁄ al-baªr al-mayyit, the Palestinian/Jordanian character Mithqål sees Beirut as the emblem of revolution, resistance, culture and pleasure and insists on navigating it in accordance with his own mental constructions. In some works, feminine Beirut is fetishized, sexualized and gendered. In his “historical” and largely didactic novel titled Wå ʾiªtaraqat Bayr¨t (1983; And Beirut was Burnt), Ghålib Óamza Ab¨ Faraj focuses on the erotic attraction of Beirut where the city is described as a woman with a “mouth like red strawberries” (75) and cheeks “like a Lebanese red apple” (75). Beirut has thick blonde rather than black hair. With such “Western” (75) looks she is sexually free and inviting. In Iraqi writer Luʿayb⁄’s Óasrat al-yåq¨t f⁄ ªi‚år Bayr¨t, the virile speaker lusts for the embodied city/woman: “from the American University to the Modca Café and from ʾUzåʿ⁄ to Raʾs Bayr¨t, I was ploughing a virgin land” (12).9 Furthermore, Darwish sees Beirut in allegorical terms as “the foster mother of a heroic mythology that could offer Arabs a promise other than that born of the June War” (134) and regards it as the Palestinians’ “last tent” and refuge (21). While the majority of Arab writers and intellectuals have idealized the

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city as a place of freedom, pleasure, resistance and culture, others have felt disappointed and disenfranchised coming face to face with the city. In Bayr¨t Bayr¨t, the narrator yearns for the old Beirut he knew in the 1960s and maintains that present-day Beirut (1980s) has shattered his dreams. It has been transformed into a violent city whose degenerate residents have gone astray and lost all ethical values and principles. Similarly, in Jordanian novelist Elyås Fark¨h’s Qåmåt al-Zabad ([1987] 2009; The Foam Figures), the character Zāhir ʿIsā al-Nābulsï is disappointed when he sets eye on Beirut for the first time: “I was stunned because I did not see what I had painted in my imagination. It is not glittery or colorful. Old buildings. Streets crowded with humans, buses and cars. Vendors screaming their goods. Men and boys selling lottery tickets. Noise like the roaring sea . . . I sniffed a distinct smell emanating from everybody, a smell like dead and rotten fish” (166). Eroticizing Space In some works, the city is feminized and eroticized by men who indulge in “fetishistic scopophilia” (Mulvey 1975: 14) in a city overwhelmed by the number of women who fill the spaces. The public sphere controlled by patriarchy is also central to feminine resistance, where the boundaries between what feminist geographer Gillian Rose (1993: 150) refers to as “paradoxical” spaces and the private space are subverted as women are able to be simultaneously within the domestic space and the outer patriarchal domain. By being sexually different in a wholly masculine terrain of sameness (149), women challenge the “spatiality”10 of their marginal position, offering a way of thinking about space that is not reliant on the enforced binary separation of spheres. Hanan al-Shaykh’s Óikåyat⁄ sharªun ya†¨l (2005; English translation, The Locust and the Bird: My Mother’s Story, 2009; Chapter 3) reveals how, as early as the 1930s, the character Kamila roams the streets of Beirut to buy commodities and go to the cinema. Likewise her participation in the voyeuristic spectacle afforded by the cinema empowers her and serves as a source of knowledge and power. The peripatetic movements of women give them access to locales that provide them with anonymity and freedom as seen in Kamila’s sojourns around the city on her way to the cinema or to an

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out-of-the-way café in Rawsha. The different “social ordering” (Rose 1993: 46) provided by such sites destabilizes a male-controlled city. Similarly, the post-war young women in Chreiteh’s Dåyman Coca-Cola seek refuge at a Starbucks coffee shop, a stronghold of the modern where they feel free to flirt and philander away from the city; in contrast, the traditional maqåh⁄ continue to be occupied by exclusively male customers. The city provides heterotopic spaces, defined by Foucault as “other, another real space as perfect as meticulous as well as arranged as ours [all other spaces] is messy, ill-constructed and jumbled” (1986: 27). Rather than viewing locales in ontological opposition, such as rural and urban, central and marginal, ordered and carnivalesque, heterotopia are “counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Hetherington 1997: 48). This is an alternative geography that challenges essentialism by taking up a different positionality. Heterotopias are not marginal places, but rather, other sites that resist the existing state of affairs. These are alternative modes of ordering in the city with their own codes, symbols and relations of power. For instance, in Jåbir’s B⁄r⁄t¨s, the underground cinema (in Downtown war Beirut) that features pornographic films is a heterotopia of desire, a counter-space where the young narrator finds refuge away from the war arena of violence and hatred. To destabilize the power relations entrenched in the city, feminist theory embraces the idea of multiple locations. Adrienne Rich refers to the “politics of location” (1994: 210–31), while Donna Haraway focuses on “situated knowledge” (1991a: 183), which is positioned, contextual and partial rather than universal, detached and objective knowledge. This “geometrics of difference” (Haraway 1991b: 170) underlines the specificity of women’s (as well as men’s) quotidian experiences of the city, thus destabilizing the ideology of patriarchal control and revealing that identities are fluid and that the performances of walkers (male and female) across the city are divergent and contradictory rather than fixed and uniform. The sexualized presence of the prostitute in the streets of Beirut destabilizes the distinction between the public sphere of action and the private sphere of intimate relations,11 thus freeing sexuality from the bonds of tradition and sexualizing the outer space. In al-Bukåʾ laylan the protagonist observes that

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the streets of the city are crowded with alcoholics and prostitutes. The war city is also responsible for the emergence of different sexualities that have so far remained concealed. Owing to the loosening of moral values, prostitutes became more brazenly conspicuous and freer to navigate the city rather than remaining restricted within the bounds of the public brothel that was destroyed. Within the public and private spheres of the city, gender is destabilized in the daily exchanges where the male protagonist in Óajar al-∂aªik comes face to face with his own homosexual inclinations and admits that he is attracted to men rather than women. The essentialist view of bodies as natural, “ahistorical” and insulated from “their cultural milieu and values” (Grosz 1994: 190) are rejected by feminists who focus on the way that bodies are inscribed by the city and how they simultaneously reinscribe themselves on to their environments. How the city is shaped by the dwellers who in turn are shaped by it can be seen in Rashid al-Daif’s ʿAz⁄z⁄ al-sayyid Kawabåtå (1995; English translation, Dear Mr. Kawabata, 1999) where the narrator’s mother would have preferred to marry her neighbor who is marked by the city where he works. He was pale and his skin was soft; he was “clean under the fingernails” (96) and he pronounced some words like a city dweller. He had all the qualities that her rural husband lacked. The Body as Metaphor of the City Just as the city resists fixity and affirms its alterity, drive, performativity and fluidity, gender identity is also in continual flux and is constituted in particular positions, quotidian practices, spatial relations and dominant discourses. Sexual identities are “spatially contingent” (Bell and Valentine 1995: 9), and in turn space itself is tied to gender roles and sexual codes. In an interview with the newspaper al-Óayåt, Hoda Barakat asserts that after fifteen years of civil war, human beings have become inextricably woven into the structure of the city. She affirms that “we are the city, and we are whatever takes place in it. Our lives are one. The street is like one of our limbs, the houses are our nightmares, and the rooms and shelters are akin to our anxious souls” (1990: 20). In some of these works, the city is less topos and more anthropoid where objects in space and the human body intersect to produce a synergetic bond, an isomorphic relation between body and city. To use the words of Grosz,

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“the city is made and made over into the simulacrum of the body,” while the body is “citified” and “urbanized” (1994: 18, 19, 23). In some works, the emphasis on corporeality is accentuated as abstract meanings are translated into “material signs and symbols” (Fraser and Greco 2004: 21), and where the body serves as a metaphor of the city. In Aªyåʾ f⁄ al-baªr al-mayyit, the narrator describes Beirut as “panting” and speaks of the collapse of nerves and buildings (16). Similarly, in al-Jabal al-‚agh⁄r “the cars are big with wide eyes” (14), and a building sags “like an old woman, her joints broken by the shells” (25). In Bar⁄d Bayr¨t, the character Asmahan describes the cars in Beirut “with their guts visibly hanging out” (30). Likewise, in F¨sªa mustahdafa bayna-l-nuʿås wa-l-naum (47), there is a link between the injured body and the battered city. The narrator is an alienated and truncated walker who desperately needs to remain invisible, intent on not being noticed in the street even when he has one arm. The narrator’s city is haunted by the female represented by the pregnant body, a suffering pregnant widow who is devastated by a phallic city controlled by violent armies and militias. The injured narrator identifies with the woman and sees her marginal situation akin to his own. In addition to the female body as a trope of the city, the male narrator’s fragmented and ruptured male body bleeds on the barren asphalt: “I was bleeding profusely over the asphalt. How I wanted my blood to water the soil of distant meadows, away from the asphalt that is never thirsty and never quenched” (55). The asphalt invades the narrator’s own subjective world, turning him into a facsimile of the fragmented city. The city as a female body and as a male phallic image are recurrent tropes, underscoring the rape of the androgynous female/male Beirut by the militaristic male who controls it, a slippage that recurs throughout the study, revealing the city’s puzzling impermeability. In al-Jabal al-‚agh⁄r, Beirut is an emblem of never-ending conflict, an aporetic place that disrupts all confidence and certitude. For instance, the narrator feminizes the city in order to grasp and control it: “What a city—a whore of a city. Who can imagine a whore laying a million men and still there?” (125). While the city itself is feminized, the forces of the city are phallic. In the novel, virility and misogyny are the prevailing attributes of the male character: “In the end, we did destroy it [Beirut] but when they announced the war was over and published pictures of the terrible devastation that had been visited upon Beirut,

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we discovered that we hadn’t destroyed it. New wars are probably needed to do that” (135). This desire to destroy the city springs not only from male misogyny, but also from frustration at its feminine fluidity, inscrutability and resistance to closure. The Problematic of the Old and New City The Solidere project, a private enterprise that took the initiative of rebuilding Downtown Beirut after the fifteen-year civil war, has had detractors as well as supporters. The former lamented the demolition of the old city center and the rise of a new city that bears no resemblance to the old one, and that looks more like a “dazzling vitrine” (D⁄b 2010: 165). These critics are troubled by the general amnesia represented by the new city and see the dire need to confront the traumatic war experience in order to be able to achieve “redemption” (Makdisi 1990: 258) and move on. They blame Solidere and the Lebanese state for draining state resources to transform Beirut into a gentrified locale that tailors only for the wealthy, while the rest of the city remains an agglomeration of sectarian zones and inequalities that will further widen the rifts within the country (Makdisi 1997; Kubursi 1999; Bayhum 1991). Referring to the Solidere project, Jad Tabet (2001: 68) critiques the “salvation-like amnesia” that will “cleanse the past and polish it in order to transform it into simple real estate speculation.” These critics complain that Lebanon is a country without an “official history” (Makdisi 2006: 201) that would guarantee a solid collective identity. For them, there is the need to regain “historical memory,” to “engage systematically with the war” and “to salvage history from all those fragments and moments—and hence to project a future based on the hope of the war’s genuine end” (Makdisi 2006: 204, 209). The implication is to embrace the universal authority of history at the expense of multiple individual memories rooted in the concrete spaces of the city. Pierre Nora maintains that memory is “by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural, and yet individual. History, on the other hand, belongs to everyone and to no one, whence its claim to universal authority. Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities” (1989: 9). In other words, while history attempts to impose closure, individual memories remain fluid and open-ended.

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On the other hand, supporters of the Solidere project reject an essentialist view that focuses on the centrality of history and see no need to confront a traumatic past. What is needed is to forget in order to allow the city to rise from its ashes like “the mythical phoenix” (Yahya 2007: 241). In a similar vein, Samir Khalaf writes that without a chance “to forget, there can never be a chance for harmony and genuine coexistence” (1998: 141). Fawaz Traboulsi finds nostalgia for Downtown Beirut quite misplaced: “Why all this fuss about the good old days of the b¨rj? It used to be noisy, dirty and dangerous” (Hanssen and Genberg 2001: 241). Traboulsi’s (Haugbolle 2010: 86) ironic comment alludes to an overriding tendency in Lebanon to attach rosy memories to Beyrouth d’avant guerre while ignoring the very social and political tensions that triggered the war. Traboulsi supports what he refers to as “selective amnesia” where one needs to forget the graphic images of war and focus on the origins of the war and the lessons to be drawn (cited in Haugbolle 2005: 197). Haugbolle (2005: 197) underpins this concept by alluding to Adrian Forty’s “artfully selective oblivion” who maintains that it is healthier for societies to forget. In his turn, al-Daif proclaims that he “adore[s] the reconstructed city centre” and since the country has changed, the idea of “restoring the former pre-war features of the city centre seems to be a childish dream” separated from reality (cited in Sakr 2007: 280). In the light of the above, one wonders whether the old city can be preserved, when its links to the rest of the country have been disrupted by a protracted civil war that lasted for more than fifteen years. Furthermore, Beirut has manifold pasts and has been destroyed and rebuilt several times, which further complicates any attempt to fix it within a rigid mold to determine what constitutes Lebanese history and, by extension, identity (Vale and Campanella 2005: 284). If Solidere has shaped its own views of what the city should be like, it is clearly only one among other views, as the city is in constant flow and will continue to evolve in accordance with historical, ideological, social and political formations that are bound to subvert the Solidere schema by assuming different trajectories than the ones that were originally intended for it. This problematic of the old and the new city pervades a variety of novels, such as B⁄r⁄t¨s, where the ancient and modern city are linked and juxtaposed. In Laylå ʿUsayrån’s novel ˝åʾir minå-l-qamar (1997), the narrator

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feels threatened by a new Beirut that she cannot fathom or understand. This new Beirut is a city without old locales like Båb ʾIdr⁄s, al-B¨rj, restaurants like al-ʿAjam⁄, al-Baªr⁄, the Bas¨l Hotel, the corn⁄ch—the sea front where people walk, exercise and drink espresso coffee from the coffee machine. The narrator’s “topophilia,” described by Yi-Fu Tuan (1974: 4) as the “fleeting visual pleasure; the sensual delight of physical contact; the fondness for place because it is familiar, because it is home and incarnates the past,” is her passion for the old city that makes her more mindful of an alienating new corn⁄che, bursting with hoards of children and men with primitive looks, long beards and dirty hair. They wear garish clothes, smoke water pipes, eat nuts and dump the pods on the ground. The narrator’s bourgeois, extravagant and stylish Beirut is now “a tattered, dirty and uncouth place,” a shocking hybrid organism that is neither rural nor urban (57). It is a grotesque creature that looks like Eugene Ionesco’s “bald singer” (63). While the protagonist of B⁄r⁄t¨s is unable to live in the present without confronting the past, the young men and women in Bayr¨t 2002 appear to live a perpetual present in a city erased of a bruising past. While in Håla Kawtharån⁄’s novel al-ʾUsb¨ʿ al-akh⁄r (2006, The Final Week), the character Laylå describes the Beirut she sees from the fourteenth floor of a new hotel as “two Beiruts,” the old “renovated Beirut awakened by force from death, and our Beirut [in the peripheries of the city] with its decrepit buildings, its years of fatigue and humiliation, with clothes emerging from its guts, weary of life and dangling from its balconies” (87). The young narrator maintains that the new city is alienating only for those who knew the old city, and sees the absurdity of her parents’ clinging to the shreds of the old city and not going out because they want the old Beirut as they knew it, “as if the war has frozen it and stopped life around them, and then by pushing a button the city goes back to the way it was in April 1975” (12). Deprived of their lieux de mémoire, they refuse to visit the new city and insist on spending their time pouring over old albums and photographs of the old city. Beirut as such is a modern city tempered by non-modern elements and embracing modernity without cutting the umbilical cord with the past. Abdelaziz Y. Saqqaf (1987: 255) sums up Beirut’s overwhelming paradoxes: “it is an Arab country, yet it is intricately linked to Europe, especially its former colonizer France. It has a secular system, yet it works on the basis of

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religious compartments. It is a highly urbanized society, yet it is fanatically tribalized. It is a ‘democracy’, yet it is a pervasive feudal system. It is an affluent society, yet it has some of the Middle East’s poorest people.” This apparent contradiction is reflected in the traditional and modern cafés that fill the city. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was an increase in the number of hotels, nightclubs, restaurants, shops and merchandise in Beirut, most notably an increase in a new brand of modern cafés, such as the Horseshoe, the Modca, Wimpy, and Starbucks in the post-war era that stood in stark contrast to the traditional maqha. In Bayr¨t 2000, the character Rajå observes a maqha full of old men, but prefers to go to Starbucks instead. Starbucks represents a global modernity that ensures subjective freedoms for Rajå and his friends. Before the civil war, the maqha, an exclusively male coffeehouse, was concentrated in the Downtown area and other traditional residential sectors of Beirut (al-D¨wayh⁄, S. 2005: 30). The Downtown al-B¨rj maqåh⁄ and motels are described by critic Shawq⁄ al-D¨wayh⁄ as the “thresholds of the city” that catered to those who came to Beirut from the outskirts and rural areas (2005: 19) in the first half of the twentieth century. For the newcomers from the rural areas, these maqåh⁄ served as extensions of their own homes (al-D¨wayh⁄, S. 2005: 30), where they received messages from their villages normally placed in a “basket at the entrance” (36) of the maqha. These maqåh⁄ provided the newcomers with substitute families to help them make the transition to urban life. Being located in the Downtown areas, these young men from the villages engaged in a rite of passage visits to the public brothel in al-Mutanabb⁄ street where they learnt Beirut’s “vernacular erotic geographies” (Pfohl 1993: 192) as seen in ʿAz⁄z⁄ al-sayyid Kawabåtå and in Jabb¨r al-D¨wayh⁄ Shar⁄d al-manåzil. Furthermore, in Aªyåʾ f⁄ al-baªr al-mayyit (71), the maqha is the location where “conspiracies” and subversive political activities and plots are hatched by men. In the study, modernity is associated with the emergence of new spaces particularly for women. In Óikåyat⁄ sharªun ya†¨l, the character Kamila roams the Beirut of the 1930s and strikes up an affair with a man where they meet in a variety of places afforded by the city, such as cafés, cinemas, streets and a flat within the city, breaking all taboos related to morality and the separation of spheres.

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In an interview with the newspaper al-Ittiªåd, Elias Khoury refers to Ra’s Bayr¨t as “the area most cosmopolitan . . . a place where universities, intellectuals, political struggle, bars, conspiracies, churches, and mosques are concentrated” (1989: 4). The modern cafés located in the liberal Hamra area were frequented by Beirut’s intelligentsia who engaged in “intellectual and political debates while they consumed Western beverages . . . rather than local beverages [such as arak] and snacks served in the maqha, the traditional coffeehouse” (Sawalha 2010: 93). In ˝awåª⁄n Bayr¨t, the Hamra café is an urban space of social exchange available to women where the protagonist Tamima meets Naji Raad, a journalist, intellectual and activist. The café fuses the public and private and compensates for restrictions within the home space.12 While this location is a transparent place, enabling Tamima to communicate and express herself freely, it is also a hazardous locale that places her in a vulnerable position in relation to male predators such as Naji. In some war novels, the sidewalk is used as a café where men meet and discuss the latest political and military situation. In al-Bukåʾ laylan, the Burj al-Baråjina Palestinian refugee camp houses a sidewalk café that is always filled with men who drink tea, smoke water pipes and discuss the latest political and military situation. In Ghassån Shibår¨’s semi-autobiographical war novel Bayr¨t 1982 (2007), the pavement is transformed into a sort of a maqha where male residents meet, and listen to the latest news. The City as Palimpsest If walking the city is an encounter with modernity, it is also a confrontation with the past. As an ancient city, Beirut is a palimpsest, a text that is built upon strata, each layer teeming with history and with inscriptions of other times and places, what de Certeau (1984: 108) refers to as “the invisible identities of the visible.” Jåbir’s B⁄r⁄t¨s explores a subterranean city akin to the human psyche and makes use of fantastic elements that flout the structural and thematic logic of the realist novel in order to convey an unfathomable experience of pain generated by the city. Pursuing what looks like a boy who appears suddenly, the protagonist, who used to hear strange voices coming from the ruined City Palace cinema, falls accidentally underground and joins pale anachro-

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nistic apparitions—threshold figures—representing the palimpsestic past of the city, and the hidden layers of the narrator’s own traumatic war experience (21). This preoccupation with the past is juxtaposed with other works that focus on a city without memory, where predominantly young characters are preoccupied with the present as a strategy of evading the past. However, the war that they did not experience personally continues to be felt in the present, leaving its traumatic effects on their lives, and producing a numbing and depersonalizing effect. In other works, ghosts haunt the new post-war generation breeding disquieting anxieties. In al-ʾUsb¨ʿ al-akh⁄r, the young female narrator who finds herself in B¨rj al-Murr area is perturbed to think that this same area where she stands was once strewn with corpses. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory”—a kind of memory that persists and continues to be felt socially even though it is not personally experienced13—Craig Larkin (2010: 616) explores the memory of a generation of Lebanese who have grown up dominated by traumatic narrative accounts of the Lebanese war although they have not experienced the war themselves, and refers to it as an inherited form of memory that carries on and connects with the “pain of others.” B¨rj al-Murr is a “memoryscape” (Butler 2009: 223–39), a locale invested with memories of violence. On another occasion, the narrator goes to a nightclub in Karant⁄nå (a place that witnessed brutal massacres), an industrial area smelling of gas and garbage (59), and dances to the tunes of wild music, embracing “the ghosts of the place and its bloody history” (39). This brand of postmemory is felt by the narrator who was too young to harbor any memories of the war but remains conscious of sorrows that linger on. In Jåbir’s Taqr⁄r M⁄l⁄s, the protagonist’s sister who was kidnapped and murdered in the museum area cannot easily be laid to rest. She flashes up disrupting notions of linear time to tell the story of her violent death in the war. Her sudden appearance in the present resuscitates a past whose unresolved mysteries produce threshold figures that hover between the worlds of the living and dead. Beirut is also haunted by the ruins of the recent past, the remnants and cadavers of ruined houses, buildings and other collapsing structures. Unlike the ruins of the classical period that “expressed the invincibility of time and

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the resisting grandeur of human constructions,” these crumbling edifices referred to by Beatriz Jaguaribe (2001: 333–4) as “modernist ruins” express the “decrepitude” and “defeat of the new” and underscore the ephemeral nature of the new and the way it rapidly falls into decay and disarray. The contiguity between the old and new remains a striking feature of Beirut. In Bayr¨t Bayr¨t, the protagonist maintains that the famous Dolce Vita nightclub, symbolizing life in the 1960s and early 1970s, is a ruin surrounded by other decrepit buildings (44). Al-Shaykh describes daily life in Beirut as inextricable from the fighting, the garbage and the ruins that mark the city. In Bar⁄d Bayr¨t, the protagonist informs us that she and her lover had swum in the foul-smelling waters of the once fashionable “St. George’s Bay” where the “blackened ruins of the hotels came into sight each time we wiped the salt water out of our eyes” (180). Similarly, in Daoud’s Binåyat Mat⁄ld, the building stands as a reminder of urban decadence and “architectural perishability” (Gaonker 2001: 333), revealing the ephemerality of the new. In Kawåb⁄s Bayr¨t, the glittering boutiques of Hamra are in a state of disarray. The windows are littered with dusty mannequins, outdated artifacts and fossils of fashion representing the short-lived life of the commodity culture. Street vendors peddling their wares on the sidewalks commence the defeat of the new, while the modern café on Hamra is invaded by a crowd of “young beggars, and before long the beggars, the donation collectors and the vendors of Arabian jasmine, lottery tickets, and Chiclets had outnumbered the customers by far” (Samman 1997: 226). The seven major tropes I have identified in the Arabic novel on the city of Beirut are organized into five major ideas and, as such, I have divided the book into five chapters. These are not impermeable divisions, as these tropes spill into the whole study, revealing the precariousness of any classification, where the boundaries between chapters remain porous. Since it is impossible to deal with all novels on Beirut, I have chosen to focus on a select few that are appropriate to a spatial and cartographic approach. In the texts, Beirut is experienced and envisioned, and characters spend a great deal of time walking the streets. These peripatetic movements in the city shed light on how Arab and Lebanese writers map the cartography of Beirut and how they imagine it; the novels draw different images of Beirut depending on a range of perspectives wrought by social, economic and cultural conditions, where the city is

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simulated, distorted, prevaricated and engendered. Each character creates his or her own imaginings of the city, leaving his or her imprint on the city, just as the city, in turn, marks the individuals who live in it. The first chapter entitled “The Rural–Urban Divide: Subverted Boundaries” focuses on three novels, Balq⁄s al-Óumån⁄’s Óayy al-lijå (1969), Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad’s ˝awaª⁄n Bayr¨t, (1972) and L⁄nå Kraydiyyå’s Khån Zåda (2010). The second chapter entitled “The Rhetoric of Walking: Cartographic versus Nomadic Itineraries” focuses on three novels: Rashid al-Daif’s Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs (1989), Elias Khoury’s al-Wuj¨h al-bay∂åʾ (1989) and Sonnallah Ibrahim’s Bayr¨t Bayr¨t (1984). The third chapter entitled “Sexualizing the City: The Yoking of Flesh and Stone” centers on three novels: Hanan alShaykh’s Óikåyat⁄ sharªun ya†¨l (2005), Hassan Daoud’s Sanat al-ʾ¨t¨mat⁄k (1996) and Alexandra Chreiteh’s Dåyman Coca-Cola (2009). The fourth chapter titled “Traffic between the Factual and the Imagined: Beirut Deferred” concentrates on three novels by Arab writers and one by a Lebanese writer: Ghada Samman’s Bayr¨t 75 (1975), Muʾnis al-Razzåz’s Aªyåʾ f⁄ al-baªr al-mayyit (1982), Shawq⁄ ʿAbd-l-Óak⁄m’s Bayr¨t: al-Bukåʾ laylan (1985), and Rashid al-Daif’s al-Mustabidd (1983). The fifth and final chapter titled “Excavating the City: Exterior and Interior Relics” deals with three fictional narratives: Rab⁄ʿ Jåbir’s B⁄r⁄t¨s mad⁄na taªtå al-ʾar∂ (2005), Hoda Barakat’s Óårith almiyåh (1998) and René al-Óåyik’s Bayr¨t 2002 (2003). Notes 1. For the city as character, see Augustine cited in Caws (1991: 73–86). 2. There are notably various spellings of these names. 3. See Prendergast cited in Caws (1991). Prendergast differentiates between the gaze and the glance: “The gaze, fixating and fetichising [sic], seeks to hold the objects of the urban environment in a safe relation to the subject’s desires . . . The glance entails a quite different kind of attention to the life of the city; it picks up what the gaze excludes, restores the primacy of the ever-changing surface over the illusion of depth” (191). 4. For women in the public space, see Walkowitz (1992: 71). See also Parsons (2000: 7). 5. With militias taking over people’s homes, spaces in private homes became “part of the logistics of combat” (Khalaf 2002: 249, 115).

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6. For the scopophillic vision, see Mulvey (1975: 6–18). For other senses related to the city, see Rodaway (1994b) and Urry (2000: 388–97, 391). 7. See Shields (1996: 242, 245–6). See also Gottdiener (1986: 1–25). In Óårith al-miyåh, the narrator’s grandfather loathes Beirut and advises his son against living in such an unpredictable city plagued with earthquakes and war. Similarly the narrator of Khoury’s R⁄ªlat Gånd⁄ al-‚agh⁄r (1989; English translation, The Journey of Little Gandhi, 1994), describes Beirut as an “island asleep in the sea, asleep atop a ferocious beast, and every seventy years the beast gets restless and the city is turned upside down, the closer it comes to the end” (149). 8. For Beirut as a political center, see Darwish (1982: 91–3). 9. Nizar Kabbani (1976) wrote a series of poems titled ʾilå Bayr¨t al – ʾunthå maʿ Taªiyyåt⁄ (To Beirut the Female, with My Greetings). 10. Soja refers to “spatiality” as “a socially produced space” (2003: 121–2). 11. For more on the sexual geography of the city, see Mort and Nead (2000). 12. For women and the public space see Aghacy (2001: 503–23). 13. For a detailed argument on “postmemory” see Hirsch (1997).

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1 The Rural–Urban Divide: Subverted Boundaries Deprive Beirut of Western influence, and nothing will be left but the church and the mosque. Adonis (ʿAl⁄ Aªmad Saʿ⁄d), Kamal Dib Bayr¨t wa al-ªadatha (2010: 329) I have lived in Beirut for fifty years, but the city still considers me an outsider when it takes notice of me and warns me that I do not belong to the ˝abbåra family. ʾAªmad Bay∂¨n cited in Íidån⁄, “Bayr¨t min khilål aªwål al-bashar wå ma‚åʾir al-nås” (2010: 123)

I

n his poem entitled “Bayr¨t,” written in the local Lebanese dialect, ‘Issåm al-ʿAbdalla maintains that there is “no city called Beirut/Beirut is a bunch of villages” (Buzayʿ 2010: 207).1 Keeping in mind the spatial proximity between Beirut and its surrounding countryside, and the fact that the overwhelming majority of people living in Beirut have migrated from rural areas as well as the peripheries, the novels challenge any view of rural and urban binarism. This chapter focuses on three novels, al-Óumån⁄’s Óayy al-lijå (1969), ʿAwwåd’s ˝awaª⁄n Bayr¨t (1972) and Kraydiyyå’s Khån Zåda (2010). The novels challenge the dualistic approach of country–city that favors two sanitized and antagonistic communities with rigid boundaries. Óayy al-lijå subverts the rural–urban divide by focusing on a family from rural South Lebanon that settles in al-lijå neighborhood of al-Mu‚aytabå district in Beirut, where kinship ties and cohesive group identities are preserved. Nevertheless, the novel shows that the boundaries between rural and urban are porous, allowing the members to interact, coexist and cross-pollinate. Far from an idyllic rural environment, the village in ˝awaª⁄n Bayr¨t 31

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is seen as a static, depraved, backward and primitive place whose inhabitants, particularly women, move away from it without nostalgia or regret. Simultaneously, if the city is initially viewed as a site of freedom, revolution, well-being, and sexual license—especially for women, it is also a site of anomie, violence and exploitation, strongly aligned with rural ferocity and abuse. The gendering of space becomes especially evident in this urban geography of menace, where women’s dread of male violence is exhibited in the form of anxiety about space. Khån Zåda, on the other hand, reveals that a traditional semi-rural consciousness is unavoidable in Beirut, especially after the 1975 Civil War (1975–90). Feeling disillusioned with the war and its accompanying ideologies, the three Beiruti female characters seek refuge in their sectarian communities in reaction to a war that had produced antagonistic confessional communities with sharply drawn boundaries and deepened anxieties about modernization with catchphrases such as pluralism, tolerance and coexistence. Rural Beirut Óayy al-lijå (1969)2 is an ecological novel with the city itself as the main protagonist. It focuses on one provincial neighborhood in Beirut consisting of a cohesive group of migrants from South Lebanon. This is a confined spatial community organized around particular rural values and conventions, a collective group that depends on solidarity, sameness, and transparent identities. This community constitutes a small fragment of the city, disrupting the idea that the city is a monolithic, reified, “self-contained, bounded entity” (King 2007: 1). In the wake of the First World War, a large number of rural peasants from South Lebanon moved into the city and settled in certain areas in Beirut. The novel focuses on a family from South Lebanon that settles in Óayy al-lijå, which is populated by other migrants from South Lebanon, constituting a homogeneous group of people with similar backgrounds, histories, customs and religious orientation. This neighborhood consists of unpaved, dirty alleys with open sewers and old, corroded buildings. Within this locale, the migrants continue to live as they did in the village, but being located in the city, the city slowly infiltrates the community, causing instability, uncertainty, and, eventually, change. The room of Fa††¨m and ʿAbd¨ in Óayy al-lijå opens onto a courtyard

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referred to as al-dår (17), a semi-private place surrounded by a number of rooms, each occupied by a different family. The courtyard itself is rented by single laborers who sleep there and spend the long days at work. The small rooms surrounding the courtyard accommodate large families, and are not equipped with water or electricity. The women and men socialize and pass the day in the courtyard as their rooms are too small and cramped. This cloistered spatial community represented by the courtyard, a major symbol of rural solidarity, consists of an undifferentiated group of rural people possessing close kinship ties and camaraderie, qualities generally considered alien to urban areas. The female protagonist, Fa††¨m, is forced to marry a dissipated and violent cousin named ʿAbd¨. The day following her marriage, she returns to her parents’ house and tells her mother that she does not want to go back to her husband’s house, but her father threatens to break a bundle of wood over her head, asserting that any daughter of his only leaves the home of her husband to go to the grave. Her husband, who works in Downtown Beirut, treats her with cruel indifference, and resorts to physical violence whenever she disobeys or contradicts him. He is tall, blue-eyed and handsome, but conceited and domineering. He works as a porter, but his neighbors consider him degenerate and dissolute for drinking and visiting the Downtown brothel. ʿAbd¨ is constantly outside of the home and only returns late at night where he finds his wife waiting to attend to his needs (13). For ʿAbd¨, marriage is no more than a house where he sleeps and has someone to serve him free of charge. The male-controlled order, stability, traditional gender roles and general moral standards of the village are carried over to the city. Accordingly, the separation of spheres demanded by the community imposes restrictions on Fa††¨m despite her relocation in the city. She is required to stay indoors, while ʿAbd¨’s movements are unlimited. Fa††¨m is told by her neighbors that her husband is not following the virtuous path. When she questions him, he flings her on the floor and starts kicking her with his shoes. Her young child tries to defend her with his small body and starts hitting his father with his fragile fists (37). As is the custom in the village, the neighbors run to her rescue and try to stand between them to release her from his grip. If community is an agent for “the reproduction and perpetuation of ‘traditional’ gendered social roles” and the subordinate

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role of women in society (Revill: 1993, 120), it also provides communal solidarity and support for women to curb the violence of men, and water down the woman’s reaction to ensure that she remains disempowered within the bounds of the nuclear family. In this homogeneous and transparent community, privacy and personal problems are non-existent and the courtyard in which they live takes on something of the sentiments and qualities of the people who live in it. The effect of this is to convert what was first a mere geographical entity into a “neighborhood,” a “locality” with traditions and “a history of its own” (Park et al. 1967: 6). In Beirut the migrants build for themselves a replica of the culture they left behind, maintaining their customs, traditions and communal relations. The novel shows that they continue to shape the culture of the city as they modify their own values in line with the new environment. While they establish their own appropriate local zones and extended families within the city, these migrants eventually make their own concessions to their new abode, marking the “ruralization” of Beirut and the urbanization of the rural.3 When Fa††¨m first arrives in Beirut as a young bride, she notices that the buildings are high as well as luxurious, and she thinks of the old and shabby shop of Hajj ʿAwå∂å back in the village. She also enjoys the “captivating din” (16) and the new colorful cars “that pass by like lightning” (16), and Fa††¨m is happy to be part of all this. The first time she sees a radio, she is surprised at a “box with a window covered by a net where the voice comes from” (23). She cannot understand how a box could talk and sing and envisions midgets as big as a finger living inside the box, singing and talking, and reading the Qur’an (23). In order to minimize male oppression, these rural women establish strong solidarity bonds among themselves that help them to cope with mounting problems generally precipitated by men. The novel reveals that this rural brand of camaraderie is all the more necessary in the city where they are away from family and kin. For instance, Umm Am⁄n, an older woman who has six sons and one daughter, takes upon herself the care of Fa††¨m on her arrival from the village. Hadiyyå, who has three daughters and has not been able to conceive for the past four years, is worried and vexed knowing that her husband believes that “daughters are no progeny” (21). Seeing her in tears, Umm Am⁄n tries to console her: “Stop killing yourself with crying . . .

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God curse men . . . Don’t break your heart” (49). Another woman is Umm Hussein, whose husband takes a second wife and visits his first wife twice a week—on Saturdays and Sundays—although she is entitled to one night every two nights; however, she does not complain as she is “thirty” and no longer young. Women come to the support of one another and reveal strong awareness of the injustice and tyranny that they are exposed to by men, but lack the means to challenge their subsidiary position. Being economically dependent on their husbands, they fear divorce and abandonment. Their husbands possess all of the weapons: money, the right to divorce any time that they deem fit, and the right to take a second wife. The women talk consistently of Fa††¨m’s husband who gambles and spends all his money on “whores” (51). The lives of village wives are threatened by urban sexuality, which is readily available for men in the public sphere. As for the women the city is virtually non-existent as they remain indoors and have no contact outside of their restricted domain. Indeed, the material city is virtually absent from the novel as the women have no access to it. With the men spending their time in the city, Fa††um can only see the degenerating effect of the city on her husband. When As‘ad, Fa††¨m’s brother-in-law, moves to Beirut from South Lebanon, he finds a job with a foreign woman. Although not young, “the madam” is beautiful with white rosy skin and short hair. As part of his job is to rub her back in the bathroom, he is haunted by her body in his dreams. He does not know how to react and wonders if he should be “reserved” with her the way he is supposed to be with a Muslim woman. He thinks of asking the shaykh about it but feels embarrassed. The foreign woman is generous; she offers him daily supplies of fruit, sweets and canned food, which he gives to Fa††¨m to feed her children, just as he will do when he starts working in the British army barracks. As‘ad treats Fa††¨m in a caring and considerate manner that she had never experienced with her husband. In the midst of the Second World War, a large number of migrants from South Lebanon, like Asʿad, worked as laborers in the service of the British Army and managed to smuggle foodstuffs (tea, bread and canned food), as well as army apparel and blankets, and sell these items in the black market (82). Asʿad fills Fa††¨m’s home with foodstuff and other articles that she starts thinking of selling in order to make money on the side.

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Fa††¨m settles down and soon excels in her housework and bargains shrewdly in the suq. Since her husband spends all of his money outside the home, Fa††¨m resorts to home-based income-generating work in order to support her children, but, as she becomes more urbanized, she begins to venture outside to work as a servant in order to support her children. The home gradually witnesses the emasculation of ʿAbd¨ and the rise and empowerment of Fa††¨m. ʿAbd¨ is relegated to assisting his wife in the housework and looking after the children in her absence. As a result, the tone of her voice starts having a cutting edge and she no longer talks of “us” but “I.” Yet this reversal of roles does not slacken the repressive demands of rural customs and traditions. On the contrary, like a rural matriarch, Fa††¨m exercises ruthless control over the family. Even though Fa††¨m herself was forced into marriage, she treats her children in the same manner that she was treated. Now that she holds the reins, she starts tyrannizing her own children and even her brother-in-law, imposing traditional communal ethical standards and denying them autonomy. When her son tells her that he does not want to marry a woman from the village and prefers a Christian woman who dresses according to the latest fashion, cuts her hair, bares her arms and wears lipstick (98), Fa††¨m forces him to marry a village girl against his will. She puts an end to her son’s noncompliance in order to safeguard communal solidarity and quell difference in her family. While Fa††¨m loves modern items, such as radios and cars, as well as high buildings and other new developments, when it comes to forces of modernity that threaten her cultural, social and religious values, she is adamantly against them.4 Fa††¨m appropriates the same communal traditions and values that had forced her to marry ʿAbd¨. Fearing that Asʿad will one day choose his own wife and unwilling to admit to herself that she is jealous, she decides to look for a wife from the village, who would be under her control. Fa††¨m quickly finds him a plain village girl with a boyish figure and dark skin, knowing full well that Asʿad is attracted to the foreign woman. Initially, Asʿad resents the fact that she is interfering and forcing him to marry against his will, but owing to his limited experience he thinks that Fa††¨m may be right and gives in to her wishes. Being a village man, communal values override personal convictions and inclinations. However, after the death of his son, Asʿad takes

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a second wife whom he loves. When Fa††¨m again interferes in his life and forces him to divorce her, Asʿad is devastated and begins taking drugs. Bereft of the wife he loved, he moves out and eventually turns into a vagabond and beggar, sleeping in the streets. Asʿad, too, is a victim of the rural patriarchal order represented ironically by Fa††¨m, who was herself abused by the same order. Han⁄yya, the daughter of Umm Am⁄n, marries in accordance with their rural traditions through an authorized agent who is supposed to represent her at the signing of the marriage contract. As is customary, the agent is supposed to ask the bride whether she would accept him as her proxy. According to tradition, the bride, who is expected to be invisible and hidden away in the house, should not speak. Instead, one of the women is supposed to say, “The bride went to rear the cows” (44). In this case, however, the woman has no choice but to say that the bride “went to make coffee” (44), causing the girls to giggle at an incongruous situation. Authentic experience persists in the city, but is now located within the urban domain of quotidian interaction where brides do not milk cows in the city as they do in the village, but make coffee instead. Fa††¨m’s twelve-year-old son was sentenced to one and a half years’ imprisonment for stealing, and Fa††¨m is depressed and fearful of what people might say: “Are they not going to say ‘thief’, God curse the one who raised him?” (89). When he is released from prison she is no longer able to control him the way she did with his older siblings. He runs away from school, earning his living as a pimp, procuring women for the British soldiers. The centrifugal forces of the city drive him out of the cocoon of the community and, therefore, out of the grip of his mother. The narrative transcribes an evolving modernism manifested in the acceptance of differentiation and the importance of individual choice. If earlier on Fa††¨m had fervently rejected outsiders, now her daughter Zaynab is the first member of her family to marry a man from outside their village. Similarly, her youngest daughter, Sam⁄ra, wears skirts stopping at the knee, and her scarf is worn in such a manner that a large portion of her thick blonde hair remains visible. Sam⁄ra will work and make money, and will marry her schoolmate. Fa††¨m’s daughter is “citified,” mirroring an urban environment making its way into Fa††¨m’s home to show the inextricable relation between

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body and city. Just as the city is marked by rural elements, the urban also leaves its marks on its rural residents. The city has also left its imprint on Fa††¨m, causing her to slacken her earlier rigidified social and moral values. Fa††¨m’s youngest daughter (who like her siblings was born in Beirut) can now choose her own husband and wear shorter dresses, unlike her older sisters who were forced into marriage and into a life dictated by the traditional values of the village. After the span of more than twenty years, Fa††¨m has now no problem with her daughter falling in love: “What is the problem? Is there any girl who does not love?” (266). Many of her neighbors, like Hadiyyå, Umm Husayn and Umm Am⁄n, have moved out of Óayy al-lijå into other areas in the city, revealing the fluidity and geographical instability of communities where they abandon the close-knit community of Óayy al-lijå to integrate into city life. Massey’s defense of locality studies has relevance in this context. She argues that places have multiple meanings and that it is important to think of localities (and arguably communities) in terms of fluidity and volatility (Massey 1991: 267–81). The novel reveals that with time and money, rural communities fragment and blend into the city, while others who cannot afford to leave remain within the circle of their communities and continue to uphold their rural values. While Fa††¨m’s children embrace the physical and cultural forces of the city, Fa††¨m and ʿAbd¨ return to the village. Life in the city was just an interlude, a means for survival. The couple truly belong to the village. Phallic Beirut If the focus in Óayy al-lijå is on rural traditions that persist in the city, Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad’s ˝awaª⁄n Bayr¨t (1972) is a novel of Beirut where migrants from the Mahdiyya village in South Lebanon insist on embracing the city and putting the village behind them. Jaber, Tamima’s brother, is an example of a primitive masculinity where mastery, ruthlessness and sexual promiscuity govern his attitude to the world. In the absence of his father who works in Africa, Jaber installs himself as the head of the household. He steals the money his mother has “put away for a rainy day” (10), tears up his sister’s magazines and cuts her pocket money for a whole month. When he learns that his sister has disobeyed his orders and left Mahdiyya for Beirut to join

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the student demonstrations, he is furious that “the bitch . . . had the audacity to disobey his orders,” and is convinced that she “deserves to be stoned” and shot to death (31). Jaber is hard, callous, bullying and vengeful, grounding his manhood upon sadistic control of women in his family. The narrator focuses on the characters’ movements from the village to the city. From the very beginning, Tamima’s dream is to move to Beirut, being weighed down by a rural existence that far from being serene and harmonious in the lap of nature is rife with limitations. Accordingly, she believes that her situation will change in the liberal atmosphere of Beirut. When her mother criticizes her for being more enthusiastic about Beirut than she is about her own brother, her answer is, “I’m not going to spend my life like you, in this chicken coop” (8). Her mother warns her that there are “all sorts of people in Beirut” (8), but Tamima insists that it cannot be worse than their old village house, which is like “a tomb” (8). Her village Mahdiyya is small, with thirty decrepit houses, and no prospects for the future but to seek a decent life in Africa or Kuwait. The only car in the village, a sign of mobility and change, is out of place in a hoary village on the verge of extinction. Tamima sees the village and the city in binary opposition, and her only link to civilization are her books and magazines, which Jaber tears up, calling her “shameless” for reading them (10). Contrary to her lethargic village, Beirut is a space that is alive and that belongs to the present and future. In addition to being a place of brick and mortar, Tamima views it as an emblem of freedom and endless possibilities. It is a fluid open space that will provide her with a variety of opportunities and sensations. In the city, she plans to take her life into her own hands, attend the university and realize herself as an autonomous individual away from the transparent space of the village that emphasizes group identity and denies individual freedom. When she visits Beirut briefly with her mother, she sits in “a pavement café” (13) and is overwhelmed with the dizzying life and nervous energy of Hamra Street. By sitting in the café, she insists on rejecting the stifling constrictions of the village and its restrictive home space and embraces a nonrestrictive semi-private space away from the exclusively private space of her home in the village. Life in Beirut’s spaces opens new vistas and possibilities hitherto unavailable to Tamima. The story is told by a narrator who records a period in Lebanese history that led to the 1975 Civil War with an attempt at historical accuracy through

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the experiential lives of individuals. This was a period that witnessed the movement of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Jordan into Lebanon and the massive student demonstrations in the late 1960s.5 From the start, Tamima learns of other forces within the city that oppose the freedom advocated by the students. While traveling in a service taxi, Tamima hears an exchange between the passengers that focuses on the student demonstration taking place on the same day. One of them criticizes the recklessness of the new generation, the “hippie generation” and “mini-skirt[s],” as he refers to them, and wonders whether they hang out in cinemas or discos (20). The passengers tell stories of how three youngsters “had grabbed one of those girls and torn the mini-skirt off her” leaving her “half naked in Burj Square” (21); his reaction is that he would “have crushed her bones under the wheel!” (11). The car is a non-place, lacking any fixed geographical location6 to warn Tamima that the city is permeated with forces that are antagonistic to the kind of modernization demonstrated by young men and women. The novel underlines the tense coexistence of the traditional and the modern in the city. Tamima catches sight of the noisy demonstration with students carrying flags and banners. Beirut is clearly a site of political contestation and she is soon caught up in the whirlwind, the heterotopia of young people challenging the status quo and demanding a better future free from sectarianism. Yet, even in Beirut, tribal and sectarian affiliations continue to challenge the demand for a non-sectarian national identity. If, in Simmel’s terms, one aspect of urban life is physical propinquity and mental distance (1903: 418), Tamima becomes fully engaged in the vibrancy and gusto of the city rather than detached from it. The essence of the city is constantly deferred with Tamima’s aleatory encounter with fear and desire, violence and pleasure, courage and dread, life and death in jolting encounters, particularly with the ghosts of primeval Mahdiyya. The modern city with all its centers of entertainment is also the city of cut-throat vendettas and sexual abuse. Tamima becomes aware of a geography of fear where “phantoms” lurk in the dark and in the side streets to frighten and bully her. Walking in the street a “voice thundered her name and, with the sound, a phantom figure assaulted her through the night, something sharp slashed one of her cheeks . . . ‘The next time, I’ll kill you, you

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whore!’ ” (102). Tamima is branded, having received her ignominious badge of shame (148) from al-Qammooʿi, her brother’s associate. The phallic dominance of masculine power transforms the street into a space of surveillance and violence where the man who attacks her is convinced that Tamima is a whore and should be punished in the traditional way (since the pistol is used against men only) of slashing the “face from the left, under the eye, in a vertical line which slanted towards the ear” (149) leaving a disfiguring scar, a sign of the disciplinary arm of the patriarchal society. In her struggle against the past, what she assumes is dead and gone, Tamima discovers that Mahdiyya is miraculously resurrected to take center stage in Beirut. When Jaber is accused of attempting to slaughter his sister, he resorts to his rural traditions and brags about going to prison for an honorable cause, being fully aware of the leniency afforded to crimes of honor in Lebanon: “Prison was for men. He would go to prison, not on this contemptible charge . . . but with his head held high, carrying in his right hand the banner of lofty honour” (264). This is an essentialist image of man who penetrates the city and unleashes a violent and misogynist masculinity backed by his rural customs and beliefs. Insisting on the naturalness and stability of femininity, he is convinced that Tamima has defied established models of female behavior. While he engages in sexual promiscuity and inauthentic practices in Beirut’s night life, he tries to murder his sister for challenging authentic, indigenous customs and traditions. Tamima’s Beirut is interspersed with the village, where al-Qammooʿis are everywhere. The gendering of space becomes evident in this geography of fear represented by Tamima’s dread of violence and fear of space. Qammooʿi himself spends his nights in hashish dens and his days with a prostitute named Antoinette in the public brothel on al-Mutanabbi Street. He lives off the latter’s earnings, but narrowly misses murdering Tamima for doing much less than he has already done. The city itself has its own brand of violence that is no less destructive than the rural type. Madam Rose, Jaber’s landlady, is also a pimp, an expert in manipulating vulnerable women, particularly from the villages, who can be hunted and offered to wealthy men for a high price. She has been in the business long enough to protect her establishment, having friends among the police who have covered up for her. She tries to arrange a meeting between Tamima and “the Bey,” a rich feudal lord from

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the Beqaa area who had released Raad from prison in exchange for articles to be written by the latter against the Bey’s political enemies. Zennoub, the servant at Madam Rose’s apartment, works while her father cashes her salary. When her father comes from the village to the city at the end of the year to collect her salary, Zennoub asks him for some money to buy a small gold bracelet. Threatened by her newly acquired aesthetic urban tastes, he beats her violently with his stick and kicks her down the stairs where she lies covered with blood. Heedless of her condition, he retorts that he can buy a goat with the price of the bracelet. Tamima runs to the assistance of Zennoub, finding in her a kindred soul and fellow sufferer in a city controlled by rural as well as urban men. The fact that the novel promotes a linear plot underpins Tamima’s inability to break the restrictions imposed by the primitive world she tries to disavow, and the peripheral position of women in the public sphere. She starts having nightmares of a city she had dreamed of earlier on. She dreams that she is walking the streets of the docks when rats start coming out of the cellars and holes in walls, following her from street to street. In her nightmares, men metamorphose into rats and crows, all set to pounce on her, representing the uncontrollable forces of the city. She dreams that she jumped out of the window landing in Place des Martyrs at the foot of the memorial statue, but rats swarm around the statue and cover the whole square. She comes to the realization that the freedom she seeks in the city is deceptive. The very “plastic” qualities that mark the city as a place of liberation make it susceptible to violence, constriction (Raban 1974: 15) and pestilence. Naji Raad, an Arab intellectual and poet who is often referred to as “the mad journalist” (140), is a misanthrope who despises humans. He is a figure that one can find exclusively in the city: intellectual, cold, corrupt, egocentric, detached and cynical. The first time that Tamima sets eye on him is in Rose’s apartment where he rents a room. Naji is described as a skinny and slight man with a sallow and rigid face. When Tamima first meets him he is wearing “a yellow striped dressing gown.” His hair is “disheveled” with “a strand hanging loose over his right temple.” His “nervous fingers” are rubbing his dark beard (16). In addition to his pallidity and etiolation, he is phlegmatic and violent and is described as an anarchist “spreading doubt about everything, stirring fires, turning freedom into pornography” (72).

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When he writes, the words on the page are “full of scratches, as if he had been writing with a knife” (30), reminiscent of al-Qammooʿi’s literal slashing. His articles in the newspaper al-‘Usur (The Epochs) are described as violent while his poetry is “modern,” devoid of “those boring, monotonous metres and rhymes creaking like bones” (32). This is a recalcitrant patriarch and committed intellectual who inflames the masses through his nihilistic articles that call for chaos, a violent dismantling of the Lebanese Government and a revolution of slaves against masters (29). On one occasion, his speech causes perturbation and turmoil, which provokes students to fight among themselves, and the meeting place is transformed into a medley of antithetical and incompatible demands. The narrator reports that one student “called for a budget to finance fidaʾi operations; another for the abolition of the confessional system; a third for standardization of the national education system; and a fourth for the closing of foreign teaching institutions, including schools and universities,” which are viewed as “dens of spying” and “factories of traitors” (169). Raad’s discourse can be construed as monological and uncompromising mirroring, an absolutist masculinist rationality that gives him control over students and over Tamima who is captivated by his phallic intellectuality. While Raad claims to be a supporter of slaves and underdogs, we are told by the narrator that he speaks “sarcastically and scornfully from above, as if he were posing as a monument of himself” (29). He reads his words in the newspaper aloud to Tamima, and she notes that he performs like a skilled actor. He takes his words very seriously and uses his phallic pen, and Tamima’s veneration and “awe of him” (43) to seduce her and force himself upon her in a crude and barbaric manner. If village life is traditional and familyoriented, the city breeds idiosyncratic individuals like Raad who follow their own pursuits with unswerving antagonism and destructiveness, using the pen as a substitute for the knife. He is always on the lookout for new words in the same way that he looks for women, preferably virgins. The semi-private space of the café offers Tamima a new place of verbal exchange that gives her the freedom to express herself no matter how superficially. In the novel, the reader is not privy to what Naji and Tamima talk about, although one could say that he succeeded in seducing her. While offering a “mise en scène” of freedom to people, particularly women, the “darkened café on Hamra” where

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Raad meets Tamima, is a site where he has the freedom to seduce her.7 They end up in a room in one quarter of the city, and without saying a word of love to her, he deflowers her as she screams “like someone being slaughtered. ‘No! No! No!’ ” (46). This crude encounter with Raad brings back memories of other men in her village who had tried to force themselves upon her. Tamima recalls how, when she was only six or seven, al-Qammooʿi “lifted up her clothes near that rock on the road to the fields near Mahdiyya. He had rubbed himself against her insistently, trying to lay her down on the rock” (44). He would have succeeded had not the watchman appeared on the scene wielding his cane. In Beirut, the rhetoric of revolution and sexual liberation are intertwined to legitimize male control rather than female liberation. In the apparently free and permissive atmosphere of Beirut that appeared to accept sex for women, Tamima assumes she has won the freedom she has always desired and of which she has been deprived of in the village in their dismal old house, but she soon discovers that men remain bound up by deeply ingrained traditional ideas and use women as sexual conveniences—even in the city. The freedom afforded to women in Beirut was less an enhancement of sexual freedom for women than the realization of male craving for female sexual accessibility. Commenting on the supposed sexual liberation of women during the war, the protagonist of ʿAlawiyya Íobª’s novel entitled Maryam al-ªikåyå views Arab intellectuals, activists and freedom fighters as “no more than samples of psychological and intellectual schizophrenia, bodies carrying inside them bygone ages and caricaturist models of a revolutionary Har¨n al-Rash⁄d” (2002: 80). In ˝awaª⁄n Bayr¨t, the demonstrations, slogans, and calls for violence underline a purely masculine world where women are seen as appendages or accessories used by men in the appropriate situations. When Hani, the student who saved Tamima’s life after she was injured in a demonstration in Beirut, sends her a postcard from Libya featuring a veiled woman, Tamima responds that women in our society “even after they remove the veil, are in no better state than that woman. The real impermeable hijab is the one over their souls” (57). The city she had always conceptualized as a refuge and space of freedom, autonomy and self-realization is destabilized and infiltrated by the rural–urban patriarchal ideology. Behind the façade of freedom and

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openness, lurks a primeval dimension that aligns Beirut with her own village where the boundaries between the supposedly two oppositional locations are erased. Jaber and Raad promote the masculinity of overweening unfeelingness, and of lascivious appetite. Raad sees women as disposable objects and admits that he “despises women . . . and does not believe in love” (105). Since Jaber is a macho man who never spares any woman who comes his way, he believes it is his right to have free sex, but his masculine honor also depends upon his sister’s virginity and abstinence. He impregnates Madame Rose’s maid Zennoub and causes her death when he deserts her, believing that a man can get away with anything. For Jaber, city life is essentially erotically peripatetic. Jaber navigates the city through such recognizable places as al-Burj, Hamra, Zeitouni, Abdel-Aziz Street, the American University Hospital, Antoine Bookshop and al-Mutanabbi Street (housing the public Beirut Brothel in al-Burj). The hotels, restaurants, nightclubs and casinos are all geographical markers of modernity, and Jaber tries to be part of this modern world by frequenting all the locales of pleasure. He stays at the luxury Palm Beach hotel where the rich gather, and in line with the ostentatious city, Jaber flashes his red Thunderbird car, and parades his gaudy “sports shirts” (204). With public display of city markers such as clothes and other prosthetic devices such as his posh car, Jaber appears ostensibly citified and urbanized. Jaber immerses himself in the stimuli of city life in order to embrace pleasures that he had no access to in the village. Beirut is a carnivalesque city, at once wild, frenzied, excessive and fleshy, and his aim is to have sex with as many women as possible. However, Jaber’s sense of belonging in the city is shaken when he enters a nightclub one night and is struck by the sight of twisting bodies advancing and retreating, jumping up and down, shaking their heads and swinging their hips. They spun round in circles, delirious, entranced, maddened by the beat of an African group that had carried the whole of Africa to this place—its garish clothes, noses and hips, bosoms and the demons of its jungles . . . From Paris, New York, and London the electric guitar had come to join forces with their drum and trumpet. The sounds and tunes were . . . beating the ground as if they were knocking on the gates of hell! (209–10)

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Beirut here tries to align itself with alien Afro/Western cadences, and Jaber cannot gauge or identify with the wild show and begins to sense the alienating side of Beirut, without actually changing his style of life or privileging the village over the city except when it comes to his honor that is inextricable from his sister’s honor, and thus the need for her to leave the city in order to restore it. Unlike Tamima, Hani is proud of his village Deir al-Mutill and has numerous anecdotes to tell about the village, its mukhtar (village mayor), the church, and its people. His enthusiasm about his village can be contrasted with Tamima’s own loathing of her sepulchral village that has encumbered her with the patriarchal yoke that plagues her and undermines the present. Her village Mahdiyya is associated with the chicken coop, wretchedness and humiliation as well as with her brother’s physical violence against her. The village is clearly more cruel and restrictive to women. Men are visible in the village, which gives them power as opposed to women who must remain invisible. Beirut is marked by traditional small-town life, and the narrator sees no way out when “the overwhelming majority of them [university students], despite the veneer of culture were still tied to the old school, carrying its slogans, and unknowingly serving its aims” (162). The city is interspersed with the village to an extent that the boundaries between them are fluid and porous. Far from being separate entities, the village, too, is touched with an urban consciousness that cannot be avoided. The fact that Tamima can go to the university reveals a modern streak. At the same time, Tamima discovers that women in the city are like those in the village, victims of male violence and patriarchal notions of morality. She discovers that spatial anarchy, social incongruities and rural intrusions disrupt the general tendency to metaphorize and fix the city. Tamima discovers that while the city embraces a modern sensibility, it cannot be separated from tugging premodern forces directed toward demolition and annihilation. As a result, Tamima opts for a third space of political choice, a revolutionary space on the borders with Israel, a heterotopia of compensation where she escapes from the duality of city and village into a space, in the company of the fidaʾi, where she hopes to come face to face with the clarity, transparency and purity of death itself.

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A Regressive City L⁄nå Kraydiyyå’s Khån Zåda (2010) belongs predominantly to the nostalgic literature on Beirut and the desire to resurrect the old city, or, more accurately, the village that continues to lurk in the city despite outward signs of urbanization. The story of the female narrator and her two Beiruti woman friends, Rawʿa and J⁄hån, is the story of Beirut that is embedded in the novel. By feeling disillusioned with the present, post-war Beirut, the female narrator attempts to re-enchant the city by focusing on a local culture that has been buried under the debris of modernity and progress. She does this by focusing on an idiosyncratic autobiographical memory that revalorizes a sectarian geography of the city that is normally absent from historical records. The narrator’s personal memories are fleeting and sporadic when she evokes the near past, and more linear and methodical when she reverts to the remoter history of her family at the turn of the century, all with intermittent references to herself as participant in some episodes.8 Nevertheless, not all of it is personal memory. Some of the stories where she is not in the picture are related to her by members of her family. She reflects on history in personal terms, showing that there are many unexplored sites in history. The narrator’s resuscitation of the past is a blend of presence as well as absence from the scene of events. Accordingly, the focus is on the city not as a totality but as a partial experience linked to particular communal and sectarian neighborhoods. The Beiruti narrator is a middle-aged woman who has moved from Beirut to a house in S¨q al-Gharb, a mountain village outside Beirut. From her strategic emplacement in the ivory tower of S¨q al-Gharb, she escapes the grasp of a city invaded by outsiders who have soiled her legitimate and purified Beiruti Muslim/Sunni identity. Living away from the city, the narrator finds refuge in her memories. Her sole companions are her aging dog, bottle of wine and television. When she returns home from work in the evening, she looks for an old Arabic film to wile away the evening hours. She thinks of her two women friends Rawʿa and J⁄hån and wonders how the three of them have lost their youthful freshness and bloom. Impatient with the present situation in her country, she wonders when people would stop worrying about the political situation and when J⁄hån will end her daily rage against dictatorships in the Arab world, when

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the only democratic country—Lebanon—in the area is suffering under the burden of civil war and internal divisions (6). Now in post-war Beirut, her friend J⁄hån decides to bury her old principles and beliefs after asking God to have mercy on Guevara at a time when the American dollar is “the currency circulating in Cuba today” (7). J⁄hån returns to point zero and her taste is now restricted to Egyptian singers from the past like Egyptian ‘Abd al-Mu††alib and Umm Kulthum, and Iraqi Nåzem al-Ghazål⁄. She becomes addicted to Egyptian films of the forties by Abdil Fattåª al-Qa‚r⁄, Muhammad Fawz⁄ and Ismåʿ⁄l Yås⁄n (a comic Egyptian actor referred to as Ismåʿ⁄l Yes), the “old furniture” as she refers to it, and repudiates all progressive ideologies she had fought for at the university in the early 1970s when she was in her twenties (7). The city had released hidden sexual and revolutionary desires, but owing to the devastating political and military situation, it has pulled the three women back into their own traditional communities, with the narrator moving out of the city to the mountain town of S¨q al-Gharb. The women’s political disappointment at the regional and Lebanese level is so intense that when they see a politician on TV, they turn the channel in disgust, refusing to allow any of these “liars” to enter their homes (17). As young women in their twenties living in Beirut in the early 1970s, they took the challenges facing a new generation in revolt. Their centrifugal movement away from traditional sites puts them face to face with an exhilarating period of change in an atmosphere of forcefulness, dynamism, optimism and excess within the spaces of Beirut. The three friends dream of Arab unity and look forward to crossing the borders of the Arab world from the gulf to the ocean without visas and with a common Arab currency. Their adoration of Abdel Nasser is such that J⁄hån insists that she could see his face reflected on the surface of the moon. As seen in ˝awaª⁄n Bayr¨t, this was an era of progress, Arab nationalism, Pan-Arab movements, and resistance. In this liberal, open and reformist environment, their progressive ideas and fervent support of Arab nationalism became directly linked to selfhood and personal freedoms where J⁄hån defies tradition and has a pre-marital sexual relation with Sam⁄r. The history and culture of the 1970s leaves its imprint on her body, allowing her to abandon her traditional views of the body and sexuality, and to revolutionize her private sexual life. Even though she embraces personal and sexual freedoms, J⁄hån still retains a strong traditional

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streak. She expects Sam⁄r to marry her after treading the risky path and breaking all constraints, but her lover ends up marrying the daughter of an ex-minister. The earlier revolutionary and political activist is transformed into a hunter of money and social status. As a result, J⁄hån’s political and military disappointments ignite a strong desire to protect herself by retreating into a more stable past and seeking refuge in her traditional cocoon. After the fall of Beirut in Israeli hands and in the wake of the civil war, J⁄hån’s ideals gradually erode, and she retreats into herself and the old Beiruti house she had inherited from her parents. In order to compensate for a ruptured national identity, she establishes links with her family and ancestors, finding refuge in this provincial emplacement. Here, she tries to insulate herself from the outside threat, seeking relations of mutual identification with her newly found Muslim/Sunni identity, and recapturing community values and traditions “at odds with projects of the nation state” (Appadurai cited in Yaeger 1996: 42). If earlier on the narrator and her two friends had rebelled against “the racism of sects” (49), they revert to the traditional past and seek sanctuary in the lap of sect and family against the cleavage and fragmentation they had experienced over a period of twenty years or so. The earlier spatial intrusions by modernity are blocked by a “paranoid structure,” a “fortified enclosure” (Yahya 1993: 133) represented by insular communities antagonistic to outsiders. Waiting for the storm in the region to subside, the narrator sees the need to retreat “like the old Egyptians when the wind proves to be stronger than themselves” (9) since the war continues to infiltrate into a post-war city. Instead of counting the number of dead in an explosion, following the fighting among Palestinians, or the achievement of Arab leaders who are democratically elected at the rate of 98 percent of the voters, the narrator recommends watching Turkish soap operas away from the absurd situation of a geography of violence, appearance, deceit and general meaninglessness. The three friends escape from a present-day Beirut invaded by the rural, which is also paradoxically fast falling into the grip of globalization represented by cosmetic surgery that has transformed women into replicas of one another (49–50) and duplicates of singers and movie stars. By resuscitating a past preserved in her consciousness, the narrator re-recreates the city through the quotidian experiences of her family

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remembered with wistfulness and nostalgia. The yoking of the city with the past reveals her rejection of present-day Beirut and a desire to sink back into the comfort of an imagined stability where “fantasies and dreams are much more beautiful than truth and reality” (9). Escaping the city into the ivory tower of her house in the mountain where she can see Beirut, the narrator seeks refuge in turn-of-the-century Beirut, an enchanted locale that would give her identity and rootedness. Her friend J⁄hån is an old Beiruti who knows more about this Mediterranean city than anyone who has lived in it, even for twenty years, and thus ridicules the idea that Beirut is an open city and declares that its original inhabitants are xenophobic. By repudiating her earlier attempts to forge ahead and immerse herself in the present, the narrator seeks refuge in the past and embraces memories and family and community attachments, baring the clandestine village that lurks at the center of the city. She resorts to a past that would deliver her from a present that no longer appeals to her or her two friends. The narrator maintains that unlike the American Las Vegas where there are no “forgotten roads full of memories” (17), no houris, alleyways, or myths, Beirut is anchored in history and myth. Accordingly, each of the three friends takes a different route to the past, to the essentialist city of kinship that remained insusceptible to external intruders. When J⁄hån considers marrying, she checks with her parents the relevant information about the suitor, including ancestry, area of residence and register in order to scrutinize the social status and purity of lineage. Marriage outside her sect and community is not on the agenda, especially as the violence forced many Beirutis to recoil into their own sectarian communities and embrace traditional values with their accompanying rites and rituals. During the feast periods, J⁄hån is euphoric when the residents (mostly rural migrants from South Lebanon) return to their respective villages. The novel focuses on the rise of strong sectarian identities and autochthonous ties, revealing that Beirut has a multiplicity of identities where the urban violates the rural, but also where the city itself is destabilized by rural encroachment. The narrator’s friend claims that outsiders from the villages have failed to make use of urbanization and have ended up ruralizing Beirut. During the Eid period, these “strangers” known by their family names return to their villages, while ironically the city itself is

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transformed into a “village” with its own traditions and families. At this time, Beirut becomes a village once again, confines itself to its families, traditions and customs and feels free of cumbersome “aliens” (49). For J⁄hån, this is the only time when one feels that Beirut is clean, unassuming and real and that it belongs “to us its real inhabitants” (11). The experience of diversity in Beirut is rejected in favor of a territorialism represented by narrow sectarianism and encroaching localism. Disappointed with the nationalist and revolutionary stances she took earlier in her life, the narrator recoils into the stability of her sectarian community to an extent that the city is transformed into what Yahya refers to as “cloistered zones representing reawakened religious identities and communities” (1993: 128), a “translocality” removed “from the national context” (Appadurai 1996: 40, 44). In their yearning for a purified environment, they embrace a sort of provincial sectarian semi-rural territorial mode of life and erect barriers around them. J⁄hån’s house is old with a camellia tree and a derelict water fountain in the garden where the narrator and her two friends smoke the water pipe. The walls of her Beiruti house are decked with old photographs of her ancestors, her grandmother’s mirror, two Turkish lamps and a canopy bed. Within her ancestors’ house, she makes her own homely fragrances since she hates vaporizers that look like insect sprays. The ingredients she uses come from Saudi Arabia and other Eastern countries like India, Cambodia and Burma; she loves the rituals linked with oil fragrances and incenses that penetrate the skin, especially after a hot bath (12–13). Similarly, when Rawʿa marries, she abandons all her modern tastes in clothes and furniture and succumbs to her sister-in-law’s French style that retains its price as time goes by. Feeling disillusioned with their nationalist struggle and a present postcivil war era caught up in the quagmire of an unending war and approaching old age, the three friends’ failed modern revolutionary project is manifested in retreat into their own sect where they embrace old practices: preparing a shroud and all other funereal requirements, reverting to a strong Beiruti accent and revalorizing the local vernacular and intonation in an attempt to erase the present by the past. The narrator is proud to be a “pure” Beiruti like all her ancestors who lived originally in the suq near the Great al-ʿOmar⁄ mosque.

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A great deal of the narrative is informative, covering the nitty-gritty details of the city through rituals upheld by the Muslim/Sunni community since the turn of the twentieth century. For instance, there is an elaborate description of a funereal ritual, beginning with washing the body, sprinkling zamzam water (water from Mecca), and ensuring that the shroud is of the best quality. When the narrator’s uncle ʾUsåma dies, her mother decides to give him a proper traditional funeral. She insists on including the inherited traditional “Turkish cloth,” which consists of a square piece of material made of velvet and embroidered with gold threads, marking the status of the Beiruti family and the extent of its purity of origin or nobility of descent. The resurrection of old Beirut is a byproduct of a desire to embrace the old city through the haze of memory and desire where the city fluctuates between a concrete entity and an abstract idea. Despite the fact that they decided to take refuge in a traditional world, modernity continues to make its way into and regulate their lives. They insist on eating healthy food, keeping in mind the danger of hypertension and the levels of cholesterol and glucose in the blood, showing that they cannot fully escape the present. Moreover, although the narrator admits that she does not like technology, she cannot escape making use of cell phones, Internet and Skype, revealing that the city, like her, is already tainted and leaves no room for unalloyed identities. Although J⁄hån reverts to her old Sunni Beiruti traditions, she does not give up drinking; the only difference is that she drinks indoors in order to avoid the gossip of nosy neighbors (8). The past/present, tradition/modernity binarisms are disrupted, and the three friends remain in a liminal space despite a centripetal immersion in the past, and despite the narrator’s relocation outside the city, in S¨q al-Gharb. At the time the narrator was immersed in her modernist revolutionary project, she had no time for the traditional, more mundane, role assigned to women. She was repelled by children on the plane or in the supermarket and made fun of parents “who think they are descended from a dynasty” and are afraid for their “Einsteinium progeny from extinction” (21). At present, the narrator is conscious of her sagging arms, legs and breasts, and envisages a lonely old age without companionship or children. When the progressive ideals that she had harbored collapse, she retreats into an internal city, lying dormant in her psyche and haunted by ghosts where occluded memories

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linked to personal and family quotidian experiences suddenly come to the surface. This is a novel that can be classified as synoptic, with Beirut as the major protagonist. The past represented by Khån Zåda, the narrator’s aunt, is endowed with an animated immediacy and strong emotive and poignant investments. The narrator compares her virginal aunt to an angel, and her grandmother, Raʾ⁄fa, the smiling, patient woman, to the prophet Ayy¨b (Job), but the narrator admits that she is more like her uncle ʾUsåma and her great-grandfather’s divorcee, a sort of rebel against convention. The narrator digs into the past hidden away in the city and tells us that her ancestors had lived originally in the old city of Beirut, a provincial town under Ottoman rule. They belonged to one of the prestigious seven families that were entrusted as guardians of one of Beirut’s seven gates. Her traditional and authoritarian great-grandfather forced his women to wear the veil and the traditional dress. Feeling bored inside the home space, his young bride leaves the house in the heart of the old city and takes a walk around the Great Mosque and al-ʿOmar⁄ mosque adjacent to S¨q ʾIyås and S¨q al-˝aw⁄la (that were destroyed in the Lebanese Civil War). Even though she was dressed in the lawful religious dress, she was also wearing clogs and a silver anklet that jingled as she walked with fragrance and incense emanating from her. When her husband learns of this, he divorces her immediately and, in order to escape the scandal, he moves to Tripoli, a city in North Lebanon, and marries the daughter of a traditional family. In order to avoid the uproar of the scandal, the family eventually moves away into the Mu‚aytaba area of Beirut. The narrative is an archaic recourse to a past city associated with rites and rituals, burial ceremonies and superstition. For instance, we are told that in the late 1940s the family garden was full of lilies and the smell filled the whole area, causing the family a great deal of trepidation. Beirutis believed that if the smell of lilies spreads beyond the area they grow in, it is a bad omen, but her grandfather was proud of his lilies and refused to accept such warnings. Sure enough, the following year, not a single stem flowered and the narrator’s grandfather dies suddenly (69). Similarly, the narrator tells us that the source of the wealth of one Beiruti family is a mermaid who falls in love with one of their ancestors and offers

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him jars full of gold and, up until now, people have attributed the wealth of this family to the “sea bride” (85). Being generally instructive and informative and sometimes downright didactic, the narrative can be read as a mode of telling rather than showing. The informative element is predominant where the narrator has the chance to educate the reader on the myths that circulated around the old city. In addition to information, she also tells sequential stories related to her father during the civil war and how he had to give away all of his belongings at a checkpoint in fear for his life. Her grandmother, who came from a wealthy Beiruti family, was educated and was considered one of the early pianists at the turn of the twentieth century. She always found psychological refuge in the Hoffman piano that her father had bought from their neighbor, the British Consul. Married to the narrator’s poor but decent grandfather, her grandmother is received with open arms by the narrator’s grandfather and his three spinster sisters (Khån Zåda, Íubªiyya and Fåtima). Her grandmother’s favorite spot was the garden where she smoked the water pipe under the acacia and jasmine trees, keeping a close eye on her rabbits. The old house with the red brick roof and the spacious hall was surrounded by the travelers’ room, the bedroom, the kitchen and the garden. This Beiruti house in the city possesses a strong rural flavor in a city that was no more than a provincial town. At the same time, her grandmother’s literacy and musical talents shed light on the situation of privileged women at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to her musical talents, her grandmother was an avid reader of Yusuf Idr⁄s, Gibran Khalil Gibran and Taha Hussein. The narrator’s uncle ʾUsåma was the black sheep of the family. In a small city like Beirut, he always returned home late and slept in his clothes, most of the time smelling of alcohol. The narrator’s grandfather was warned about ʾUsåma skipping school, playing cards, drinking alcohol and frequenting “suspicious” places (72). Her grandfather could not believe it for he himself had taught ʾUsåma to pray in the mosque and to memorize the Qur’an, cutting down the family’s food to send him to the best schools in Lebanon. Returning home one night dead drunk, his elder, blue-eyed sister Fåtima tells him that since there is no room for alcoholics in the family, the family has decided to repudiate him. ʾUsåma opens the safe, steals the money at hand, and leaves the house for the next fifty years. Her uncle’s acts of transgressive

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wastefulness, eroticism, and rejection of taboos reveal his quest for an order that is different from the one in his traditional and religious family. He lived a life of freedom without constricting religious rituals and away from notions of shame and ªaråm that weighed down on people in Beirut. Freed from nosy neighbors, he can now drink alcohol and seek a place of otherness where he has free access to prostitutes as well as other “liberal” women. His peripatetic movements between the mountain villages and the city enable him to spend only a short time in each village for fear of getting involved with a particular woman and before he gets ensnared in problems that he cannot cope with. He lives a nomadic life and refuses to settle down and give up his unconditional freedom. The narrator’s third aunt Khån Zåda is the only one in the family who knows his whereabouts. When he moves to Beirut, he settles in the disreputable Zayt¨na area. Despite the fact that urban space is subject to strict regulation for virtuous women, Khån Zåda disrupts the taboo by insisting on going to her brother’s room, occasionally accompanied by her young niece, the narrator. In Zayt¨na the virginal aunt suffered harassment as she was wearing her dignified veil and walking in a notorious area inhabited by prostitutes and pimps. By being other in the Zayt¨na area, Khån Zåda occupies a “paradoxical space” (Rose 1993: 46) that disturbs the polarity between the traditional and non-traditional worlds (149). Once she reaches her brother’s room, she cleans the place, washes the dirty dishes and clothes, mends his socks and sews his shirt buttons. Khån Zåda is a pious sort of “angel in the house,” devoted to the service of her family. In her plain and outmoded clothes, she glides by like a “summer whiff,” hardly visible, and smells of bålad⁄ (locally made) soap made from olive oil (91). In the Zayt¨na area, ʾUsåma continues to live a dissolute existence, trading in batteries and bogus whisky and spending his money on his pleasures. Being the charming and irresistible man that he is, he flirts with the prostitutes, complimenting their beauty and kissing their hands like princesses (78). They, in turn, clean his house occasionally, drink coffee with him, and complain to him about the troubles of life. When the civil war breaks out, ʾUsåma is forced to leave an area he loves for Råʾs al-Nabiʿ, on the demarcation line between the east of Beirut and the west,

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being the cheapest place where he could afford to secure accommodation. At seventy and feeling physically frail, he misses his original home in Mu‚aytaba and starts haunting the area, introducing himself to the butcher and grocer as the uncle of the young men in the family. Like the prodigal son, the family takes him in, some because they did not know him, and others to avoid the gossip by people who wonder how the family could throw an old man into the streets. Despite his return, he never really repents. He hides his alcohol boxes with the neighboring carpenter and the horse race tickets in his room, but when he dies he is given a fitting traditional Beiruti funeral. Even though the narrator claims to live an independent and autonomous life, her reminiscences reveal her attachment to her family as well as her sympathy with tradition and disappointment with modernity. Despite the fact that her parents have a traditional loveless marriage, their relationship flowers into love and respect. The narrator’s father is a role model for her mother and the first and last man in her life. After his death and whenever she thinks of him, she goes to their bedroom to smell his hairbrush and his Cartier aftershave. This simple love affair is in stark contrast with the narrator’s own failed love affairs, complicated by her modern revolutionary project. The narrator is critical of the rapid way that Beirut is changing. Buildings rise like fungus on a rainy tropical night, and the city is losing its identity at unprecedented speed. The narrator can no longer distinguish the contours of Hamra Street, which now looks like any other street; its traditional, intimate and cheap cafés have ceased to exist, and the street has been overpowered with international chains and spectacular cafés. The globalization monster has also “swallowed” the Mu‚aytaba area that is now crammed with buildings and tenants like sardine cans (111). The narrator’s journey through time is seen in her peripatetic movements “through the spaces of the city” (Pile 2005: 10). She recalls in flickering images how in the early 1960s she and her siblings walked in the Rawsha area, moved on toward the football field in al-Najma club and Shåt⁄lå Café, past modern and luxurious hotels like the Riviera and Carlton, until they reached the mosque of ʿAyn- l-Mraysa where her father in his silver Simca car would pick them up (116–17). By thinking of the good old days, she invokes a strong reality effect represented by traditional cafés, hotels, clubs, mosques and other geographical signposts. In the Beirut of the 1960s and early 1970s,

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there was a balanced coexistence between the traditional and the modern, unlike the present where she sees the eradication of all vestiges of locality in favor of globalization. From her window, she watches the sun fall into the sea and dissolve like a vitamin C effervescent tablet that her father took daily, and is reminded of the traditional sweets that they used to eat. At fifty she has managed to escape from Beirut, from the “God is great” sounds of the fitr and Ramadan feasts and from “the carnivals of blood” of the war and post-war period (119). She realizes that her failure to have a baby reveals the dead end she has reached. She thinks of her daily routine: work, lunch with her mother and family and then an outing with J⁄hån, keeping in mind that the latter has a new boyfriend. As for herself, her journey into the past where she seeks to re-capture the pure world of Khån Zåda turns out to be her passport into death. Now she is ready to depart just like her aunt and other “millions of women” who “have left without a trace” (59). Modernity has not given her the self-realization and contentment she had imagined, and like her aunt, she feels relegated to the margins of society. Nevertheless, she comes to the realization that the world of Khån Zåda can only be captured in death itself. Concluding Remarks While the three novels focus on the rural–urban divide, they differ in many ways. Using the realistic mode of writing, al-Óuman⁄ focuses on migrants from rural South Lebanon who settle in a neighborhood in Beirut where they maintain a rural existence marked by selves that are transparent to one another, tightly knit solidarities and relationships of mutual identification. The realistic plot paradigm, linear chronology and coherent sequential narrative, underline the insistence of the rural migrants on preserving rural communal identity in the face of forces that threaten to destabilize a supposedly stable rural identity. In Beirut, the freedom afforded by the city belongs to men rather than women who remain wrapped up in their confined existence. The courtyard where the women and their children spend their time is a major trope underscoring their rural homogeneity, and cohesiveness. Despite lack of access to a material city, the impact of an urban consciousness is clearly reflected in the manner in which the characters conduct their daily lives. These migrants are unavoidably marked by the city in the same manner

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they mark the city. The movement of these families into other areas and the marriage of Fa††¨m’s daughters outside of their community mark the erosion, but not erasure, of traditional culture. On the other hand, ˝awaª⁄n Bayr¨t presents characters who do not see their village as an idyllic rural terrain in opposition to an urban nightmarish wasteland. They reverse this hierarchy and view their village as a place of inertia and squalor divorced from any sign of change. In their view, the city is a site of freedom, transformation and progress. The urban tropes that predominantly govern the city are the street, the car and the café. They represent desire, drive, defiance, personal freedoms and mobility but, paradoxically, they are sites of oppression, exploitation and fear, notably for women who, like the women in Óayy al-lijå, remain predominantly outside the privileges afforded by the city. The café, a trope of freedom and communication, is a place that allows Naji to seduce Tamima and eventually rape her. The outer spaces of the city belong to men like Tamima’s brother, or Naji Raad her urban lover, and the line between urban and rural becomes blurred. Tamima soon discovers that this urban geography, gendered masculine is a sign of the disciplinary arm of the patriarchal society, housing cut-throat vendettas and sexual abuse. The city provides unlicensed sexual freedoms for men to use women as sexual conveniences and to oppress, scar or kill them with the primitive knife rather than the pistol normally used against men. The fact that the novel promotes a linear plot underpins Tamima’s inability to break the restrictions imposed by the primitive world that she tries to disavow and the peripheral position of women in the public sphere. Her nightmarish dream of jumping out of the window to land in Place des Martyrs at the foot of the rat-infested memorial statue is a metaphor of a monstrous patriarchal society that is consuming the country. Just as Tamima’s brother holds fixed ideas about the position of women in society, her lover Raad, too, is uncompromising, mirroring a masculinist rationality that gives him control over women whom he despises. Despite the public display of city markers such as demonstrations, cafés, streets, clothes, and flashy cars, the city uncovers a dangerous and destructive primitive masculinity wrapped up in the cotton wool of freedom, tolerance and equality. The novel reveals that space is the domain of men, while women’s fear of space is manifested in a geography of danger represented by the streets and cafés of Beirut. As in ˝awaª⁄n Bayr¨t, Khån Zåda also focuses on an era in Arab history of

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progress, Pan-Arab movements, and resistance. In this seemingly liberal, open and reformist environment, the three women in Khån Zådå adopt progressive ideas that became directly linked to selfhood and personal freedoms. The Beirut of the 1970s leaves its imprint on the women’s bodies, allowing them to abandon traditional views of the body and sexuality and immerse themselves in political and personal freedoms afforded by an atmosphere of change and hope. In the wake of endless political disappointments in Lebanon and the region, these women escape by seeking refuge in the remnants of a golden past and a village that lurks in the bowels of the city. Through the haze of memory and desire, they retrieve the old city that represents an imagined stability, marking an abrupt breach in their modern project. The old Beiruti house inherited by J⁄hån from her parents, which is decked with old photographs of her ancestors, her grandmother’s mirror, two Turkish lamps and a canopy bed is a metaphor of the past that lurks at the center of their urban consciousness. Their nostalgic recourse to the traditional embedded in the modern is their way of compensating for a ruptured national identity. In their yearning for a purified environment, they adopt a sort of provincial sectarian semi-rural territorial stance and erect barriers around them. Nevertheless, although they revert to semi-rural Sunni Beiruti traditions, they do not give up drinking. The past/present, tradition/modernity binaries are disrupted, and the three friends remain in a liminal space that leaves no room for a sanitized identity. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

‘‫’بيروت عنقود الضيع‬ ‫( حي‬Óayy) in Arabic means “district.” For more on cities in developing countries, see Abu-Lughod (1961: 22–32). For more on the relationship between modernity and modernization, see Aghacy (2006: 561–80). Martyrs’ Square became the location of violent student and labor demonstrations. As Sune Haugbolle (2010: 32) puts it, “Prewar Beirut was a cauldron of strident forces, of new imaginaries and of Western culture, its campuses the scene of revolutionary activism, hippies, pan-Arab movements and conservative Christian nationalist mobilization.” For non-places, see Augé (1995: 75–115). For more on the city and spaces of femininity, see Pollock (1988). For more on episodic memory, see Tulving (1983: 180).

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2 The Rhetoric of Walking: Cartographic versus Nomadic Itineraries Beirut poor, ugly, stricken Beirut, broken Beirut, unloved city, lost Beirut. Makdisi, Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir (1990: 252) I became a pedestrian among pedestrians. No one could have picked me out from others. al-Daif, Fusªa mustahdafå baynå- l-nuʿås wa-l-naum (1986: 38) [I]n a way there is no longer a city, there is only a man walking through it. Williams on James Joyce’s Ulysses, The Country and the City (1973: 243) The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1969: 150)

T

his chapter focuses on three novels: Rashid al-Daif’s Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs (1989), Elias Khoury’s al-Wuj¨h al-bay∂åʾ (1977) and Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim’s Bayr¨t Bayr¨t (1984). It centers on ordinary citizens who navigate the city in a fragmentary and disconnected manner. The city speaks through pedestrians who experience a delimited space in the city, subverting the panoramic controlling vision that attempts to know the city in its wholeness. As a result, the city is experienced as an opaque, labyrinthine locale rather than as known and transparent. In a dangerous and unpredictable locale of wartime in Beirut, the male protagonist of Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs develops a problematic relationship with the hostile environment of the city by traversing the streets with utmost vigilance where his itineraries in the city are restricted to brief encounters triggered by a city at war. By walking the streets, the character Håshim transgresses the structures that thwart his freedoms and force him to hide in the private space. 60

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Unlike Håshim, Khalil the protagonist of al-Wuj¨h al-baydåʾ confronts the city headlong in order to express frustration and incomprehension at a situation where death is meaningless and accountability is no more than an exercise in futility. In Bayr¨t Bayr¨t, posters of martyrs, miscellaneous ads, graffiti, cafés, sidewalks, streets, cars, vendors, pedestrians and militiamen constitute the cartography of the city, and it is through these visual and lettered landmarks on the alien streets that the characters map their movements on the streets of a city at war. Strategies of Navigating the City While Beirut emerged as the protagonist of the novels discussed thus far, one could say that the subject of Rashid al-Daif’s Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs (1989) are the strategies of walking a city burdened with war. As the title signifies, the novel is about learning how to exist within the constraints of utter wretchedness by acquiring skills to cope with the incommodious daily reality of warring Beirut, both in the external as well as internal spheres. Håshim, the protagonist, whose name is an anagram for håmish (meaning “marginal” in Arabic), is a teacher whose school has been bombarded and who has “seven million ideas” that he wants “to record” (13), but his creativity is blocked by the brutal reality outside. He is bogged down with trivialities, such as fixing broken glass and trying to survive in a drab setting where the destruction outside that has damaged the city’s infrastructure has infiltrated into the inner space, leaving the citizens without water, electricity, and telephone lines. Before the war, the water supply was uninterrupted, but now the water is no longer available except for a quarter of an hour once a week and, at times, people go without it for months. In this situation, if one wants to survive one has to learn how to use water economically and with an excessive and nauseating rationality. One has to learn how to store and use water for the washing up, and with this same water, wash and clean the toilet. The same principles apply to electricity, which appears only for a short while and disappears at random and without warning. Accordingly, the process of adjusting to such a situation is an art with its own rules of decorum. In order to master the technique of dealing with wretchedness, one needs to establish a new kind of relationship with time and place. For instance, if the light goes off and

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darkness suddenly steals in, and if Håshim happens to be in the sitting room, he is able to avoid stumbling and breaking his neck because he has learned and mastered the techniques of moving around his flat in pitch darkness through trial and error. As a result of the absence of electricity, some people have acquired generators and Håshim is disturbed by the exponential noise of the generator on the other side of the street, where there is a flower shop and a hairdressing salon. A solitary figure overlooking the street, Håshim watches the girl from the flower shop and the young man from the hairdressing salon standing side by side on the pavement. He also notes that the generator installed on the pavement prevents cars from parking on the pavement, and Håshim’s reaction to the generator is to close the window in order to avoid the sound pollution. Furthermore, in order for Håshim not to feel cheated or exploited, a system of bartering is used among the neighbors. Håshim’s neighbor, who owns a generator, takes the liberty of using Håshim’s toilet in order to save their own water, while allowing Håshim, in return, to watch television in the evenings. Even the telephone must be used economically: to spell out the reason for why they phoned (without any introductions or phatic communication) before the line goes dead (8). Håshim feels simplified to his basic biological needs to the extent that water flowing in his toilet can give him a feeling of utter happiness and contentment: He raised the bucket about thirty centimeters above the toilet seat, slanted it, continued to slant it in such a manner that the water poured forth without interruption. After emptying the bucket, he carried it and pushed it to the right to see how the water is flowing in the toilet. It spins around itself, drains itself in the middle, curls up, goes down until it dissipates, then it appears again after a while, goes up a little and finally settles down. Håshim almost smiled at his success. But then scowled and kept repeating, until his ears began to hear it: “Seven million ideas in Håshim’s mind which he wants to record instead of wasting his time cleaning the toilet!” (47)

Minute descriptions of his mundane actions fill the novel, revealing Håshim’s entanglement in the minutiae of the urban setting away from the intellectual

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endeavor that he has in mind. Indeed, as Elise Salem asserts, Håshim “is reduced in many ways to an animal sniffing about his den searching for sustenance” (2003: 162). He hears the humming of the electric generators, smells the garbage and his own body odor, and performs his bodily functions in a city that has become a breeding ground for the unsavory smells of mounds of garbage that augment the overall dilapidation and decay. Mona Amyuni writes that al-Daif “expresses himself in a language stripped to its bare essentials, as well, breaking away from the traditional Arab mode, in which rhetoric and lyricism dominated” (1996: 177). This brand of plain, depersonalized, unembellished and unemotional language underlines Håshim’s attempt to neutralize any explosive feelings, acts or words that can expose him to danger in an unpredictable place like Beirut. In a narrative where spatial conditions play a central role, Håshim’s actions become marginal and the charged atmosphere breaks the continuity of a plot that becomes more episodic, where nothing happens, and turns the protagonist’s actions into anemic appendices to the external environment. What goes for the flat goes for the city. Michel de Certeau’s (1984: 93) “migrational” city is the preoccupation of the novel. The narrative focuses on the ground level, the micro sphere of quotidian experience. The protagonist concerns himself with scrappy details and minutiae that a panoramic view from above is unable to perceive. He is moored in Beirut, having mastered the tactics of negotiating the city in a war context in the same manner that he navigates his own apartment. The street spills into the apartment, implicating the internal with the external. Even though the third-person perspective refers to acts that took place in the past, the past tense is frequently undercut with actions that seem to happen in the immediate present: “Håshim now puts his right leg over his left thigh” (10); “Håshim speculates” (10); “M¨så [one of Håshim’s café companions] reads the newspaper” (11); “Håshim closes his eyes for an instance, two instances, or three” (34). This sense of immediacy and presentness underpins the general sense of contingency that grips the warring city. Håshim’s masculine freedom to wander at will finds him on the road roaming the streets in a—generally unsuccessful—attempt to put his domestic life in order by trying to fix the water, the telephone and electricity. He is always watchful and vigilant and does not go out in the rush hours in order to avoid

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possible car bombs. If he has to go out, he must not forget his sleeping pills, tranquilizers or stomach pills for he may end up marooned in the staircase of a building for hours, or perhaps even days, if he is unfortunate enough to be outside when a battle suddenly erupts. He is a kind of wanderer, and a great deal of what he sees is in a state of kinesis. His descriptions are often peripatetic—the outcome of Håshim’s nomadic movements and the mobile objects and persons he encounters. Unlike the flaneur who enjoys the aesthetic beauty of the urban landscape, Håshim is vigilant and tense, watching the urban scene with trepidation and expecting the worst, particularly at the time he usually goes out, from nine to eleven in the morning, which appears to be an appropriate time to detonate a car bomb. As he watches the road in front of him and the pavement crammed with cars, one car draws his attention and makes him feel restless. Suspecting a bomb inside the car, his hair stands on its ends and his pulse beats fast, but nothing happens (9). His performative, peripatetic movements consist of close attention to the goings on around him in order to evade unanticipated occurrences. Despite an unpredictable situation, he looks for companionship in an empty world that has consumed him: his perambulation is an existential necessity rather than a pleasant stroll; it is his need to be with men he can communicate with in the Hamra cafés that are transformed by the civil war into maqåh⁄, catering for male customers only. Håshim reaches his destination—the Café de Paris on Hamra Street— that before the war swarmed with women (and men) and is now transformed into a maqha frequented by men only, a homosocial setting where Håshim meets male colleagues and associates. In the semi-private space of the café, men gather around the table, read the newspapers, share impressions and discuss the financial and political situation. In the words of al-D¨wayh⁄, the café is “a warehouse of news,” particularly in a war situation where people are always on the lookout for news about what is going on (2005: 105). These daily gatherings divulge a strong desire for connectivity and male solidarity in a blank and unfriendly world. Sitting at a table inside the café, Håshim is able to see the whole place, including its glass exterior. He is also able to observe the city in flux. On the outside, he sees cars, pedestrians, vendors, military men of all kinds and colors, as well as dollar traders carrying their money in plastic bags, under-

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scoring the proletarization of Hamra. This polarization is further reinforced when, on a different day, he sees three young men looking much younger and dressed differently from the ones who normally frequent the café. A young man, probably a waiter from a neighboring takeaway shop, suddenly appears carrying a tray with three plates of beans covered with paper, which he places on a table inside the Café de Paris that does not serve this morning meal, along with a few loaves of bread, some radishes, an onion and mint. The three men eat their meal and leave the empty plates on the pavement (96). Although Håshim does not comment on what he sees, one deduces that Hamra has shifted from a haunt of the urban rich to that of the rural poor. Håshim simply records what he observes, leaving the reader to decipher the implications of his observations. On his way out, Håshim spots a plastic bottle fall on the shoulder of a pedestrian right in front of the Café de Paris, which further reinforces the proletarization of the city and its fall into the grip of the mundane and the prosaic where any attempt by Håshim to produce intellectual work is intersected with a paralyzing banality. On his return home, Håshim comes across a heap of garbage covering the sidewalk, which forces him to walk in the middle of the street in order to sidestep this hurdle. Håshim watches the garbage pile as if he were a flaneur looking at a spectacle or phantasmagoric gargoyle: “A carnival of strong colors. The colors of the bags are intended to draw attention in a natural manner. Blue, blue and green, black and white . . . rubbish are mines of diversity and paraphernalia . . . Garbage is the mirror of people” (72). The garbage is aestheticized, “cathected” (in Freudian terms) to compensate for a general lack of beauty, poetry or fanciful dreams in the city. The narrator/ flaneur yearns for aesthetic appeal, and compensates by fixing on the colorful garbage bags.1 The precinct that collects garbage is a synecdoche of the city turned into carnivalistic filth that is unleashed from any regulatory rubrics. In addition to color, Håshim experiences the odor and clamor of the war city that takes precedence over character, rising to the level of protagonist. In addition to Håshim’s concern with the topography of the city—the metonymic successions of dirt and rubbish dumps—he also focuses on other generic features of the streets, such as the old woman with thin, white hair and sand-dark complexion wearing a blue nightgown with slippers and thick

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stockings, and standing in the rubbish dump on the pavement, probably gathering crumbs from the refuse. With microscopic accuracy, Håshim notes that her right slipper was stuck on a small, sticky carton with a rat already caught on it. When he bends to save her from this situation, she waves her stick at him. He addresses her as hajj⁄ (meaning “pilgrim,” but also a respectful term of address for elders) and tells her that he only wanted to help, but she sticks to her guns and continues to wave her stick at him. The old woman standing amidst the garbage is an abject sight that upsets and befuddles the narrator. The garbage that surrounds her is a synecdoche for the social and moral degradation that pervades the city, turning many locales into slum areas. Beirut is chock-full of rats and other creatures feeding on garbage piles scattered all over the city. These creatures reveal that far from being an ordered, sanitized, non-corporeal city, Beirut is a city infested with corporeal creatures dragging humans into the animal level so that the old woman becomes inextricable from the rats and the garbage (Donald 1999: 17, 24). Propelled by the complexities of the city, Håshim views Beirut as an anthropoid that takes center stage and places him in a secondary, marginal role. Another old woman who lives on the fourth floor of Håshim’s building runs into Håshim on the staircase and complains to him about electricity cuts. She points to the spittle inside the elevator and recalls nostalgically how beautiful and clean the building used to be. The entrance used to be spacious and filled with flower pots made of brown stone. The building was also equipped with hot water and central heating (69), but the war has denied any semblance of solidity or durability, turning the building into a modernist ruin. The number of elderly women living alone in the building and in the area generally reveals that younger people have left the country seeking their fortunes outside, and that the old are left behind, living in squalid conditions and yearning for a rosy past. The novel accentuates the close association of architectural surfaces, such as doors, windows, staircases and balconies, with daily experiences. The novel’s abandonment of sequence and coherence is appropriate to a fragmentary and segmental reality that the narrative tries to depict. In the novel, city life takes place in public, a large portion of it in motion. What is seen are snapshots of people’s living that focus on the outside facade or theatricality of living in the city, underpinning a fragmentary vision of the city.

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The novel is a congeries of topographies and objects that include streets, buildings, sidewalks, cafés, garbage heaps, water tanks and service taxis, and the narrative is predominantly told in terms of minutiae and the prosaic details of everyday life. In a city at war, the side-by-side relations that Håshim experiences underscore feelings of isolation and incongruity. Awaiting a service taxi, Håshim watches the shoes of a man standing under a tree and assumes these are the shoes of a laborer. Håshim’s eyes remain fixed on the ground without looking right or left to avoid any eye contact that may lead to unwelcome confrontations; he intends to remain safely inconspicuous. When he does finally raise his eyes, he discovers that the man is wearing a military jacket. This assumed laborer appears to have been promoted into a militiaman, revealing that the majority of those who joined the militia came from working-class backgrounds. Much the same as the old woman gathering junk, Håshim tries to draw the features or events he encounters in the streets into a meaningful pattern. Traversing the city on foot, he achieves epistemological knowledge, although he focuses exclusively on what he sees without attributing any meaning to his random observations. He focuses on the physiognomy of pedestrians and tries to categorize them in accordance with dress, look and gait. Moving from one place to another, Håshim describes people metonymically and encounters individuals who have nothing in common. Walking through the streets, he gathers clues in an attempt to map the entropic landscape of Beirut. Håshim is a sort of inverted flaneur, wandering not in a dazzling place, but along the squalid and explosive streets of Beirut. The novel is rife with fleeting and ephemeral personalities, neutral descriptions and minimal conversations. For instance, on a rainy day Håshim takes cover with a boy carrying an umbrella to avoid being soaked. The boy is on his way to a pharmacy to buy medicine for his sick brother. The boy prefers to walk in the street and get soaked rather than walk beside Håshim on the pavement, being suspicious that he will be mugged by the stranger. When Håshim’s hand accidently falls to the level of his back pockets, the boy pushes him away disgustingly as if he were pushing a “dead mouse or the remains of a drunkard’s vomit” (85). In a war situation, a stranger is always suspect, and the boy is on his guard and downright suspicious. It is not clear what exactly he is afraid of, but presumably in his mind the menacing stranger could be

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a thief, a killer, a kidnapper or a pedophile. Having spoken to the boy very briefly and learned about his sick brother, the story is abruptly interrupted and Håshim (and, as a result, the reader) never gets to the end of the story. The contingent nature of contacts in the war city breeds indifference, mistrust and hostility. For a boy living in Beirut, Håshim is a stranger and therefore is potentially threatening and treacherous. Among Håshim’s peripatetic observations, combining walking and voyeurism, is a woman driving a car. The protagonist maintains that the smell of cleanliness emanated from her, from her white shirt and her wellcombed hair, but he could not distinguish the color of her eyes or how tall she was, although she looked tall and svelte. He has a quick look at her, yet a great deal of what he sees exposes the subjective meanings with which he infuses the external world, and his emphasis on the conceptual rather than perceptual. In other words, he observes the woman and records impressions rather than facts. By commenting on her cleanliness, he wants to verify his guess that she belongs to a class that has none of his problems with water, outside the grime that surrounds the area in which he circulates. To him, everything about her suggests barriers. Remaining disembodied himself, he gazes at another woman and describes her walking the street with exclusive focus on her body: she was young, with a beautiful face, body and clothes (89). He describes her as an “aching” (89) woman who is carrying a green umbrella, the same shade that one sees in the pictures in “high life” magazines. She is dressed in style, in a dress that drops to above the knee and black stockings over slim legs. The outward signs of dress reflect the woman’s social and economic status. Without resorting to a direct epistemological approach, the text denotes that this woman belongs to a world other than the one he is swamped in, suggesting that the war belonged to a certain class of people while others remained immune to its effects. These brief encounters sexualize the street where women are present as bodies, objects of the gaze as well as objects placed in space among other objects like the old woman. Resembling Simmel’s city, Beirut is a succession of actions and impressions, a representational space where transient, ephemeral and chance interactions take place. Håshim is basically a solitary onlooker with predominantly aesthetic tastes; there is no indication that he finds the time for any active sexual life except through voyeurism. His libidinous tendencies have been spent in

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endless, mundane daily chores and volatile and erratic events in a war city that has sapped all energy out of him. Håshim’s “flaneurie” is accompanied by watchfulness and the ability to catch things in flight, and the women he encounters remain nameless, passive and voiceless—more like emblems of the cityscape that accentuate his alienation despite daily and numerous encounters. Sitting in the service taxi, he encounters two women who are rather plump with heavy makeup, sitting in the back seat of the car, suggesting perhaps that they are prostitutes. He reads their physiognomy, seeking further clues to their identities. This scene accentuates the fragmentary nature of Håshim’s response to the city, his glimpses and snapshots of the city, prioritizing the visual over the verbal. The car is a non-place that is always on the move, showing the transitory nature of engagements in the city and their unknown sectarian/ideological/geographical identities and affiliations that further intensify Håshim’s anxieties whenever he encounters strangers in the outer sphere. The only time that Håshim abandons his listless attitude and tries to do something about his situation is when he accepts to go with his friend Shawq⁄ to meet a rich and influential man who can offer him a job, but the man keeps them waiting for a long time. His wife, who looks like she was crying, keeps them company for a short while and then disappears. Håshim’s focalization is limited to recording the surface impressions of people, objects and brief events without closure. Håshim experiences Beirut in fragments and jiffies, catching glimpses of fleeting characters that appear briefly on the scene and then disappear forever. The coexistence of physical proximity and mental distance underlines Håshim’s transitory and alienating urban experience in a war-infected city. Since the city is composed of heterogeneous and transitory images and characters, Håshim’s attempt at a vestige of order or stable existence becomes a cul-de-sac. The narrative is spatial rather than sequential, an agglomeration of contiguous districts rather than temporal events. Håshim’s nomadic movements in the streets of Beirut are not those of the flaneur, or an idle man of pleasure, but a person whose movement can be construed as a functional foray into the city; at one point, Håshim is a man on the lookout for a plumber who would install a water tank in his apartment. Looking for the plumber, Håshim

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moves in labyrinthine routes that accentuate his general ineffectualness and impotence. On his way to the forgery, he feels trapped inside an area of the city that he experiences in terms of nomadic movements. Although Håshim describes what he sees in the city, it is the city itself that controls him. Rather than a passive background, Beirut is a dynamic and raucous participator in the action. Since the city cannot be mapped by access to house numbers, Håshim has to orient himself through reference points like shops and cinemas, and even garages and garbage dumps. Looking for the plumber, he soon loses his bearings and finds the people he encounters aggressive and unfriendly, and unwilling to give him help. One man standing in a garage responds angrily to his query: “Do you see in this garage any signs of plumbing?” (104). After moving around in labyrinthine circles, he finally stumbles upon the plumber’s shop. When the plumber comes to install the tank, he finds it necessary to drill the wall, but Håshim is overwhelmed: “Enough! Look at this house: broken glass, dirty walls, doors that do not lock . . . this house is shameful. Enough! I don’t want any more changes . . . I do not like wretchedness” (114–15). Similarly, when his telephone goes out of order, he reports the incident. The ground nearby is drilled to get to the telephone cable, and he is promised that the telephone will be fixed the following day. A few hours later, Håshim hears voices outside and goes out on the balcony to discover that a car wheel got stuck in the cable hole. Eventually, Håshim learns from the employee who had come to fix his line that there is a hole in the sewer where rats get out and nip the subsidiary cable that connects Håshim’s building with the main cable. The rat-infested sewer reveals how far Beirut has been removed from civilized cleanliness into the dirt of the pre-modern sewer. The sewer infested with rats generates disgust at the stench, and horror at underground and dark areas, underscoring the connectivity between the spatial and corporeal. The sanitized and civilized pre-war Beirut was just a cover for the repulsive creatures concealed underneath, and that are suddenly exposed in a raw fashion by the war. The scenes with the plumber and the telephone employee underline Håshim’s segmental relations in the city where he reacts solely to one part of their personality, while the total identity of the individual is lost. In other

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words, he deals with them as though they are functions (like the plumber) rather than fully developed individuals. This highlights his fragmented and exclusively functional relations with people rather than personal and subjective interactions. This minutely described world has the effect of boredom, ennui and monotony where the narrator is sucked into the centripetal forces of the city and the minute details of daily life. This brand of realism based on intense scrutiny of detail has the effect of defamiliarizing the reader and challenging the normal way he perceives the world. The depiction of the external world in a chaotic and unstable war set up also reveals the instability of the real and the ephemerality of life in a city at war. The narrative ends with Håshim stuck in a filthy elevator full of spittle and dirt after a sudden cut in electricity. Like the car in ˝awåª⁄n Bayr¨t and the woman stuck in the garbage, the claustrophobic elevator represents the squalor, the suffocating enclosure of the city and Håshim’s final capitulation. He could have called for help but he has lost the energy and desire and ends up spending the night in the elevator, having surrendered to his fate entirely. Carrying a plate of garlic lentil soup, he puts the edge of the plate on his mouth and quickly gulps it down in order not to drop it on the floor. He then wipes the plate with a tissue and puts the plate between his shirt and his cotton vest. In order to wile away the hours of the night, he sits on the floor, smokes a cigarette, takes a sleeping pill, and falls asleep in the non-place of the elevator. The fact that narratives have close-knit plots and coherent endings seems unsustainable in the novel. The sober, economical and stifled language employed reinforces the general muted and subdued atmosphere of the war city. It was a Factory for Making Posters Unlike Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs, Elias Khoury’s al-Wuj¨h al-bay∂åʾ (1981) is a novel where the protagonist Khalil Ahmad Jaber walks the streets heedless of possible dangers since he is traumatized by the gradual disappearance of his son’s posters from the walls of the city. The narrative focuses on the murder of this same Khalil Jaber. The frame narrator maintains that his story will attract no readers since people in Beirut are concerned with more vital issues, such as political and military strategies, than simply reading stories. He

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informs us that he had learned about this “horrendous murder” (9), discovered in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) area in Beirut next to the Habib Abi Shahla monument, from a small piece of news in the newspaper. The victim, Jaber, is a man in his fifties who was murdered and mutilated. There are signs of bruises on the chest and gunshot wounds on the face; the report of the coroner indicated that the death occurred three days earlier. The narrator asserts ironically that he is an admirer of Habib Abi Shahla, one of the makers of Lebanese independence, and whose monument is the only one standing intact among all of the other monuments of other makers of Lebanese independence. Those of Riad al-Solh (1894–1951)2 and Bechara al-Khoury (1890–1964)3 have been destroyed in the war, proclaiming the collapse of Lebanon as an independent state. The remaining Habib Abi Shahla monument is now a puny witness of Lebanon’s independence since Abi Shahla died not heroically on the battlefield, but in bed with a mistress. On top of that, the fact that the monument is contiguous with a garbage heap reveals the narrator’s aversion to the collapsing Lebanese state. Why is the frame narrator so interested in this crime? He tells us that he graduated from the Department of Political Science at the Lebanese University in 1974, one year before the war began. As a result, he could not find an appropriate job in journalism and ended up as an employee in a travel agency, registering the names of passengers. Since he is generally idle and bored, he decides to “amuse” himself (10) by trying his hand at investigating the murder of a man named Khalil Ahmad Jaber, a Lebanese, born in 1928 who lives in the Mazraa area of Beirut and is employed at the Ministry of Telecommunications. In a chaotic city, playing detective is one way of testing his rational capabilities, in addition to being an attempt to address the city’s lawlessness and probe its ambiguities. The narrator decides to play amateur detective, gather details and unravel the murder of the man by scrutinizing all the facts available to him, even though he is not sure that people care to know or read his story. He is conscious that people have the choice of reading the coroner’s report rather than his story, and even if they do read his story, they may end up preferring to believe the reports of other witnesses to the murder, such as the report of Khalil’s wife, or that of other characters whose testimonies are made available

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to the narrator. From the start, the narrator subverts the detective story by claiming that his aim is to amuse himself by trivializing the whole process and showing the absurdity of investigating any crime or using rational tools in a chaotic and irrational set up. The fact that the narrator/detective decides to rely on subjective narratives and confessions of the characters involved with Khalil disrupts any linear narrative appropriate to detective fiction. Besides, detective fiction is the outcome of a central authority and order that responds to rational investigation, not of a segment of a chaotic city with provisional, generally armed and unprofessional authority full of fissures and aporias. The fact that the narrator is cynical and conscious from the start of his limitations as detective reveals his sense that he has no control over events and that the truth will remain an eternally receding presence. Rumors circulate about the financial situation of Khalil. It is said that his son who was a boxer before the war joined the militias and accumulated a fortune, which he kept at his parents’ house before he was martyred. One possible reason for the murder of Khalil is that his son’s war comrades killed him when they asked him about the money and he denied having any. This is a city of militiamen, robbers, murderers and third-rate government employees all swamped together in an unruly, brutal and squalid locale that acts not as a passive background but as an active motivator of the action. The narrator deduces from his investigations that Khalil is a decent family man who spends his spare time playing dominoes or backgammon or watching television; he does not drink and has no relations with prostitutes. One probable reason for his death is that he is the victim of sectarian violence, but being a Muslim and living in the predominantly Muslim area of Mazraa rules out this possibility, particularly as the militiamen in the area know him, and he can prove to anyone that he is the father of a martyr and should be treated with the deference that is his due. The narrator learns that Khalil had left the house three weeks prior to his death and had not returned. It was also assumed that he was kidnapped and killed on the Junieh–Tripoli road, a road predominantly controlled by Christian militias, and his body dumped near the Habib Abi Shahla monument, but there is no proof or negation of this possibility. Since rumors and hearsay are not enough to convince a rational being, the narrator resorts to documented information that he believes is a more

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reliable source as it would ensure distance from quotidian action and, therefore, a more objective approach. Living in a war city, he is also aware that readers will probably assume that the murder does not deserve more than the effort of reading about it since violent death is a daily occurrence in Beirut. Despite such reservations, he is still optimistic and hopes to establish epistemological control over an impervious and uncontainable city. Apart from his investigations, which drive him out on several visits to the wife of the deceased in order to glean information, it is clear that all of the other stories he tells appear to be derived from texts rather than from personal encounters, rumors and other potential stories, perhaps because he believes that writing is more reliable than speech. His view is that the mysteries of this opaque city will become legible primarily through the medium of writing (Wirth-Nesher 1996: 3) where he manages to exercise control by converting experience into textual account. Yet his written text is no more than a Derridean process of deferral; the narrator knows that he will not arrive at any final meaning or truth. The frame narrator is an armchair detective who tells us he was on the streets, but we never actually see him there. In an attempt to uncover the story behind Khalil’s death, he ends up writing a metafictional story. Through documents, reports, and official confessions we are faced with the artificiality of the narrative as manifested in self-reflexive devices that question the authenticity of the narrative itself by exposing its technical devices. As a crippled narrator/detective, his written text appears to focus on topographical and anthropoid features of the city where human beings and the locale in which they circulate are reciprocal impersonations of one another. By searching for the identity of the criminal and scrutinizing the nature of the crime, the narrator/detective tries to rationalize the unruly world around him. His aim, as he puts it in the preface, is to “understand the situation of Khalil Ahmad Jaber, and other similar incidents that prevent us from understanding the motives behind them and consider the reasons why it [crime] has spread at this rate” (13). The narrative is told through six voices that offer multiple readings of the crime. These individuals tend to repeat some occurrences but contradict one another on other instances. They also uncover aspects of their personal lives to impress, comment on the murder, or tell stories related to Khalil in order

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to remove any doubt about their involvement in the murder. The Chinese box technique underpins an environment of doubt and uncertainty and a plurality of marginal voices belonging to the lower echelons of society: Nuha Jaber (Khalil’s widow), Ali Kalakesh (an engineer), Fatima (the widow of the concierge in a Beiruti building), Zayn ʿAllul (the garbage collector) and Fahid Baddreddine (a student and fighter). The number of narrators attempting to tell the story of Khalil emphasizes simultaneity and the privileging of spatial contiguity over temporal succession. These multiple narrators blur but do not erase the narrator’s voice. Through these multiple voices, Khalil emerges as a man who traverses the streets, carries a pail of paint and whitewashes his son’s posters, while the armchair narrator remains generally indoors, monitoring the city through the discourses of others. The narrator/detective visits Nuha Jaber, the wife of the deceased, claiming that he is a journalist and friend of the martyr, who wants to cover the incident. Making use of colloquial words and expressions, Nuha maintains that when the country was on fire and the city was drowned in garbage, her husband died on the road. They dumped him naked in a fallow land after the murder. She tells him that her husband is an honest man who returns home from work, washes and sits in front of the television “just like a child” (16). She tells the narrator that Khalil does not take any bribes, although his salary is very low. He visits the café daily to play dominoes, but he spends a good deal of time at home. When Ahmad, their first child, was born, Khalil helped in the housework, but she has heard that at his place of paid employment he is seen as run-of-the-mill, careless of his work, spending his time solving crossword puzzles, smoking, and drinking coffee. His wife does not believe this story and attributes his failure to get a promotion to the fact that he is not a flatterer. After the death of his son, he was overjoyed by the poster of Ahmad on the walls of the city, and was proud to be the father of a martyr. The poster was colored red and blue, and right below the photograph the name of his son was printed: “The Heroic Martyr Ahmad Khalil Jaber.” The wall is a visual surface over which his son, like all other martyrs, is immortalized. The poster signifies the glory of the revolution and the value of his son’s death as well as being a sign of belonging and “of allegiance and identity” (Haugbolle 2010: 161).

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According to his wife, Khalil brought home about a hundred posters, but he felt depressed when it rained and the posters got drenched. Furthermore, when a poster of his son fell off the walls, he made a point to re-plaster it, but the situation got worse when new adverts were plastered over it, especially after the two-year war (1975–6). During this short period of peace, the walls became crammed with commercials and cinema and theatre posters, and Khalil began to realize that there was no respect for martyrdom in a city that has claimed the lives of so many people, destroyed monuments, homes and other buildings and wiped out the posters of his son. The disappearance of the posters from the walls through material attrition, rain and replacement by other posters marks his son’s final withdrawal into oblivion. As a result, Khalil locks himself up in his room, and his wife sees him wipe away all newspaper references to his martyred son. He puts the scraps on the floor and begins rubbing out the picture of Ahmad, starting with the eyes, the chin and the nose. He is unresponsive when she protests: “This is our son, you monster. They killed him. Do you want to erase him from existence?” (37). Khalil’s ostracism within the inner space is his escape from the ferociousness of the city and the outer space. His strong sense of alienation is not an existential angst or a modernist experience of alienation, but rather the result of war conditions in a monstrous city of aggression, violence and ochlophobia that drains its own children, creating estranged and truncated personalities. Yet it is presumed by his wife, as well as many others who were acquainted with him, that he had a nervous breakdown, but Sitt Khadijah, who prepares hijabs (that is, using magic to cure an illness or solve a problem) invokes spirits, and talks to the jinn, and ʿafarit maintains that Khalil is possessed. The second testimony is of Ali Kalakesh, an engineer and employee in the National Engineering Company in Beirut. He volunteers to place his information at the disposal of the wife of the deceased and the security apparatus concerned, even though he is convinced that it will not yield any result. Kalakesh is not shocked by the murder of Khalil, and maintains that similar atrocities have been committed in the city, such as the murder of a medical doctor and his wife inside their home by three young hooligans. To boot, the sixty-five year-old wife was raped before being shot. The intrusion of the war into the private world reveals the internal space to be implicated in the war raging outside.

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Kalakesh reports that he saw Khalil sleeping in the entrance of his building and saw the man again ripping off papers and whitewashing the walls,4 a gesture of defiance and insistence that the city does not preserve the martyr’s memory and is downright indifferent to their fate. The white paint also represents extinction, the general propensity toward death that the city represents. At first, Kalakesh thought that Khalil belonged to an advertising company whose job was to remove commercials in order to add new ones, but when he approaches Khalil he notices that he is putting the poster scraps in his mouth. Kalakesh also reports that his friend’s wife complained that her daughter was alarmed when she spotted Khalil urinating against the wall and was shocked to see his organ. This private biological function in the public space blurs the boundaries between the inner and outer space, revealing the inextricable link between private and collective identities in a war situation. It also reveals that the wall that publicized his son’s martyrdom is now no more than a substitute for the lavatory. Who is this man? Why does he sleep in the streets? What does he do? The girl’s mother approaches Khalil and asks him why he is tearing off the posters and why he has frightened her daughter, but he is untouched by her questioning. He takes his equipment—brush, bucket full of lime and ripped papers—and disappears. This strange and enigmatic figure reflects the mystery of the city itself. Khalil experiences the city in motion and roams around engrossed in his own self, distancing himself from events, although he remains intensely visible. Some assume that he is a beggar who should not be allowed to deface the streets and impair the face of the city, but Kalakesh is sure that he is not a beggar, for Khalil had refused to accept the money he had offered him. Even though the western part of Beirut is supposed to be inhabited by coherent and homogeneous groups, Khalil is a transgressive element who challenges the essentialist model of communal sameness and connectedness and embraces idiosyncrasy and difference. The third testimony is by Fatimah Fakhro, a widow and concierge of a building. On the murder of Khalil, she is interrogated several times by police and since the narrator does not talk to her personally, as he did with Khalil’s wife, the reader assumes that this is part of her confession. Unlike the earlier speakers, we do not hear Fatima’s voice, and her story is told from a thirdperson point of view.

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We are told by the uninvolved narrator that she knew Khalil and had a relationship with him, but she did not kill him. At the age of twelve she worked as a servant in Ashrafiyya where she got to know new people who drink and dance until the early hours of the morning, and where the lady of the house sleeps until noon. Fatima associates this family with modernity, or, more accurately, with Westernization and prefers Fadi, the son of her Christian mistress, who is tall and white, possessing a soft brand of masculinity compared to Mahmud, the Kurdish concierge who wants to marry her. Unlike Fadi, Mahmud is of medium height, half bald, and crude. Fatima’s wedding night is described: “He [Mahmud] switched off the light, took off his clothes . . . came close, put his hand on her mouth and began beating her with a stick.” Then he “threw her on the floor, tore her remaining clothes . . . then he raised her up and entered that thing. Severe pain, but she did not scream; with his hand on her mouth, how could she?” (79–80). This description of her first night with Mahmud as an integral part of her official testimony is curious. It looks as though it is essential for Fatimah to go through the personal side of her life to defend herself against any charges of foul play. Consequently, sexuality, which is normally associated with the subjective and personal, intrudes into the outer space, blurring the distinction between public and private. After the marriage, Fatima’s family moves to the Kantari zone on the west side of the city, an area that had witnessed fierce battles but has now been liberated by the leftist and Palestinian forces. Since the battles have moved to the Downtown area, the Kantari area is virtually empty when Fatima and her family arrive at the building where her husband is to serve as concierge. In Kantari, Mahmud Fakhro is all alone. The streets are empty save for the remains of sand bags and the sound of shots in the distance. He stands alone in front of the iron gate of the empty building with the shattered glass, the stench of garbage and the remains of perforated cars that look like cadavers. Soon he is inscribed by the war city when he joins the militias and begins flashing his gun wherever he goes. Now he truly belongs to Beirut. West Beirut, which has the character of a bounded, small town, is prey to internal disruptive forces manifested in the pervading squalor, illness, manslaughter, robbery, violence, poverty, destruction, filth and coercion. In this wasteland, Fatima encounters Khalil and describes him as skinny with a small

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beard and a few white hairs. He wears a navy blue coat and carries a small bucket. Looking left and right, he rips off whatever is plastered on the walls and chews the shredded scraps. The children hurl stones at him, while young men think he is a beggar, and throw coins into his bucket. He talks to no one, answers no questions, and leaps between cars in the traffic jams without looking, causing drivers to shower him with curses. Khalil is the outcome of eccentricities produced by the war, unsettling any attempt to understand the world as cogent, decipherable and complete, and the supposedly circumscribed city appears to be bursting at the seams. Fatima spots the lone figure of Khalil, wearing his long beard, coat and hat, sitting on the pavement with a bucket full of lime. He moves with his bent back and shoes damp with white paint, walking adjacent to the walls without looking at her. In the evening, he returns and sits on the sidewalk, and, surprisingly, he strikes up a conversation with her and tells her that he is married, that his son Ahmad is a captain in the Lebanese Army, and that he (Khalil) is a boxing hero: “Ask the TV about me” (102). The garbage collector Zayn Alloul, the man who found Khalil’s body, works for the Municipality of Beirut. Displaced from the Nabaa residential slum area, located in the predominantly Christian area on the east side of Beirut, he moves with his family to Hamra where he occupies a flat. The owner of the building views his family members as scabs and shows disgust with the garish clothes hanging on the line, deforming the exterior of the building. Zein is particularly dissatisfied with the cinema next door, as it shows pornographic films of naked women, and his family has to put up with the laughter and noise until after midnight. This is disturbing, as he has young daughters who need to be protected. For him, Hamra is an alienating space where he does not feel at home. His abrupt displacement from Nabaa causes disorientation and dissociation and creates a gap between the modernity of Hamra and the backward periphery. Moving toward the UNESCO area, Zayn approaches the Habib Abi Shahla monument after smelling a dead dog, which turns out to be a human body, the body of Khalil in a rubbish dump, lying on his back with bare chest, burnt hands and perforated body. Like the old woman in Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs, Khalil blends with the rubbish. Like a dead animal he is dumped in the garbage.

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The final testimony is of Fahd Badreddine, a fighter who is twenty-fix years old and a third-year student in the Faculty of Arts at the Lebanese University. Fahd had fought in the mountains where he lost one of his eyes. Now he sleeps in the headquarters of the joint forces in Wata al-Mussaytbeh. He had met Khalil only once and for a brief ten minutes when the latter was brought to the headquarters soaking wet, shivering like a leaf, and looking like the beggars that usually hang out around the city. According to Fahd, the death of Khalil is not such a big issue in a city like Beirut; Beirutis have acquired a blasé attitude. This is not meant in the Simmelian sense of protecting oneself from the barrage of stimuli in the city, but as the only way to cope with the daily assault of violence and death. Fahid hears rumors about Khalil being the father of a martyr and his reaction is that martyrs are constantly reproducing themselves: “Everyone is a martyr or from a family of martyrs” (198). This discourteous attitude to the elevated status of the martyr reveals that the war has trivialized all lofty ideas. According to Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, the “deconstruction of the image of the martyr goes hand in hand with the deconstruction of other heroic images . . . and a general disillusionment with the Civil War” (cited in Pannewick 2004: 350–1, 343–55). Khalil’s need to safeguard the memory of the martyrdom of his son amidst a plethora of martyrs echoes a general sentiment of disillusionment that the warring city generates. Commenting on the concept of martyrdom, one character in Iman Humaydan’s novel Båʾ mithlå bayt mithlå Bayr¨t declares: “To hell with martyrdom and commemoration . . . I asked him [her husband] why we search for our identity among the dead” (Humaydan 1997: 48, 49). Abu Jassem, head of the headquarters of the Joint Forces and one of the top leaders of the west of Beirut, emphasizes group affiliation and common struggle and believes in a homogeneous, cohesive group identity in the geographical area under his control. In the presence of city representatives, Abu Jassem pledges that the killer of Khalil will be found, but the novel reveals that his authority is punctured and full of inconsistencies. The territory that he tries to map and regulate is more porous than he assumes and is full of irregularities. While Abu Jassem vouches to get to the end of the story and execute the culprits in front of the people, rumors have it that Abu Jassem himself is responsible for the murder of Khalil. While others talk of Abu

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Jassem’s coercive measures, extortion and intimidation, the latter denies such rumors. When the representatives of the city refer to the corruption of militia leaders he reacts: “Ask me. By God, they [leaders] have no time to eat, but vigilance and caution are necessary in these circumstances” (214), but Fahd comments ironically: “Abu Jassem speaks and people are convinced” (214). This sardonic statement reveals the gap in Abu Jassem’s authority and the failure of his totalistic project. Indeed, the novel reveals that it is the sequestration of the individual rather than the cohesion of the group that takes center stage. The narrator distances himself from the immediate reality of violence but fails to discover the culprit. He asserts that even if he knew, he would not dare tell anyone or write about it for fear of infuriating the militias, and wonders whether this endeavor was worthwhile. Even if the killer is hanged he will not be a lesson to others. Murders go on. He wonders if Ali Kalakesh, Fatimah Fakhro or even Elias Khoury is the culprit. Íabåª Ghand¨r maintains that the inclusion of Khoury along with the other fictional characters suggests that in such an incoherent and illogical war city “anything is possible” (1988: 96). In such an unpredictable environment anything can happen, even within the world of the narrative where the blurring of public and private comes hand in hand with the blurring of the real and fictional in the narrative. The author himself, who is supposed to be in control, discovers the futility of his effort and is unable to establish any closure to a novel that remains open-ended, challenging all forms of authority in a city that remains fluid and unstable. If no one knew who killed Kamal Jumblat (1917–77),5 how could one discover who killed Khalil? The narrator spends months sitting behind his desk, reading and smoking thousands of cigarettes, but he fails to find the criminal and wonders about the value of finding the body of an ordinary man in a city like Beirut. Rather than ending in closure, the investigation ends with the abrupt statement “God only knows” (276), and the detective story is dismantled. The narrator himself admits that he is merely having fun in a deliberate negation of the detective genre within the chaos and uncertainty that prevail. It is just a rough exercise in interrogation without detection where the narrator’s efforts are restricted to testimonies that remain open-ended while the truth remains a mirage. The novel marks the victory of the city over the detective, the irrational over the rational, irresolution over resolution, process over

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result and chaos over order. Khalil moves around the city confronting the unpredictable, while the narrator safeguards himself within his own room, hiding behind a textual city of his own creation. Discursive Beirut Instead of depicting the city in bright colors or as victim of Israeli occupation, as in al-Razzåz’s novel, Beirut in Sonallah Ibrahim’s Bayr¨t Bayr¨t (1984) is an overwhelming series of events and impressions that reveal a debased and besmirched city leaving its mark on the inhabitants and vice versa. The narrator is on an airplane bound to Beirut to look for a publisher for a book he has written, Beirut being the only place in the area that publishes material dealing with politics and sexuality, topics that are banned in other Arab countries. It is interesting to note here that all three narratives discussed in this chapter are of aspiring writers like Håshim in Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs who has ideas but has trouble putting them in writing, the narrator in al-Wuj¨h al-bay∂åʾ who writes the story of Khalil and the narrator in Bayr¨t Bayr¨t who comes to Lebanon in order to publish his book. The three protagonists spend their time roaming the streets of Beirut, underlining the relationship between writing and walking. As de Certeau puts it, “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to statements uttered” (1984: 97), revealing the city and the novel to be signs or texts that are open to the interpretive strategies of walker and writer. Like al-Wuj¨h al-bay∂åʾ this is a novel that integrates documentary material and “social history” to emphasize verisimilitude and authenticity. On route to Beirut, the narrator reads the newspapers and learns that, after contacts with Lebanese political parties, Palestinian organizations and the Syrian authorities, firm decisions have been taken to try to stop the fighting among militias in the west of Beirut. These armed militias, controlled, ironically, by the above three groups, are responsible for the unruly security situation in the city, killings, armed robberies, rapes, confiscation of apartments, and the piles of garbage that have accumulated on the streets. He learns from the newspaper that the militias are no more than wrangling tribes and groups, which reminds him of the Chicago gangs of the 1930s and the bloody battles among the mafia families (13). The newspaper constructs a word city that gives him guidance to navigate a chaotic place and to understand the befuddling situation, even before he arrives.

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The novel begins with two topographical maps: one of Lebanon before the war and the other of the west of Beirut. The first map represents a once sovereign Lebanese state before the outbreak of the civil war. The second is a rough map of west Beirut, charting the war geography of the city. The latter is an agent of disruption that represents the dismantling of the Lebanese state, problematizing “any discourse which proposes itself as an exact map of reality” (Hart 1986: 113). The map of the west of Beirut features the map as a construct rather than a static, abstract and ahistorical chart, revealing that maps are not neutral but political, not abstract but performative, producing new enactments of space. The map of the west of Beirut is an attempt to consolidate the new powers on the ground through “centrifugal displacements” (Huggan 1989: 126) of the old map, proclaiming the dislodgment of the Lebanese state. The new map of Beirut discloses a new articulation of space, underlining a partial way of looking at the city. The map of the west of Beirut reduces the city to manageable proportions by acting as a guide for survival in a war setup. Nevertheless, the narrator will soon discover that far from being an abstract space determined by the map’s panopticon knowledge, the city is a representational space that depends upon situated experiences, fleeting interactions and incoherent pedestrian trajectories that run counter to the rational and authoritative project of the map.6 The novel’s attention to physical and sensuous detail establishes a plausible setting. The narrator observes that the airport has no customs control, and no one bothers to search him. He hires a taxi and, looking out of the window, he is struck by a partially destroyed building. On both sides of the street the shops are closed and there are no pedestrians. The site of this deserted area suggests that this is a war zone or an area that has witnessed a recent battle. As the driver who escaped from South Lebanon after the 1978 Israeli invasion was not familiar with the city, and since Beirut defies formal mapping, they have to find their way in the city not through street names or numbers, but rather through landmarks, such as the Piccadilly cinema, and more mundane sights, such as shops, drab buildings, rubble, and garbage heaps. When the narrator gets off in Hamra, he spots the driver fiddling in the narrator’s bag, trying to steal money, and his reaction is “Shame, Brother” (19). This incident foreshadows his eventual discovery of the cruel reality of the city and the way the inhabitants have become tinged with the vices of the city. He enters

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the hotel where the lobby is dimly lit and a few young men are sitting on the worn out leather seats. He meets his old Egyptian friend Wad⁄ʿ who, like the narrator, is an ex-leftist activist. His friend works for one of the newspapers in Beirut and refuses to go back to Egypt because the thought of his country makes him “feel suffocated” (24). While he admits that Beirut used to be a breathing space from dictatorial regimes and a refuge and political asylum for refugees from neighboring Arab countries, it is now a free zone of political corruption, kidnappings and murder. Having visited Hamra in the prosperous 1960s, the narrator notes that the contours of the place have changed. The kinds of people who frequent it have also changed, and the city’s earlier refinement is wiped out. Hamra now is bursting with militiamen, armed vehicles and prostitutes, including Egyptian women who sleep around and have no scruples about spending one night with a man and then moving on to the next. Beirut houses the underworld of prostitutes and criminals as well as the political world of revolutionaries and fugitives, invoking the chaos and dark secrets of a convoluted city. A great deal of his response to the city is visual, and, up close, he is generally disappointed, although he finds some advantages in what he sees. In other words, his attitude to the city is one of animosity and cynicism as well as casual appraisals. When the narrator hears of an explosion in a publishing house, Wad⁄ʿ responds that anyone could have done it: Iraqis, Syrians, Jordanians, Israelis or Libyans. When asked whether Wad⁄ʿ is committed to a particular side, his friend’s answer is that “the time has gone when one is committed to one particular group. Everyone diversifies to avoid surprises” (30); survival in war Beirut depends upon the contacts that the individual is able to forge. The narrator can be viewed as a sort of flaneur, a journalist, a novelist and visitor/tourist, reading the city at ground level through ephemeral and fragmentary impressions. Mindful of the fact that Beirut is a threatening place for those who are not familiar with the setup, he relies on his eyes, his quotidian walks, newspapers, books, maps, as well as his friend Wad⁄ʿ, to understand this perplexing city. Accompanied by his friend, he walks the streets of the west of Beirut and notices a flag fluttering on a balcony, which he learns is the flag of a Nasserite militia group named al-Muråbi†¨n (meaning those positioned and ready to

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fight). Underneath, he sees armed men wearing military suites, one of whom he describes as possessing aggressive features. Not far away, he sees an armed vehicle of the Arab Deterrent Force (ADF), while on the opposite street he spots a vendor selling cigarettes, alcohol and chocolate. The signs of fierce battles and destruction are everywhere, and Wad⁄ʿ drags him away from the cars parked near the pavement for fear of a random car bomb. This is a ragged place in the process of dismemberment and decay, reflected in the indecorous reality where the inhabitants appear inextricable from the place itself. The city that used to be a prime destination of the rich and famous is now a depraved and underprivileged place susceptible to the rule of ruthless warring factions. Like any poor third-world city, the pavements are crowded with vendors, and sandwich shops of shawarma and refreshments. Like Håshim in Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs, the narrator becomes acutely conscious of the proletarization of Beirut and its transformation into a poor city. What’s more, the women that filled the streets before the war have vanished, and the city is now dominated by male power. The narrator remembers nostalgically the old Beirut of the 1960s and early 1970s that drew writers, artists, intellectuals and political activists from all over the Arab world. He recalls nostalgically the earlier dynamic city, a center of culture and commerce, of fashion and elegance, where he watched fascinating commodities displayed for the observer, the flaneur and the enchanted onlooker. He visits certain landmarks of the city, such as the Rawsha rock, and discovers that the sea line and the pavements are full of cars selling coffee and other refreshments and vendors selling clothes, shoes, vegetables and home equipment. The Dolce Vita nightclub symbol of Beirut’s night life in the congenial and delightful 1960s is now a ruin encircled by a number of derelict buildings. He walks to Riyåd al-Íolª Square and observes the destruction, although he notes that few houses that go back to Ottoman times are still standing. He also discerns fragments of neon adverts of beer, chocolate and Coca-Cola, which in the past used to turn the square into a blaze of light. Despite the general destruction, the square is a source of energy and drive: he sees wagons loaded with all sorts of merchandise, including clothes, shoes and electric equipment, as well as money exchangers in the entrances of damaged shops and a cinema featuring pornographic films. On one of his nomadic itineraries, he stops by a sidewalk vendor and

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buys books that are banned in Egypt, such as one on the October War (the 1973 Arab–Israeli War) and another on the Camp David Accords (agreements between Israel and Egypt signed in 1978). He also buys a pornographic magazine that he assumes looks more scientific and thus more serious. While the availability of such books distinguishes Lebanon from other Arab countries, his excitement is soon dampened when his friend draws his attention to two books, one by Naguib Mahfouz and another by J¨rj⁄ Zaydån, each with cheap covers, and tells him that there are no copyright laws in Lebanon, implying that their books have been illegally and cheaply reproduced and sold. He learns from his friend of the vicissitudes of publishing in Lebanon, the corruption of publishers and the tricks they use in order not to pay royalties. Indeed, many publishers as well as newspapers and television stations are backed and sponsored by opposing political forces in the Arab world. For instance, the narrator and his friend make a visit to the Nizår Bʿalbak⁄ publishing house, which is sponsored by the Libyan Government. The city of Beirut is a representation of the gloomy state of affairs in the Arab world and the narrator feels nostalgic for the 1960s, Vietnam, Abdel Nasser, the student revolution, Guevara and Brigitte Bardot. The present represents tapered off ideologies replaced by killings, burglary and kidnappings. The narrator’s fluctuating views of Beirut are related to his present quotidian experience of the city that can be sharply contrasted with an imagined environment constructed from former impressions and views of Beirut. His notion of the city as a representation of an earlier city that he had internalized creates a disturbing slippage between the real and unreal, producing an unsettling incongruity. In addition to the verisimilitude of realism, an attempt to replicate a real and factual place, the novel incorporates other cultural artifacts. In line with the narrator’s shifting impressions of the city is his visit to what he refers to as a “unique” restaurant named Smuggler’s Inn, owned by artist and politician George Zʿinn⁄, which offers light meals and alcohol and exhibits paintings by Lebanese artists. This place is frequented by lovers, thieves, homosexuals, lesbians and all sorts of other marginal groups. The narrator describes the paintings as having a European orientation with very few local features. At the American University of Beirut nearby, he attends an exhibition of old

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photographs entitled “Lebanon in Past Times.” These consist of old photographs of traditional Lebanese families wearing Druze, Christian, and Shi’a costumes. He also learns that a woman named Antoinette Fåkh¨r⁄ is directing a film on the Lebanese Civil War and is looking for a commentator for her documentary. The documentary film is a bird’s eye view of Lebanon, covering scenes from thriving pre-war cafés on Hamra, such as Wimpy, Modca, Horse Shoe, and the Café de Paris. It also covers events such as the “Ash¨ra” procession in South Lebanon, ʿÅ‚⁄ and Fayr¨z al-Raªbån⁄ concerts, Yasir Arafat, the Syrian intervention, the assassination of Kamal Jumblatt, Sadat’s visit to Israel, leftist national and progressive parties and Palestinian groups. The film also features battle sites, landmarks of the war and interviews by survivors of Tal-al-Zaʿtar, Karant⁄nå and Dam¨r. Since major massacres took place in these locales, these sites became strictly aligned with massacres. The war in Lebanon changed the iconography of places in such a manner that Dam¨r, Tal al-Zaʿtar and Karant⁄nå lose their original representation and come to mean simply massacres. These once stable locales are transformed into performative entities that obliterate any other identity prior to the carnage that took place. The narrator undertakes the job of commenting on the visual images projected in the documentary. From the beginning, his commentary relies heavily on texts that are more in line with the Muslim progressive and Palestinian discourses where Bash⁄r Gemayy⁄l (1947–82), one of the leaders of the Christian factions, is depicted as the war culprit. The narrator tells us that his belligerence is the outcome of an inferiority complex. Being less handsome than his brother ʾAm⁄n, Bash⁄r develops a tendency for violence. He is short, with a face full of acne, but he is unable to stop eating chocolate. In the novel, the east sector of Beirut is an imagined locale garnered from leftist discourses, books and personal opinion. His views of the east of Beirut appear to be one-sided, and the Christian political leaders are no more than “caricatures,” as Elise Salem puts it (2013: 11). He regards the Lebanese conflict as one between progressive Muslim and Palestinian forces against reactionary Christian forces backed by Israel and the colonizers. The narrator gathers information from old newspapers, history books and other sources given to him by Antoinette, the film director, who is sympathetic with the

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leftist forces and Palestinians. Even though he seeks statistical accounts of the number of casualties and the money spent on the war, his account of the history of Lebanon remains one-sided and full of gaps. For instance, he wrongly assumes that Fayr¨z and Ziyåd al-Raªbån⁄ are Maronites, although the truth is that they are Greek Orthodox. The political situation is filtered through his ideology, and what he likes to see rather than what is there. If the warring zones of Beirut are founded upon common exclusion, the narrator thinks that he knows who is right and on what side he would like to be. The novel is a collage of cartography, fictional narrative, newspaper news, paintings, photography exhibitions, documentary material, history books, documentary films and statistical reports; quotidian experiences in real places also make their way on to this cartography, like in the Smuggler’s Inn and in geographical locales such as streets and cinemas. Nevertheless, all such tools of navigation do not make the city any less enigmatic. The lack of solid geographical boundaries between the two sectors of the city lands him unwittingly on the east side where he discovers that the borders between the east side of Beirut and the west are permeable. On the east side, he recognizes a placard of the leader of the Phalange Party, Pierre Gemayy⁄l (1905–84), who possesses a “strict face with the mad eyes” (211). A car suddenly stops and he is dumped into the boot of a car and deposited in an underground room without furniture, save for a few cardboard boxes. Even though he is kidnapped by the Phalangists, he is allowed to express his political views and challenge the interrogator on political and religious issues. He is released through Wad⁄ʿ’s contacts, and soon discovers, to his chagrin, that the warring city has corrupted everyone, including his friend and earlier comrade Wad⁄ʿ who now works with the Lebanese Deuxième Bureau (Lebanon’s intelligence service), spies on people and reports any subversive activity to the bureau. In order to navigate the city one should be cognizant of the geography of war. Antoinette guides the narrator out of an area where fighting erupts suddenly. She also takes him around the Íabrå refugee camp where he is pleasantly surprised to see flourishing boutiques and shops in addition to secondhand ones with clothes hanging from the ceilings. This is an alternative geography that bespeaks politics and resistance, where the walls are covered with graffiti and posters and photographs of martyrs, highlighting the political identity of the place. Antoinette takes him to a local restaurant

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and insists on footing the bill, reflecting a reversal of gender boundaries in a war situation. She leads a double life, moving from one sector of the city to another. On the east side she looks like any traditional female, wearing a blouse and skirt or a dress, but the moment she reaches the west of Beirut, she puts on her military overalls and carries the Kalashnikov in preparation for the struggle, to which she is committed, sparing time for Wad⁄ʿ with whom she has sex in return for hashish. In the evening, she changes into her morning clothes before returning to her parents’ home on the east side of the city. Another disruptive female is Lamyå, the wife of a publisher, and a woman who the narrator desires. When he pays her a visit at home, she refuses to offer him alcoholic drinks because they are Muslim, but he discovers that she has sex with both men and women. When he asks her about her lesbian relations, her answer is, “Is it my fault that I can’t stand your coarseness, selfishness and arrogance?” (258), which amounts to an expression of disgust with men’s conceited and condescending attitudes. From his male patriarchal perspective, she is dangerous, seductive and amoral. By unsettling traditional sexual mores, she collapses the inviolate boundaries between masculinity and femininity and embraces other sexualities in the freedom afforded by the city. Even so, Beirut gets on her nerves because it is too small for anyone to move freely without being seen by someone. Feeling threatened by her, he pronounces his male patriarchal ruling, accusing her of being dangerous, flirtatious and unscrupulous. Lamyå informs him that his book cannot be published because it is full of erotic scenes and scathing attacks on Arab regimes, many of which are active in present-day-Beirut. When he suggests that it could be read, at least, in Beirut, the answer is that Beirut is not a center of consumption, but of distribution. Since one cannot depend solely on the Lebanese reader, she suggests that they distribute the book among the one and a quarter million Palestinians in Israel. This unexpected statement enrages him and pushes him to attack her and try to strangle her. Lamyå constitutes a threat to the stability of his political views on the Arab–Israeli problem, which obstinately adheres to the importance of boycotting anything linked to Israel, even if it were the Palestinians themselves. The narrator, who possesses a preponderant masculine ego, is threatened

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by the unpredictability of the city and views it as a place of deviance, sexual degeneracy and lack of principles. When he attends a musical concert of Arabic music and songs at the American University of Beirut, he starts crying on hearing an old Egyptian song written sixty years earlier about Arab unity. Looking at the panoramic picture, he sees a fragmented nation and an incoherent social and political order. The lofty ideas that are generally associated with Beirut are undercut by a narrative that underscores grim disenchantment. The narrator comes to the conclusion that this miniature area of the city represented by the west of Beirut with its dirt, chaos, violence, spiritual emptiness and general drabness is no more than a moral synecdoche of the whole country as well as the region. Concluding Remarks The focus in this chapter has been on street-level walking as the predominant urban experience and the central spatial practice for experiencing the city. The novels present characters who speak the city by moving through it. Street names, monuments and other markers of the city feature in these works, and the focus is on an opaque and partial view, centering on the position of the characters within the city, rather than a transparent panoramic view. Al-Daif’s Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs is a peripatetic novel par-excellence. It represents a segment of the city where social relations remain impersonal, manifesting a strong epistemological anxiety. Beirut is a representational space contingent upon the protagonist’s situated experiences, fleeting interactions and incoherent pedestrian trajectories. In the grasp of a dangerously unpredictable city, the characters of Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs are flat and have few options, while the actions and events are more related to the conditions surrounding them than they are related to one another. The novel is enmeshed with repetition without development, floating episodes and a receding plot. Håshim, the protagonist, constantly brushes against strangers whose stories remain inconclusive. In a war setup, the protagonist’s mental distancing is essential to safeguarding his identity in a city where survival rather than heroism takes center stage. He interacts with garbage, rats, potential boobytrapped cars and other hurdles in the streets—tropes that represent the pervading state of squalor both at the physical and psychological levels. Al-Daif

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also sets his characters in a perpetual present, underlining their entrapment by endless, indefinable and malignant spatial conditions. Like al-Daif’s Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs, Khoury’s al-Wuj¨h al-bay∂åʾ presents ordinary citizens, trivial traces, scraps and refuse as part of the quotidian experience of war Beirut. Despite the fact that the west of Beirut is a limited area of the city that is supposed to mirror a cohesive community upholding common ideologies and goals, the novel focuses on a sequestered protagonist who challenges the communal spirit. The protagonist’s fleeting and nomadic movements around the city are subversive acts of defiance against the city’s entrenched ideologies, particularly the concept of martyrdom. Within the mental geography of the west of Beirut, the frame narrator pokes fun at the concept of martyrdom epitomized by posters on the wall that appear and then disappear to be replaced by new ones, marking the ephemerality of life and the transience of ideological discourses that mark present-day war Beirut. In the novel, the monument, a metaphor of a sovereign state, is surrounded by a garbage dump, deconstructing the image of a ceremonial, stable, unscathed Lebanese republic. The opaque complexity of the city is represented by the mysterious unresolved murder of Khalil and the narrator’s cynical attitude toward any attempt at understanding the city through rational tools. Like the earlier two novels, Bayr¨t Bayr¨t is a novel attuned to the war crisis in Lebanon where an Egyptian intellectual roams the streets of Beirut in an attempt to understand the city and the political crisis. The narrator is a sort of flaneur, journalist, novelist, intellectual and visitor/tourist who, like Håshim in Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs, reads the city at ground level through ephemeral and fragmentary impressions. The novel makes use of physical and sensuous details to establish a plausible setting to emphasize authenticity and verisimilitude. It is also a collage of cartography, fictional narrative, newspaper accounts, paintings, photography exhibitions, documentary material, history books, documentary films and graffiti where the city is transformed into a text that can be read and interpreted. In trying to fathom the war city, the narrator constantly compares it to the thriving Beirut of the 1960s and finds the former lacking, and his attitude is one of animosity, and cynicism. The Dolce Vita nightclub symbol of Beiruti night life in the 1960s is now a “ruin” surrounded by similar derelict structures. The city has changed, and

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the iconography of places like al-Dam¨r, Tal al-Zaʿtar and Karant⁄nå have lost their original representation and come to mean simply massacres. Despite the real presence of the city, the meaning of what the narrator sees in it is filtered through his own ideology and what he likes to see rather than what is there, creating a slippage between a real and unreal city and thus creating the narrator’s own textual city. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Mona Amyuni (1996: 188) refers to this scene as “poetically described.” The first post-independence prime minister of Lebanon. The first post-independence president of Lebanon. Íabåh Ghand¨r maintains that the white paint represents “Khalil’s wishful thinking that he can eradicate all memories of his son and hence of the city” (Ghand¨r 1988: 96). 5. A powerful Druze leader and important Lebanese politician. He led the antigovernment forces who opposed the Assad regime in the Lebanese Civil War. He was also a major ally of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) until his assassination in 1977. 6. According to Harley, “All maps employ the common devices of rhetoric such as invocations of authority” (1989: 11). See also Hart (1986: 110).

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3 Sexualizing the City: The Yoking of Flesh and Stone Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975: 11) When the Woman Looks. Williams, “When the Woman Looks” (1984: 83)

T

he emphasis in this chapter is on how sexuality otherwise perceived as private and personal spills into the public sphere and is discernible in the outer spaces of the city. In these works, the city is feminized and eroticized by men who indulge in “fetishistic scopophilia” (Mulvey 1975: 14). In addition to their voyeuristic activities in the outer space, some male characters in Daoud’s Sanat al-ʾ¨t¨mat⁄k take refuge on the roofs of buildings where they withdraw from the street in a voyeuristic attempt to watch women in their apartments. The roof where they position themselves is a liminal space where they indulge freely in fetishistic gazes, watching women sleeping or dressing up. In the city, these men of rural background are overwhelmed by this female presence. Within the public as well as private spheres of the city, gender is constructed and reconstructed in daily quotidian exchanges. In Óikåyat⁄ sharªun ya†¨l, women as early as the 1930s roamed the streets of Downtown Beirut to buy commodities or go to the cinema and watch Egyptian romantic films of the period. Their peripatetic movements around the streets give them access to shortcuts and other hidden locales that provide them with autonomy and freedom, challenging the separation of public/outside and private/inside spheres. It also reveals that modernity is relative and that even in this period women are citified and certain locales in the city like a café in Rawsha that accommodate women are feminized and sexualized. Such sites are open to 93

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a different “social ordering” (Rose 1993: 46), which destabilizes a malecontrolled city. The public sphere controlled by patriarchy is also central to feminine resistance, where the boundaries between what Rose (1993: 150) refers to as the “territoriality of masculinism” and private female spaces are erased, producing “paradoxical” spaces where women occupy, simultaneously, the inner sphere and the outer patriarchal domain. In point of fact, woman’s participation in the voyeuristic spectacle afforded by the cinema empowers her and serves as a source of knowledge and power. In Dåyman Coca-Cola, a modernized Beirut is mainly represented by the Hamra and Verdun areas that are juxtaposed with the more traditional Mar Elias area where the narrator lives. In Hamra and Verdun, women live the full tide of the new and are overwhelmed by the intense variety and versatility of the city. In the novel, the carnivalesque masculine performances of some women characters who insist on taking boxing lessons mocks the patriarchal order, destabilizing a fixed gender identity. While providing freedom for women to traverse the public sphere, some of these women fashion themselves after the cityscape of spectacle, advertising and commodification where they are over-sexualized and subjected to the male gaze and to the gazes of one another. Feminizing the City Hassan Daoud’s Sanat al-ʾ¨t¨mat⁄k (1996) focuses on Beirut not from a woman’s point of view, but rather from the perspective of rural men whose attraction to women is projected upon an equally feminized city. A family from South Lebanon opens a bakery in Ra’s Bayr¨t, facing the American University of Beirut, an especially vibrant area, owing in large part to the university, an educational and cultural center at the forefront of modernity in Lebanon and the Arab world. Like the majority of the novels dealt with thus far, this is another city novel predominantly confined to a segment of the city, the Hamra area, a narrow geographical space where the bakery is located. The time is the early 1960s, and the narrative is told from the perspective of the younger son of the family who records the events that take place in the bakery and the vicinity. The bakery is a little world where interaction between the residents of the area takes place. The characters are devoid of interior life

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in a narrative where there are no sequential events and where the action is cyclical and repetitive. The narrator is a young man who traces the gradual infiltration of modern technology into the bakery and the waning of a particular brand of life that depended on muscle and body energy. The narrator maintains that his father hired Ab¨ Óa†ab (that means “father of firewood”) partly because he liked the name, and because he looked like the earlier “tough” (23) guys who used to work in bakeries despite the fact that bakeries had stopped using wood and exchanged it for fuel oil, marking the replacement of masculine with feminine signifiers. From inside, the bakers can see passers-by, particularly American professors and employees at the American University of Beirut, and agree unanimously that they are all handsome. For instance, the narrator tells us that Zayd, one of the workers at the bakery, possesses a soft brand of masculinity because he looks just like the Americans: beautiful face, soft hair and a straight nose (24). The bakers, who come from rural backgrounds, are strangers to the city and spend their time observing people from a distance, but cannot avoid occasional, segmental encounters with neighbors and customers. This, of course, is not the reserve that Simmel refers to; rather it springs from a way of life that is alien to their rural modes of behavior, causing a sense of inferiority and lack in the presence of the urban “other.” Nevertheless, despite the barriers, the city infiltrates into their lives in a variety of ways. For instance, the narrator observes that his father has picked up an “unfamiliar” word used exclusively by younger people in the city when he describes one of the workers as “complexed” (25), using the English word. The bakery is an exclusively male locale where bad language, uncouth behavior and sexual innuendoes are rife. This is why the narrator’s mother fears that the bakery would corrupt her younger son, especially during holidays when he works there. While his father favors an excessive macho masculinity, his mother wants her son to overstep such phallic signifiers and immerse himself in a modern city where he can succeed and realize himself. Modernity colored by feminine signifiers pervades the city and penetrates the bakery, unsettling a formerly stable, rural masculinity. Such feminine signifiers include the women who come to the bakery and the women the bakers encounter in the Khayyåt bookshop who talk to men without reservations. The city leaves its traces on the narrator’s brother Råmiz, driving him

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to abandon rural values by immersing himself in the city where he develops attachments to new things and new experiences. He goes to the public brothel twice, but leaves hurriedly for fear of being spotted and recognized by kin or acquaintance, as such behavior is considered a rupture with rural customs and traditions. In order to avoid any suspicions, he is content with a shawarma sandwich1 that he eats in a restaurant facing the suq as a pretext to be in the area. On his earlier sojourns inside the suq, he notes that women exhibit their bodies behind the windows just like commodities in a window shop, but the beautiful ones remain indoors and charge twenty liras. The brothel signifies the intrusion of the body and sex into the public sphere where the binary of public/private is disrupted. Sex is no longer a private affair, but an object of economic exchange readily available for anyone who is willing to pay. Sexuality molds the social environment of the city so much so that Råmiz discovers that he does not care about the village land and would like to sell it and settle down in Beirut. The women in the family attribute this to his need for money “to spend it on his organ” (63). The bakery is a miniature village where men who know very little of the city stick together as a defense mechanism. It is a protective cocoon, a homosocial space, much like the café in Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs—a place that safeguards the men’s rural affinities in order to protect them against an impervious and perplexing city, a penetrating force that has the potential to infiltrate into their lives and unsettle any values that they honored and held sacred. The bakery produces its own semantics and particular behavioral patterns based upon the background and culture of those who work there. Being deprived of feminine company, the men indulge in sexual innuendoes exclusively derived from the bakery. Speaking of the narrator’s brother who left school for the bakery, the narrator reports that his tall uncle comments sardonically that some men “leave their schools for the bakeries because they like to eat the bread hot, meaning something that I could not understand” (20). Similarly, when they go to the beach and see two women swimming nearby, one of the bakers starts talking to his friends in language that is derived from the bakery, referring to the two women as “dough,” that is, a malleable body at their beck and call. Misconceptions abound when actions and events are seen through a rural framework that is rife with particular notions and beliefs, especially

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those related to sexuality. For instance, the narrator’s father attributes the foul breath of one of the workers to continuous indulgence in lascivious behavior that has “ruined” his body (20). When the narrator’s father—who has no access to radio or television and hardly leaves the precincts of the bakery—hears one baker, Mohammad Óalab⁄, singing, he wonders where he had learnt these songs and assumes that he visits the Fontana nightclub in ʿAyn-l-Mraysa. Despite its rural otherness, the bakery cannot escape the taint of the city. The place is rapidly converted into a sexualized and gendered place where the men indulge in voyeurism, especially when women enter the bakery to buy bread. Because of his shyness and inexperience with city women, the baker ʿÅrif does not look at them except when they turn their backs, but he talks of their bodies “as if he were embracing them” (43). For these men, women are bodies, figures that kindle desire, but who remain distant and inaccessible. Within the daily bustle of the bakery, a wide assortment of people circulate around the bakery or come in to buy bread, in a mixed neighborhood that in the 1960s thrived with Christians, Muslims, Armenians and foreigners. The bakery, encircled by a bookstore, a restaurant, a cinema, sundry shops, a church and the American University across the street, is also haunted by the brothel that infiltrates the bakery and unsettles supposedly stable rural values. Although the signboard indicates that the bakery sells franj⁄ bread, that is, phallic-looking French bread, or baguettes, only flat, circular loafs of Arabic bread are actually sold. When the narrator’s father buys a new machine to make bread, Ghålib, the baker, leaves three days after the arrival of the machine, as he feels that even a small boy could replace him and do a better job. Ghålib did not know what to do with his “strong body” in the face of a machine that he could carry in both of his hands any time he wanted (70). Since the machine injures, kills or simply displaces them, many of the laborers end up without work. As a result, Óarq¨‚ quits, and since street peddling requires minimal capital, he ends up as a pavement vendor selling socks in al-ʿAzariyya area in Downtown Beirut. After the arrival of the new machine that takes the dough and produces bread without interference by anyone, the number of bakers declines, and the narrator’s father predicts that men’s bodies will become frailer from generation to generation, leading to emasculation and the feminization of men and the city itself. Modernization

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represented by new technology as well as education represented by the American University are forces contributing to the feminization of the city. Outside the bakery, the men walk toward al-Íanåʾiʿ Garden. On their way, they discuss politics, and the narrator, walking behind them, hears Farªåt and Mustafa refer to Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Palestinian problem, and the Japanese captains who blew up their plane.2 Walking around the city, Khal⁄l, one of the bakers, is tired of looking at shops, building entrances and cars that pass by. Flaneurie is a tedious undertaking and items of modernity have no interest for him since he is a village man with strong muscles and very little to do with the fineries of civilization. He prefers politics and ends up borrowing the newspaper from one of his friends and reading as he walks, utterly oblivious of the experiential city. When Khal⁄l visits the narrator’s house, he is fascinated by the modern bathroom. He looks at the toilet seat and the wash basin, passing his palms on the porcelain tub and envisioning a naked woman stretched out there (75). For Farªåt, modernity is a female that arouses sexual cravings within a dazzling, enthralling and unsoiled atmosphere. Convinced that such a modern bathroom cannot accommodate the dirty biological functions of urination and defecation, he ends up urinating as he has always done, in the old Arabic toilet, which is a hole in the ground. Similarly, another baker, Råmiz, brags about his masculinity and difference from the other virginal village lads by dropping hints about having visited the suq. Råmiz immerses himself in the centripetal forces of modernity represented by the brothel without feeling any embarrassment or shame. Mohammad Óalab⁄ is the only one who attracts women with his voice when they hear him singing. They praise his singing and he thanks them, “borrowing the language used by famous singers” (59). Having succeeded with women, he urges the shy narrator to talk to one of the two sisters who visit the bakery, but the narrator’s voice shakes when he stands close to either of them; however, when they turn their backs, he stares fetishistically at their feet that look more bare in the open slippers. Similarly, when the blonde girl finishes her telephone call, the narrator puts the receiver next to his ears and feels as though he had actually touched her. This represents the narrator’s rite of passage to manhood and to the feminine city itself. Ra∂wån, the baker, on the other hand, has little interest in any of these women. He is already on his

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way into the hub and core of the city and hopes that until he takes up singing as a career, he will stay with a woman who works in a nightclub. In the novel, women are seen as silent bodies, and passive figures, features of the landscape, and landmarks of the city. The bakers eroticize and fetishize both women and the city. When the American woman leaves one shoe on the back seat of the car, the rural narrator, who has never seen such shoes before, wonders how such a small pair of shoes without much leather to them can carry the woman. The narrator observes her straight hair cut to the nape of her neck, her face and pregnant body, and deduces that she looks like a doll. Accustomed to the bulky women of the village, the narrator’s brother believes that the American woman will miscarry, particularly supposing that her soft body will not be able to carry the baby. Her fragility as well as power confound the narrator, and further intensify his fear of the urban feminine. The old, local, rural, manual, physical and masculine sphere is gradually being displaced by a new, foreign, urban, technological, intellectual and feminine world. The narrator is aware of the fact that the new city dweller has to negotiate the city and learn how to read its codes and its new alphabet. The bookshop is a place where men and women spend a good deal of time talking and socializing in an atmosphere of social permissiveness marked by the presence of both sexes. Noting the bakers’ reserve, the library employee tells them that the girls will respond to anyone who speaks to them and even smile at him and encourage him to talk. He reassures them that it does not require courage to talk to them “just like that, as if we knew them” (85). Since the young village men have no access to city women, they compensate through voyeuristic eroticism, enabled by the proximity of buildings to one another, where the inhabitants can be seen inside their apartments. The view from the roof is not of a natural landscape, but of the built environment where the public invades the inner spaces and where the glimpsed interiors become no more than window dressing. The three high school students Farªåt, Khal⁄l and Råmiz set up a tent on the roof of the building in order to be free to study at night and prepare for their exams. The proximity of buildings in Beirut enables them to participate in a voyeuristic spectacle of a woman who is taking off her clothes within her apartment. In the freedom afforded by the roof, the narrator and his

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three other young friends watch the blonde woman in her apartment and wait for her to do what she did on the first night, that is take off her clothes. Standing in the darkness and looking through the openings in the railing, they feel as though they were in the cinema watching a film. The roof where they are positioned is a liminal space where transgressive behavior is possible, particularly as they are screened from their neighbors in their inviolate hiding. Occupying this removed and unobtrusive position is a strategy of selfdefense, allowing them to indulge freely in fetishistic gazes, watching women sleeping or dressing up in their apartments. Hidden away on the roof they play voyeurs, watching a married couple in their bed as well as other women in their beds with bare and uncovered legs in the heat of Beirut. The inner space is thus trespassed and exposed to a stream of voyeurism by outsiders. The public trespasses into the apartment buildings glimpsed from outside, disrupting the separation of spheres where the dwellers in the private space are penetrated by the sharp gaze of the young men on the roof. This voyeuristic spectacle embodies a strong desire for control, revealing the intimate connection “between male power, masculinity and voyeurism” (Pile 1996: 229) in a city where they feel passive and second-rate. The visual takes precedence over all the other senses where the roof promotes prurience, leaving the young men locked up in a feminine city, and in a perpetual state of desire.3 Woman as Subject of the Gaze In her “Introduction” to Óikåyat⁄ sharªun ya†¨l (2005), Hanan al-Shaykh maintains that the work constitutes her mother Kamila’s oral autobiography dictated to her daughter, Hanan. Focusing on a woman’s personal record of Beirut during the 1930s and 1940s, al-Shaykh challenges “historicized memory” (Nora 1989: 14) by attempting to “make” her own personal, affective history of Beirut in the 1930s and 1940s. Kamila’s life story is an oral account addressed to her daughter Hanan in an attempt to preserve her past from oblivion by making history rather than taking it for granted. The story commences in the early 1930s when Kamila’s family moves to Beirut from the village in the Nabatiyyeh area in South Lebanon after suffering dire poverty and scarcity of food. This bildungsroman deals with the quotidian past of a woman who immerses herself in the city and achieves self-

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realization despite the insurmountable hurdles and restrictions that prevent her from realizing herself. When life becomes unbearable in Nabatiyyeh, Kamila and her mother (hounded by the threat of starvation) move to Beirut in the steps of Kamila’s brother Hasan who has gone ahead of them in the hope of finding a job to sustain the family. In Beirut, they stay at the home of Kamila’s half-sister Manifa and Manifa’s husband Abu-Hussein. The novel focuses on everyday, experiential life in Beirut and how the city transforms and is transformed by these individuals with rural backgrounds. Kamila’s initial response to Beirut is based upon awareness of the city’s difference from her own rural background. When she first sets eyes on Beirut, she notes that it is larger than the market in Nabatiyyeh. In Beirut, there are no sacks spilling over with rice and sugar, as she had imagined, and she does not see “people licking the treacle from the barrel” (28). The trees in Beirut are not like the ones at home, and Kamila soon learns their names: azedarach, date, mulberry and locust. Kamila also notes that unlike folk in the village, people in Beirut do not stop to greet one another as they do in Nabatiyyeh. In Beirut, houses possess unique qualities and colors, and on first catching sight of them, Kamila describes them as “vaulted with red tiles . . . like a pomegranate pulp” (29). The pomegranate, according to the Qur’an, grows in the gardens of paradise; it is also associated with life and fertility. In the novel, it is also a sexual metaphor, alluding to the female genitalia, which foreshadows Kamila’s sexual escapades in the city. Like the bakers in Sanat al-ʾ¨t¨mat⁄k, she embraces modernity represented by a French loaf of bread, a baguette, which she refers to as “long bread” (30), a phallic image prefiguring the sexual autonomy that she will experience in the city. All in all, her Beirut is like “the vast world itself” (28), a centripetal force that envelops her wholly within an eroticized environment. At age nine, Kamila resents the fact that she has to sell rubber bibs while other girls her age go to school. She cries and demands that her family send her to school in a city where “even the pigeons go to school” (35), but within her rural community, school for girls is deemed irrelevant as marriage and domestic work do not require any such education. Kamila’s entreaties fall on deaf ears, as she is needed to look after her sister’s children, rock the cradle and wash the nappies. Knocking on people’s doors, imploring them to buy

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a bib (33), she tries to force the baby bibs on them. Some women take pity on the pretty child and warn her against people who may exploit her: “Don’t let anyone deceive you. If any woman opens the door for you don’t ever go in” (33). Heedless of the seriousness of the woman’s threat, she compares her advice to what women in Nabatiyyeh used to caution against: “the ghoul, hyena, and Satan himself” (34), underlining the superstitious world of rural Lebanon as opposed to the city where evil comes from human beings rather than supernatural beings. Since Kamila clearly reflects rurality and poverty, a girl living in the neighborhood refuses to befriend her until she stops wearing clogs. Kamila dreams of wearing proper shoes and a new dress on Feast Day,4 just like other Beiruti girls, but realizing that no one in her family will ever buy her a new dress, she wonders if she can beg for one: “If I were carried from one house to another and when the door opens, the woman who carries me, begs: ‘Please give this crippled girl a pair of shoes for the Feast so she can walk’ ” (39). Contrary to the lowly Beiruti provincial area they live in, she soon discovers that the “real Beirut” is Burj Square where her brother Kamel takes her and to which she responds, “Oh God! . . . this is Beirut, not al-Khandaq al-Ghamiq” (41), the neighborhood where they lived that is predominantly rural and communal.5 For her, Beirut is a captivating amalgam of places, vendors, dressing styles, movement and clamor: the tram that her brother Ibrahim drove in the mornings before joining Abu Hussein at their stall, cars blaring their horns, the horse-drawn carts, the liquorice-juice seller, the women without headscarves and men wearing sirwals (baggy farmers’ trousers), just as they do in South Lebanon (41). Walking the streets, Kamila is mesmerized by a billboard featuring a beautiful woman with dazzling white teeth and tears on her cheeks like “soap bubbles” (42), and red lipstick so different from her own rural brand that consists of a walnut bark that she and her friend Tuffåªa rubbed against their lips in the village (42). Downtown Beirut is a lavish place of plenitude, rich in foodstuffs, cheeses of every kind, gold shops and other irresistible items (41), and Kamila’s pedestrian itineraries parallel the pleasures of flaneurie and spectatorship. Fascinated by the dazzling sight of the two billboard lovers, Kamila begs her sister Raoufa, who prays and fasts regularly, to take her to the cinema.

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Despite her religiosity, Raoufa lies to her husband about her destination and takes Kamila to the cinema to see the advertised Egyptian melodrama entitled The White Rose (1933).6 Having entered the cinema for the first time, Kamila compares it to the “magic-lantern we saw in the village” (43), except that it was mobile rather than fixed. At the same time, she could not understand the Egyptian dialect and did not even know that there was a country called Egypt. Living a narrow and confined existence, Kamila is unable to distinguish between fiction and reality. Watching the hero Abdal-Wahhab singing with passion, and being unfamiliar with the Egyptian dialect, she assumes he said, “No jacket, and I cried,” (instead of “I complained and cried”)7 and decides to provide him with a jacket (43). She thinks of stealing her brother Ibrahim’s tram driver’s jacket, but the “khaki colour and the sweat stain under the arms” (43–4) make it impossible for the stylish actor to wear. Dismissing this idea, she considers Abu-Hussein’s jacket, but deduces that it is too plain and short for Abdal-Wahhab. The jacket that she wants to give the handsome actor makes her suddenly aware of the gap between her brother-in-law, who prays and reads the Qur’an, and Abdal-Wahhab, who in the film “spoke to the woman, sang to her, embraced her, then whistled as he walked hurriedly” (44). Kamila finally comes to the conclusion that these men are poles apart and can never wear the same jacket. Instead of being restricted to a particular “epoch,” the novel presents modernity as an “attitude” that cuts across different times and places (Donald 1999: 27) and that is strongly aligned with femininity. In Kamila’s youth, the cinema belongs exclusively to Beirut while the other parts of the country are deprived. In the cinema she finds herself in a different positionality where she is the subject of the gaze, and the world is suddenly perceived from a radically different perspective. This can be linked to Sanat al-ʾ¨t¨mat⁄k where the three young men acquire power over a threatening city by watching from the roof in the dark a woman take off her clothes. The film brings Kamila face to face with a sudden awareness of a different brand of life than the traditional, religious and communal one, one that offers freedom, individualism and corporeality. The cinema reflects a new brand of urbanity connected with a modernity that dazzles her and incites her to embrace it in her own life. It is a heterotopic site of difference, offering an alternative way of life (Hetherington 1997: viii) that she did not know existed. In line with this new brand of life,

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her name, which means “perfect,” no longer appeals to her, and she thinks of changing it to Warda (rose) to stay in line with the people in the film. This new aesthetic penchant challenges the ethical and moralistic approach to life represented by her “frowning brother Ibrahim” who is serious and unmusical, someone who will never appreciate or understand Abdal-Wahhab’s “rose of pure love” (57).8 Her fascination with the cinema is such that she prefers it to “eating a whole glass container of treacle” (45), talking to the Beiruti girl, or playing house in the vegetable patch with her friend Tuffåªa. Outside the constraints of the private space, she breaks taboos by catching the tram at midday, ensuring that it is at a time when her brother does not drive it. As a woman living in 1930s Beirut, she is not afraid of being harassed or molested on the streets, and her only source of fear is the watchful eyes of her brother Ibrahim and brother-in-law Abu-Hussein. It is interesting to note that the city is not a place from which women are excluded even in this early period aligned with Al-Nahda era, revealing the city to be a “paradoxical space” (Rose 1993: 46) where Kamila challenges her marginal positioning and insists on traversing the streets as men do. Free to appreciate the spaciousness and beauty of Burj Square, Kamila observes the shops and the products on display in the shop windows. This is a new space where a woman can experience her own form of flaneurie, where priority is given to the visual, the scopic pleasure of looking rather than being the passive object of the gaze. Having placed herself as subject in the city, she now plays the flaneur and appropriates the masculine gaze. Being inscribed by the city, Kamila, too, is the maker of her own city. This is a female vision of the city that celebrates a new kind of life and people that she had never encountered within her rural community. For Kamila, the people in the city are different: unlike herself and her family and kin, they “studied in schools” (46). Beirut is a place that opens vistas for her to take ownership of her body and herself and to embrace a subjective consciousness away from family, kin and collectivity. This new secular existence based upon the importance of the subjective individual and the pleasures of present-day life are in stark contrast with the communal, rural and religious rituals, represented by the Ashoura commemoration of Imam Hussein in Nabatiyyeh Square (47).

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After the death of Kamila’s sister Manifa by the bite of a rabid rat, the family moves to a larger apartment in Ras al-Nabiʾ—the head of the spring’s source—that is one of the more refined districts of Beirut, even though Kamila discovers that the “spring” is no more than a “drinking fountain flowing from a wall by a grocery shop” (49). In the new house, Kamila and her mother sleep in a corner between the bedrooms. From her corner, Kamila could hear music and songs emanating from the radios in the neighbourhood, which delight and incite her “to sing along with them even if in her heart” (51). The aural city infiltrates into the domestic sphere, heralding her ensuing passion for the cinema and the romantic songs of Abdal-Wahhab. Kamila fully immerses herself in the culture of the city. With her sister’s family in need of a caretaker, Kamila believes that her mother is not up to the job because she is lazy (48). Kamila hears the other adults joking about what she used to tell her first husband when he rode his donkey on his way to work: “‘wait, wait until I bake a few loaves of bread’ ” (48). Despite her desire to free herself from a stifling existence, Kamila fails under the pressure of her family. Abu-Hussein decides to re-marry and his choice falls upon his wife’s young sister Kamila who, in his opinion, is best equipped to look after his children. In order to pacify her and get her to marry her brother-in-law, her mother allows her to play rather than sweep the floor and wash the dishes (54). Furthermore, she is sent to a neighboring seamstress to learn sewing. Ignorant of the marriage that awaits her, Kamila is delighted to visit the house that she saw from the roof of the building, the garden, the fountain and a few trees, especially the luxuriant azedarach (50). She is captivated by the liberal atmosphere of the dressmaker’s house, her strong “Beiruti accent,” her joviality, generosity and uninhibited “cursing, swearing, laughing,” smoking and swaying to the songs as she sat behind the sewing machine (59). Her house is a heterotopia, an “alternative mode of ordering” (Hetherington 1997: 51–2) that Kamila had never been accustomed to. The garden where she first sets eye on Muhammad, the dressmaker’s cousin, standing by the fountain, is an Edenic place that she associates with the cinema and “The White Rose.” When she meets him unexpectedly in the garden, she thinks that “a genie had conjured him out of the water,” an encounter that reminds her of a scene from “The White Rose” (57). Kamila identifies with the heroine of the film and views Muhammad as

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a surrogate Abdal-Wahhab: handsome, educated and rich. Walking in the garden with Muhammad, Kamila feels “as if I were in a film” (77). She notes that everything about Muhammad was fashionable; his stylish sunglasses remind her that in her family “dark glasses are used solely by the blind” (195). Muhammad is linked with the dream world that she had gleaned from the cinema. She tells him that for her, the cinema is a major source of education where she acquires knowledge of history, geography, fashion, and social communication. This is a female bildungsroman where Kamila develops and acquires more knowledge and awareness, and begins to see the world with more critical eyes. Even after she marries Muhammad, she is never compliant or submissive. After the birth of her fifth daughter Majida, Kamila compares herself to “one of our cows back in their orchard in Nabatiyyeh” (247), with the milk oozing from her breasts. In Beirut, Kamila releases herself from rural superstition where the act of looking at the stars is said to cause warts on the face. Extricating herself from communal stultification, she unleashes her individual feelings and achieves personal autonomy by looking at the stars just like Abdal-Wahhab who “sings while looking at the stars” (67). Kamila watches the melodramatic film Layla, Daughter of the Desert (1937)9 about Layla, a beautiful bedouin girl who was rescued from the Persian King by her cousin who attacked the king’s fortress, released her, took her back to her family, and married her eventually. Having been forced to marry her brother-in-law, Kamila wishes that her lover Muhammad could have saved her from this ordeal, but Muhammad is not the knight who rescues the damsel in distress from Abu-Hussein. Kamila’s passion for the cinema is such that she is ready to watch every single film with anyone who is willing to accompany her. One of her cousins from Nabatiyyeh who looks like a movie star in “the dresses she sported, the cigarette always in her hand, her crepe-soled shoes and the crocodile-skin handbag whose clicking sound I can hear when she opens it and smell her cologne” (104), was a frequent companion to the cinema. Although she still lives in rural Nabatiyyeh, it is clear that her cousin’s social position and frequent visits to the city have urbanized her, as seen in her clothes and general appearance. The proximity of the village to the city has enabled the rich to

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connect with Beirut and cross the boundaries between city and village. As for the poor, constituting the majority of people in the town, the gap remains wide and the differences appear insurmountable. In an attempt to placate Kamila and get her to accept to marry AbuHussein, her mother crosses domestic boundaries and offers to accompany her to the cinema. Like Kamila’s brother Ibrahim who has no sense of humor, her mother is unable to appreciate the humor in the Laurel and Hardy film that they see: “For God’s sake, tell them to rest a bit and stop making such a fuss! They keep running back and forth like the shuttle on a sewing machine” (75). The homely image she employs reveals clearly where her mother belongs. Kamila, who has become a frequenter of the cinema, has developed a more cognizant and more critical view of the American film and can see the relevance of this foreign movie to her own culture and situation. Unlike her mother who sees the behavior of the actors in the film as a nonsensical and disturbing nuisance, Kamila appreciates the humor and relates to it. Laurel and Hardy remind her of Abu-Hussein and Ibrahim: “Laurel, the thin and short one with little to say, was my brother-in-law, while Hardy who was tall and burly with a bushy mustache and a short temper was my brother Ibrahim” (75). Kamila’s carnivalesque behavior in the city is such that when her husband’s devout female cousins arrive from the south to visit, she takes them to watch a comedy under the pretext that they were visiting a woman from a very pious family. Kamila tells us that they had no clue what a comedy meant and had never even heard of Umar al-Zooni (1898–1961),10 the famous comedian (114). Rather than a backdrop, the city shapes and recreates Kamila, leaving its label on her physique. To use the words of Lefevbvre, “There is an immediate relationship between the body and its space, between the body’s deployment in space and its occupation of space . . . each living body is space and has space: it produces itself in space, and it also produces that space” (1991: 170). She maintains that she desires “a dress with ruffles and a necklace” (64), and is determined to buy the items she had seen in the movies, even though she is aware of the contingency of urban life and the fact that films and styles keep changing: dresses, brilliantine, hairpins, perfumed soap, ribbons and “lacy silk underwear, not the flannel shirts that reached to my knee” (108). She also wants to replace the old white pair of shoes that her husband had

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bought her, “which he dyes black or brown for winter” with a paint that runs over her feet when the rain falls (119). Within the ephemeral and contingent modern world of the city, Kamila seeks the new, the artificial, the abundant, the gorgeous and the flamboyant. By marking her body with clothing, ornamentation and makeup, she plunges into the centripetal currents of the city, while her husband remains on the margins. Her lack of domestic virtue and pursuit of pleasure unleashes an audacious desire to unsettle a repetitive and monotonous order and embrace a defiant unruliness. In order to buy of all the items she desires and watch any new film in the cinema (the films, like the city, also keep changing), she sells a wristwatch given to her by her husband, reflecting her rejection of his sluggish tempo and her desire to move on. She tells him, however, that the watch “had fallen into a ditch full of rainwater” (122); her husband spends hours “bent double with a sieve, trying to sift through the water” in the hope of finding it (122). Despite her marriage, she unabashedly resumes her relationship with Muhammad. Turning her back on the oppressive domestic space, she finds herself in the outer spaces with Muhammad: on a street corner, in a restaurant near Rawshe, by the famous rock on Beirut’s seafront, in a park outside Beirut and in a taxi. The taxi is a non-space, a heterotopia mirroring Kamila’s own unpredictable and unruly behavior. In the city, Kamila moves in an atmosphere of excitement, agility, freedom and excess and has no scruples about holding hands with Muhammad in public. Such action is spurred by her conviction that her husband and brother are at work and have no idea of the existence of such out-of-the way places, fissures and crannies of the city such as cafés, apartments and street corners in “the margins of hegemonic discourses, social spaces carved in the interstices of institutions and in the chinks and cracks of the power-knowledge apparati” (de Lauretis 1987: 25). Kamila is critical of her husband’s apathetic attitude to the city, and of his insistence on perpetuating his rural values and brand of life heedless of the new environment around him. Abu-Hussein is a self-made man who started off as an errand boy to a Beiruti family, and then became a peddler and finally a merchant who, like Fa††¨m and ʿAbd¨ in Óayy al-lijå, regards Beirut as a place where one makes money, but continues to live his life as if they were still in the village. Unlike Kamila, whose eyes went everywhere, Abu-Hussein

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had no eyes for the city. His general inertness and insistence on remaining indoors on Sundays can be compared with Kamila’s eager geographical mobility and walks on the seafront on Sundays: “he didn’t like strolling like everyone else along the Rawshe seafront or the Beirut pine forest” (95). This underlines the reversal of gender roles where Kamila is constantly in the outer space while her husband prefers the domestic realm. Kamila’s meeting place with her lover is a tiny room that she associates with the cinema, a place away from the drab reality of her own environment. The room is another heterotopic place, which, according to Foucault (1986), is a real place that runs counter to the social and religious values, disrupting the rigidified order of things within her home and opening new vistas. It is a “mode of (dis)ordering” (Hetherington 1999: 51–2), a space of resistance privileging corporeality and sexuality (Grosz 1995: 104, 110, 108). Kamila’s transgression is such that she is prepared to accompany a woman named Fadila (a name that ironically means “virtuous”) to a nightclub where the latter intends to get a job as a singer. They accelerate their steps across Burj Square in order to avoid being spotted by her brother Ibrahim on his train. Kamila has the guts to take all of these risks even though she knows that “by entering the club, we were breaching the unbreachable” (112), which would damage even men’s reputation. By repudiating a world dominated by nature in her earlier rural abode, she submits to her natural desires and the pleasures of the body in the city. When she recalls how women accused of being adulterous are treated in her village, she feels lucky to belong to the city: “Suddenly the image of a woman paraded in Nabatiyyeh comes to mind.” She thinks of her own love affair with Muhammad and imagines what would have happened to her had she been in the village: “The people of Nabatiyyeh would have paraded her around the villages and the vicinity after mounting her in a reverse manner on the back of a roguish donkey without a saddle” (187). Kamila thanks God that she is in Beirut, not in her village. But her husband remains a harsh reminder of the past. She tells us that he questioned her about her affair with Muhammad, but strangely enough his reaction is far from violent. Keeping in mind that this is a biography of Al-Shaykh’s mother, the response of a Muslim man in the 1930s, who abstains from using physical violence against an “adulteress,” interrogates

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totalizing forms of history. As Andreas Huyssen (1995: 254) puts it, “the clarion call to objective truth will simply not do,” especially when it comes to historians and scholarly works pertaining to the state of women in the Arab world. Even as early as the 1930s and 1940s, the novel reveals that the streets of Beirut were traversed by respectable women and did not solely belong to the disreputable. There was trouble every time Kamila wanted to go out, and the “noose seemed to be narrowing” (129) around her and her niece Mariam’s necks, who accompanied her on her sojourns around the city. Feeling the complicity between the two women, her husband and his brother would comment whenever they heard the two women laugh: “The Devil’s with us,” or “Bitch’s daughter!” (129). Her extreme partiality to life in the city, and the freedom she earns, drives her to renounce all moral constraints, going as far as asking her eight-year-old daughter to write her love letters to Muhammad. Her justification is that her daughter loves Muhammad more than her own father. Kamila negotiates life in the city without inhibitions, breaking rules with impunity and embracing a hedonistic existence where values are measured by sentiments and emotive responses. Far from being an alienating masculine domain, Beirut is where Kamila indulges in the pleasures offered by the city, enjoying the urban spectacle in her uninhibited actions and peripatetic movements around the city that persist unabatedly even after her marriage to Muhammad and more so after his death. Her passion for freedom appears to exceed her love for Muhammad himself. After her marriage to her lover, she yearns for the earlier Muhammad who was forever reciting poetry. The present “married” Muhammad ensured that she was eternally pregnant and having endless miscarriages. Whenever Muhammad’s work took them outside Beirut, Kamila was depressed. She always yearned for the bustle and excitement of the city. She tells Muhammad that in Ras al-Naqurah in South Lebanon, the “roar of the sea” makes her want to cry (254), causing palpitations and anxiety. Kamila only feels animated in the city that she pines for whenever she is parted from it. After Muhammad’s death, her tenacious passion for life persists relentlessly. She is pleased to be pursued by so many men: “It would only have taken a ‘broom’ to sweep away all the amorous glances” (324). But she preferred younger men. One day, as she is taking a walk with a friend, she suddenly

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“tidies” up her hair, having spotted a young man looking at her from a balcony. But her friend bursts out laughing and tells her jokingly that she is indeed “blind.” Her young man turns out to be “shirts and sheets hanging on the clothes line” (247). Kamila’s search for the vibrant and exhilarating life offered by Beirut remains unabated to the very end. A Yonic City While focusing on women in the streets of Beirut, Alexandra Chreiteh’s Dåyman Coca-Cola (2009) goes further to refer to other sexualities inscribed on the city, unsettling gender binaries. This synoptic novel focuses on the city as protagonist where the setting takes precedence over character. The narrative is told from the perspective of a young woman named Abir Ward, whose name means “fragrance of roses” in Arabic (9). She is enthusiastically engaged with her city, especially in her nomadic movements around its various spaces. The novel presents a vision of the city that celebrates urban life with all its newness, variety, openness and volatility, interspersed by subversive banter and cynical humor. It is an all-encompassing city novel free from the infringement of the rural that lurks in many works of Lebanese fiction, or from the modernist binarism of urban corruption and anarchy as opposed to rural purity and harmony. The narrator’s identity is more dependent on the street than on the domestic sphere; she is fully engrossed in the city and wanders around on foot or by car in the company of her two female friends: Yasmine and Yana. Abir is a young woman studying at the Lebanese American University whose father owns a flower shop named Abir Ward on Mar Elias Street in the west of Beirut. He had opened the shop twenty-five years before, and when his daughter was born he gave her the name Abir, the same name he had given his shop. The fact that they have the same name underlines the way her father links commercial factors with paternity and offspring, where brick and flesh become inextricable, and the “social reality” is spatialized within a lived, animated, and performative space.11 Abir’s Romanian friend Yana comes to Lebanon in the company of her husband who had a job in Beirut. Yana’s excitement about the city springs from an orientalist vision of the East. The books she had read about the East have transformed the Arab city into an opulent erotic utopia where Beirut is an Edenic place “that flows with milk and honey” (11) and that happens to be

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in line with her “illustrated tourist guide” (11). The narrator tells us that Yana dreamt of a court where “the emir, her husband, sits on silk cushions and ostrich feathers” (11). However, instead of the jawari, Yana observes women wearing bikinis, lying on the golden sands. She soon discovers that her golden shore is covered with broken bottles and cast-off medical serums. As for the blue sea, it is filled with jellyfish that look like nylon bags, or, more accurately, “plastic bags that look like jellyfish” (12). Yana refers to her two friends Abir and Yasmine as “milk and honey,” the former being dark like “fried kibbeh,”12 while the latter is white like a plate of “labneh”13 (78). Her description is in line with the famous song “Didi,” originally sung by Algerian singer Cheb Khaled, which was “re-released” (78) by the German group Milk and Honey. The song reminds her of her first meeting with her Lebanese lover: On a dark desert night, in a land far away You took my heart—that’s the price I pay. (78)

Yana’s Beirut is an abstraction, a representation rather than a reality, a desert with dunes and palm trees where she would find true love, although, ironically, her apartment in Beirut is just above a Starbucks. Being Romanian, she is automatically assumed to be a prostitute, and, therefore, on the beach, she is approached by a few young men with the question, “How much?” (12) spelled out in English. Rather than a private affair, sex in Beirut is an article of economic exchange where women are harassed in the sexualized public space. At Starbucks, Abir is struck by the obscene words written on the door of the toilet, revealing that sexuality has become everyone’s business. Yana has an affair with the director of the advertising company she works for, gets pregnant, and insists on keeping the baby. As a result, her friends Abir and Yasmine find a gynecologist in Ashrafiyya, on the east side of Beirut away from where they live and from family pressure, in order to secure an abortion for Yana in a place that affords them anonymity. Like Kamila in Óikåyat⁄ sharª¨n ya†ul, they seek areas in Beirut where they would not be recognized and thus protect themselves from the eyes of the patriarchal society. On their way to Ashrafiyya, Yana, Abir and Yasmine are caught up in the traffic jam on Corniche al-Mazraʾa, owing to the street diggings taking place, which mirror the energy and vitality of the city. At the same time, traffic jams

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constitute a rupture in community in favor of a more idiosyncratic perspective. To use the words of Robert Alter, in a traffic jam everyone “is trying to get somewhere; everyone is frustrated by all the others who are exasperatingly in the way” (2005: 19). Post-war Beirut is a place of mobility and contingency, particularly for women where Beirut’s centripetal forces immerse Abir in a stream of freedom and kinetic energy promising adventure, breaking taboos and taking control of herself and her body away from restrictions imposed by her traditional family. Her city is characterized by movement, drive and clamor, reflecting her own captivation with the modern, the artificial and the transitory. The city throbs with the rhythms of modern life: cars, traffic jams, motorcycles, sudden encounters and digging sites. In the traffic jam, one young man on a motorcycle presses his face against the car window, stares at Abir’s unbuttoned shirt and screams, “Mare!” (a female horse to be mounted), but Yasmine opens the window and retorts flippantly, “Donkey!” (40). This dismissive remark intimidates him and spurs him to try to open the door of the car, but Yasmine is faster: she opens the door and pushes him away with all her strength. He falls off the motorbike, stands up, gets back on his motorbike and disappears, shocked at a strangling female Sphinx, an unbridled female in the midst of the city. His capacity for speech evaporates, and in the face of a woman’s masculine aggressiveness, his voice all but fails him, shifting the terms on which the city is negotiated. When they reach the clinic, Abir is anxious, knowing that a young woman like herself should not be seen in such a place. She is aware of the fact that Beirut is a small city where chance meetings could take place anywhere. Indeed, the whole idea of a physician in Ashrafiyya on the east side of Beirut is to avoid being recognized. Therefore, she tries to exonerate herself from any suspicion by drawing the attention of those present to the fact that it was Yana who needed to see the gynecologist, asking her in a loud voice—to be heard by everyone in the room—how she was feeling. Abir stands on the thin line between modernity and tradition, although emotionally she leans toward the new and despises the old. The training center where Yasmine has boxing exercises is a heterotopia of contestation where women’s association with physical weakness and inferiority in relation to men is “contested and inverted” (Foucault 1986: 24),

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challenging the dualisms male/female, active/passive, weak/strong. Yasmine maintains that because of her boxing exercises she can beat any man “and squash him . . . like an insect” (82), but Abir, who possesses a vivacious sense of contemporaneity, challenges her friend’s outdated metaphor and is about to tell her that crushing mosquitos does not need any physical effort after the invention of mosquito killers such as “Piff-Paff” (82). In another context, Abir makes use of similar metaphors when she tells Yasmine that if her family finds out about her pregnancy, they would “chop me into pieces— they would chop me up in the very same Moulinex mixer that I had once given to my mother on the occasion of Mother’s Day!” (76). The use of the Moulinex mixer supports her acceptance and excitement about all vestiges of modernity. By resisting the patriarchal order through the subversive boxing sport, Yasmine reverses expected feminine behavior and installs her own ordering strategies by performing acts assumed culturally appropriate to the male body. Keeping in mind her behavior in al-Mazra’a traffic jam and her boxing exercises, it is clear that new femininities and masculinities are being produced at the crevices between private and public spheres. This carnivalesque performance is her way of resisting patriarchal images of the female body that Abir tries to safeguard by centering on her femininity. The training center is clearly a space of resistance to the hegemony of heterosexuality. Abir notices that a male boxer with glistening legs like a washed up and shiny Pyrex tray is wearing pink gloves, a color her friend Yasmine detests because it is a sign of profuse femininity. One of the other boxers admires his legs and asks him jokingly if he had plucked the hair on his legs lately. Judith Butler’s discussion of the role of parodic acts like drag, which highlights the performativity of all gendered identities, is relevant here. These “subversive bodily acts” (Butler 1990: 79) represented by the effeminate boxer disrupt the normally heterosexual space of the training center. Society’s construction of the body is understood differently by marginal groups like Yasmine and the boxer who embrace a different brand of masculinity, femininity or sexuality in a place that can be referred to as a “counter-hegemonic space[s] of freedom” (Hetherington 1997: 24). Yasmine, who has a German mother, lives alone in a rented apartment in the Snubra area of Beirut. She wears her hair very short, maintaining that

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she has more important things to attend to. Her boxing coach is a pregnant woman rather than a tough male, further erasing the boundaries between femininity and masculinity. The city that allows for these unconventional gender crossings that are shocking to some are perfectly acceptable in the heterotopic space of the gym. Despite Abir’s immersion in the modern that is afforded by the city, the traditional lurks behind this facade of newness since the “hegemony of the modern over what it displaces as ‘traditional’ is never complete” (Mitchell 2000: xviii).14 In view of that, Abir tries to convince Yasmine to stop boxing before her body becomes no different to the male body, and before she loses her femininity. Abir tries to frighten her friend by telling her that at the university they say she is a lesbian. Although Abir is fascinated with the new, and with what Werner Sombart (1863–1941) refers to as “asphalt culture”15 (cited in Frisby 2001: 246) that is inextricable from it, she still retains dregs of the orthodoxy and conformity that Yasmine has cast out. Abir’s cousin Hala panders to the patriarchal society; she changes her mind about marrying her fiancé Fares after an incident in a bar in Gemmayzeh where Fares, the knight of her dreams, exhibited cowardice and lack of heroism. When two drunks come over to their table and start cursing them, and when one of them tries to put his hand on her breast, Fares hides himself under the table. The only voice she heard from him was the “chattering of his teeth,” and she tells Abir mockingly that he turned out to be a tante, meaning a “sissy” (51). At Starbucks, Abir observes a young couple stretched on a couch in a dark corner kissing without taking a break. The café conflates the public and private and blurs the opposition between bedroom and street. It also plays an active role in challenging traditional values and ideologies that have dominated the Lebanese scene and opens a crevice through which new ideas can infiltrate. It is a place of encounter where people are able to forge new social relations, new forms of communication and new ways of looking at and experiencing the world. In the café, menstruation is discussed rather shamelessly by Yasmine who asserts that she will not allow menstruation to stop her from boxing. She tells the more traditional Abir that she should use tampons rather than sanitary pads that look like diapers. She wonders how Abir could stand the filthy pads

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and compares her outdated action to riding a camel down an asphalted road used by cars. The global mass culture has invaded the city now full of foreigners and young people with at least one parent from a Western country (like Yana and Yasmine), accelerating the rapid modernization process of post-war Beirut, and conflating the indigenous local culture to produce new configurations and confrontations. According to the narrator, the building where Yasmine lives is not “clean,” being inhabited by outlandish people such as a big man overflowing with femininity: “Despite his massive size, femininity just exudes from him, in the same way Coca-Cola spills out of a bottle that’s been shaken before it’s opened!” (21). Furthermore, the hair on his body has been plucked; his face is crammed with makeup, and he wears an embroidered satin robe and a pair of open-toed shoes showing his giant red toenails. The city marks his body “through dress and personal adornment, stylized forms of movement, display and visual spectacle” (Mort 2003: 313). The narrator is alarmed by this cross-dresser whose large physique contrasts with his lack of masculinity, breaking the normative model of what a man should be. His body is a site of anarchy and revulsion that overflows its boundaries, turning him into a grotesque carnivalistic force that mocks the norms of ocular as well as performative masculinity, producing extravagant peculiarities. Yasmine’s building is a strategic location for resistance away from the city’s overriding patriarchal control, where a different brand of masculinity is developed and performed despite general surveillance and restriction. Through the mirror of Abir’s bedroom the Coca-Cola billboard (that was a big success, lasting six consecutive months) blocked any other view. Instead of the sky and the sea, the external world is transformed into a huge billboard where the narrator’s world is dominated by visual culture. The “language of the street” penetrates the inner space and Yana is part of the spectacle and of the “textualized city of signs” (Geyh 2006: 413). From her bedroom, Abir could see her friend Yana with a full chest and slim waist, standing next to a huge Coca-Cola bottle with a long neck. Yana drinks from a small bottle in her hand, “embracing the front of the bottle with her full, open lips, which are painted a striking shade of red, her eyes closed” (36), and totally oblivious of the world around her. The Coca-Cola bottle is a predominant metaphor in this novel. The phallic shape of the bottle reveals

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the erotic objectification and commodification of women within modern life in the city, although the bottle is also depicted as feminine. Abir observes that whenever “I looked at my image in the mirror, a huge bottle of Coca-Cola— with its long neck, full chest, and slim waistline—was reflected behind me” (36). The shape that emerges is one in conformity with the general patriarchal objectification of women, and expectations of what a woman’s body should look like. It reveals the relegation of woman to the status of exhibition, voyeuristic spectacle, object of the male gaze and of public consumption and mass production, underlining the “power geometry” (Haraway 1991: 170) that actually controls the spaces of the city. The novel focuses on ephemerality, spectacle, fashion and the commodification of women as well as fierce competition. Accordingly, Yana fails to make a new advertisement with Exotica the famous flower shop. The new girl that is selected is, according to Abir, prettier than Yana. In the shortlived existence of the modern, “Beauty turns out to be easy to fabricate” (Calinescu 1987: 228), and just as easy to dispense with. Yana’s body has become a public affair that intimidates religious forces, driving them to smear her poster with black paint and deface her image. The Coca-Cola billboard is rapidly transformed into a modernist ruin. While Abir immerses herself in the modernity afforded by the city, her family represents the obverse side of the coin. She tells us that her family gathers for lunch every Friday after prayers at her grandmother’s house. Loud speakers in the mosque next door carry the Friday speech to everyone. Her grandmother’s apartment is on the fifth floor and, since there is no electricity, Abir has to climb the stairs, cursing the electricity company as she does so. She tells us sarcastically that the number of children in her grandmother’s house was almost equal to the population of a small village. The “village” (46) is sandwiched in a tiny three-room apartment consisting of the entrance, the salon and the bedroom. The large number of offspring produced by her traditional family is, according to Abir, instrumental in increasing the population to an extent that would shock the United Nations’ offices that deal with population control. For her, the racket made by the children was enough to wake “the Companions of the Cave from their deep slumber” (46).16 Abir’s negative attitude springs from her insistence on associating the local (religion, custom and tradition) with the absence of modernity.

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Abir is contemptuous of close kinship bonds and group identity represented by her family, and her sympathy is with a different brand of life represented by her friend Yasmine who lives by herself and values her own idiosyncratic brand of life, which circumvents socially acceptable models of behavior and reveals the diverse ways of living in Beirut and the city’s Janusfaced relation to the past. Nevertheless, far from accepting the hybrid charm of Beirut, Abir insists on viewing the modern and traditional in binary terms, favoring the former and denigrating the latter. The narrator’s father is an admirer of the Lebanese singer Sabah nicknamed al-Shahroura (from a place in Lebanon called Wåd⁄ Shaªr¨r). Her father wonders: “Who could have imagined Al-Shahroura would declare bankruptcy and find no other way to pay her debts than to re-release her old songs in collaboration with a ‘new’ artist whose voice is as close to Sabah’s as kenafeh17 is to hamburger!” (42). He declares that “this young singer’s voice comes from her belly button rather than her mouth!” (42). He is critical of the phenomenon of nakedness associated with success in singing, and of the new generation, like his own daughter Abir, who no longer appreciate good art or music, revel in the new and rejoice in the transient and artificial. On the other hand, Yana’s admiration of Sabah is related to the latter’s success in preserving her beauty. Yana hopes to be able to do likewise in the future. Abir is in love with her mirror and is attracted to it like metal to magnet. Whenever she looks in the mirror she sees a lack and notes that her behind is full of cellulite described by women’s magazines as “orange-peel skin” (37). In accordance with these magazines, Abir starts exercising to help smooth “my two big oranges” (37), to catch up with Yana and other international fashion models. Additionally, she discovers lip balm in an article in a fashion magazine that maintains that “models never leave home without applying a protective lip balm to guard them against damaging outdoor elements like sun and dust” (7). Accordingly, Abir’s beauty becomes directly linked to the marketing industry that makes such products a necessity. Her fixation on her figure can also be seen when Yasmine expresses admiration of the Exotica advertisement under which was written: “Beirut the Mother of the World,” but Abir asserts ironically: “If Beirut really were a mother, indeed if she were even a woman, would she have suffered from cellulite?” (88). This deflationary method underscores the isomorphic relation

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between body and space as well as an inner sense of the absurdity of the whole idea. Abir resists the traditional city through irony, sarcasm, indirection and deflation. Yana’s body is a marked surface, a spot of consumption where sexuality is no longer a private affair, but the object of economic exchange. Abir fears that if Yana keeps her pregnancy she “will swell up like a ripe water melon, and cellulite will attack her with the speed of a rocket” (38). By keeping her baby, Yana is taking the risk of diverging from the prototype, causing her spring season to wane and wind up a mere “phantom from the past” (38). The city that is constituted by cultural practices and social processes leaves its traces on the body that walks the streets, and Yana is the one whose body meets the required model, while Abir has to struggle to fit the model. In the novel, modernity is consolidated through advertisements, billboards, posters, placards, hair salons and sports centers. Abir and Yasmine accompany Yana to Hawwa’s (Eve’s) Beauty Salon in the Verdun area, a place frequented by her fellow models. They decide to walk to avoid the traffic caused by numerous checkpoints erected by the security forces that check the credentials of every single driver and car on account of the unstable security situation. Such measures underline the “unfinished nature” of the Lebanese war (Haugbolle 2005: 192), which is mirrored in the checkpoints that hamper the movement of cars in Beirut. The city determines the three friends’ trajectories and whether they should walk or take a taxi. The novel set in post-war Beirut deconstructs the narrator’s enthusiasm about modernity, revealing that she is outside of the events that are rocking the country, the unfinished political/military conflict that continues to determine the lives of individuals, showing that the war culture still lurks in the background, ready to pounce on the city at any time. Even Yana speaks Beirut, using the language of war and the war streets when she tells Abir that she is allergic to tabbouleh18 and that the “best way to assassinate me is to give me tabbouleh!” (23). Beirut is still in the clutches of the chaos precipitated by the war where the streets as well as the sidewalks are hazardous sites. Furthermore, Abir tells us that she does not like to walk because sidewalks are dangerous sites owing to the lawless traffic where cars make use of sidewalks for transportation: “a truly life-threatening adventure when motorbikes and cars zoom past me as

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though trying to assassinate me, but changing their minds at the very last minute” (60). The narrator does not like to walk in the company of Yana where people harass them and stare at Yana while Abir is ignored just like “a desert shadow”19 (60). Yana is constituted as an embodied subject and object of the gaze, marking the intrusion of the female body and sexuality into the public sphere, and the simultaneous attempt by the patriarchal society to harass women and drive them back to the inner sphere. As Rose puts it, “women’s sense of embodiment makes space feel like a thousand piercing eyes” (Rose 1993: 317). Nevertheless, the narrator and her friends walk along the streets confidently despite sporadic harassment by some men, revealing that mobility for women in the area between Hamra and Verdun is recognized and taken for granted. Beirut is shaped by the women who walk the streets, while the women themselves are also molded by the city itself. Nevertheless, Beirut is also haunted by other traditional forces that disrupt the modern and make their presence felt. Looking through the mirror, Abir suddenly discovers that Yana’s poster is covered with black paint in such a manner that her naked body appears to be wrapped in a black abaya and her black hair covered with a hijab; the traditional infiltrates the crevices of modernity and dismantles it. In a similar vein, we are told that her cousin regresses into a conservative brand of Islam and no longer shakes hands with women. He believes that once a girl loses her virginity, there is no return: no man will accept marrying a non-virgin. Using metaphoric references, such as the flower and the bottle of coke, to explain his notion of virginity, he maintains that a “girl is like a flower. She can only be picked once and when plucked, it withers and loses its fragrance . . . She is like a bottle of Coke that can be opened only once! Who would buy an open coke bottle?” (58). These occurrences reveal that there is no archetypal Beiruti and no uniform, totalizing socio-spatial order in Lebanon. Abir’s positionality is “situated” (Haraway 1991a: 188), restricted to one localized area of Beirut (Hamra and Verdun) that happens to be in direct contact with modernity, underscoring the partiality and limitations of her views. Having no money for a taxi, Abir goes to Hazmieh on the eastern side of Beirut on a motorcycle owned by a student at her university, the Lebanese American University, who offers to give her a lift. She wraps her hands

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around his waist and sticks her chest to his back to protect herself from falling. She admits that she felt freedom and energy: “I tucked up the hem of my dress, sat behind him on the motorbike’s leather seat and felt directly the hotness of the seat between my open legs” (68). This incident prepares the reader for the ensuing scene. The following rape scene uncovers Abir’s insensitivity and lack of sympathy and respect for women who are actually raped. She describes her own rape with an amazing lightness and with bantering humor. She refers to this encounter as “rape” to avoid admitting that she actually wanted this escapade. This reveals her indifference to trauma that continues to haunt women and her superficiality and ignorance of a world that is not as simplistic as she had assumed. Abir describes her feelings when Yana’s boyfriend approaches her: “I felt a slight shiver—at that moment I wished I had had listened to Yana and plucked my mustache earlier that day. I covered my upper lip with my hand to conceal any noticeable hairs” (69). She takes the whole affair lightly and expresses her attraction to Yana’s lover and intent to cover up her desire under the pretext of rape. Indeed, her brand of modernity is no more than a tool that gives her license to do as she pleases. After her return home, she admits that she was “thinking about Yana more than I was thinking about what had happened to me” (70). This triangular relation reveals that Yana was the focus rather than her lover. Sex with Yana’s lover meant that she had succeeded in seducing a man who was attracted to Yana, her model of what a beautiful woman should look like. Furthermore, by having sex with Yana’s lover, Abir manages to boost her morale and her despair about her looks. This reveals her compliance with patriarchy and, paradoxically, her sexual attraction to Yana. Following the rape incident, Abir is worried about the possibility of being pregnant and complains that Yana as a foreigner can get pregnant outside marriage without any problem, while she does not have this privilege in a country like Lebanon where honor is vital when it comes to women. Here again, she would have liked to keep the rapist’s child if she were in a different country, revealing that sex for her is inextricable from fantasies of rape and sexual violence and where, despite her disruptive invasion of the outer space, her sojourn jolts her back into the regulatory arm of the patriarchy. Her friend does not feel that losing one’s virginity is a focal point in one’s

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life, but she knows that the only way to save Abir is to help her avoid pregnancy, as her father would “kill” her if he found out about it. Abir, accompanied by Yasmine, finds a pharmacy in Jal al-Dib (a place away from the neighborhood she lives in). Anonymity is her way of escaping being caught, although, at the same time, it is her own seditious challenge to authority. Abir tells us that she was surprised and awed at Yasmine’s nonchalant demand (in English) for a “pregnancy test” as if “she was buying a kilo of cucumbers” (75), and her knowledge of the accuracy or inaccuracy of pregnancy tests, especially as she is not married. Since the pregnancy test is not reliable, she has no choice but to wait until “the blood flows out of me just like a Coca-Cola bottle that has been shaken spurts and overflows when opened” (77). Again the Coke bottle permeates the narrative as a major symbol of an invading global culture, but, more importantly, as a phallic symbol in the shape of a female body that continues to dominate the scene. When Abir expresses a desire to reconstruct her hymen, her friend Yasmine advises her to wait, as she is not marrying any time soon. In Yasmine’s view, the “restoration operation is pointless because whatever you restore you’ll just go back and tear down once again” (93). Despite all vestiges of modernity, Abir awaits other unforeseen, but inevitable, “rapes.” Concluding Remarks This chapter has focused on a city colored by feminine signifiers that disrupt masculine entrenchment and reveal women’s immersion in the centripetal currents of the city. However, unlike the female characters in al-Shaykh’s Óikåyat⁄ sharªun Ya†¨l, and Chreiteh’s Dåyman Coca-Cola, who revel in the pleasures offered by the city, Daoud’s novel centers on male characters who feel threatened by the city. Daoud’s novel is predominantly confined to the Hamra area, a narrow geographical space where the bakery, owned by migrants from South Lebanon, is located. The bakery is a major trope, representing a rural environment governed by men, but penetrated by feminine signifiers that unsettle a formerly stable, rural masculinity, causing a sense of inferiority and lack in the presence of the urban “other.” The bakery is a homosocial space where men who know very little of the

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city stick together as a defense mechanism. It is a place that safeguards their rural affinities in order to protect them from a penetrating force that has the potential to infiltrate into their lives and unsettle any values that they honored and held sacred. Women, in this novel, are unsettling visual presences— bodies, that kindle desire, but remain distant, passive, inaccessible features of the cityscape, and threatening landmarks of the city. Beirut stimulates the rural men’s sexual awakening where they experience the city in terms of sexual conquests and voyeurism. The brothel represents the intrusion of the body and sex into the public sphere where sex is no longer a private affair, but an object of economic exchange readily available for anyone who is able to pay. Not having access to the brothel, the younger males—still at school— position themselves on the roof of a building, a strategically panoramic view, to watch women within their private spaces. Their voyeuristic distance and proximity embody a strong desire for control over what appears to be uncontainable or overpowering. The novel records the gradual displacement of the old, traditional, local, rural, manual, physical and masculine sphere by a new, foreign, urban, modern, technological, intellectual and feminine world. While Sanat al-ʾ¨t¨mat⁄k centers on male resistance to the centripetal forces of the city, al-Shaykh’s Óikåyat⁄ sharªun ya†¨l reveals woman’s headlong immersion in the city and the strong link between women’s empowerment and walking the public spaces of the city. Beirut is a place pregnant with possibilities, giving the protagonist access to prohibited spaces where she can disappear into the urban landscape, disrupt gender polarities and appropriate male prerogatives. The female protagonist’s pedestrian itineraries are composed of the pleasures of flaneurie and spectatorship. The cinema is a central metaphor of modernity where she finds herself in a different positionality as subject instead of object of the gaze. Rather than a backdrop, the city shapes and recreates Kamila with its sensory abundance, and marks her body with clothing, ornamentation and makeup. For her, the streets of Beirut are spaces of freedom, away from the stifling gendered space of the home and the private domain, where she is able to move freely in an enveloping, liquefying city. If the cinema is a predominant trope in Óikåyat⁄ sharªun ya†¨l representing modernity, advertising slogans dominate the streets of Chreiteh’s novel. Instead of the romantic view of sea and sky, the visualized/textualized city takes

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center stage. Dåyman Coca-Cola builds on Kamila’s 1930s Beirut experience by focusing on three women’s itineraries in the spaces of post-war Beirut, offering them new social and spatial liberties and the pleasures of anonymity, and revealing that power relations are spatially contingent. Within the city, modernity is affirmed through advertisements, billboards, posters and sports centers. Nevertheless, Beirut is also haunted by other traditional forces that disrupt the modern and make their presence felt. These forces appear to be more sinister in Chreiteh’s novel than in al-Shaykh’s work (a novel permeated by the liberal values of Al-Nahda) where they are exposed to ironical banter and nonchalance on the part of the protagonist. Like Kamila’s city, Abir’s Beirut is characterized by movement, drive and clamor, reflecting these women’s captivation with the modern, the artificial and the transitory. The Romanian model’s body in Dåyman Coca-Cola is a marked surface, a spectacle, a spot of consumption where sexuality is no longer a private affair but the object of economic exchange and commodification. The Coca-Cola bottle is a trope of modernity representing the female body in the public sphere as well as a metaphor of phallic sexuality that unsettles this presence. In other words, one could say that Beirut is a yonic city that is continuously punctured by phallic signifiers. Notes 1. A sandwich of sliced lamb or chicken, or mixed meat, vegetables and tahini. 2. This is a reference to the Japanese Red Army, a communist militant group that flourished in the early 1970s. 3. For women’s nomadic movements in the city, see Wolff (1985) and Wilson (1991: 90–110). 4. The reference is to any religious holiday: Ramadan or al-Adha. 5. According to Pahl (1968: 267), “urban villages exist in the centre of cities in which there is a high level of social cohesion based on interwoven kinship networks and a high level of primary contact with familiar faces.” 6. ‘‫’الوردة البيضاء‬. The first film by Muhammad Abd al-Wahab, co-starring Sam⁄ra Khl¨‚⁄; directed by Muhammad Kar⁄m (1886–1972). 7. Instead of ‘‫ ’يا ما بكيت واشتكيت‬Kamila understood ‘‫’يا ما جاكيت وبكيت‬ 8. ‘‫’وردة الحب الصافي‬ 9. ‘‫ ’ليلى ابنة الصحراء‬The film was produced by Bahiga Hafez (1908–83), featuring Bahiga Hafez, Hussein Riyad (1929–2011) and Zaki Rostom (1903–72) as

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

16.

17.

18. 19.

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leading actors. The film was banned because of scenes depicting the Persians and the Persian King in an unfavorable light. A famous Lebanese comedian for half a century. According to Soja (1997: 46), there is “no unspatialized social reality.“ Kibbeh or kibbe is a Middle Eastern dish made of bulghur, minced onions and finely ground lean beef, lamb, goat or camel meat. Strained yogurt mostly eaten at breakfast. See Asad (1993) on modernizing religion. It refers to the ills of modern life, a new modern culture that Sombart (German sociologist and economist) refers to as “stone pavement” culture that has created “a species of human being that leads its life with no genuine affinity with living nature . . . A species with pocket watches, umbrellas, rubber shoes and electric light: an artificial species” (cited in Frisby 2001: 246). The quotation is translated by Frisby from the German from a book titled The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1951). This is a reference to ahl-al-kahf, a story alluded to in the Qurʾan of men who were persecuted for being monotheistic. They fled the city and hid in a cave where God put them to sleep for years, awaking to find that the whole area had become monotheistic. A cheese pastry soaked in sugar-based syrup and served as dessert in Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Syria. (The variety known in Egypt uses plain pastry: no cheese!) A popular Lebanese parsley and bulgur salad. ‫خيال صحراء‬

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4 Traffic between the Factual and the Imagined: Beirut Deferred [T]he city was now landscape, now a room. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (1973: 170) Beirut, a slice of sugar and poison. Óamåda, “Bayr¨t marratan ukhrå” (2010: 358) On the street nobody watches, everyone performs. Gornick, Approaching Eye Level (1997: 1) Beirut was not Lebanon; it had become Arab and was sung by the Arabs. Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness (1995: 135)

T

his chapter centers on three novels by Arab writers and one by a Lebanese writer: Syrian Ghada Samman’s Bayr¨t 75, Muʾnis al-Razzåz’s Aªyåʾ f⁄ al-baªr al-mayyit, Egyptian Shawq⁄ ʿAbd-l-Óak⁄m’s Bayr¨t: al-Bukåʾ laylan and Lebanese Rashid al-Daif’s al-Mustabidd. These texts reveal the tension between the city as a cartographic entity as opposed to the city as a mental construction. In Aªyåʾ f⁄ al-baªr al-mayyit, Beirut is a city that has attracted intellectuals, writers, artists, revolutionaries and political activists seeking asylum from Arab dictatorial regimes. For those characters who come from various Arab countries, Beirut is a mythic locale of phantasmagoria, revolution, sexuality, empowerment and culture where the boundaries between the real and imagined city are slippery, shifting between the city as a physical space and a set of ideas gleaned from prevailing discourses on Beirut. Beirut is an active component of the action where the relationship between topography and cartography is problematic, revealing both the coincidence and disparity 126

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between the real and unreal city, and the way the city is perceived and conceived. Offering brief and scattered descriptions of the material city, Beirut is transformed into an essentially unreal city that emerges in a fragmentary manner, depending on the disposition of the walker and his frame of mind. In Bayr¨t 75, two Syrian characters, Yasmeena and Farah (that means “joy”), view Beirut as the city of their desires and aspirations and dream of success and wealth. From a distance, Beirut is an alluring female, promising sexual freedom, and an enchantress that will transform their lives; however, their hopes are soon dashed when they come face to face with the other nightmarish and destructive side of the city. Al-Bukåʾ laylan is a novel about an Egyptian intellectual who finds himself in Beirut during the Israeli invasion and witnesses the displacements and massacres of ordinary people. Coming to Beirut as an already bruised man who had lived by a cemetery in al-Fayy¨m, he ends up in another deadly city where the boundaries between Beirut and al-Fayy¨m become blurred and the two places become indistinguishable. The third novel, al-Mustabidd, focuses on a university professor living in a war-torn city who finds himself at the mercy of surreal spatial conditions that he is unable to understand or control. In order to deal with such circumstances, he orients himself by constructing a city that fluctuates between actuality and hallucination. The City as Whore In Syrian writer Ghada al-Samman’s Bayr¨t 75 (1975), a young man named Farah and a young woman named Yasmeena from Syria are in a taxi bound for Beirut seeking money and fame. Beirut, the leading character in this synoptic novel, draws them like a magnet because this is the place where they assume they will realize their dreams for freedom and personal advancement. When Farah reaches the taxi station, he hears a man calling “Beirut! Beirut!” as if “he [the man] were introducing a dancer to the audience at a cabaret” (3). Farah shivers at the name “Beirut,” as if “the name were the body of a naked woman pressed up against him” (5). This topophilic attraction to the city is also felt through Yasmeena’s and Farah’s bodies,1 where the city is viewed as an erogenous force. Keeping in mind that the city in Arabic is gendered feminine, Farah views Beirut as a lustful and desirable woman,

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an alluring cabaret dancer and tempting prostitute. For both Farah and Yasmeena, Beirut represents passion, excess, freedom, erotic potential, material wealth and social well-being where they have the freedom to do what they please. It is a place of deliverance from the shackles of the past and a place of hope for the future. Sitting in the car, Farah envisages himself married to the woman sitting next to him—Yasmeena—and living in Douma (Syria) where she grows fat and disgruntled. He imagines them growing old together in a life of boredom, lethargy and discontent (8). Yasmeena’s Beirut belongs to the young and energetic where the old have no place. It is a trope of what she would like to be: feminine, sensual, energetic and wealthy. Nevertheless, the city that promises adventure, pleasure and self-realization will eventually expose its phallic weapons and tread upon their dreams with its heavy boots. Being absorbed in their rosy thoughts, the two young people take no heed of the three weeping and wailing women dressed in black on the back seat of the car, and the mute and indifferent driver who drives the car that has a ‘striking resemblance to a hearse’ (6). Yasmeena assumes that the women are mourning a deceased relative and are on their way to the funeral. Disregarding such portentous signs, the two young people hang on to their hopes and dreams, and their desire for a more affluent and prosperous future in the enthralling city. Yasmeena is tired of the ‘anesthetized’ (9) life she had lived in Syria where she worked as a teacher in a convent, and where the days dragged indolently and monotonously. Overwhelmed by the sight of the city from the mountains overlooking Beirut, she views the city through her own conceptions of it, but discovers otherwise when she comes to live in it. Farah’s and Yasmeena’s views of the city are garnered from Beirut’s reputation in the Arab world, and also from hearsay, keeping in mind the proximity between Beirut and Damascus. Their city is an “immaterial city,”2 based on word of mouth, a city of words existing predominantly in their minds. Being the feast of the Cross, Beirut “glowed and twinkled like the jewels of a sorceress who had gone down to bathe in the sea by night, leaving behind on the shore her precious pearls, and multicolored enchanted objects” (8). Beirut is a bewitching conjurer and fabricator of valuable objects and precious stones. Like an enchantress it is expected to transform their lives and grant them wealth, pleasure and fame. Simultaneously, the feast of the Cross points to

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the crucifixion, and the fires that burn in Beirut foreshadow the stifling of all their hopes and dreams. The old women on the back seat of the car suddenly disappeared and “melted into the night . . . like all supernatural beings” (9). This is an allusion by an apparently educated narrator to Shakespeare’s three witches who confound Macbeth by promising him the throne and then vanishing “into thin air,” reinforcing the foreboding atmosphere and an ominous fate for both of them. The three women are replaced by three other passengers: Abu Mustafa, the fisherman, Abuʾl – Malla, a man whose poverty drives him to force his daughter to work as a servant in one of the luxurious summer residences of the wealthy in Aley, and Taan, a young chemist who is the victim of a vendetta, a primitive practice that permeates the city and uncovers another Beirut than the one that Farah and Yasmeena envisage. All five passengers gaze at Beirut “the luminous stone jungle,” although each one of them imagines it differently: “Instead of one Beirut, there were five Beiruts” (12). The next time we meet Yasmeena, she is in the company of Nimr, her Lebanese lover who possesses a virile masculinity amplified by his physical beauty, wealth and social status. Now that she is enamored of her lover, she forgets all about the poetry that she wanted to publish, and her litrary aspirations evaporate. Yasmeena is convinced that this relationship with Nimr has freed her from all earlier taboos that are like stinging scorpions. Yasmeena’s adoration of Nimr’s manliness places her automatically in an inferior position, while Nimr plays games with her and humiliates her in order to prove his manly “charm” (40). On her part, she assumes that now, in the company of Nimr, the “corpse” of her body is resurrected (13), and, for the first time, she undresses out in the open and experiences the delights and pleasures of the flesh. In Beirut, Yasmeena’s attitude is no more than adoration of the phallus and a desire to succumb to it. In the dreams of Yasmeena and Farah Beirut is idealized as feminine, but when they actually live in it it is transformed into a brutal male force. Rather than realize herself in the city as a free, productive and independent woman, she surrenders her fate to a phallic city ruled by men. She recalls a suffocating affair in the house of a man in Damascus: “We closed all the windows, drew all the curtains, switched off all the lights, and locked all the doors” (13) for fear of being caught. In Damascus her body was a “burden, a corpse” (14), and without

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Beirut, “she would have remained ignorant” (14) about the pleasures of the body. Yasmeena is grateful because Nimr has made her addicted to his body and transformed her from “a plane of ice into a minefield” (38). As a result she finds herself placating him, enjoying the fact that he spends lavishly on her, dresses her up in expensive clothes and parades her before his friends—in other words, that he insists on inscribing wealthy Beirut on the surface of her body and turning her into a stylish Beiruti woman. Beirut is a city controlled by men like her lover Nimr who views her as a convenience and casts her off whenever it suits him. Nishan, a renowned politician and businessman, is not taken in by this false facade and notes the marks on the surface of her body of her humble background. Nishan asserts mockingly that the signs of commonness are still visible: “She’s a bit fat. She doesn’t know how to dress or how to move. She looks like a tenth-rate courtesan who has inherited a fortune, but doesn’t know the meaning of elegance. That plunging neckline reveals her common taste” (76). When Yasmeena hears the sound of explosions, Nimr reassures her that it is “only Israeli planes breaking the sound barrier like they always do” and asks her to bring her “breasts closer” (16). Still, she cannot forget how Israeli planes had “rained death on Damascus less than a year earlier” (15), but she refrains from expressing any opinion, since it is Nimr who controls her body and, as a result, her mind. Despite her attachment to Nimr, she is aware of his tendency to show off and flaunt his virility and prowess. He is eager to show his friends that he can possess any woman and prove his potency. When he deserts her for a wealthy woman, Yasmeena complains that Beirut has ruined her, but Nimr’s reaction is: “You women blame Beirut for ruining you when the truth of the matter is that the seeds of corruption were already there deep inside you. All that Beirut did was to embrace them and expose them” (52). Beirut is a yardstick that exposes Yasmeena’s adoration of the male phallus and her naïve view that free sexual love represents true liberation regardless of who is in control in such a relationship. Having been discarded by Nimr, Yasmeena is no longer able to buy her brother’s honor with money. Like Tamima in ˝awåª⁄n Bayr¨t, a man’s honor is linked to his sister’s purity and the price is deadly. As long as Yasmeena was able to buy her honor with money she was secure, but, with-

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out money, she is totally at her brother’s mercy. He murders the sister who once thought that in the city she will be free like a “butterfly” (10). The city that she considers beautiful and alluring turns out to be both a magnet and a snare where Yasmeena learns that a soft and feminine Beirut is no more than a mask that hides the overpowering phallic supremacy of the city. Farah, who possesses a melodious voice, comes to Beirut to seek his fortune as a singer. His father is certain that his son will succeed: “That voice of yours could be turned into a fortune . . . I’m going to turn you over to my cousin Nishan who will cast you into the right mould—a gold mould!” (20). When he goes to see his cousin, Farah discovers that he is not welcome and that he does not “amount to anything in this voracious city” (22). Instead of the early feeling that the city is transparent and lucid, he begins to realize that it is baffling and opaque. Unlike Yasmeena, who is not seen on the streets except when she visits her brother toward the end of the novel, Farah’s peripatetic movements around the streets are frequent. He has his first pizza at Popey’s restaurant in Rawshe where he encounters two lovers “sipping wine in a dimly lit” place (23). The freedom that the restaurant affords the young lovers is something that Farah has never experienced. He also discovers that Beirut is a city of many faces, and it is clear that the cheap and decrepit Honey Hotel on Burj Square where he is staying represents the obverse side of the city. His dilapidated room with its “filthy, moldy walls and the creaky wood drawer of the ancient bedside table” (21) is a reflection of the state of an edifice haunted by human beings in a state of exhaustion and decline. Farah scans the “eyes of tattered women who floated about like ghosts of some historical massacre, slipping into the rooms of poor, worn out men like myself” (21). At one point, in this leaky room, Farah is awakened at the crack of dawn by a “piercing cry for help” from the public brothel on al-Mutanabbi Street in Martyr Square, a “sharp and protracted” (21) scream of a battered heart, the heart of the city itself (21). The brand of urban sexuality represented by al-Mutanabbi Street is a site of disturbance, pronouncing the privileging of upper-class prostitution that has moved to the Hamra area, while the brothel downtown is gradually turning into a “modernist ruin” fast falling into disarray. The crumbling edifice and the broken women who haunt it are the outcome of deterministic external forces that have succeeded in crushing them physically and morally. Martyr Square, the image of the city as a coherent

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whole, representing a collective consciousness, is ironically the locale where prostitution and sexual exploitation are authorized. The scream that is heard by Farah represents the tragedy of the prostitutes, but, more importantly, the tragedy of the city itself. Al-Mutanabbi Street is a representational space both sexed and gendered, taking the form and life force of those who live in it or frequent it. When Farah goes to see Nishan’s secretary for an appointment, he notes the secretary’s disdainful look and is reminded of the hotel employee’s words that still ring in his ears “like a hammer: ‘If you’ve got a piaster, you’re worth a piaster’ ” (22). Farah has to wait for two and a half hours to meet Nishan. Within the luxury of Nishan’s office, Farah feels dwarfed and trivial like “a half-crushed cockroach” (43), and soon discovers the menacing rapacity and hideousness of a city that commodifies him, thwarts, and frustrates his hopes and dreams. To realize his dreams of becoming a famous singer, Farah accepts the advances of Nishan, his new boss, and has sex with him, but he soon discovers to his chagrin that while he has no problems having sex with women, sheep or goats, to be “screwed” (69) by a man is something that he cannot endure. Initially, Farah, who is shocked by Nishan’s advances, accepts to play this role for personal benefits, but he knows that “something inside me was breaking” (65) and that he no longer possessed himself: “I had sold it [his soul] forever . . . to . . . the devil!” (65). His traditional rural upbringing that views this act as an aberration and sin causes him heartache and vexation. Nishan is the penetrator, and Farah the penetrated, the effeminate, the male prostitute, the one who assumes the subordinate and servile role in the relationship. Farah feels that he has lost control and that his masculinity is compromised: “I was lying on my stomach when he [Nishan] began to massage my back, and I could smell the aroma of the expensive suntan oil. At first his fingers moved gently and delicately back and forth over my skin, like the fingers of a blind lover feeling the body of his female. But then his touch became rough and violent, like a plow penetrating the earth. Then I understood” (64–5). His rural male vigor is depleted in the sexual excesses of the city that have feminized, embodied, and transformed him into an object of the lusting male gaze. In his ruthless exploitation of those below him, Nishan is associated with “the crack of the trainer’s whip on the bodies of circus animals” (44). Beirut

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now is viewed by Farah in mythical terms as Sodom and Gomorrah, a place of debauchery and perversion, subjugation and compunction, and he is soon swallowed up by the shifting sands of the city. When Yasmeena is murdered, Farah is devastated, recognizing her as the young woman he first met in the taxi bound for Beirut. At her funeral he walks around like someone dazed and uncomprehending, and Beirut is transformed into a funereal city where Farah ends up marching in funeral processions without having any acquaintance with the deceased. Feeling dishonored and humiliated for not possessing his own body in a phallic city that castrates him, he starts wearing women’s clothes and makeup, even while he has nightmares of himself as a widower (after the death of Yasmeena). Farah and Yasmeena are companions who have similar dreams of a city that kills one and incapacitates the other. Farah has nightmares of vampires, and of Nishan taking him out of his pocket (101) and turning him into a commodity. The bestial city transforms him into a lacerated dog: instead of singing he begins to “bark at the crowd” (106). His fretful movements around the streets of Beirut are like the ravings of a mad man; he is soon declared insane and transported to an asylum. Farah’s prospects for money and fame are dashed in the city where he comes face to face with epicene tendencies, maddening impotence and a confounding loss of identity. The monstrous city has devoured his hopes, manhood and sanity. The alluring female city is metamorphosed into a phallic sea monster that devours whatever small fish come its way. Farah proclaims despondently that Beirut “has withdrawn from me as the waves recede from the land, spitting me out onto the shore like a lonely, empty shell. I hear a voice sobbing inside me, like the sound that emanates from a sea-shell” (108). The words of poet Mahmoud Darwish are telling here: “Beirut, sapphire, coffin”3 (1985: 91). The glittering, animated and alluring Beirut has been transformed into one large, engulfing coffin. Far from being neutral, the narrator is critical of the rich and powerful and is on the side of the subaltern and the marginal. Mustafa, the son of Abu Mustafa the fisherman, is a marginal figure who lives on the peripheries of the city, the abode of poverty and destitution. He lives within what was referred to in the 1960s and 1970s as the “misery belt” surrounding Beirut and inhabited by the poor and depraved. It is a neglected zone, a shadowy other that is eclipsed by a city that is seen as a homogeneous entity embracing

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the whole country. This is another zone that uncovers the hierarchical nature of space within the city, which, like an ogre, devours any signs of difference by solidifying the spatial and social boundaries between the two sectors of the city. This is the Beirut that Yasmeena and Farah had not heard of. In their minds, Beirut is the flashy city inhabited by the wealthy. Accordingly, Mustafa finds himself in a prison where there are no means of escape. He is disturbed because the inner space of his home in al-Awza‘i area on the outskirts of Beirut is one where his father vents his frustrations in bed with his wife, and the result is another mouth to feed: “when my father is unable to fish and comes home feeling crushed, he goes hunting the golden bird in my mother’s gardens. And the result is a new mouth to feed and the body of a new baby prostrate inside our cramped room” (58). Abu Mustafa has been a fisherman for thirty years, but he finds himself growing “more dwarf-like, as the difficulties of life continue to scourge him” (25). He is burdened with debts and moneylenders who have turned his life into a nightmare, particularly after the death of his son Ali at sea. As a result, he seeks the support of his second son, Mustafa, who loves poetry and hates the sea that has taken his brother, and that will kill all the poetry within him by the “disturbing sound of the motor and the stench of the smoke produced by the fuel oil” (28). The sea is no longer a source of beauty and colorful romantic dreams. It has been marred by the machine that has tarnished his imaginative capacities. The father attributes his son’s aversion to the job to his softness and effeminacy: “This boy will never be a fisherman, he thought. He’s been corrupted and soft. He wants to be a poet! He’s half crazy, drowned in dreams and delusions” (34). The sea has been polluted by a government that has turned its back on the poor sector of the city: “The sea is polluted, and our fishing methods are primitive. That’s why we work at night . . . The fish are becoming unhealthy because of the sewage which is poured into the sea. Waste products, garbage, and tin cans which if caught in our nets, they [the cans] rip them with their knife-like edges” (54). The fishermen are left without any social security or protection and the icy indifference of the city has left them with no “defenses” (55). They are exposed to disfigurement and death, while their families are in danger of displacement. Mustafa’s world is one of absurdity, hopelessness and bankruptcy at all levels. Despite his aversion to fishing, Mustafa views

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this plain and lowly job as the only way of waging war against the forces that insist on impoverishing them and depriving them of their rights. This “other” Beirut is a Sisyphean world, a place of repetitiveness, uncertainty, inhuman toil, poverty, meaninglessness and disillusionment. Feeling frustrated that “everything existed for the express purpose of coercing him and of destroying any attempt to get out of the stalemate of poverty” (58), Mustafa decides to join a subversive group to fight for the workers’ rights and rise against the established order to undermine Beirut, this site of anomie, corruption and exploitation. The flashy Beirut that Farah and Yasmeena dreamt of is just a limited space hiding another side that lurks in darkness to pounce on them. Mustafa’s impoverished and deprived sector of the city is what Yasmeena and Farah suddenly come face to face with. Instead of realizing their dreams, Yasmeena and Farah land up as prostitutes: Yasmeena as the mistress of a wealthy man and Farah as the lover of a renowned and rich politician, while Mustafa continues to struggle for his rights. The novel reveals the distinction between the way that the city is conceptualized and the way it is lived. The city is a force with a distinct life of its own that determines the lives of Yasmeena and Farah who discover that this Beirut does not coincide with the totalizing scopic vision that they had watched with trepidation from the vista of the mountain. The city that emerges from lived experience unsettles their earlier beliefs in a transparent city and, they come to the realization that this is an uncertain and unpredictable place. “Hush . . . Do you think you are in Beirut?” If Bayr¨t 75 underlines the defeat and disillusionment of Yasmeena and Farah in a dream city that turns out to be a scorching inferno, Jordanian writer Muʾnis al-Razzåz’s Aªyåʾ f⁄ al-baªr al-mayyit (1982) is a celebration of a city that represents freedom and revolution in a barren Arab world. In the “Introduction” to the narrative, Mithqål, the frame narrator and editor of his friend ʿInåd al-Shåhid’s manuscript, which the latter titled “Arab”4 at times and “Aʿråb” (bedouins)5 at others. The interchangeability between the two words reflects ʿInåd’s view of Arabs as regressive bedouins. The narrative came to Mithqål in the form of “manuscripts written by my friend ʿInåd al-Shåhid through a period of psychological, spiritual, and material uprisings

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and transformations” (5). The random ordering and the sense of fragmentation and discontinuity reflect ʿInåd’s failure to come to terms with all of the obstacles that stand in the way of the realization of his revolutionary dream of Arab unity. Mithqål tells us that his friend ʿInåd was sensitive and unpredictable, and that he took drugs and amphetamines in order to achieve the highest levels of wakefulness and concentration, which sheds doubt on his reliability as a narrator. Still, Mithqål refuses to tamper with the text and merely introduces minor changes. Having found ʿInåd’s papers jumbled and scattered all over the place, Mithqål, the frame narrator, admits that he could not categorize the work. Despite this major hurdle, the frame narrator (himself a character in ʿInåd’s novel) insists that his role is to make the manuscript legible and coherent. Mithqål as narrator, editor and critic wonders whether the manuscript can be considered a novel, an anti-novel, an autobiography or mere hallucination blurring the boundaries between the fictional and the real. He describes the unruly manner in which ʿInåd wrote: “he would scribble some autobiographical incident and then move on to the next page to register the words of others” (5). These others could be anyone: ʿInåd himself, the narrator, the marshal in the city of dreams, death, Plato, Hamlet, ʿAntara, Dimitri Karamazov, and so on, which shows ʿInåd to be widely read, cosmopolitan in outlook, and in touch with the international literary and intellectual scene. While other readers and critics may consider his novel mere trash, solely fit for the “toilet” (6). When his friend Mithqål criticizes the novel for its fragmentary nature, ʿInåd’s reaction is: “You say, fragmented. Of course it is fragmented. Are not the nation [a supposedly unified Arab world], man, myself, yourself fragmented?” (150).6 The novel is a self-referential modernist text, displaying its own devices and strategies and challenging the realistic mode of writing. This is a narrative where the real and hallucinatory coalesce, blurring the boundaries between places and thoughts. Mithqål ends his short introduction by describing the work as a “vertical migration,” a journey into “the interior” (8) of ʿInåd’s mind. ʿInåd shuttles between Beirut, his birthplace, the city of dreams and other cities. While Beirut appears to be a real city, the second city (that appears to be Amman) is absent as ʿInåd is seen predominantly inside his home rather than outside. ʿInåd’s reaction to his birthplace coincides with Steney Shami’s assertions that Amman is “an

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incomplete and disjointed city” where Ammanis “construct their identities through references to a multiplicity of cities.” According to Shami, the inhabitants of Amman “complain endlessly of its dullness and lack of charm. The elites complain of the lack of artistic or literary movements, merchants complain of a lack of market, university students complain of the lack of campus life, and ethnic groups complain of the lack of ethnic neighborhoods” (Cinar and Bender 2007: 208, 209; see also Hannoyer and Shami 1996: 37–54). While the city of his dreams (perhaps Baghdad, Damascus or Cairo) is virtually non-existent and only serves as background to the political actions and discourses exchanged by ʿInåd himself and others, particularly army generals (keeping in mind that al-Razzåz’s own father suffered from house arrest in Baghdad). Beirut is the city of action and energy; his birthplace is a dead city; while the city of dreams, supposed to be the model of a city that upholds Arab unity, is one where he is placed under house arrest, a place controlled by despotic, corrupt and ruthless generals and military personnel. With the exception of Beirut, these cities are metaphors of other Arab cities that ʿInåd views as comatose like the Dead Sea and barren like the desert, an allusion to the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. From the start the novel is interrupted by comments made by ʿInåd on the process of writing, disrupting coherent or linear writing, and thus revealing the inherent fictiveness of the novel, the imagined cloaked in verisimilitude particularly, when it comes to Beirut. The events of the novel do not follow a logical, sequential pattern, and the work depends upon repetition and digressions, reflecting ʿInåd’s epistemological and ontological uncertainties. By subverting traditional forms of representation, ʿInåd focuses on the reflexivity of the text, and in this manner uncovers gaps in the prevalent ideology of unity and resistance that are metamorphosed into power-thirsty autocratic regimes, or reactionary states that demonize any brand of resistance as threatening the integrity of the state. ʿInåd’s birthplace is an abode of entrapment, incarceration and whisperings, and when the word “hush” is repeated by the taxi driver as well as the grocer, it suddenly dawns upon him that he is no longer in Beirut: “Hush . . . Do you think you are in Beirut?” (11). In his birthplace, people cannot voice their free opinions and the political freedom that he finds in Beirut is anathema in his country. The novel is a celebration of Beirut as a city of life, energy

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and action, an imagined site of desire, and a theatre of resistance and freedom not available anywhere else in the Arab world. The centripetal forces of Beirut pull ʿInåd into the core of the city where he intends to realize his political, cultural and human aspirations. Beirut is a real and imagined construct and representational space that serves as compensation for the general lack in the area. Unlike Farah’s and Yasmeena’s imagined Beirut, ʿInåd’s Beirut is a model for what Arab cities should be like. For instance, ʿInåd maintains that his friend al-Ghazzåw⁄, a Palestinian resistance fighter, tells him that the difference between Beirut and other Arab cities is that the former is a place where one can see the Israeli enemy with the naked eye and whenever it hits us, we hit back as opposed to all other Arab countries described by ʿInåd as “a large village” (12) where nothing happens and where any confrontation with the enemy is prevaricated. Within this framework, Beirut is viewed as the only “city” in a rural Arab world. ʿInåd embraces this revolutionary fervor of Beirut, a discursive space molded by his own notions of what an Arab city should be like. The mental image that he has created is constructed around Beirut as the archetypal city of resistance, a visual site and experiential space permeated by revolutionary ideology that opens up the possibility for unhampered struggle and transformation. For him, Beirut is “two lungs and oxygen” (16), while other Arab countries are like a “desert where no grass or dream grows” (11). ʿInåd declares that his “birthplace” is a dull and dreary place where it is impossible to distinguish between wakefulness and sleep. In comparison with Beirut, ʿInåd’s birthplace is deficient, incomplete and paralytic, a place hemmed in by the “prison” and the “cemetery”’ (167). In his birthplace, he wakes up with a head that is “noisy like a vegetable market” (9). In his frame of mind, he describes the walls of his bedroom as “hunchbacked,” bending over him like the walls in a Van Gogh painting (11). In the claustrophobic atmosphere of his bedroom, boredom looks like “a deformed creature” (9) and the hands of the circular clock on the wall are damaged. Here, ʿInåd is outside time, stuck in the vicious circle of monotony and ennui to the extent that he has no energy to drive off a fly that lands on his nose. In “the big village” of his hometown (132), time is recursive and any sign of energy or resourcefulness is subdued where he is stuck in the fixity of his hometown, suffering from severe historical anxiety, the Arab defeatist attitude toward

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Israel. The electric fan is on, but he continues to sweat, and his apathy is such that he does not even bother to wipe the sweat away. In the kitchen he observes three poetry books lying next to a jar of pickles, rusty spoons, unwashed plates and tea cups invaded with fungus. In this corroding and putrid atmosphere, he can only occupy himself by watching a cockroach in the room. In this nightmarish world, the day is prolonged, turning into an “abysmal grave opening its mouth to receive his corpse” (12). In his birthplace ʿInåd needs to take a valium tablet in order to reduce his despondency and restlessness, while his friend in Beirut takes his breakfast and carries his machine gun. The people in Beirut are full of the energy of youth and do not stop to take a breath as opposed to the deadly sluggishness of his hoary birthplace. In his hometown, he is physically in one place and psychologically in Beirut. He lives in two places at the same time: the real and the imagined. When he calls his girlfriend Maryam, a Palestinian activist and resistance fighter who is stationed in Beirut, he imagines her in her room, smells the gunpowder and hears the explosions. When ʿInåd’s friend Mithqål arrives in Beirut, the former undertakes to show him around the “real city” (13). His Beirut is like a flowing river, while his birthplace is like “a closed bottle of stale water” (11). His Beirut is the west of Beirut, which encompasses Hamra, Rawsha, Manåra and the Palestinian refugee camps in Íabrå and Fakhån⁄. Like ʿInåd and Farah in Bayr¨t 75, Mithqål has predetermined notions of the city as an erogenous zone. Thinking that Beirut is “a basket of figs” (13), Mithqål the bedouin dresses up, sprays himself with perfume and asks ʿInåd about women and prostitutes. But, for the latter, the real Beirut is not the unaffordable casino that caters for the rich; it does not belong to those with empty pockets like Mithqål who cannot afford to survive in this other rich Beirut that ʿInåd sweeps under the carpet. The latter only acknowledges the mud-covered streets of the B¨rj al-Baråjna Palestinian refugee camp where fighters assume their military duties in order to liberate Palestine. For ʿInåd, Beirut is active, stimulating, alive and fluid. It is both feminine and phallic, a sort of androgynous entity. ʿInåd notes the assertive presence of women in the public sphere where he frequents cafés, drinks ʿarak, smokes water pipes and dances with Maryam in the Talk of the Town nightclub. Soon afterwards, they return to the military barricade in Íabrå.

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Beirut is a hybrid place that embraces two divergent worlds: Hamra as Paris and Íabrå as Hanoi (172), although the distance between them is no more than five minutes by car. Beirut is marked by modernity: it is full of crowds and cars, shopping centers and cafés full of women; it is also the bed of the resistance. It infects him with restless drive and teaches him how to use dirty words in public and to speak out in cafés without fear. In Beirut, his own revolutionary ideology demands a strong communal identity forged by predominantly male homosocial relations nurtured by the revolution (without excluding women like Maryam) as well as general relations of shared views, mutual identification, and similar goals and interests. In his birthplace, he spends his time “paving the sea,” living in a sort of limbo outside time (177), marginalized and debarred from any political or military involvement. However, in the fluid and multifaceted public spaces of Beirut, ʿInåd is always busy: going to meetings, visiting libraries, reading good books and having access to volumes of Majallat Shi‘ir.7 While other Arab cities are “dead,” Beirut is alive, and kicking. In the novel, there are no detailed observations of people and no descriptive accounts of the city. It is largely an unreal city pursued for what it represents. Unlike the library in ʿInåd’s homeland that has a streak of a “dusty stationery” (100), where there are no useful books, Beirut is about libraries, theatres and the latest books and magazines. While his birthplace is “an engine that fails to start,” a “mummified tortoise,” a “dinosaur” (100), Beirut is a place where one has the freedom to read what one wants, to resist, and to speak one’s mind. Mithqål in Beirut does not take “drugs”—he “takes surprises” (170)—and he is described by ʿInåd as “amazement walking on two feet” (100). For ʿInåd, it is as if Mithqål wanted to compensate for twenty years wasted in the Dead Sea and other deserts, all in one day in Beirut. The Dead Sea is a metaphor of the whole Arab world “from the Ocean to the Gulf” (55). ʿInåd’s Palestinian girlfriend Maryam dislikes tradition and anything related to the past, and like Tamima in ˝awaª⁄n Bayr¨t, seeks out the excitement of the new in Beirut that allows her to resist and fight the Israeli enemy without constraints. Having been imprisoned in the Israeli prison of ʿAzqalån and raped in other Arab prisons, she finds refuge in Beirut. When she visits Jordanian Aqabå, she voices her antipathy to the ruins, as she does not like to

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“cry over ruins”8 like the Arab poets of the Jåhiliyya period (20), preferring to embrace the kinetic energy of present-day Beirut. ʿInåd experiences the city through metonymic images where toponymy replaces topography, where Beirut is a linguistic space recognizable through street names: ʿInåd tells us that Mithqål moves around a multiplicity of places from Shiyyåh, al-Ramla al-Bay∂åʾ, al-Manåra, Clemenceau, the Beirut Arab University Library, The Russian Cultural Center, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Jafet Library (of the American University of Beirut). Contrary to his “rural” birthplace, Beirut is a city that energizes him and spurs him on. ʿInåd is aware of the speedy pace of life in the city and spends his time moving from one barricade to another, one front to another and one play to another. As an Arab intellectual and “poet of the poetry of revolutionary unity” (49), ʿInåd is also a “cultural intellectual who is also a political militant, the intellectual who produces both poetry and praxis” (Jameson 1986: 75). Like other intellectuals, he is supposed to have “a leadership role in society” where he insists “on commitment to principles and ideologies” and “engages in public political [and military] struggle” (Aghacy 2009: 55).9 The novel combines historical and fictive personages. For instance, in Beirut, Mithqål has access to a variety of cultural activities that he had never experienced before: Mahmoud Darwish in the Faculty of Law, play director Roger ʿAssåf in al-Nåd⁄ al-Thaqåf⁄ al-ʿArab⁄, Ab¨ ʿAmmår (Yasir Arafat) in Gamal Abdel Nasser Hall at the Arab University. Other activities include plays by Oscar Wilde, and Arabic concerts. Metonymic topography, such as neighborhoods, zones, street names, cafés and buildings, are passive topoi or backdrops that produce verisimilitude through the use of visual, auditory and tactile elements. Mithqål drinks a toast to “the sea of Beirut” (95), in contrast to the Dead Sea, and sings a love song by Umm Kulthum to his beloved city: “What I suffered before my eyes fell on you, I do not consider as part of my life” (95).10 Beirut is a series of impressions of a transitory nature, a state of mind generated by ʿInåd’s inner feelings, convictions and ideology projected outward, leaving their imprint on the city. For instance, the streets of Beirut “run,” the sea “trunk” rises and falls and Rawsha is a “knight riding the saddle of waves” (100), the waves being the neighing of the horse. These metaphors underpin the anthroporphism of the city where stone becomes flesh, a representation that blurs the boundaries between the city as physical and real as

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well as abstract and disembodied; both nerves and buildings collapse (175), and Mithqål maintains that he knows Beirut “just like I know the body of my beloved” (25). Similarly, he tells us that “the waves [of the sea] are excited when Maryam’s gaze embraces them” (20). The city is viewed in biological terms, underlining the analogy between the city and the body and a passionate attraction to the city that verges on the sexual. To use the words of David Frisby, the “rhythm of sensual intellectual” (1992: 98) life is open to all in a city where the sexual, social and the political are interlaced. ʿInåd’s Beirut is not only about observations of people and places; it is basically an unreal city, an assemblage of signs and images, mirroring his desire for freedom that goes hand in hand with his revolutionary project. Beirut is a city in motion where the streets run and “the sea swims with heaving chest” (95), reflecting his own militarized view of the city. What ʿInåd gives us are contours of the city represented by names of places frequented by him and Mithqål. ʿInåd and his friends sit in the Dolce Vita Café in Rawsha, a “safe and remote continent” (79), which, in reality, is only about six and a half kilometers from Íabrå, but still far away from Israeli planes flying over Íabrå and Fakhån⁄. ʿInåd immerses himself in the city and sits at the Modca café, Dbayb¨ restaurant and other real places that remain shadowy, lived and imagined simultaneously. While the novel attempts to replicate a real city through the names of real places, the emphasis remains on how the protagonist conceives these places. ʿInåd is a man weighed down by a past that burdens him with guilt for having caused the death of two of his comrades and co-activists. In Beirut, he wants to cross over to the present, hoping that the city will compensate for a violent, oppressive past and for autocratic regimes where “his years have been confiscated by cells and dungeons” (40). Nevertheless, Beirut does not heal the bruises precipitated by the “city of dreams” that has been converted into a dictatorial military state. Having surrendered Maryam’s cousin Maªj¨b Abdl-Såtir to the military regime, he is unable to have sex with her, revealing the inextricable relation between masculinity, politics and sexuality. Feeling politically castrated in his supposed city of dreams, he fights back by having sex with a general’s wife who accuses him of being “backward” despite the facade of a progressive revolutionary. His political defeat has a direct impact on his views of himself as an Arab male, and he describes himself as “a soldier

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who has lost his own battalion” (151). ʿInåd’s dream of a unified Arab world is dashed and his recurrent visits to Beirut can be considered as temporarily therapeutic, but never healing. Despite his excitement about Beirut, he is unable to overcome his nightmarish dejection. Beirut is seen through a state of mind arbitrated with drugs and alcohol. In Beirut, ʿInåd tells us: “I found myself standing in ʿAyn-l-Mraysa gasping with the rain falling heavily. It went on raining. I entered a bar. I saw Maªj¨b’s skull in the form of an ashtray. Petrified, I left the bar. Drunk. Staggering. The nightclubs in Zayt¨n⁄ passed me by” (46–7). Indeed his description of Mithqål’s and his own horizontal movements around Beirut without focusing on any particular place reflects an abiding sense of restlessness and anxiety that the city is unable to expunge. His references to Virginia Woolf’s suicide and to Jordanian writer Tays⁄r Sib¨l’s (1939–73) suicide underline his own state of mind that persists in Beirut and outside of it. Beirut or Cairo? If Beirut in Aªyåʾ f⁄ al-baªr al-mayyit is a breathing space for ʿInåd and Mithqål, Bayr¨t: al-Bukåʾ laylan (1985), by Egyptian writer Shawq⁄ ʿAbdl-Óak⁄m, represents Beirut under Israeli siege (1982) and bombardment as a wasteland heading toward extinction, where the peripatetic movements of individuals are no more than inconsequential activities leading nowhere. The protagonist is an Egyptian man who comes to Beirut from al-Fayy¨m in Upper Egypt. We are told by the detached narrator who uses free indirect speech11 that the protagonist has been on the road for thirty years, and that he refers to himself as a “migrant” who shuttles among Arab cities such as Amman, Damascus and Cairo. He journeys among them in the manner of the old maqåmåt hero who travels from one place to another in search of anecdotes from the mouths of deprived and underprivileged people who recall random stories that have accumulated “like pandemic garbage in besieged cities” (5). His domains are local market places rife with thieves and vagabonds and full of second-hand clothing and other cheap and affordable items. Såm⁄ Sulaymån Aªmad categorizes this novel as travel literature (2010: 306). The novel is also aligned with the maqåma since the people who he meets belong to the lower classes. This is a hybrid narrative that can also be construed as an ecological novel, where the city itself is a character if not the

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major protagonist, a force that has such a strong influence on individuals that it actually determines their lives, producing behavior that would not have been feasible in another environment. The protagonist comes to Beirut via Damascus and through the frost-covered mountains interjected by the sound of shotguns from the demarcation lines. The three other passengers in the car remain apathetic even when they learn that they may be stuck in the ice and would need a snow plough and helicopters to get them out. The oxymoronic snow and fire underline the contradictions of the city, triggering “the remains of a cold dismembered body” (6) evocative of the massacred gods of fertility: Adonis the severed god of Phoenicia, Tamm¨z, God of the Tigris and Euphrates, and Osiris the Ancient Egyptian god. This mythical view of the city underlines the sense that like these ancient gods who were massacred, the people of the city have experienced “collective assassinations” (6). Contrary to other cities he had visited, the people of Beirut appear to suffer not solely from estrangement and isolation, but also from a strong sense of indifference, listlessness and capitulation. This is an environment conducive to what he refers to as the “budding” of “the prophet of endurance, Ayy¨b [Job] the Damascene” (15). Furthermore, Beirut appears to steadily conform to the migrant’s quotation from Nietzsche that the “strong being is the only human being” (6).12 This frightening statement reminds the migrant of what is happening on the demarcation lines between the two warring wings of the city. He compares the “racist shooting” (6) to symptoms of his kidney disease, such as vomiting and stomach cramps. Significantly, this is a gripping example of anthropomorphism where the city-as-body is humanized and viewed as a creature infected with disease. The migrant describes the city besieged and under fire as an “amputated human body” (6), and as “a giant body of a sick or wounded person with open belly under an Israeli surgical operation” (86). The fragmented body of the city reflects the fate of vulnerable citizens torn apart by Israeli military supremacy. Having spent his life recording anecdotes of poor simple people and local markets swarming with sellers and buyers, thugs and gangsters, he comes to Beirut to register potential stories by ordinary people about the war. In an attempt to escape “other more brutal sieges” (7), an allusion to the lack of personal freedoms under dictatorial regimes in Sadat’s Egypt and around the Arab world, he lands in a Beirut under Israeli siege. In his threadbare bag, he

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carries tatty yellowing manuscripts of bandits, vagabonds, beggars, wailing women and cemetery sentries, whom he refers to as his “caged creatures” (9). These are oral tales and anecdotes that are supposed to preserve the collective memory of lowly people within the towns and cities that he had visited for this particular purpose. Walking the streets of Beirut the migrant becomes conscious of undercurrents related to his own traumatic past that intermingle with new stories of the war in Beirut, the demarcation lines, squares scorched with fire, sidewalks, and cinemas featuring a mishmash of pornographic, James Bond, and “American Gigolo” films. The migrant coughs violently whenever he is struck with what he refers to as a chronic “inner weeping” represented by “nightly wailing attacks” (28) that he developed from the daily funerals that he had witnessed as a child in al-Fayy¨m from the window of his family home overlooking a cemetery. Accordingly, his desire to preserve stories springs from his strong awareness of the ephemerality of life. He arrives in Beirut intending to stay with a friend who turns out to be absent from home; he knocks at his neighbors’ door and is allowed into the apartment of two sisters who take him in after midnight, despite his frightening odd looks, tall build, tattered leather bag and ancient suitcase. He learns that the two sisters are refugees from their own mountain village that they talk about as a “little lost paradise” (21). Their father was shot in the garden and fell into the bed of violets, and the village was razed by trucks and tanks, not excluding their garden and flower beds. This traumatic experience has left its mark on the two sisters who appear to be mentally disturbed. The younger sister ʿAlyå, who has an elongated “Phoenician face” (18) and black flowing hair, is struck with a tenacious nervous cough that repeatedly takes hold of her just like the migrant’s own nervous cough. The older sister Måjida, who tells him about the tragic fate of her family, “sings to herself on the balcony and crawls on fours, slowly and agonizingly” (32), mirroring a sudden descent into the non-human level in the wake of her harrowing experience in a village caught up in the fever of the Civil War. Watching ʿAlyå holding Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, he is reminded of “the sorrow seeping inside the home” (18). In the same context, we are told that he looks in the mirror and sees himself as a Van Gogh figure with protruding eyes. Being an educated man and writer, the emigrant understands reality through the aid of art, literature and other texts. Among such texts are canonical European, Biblical,

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Qur’anic, Pharaonic, Mesopotamian and Phoenician sources. His experience with the city is mediated by such works, which blur the line between the material city and the city of words. The migrant discovers kindred souls in the sisters, having gone himself through an ordeal similar to theirs. His own father was killed by soldiers in their garden when he fell into the rose bed. Accordingly, he feels sympathy with the two sisters and identifies with their predicament. Their plight mirrors his own predicament, and fixes him on the precarious line between past and present. Having lived by the cemetery, he develops a depressive funereal mind that keeps him moaning. He recalls that, as a boy, he would watch the funerals from the window across the long fence that separated the house from the cemetery where there were trees of camphor, sant acacia and mimosa. As a little boy sitting on his mother’s shoulder, he watches women dressed in black with indigo paint on their faces as a mark of mourning. When the deceased is someone from a prominent family, tambourines are used and the women sob and wail and dance in circles. This experience has given him a chronic depression, which is represented by constant distraction, sudden fits of crying and aphasia. The migrant spends his time walking the streets of the war city and meandering among cars, taxis and trucks. His “pedestrian enunciations” (de Certeau 1984: 116) consist of navigating the urban space in such a manner that his trajectories are determined by contingency measures depending upon the military situation. Rather than a holistic abstract manner, he experiences the city in a quotidian fragmented and atomistic manner. Out in the streets of the war city he spots the snipers on the roofs of buildings, having a break, smoking, and slackening their pace. As both walker and voyeur, he observes the crowds around bakeries as well as boutiques and notes that people in Beirut do not look enough in the faces of one another like Håshim in Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs who prefers to look on the ground rather than meet anyone’s eye. The chaotic condition of the streets and the state of continual danger makes any brand of flaneurie—despite the presence of fashion “boutiques” in the streets—an absurdity. Within the same framework, the contiguous relations of anonymity are further intensified in Beirut by fear of the other in a war situation of enmity, suspicion and aggression. The migrant observes a group of soldiers running after a big bare-foot

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woman carrying a lit lamp in broad daylight, and he soon learns that she is a militia leader. This is a representational space that integrates metonymic images and ephemeral events where the matriarchal figure takes center stage and appropriates the military role normally assigned for men. This is Halberstam’s (1998) “female masculinity,” fully submerged in the quotidian where gender and sexed categories undergo slippage. At the same time, it is presented in passing where the woman looks more distraught than possessing any real power. Carrying his binoculars in his left hand and running in the opposite direction, the migrant is jostled by a crowd of people on the move. He stumbles and falls, but tries to restore his balance by standing up and running again with his tall frame and bony limbs. The women queuing in front of a bakery, a supermarket and vegetable vendors join the line of running people. The fast rhythms of the city represented by hectic crowds engulf him and pull him into the centripetal forces of the city fraught with swarming masses and fleeting, depersonalized encounters. He finds himself drifting with the crowds and suddenly discovers that ever since he set foot in this city (97), he has been running purposelessly. The dissonance of impressions at street level is analogous to a labyrinth where the city envelops him in a dizzying mesh of confusion. The energized and fleeting encounters in Beirut coincide with Simmel’s description of metropolitan existence as an “intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli” (cited in Wolff 1964: 410). Nevertheless, in a small city like Beirut, this anxious drive and restlessness spring fundamentally from a threatening and unstable war situation. This is a novel of peripatetic movements and vehicular mobility where the migrant experiences a restless, pedestrian and nomadic existence within the narrow confines of one sector of a very small city. To cope with a general sensation of speediness within the city, he discovers his own ability to run and infiltrate the rows of people seeking shelter against the walls. Unlike the walls in Khoury’s al-Wuj¨h al-bay∂åʾ that display posters of the martyrs of the west of Beirut, the walls in this novel provide shelter from falling shells and bombs. The narrative disrupts linearity, emphasizing fragmentary impressions in an arena of volatility and precariousness, an augur of devastation and annihilation. He takes a taxi to the nearest furnished apartment, a time-worn Byzantine

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building, with high walls, that looks like a ruined fortress. Having settled there, he takes a walk to a pub with dim lights, flings himself on the first couch and begins coughing, but no one pays any attention. He is joined by a girl who tells him that she is from the southern Lebanese village of Råshayyå al-Fakhår on the borders with Israel and that she has fled the area because of Israeli attacks. The narrator lives the present as part of the past, where he suffers in the present the burden of ongoing anguish and traumatic memories. The story is told in flashbacks, the narrative sequence is disrupted, and actions take place simultaneously rather than chronologically. Disregarding time sequence, the novel fuses actions that take place in different places and times, such as the demarcation line, squares scorched with gas and petrol, scenes from sex films, shepherds, wailing women, actresses, cemetery sentinels and thieves. The protagonist is an existential nomad who fuses present sensory impressions, and remembered incidents fragmented into a turmoil of incongruous combinations, a hotchpotch of memories, and events. Within this kinetic instability and the unpredictability of the streets, fragments of sensory data that the nomadic narrator gleans within the city amalgamate with images of his funereal home to accentuate the inextricable relation between past and present and between places. The migrant is an educated man who views himself as an expert in “village stories of grandmothers” (41) and alludes to a seminar on “The Culture of Village and City in the Middle East” that he had come to attend in Beirut. In his view, there is no difference between the city and the village in the Middle East. For him, the Arab city (such as Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Tripoli or Carthage) is a developed if not modified image of the village (44). In Beirut, he observes “the mountain villages surrounding the city . . . spreading under this spring sunny day despite the vicious Civil War” (42). An explosion suddenly rocks the site where the seminar is taking place, and he finds himself in what appears to be a hospital, which he then assumes is a warehouse, and manages to get away without difficulty. It is not clear whether he is injured, apprehended or kidnapped or whether there was such a thing as a conference or explosion. The girl he assumes accompanied him to the conference denies his claim that she attended the conference, while he himself imagines that he had had a similar experience of a conference or explosion in Cairo. Did it take

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place in Cairo or Beirut? Arab cities melt into one another; the line between the real and fantastic is blurred, and his story erases itself as he goes along. This locale of incoherence and confusion is accentuated by the use of disconnected sentences with their tendencies to ellipses. His own fragmented state of mind is further reinforced in his use of flashback technique where the present melts into the past and vice versa. The unnamed girl tells him disconnected stories that echo his own disconnected story. She tells him that her school on the road to the airport was burnt twice and the school bus carrying children was shelled. All the children died, while she and the driver were accidentally spared. He learns that Hamra is a refuge from Israeli shelling where southerners throw their calamity on “a shabby, timeworn city burdened with the Civil War” (74) and seek shelter inside cinemas and in the entrances of buildings. Feeling personally involved in the war in Beirut, the migrant decides to stay in a city run down with violence and political and military liquidation. He moves around the sick body of the city that is bitten with dilapidation, despair and absurdity. The city’s fidgety nervousness, represented by sniping, explosions and air raids, is seized by the inertia of death that surrounds it. Thousands of Israeli bombs pound mountains, cities and towns “amassed with the deprived and the homeless” (73), and the migrant hears the cries of the wounded and ambulances carrying the injured to hospital (74). In this gloomy atmosphere, he perceives women in their nightgowns and slippers dragging their children, and men carrying any items that could be rescued from their homes. In this entropic world, the city is transformed into a lethal mechanism that violates and annihilates. All this occurs in the land of what he thought was a Hellenic, Phoenician paradise, and an enlightened culture that gives sanctuary to strangers before kin. Yet, in this “rugged mountainous nation” (78), the land of Adonis the “noble lord who was beautiful and was loved by women” (78), he felt no more beleaguered than in other Arab cities such as Hijåz, Najd, Sanʿå,” Carthage, Amman and Cairo, Arab cities that are plagued with agents of oppression and surveillance. The protagonist and the girl escape the bombarded building, take shelter against the walls and seek refuge in the garage of a building where he recognizes a few faces—alcoholics, Egyptian and Ethiopian prostitutes, and girls of small build and brown complexions from Srilanka, Singapore, and the

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Philippines. Such figures underline the transitory nature of life in the city. He soon loses the girl in the commotion and looks for her in the streets and alleyways of Hamra. He even goes back to his building, which was swarming with tenants as well as with foreigners, fighters, prostitutes, a middle-aged Belgian woman with her dogs and posters of Imam Musa al-Sadr (1928–78)13 and Kamal Jumblatt (1917–77) a prominent Druze leader, underscoring the identity of the quarter and the ideology that held sway. Under siege the people communicate, recognize one another and exchange enquiring glances from balconies, streets, cafés, roof tops and public gardens. The city looks like a prison or a fortress surrounded by the war machinery of the invaders. There are piles and piles of lifeless garbage in the wreckage, squares, crossroads and building entries, and even in public gardens, which contribute to the siege by serving as garbage barricades. At night, the “dumb” (96) streets are drowned in pitch darkness with nothing to tell of life except for trucks carrying fighters on road intersections. The streets are covered with glass and the city is filled with packs of dogs and stray cats whose barking and mewing fill the spaces of the city and incite the migrant to start barking himself, revealing an isomorphic relation between the human and animal worlds in a city where humans and animals have become indistinguishable. The migrant enters a café and observes that the people look absentminded, divorced from the world surrounding them, and unshaken by any incident. He wonders why people are so composed, as if the current situation does not concern them. When two planes soar above them, he expects that they will empty their cargo of napalm and cluster bombs over their heads. Accordingly, he finds himself lying prostrate on the floor, dropping chairs and breaking alcohol bottles. He apologizes but no one in the café is perturbed or bothered. Instead of looking at the planes, the men were watching women on the balconies, revealing a strong link between sexuality and war. The side-by-side relations of anonymity within the café mirror the migrant’s contiguous relation to the city. He ends up in the Shåt⁄lå refugee camp in the company of a man he meets in a café. He also sees people seeking shelter on staircases and building entrances. Here he finds the girl from South Lebanon in a hospital in Shåt⁄lå, cleaning and sweeping the floors (her family having already immigrated to Canada), and taking care of the wounded. After work she makes bitter Arabic

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coffee, cooks, and reads for him. The girl insists on going to work at the hospital despite the falling bombs overhead, but the massacre at Íabrå and Shåt⁄lå forces him to escape and leave his “daughter” (129) behind. He finds himself in Cairo International Airport where he envisages the same Israeli soldiers shooting his girl. She falls on the floor of the airport with a ripped-off abdomen, and he wonders whether the same war is going to commence in Cairo. The boundaries between Cairo and Beirut become blurred and the two cities dissolve into each other, underlining the prevalence of the conceptual over the material city. “Places explode in my brain as they do in Beirut” Like al-Bukåʾ laylan, Rashid al-Daif’s al-Mustabidd underlines the infiltration of the war city into the narrator’s mind, turning the whole war experience into hallucination. This is a novel set in the Lebanese Civil War about a university professor who is teaching a translation class at the Lebanese University when Israeli planes attack Palestinian positions in Beirut. At the sound of the explosions, he rushes with other students, predominantly female, to the janitor’s room underground, keeping in mind that there are hardly any shelters in the city save for warehouses that were used as shelters. Within the dark and crowded room he tells us that he has sex with a woman in the darkness without being able to see her face or to find out who she is. The shelter is a heterotopia of compensation that protects him against the raging explosions outside. In this third space of desire where he feels like a “king over the five continents” (23), the narrator manages to cope with the violent world outside that has reduced him to a nonentity. In this dark, underground refuge, which he refers to as his “sixth continent,” (23) he tells us that he was transformed into a body devoid of any sign of anger or worry. Within this continent he does not live or die, but simply exists. He feels the woman’s cheeks and her warm body and wonders “where people who have no shelter hide” (23). He tells us that he slept in the shelter for two nights and one day like “a fetus in its mother’s womb” (29). He confiscates all “antennas” (26) that transmit images of the combatting city, and basks in the security of the maternal. He announces his new birth and tells us that now he is two days old. Having found the woman of his dreams, he refers to her in abstract terms: “Woman is safety.

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Woman is sleep. Woman is nation. Woman is the mind of man and his equilibrium” (30). In a city like Beirut, the narrator has a great deal to complain about. Being forced to deal with the bad odors, flies and mosquitos, continual water cuts and abrupt electricity cuts, he asserts that his maxim is, “I am alive, alive and the proof is that I whine!” (34). He recalls how the elevator stopped and he had to wait a long time for the concierge to get him out because he was absent as usual, being a member of an armed organization. The protagonist admits that the war has sapped all feelings from him, but now, after his encounter with the woman, he can say that he is alive once again. The narrator situates his story in Beirut, but there are no infinitesimal descriptions of what, he assumes, is the material city. Yet the stories he relates are inherently spatial as he traverses the external spaces of a city in the throes of merciless and uncontrollable events. The narrator relates stories about cars being stolen in the city, in car parks, on the sides of streets and at checkpoints by armed men. People are also mugged within service taxis where a passenger is threatened at gun point by the driver who takes his money and the gold watch that he had received as a gift from his brother who works in Saudia Arabia. Some of the stolen cars are booby-trapped and detonated in crowded suqs, killing people. The narrator also tells of barricades and counter-barricades within the city, and kidnappings based on religious or geographical background. These concrete images trigger fantasies of an explosion where he happens to be one of the “unlucky” survivors. Envisioning himself miraculously alive, he becomes the object of suspicion by militiamen who interrogate him: “How did you survive when the one who was walking next to you died as did the one in front of you, and the one behind you and the one on your right and on your left? And you, why did you not die?” (49). Owing to the breakdown of the civic government, the Faculty of Arts at the Lebanese University has turned into a dilapidated place. Nothing works here. The bathrooms are locked up to avoid accumulating dirt, and there is no water in the taps. The windows are broken and the glass is scattered all around; the narrator is certain that they will not be fixed until doomsday. Moreover, the narrator is aware that the deadly atmosphere that surrounds him destabilizes the central position attributed to a university professor like himself. At the university, the classrooms are wide open to all kinds of

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trespassers. For one, the Chiclets boy interrupts the class to sell his goods, and the professor does not dare to throw him out for fear he may be connected to some militia that may expose him to humiliation in front of students, or outside when the class is over. The university is a synecdoche for a city in the advanced stages of physical, moral and mental deterioration. Going down to the cafeteria, he overhears a professor telling of how a student hit him with the butt of his gun when he refused to raise his grade. It soon becomes clear that there was no woman in the shelter and that the narrator is simply hallucinating, and his story begins to erase itself. When he asks one student whether anyone was injured by the broken glass, the answer is: “What glass, professor?” (68). Similarly, when he asks another student whether she sought refuge in the janitor’s house underground, on Friday, the day of the Israeli air raid, her answer is that she had stayed in the classroom with many other students to watch the raiding planes, but when there was another air raid they went home. The narrative uncovers the narrator’s disturbed state of mind, which is fixated on a city plagued with war where he is lonely and frightened. Alienated from the city and from human company, hallucination is the only way to deal with the trauma of war. As the protagonist of al-Daif’s ʿAz⁄z⁄ al-sayyid Kawabåtå puts it, “[I]t looked to me with the beginning of the war . . . that my mouth was filled with ants, and my lips were sewn tightly together, as one would sew a deep wound with a hard wire . . . And I became convinced, with the war still raging, that only delirium can accurately describe this obdurate condition” (15–16). Within the labyrinthine city, the subjectively monological voice of the narrator articulates a strong sense of effeminacy and impotence. His fears and anxieties drive him to distance himself from companionship, seeking refuge in the shelter of his own mind. The narrator’s truncated personality is consistent with the external curtailment and fragmentation. The imploding spaces of the city have impinged on the subjective world of the narrator and affected the manner he (mis)connects with the external environment. In as much as the narrator becomes muddled, shaky, uncertain and hallucinatory, the city develops pincers that gnaw at the narrator, turning him into a robotic cipher. In other words, the city takes precedence and rises to the level of protagonist by ousting the narrator from his pivotal role in the novel, where he finds himself hounded by menacing, baffling and impenetrable

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spatial conditions, disrupting the sequential in favor of the simultaneous and contiguous. The world as a coherent totality is shattered, and the city transforms him into a paranoiac self-estranged person who shuttles between demographic reality and inward process, physical verisimilitude and conceptual perception. The novel outlines an imagined world that is contingent on physical and mental verisimilitude to give the impression of an authentic reality, and the city fluctuates between the demographic and imaginative, and the perceptual and conceptual. When the narrator collapses at the university and is taken by students to the hospital, the student driving the car continues to sound the horn to remind drivers that this was an emergency, but the cars at this time are like “cement casts” (57). When no one pays any attention to them, the student takes out a gun and starts shooting into the air to open up the road. This disperses many cars whose drivers assume there are battles raging nearby. The narrator spends a week in hospital and is then nursed by his own mother at home in the village. On his return to Beirut, he feels that “the train has already left him” (58),14 a local expression referring to women who have exceeded marrying age and lost their chances. This is an ironic reversal of roles where the narrator regards himself as a spinster who has lost her chances for marriage. He starts looking for the girl of the shelter and assumes that she must have come to the conclusion that he had used her sexually and forgotten all about her. He insists that he must find her as she is the “key to my earthly paradise” (61). The language used by the narrator parodies his stifling traditional attitudes, stupid idealism and obsolete view of women as representatives of maternity, domesticity and homeliness rather than real flesh and blood human beings. The narrator is essentially a traditional man who wants a pure (as opposed to promiscuous) woman for a wife. Now that he is forty, he wants to make a pivotal decision and marry the shelter woman since he is sure that she is pure and virginal. He assumes that he was “the first to touch her” (102) and attributes the fact that she is totally submissive when he has sex with her to inexperience. The narrator tries to clothe this incident in a traditional garb to coincide with his own desire to marry in the old-fashioned manner. This insistence on a traditional marriage is his way of looking for harmony and

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solidity within the safe haven of the home, in a world of contingency and chance. He imagines the refuge woman knocking at his door and playing the role of obedient wife/mother/servant. The tone of his discourse is fraught with derisive humor. He is overjoyed when she tells him that she is captivated with his books and his intellectual superiority, and when she pledges to be his “friend, lover and servant” (107). She greatly appreciates the manner in which he entertains and tries to serve her in his flat. She appreciates his respect for women and admits that she “had never seen a man who respects woman the way I do” (108). She insists on making the coffee herself, saying that it is not his job (108). She contends that an intellectual should not be washing dishes and that a man cannot excel without a woman who understands him. This preoccupation with woman is his way of compensating for his lack, his marginal position within the city, and his desire for stability. The vertical relationship he envisages with the woman is ample proof of his desire to control the city by controlling the female through make-believe performance, but the sound of shooting brings him back to the real world where he finds himself heading to the bathroom, the safest place in the house. The house that he wants to view as “the epitome of immovability,” as Lefebvre warns against (1991: 454) is vulnerable to the thrust of history that encroaches on the inner space and disrupts the narrator’s rosy dreams, blurring the boundaries between the home and the street. The narrator finds the bathroom as the only safe place that could protect him from the thrust of the vicious public sphere. Within his lonely apartment, he yearns for company and communal life even at the cost of personal injury. He wishes he were injured so that people would take him to a hospital relatively spared from the shells. He yearns for his mother to envelop him with her black hair that looks like a black shroud so that people would think him dead and stop harassing him. The city bends the narrator’s will, reducing him to a state of panicky fright and complete ineffectuality. When he enters his apartment he finds “fear” installed in its corners and assumes that if the streets were safe he would have walked until past midnight (149). He would have gone to the cinema and would not have returned until the early hours of the morning, but he does not have the privilege of walking the city or exercising this masculine prerogative. Within a male-controlled

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city, the streets belong to men rather than women, but the militant city has emasculated and driven him into the feminine domestic space. Now his situation is generally passive, immobile and effeminate where he sits at home waiting for the woman of his dreams: “Why did she not come? How does she dare until now not to announce herself? What logic does she glean power from? What ethics? What tradition?” (150). Since walking is a dangerous employment in a city regularly threatened by car bombs and explosions, it is replaced by fretful mental wandering, reflecting an unrelenting geography of fear molded by fantasy and desire, and representing Beirut as a space of the imagination. The narrator’s nightmarish dream reinforces the maze that he got entangled in: I started moving from one street to another to find an outlet . . . Every road led to another and I ended up in the same area. I moved from one hostile street to another more hostile street until I met a boy . . . who became suspicious of me and called an armed man. I realized I would be subjected to interrogation, that is, to death. I am originally from this area, but I supported the other area . . . But before my death sentence was implemented, I luckily woke up. (153–44)

For the narrator the city is a realm of twists and turns, a nightmarish mental space, labyrinthine and agoraphobic, and deeply informed by the exterior situation. This is a surreal and uncanny space, a mental state that obliterates the boundaries of the real and the unreal, causing an unsettling slippage between walking and dreaming. Although the narrator tries to avoid obstructions and blockades within the city, he is stopped at one checkpoint. Having attended a party and while giving a lift to one young woman, he encounters a barricade where he is stopped and interrogated. When the militiaman looks at the identity cards and discovers that they are of different religions, he accuses the narrator of stealing the car. He is detained while the girl is allowed to go; he is released three days later. He does not understand the raison d’être of the checkpoint in a city flooded with weapons of all kinds: mortars, anti-aircraft missiles, anti-tank missiles and rocket launchers. If militiamen are on the streets day and night and assassinations are rife and stealing, mugging and car bombs are occurrences everywhere then what is the function of checkpoints?

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At the university and while he is translating passages from Albert Camus’s The Plague into Arabic, one student suddenly leaves the class, and the narrator assumes it is the shelter woman. He runs after her, but she stops the first taxi that comes her way. He takes his car to catch up with her, but he ends up at the same checkpoint that had stopped him for three days a year earlier. He takes out his identity card and screams: “Where is the checkpoint?” (173). He is told that the checkpoint had been moved to another spot, but the narrator insists on being checked. The narrator sees the absurdity of a checkpoint within the city, one that intimidates and harasses its inhabitants and suddenly disappears to ensure its own safety from any shelling from the other side of the city. In order to mollify him, a man in military outfit approaches him, checks his ID and asks him to move on. He returns to his car and starts the engine. Although he cannot effect any changes, he can at least resist by stubbornly insisting on re-installing the checkpoint. Living in an aggressive and incongruous city, the narrator finds refuge in the dark recesses of his mind. Concluding Remarks Beirut in this chapter is a real as well as imagined place where boundaries between the material and abstract city are ill-defined, shifting and slippery. Three out of the four novels dealt with are by Arab writers who present characters—predominantly Arab intellectuals, activists, writers and aspiring young men and women—who imagine finding in Beirut what they are searching for. Feeling that Beirut belongs to them, they project a finality of meaning on it that ends in catastrophe for some and gratification for others. In this chapter the novels encompass a range of imagined worlds that subvert and sometimes substitute for the real city outside. In Bayr¨t 75, Beirut is a representation that is supposed to provide passion, freedom, erotic potential, material wealth and social well-being for the two Syrian individuals (Yasmeena and Farah) bound for Beirut. It is a place of liberation from the past, self-realization and great expectations for the future. The desired city is predominantly immaterial, located in Farah’s and Yasmeena’s minds and garnered from prevalent discourses on Beirut that circulated in the Arab world in the 1960s and the early 1970s. However, the city inhabited by the renowned rich is infiltrated by another zone, a shadowy other that is eclipsed by the Beirut that is seen as

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a homogeneous entity embracing the whole country. This shadowy double, both occluded and neglected, is a site of abject poverty, marginalization and lack, exposing the hierarchical nature of spaces within a city with deeply entrenched spatial and social boundaries. This transgressive incursion into a complacent city by the shadowy other soon transforms the city of dreams into a hellish urban site. The city that Yasmeena considers alluring turns out to be both a magnet and a snare where she, like Tamima in ˝awaª⁄n Bayr¨t, learns that a soft, feminine Beirut is no more than a mask that hides the overpowering phallic supremacy of the city. Martyrs’ Square, a sign of the city as a coherent whole marking a collective consciousness, is ironically the locale where prostitution and sexual exploitation are sanctioned. Farah’s leaky room in Martyrs’ Square with its moldy walls and creaky drawer is a synecdoche of a city in a state of decay and exhaustion. Beirut is a treacherous, castrating, devouring monster where Farah’s rural male vigor is depleted. It is a city that feminizes him, turning him into an object of Nishan’s lusting male gaze in a city of dissipation and perversion. What is more, the novel accentuates the distinction between the way that the city is conceptualized and the way it is experienced. If Bayr¨t 75 underlines the defeat and disillusionment of Yasmeena and Farah in a dream city that turns out to be a scorching inferno, Jordanian writer Muʾnis al-Razzåz’s Aªyāʾ fī al-baªr al-mayyit is a celebration of a city that coincides with the protagonist’s political and sexual aspirations. The meaning of what the narrator attributes to it is filtered through images and tropes as well as through his own ideology and what he likes to see rather than what is there, creating a slippage between a real and unreal city. Unlike Farah’s and Yasmeena’s imagined Beirut, ʿInåd’s Beirut is a model for what Arab cities should be like. From the start he lives not so much in the city as inside the mental image he had created. The text is filled with names of places that Mithqål visits, giving an impression of verisimilitude, but toponymy takes center stage, replacing topography. It is a city in restless motion spurred by the confident mobility of a virile hero who sees the essence of Beirut in sexualized revolutionary activity. The city is liquescent, associated with women, and also rigid, associated with men (as in Bayr¨t 75), a sort of epicene entity conjoining both. ʿInåd celebrates the city’s modernity that facilitates individual freedoms, but,

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ironically, also its strong communal identity forged by predominantly male homosocial relations nurtured by the revolution that demands shared views, mutual identification, and similar goals and interests. If Beirut in Aªyåʾ f⁄ al-baªr al-mayyit is a breathing space for ʿInåd and Mithqål, Bayrūt: al-Bukāʾ laylan represents the city as a wasteland heading toward annihilation. Like the hero of the maqåmåt, the Egyptian intellectual travels from one place to another in search of anecdotes from the mouths of common people. The fast rhythms of Beirut, represented in flickering impressions of frenzied crowds, engulf the protagonist, and he finds himself drifting with the masses. The force of the city is perceived through fragmentary details, disconnected incidents and sketchy descriptions, registering impressions rather than facts in a setup where the narrator is acted upon rather than acting and responding passively to the city’s turmoil. This is an anguished urban vision, underlining an ontological insecurity that brings the psychological and material into collusion. The protagonist is an existential nomad who blends present-day sensory impressions with fragmentary episodes from the past. In order to make sense of an absurd war situation he evokes myths of massacred gods like Adonis, Tammuz and Osiris that he links with the sacrifice of human beings in the war city. In the novel, the body of the city is prey to packs of dogs and stray cats whose barking and mewing fill the spaces of the city and incite the migrant to start barking himself, underscoring an isomorphic relation between the human and animal worlds. While Beirut features as street names, cafés, buildings, monuments, educational institutions, cultural centers, brothels and architectural features in Aªyāʾ fī al-baªr al-mayyit, it is a psychological landscape in al-Daif’s alMustabidd. This is a novel focalized on the consciousness of the protagonist with intensity, sharp detail and subjective insight. The imploding chaotic spaces of the war city intrude into the mental world of the narrator, blurring the line between the real and imagined. To shield himself from the city’s assault, the narrator builds his own narcissistic inner world to subvert the material city outside and sometimes to erase it completely. Al-Daif makes use of a brand of realism magnified by fantasy and triggered by a haunting sense of alienation and historical anxiety perpetrated by spatial conditions. In the novel, the material colored with the narrator’s fantasies, metaphors and other tropes turn the city into a construct where wandering

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in the mind accompanies physical walking, and where the city is as much the narrator’s creation as his creator. His own flat, the embodiment of stability and security, is not immune from the hostile intrusion of the outer space, where the line between home and street becomes blurred, finding the narrator exposed within the supposed safety of the internal space. While al-Daif’s al-Mustabidd, like his other novel Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs, projects a landscape of marginal encounters, the former goes further to present the war city through the prism of private experience, fantasy, hallucination and fragmentation. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

For topohilia, see Tuan (1977). Donald (2003: 46). ‘‫’بيروت ياقوت تابوت‬ ‫عرب‬ ‫أعراب‬ ُ ‘’‫ مج ّزأين؟ ألسنا؟‬.. َ‫ ألستَ أنت‬..‫ألست أنا‬ ..‫ أليس اإلنسان‬..‫ أليس الوطن‬..‫تقول مج ّزأ؟ طبعًا مج ّزأ‬ A progressive poetry magazine founded in 1957 in Beirut by Youssef Al-Khal (1917–87). It published experimental poetry, and showed interest in Western poetry. The poetic tradition it attempted to advance was based on the aesthetic concepts of modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Saint-John Perse. This brand of new poetry was referred to as ‫الشعر الحديث‬. ‫البكاء على األطالل‬ For more about the Arab intellectual as activist, see also Aghacy (2009: 55–68). Known as the “Star of the East” (‫ )كوكب الشرق‬Umm Kulthum (1904?–1976) was the most famous Arab singer of the twentieth century. ‫عمرضايع يحسبوه إزاي عل ّي‬..‫اللي شفته قبل ما تشوفك عين ّي‬ A type of third-person narration where the narrator moves in and out of the character’s consciousness, combining characteristics of third- and first-person narration. While a similar quote cannot be traced, the reference is to Nietzsche’s concept of power and the superman. He founded the Lebanese Shiʿa Amal movement or the Movement of the Disinherited (in Arabic ‫ )حركة المحرومين‬in 1974. ‫فاته القطار‬

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5 Excavating the City: Exterior and Interior Relics Let the Dead Bury the Living. Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (1997: 72) Haunted places are the only ones people can live in. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984: 108) Beirut is a gigantic burial place for memory. Humaydan cited in Íidån⁄ (2010: 113) He couldn’t help it if the bones poked through the pavement under his feet. Duffy, Capital: A Fiction (1975: 17)

T

his chapter deals with three novels: Jåbir’s B⁄r⁄t¨s, Hoda Barakat’s Óårith al-miyåh and René al-Óåyik’s Bayr¨t 2002. In these works, Beirut is a place where ghosts of the past represented by the destroyed city and its ruins fill the spaces, where specters of wars and natural disasters haunt the city. B⁄r⁄t¨s is a novel where the protagonist takes recourse to fantastic elements in order to convey an otherwise inexplicable experience of pain. The narrator’s sojourn in the underground city of Beirut is his own confrontation with the past and his way of coming to terms with the trauma of violent death. Underground he encounters archaic and spectral figures, phantoms that represent the palimpsestic past of the city. The ghost haunts the present, “meddling with taken for granted realities” (Gordon 1997: 8) and forcing the characters and narrators to evoke the lives of those who have gone, notably his own young cousin who was kidnapped in the war. In Óårith al-miyåh, the devastated Downtown area is a sign of a world faced with annihilation that the protagonist continues to hang on to, uncov161

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ering a palimpsestic city burdened with history, creating nostalgia as well as awesome dread. The ruins that fill the city are concrete manifestations of a convoluted relation with the past and with the meaning of life and death. The two works express fascination with the ruin that marks the city with an uncanny aura of spectrality. This preoccupation with the past is juxtaposed with Bayr¨t 2002, which focuses on a city without memory, where young characters are preoccupied with the present as a strategy of evading the past. This much desired forgetfulness and erasure is not complete. Nevertheless, the war that they did not experience personally continues to be felt in the present, leaving a traumatic sway on their lives and producing a numbing and depersonalizing effect. Spectral Beirut While present-day Beirut is a tangible locale in Jåbir’s B⁄r⁄t¨s, the novel centers on the past that continues to break into the present, demanding recognition and causing ominous foreboding. A guard of the derelict City Palace cinema falls into a chasm, landing him in an underground city with the eponymous name Beirut, a sort of nightmarish pastoral world where he spends almost two years before returning to present-day Beirut to tell his story to the writer Rab⁄ʿ Jåbir. This vertical configuration represented by his descent underground—a common trope in literature—is a metaphorical excavation of the war, where the narrator finds himself in two ontologically different worlds. The novel begins with a rejuvenated Beirut full of restaurants, nightclubs, festivals, dancers and singers. It is filled with the smell of food and the salty sea, the aroma of perfume and the sound of loud music until the early hours of the morning. The city is flooded with some one and a half million tourists from the Arab Gulf, who, after 9/11, spend their vacations in Beirut, as it has become difficult for them to travel to Europe and North America. Beirut is like Babel, a place where one can hear so many dialects and languages, an ironic statement alluding to the violent and bloody discords that have plagued the city for fifteen years. The city is packed with young men with long hair, earrings and lip-rings, semi-naked women and young people lying on the backseats of cars, smelling of smoke and alcohol. In this novel, the line between reality and fiction is blurred in the inclusion of real personalities, such as Wal⁄d Nuwayhi∂ and Joseph Samåªa, two

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Lebanese journalists who have dinner in a restaurant on the rooftop of the Virgin Megastore with the author Rab⁄ʿ Jåbir. They are approached by a pale and skinny man dragging his body toward them. The fictional Jåbir notes that the man has a hoarse, whispering, smothered voice, and looks like he has just survived a deadly illness. Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, he possesses a sort of outlandish look that mesmerizes and enthralls the narrator. This strange man tells them that he had served as sentry in various newspaper quarters and was then transferred to the ruined City Palace cinema, which looks like a “legendary giant” (17) amidst cars, revelers and burning lights in Downtown Beirut. Although the guard, whose name is Butrus, relishes the new city, he is also conscious of the old that furtively infiltrates the new. Walking in the city is at once an encounter with modernity, but also with the haunting ghosts of the city. The derelict sites stand in stark contrast with the renovated city, venting the trauma the ruins had to endure and linking these relics to clandestine, palimpsestic layers of the city. This emaciated man watches Rab⁄ʿ Jåbir anxiously, “as though he knew me, as if there was an ancient tie” (13) between them. Since this was not the time to tell his story, he meets Rab⁄ʿ Jåbir again and begins the nightmarish tale of his underground journey. He hopes that the former would write about it, particularly that he knows that Jåbir likes to write “stories that look real” (15), such as Ralph Rizqallå f⁄-l-mirʾåt (1997; Ralph Rizqallå in The LookingGlass), a novel based on the real incident of the suicide of Ralph Rizqallå, Professor of Psychology at the Lebanese University. Like B⁄r⁄t¨s, these works by Jåbir blend the real and imaginative, blurring the line between the fictitious and the factual. As guard of the cinema, he tells the narrator that he spends a great deal of time walking from Maʿra∂ Street, to the corner of Lubnån wa-l-Mahjar Bank, the Prince Bash⁄r street, al-ʿAzariyya where he visits other guards, and then back to his empty headquarters. These concrete spaces with recognizable topographical markers reinforce the impact of toponymy and verisimilitude that duplicate a factual world. His experiential wanderings in the city are his efforts to overcome the city’s impenetrability and to achieve legibility, to move from chaos to some kind of systematic coherence. The City Palace, referred to as the “ruin” (12), is a place unlike the rest of the city. Grass grows around it and birds fly above the small thorn trees in the corner, reminding him of his childhood and his village in the Sh¨f

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area, both of which are infused with affective connotations and topophilia. The guard’s story, which is a brand of “affective” or personal rather than “historicized” official memory (Nora 1989: 14), is told from the guard’s perspective, in his words, as the quotations in the novel indicate. Butrus, the narrator/guard who appears to represent the city’s irresolvable inner conflicts, insists on telling the story to Rab⁄ʿ Jåbir in a cathartic attempt to come to terms with a traumatic past. Contrary to the visible buildings of the newly renovated al-Íayf⁄ area referred to on the Solidere map as “al-Íayf⁄ village,” the City Palace facing the Fuʾåd Shihåb Bridge stands on pillars with “metal poles plainly visible in their guts” (19). The cinema has also been perforated by shotguns and shrapnel. Built in the 1960s, it stands like a ghost, hiding an underworld that the guard had not imagined existed before. Sitting near the derelict cinema, the narrator hears the thunder and experiences the same fear he felt as a child hearing the bombs and watching the Fuʾåd Shihåb Bridge being shelled. Butrus tells how he was sitting by the entrance of the City Palace, listening to a song by Umm Kulthum, the rain falling in puddles, when he falls asleep and awakens to spot a little boy. He runs after the intruder who is dressed in white, and who jumps like a rabbit and disappears in the darkness. Like Alice in Lewis Carroll’s novel who runs after the rabbit, the narrator chases the boy down the stairs inside the cinema, but falls accidentally into an abyss to find himself in a strange and mysterious underground world. This fall underground triggers memories that link the past with present. He recalls how, in his village, an old acquaintance named George Zakk¨r fell into the sewer for three days before he was miraculously rescued. The novel reinforces relationships of simultaneity and contiguity rather than chronology and difference, alternating between past and present. What appear to be two ontologically different worlds turn out paradoxically to be interrelated where the upper city defines itself against the underground city, revealing the porosity of boundaries between them. This again is a novel where the setting takes precedence over character, rising to the level of protagonist as reflected in the title of the book. The underground city where the “sun does not rise or set at all” (47) is a place where Butrus escapes the nightmare of history. It is a virtual and abstract place represented in spatial and topographical terms. Butrus finds himself in

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a partially painted cavern where he observes a shelf with an extinguished old glass lamp, a clock, and gadgets of a domestic nature with striking similarities to items used in present-day Beirut. The clock points to 8:00, but he soon discovers that the hands have stopped at just after 8:00, accentuating the interruption of time and temporality. These cloistral and suffocating images underline the spatial paucity where archaic objects are interspersed with the anachronistic image of the neon lights in the room where Butrus lies, linking the archaic to the modern city above (58). This is an oneiric place, an amalgamation of necropolis and pastoral, an antiquated and clandestine version of the upper city. It is an uncanny space with unnerving habitations and outlandish encounters, a mental state inducing a slippage between the real and unreal. Stuck in this cavern, having broken his bones, Butrus spends a whole year with a family that consists of a father (Isªåq, or Isaac) and daughter (Råª⁄l, or Rachel), whose eponymous names have biblical resonances, underlining a sort of simple and uncomplicated pastoral life away from the convoluted and nightmarish war that has haunted him ever since he was a child. The appellations Butros (the narrator), Simaan (the narrator’s uncle) and Ibrahim (the narrator’s cousin) underscore the erasure of the boundaries between the two ontologically divided worlds of ancient and modern. Rather than the panoramic, controlling view from above, the view from below is epitomized by his descent into the lower regions of the city. The narrator’s encounter with the two ghost-like figures underpins the uncanny atmosphere, the haunting presence of the past in the present where his injured body underground can be linked to the injured city above. The underground figures look like resuscitated apparitions from the past, mirroring the antiquity that exists within the narrator’s psyche, and reflecting his sense of ontological insecurity. This phantom presence gives him the sense of being trapped in a liminal space, between present and past, and life and death. In Freudian terms, this is a buried, secluded and archaic unconscious, a space of dislocation, reflecting his obsessional fears and losses, where the geography of the lower world partakes of the porosity and indistinctness of a dream and where the literal and metaphorical become indistinct. In this place of ectoplasms, the creatures he encounters look identical. They have wide eyes, long pyramidal faces, yellowish-white complexions and whispering voices; they look like ghostly figures representing abstract states of being.

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At night, the dead silence is reminiscent of a burial chamber, although, at times, Butrus overhears Arabic music and singing emanating from the upper city. The view from below allows him to confront his monsters and visualize them, to map his war experience and its diabolical excesses in order to come to terms with them. When the shells start to fall the family seeks refuge in the shelter in the Monot area where his aunt invokes the Holy Virgin Mother to save them from the bombs (39). Another neighbor kisses the Bible and prays to God to save them from “the mortar bombs, the 106 guns” (39) and other rocket launchers. The narrator tells us that they did “not know whether to laugh or cry hearing her mutter the names of the guns as though she were muttering the names of saints” (39). The necropolis is an alternative to the abysmal deadly war and a reaction to the furtively clandestine lives that people lived in the shelters. The narrator recalls a childhood site where he awakens in the shelter to see his father carrying a candle in his hand and holding the transistor radio to his ear to listen to the news of battles and try to situate the missiles screeching above them. As Jacques Attali puts it, the world is “audible” and “[n]othing essential happens in the absence of noise” (1985: 3). In a similar manner, we are told that the underground place was lit with candles and the place itself was a cave with rock protrusions and dangling stone needles. The narrator observes that there are no doors in his room and wonders if it is possible that these ghost-like figures can penetrate locked doors. The sense that this is a necropolis is reinforced when he tells us that, owing to his injury, his body is wrapped in bandages that make him look like a mummy in a Pharonic tomb: “It really looked like a tomb. If I were in a story I would have thought that I was dead, and the face I saw a few hours or days earlier was indeed my father’s face” (38). He wonders whether “this is a long dream that he will soon awaken from” (38). The underground city reflects the multiple past lives of the place, wars and natural disasters that dragged people underground. Beirut, a synecdochic domicile standing for death, has always been associated with violence and destruction stretching back to pre-historical and Roman times. The narrator’s story can be construed as a bird’s eye-view of Lebanon’s tragic history: the victims of the 1860 massacres from Damascus, Hå‚bayyå, Dayr al-Qamar, Zaªla and Jizz⁄n; the victims of the famine (probably referring to the 1914

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famine in the area); and the victims of earthquakes, all of whom ended up in the lower city. Butrus soon learns that the boy he ran after was actually a woman, Yasm⁄na, who broke the rules of the lower city and went to upper Beirut (some say looking for her husband Iliyyå who had fled to the upper city). Feeling bored lying in bed all these months, his mood changes when Yasm⁄na shows up and sleeps next to him fully naked. After this necrophilic encounter, he falls asleep and dreams of being on horseback, penetrating boundless plains of golden wheat. This again is a rural dream of trees, meadows and fields as well as a sexual metaphor alluding to Butrus’s dream of potency and life away from this deadly abode. In the novel, any occurrence in the underworld triggers a parallel incident in the upper world to emphasize the connection. When the narrator opens his eyes for the first time in the lower city, he thinks he has spotted his own deceased father with his hazel eyes, tawny complexion and curly black hair lined with white, suggesting that this underground is akin to a netherworld (Hades), the abode of the dead. He recalls how, in the village, he once fell into the sewer inside the rocks, and how the rocks looked like mythological animals and creatures and how his father saved him. The text is punctuated with references to his father who is reincarnated in innumerable modes. The gothic employment of prosopopoeia reveals an obsessive need to resurrect his dead father, so much so that the presence of the absent father is an overpowering compulsion in this timeless world. It also shows that the narrator can only remember past sites and incidents through nightmarish experiences and visions. The underground city appears to be inextricably connected with the upper world. When the battles rage outside, the inner city shakes, the roofs fall in, and the smoke coming from above suffocates the inhabitants. The narrator is told that, at certain times, some fishermen actually get out and steal clothes and furniture as well as food from the refrigerators of the Embassy, Abella, Monoprix and Spinneys supermarkets; some of them go blind because of the glaring light of above while others are lost and never come back. Falling into the underground evokes another place and time: his visits to the cinema that he used to frequent. He tells us that from 1983 to 1990,

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he spent a great deal of time underground in a cinema in Beirut that featured pornographic films. The cinema is a heterotopia of separation, a place of resistance that immerses him into an erogenous zone of spectacle and libidinal gratification. At the same time, it is a dilapidated place with broken seats, some of which are blackened, having been consumed by fire. Part of the screen is torn so that whenever actors move to the left or right their heads disappear from the screen. Militiamen go in without paying any fares and there are also impotent old men who crowd the toilets. The narrator normally brings his sandwiches with him and spends the whole day watching the few films that are played and re-played throughout the day. Rather than a replication, the relation between the two Beiruts above and below, present and past, modern and anachronistic, material and spectral, is symbiotic. This archaic Beirut is a counter-site, a space that is other, imaginary, but interconnected with the Beirut above. For instance, the character Isªåq’s ancestors were Jews and Óayy al-Shaykh Muªammad in the lower city is referred to as the district of the Jews, which is reminiscent of the Jewish district in upper Beirut, Óayy Wåd⁄ Ab¨ Jam⁄l. The fall into the chasm is in itself a metaphorical excavation of the past, and the narrator oscillates between lower and upper life in such a manner that the synchronic disrupts the diachronic. The geographer/historian of the underground city is the only one who knows his way in the labyrinthine passageways below. He owns a map of the lower city that he always updates; he also possesses a map of the upper city and can tell the narrator what places are directly above him, but the narrator doubts the accuracy of his maps. For instance, he asks the narrator to describe the huge trees in Beirut where birds build their nests and fill the branches. His map represents Beirut as a rustic, ruralized town that is different from the contemporary city of Beirut. The narrator tells him that trees nowadays are very scarce in Beirut, and buildings have replaced vegetation in order to accommodate the increasing population, particularly those moving from rural areas. The geographer’s reaction is that he has maps, and does not understand what the narrator is saying in a place that has the advantages of sun and sky. His map, which purports to be accurate, actually deals with abstract rather than lived space, and his cartographic facts are restricted to the limits of the underground world, flawed when it comes to the upper world, and clearly need updating.

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The narrator refers to himself as belonging to the war generation, having been born during the war and having experienced its traumatic incidents: massacres between the Christians and Druze in the mountains where his own house was blown up, forcing his family out into the Christian east of Beirut; the kidnapping and vanishing of his fifteen-year-old cousin Ibrahim in 1987; and the murder of his uncle Simʿån where Butrus saw his body split as if by a firewood saw (43). The narrator is haunted with memories of disaster, death, kidnapping, carnage and violence precipitated by the war. The ruptured human connectivity and solidarity and the disappearance of relatives and friends accentuate his feelings of intense sequestration. The narrator’s traumatic experience is so intense that he claims he does not remember what happened to Simʿån, although he actually describes what he saw: I do not remember the green intestine on the stairs under the balcony. I do not remember the mewing of the cats, and I don’t remember the pieces of flesh on the colored washing hanging on the line, and the white washing that fell with the line which was cut by shrapnel or the pressure of an explosion. (43)

For him, Beirut is a funereal city, an uncanny, formless, fluid, incongruous and monstrous place that has gobbled up many of its inhabitants. Having no money to live in areas away from the battles, he scans the Fuʾåd Shihåb Bridge from their apartment on the eighth floor of the building. Behind the bridge, he sees buildings with wide open windows that are “cold, dark like the eyes of ghouls staring at me but not seeing me” (124), underlying an isomorphic relation between city and humans. There are swamps among the buildings, and at night the barking of dogs becomes louder and sounds like “a pack of foxes barking in unison” (124). This entropic atmosphere with its drab buildings and eerie atmosphere transforms the city into a frightening, suffocating and uncanny ghost town. From his tiny apartment on the eighth floor on the east side of Beirut, he sees washing hanging from the windows of tumbling buildings, a vision restricted to a limited area, and underscoring a fragmented and atomistic rather than a comprehensive, totalistic perspective. The city is an expanse that can only be known in a limited and imperfect manner, challenging assumptions of a fathomable reality. Butrus’s view of people in the streets is

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of displaced and subaltern inhabitants of the Downtown area. He watches children running between charred cars in the swamps and among the mire trenches. He also spots barricades made of ripped sandbags, colored plastic gallons, carriages and thyme vendors. He hears the voice of Mohammed Abdel Wahab coming from a huge black radio on the roof of a car. He wonders how these people have managed to escape the snipers and the shelling. He watches displaced families (from South Lebanon, the mountain and North Lebanon) sitting in the courtyard among collapsing statues with broken edges, which reflect the unstable and fluid state of affairs in the city. The public space is transformed into a sort of domestic space where people cook, eat and drink and where kitchen utensils and other items find their place next to collapsing public monuments; the distinction between outer space and inner spaces becomes blurred. A few days later, he walks toward the Fuʾåd Shihåb Bridge where he sees human bones on the bridge with nylon bags floating like jellyfish on green swamps, and in one of the derelict buildings, Butrus reads a paper that was left there nine or ten years before. The narrator deals with the traumatic past in a piecemeal manner to make it more tolerable and palatable. He reassembles fragments into whole narratives, abandoning sequential narration in favor of simultaneity without ruling out the presence of history that interacts with geography to project a spatio-temporal pattern. In other words, the past comes alive in wavering images and fragmented modes. The traumatic war experience continues to haunt the narrator unabated even after the official end of the war. He recalls how his brother joins an extreme militia group called the T¨y¨s (that means “male goats,” metaphorically meaning “obstinate” and “pig-headed”) of the Lebanese Christian forces, taking drugs and committing atrocities. Butrus’s horrendous memories of his brother’s deeds reveals a dystopian nightmare where the atrocities committed by his brother bring violent nightmares of heads rolling on the ground, brains dashed and flesh peeled “like a banana skin” (218). Such gory nightmares reveal the extent of his psychological ordeal and the impact of his brother’s supposed deeds on his psyche as well as a reaction to the official Lebanese policy of erasure, starting with a clean slate and letting the “Dead be Dead” (Yahya 2007: 236). Unlike his brother, the narrator insists on retaining his individuality against the group identity that the war embraced, but, paradoxi-

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cally, and away from the security of the group, he feels isolated, vulnerable, marginalized, naked and defenseless. After recovering from his injury, he moves from Óayy al-Shaykh Muªammad on to another residence in Óayy al-Maʿåmil (factory district), and Óayy al-Manåjim (mine district). His fragmentary impressions focus on a landscape of angst, dearth, sickness and squalor. The lower city is a nebulous, anemic, sluggish place, ontologically opposed to the outer world, a shadowy double to the upper city. Toward the end of his underground journey, he encounters the “Mud People” who live in the forgotten outskirts of the city, an inhuman and debased locale filled with rotting fish and diseased bodies. In line with premodern societies, this landscape is predominantly “characterized by distinctions of smell” (Urry 2000: 394; Rodaway 1994a: 61–81; Porteous 1990: 369). In this “smellscape” the people are sick, poor and starving with mud driveling down their chins. The narrator tells how he went to get water from Sab⁄l al-ʿUmyån (the spring of the blind). While filling the pitcher, a group of blind individuals approach him asking for water since the “Mud People” are bitten with diarrhea. He suddenly hears a familiar voice: “Above we have medication for these diseases . . . My mother used to give me medicine when I had diarrhea and I was healed. I still remember the medicine box. It was red like blood” (230). The narrator recognizes the old voice. It was his kidnapped cousin who is now blind with lines on his forehead, his skin having lost its “shiny swarthiness” (230), a sight that he will never forget. He recognizes the beloved face: It was Ibråh⁄m, looking at me without seeing me! I was afraid to talk when he talked to me. I was afraid that if he had heard my voice from this short distance he would have recognized it. I was afraid to be recognized. I was afraid he would remember me! He asked for water and I gave him. He said “Thank you,” but I did not answer (230–1).

The unresolved traumatic incident of Ibråh⁄m’s disappearance suddenly erupts, and he comes face to face with his dead cousin in a perturbingly uncanny moment.1 This “painful re-membering” (Bhabha 1986: xxiii) of the dormant past is the first step toward escape from the abyss of the past, a sudden revelatory unveiling of his psychic occlusions.

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This uncanny exposure in the Lake of the Blind marks the beginning of the healing process (an allusion to the biblical lake of Siloam where Jesus physically healed a blind man) from what appears to be post-traumatic stress disorder epitomized by gothic and other supernatural tropes, such as the deployment of prosopopoeia, the trope of haunting (Collins and Jervis 2008: 1–7). His dead cousin is suddenly present, embodied, tangible and vocal. In a state of dread of the human corpse, he feels that the boundaries between the world of death and that of life are blurring, a state that is described by Julia Kristeva (1980: 4) as “the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject.” It was his dead cousin lamenting the loss of his young life and protesting against the ordeal he had to endure. This dead/undead figure is an object of conflicting feelings: love and dread, empathy and rejection, hopelessness and adoration, nostalgia and disavowal. The narrator’s reaction is to flee the apparitional, cryptic, sepulchral netherworld for the upper world where he intends to erect boundaries between the corporeal and otherworldly where he would be able to heal the rift between himself and the inadmissible others (his cousin, father, mother, friends and all those lost to him). Opting for the present, the narrator gets out of the abyss, and the first sight is the Rawsha rock, a synecdoche for Beirut itself, and the Dbayb¨ restaurant, which is full of people drinking arak. He discovers that he loves their voices and their giggles, and is not disturbed by their drinking or the racket they make all night long. The vertical journey allows him to finally bury his dead and his past in a safe, bounded, impervious region underground. He turns his back to the archaic, opts for life, and embraces the modern evanescent present. He is able now to appreciate a bad song and low and distasteful kitsch. It is when he experiences the alterity, the premodern and archaic, that the full significance of Beirut’s brand of modernity becomes apparent and makes him risk his life to be part of it. But the fact that he finds the need to tell his story to Rab⁄ʿ Jåbir reveals that while the experience gives him a sense of catharsis, the past is not fully eradicated. As Derrida puts it, the revenant spectre is uncontrollable “because it begins by coming back” (1994: 11; emphasis in original). His underground journey teaches him not to erase but rather to cope with the past. That is why he can declare with confidence that “Beirut is my city which, despite its high cement buildings full of apart-

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ments referred to by my father as ‘sardine cans’, remains my beloved city” (135). Ruins as the Real Fabrics of the City Unlike Jåbir’s novel that tries to draw strength from the past, Barakat’s Óårith al-miyåh focuses on the ruined Downtown Beirut that the narrator identifies with, and holds on to. This is a hominocentric narrative told by a man named Nicholas Mitri, a Greek Orthodox Christian who had lived with his parents in the quarter of Wadi Abu Jmil on the west side of Beirut up until the third year of the civil war. He returns home one day after the death of his parents to find their home looted and occupied. His neighbor Abu Adnan tells him that “the people who lived there were not the same ones who had stolen its contents,” and that in a war situation he “should never have left it without delegating someone to protect it” (18). Despite the occupation of his home, the narrator is astonished at his own inexplicable indifference. In addition to the house, his father’s shop, like all other businesses in Downtown Beirut, has been raided and ransacked. To salvage whatever is left, he and his neighbor Abdel-Karim, who owned the shop adjacent to his father’s shop, rent a six-wheel truck; however, because of narrow lanes, other vans, pickup trucks and crowds of people trying to rescue their merchandise before the next round of fighting, the truck cannot enter the souq from Rue Weygand, and when explosions are heard nearby, the van and hired porters disappear, leaving them behind. Abdel-Karim begins cursing and swearing, blaming it “on the Kurds and their ilk, by whom he meant the porters and truck driver, who had all disappeared in a flash” (12); the narrator, on the other hand, is unresponsive and does not share Abdel-Karim’s frustration and ire. He seems strangely detached and disconnected from the political and military events. When the Downtown Beirut merchants meet to discuss their plight, the narrator again feels a debilitating, cold and unsympathetic feeling. This enervating indifference and inability to acknowledge any feelings takes him by surprise and drives him to eventually retreat into himself, both physically and mentally. He makes his way to the Downtown area, a space already devastated and done with, that appears to shield him from the war and challenge the dualism

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of the two warring factions on the two opposing sides of Beirut. In this heterotopia of a sanitized psycho space interspersed with personal memories of the past, nothing disturbs his equilibrium. He is now a figure of solitude in a third space of political choice removed from the commotion and turmoil of the war city. This counter-space is empty and deserted, where he looks like a lone survivor of an engulfing deluge. Within this locale, he has ample time to “review the lessons” he had learned from his father about fabrics (9). This heterotopia, an alternative mode of ordering,2 is a site from which to repudiate the war, condemn the current political state of affairs, and escape from history in a setting where he stages his disturbed feelings. Simultaneously, it is concomitant with the freedom of indulging in psychosis, sexual desire, omnipotence and withdrawal. In the deserted old city, the past is evoked in flickers, in a non-linear manner in accordance with external as well as internal stimuli. Nicholas’s brand of personal memory is one that appears to disrupt the systematized and epistemological approach of historical memory through the use of a discourse that can be construed as mytho-scientific: the discourse on fabrics and weaving. In his repudiation of times’ uninterrupted flow, he clings to what he insists is a stable and unchangeable world represented by his father. His aim is to focus not on the bloody war, but on his father and his old textile business and well-known shop in Downtown Beirut, which is turned over to the narrator after his father’s death. The shop in Souq al-Tawile is the place where he lives now, a supposedly stable locale dominated by his father. His movement into the devastated Downtown area is an attempt to suppress change and literally pick up the pieces in order to revive his father’s worn-out world, which is hierarchical, whole and unadulterated. For instance, when his mother complained that the seamstress Madame Rahmi had not considered current fashion and rejected anything modern, his father’s face became grim and somber: Do you know that to put things together was—and still is—forbidden in the holy books of the Jews? Do you know, for instance, that those scriptures forbade a man to till his field with an ox and a donkey yoked together to his plow? And that it was forbidden to wear cloth woven from two fibres of different origins? This is not only to avoid bringing together what God had

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kept apart. More important, it is because to combine, in itself, is a venture of uncertain outcome. The experiment might fail, and leave behind loss and regret. (39–40)

His father is no “cloth-trader” with fabrics that have no history; his role model is their old friend Hajj Akbar Maktabi whose manner of dealing with carpets is reminiscent of “his Persian ancestors bent over their folios” (33). His father’s aversion to hybridity is the pure and unalloyed that the narrator strives to preserve and re-capture. The narrator’s sympathy with his father’s point of view reflects his aversion to the erosion of a sovereign country that has fragmented into irreconcilable groups and localities. Unlike the cheap material that is sold today, the old fabric is a creature of art, panache, as well as mental power and deep poring over precious volumes and perusal of studies related to the subject. The narrator is dissatisfied that velvet that was worn by the elite in the “age of privilege” is today adulterated by democracy’s corduroy, proclaiming the “fabric’s age of decadence” (98). Like his father, his mother had a strong artistic and aesthetic temperament and always talked of her operatic singing. Like him, she belongs to the past and is always nostalgic for the old life in Egypt: her singing at the court of King Farouk and her relation with Queen Nazli. Whenever his mother reflected on these bygone days, her “voice fell back into the rhythms of the Egyptian dialect” (8). His mother sang at King Farouk’s birthday celebration where she met the narrator’s grandfather who was captivated by her, and speedily marries her to his son for fear that if she returned to the palace, “Farouq would surely add me to his harem” (7). He feared that “I would become an artiste, a famous one, because I was so beautiful and my voice was sublime” (7). His mother is self-absorbed and sure of her effect on men, including her husband’s father and King Farouq himself. When she decides to move to Beirut, her father-in-law is opposed to such a decision since he detests the city and believes that Beirut is heading toward destruction either by earthquakes or wars: “Quakes had twice wiped the city off the earth already, and there was no doubt that the third convulsion was due. The time has come for the third, he would say, and we’re not even counting the havoc of wars” (8). At the same time, unlike his father who had a passion for fabrics, his

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mother loved the design of a garment and was less enthusiastic about the fabric. She preferred color to matters of “the material’s weight or density” and its “draping qualities” (39), which in the seamstress’s eyes were inconsistent with the wife of a man who knew textiles, understanding cloth to a very high degree (38–9). Furthermore, his mother did not like any particular outfit in the fashion magazines. Instead, “it would be the collar from this dress with a sleeve from that one” (37). She chose hybrid styles that his father and the French-speaking upper-class seamstress strongly rejected. Yet the war has abraded this brand of elitism that the narrator clings to and desperately wants to preserve. When his mother dumps the cloth scraps into the dustbin, the narrator “rescues” them, “closing my fingers hard around each one, bringing them against my ears. Then I would open my hands quickly to hear the scraps’ secret rustling. I would breathe them in, eyes closed, capturing their smell” (38). This early obsession with fabric foreshadows his eventual withdrawal into his father’s shop in the Downtown area. The narrator’s father possesses a bourgeois elitist taste where the pure substance, the prestigious and “sacred garments of bishops and kings,” takes precedence over the offensive mishmash, and “the mongrel blends” (40) produced for public and market consumption. Despite his mother’s nonconformist behavior, the narrator notes that his father never opposed her “even when she dressed me in girls’ clothes against my wishes, instructing me at home on how to sing opera” (3). The narrator resents his mother’s indifference to his male integrity and insists on a pure untainted masculinity. His movement to Downtown Beirut which stood for a unified, sovereign state, underlines his aversion to hybridity or any mongrel identity. Unlike Yasmine in Dåyman Coca-Cola, who embraces hybridity, living in a place where gender-crossing is accepted, the narrator holds on to his father’s totalistic views. Whenever they are late at work, his father would insist on buying his wife flowers or out-of-season fruit with exorbitant prices from La Damascene in Rue Weygand to atone for being late to dinner and making Athena, his wife, hungry. Nicholas describes the burdensome task of carrying the huge bunch of flowers where he “would be shrouded in a cumbersome bouquet of roses whose thorns would poke into my hands, or flowers whose enormous leaves would prevent me from seeing the lights of the city as we made our

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way home” (4). His mother who bears the same name as the Greek Goddess Athena (weaver of the city) combines sexuality, maternity and power. The narrator is literally hurt by his father’s tolerance of her and blindness to her faults, and by his mother’s power and control over him. The only time that Nicholas begins to tolerate her is when, in her old age, she ends up totally dependent on him: “Slowly and carefully I washed her face and cleaned her dentures. I combed and plaited her hair. I brought her sweet biscuits and milk” (55). After his father’s death, the narrator realizes that he was a disappointment to his mother. Not only had he interrupted his studies and failed to become a doctor or music scholar, but in the fabric business it is clear that he will never fill his “father’s shoes” (5). He clearly felt that he had failed to achieve anything worthwhile to make his mother proud of him. In the devastated Downtown area where he takes his abode, Nicholas is an idiosyncratic loner, out of sync with the war city, a pariah possessing an anomic hyper-inflation of individuality, far removed from any communal or national attachment. This Romantic withdrawal into the past proclaims the obfuscation of social relations and the retreat of the narrator into his own shell, spurred by his pathological individualism and solipsism. This brand of urban individualism touched on by Simmel (Wolff 1964: 409–24) is further radicalized with the added dimension of a vicious war where the narrator is equally ex-centric and eccentric to the world and to himself. Far from being a modernist brand of subjectivity—“the autonomous, self-willing, selfdefining, and self-conscious individual agent” (Habermas 1990: 338), this is a retreat into a fixed and stable past that would brush aside the war’s unstable state of fluidity and perpetual becoming. Unable to cut the umbilical cord to the past, he ends up a figure of a crumbling past peculiarly at odds with modernity mirrored in the material traces of the old-fashioned clothes that he was wearing on his visit to the bank before finally moving into his father’s shop. Moving in the direction of Rue de France, he begins walking through the maze of the narrow lanes of the still and empty space of the city center to find himself at dusk in front of his father’s shop. The antiquated effects of the shop give him a good feeling, particularly as he views them as belonging to the world of his father whose ghost lingers on in the old shop. Suffering from

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a strange sense of apathy and indifference after the looting and occupation of his house by displaced people, he finds that moving into his father’s old shop is his ultimate desire and that the city has not betrayed him as his grandfather had predicted it would. Rather, it has given him his heart’s desire, a shelter from a threatened identity. Through a slippage into a bygone past, he retreats from history and finds himself in “lieux de memoire” (Nora 1989: 7), or in remains of the past represented by his father who no longer exists, the fabrics that are no longer sellable, and a shop that is in shambles. Within this vacant locale, one notes a shift from the collective to the individual, the historical to the autobiographical, the diachronic to the synchronic, and the fleeting modern to the revenant past. Ironically, in seeking to embrace the father, he ends up in a timeless world of passivity countered by fantasies of erotic control. The invocation of the fabrics trope reveals his aversion to change and a desire for permanence. This no-man’s land that he now occupies remains in the hazy liminal space, on the margin of the open-ended hostilities around him, a space of resistance to the geography of a sectarian city. Away from the violent present, his psyco-space is filled with ghosts, remnants of the past and apparitional figures that shield an atavistic world, like sturdy barricades against change. His part of the city mirrors an idyllic past severed from the rest of the country. This is a region constructed from an intermingling of concrete and abstract, presence and absence, material and immaterial. Fearing change, he resurrects his father by inhabiting his shop and soon discovers that all the cheap fabrics have been burnt while the “real stuff” (22) revered by his father remained intact on the lower floor. The lower floor clearly stands for his deeply ingrained desires to rescue the past and eradicate the present. In this lower region, he dotes on the fabrics, his route to desire and escape from impotence and castration. His wanderings along the deserted streets that bear French names, like Rue Foch and Rue Allenby, as well as Arabic and Turkish names, such as Rue Abdallah Bayhum, reveal the city’s hybrid identity that has become a site of contention between Lebanese proponents of Western/Christian and Arab/ Islamic identity. The narrative highlights metonymic relations among places and settings of spatial contiguity: “This evening, my route will take me by the façade of the Restaurant Ajami. I’ll walk down Rue Khan Fakhri Bek as

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far as the Majidiyya Mosque, or south to the Samatiyya cemetery” (35). The focus on these deserted places underlines his desire to remain in a past world outside the time belonging to the civil war. This deserted part of the city has lost a great deal of its urban qualities and appears to be acquiring qualities akin to the rural. If the Baudlarian flaneur botanizes on the asphalt (Benjamin 1983: 36), the wanderer in the devastated streets botanizes on the newfound paradise, the “garden of Eden that the Lord had set aflame to conquer the destruction, to obliterate it and triumph over it. To return sovereignty to the land” (25). The asphalt, plowed away by warfare, gives way for “fertile ground for grass and weeds” and other vegetation, like castor-oil plants (24–5). Nature imposes itself upon the devastated urban jungle. This romantic escape into nature underpins his retreat into an atavistic, antediluvian, pre-Adamite world. The labyrinthine city is a place where he thinks this “self-propagating” rural environment can annihilate the urban, where he can embrace pastness and its counterpart fixity, and save himself from the cheap and adulterated diolen to embrace the pure and untainted lace. Outside the world of humans, he feels like a privileged male subject with a stable, coherent identity in control of the empty world that he assumes belongs to him. In this peripheral position, he finds himself at the center of a new world that he controls and possesses. He describes himself as the “only sovereign” of this new area, presiding “over all that is above earth and what lies beneath the surface . . . I build and demolish, erect and raze” (61). Within his exilic position he voices his desire to control, in a city that has robbed him of agency and exposed his paranoiac fears of losing an ornate past in an unembellished present. His father’s shop is transformed into an exotic palace where the fabrics like Harun al-Rashid’s jawari await the sovereign’s arrival: My house, I call it. My palace, I really should say. I live in a palace such as not even Harun al-Rashid enjoyed . . . Every time I took down a bolt of fabric—these rare and precious pearls of mine—I spread it out on the floor and began to consider it from a distance, examining it from every angle . . . I all but wept, my happiness and awe were so great, before coming forward to touch the material. Then I would take off all of my clothes and wrap

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myself in the length of the fabric. I would spend an entire night shrouded in each one. I would breathe in its fragrance and hear its rustle from inside; I would press it against my skin, against every part of my body, to resuscitate my own intimate memories of that particular fabric in every detail. (35)

Within his “palace,” he shapes his dreams of omnipotent control and stages himself as the virile prince whose concubines are at his beck and call; he wonders whether the fabric, or mistress he selects will “be tender and gracious . . . lascivious and wicked . . . dreamy and idle . . . ignorant and enchanting . . . distracted and forgetful of me” (61). Under the spell of antiquity, he spins the yarns of his narrative that he weaves with the fine filaments of his father’s outmoded fabrics, turning the city into a linguistic interlacing texture that bespeaks his atavistic tale. He also goes further to claim possession of the “whole expanse” of the empty city and views himself as a prophet: “With my bundle and thick stick” (61). If he carries his prophetic stick outside, he also holds the phallic fabric spools inside the shop that give him sexual control over the inner space of the shop. In the Mar Jirjis Cathedral, he ends up “in a dark cavity below ground” (45) and begins descending the “stone steps,” assuming they are “crypts where they once buried the prelates and the saints” (45). He is ready to pick any object “even if it were a grave marker or the bones and skulls of those felicitous holy personages” (46), but instead of the remains of these personages, he found a “large terracotta jar, supported on either side by a pair of stubby pillars or perhaps semi-globular rocks” (46). He enters a chamber “walled round with what looked like white marble” and “upright stones, perhaps statues or small obelisks planted in the hard earth” (65). The archeological objects unexpectedly encountered put him face to face with the palimpsestic city and its manifold pasts. The first thing he tries to do is remove the artifacts that belong to different layers of history, and then carry them home despite their weight; this mirrors his own obsession with the archaic that infiltrates into the modern world and tries to dismantle it. Coming face to face with layers of the past preserved underneath the city, he sets out to excavate these archeological sites. The descent into the ancient city is a psychological descent into his derelict psyche. This is a real as well as psycho-archeological expedi-

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tion where Nicholas tries to excavate his archaic self through the spatial, archeological and architectural metaphors of the city. The Mar Jirjis Cathedral and the crypt underneath are viewed by the narrator in sepulchral terms where the horrendous violence and destruction have transformed the place into a city of the dead. The city’s past asserts its presence in the familiar quotidian site of the girl who looks as though she were alive. He tells us that he spots a human figure sitting cross-legged, the torso leaning against the part of the amphora that remained intact. This artifact is a girl with hair and a gown that have survived the ravages of time. The transparency of her delicate skin gives her the aspect of a skeleton, but with her hair and clothes intact, she had more the appearance of a young woman who had just been laid in her coffin. (46–7)

The amphora girl looks familiar, even quotidian, but also enigmatic and mysterious, unearthing the narrator’s surprise at the power of the past to endure and intrude into the present, and the fragility of individual life. This amalgamation of history with geography can be seen when traces of the past intrude into the present, underscoring the coexistence between space and time, past and present, the amphora girl leading him back to Shamsa (his parents’ beautiful Kurdish servant). He re-visits the amphora girl and feels a sense of security and peace in her presence: My breathing grew regular, my limbs relaxed, and a gentle, pleasant sleepiness rose to my head. I looked at her. It seemed to me now that I had poorly estimated her age on the last occasion. She was not a girl. She was a small woman . . . as if, in my absence, she had sat still in her small frame, waiting until my gaze would bring her to life, in her wholeness, sitting cross-legged before me. For me. (69)

While his voyeuristic approach to her is reminiscent of his attitude to Shamsa, the fact that she is lifeless suggests that necrophilia appears to be his passage to potency and sexuality. Only when a woman is passive, indeed dead, does he feel sexually functional. In looking at her he paradoxically brings her, and therefore himself, to life. He would walk down in front of the Azar Coffee Roastery and across

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Place des Martyrs to the Rivoli and Foch Avenue, and then straight toward the sea to reach his abode. The empty city is mapped through the use of metonymic toponymy, the naming of places that ensure his safe return to his headquarters. His peripatetic movements around the old places that appear to be frozen in time reveal his Gulliver-like aversion to people and his attraction to empty spaces, edifices and other remains. These are recognizable old haunts abandoned by the people who were allied with them: Today . . . I felt so energetic that I convinced myself to take a serious walk to the further end of the Places des Martyrs, as far as Café Parisiana and, opposite, the shop of Qaysar Amir, king of fireworks . . . Then I made a turn at Zayn, the fresh juice seller, where I had already carried off two metal trays that I now use at home. I passed in front of the Café Laronda, then the theatre of Shushu the comedian, and went on to Gaumont Palace, the famous cinema that I had not yet entered, though a few days ago I had been inside of Cinema Byblos, where I had taken some plastic sheets that I put over the plants in my garden to intensify the sunlight and heat on cold and wintry days . . . I thought about going on as far as the Bint Jbayl Garage and the shop of Abu Saʿ⁄d, “the licorice man.” (43)

The shop is there without Abu Saʿ⁄d, the theatre of Shushu without Shushu, the café Laronda without the customers. These are skeleton places, remains that he adheres to in the old Jahiliyya tradition of standing by the ruins. A great deal of his life in this new abode is nomadic, taking place in public and in motion rather than in a sedentary state. He walks as far as souq Sursock, turning in the direction of the Mansour Assaf Mosque. Relying on memory, he decides to walk down Rue Husayn al-Ahdab, the Palace d’Etoile, and on to the Omary Mosque, Rue Weygand, and home, but he gets lost. Even though these places continue to bear traces of the past, it is clear that this is not the city in any mimetic sense even though the skeleton places can be identifiable. In order not to lose his way, he marks his path and gives new names to streets and places that he does not recognize. Walking along the devastated city, the protagonist’s old memories of the locale are evoked. In his movements around the city, it “goes soft” and “invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can live in” (Raban 1974: 9). In other words, it

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starts losing its opaqueness and gradually becoming more transparent. A large portion of this deserted city center is described by Nicholas as “a labyrinth of small crisscrossing alleys” (48) and meandering paths that project his fear of losing his way and not arriving at his destination. In order to move smoothly through the changed landscape, he charts the city by drawing on street names, buildings, edifices and other architectural features. More importantly, he draws a skeleton map of the sites that have lost their original features (61–2). For instance, he gives the square where he hides from the howling dogs the new name, “Square of Dogs” (64), and the map of the city is reconstructed in accordance with shifting associations, routes and destinations. In other words, he reads the city through his thoughts as well as the material spaces he traverses, and disrupts the representational legitimacy of the cartographer’s map by constructing his own cognitive map to ease his route and ensure that his city is both legible and accessible. Unlike the geographer’s obsolete map of Beirut in B⁄r⁄t¨s, Nicholas’s own cognitive map is one that is contingent and expedient. For him, the enmeshing of public and private mapping is a way of controlling the entropic and fluid city and thus attaining autonomy and self-sufficiency. The aim of Nicholas is to restore the old prewar stability and clarity in the lap of his father and his pure, unadulterated fabrics, and to re-capture—what he assumes to be—the old transparency and certainty. His intention is to impose systematic order on chaos and urban fluidity. Despite his attempt at accuracy, the narrator—like Butrus in B⁄r⁄t¨s who suggests that his experience may have been a nightmarish dream—is not sure of the authenticity of his tale and always reminds the reader that certain incidents may have been hallucinations precipitated by the fever he had suffered from, such as his escape from the wild dogs. Accordingly, the boundaries between fantasy and verisimilitude, and topography and the imagination, become indistinct. He wakes up the following day and finds no dogs and wonders: “Had yesterday’s scenes come from my disturbed dreams or been the result of the fevers flaming inside my head? I had the taste of rusty metal in my throat as I slipped from my lofty hiding place to the ground. I recalled the wild tomatoes that I had eaten yesterday; perhaps they were poisonous” (51). The no-man’s land he circulates in is an uncanny derelict site littered

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with ruins, wrecks and human remains: “I caught sight of a long white bone. I went over to it and turned it over with my foot, feeling uneasy. It did not take me long to convince myself that it was a human thighbone” (63). This uncanny sight confronts the narrator on his quotidian encounters with human fragments and remains in his bizarre sepulchral territory. Unable to survive in the dystopian war zone, he prefers to encounter the city through cadavers, fragmentary ruins, wreckage, monstrous dogs and wild fruits and vegetables. The city is anthropomorphized, compounding brick and flesh, anthropoid and faunae, and cadavers and hominids. Away from the destructive warfare, and amidst the devastated remains, the earth is revived and the fertility of the soil is renewed. This self-propagating environment is the narrator’s source of sustenance in his centrifugal movement away from the city into a lingering life-in-death existence nourished by an atavistic past. Like a present-day Robinson Crusoe, he picks wild blackberries and tomatoes sprouting in the deserted city, and also grows his own fruit and vegetable garden. The ruins appear to coexist with the surrounding vegetable and animal world. Living in an empty and destroyed space, he survives by making use of bricolage, where he makes his own fishing hook and water pipes from the bone stools left in his father’s shop. In a sort of contingent, imaginary, empty rural landscape, he manages to build a fire, go fishing, hunting and gathering as well as keep a companion Man Friday represented by a dog: “The dog followed me closely and I was soon persuaded that from the beginning all he had wanted was company . . . he wanted a human being as a friend and master; he longed for a sociability that would resemble whatever had disappeared, one day, behind the roadblocks” (119). To communicate with the dog by “oral mimicry” (Rodaway 1994b: 109) underlines a pre-historic, oral culture that is part and parcel of what Rodaway refers to as “auditory geography” (1994b: 84). Living in this labyrinthine area outside history, he reverts to the animal subhuman level and becomes anthropomorphized: “Like a pair of mad dogs, we [Nicholas and the dog] run together, and in harmony we howl feverishly” (136). In a landscape that he likes to view as rural and with a view of himself as a sort of pre-industrial hunter-gatherer, and handicraftsman away from urban technology, he develops a strong “auditory sensitivity” (Rodaway 1994b: 109). Hearing a howl in the distance, he tries to locate the site where

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the eerie sound is coming from and wonders whether “subconsciously” he had “assumed that the barking was coming from outside of the city center, beyond the sandbag barrier”’ (64). Explosions drive Nicholas away into the shop that is relatively free from this menacing soundscape: “Yet when the din of explosions intensifies and fiery blazes fill the sky over the souqs . . . I prefer to retreat to my house as night falls” (35). To use Rodaway’s words, “Amplification of sound not only fills space, it obliterates it” (108), marking the disintegration of sight; that is, the city is no longer visual but auditory as well, reminiscent of the city in B⁄r⁄t¨s where Butrus’s father hides in the shelter and tries to locate the shells screeching outside. Similarly, when the “howling rose, sharp and aggressive, it poured into my head, filling it instantly with terror . . . I jumped onto the flooring of what remained of a small balcony overlooking a space where several lanes met . . . poking my head out through the ferns, I saw the pack” (49). Since the noise has no stable locale and emanates from all directions, the narrator panics and hides on a ruined balcony, but only feels secure when he actually sees the pack of dogs within a particular locale. It is clear that contrary to sight, the sound of the barking has no boundaries and seems to come from any direction, filling his ears and forcing him to seek shelter. Unlike the guard’s father in B⁄r⁄t¨s who is acquainted with his surroundings, Nicholas’s inability to trace the sounds springs from his lack of familiarity with the wrecked surroundings that forces him to construct his own cognitive map of the city. In addition to the howl of animals, the narrator is taken aback by the sound of “a tank or an armored car” (68) that comes from the war zone. Walking in the underground area, he hears “[h]uman voices and the staccato clatter of machines. Metallic human voices. Splintered and shattered, vibrating, muddled” (68).3 The short staccato sentences reflect a fragmented and incoherent city. He feels threatened by the decentered and displaced auditory landscape and seeks refuge in his shop. The ruined city, the crumbling buildings, the broken glass, the bullet ridden walls, falling balconies, crumbling facades and other fragments from billboards, posters and commercials are symbols of the mutability of modernist ruins. The labyrinth, according to Benjamin (1985: 40), “has a specific sexual meaning: male impotence . . . The path of someone shy of arrival at a goal

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easily takes the form of a labyrinth. This is the way of the (sexual) drive in those episodes which precede its satisfaction.” This ties in well with his complicated sexuality: his mother complex, his fear of Shamsa’s mature sexuality, who is able to shock him through her gaze and disturb a fragile masculinity accentuated by occasional references to himself as impotent in the presence of female sexuality, his necrophilic desire for the terracotta girl and his daily orgies with his fabrics. He walks through the labyrinth of the streets that run parallel to the labyrinth of his own psycho-geography, the omnipresent past epitomized in the tangled web of his relations with his mother, father, Shamsa and other persons in the domestic and the public space. In the narrator’s state of mind, a complete and coherent story of the past is shattered into bitty and disjointed fragments. The narrator’s relationship with Shamsa is articulated through his discourse on fabrics. He wonders whether he fell “in love with Shamsa for her linen” (53)—the fabrics and colors she wears: “all of these colors over which she threw her dark-red shawl and her white scarf . . . all of this linen, and a little velvet and she had gone. Nothing stayed behind for me” (55). This discourse reinforces his voyeuristic and licentious imagination as compensation for sexual inadequacy and desire for control. His discourse on linen underlines the association of linen with purity, virginity and modesty, which Shamsa, who wears this fabric, and, more importantly, his mother, must represent. The narrator resorts to the erotics of narration to substitute for the real sexual gratification that is absent from his life. Under his tutorship, Shamsa is like a “disciple of a Sufi master,” (72) ascending with him “in each level of pleasure” (72), demanding obedience to her master and becoming more beautiful to please him. He tells us that her “white flesh overflowed between my hands. She grew and rose like blessed dough. Her thighs took on the fragrance of vanilla, her buttocks the taste of delicate biscuits” (71). With Shamsa, he remains in an eternal state of excitement: “To leave the crescendo at its very summit is to deliver it from its own decay and from an ugly dissonance” (110). He admits that “[c]astration menaces me when I come near you” (97), and finds no outlet but in an erogenous imagination that serves to compensate for his lack, his “blocked” appetite (154). Like the narrator, the city is paralyzed at its center and unable to move

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forward, turning around in circles as if caught in a maze. The fabric discourse that he acquires from his father takes over, debilitating any possibility for action. The invasion of the yarn brand Diolen heralds the commercialism that has taken hold of the city, leaving his elitist fabrics behind. By weaving his own story of Beirut, he unsettles the established supremacy of history. Nicholas creates his city by weaving his story gleaned from his father and grandfather, but it falls apart when “the stranger” armed with modern warfare deals the final blow to his atavistic world, transforming his domain from a landscape of desire into a landscape of death: Father, who killed me? . . . For I did not die a natural death . . . I did not eat any poisoned plants, nor did the dogs take me as their prey . . . Was it stray bullets that felled me, after I lost myself in the burning streets? . . . Or was I blown up by one of the landmines left by the soldiers who passed along the seashore one day, cursing and shouting in a language I realized later was Hebrew? (173)

He wonders whether he was killed by a stray bullet or by a landmine left behind by the Israeli enemy. Constrained within the limits of aboriginal archaism, he remains an antiquated ruin entombed in its vanishing way of life, a fossil of a bygone past that cannot survive in a new city colonized and destroyed by the alien modern. A City Afflicted with Dementia René al-Óåyik’s Bayr¨t 2002 deals with a post-war Beirut that has immunized itself from a painful past. This novel is about a small group of young university students predominantly studying at the American University of Beirut in post-war Lebanon, young people who did not actually witness the raging cauldron of the civil war. Belonging generally to Lebanese bourgeois families, they immerse themselves in the present to escape the unpleasant consequences of the war on their lives. They circulate in a perpetual present by insulating themselves from a vicious and bloody recent history that they want to forget, but also retain a general anxiety about an unstable present and future. The novel is more concerned with the here and now, with horizontal relations in the present, contrary to the vertical configuration of B⁄r⁄t¨s, which is closely linked with the past. Appearing to harbor no romantic attachment to the

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past, the characters discard an intolerable history and immerse themselves in the general amnesia that dominates Lebanese society. The novel explores the manner in which the city is experienced, centering on spaces where characters subvert mainstream Lebanese values by indulging in drinking and drugs. As revealed in ˝awaª⁄n Bayr¨t, AUB before the war was at the forefront of political life and ideologies represented by various Lebanese political parties and the Palestinian resistance. Now, it has petered out into a place where sex is practiced in a mechanical manner and where drugs are taken in large doses, keeping students in a daze as if sedated. Unlike their contemporary Abir in Dåyman Coca-Cola, who is very much aware of social norms, the young men and women in Bayr¨t 2002 appear to be living in a world isolated from society. This is a zone where the Lebanese communal identity manifested in social and religious affiliation is absent. Characters appear to be generally enisled within themselves, away from wartime camaraderie, sectarian associations and the energy of present-day crowded and noisy streets. As university students, these young people have no interest in any social, religious or political problems in a post-war era where Lebanon is preparing to re-build itself not only physically but also at the human level. For instance, Joseph, a medical student, visits his friend Råmz⁄, and since they have little to talk about, he takes a magazine and sees a beautiful, naked woman wearing high boots, holding a whip in her hand and wearing long earrings dangling from her ears. When he shows the picture to his friend, Råmz⁄ comments that this is the way that women should be. But Joseph has a different view: “She looks like professor ‘Arb⁄d” (188). His friend reacts, “God curse you Joseph. Spoiler of pleasure. Is it possible to compare this bomb with that old monkey?” (188). On another occasion, Joseph follows the events of 9/11, particularly the attacks on Arabs in the US. His concern, however, is mainly that this incident will affect his acceptance at universities in America. Similarly, when he watches television and sees Israeli tanks destroying houses in the West Bank, and a demonstration in Beirut against diesel fuel, he feels bored and complains that there is “nothing” on television, and decides to go out for a walk. The narrative consists of five sections marked by a polyphony of voices, which disrupt sequence and emphasize synchronic relations that serve to

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deepen the divide between past and present and ensure the predominance of the present. The narrative begins with the point of view of Rajå, the first narrator. On his walks about the city, he simultaneously thinks of his grandparents and aunt and alludes taciturnly to his childhood when his parents had a car accident in Br⁄ª in the Sh¨f area. The euphemism “car accident” alludes probably to the murder of his parents in the sectarian war and massacres that took place in the mountains between the Maronites and the Druze (1982–4), such as the one in the village of Br⁄ª. Rajå was nine years old when both his parents were killed. In the novel, there is a sense of disinclined anamnesis, a strong desire to block the past, but revenant traces can be spotted through evanescent references to past moments, impressions, and disengaged and fleeting allusions to his aunt, grandparents and his parents’ house. While existing in the present, these imperceptible, revenant traces are capable of causing him unease, further resistance to the past, and disengagement from history and politics. Rajå tells us that his grandmother took him every fortnight to his deceased parents’ house, a few minutes’ walk from the home of his grandparents where Rajå lives, while she waited for the cleaner to clean the house. During the Taªr⁄r and Ilghåʾ (Liberation and Elimination; 1989 and 1990, respectively)4 wars of General Michel Aoun, the family escaped to Cyprus and stopped visiting the house for a long time, yet Rajå maintains that his grandmother always worried, as if she had left people she loved behind, “not furniture covered in white” (39). The Lebanese War remains a shadow that continues to haunt the present. The novel commences on New Year’s Eve when Rajå tells us that he wakes up with severe pain in his waist, as though he had slept over an elongated stone. He picks up a woman’s boot underneath him and observes his girlfriend Caroline fast asleep next to him and her friend Sonia asleep naked at the edge of the bed. This group of young men and women had spent the evening in a chalet, bought food, sweets and drinks—but consumed the drinks only—and ended up having sex, which appears to be performed without inhibitions. Out of the forty people, twenty of them sleep at Caroline’s father’s chalet, which is too small to accommodate them. Their relationships are short-lived and superficial. For instance, Rajå and Caroline become intimate in the short span of one week, while his friend ˝åriq has affairs with

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two sisters in the same year. The first of these affairs—with a young woman studying graphic design—“lasts” for a few months until he switches to her sister, a public health student, for the rest of the year. Furthermore, when Rajå complains that he is attracted to Sonya even though he is going out with her friend Caroline, his friend ‘Amir responds, “the more the merrier” (18).5 Rajå tells us that Caroline occasionally sleeps at his place and tells her brother that she is staying at a girl friend’s home. Caroline and her brother have rented an apartment near AUB in Jean D’Arc Street, and her brother is glad when she sleeps outside the apartment because he can feel free with his own girlfriend. Rajå dislikes bad language and swear words, but, at the university, it is fashionable talk, especially with girls. Even “hello” is accompanied by a swear word, which is a strategy of resistance to a sense of hollowness and ennui that predominates. Rajå leaves the chalet group behind, including his girlfriend, drives his Mercedes car carefully, and returns home. This is a group of young men who belong to an upper- and upper-middle-class background, moving in a performative translocality where the spaces in which they circulate give them the freedom to do as they please. This promiscuity that appears to be alien from the general Lebanese culture discloses a community withdrawn from the rest of the country; it challenges local cultural identity where kitsch, which centers around cheap entertainment, “imitation, forgery, [and] counterfeit” (Calinescu 1987: 228), dominates their lives. These young people appear to be in a sanitized and liminal space that stands outside the political and social world of post-war Lebanon. They are in a void, detached from any notion of urban community or coherent collectivity. Unlike Kamila’s poverty-stricken family that struggles for daily sustenance, these privileged young people survive from day to day6 purged of interior life. Confined to the limits of their bodies and mental blockage, they circulate in a limited area, attesting to the unfinished nature of war as seen through the army and security forces in the streets (reminiscent of the war militia checkpoint in al-Mustabidd, and army checkpoints in post-war Beirut in Dåyman Coca-Cola). Their inner psyche remains hidden, and they communicate only at surface level, keeping their private and autistic selves intact. This overriding blasé and detached attitude is not the outcome of Simmelian urban modernity, but a post-war phenomenon that has left them in the void of an apolitical

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existence of “forgetfulness and erasure” (Larkin 2010: 619). The locale in which they circulate appears uncannily void of crowds in the streets like the deserted streets of Nicholas’s city center in Óårith al-miyåh. Rajå and his friends ignore the war that continues to spill into the present and embrace a fluid and polymorphous locale that gives them a sense that they are nowhere. Their Beirut is mute, idle, distracted and downcast, producing hollow and futile experiences. Their reserved and detached attitudes imprinted on the surface of the city can be construed as a self-protective strategy against an abjected past that has not been eradicated, but resisted and locked away in the dark chambers of their souls. At home, Rajå tries to escape from the isolation of the self by reassuring himself that he will not have to be alone for long as he and his friends have agreed to spend the night in a new club in the mountain town of Brummånå. Initially, they are enthusiastic about this adventure, but once they are at the nightclub in the mountain town, they get bored and “spend the night moving from one place to another” (26), blaming their boredom on the clientele, the food and the music. Even when they escape the city into a pub or restaurant outside it, their way of escaping a major trope of the war, they remain anxious and dissatisfied and soon find themselves again in the city. This restlessness is one way of evading the continued presence of the past, and chasing a present that they can never (or are unwilling) to confront. They have hardly any urgent business to attend to and end up frittering their time away, transforming linear into circular time as they are caught up in dull repetitiveness. Existing in a sanitized and empty world outside history, they are in perpetual search of excitement and stimulation. Except for Joseph, none of them is seen doing any work or studying; they merely vegetate. The areas of Beirut frequented by the students are spaces that serve as metonymic signs of a Western culture that they have embraced and taken for granted. They inhabit particular zones and delimited spaces of the city, challenging the city as a totality. Rajå loiters around the city to get over his boredom and inner suffocation, and his rambling is no more than a mode of movement that enables him to evade thinking and feeling. The city appears to be a vacant surface, reflecting his sense of emptiness and ennui. Still for him there is no outlet beyond the cityscape—the pastoral alternative is non-existent. Their experience in the mountainous chalet in Brummånå is

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momentary, one way of escaping a nightmarish boredom. Aimless wandering is an existential need for Rajå, not a source of flaneurie or pleasure, and the city he traverses remains disembodied and non-existent. It appears strangely empty rather than active and alive, drained of vitality and reduced to the empty grid of visits to oppressive rooms and apartments, random walking without seeing, empty streets and subdued sounds where the gap between the self and the city is all-embracing. This is clearly a bare and hollow place, divulging Rajå’s own sense of diminution and incomprehension as well as an alarming anamnesis that pushes him to erect boundaries between himself and the environment, between past and present, and a desire for space cleansed of all uncanny and unsettling actions related to the civil war. Such confusion pushes him to escape into a physical and mental “interiority” and inability to express feelings (Donald 1999: 136). These are estranged and truncated personalities of young men and women severed from country, nation, family, community, religion and traditional values and relations. Walking along the streets, Rajå takes notice of a café that has opened in a transformed old and beautiful Beiruti house. It has a pond and fountain in the midst of a courtyard where the floor is “embellished with blue and orange” (26). Although he is enticed by this emblem of the past, it is only momentary, and he moves on toward the main Hamra Street to go to Starbucks where he usually meets his friends. If he does not find them there, he can always look at a magazine and have hot chocolate or a cake to wile away the sluggish hours. Unlike the active communal relations gleaned in cafés before and during the war where the political situation takes center stage and where demonstrations and revolutions are plotted, Rajå simply eats and reads a magazine to pass the tedious and repetitive hours. When he returns home, he joins his grandfather who is watching television, but he soon feels nauseated by the traditional cardamom coffee that he is drinking, and decides to go out again. He puts on his coat and walks aimlessly in the streets to get over his boredom. The world around him appears sterilized and robbed of pleasures, excitement and anticipation, a place characterized not by plenitude, but by paucity, which mirrors the vacuum within him. He watches the cats gathering around the garbage piles similar to the garbage that had accumulated in the streets of Beirut and had been ransacked by rats in al-Daif’s war novel Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs or Khoury’s al-Wuj¨h al-bay∂åʾ. Rajå moves on to the Íanåʾiʿ Garden where he

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observes a drunken man holding on to the bottoms of his trousers with the rancid smell of alcohol emanating from his mouth. Although set in a modern post-war Beirut, the city is still dirty, bereft and alienating, like the empty city of Óårith al-miyåh or Bayr¨t: al-Bukåʾ laylan. The garbage that overwhelmed the streets in Taqaniyyåt al-buʾs still litters the streets, and bad smells still permeate the city notably in areas inhabited by the less privileged. On the other side of the pavement he spots a café/restaurant full of prattling old men. The smell of arak and barbecue fill the whole expanse, and Rajå feels disoriented. Unlike Starbucks and the other cafés he frequents, this is a segregated all-male, local, working-class bar full of noisy men who drink traditional Lebanese alcohol and who enjoy traditional Lebanese food. Their sounds and smells are bursts of an unfamiliar local scene that seems absent from his life, revealing the close geographical proximity between zones of affluence and those of deprivation in the city. This disgruntling place underscores his fear of a monstrous city that could easily and without prior notice arouse a dormant past. By creating his own spaces apart from the ones frequented by the old, he resists the contamination of people strongly aligned with war. The streets are infiltrated by a dark and arcane brand of lived existence that Rajå does not know. His city, by contrast, is a configuration of surfaces that encourage distance, spaces of anomie and inertia, rather than the vibrant intimacy of lived space. His city accentuates a sealed impenetrable present brought about by an intense alienation from history and culture. Feeling bored, he drives his car to the seaside, the car being a non-place that underlines his strong sense of alienation, disorientation, fear and instability generated by his ostracism from past and present. On the sea line, he puts his hands on the bannister and watches the fishermen on the rocks at sea. He watches an old man sitting on a small wooden chair with a big pot of coffee nearby, and Rajå smells kaʾk7 with thyme and feels hungry for the first time in two days. This olfactory space brings him closer to the pleasures of quotidian existence and the spatial. His movement across the spaces of the city takes precedence over any temporal perspective, and his geographical mobility allows him to cross barriers of class, to strike out into different localities and to familiarize himself with a new spatiality, pronouncing a possible contrapuntal relation with a new locale. No longer excited about a “narrow place like an attic with smoke, noise,

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loud music, and people dancing” (54), he refuses to accompany his friends to “Bongos,” and returns home alone. Now he only thinks of Rulå whom he spots at the AUB cafeteria, carrying her lighter, pen and pack of Marlboro cigarettes. He is struck by her fast panting and quick breath as she walks and notes that she drinks vodka with ice and does not listen to him when he talks to her. At one point, they drink three quarters of the bottle and he feels dizzy and can hardly carry his legs. Staggering, he reaches home and flings himself on the bed without taking off his clothes or his shoes, baffled by the sheer amount of alcohol that Rulå is able to consume. He dreams of being in the Beirut city center eating corn on the cob (a popular local meal) when it is suddenly metamorphosed into a baguette with fried potatoes and meat, oil dripping and soiling his clothes, a more complex, overwhelming meal. Passers-by start staring at him, and the baguette gets longer and longer and takes control of the place. His nightmarish dream represents an imported phallic modernity that infiltrates the city and dislodges the local culture. While the corn on the cab is another phallic symbol, it is a more simple local food so unlike the more refined baguette that is replacing local customs and diets, announcing the dislocation of a phallic local culture by a more virile and urbane Western power represented by the baguette. This is a recurring metaphor that appears in Sanat al-ʾ¨t¨mat⁄k and Óikåyati sharh¨n ya†¨l, where individuals from the villages are introduced to French bread for the first time. Rajå’s grandmother believes in the need to adhere to the rules of decorum and good behavior. She criticizes his friend ‘Amir and the uncivilized way that he acts, eats, speaks and laughs, and the way he puts his feet on the table and leaves without thanking her. Aware of Rajå’s grandmother’s more traditional approach, ‘Amir wonders how Rajå can bear to live with two old people, and tells him that he almost kills himself when his parents leave him with his grandmother when they go on vacation. His grandmother, like a “prison sentry” (17), controls his sleeping hours and monitors the time he spends on the phone. She rips the pictures off the walls of his room and throws away his scattered magazines. He wonders where the good grandmother can be found who buys gifts for her grandchildren, defends them, and tells them stories. Consequently, ‘Amir makes a point of disengaging himself from his family.

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Rulå remains an enigma and all that Rajå knows about her is that he can buy her Courvoisier cognac and wine. She keeps barriers between them and he wonders if she loves anyone. She appears to have no past, as though she has suddenly come into being on the spur of the moment. He does not know that she is addicted to cocaine. The sense of loss that these young people feel is related to the present and their fields of specialization. For instance, ˝åriq does not like the computer science course and expects to fail at the end of the year. Rajå advises him to switch to the graphic design course. His reaction is: “What is the matter with you, Rajå. You talk to me like a creature of space. How can I convince him [his father] of a field that he thinks is a waste of time? He has never heard of this field before” (42). He envies Rajå his freedom of choice, but Rajå, too, is bored with the subjects he is taking at the university, and spends his time watching trivial films and video clips (43). He wonders how people can tell a good book from any other: “With CDs it is easy to choose. We listen to them, and if we like them, we buy them. Do they read books to know whether they are good or not? All this waste of time!” (45). He remembers the books he had to read at school and how he would fall asleep after the first page. The second section of the novel is told from the perspective of Philip, å Raj ’s grandfather. It is interesting to note that this section focuses on the mountain rather than the city to stress the point that as, an old man, he is relegated to the mountain town. The modern city has no place for Rajå’s old grandfather who moves to the mountain town of ¤h¨r al-Shwayr to die. The section told from Rulå’s point of view focuses on absolute presentness. Like Rajå, Rulå is also alienated from the external world. She is unconcerned with the war, politics and society and appears to exist in another world erased from history and submerged in lethargy, indifference and stupor. She lives in a hazy present where she retreats into herself and suffers from an incapacitating failure to express feelings. Rulå is seen in the semi-private AUB cafeteria and in the private apartments of men who could provide her with cocaine. The novel presents male as well as female characters that are disconnected from, and, indeed, sometimes antagonistic to, the domestic space. Lacking any familial or domestic ideals, she spends her time outdoors in the “paved solitude” (Hawthorne cited in Pike 1981: 72) of the city. Her father, who works in Saudi Arabia, is

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a stranger to her; all she knows of him is that he plays with her sister, sleeps in her mother’s bed, gives her money and pays her fees at the university. He embraces her and kisses her head, which causes her to have to hide her physical revulsion toward him. He is an ineffective figure without any immediate power. In the face of his absence and given her own estrangement within the city, the authority of her father (and mother) declines, even though her father blames his wife for Rulå’s negligence. Her mother, on her part, accuses him of being too strict: “we are not in Saudi Arabia” (151). The mother, herself a working woman, believes that the outer space should belong to her daughter. One place that Rulå frequents is Saʿad’s room in Råʾs al-Nabiʿ, where she tries LSD, amphetamines and cocaine. Fearing prying neighbors, Saʿad always warns those gathered in his room to be careful and lower their voices. Saʿad does not like to be suspected by his neighbors and decides to look for another apartment somewhere else, far from a traditional local area that no longer belongs to them. Rulå finds refuge in a little cramped flat with Wal⁄d on the eighth floor of a decrepit building where she is provided with drugs and overnight accommodation. When she wakes up, she looks for her lost shoe to find it on the balcony and descends the stairs like “an old tortoise” (119), feeling giddy and wobbly. She hears the sound of an electric vacuum cleaner emanating from one apartment and a pressure cooker from another. She also hears the voice of a woman asking a street vendor for the price of a bunch of leaks. The stairs are narrow and she stumbles and holds on to the dirty railings. When she gets to the lower floors, it becomes dark; she encounters an overweight woman carrying vegetable bags, who stares at Rulå’s uncombed hair, unwashed face and crumpled clothes. Rulå’s outlandish appearance uncovers a transgressive behavior out of sync with propriety and decorum. The dirt, the dark-colored spots on the stairs and the garbage bags on the ground floor are signifiers of Rulå’s own dejected and wasted state. Her body is a site of displacement and lack, and she is unable to remember the location of the building, the street or area. She loses the ability to chart her surroundings and is thrown deeper into isolation and deadly stupor. Free of any judgmental remarks or moral corollaries, the novel thus focuses on the manner in which Ra’s Bayr¨t is experienced rather than on whether the characters are right or wrong. Having just enough money to go home, she catches a taxi and sits at the

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back, keeping an aspirin packet and four pills of Lexotanil, a tranquilizer, in her bag. When she reaches her home in Såqiyat al-Janz⁄r, she looks at herself in the mirror of the elevator and is struck by her sinking eyes and the one earring in her ear. Her mother comments that she has lost weight and asks her where she spent the night, but Rulå lies, claiming that she had slept at her female friend Rita’s home in Ashrafiyya. Like Joseph who is a brilliant student and scores very high grades at university, Rulå, too, was once a good student with ambitions to pursue her doctorate in the United State, but all these dreams evaporate after she starts taking drugs. In order to buy drugs, she writes assignments for students and charges for them: an article on Machiavelli costs $70; an assignment on Robert Frost $50. She steals money from her mother who sacks the Sri Lankan maid, accusing the latter of stealing the money, but Rulå is not moved. Rulå cannot recall where she first met Joseph, but she joins him in a café on Makª¨l Street, and they walk together until they reach Målik’s Bookshop where they separate. She stands by Pizza Hut, and then heads toward the Concord and stands by Zara’s boutique. The predominance of toponymy reveals that Rulå fastens on names of places rather than the places themselves, moving reflexively and in a desensitized manner around the streets of Ra’s Bayr¨t. She covers these distances through dazed robotic movements, underlining her extrication from the city. She thinks of going to Wal⁄d’s apartment for some cocaine, but doubts whether he would share it with her. She is on the street a great deal of the time. She stands by Patisserie Socrates where she buys a chocolate cake. Rarely does she observe what is happening in the city around her unless it illuminates feelings in her that she has not understood. For instance, she walks toward the Concord Center where she notices a group of young men her age standing by, and she discovers that, compared to them, she looks thirty. The city to her is an emptied landscape, reflecting the emptiness within, a city that exists in her head rather than outside. The cafés are almost empty, and the man at the newspaper kiosk covers his head with a blue nylon bag. Within this setup, she is reminded of one of her dreams where she walks in the streets of Beirut but is unable to find a shop, café or building that she recognizes. The faces behind balconies are hidden and the buildings and shops have lost their entrances. The cafés are

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full of scattered pieces of wood and dismantled chairs; the city is not asphalted and is full of pebbles and the streets are desolate. The dream is a reflection of the void within and her own sense of estrangement. If Rulå becomes hooked on drugs, Joseph’s hypochondria also reveals that his problems are partly related to the absence of any interior life. Joseph is a pre-med student who does not talk much and gets up every now and then to wash his hands—a case of hypochondria that appears to be related to a strong sense of vulnerability and insecurity. Joseph stays at the Newman’s Residence Hall at AUB after his father sells their house near Rizk Hospital in Ashrafiyya, and the family moves to their hometown Z¨ghartå in North Lebanon. While Joseph’s hypochondria is related to his major as a medical student, one could say that the loss of the Ashrafiyya home and the family’s relocation to the village must have increased Joseph’s sense of defenselessness. He admits that he feels as though diseases jump out of his books and infiltrate his body. He is generally lethargic and enervated, leading an encapsulated life inside his room. He does not open his door to anyone and sleeps for ten hours, like someone who is drugged (189). On other days he cannot stand spending half an hour by himself. Even though he is a top student, he starts absenting himself from his classes. He describes his peripatetic movements around the city as isolating, “as if I am outside all that surrounds me” (204): empty and meaningless conversations, people standing by window shops or walking and talking on their cell phones, manual workers sweeping the pavements, lottery and chewing gum, vendors chasing pedestrians, and the clatter of cups and plates in the kitchen of a café (204). He imagines that he has all the symptoms of cancer. He suffers from swallowing difficulties, acidity, swelling in the stomach, loss of appetite and loss of weight and assumes that there is a swelling under his armpits that no one can see but himself. As a result, he has numerous tests that show no physical ailments. He visits a psychiatrist who asks him questions that appear to have nothing to do with his “obsessions and fears” (186). When he calls his parents from the telephone booth, he imagines hands that have held the receiver and lips that have touched it (190), and feels that he will be contaminated. His obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) alienates him and drives him indoors. He reads about OCD and learns of a man in England

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who spent forty-six hours under the shower and had to be pulled out by force. Joseph reassures himself: “No I am not like that” (219). These young people lead prosaic lives wrought by post-war Beirut that causes the death of Rulå and the plummeting of Joseph into depression. Rajå is the only one who survives by embracing a syncretic identity and reconciling himself with what appears to be the differing world of his parents and grandparents, and re-establishing a link with the past. Rajå comes to terms with the past by nursing his grandfather who has a stroke and starts coming to terms with his parents’ death. He decides to move to his parents’ house, which he now considers his own. He goes as far as wearing his father’s clothes, listening to Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, the Bee Gees as well as Fair¨z and Umm Kulthum, revealing his determination to establish links with the past and with his parents’ death. After his earlier rejection of the old house and his own parents, his way of rejecting a war that has taken away his parents, his decision to acknowledge the past stems paradoxically from his desire to cope with the present. His passage into the past revives a sterile present, allowing him to look outwards and start engaging in the world around him. Concluding Remarks In this chapter, walking the streets of the renovated city of Beirut is at once an encounter with recognizable topographical markers that reinforce the impact of verisimilitude and duplicate a factual world as well as a confrontation with haunting ghosts that make their presence felt through derelict sites, notably the crumbling City Palace cinema. Like an archeologist, the protagonist Butrus digs deep into the historical and mythical layers of the sepulchral city, which mirror his funereal psyche. The underground city, where he encounters apparitional figures, is an oneiric place, an amalgamation of necropolis and pastoral permeated by layers of history and memory. Jåbir’s gothic deployment of prosopopoeia, the trope of haunting, represents the narrator’s confrontation with his psychic blockings in an attempt to escape the abyss of a buried past. The past represented by the lower region is a web of apparitional presences that continue to haunt a renovated city through an unsettling anamnesis, causing a strong sense of ontological insecurity. The narrator’s upper city defines itself against the lower city, inducing a slippage

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between the lower and upper regions, the topographic and the phantasmagoric, and the synchronic and diachronic. This vertical confrontational journey that puts Butrus face to face with specters from the past finally allows him to bury his dead and move on with his life. Unlike women characters in Dåyman Coca-Cola and Óikåyat⁄ sharª¨n ya†¨l who embrace the pleasures of a modern-day Beirut, Barakat’s novel focuses on a male character who retreats into the past represented by ruined Downtown Beirut where he lodges at his father’s derelict textile shop. He descends into the lower floor of his father’s shop not so much like Butrus to free himself from the past, but rather to embrace the past. The ruined Downtown area is perceived in fragmentary details, such as relics, remains and carcasses. Through a slippage into a bygone past, the narrator retreats from the raging war into a sanitized psycho-space interlaced with fleeting memories that land him in Downtown Beirut where he seeks refuge in his lieux de memoire. Goaded by a solipsistic ego, he holds on to the remains of this crumbling world, being a figure at odds with any vestiges of change. Within the demolished city, he extricates himself from the historical, modern, fleeting, collective and diachronic, and embraces the individual, autobiographical, synchronic and revenant past. The descent into the lower floor of his father’s shop, reminiscent of Butrus’s descent into the underground city, is a metaphorical journey, a psycho-archeological expedition into his own archaic and derelict self. In order to map a ghost-like city composed of skeleton places, he draws his own cognitive map that is practical and provisional. In the face of a devastating war, Nicholas tries to reinstate his father’s unalloyed and transparent world in order to control an entropic city and salvage a debilitating powerlessness and castration. If Jåbir’s and Barakat’s novels are preoccupied with the past represented by the ruined city of Beirut, Bayr¨t 2000 focuses on a perpetual present that is supposed to insulate the young university students from a bloody civil war that they want to obliterate. Some of these characters are traumatized by loss of family members or possessions of which they have no memory, while others are troubled by memories of incidents that never actually happened to them. The novel is built around horizontal relations in present-day postwar Beirut, away from the vertical structure of B⁄r⁄tus that is aligned with a palimpsestic city. The multiple points of view accentuate private and secluded

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selves divorced from sectarian and ideological solidarity, and the homosocial relations forged during the war. With the legacy of the war being everywhere, amnesia and mental blockage is the characters’ way of survival where they live in a sort of void, divorced from history, politics or communal relations, communicating exclusively at surface level. Their Beirut is a polymorphous and hazy landscape that they traverse in a desensitized manner and respond to solely in a toponymic manner. The streets they navigate appear to be cleansed of signs of the civil war, uncannily void of crowds, or any symptom of a bustling city life. Like Nicholas in Hårith al-miyåh, the young students appear to circulate in a no-man’s land. They resist by living in deliberate obliviousness to the visible legacy of the war in a perpetual present in an attempt to erase the past manifested by the unnerving specter of the war. The inner spaces are no less dreary than the streets, being cramped spaces of boredom, emptiness and drug abuse, keeping the characters in a perpetual state of stupor and inertia. Unlike the character Rulå’s headlong plunge into a still, cold, noiseless, crepuscular death-dealing world, Rajå moves away from a numbing existence by reaching out and crossing barriers where he finds himself face to face with a scene teeming with sounds and smells that suddenly bring him closer to the pleasures of locality. In spite of his earlier detachment, Rajå makes the decision to confront the past. Notes 1. For modernity and the uncanny, see Collins and Jervis (2008: 1–7). 2. For an interpretation of modernity and heterotopia, see Hetherington (1997: 27–8). 3. Similarly, in his novel Óasrat al-yåq¨t f⁄ hi‚år Bayr¨t, Shåker al-Luʿaybi talks about the “sleeping sectarian agitation” that wakes up to talk in “a pugnacious metallic voice” (27). 4. ‫حرب اإللغاء والتحرير‬. The Liberation War was launched by General Aoun against the Syrian occupation in 1989, while the Elimination War (1990) was aimed at dissolving the Lebanese Forces led by Samir Geagea. 5. Ziyådat al-khayr, khayr ”, ‘‫’زيادة الخير خير‬. 6. For a contrasting view, see Larkin (2010). 7. A traditional, local flat bread covered in sesame seeds and usually sold on street carts.

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Inconclusive Conclusion

W

ithout adherence to chronological sequence, the study centers on pre-war, war and post-war novels, focusing on their interrelatedness, particularly when it comes to preoccupation with modernity. The thrust of the work has been on how these texts inscribe a sense of the city rather than on how each writer views the city individually. My approach has been interpretive, but also indirectly evaluative where the aesthetic value of each text is embedded in the study of figures of speech, tropes, metaphors, sights, sounds and smells, allegory, genre, plot, narrative techniques and so forth. Among the issues that have transpired in this study is that Beirut in the modern Arabic novel is not a totalizing entity to be categorized, branded or concluded. Rather than an “absolute grid, within which objects are located and events occur” (Curry 1995: 5), the city emerges as performative, partial and incomplete. The study has shown that Beirut is an aporetic city of uncertainties and conflicts, inspiring a rich variety of fictional narratives captured by Lebanese and Arab writers from different times and places. These texts by different authors speak Beirut in a variety of ways and in diverse conglomerations, producing a multiplicity of worlds and a city without closure. In the novels, Beirut emerges as an empirical, abstract, allegorical and spectral entity. It fluctuates between the real and the imagined, the public and the private, the urban and the rural, the masculine and the feminine, and the ancient and the modern, destabilizing any teleological imperative. Indeed, these texts unsettle any certainties that may come with these polar conceptions and thus cause a disturbing sense of anxiety and disillusionment. In these novels, the characters are trapped by spatial conditions that they cannot fathom or understand. Atmospheric and topographical elements 202

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as well as political and military conflicts alter and transform spaces, erase boundaries and contest maps by adding new ones predicated on ideological and armed struggles, personal desires, recollections, quotidian trajectories, individual interactions and textual representations. In the study, Beirut emerges as a textual city understood through a series of tropes, images and metaphors such as light, darkness, fire, posters, graffiti, advertisements, cafés, Coca-Cola bottles, French and Arabic bread, bakeries, maqåh⁄ and cafés, garbage piles, shattered glass, cars, and so forth. In addition to the atmospheric troping of sky and sea, which offers a romantic view of each, the visualized/textualized city takes center stage. In addition to topographical and atmospheric tropes, some novels focus on characters and narrators who, in an effort to decode the city, resort to the allegorical through the use of myths of massacred gods such as Adonis, the severed god of Phoenicia, and other tropes like Sodom and Gomorrah. The use of allegory epitomizes an attempt to fathom the city by attributing an abstract or spiritual meaning to it through the use of figurative language. While many of these works present a recognizable city with markers such as monuments, hotels, cinemas, streets, areas and zones, the emphasis is predominantly on fleeting impressionistic sites rather than on palpable ones. Nevertheless, the tension between the real and the metaphorical city results in the latter displacing the material city and turning it into a construct of the viewer’s own ideology and perspective. The major tropes that represent each chapter in the study are not rigidly self-contained patterns but rather permeable and unstable, overlapping and spilling into the whole spectrum of the study. Chapter 1 projects Beirut as an urban entity interspersed by the rural, producing continuities rather than oppositions between them—so much so that at certain moments they become linked inextricably. In these novels, Beirut houses individuals who immerse themselves in the urban modern, but always look back over their shoulders to a supposedly more holistic world represented by a pristine rural existence. The texts also focus on Beirut’s modernity, which is as deep-rooted as the history of the city itself. At the same time, the hegemony of the modern in Beirut is never complete since the city continues to appropriate nonmodern elements, generating its own hybrid modernity. Since walking is a prevailing mode of experiencing the city in the novels

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selected, Chapter 2 focuses on these pedestrian movements as the primary practice for experiencing the city. The novels present characters who speak the city by moving through it and enunciating a private language of place and practice. The street is where nomadic trajectories and aleatory encounters take place in a multiplicity of positionalities. As a result, the city emerges as performative, fragmented, multidimensional, inconsistent, provisional and open to a wide variety of interpretations. In Chapter 3, the female protagonists’ rambles create new geographies of resistance and new itineraries and precincts where different brands of transgressive social and sexual relations are produced. Within the mobile spaces of the city, women circulate and celebrate their freedom in sexual extravagance and carnivalesque performances, which destabilize a differentiated gender identity. The urban modernity of Beirut is invigorated by feminine signifiers. If women kindle male desire and scopophilia, and are subjected to commodification, their resistance to male control is reflected in their own participation in the voyeuristic spectacle where they subject men and other women to the female gaze as seen in Óikåyat⁄ sharªun ya†¨l and Dåyman Coca-Cola. Rather than a backdrop to the action, the city is an integral part of the plot and characterization. As seen in Chapter 2, Beirut is a city in process experienced from below, an opaque partial site resisting the transparency and controlling strategy of the panoptic view that is associated with male characters, as in Sanat al-ʾ¨t¨mat⁄k. Such voyeuristic strategies in the latter text emerge as a way of assuming control, but, at the same time, of seeking refuge from the alienating and defamiliarizing experience of the city. Chapter 4 reveals that if Beirut is a city of brick and mortar, it is also an imagined construct where characters, particularly Arab, read the city through their desires and ideologies. Feeling that Beirut belongs to them, they project a conclusive meaning on the city that ends in disillusionment for some and gratification for others. In these works, the city is predominantly immaterial, located in the characters’ minds and seen not through the eye but through the prism of ideology and notions of what Beirut should be like. Beirut is largely an imagined linguistic space, a city pursued for what it represents, blurring the line between the abstract and concrete. Other novels go as far as erasing material descriptions of the urban settings to give room for the interior psychic space that takes center stage. The fear of external spaces speaks of loss of

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agency that produces works obsessed with interiority, where the imploding spaces of the war city intrude into the mental world of characters. Chapter 5 shows that Beirut is a palimpsestic city, a necrophilic architectural dig that awaits excavation, where the mythological past is not only contiguous with, but also inextricable from it. In Beirut, the geographical intersects with the historical, and the past always spills into the present. The city is encountered in skeleton monuments, relics, fragments, cadavers and specters that make their presence felt through dilapidated sites in Downtown Beirut. In these works, ruined Downtown Beirut with its relics, remains and carcasses are lieux de memoires, where some characters take their abode to counteract the loss of older—and more stable—forms represented by the imagined city’s past. Through a slippage into a bygone past, these characters retreat from the raging war into a sanitized psycho-space interlaced with fleeting memories. If agoraphobia leads to fear of the external space, especially in a war context, amnesia is the outcome of anxieties generated by the war on characters who lived it as well as on those who did not experience the war, what Hirsch refers to as “postmemory.” In Bayr¨t 2000, the—predominantly young— characters insist on living an untainted boundless present in the quotidian moment to avoid a persisting past that continues to haunt them in the present. This work engages Western concepts and theories by challenging the essentialist view of urban modernity as a Western model to be matched by developing countries. While Georg Simmel describes the metropolitan individual as detached, impersonal and neutral, this same attitude in Beirut is not linked to metropolitan modernity but rather to a threatening war situation where apparent neutrality is a self-defense mechanism. Beirut is a city with its own particular mode of urbanization and modernity traversed with historical, social, quotidian, religious and cultural factors, always in a state of becoming rather than being. The study shows that modernity in Beirut is not new; it is imagined and practiced differently in different periods and places. Furthermore, the proximity of buildings in Beirut disrupts the urban notion of individual privacy, making characters within their homes exposed to the public sphere represented by adjacent buildings and sites. Similarly, in a war framework, the private sphere is never immune from the violent penetration of the war city.

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Unlike New York, London or Paris, Beirut is a small city; however, its importance within the Arab context is indisputable, as it has been at the forefront of modernity, freedom, cultural activity, revolutionary politics, wars, insurrections and resistance since the inception of Lebanon as an independent state in 1943, and, indeed, even before that date. In line with an unstable city, the study itself is open-ended, inviting further work on Beirut. The focus has been on novels written in Arabic, many of which have not been translated, but there still remain a large number of poems, anthems, songs, plays, films, documentaries and examples of graffiti that are worth exploration. Similarly, there is a wide range of fiction and poetry written in French and English, such as the works of Rabih Alameddine, Rawi al-Hajj, Etel Adnan, Andre Chedid and Nadia Tueini, to name but a few, that center on Beirut in their writings. While these works are outside the scope of my project, my study provides a theoretical framework and starting point that opens up new vistas for future studies on Beirut. Unavailable to any generalization, Beirut has always been an unruly and drifting place, lacking any formal design and growing aimlessly and multifariously. This is a city bespeaking incompletion and ineffability, denying the possibility of a stable center, resisting ontology and avowing its alterity and dissidence. Rather than understood through a single interpretation, these texts have produced many Beiruts that defy generalizations and embrace idiosyncratic perspectives. Accordingly, a mere pretense at closure results in an inconclusive conclusion, a labyrinthine endeavor that ends us where we began, with Adonis who proclaims that Beirut “is not the city of ‘endings’ . . . but the city of ‘beginnings’ ” (D⁄b 2010: 223).

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Index

9/11, 162, 188 Abella supermarket, 167 ʿAbd-l-Óakīm, Shawqī Bayrūt: Al-Bukāʾ laylan, 8, 127, 143–51 Abdel-Aziz Street, 45 Abir Ward flower shop, Mar Elias Street, 111 Abū Faraj, Ghālib Óamza, 17 al-ʿAbdalla, Issām, 31 al-dār, 33 Adonis, ʿAlī Aḥmad Saʿīd, 1, 31 Aghacy, Samira, 141 Aḥmad, Sāmī Sulaymān, 143 ʿAḥyāʾ fī al-baḥr al-mayyit (Muʾnis al-Razzāz, 1982), 11, 17, 21, 126–7, 135–43, 158–9 Beirut, real and imagined city, 17, 135–43, 158 books and culture, 140, 141, 159 comparison with birthplace, 11, 136–7, 138–9, 140 Dead Sea as metaphor, 137, 140, 141 drug-taking, 136, 143 guilt, 142 Israeli enemy, 138, 140 model city, 138 modernity, 140 political freedom, 137 resistance fighters, 138, 139, 140 revolutionary ideology, 138, 140 alcohol, 20, 33, 47, 52, 54, 55, 56, 59, 89, 172, 194, 195 Alter, Robert, 113 American University Hospital, 45 American University of Beirut, 86, 90, 94, 95, 97, 98, 111, 120, 141, 187–99 Newman-Residence Hall, 198 Amman, 136–7, 143 amnesia, 22, 23, 188, 201 Amyuni, Mona, 63 Anderson, Benedict, 15 Antoine Bookshop, 45 Aoun, General Michel, 189, 201 Appadurai, Arjun, 6, 49 Aqaba, 140 Arab Deterrent Force (ADF), 85 Arab–Israeli problem, 89 Arab–Israeli War (1973), 86

Arab nationalism, 48 Arab University Gamal Abdel Nasser Hall, 141 Ashrafiyya, 4, 9, 11, 78, 112, 113, 197, 198 asphalt, 10, 16, 21, 179 “asphalt culture,” 115, 125 Attali, Jacques, 166 auditory geography, 3, 14–15, 152, 156, 166, 184–5 Awwad, Tawfiq Yusuf ˝awāhīn Bayrūt, 8, 31–2, 38–46 al-Awzāʿi area, 134 ʿAyn- l-Mraysa mosque, 56 Azar Coffee Roastery, 181 al-ʿAzariyyā area, 4, 97, 163 ʿAzqalān, Israeli prison, 140 baguette as phallic symbol, 97, 101, 194 Barakat, Halim country–city dichotomy, 7 Barakat, Hoda, 14, 20 Óārith al-miyāh (1998), 4, 6, 161–2, 173–87, 191, 193, 200 Barīd Bayrūt (Óanān al-Shaykh, 1995) body as metaphor, 21 country–city boundary, 8 maps, 10 old and new, 28 war as liberating force, 10 bartering, 62 Bayhum, Nabil, 22 Bayrūt: al-Bukāʾ laylan (ʿAbd-l-Óakīm, Shawqī, 1985), 8, 19–20, 26, 127, 143–51, 159, 193 anecdotes, 144–5, 149 Beirut or Cairo, 143–51 bombs, 149–50 cinemas, 145, 149 city-as-body, 144 city as developed image of village, 148 continual danger, 146–7 country–city boundaries, 8 female masculinity, 147 funerals, 145, 146, 148 massacred ancient gods, 144, 159 refugees, 145–6 running, 146–7 snipers, 146

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Bayrūt: al-Bukāʾ laylan (cont.) soldiers, 146–7 travel literature, 143 under Israeli siege, 143–51 walking the city, 145–50 Bayrūt Bayrūt (Sonallah Ibrahim, 1984), 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 18, 28, 60, 61, 82–90, 91–2 cartography of Beirut, 61, 88, 91 claustrophobia, 11 cultural artifacts, 86–7 discursive Beirut, 82–90 documentary film, 5, 87–8 gender boundaries, reversal, 88–9 maps, 83, 88 massacres, 87, 92 nostalgia, 85, 86, 90 navigation tools, 88 old photographs, 87 posters, 9, 88, 91 publishing, 82, 84, 89 sexual boundaries, 89 transformation of city, 18, 85 walking and writing, 82, 91–2 Bayrūt 75 (Ghada Samman, 1975), 127–35, 139, 157–8 brothel, 131 cross-dressing, 133 crucifixion, 128–9 dreams turn to nightmare, 11, 127–35, 157–8 female prostitution, 129–31, 135, 158 fishermen, 133–4 funereal city, 128, 133 honour and purity, 130–1 “luminous stone jungle,” 129, 133 male prostitution, 132–3, 135, 158 “misery belt,” 133 music and song, 131, 132 poor sector of Beirut, 133–5 sexual exploitation, 129–33, 135, 158 urban sexuality, 11, 127–8, 131–2 Bayrūt 2002 (René al-Óāyik, 2003), 12, 24, 25, 162, 187–99, 200–1 aimless wandering, 192–3 amnesia as survival mechanism, 188, 201 apolitical, 190–1 boredom, 191–2, 193, 201 disconnection, 12, 195–6 drinking, 188, 193, 194, 195 drugs, 188, 195, 196–7, 201 family, 189, 194, 195–6, 199, 200 hypochondria, 198–9 isolation, 188, 200–1 phallic symbols, 194 post-war Beirut, 12, 24, 162, 187–99, 200, 205 post-war Lebanon, 187, 188, 190 promiscuity, 189–90 students, 187, 188–99, 200–1, 205 war, unfinished nature of, 190 Bechara al-Koury monument, 72 Beirut: overview aural and olfactory, 14–15 body as metaphor of city, 20–2

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country–city polarity, 7–10 eroticizing space, 18–20 feminine, 17 generally, 1–29, 202–6 hard city–soft city, 16 imagined environment, as, 15–18 memory, 22–3, 26–8 old and new linked, 22–6, 27–8 palimpsest, city as, 26–9 proletarization, 17–18 public and private spaces, 13–14 regressive city, 47–59 spatial representation, 2, 5 summary, 202–6 walking the city, 10–13, 60–92, 145–50 Beirut Brothel, 45 Bell, David & Valentine, Gill, 20 Benjamin, Walter, 10, 126, 179, 185–6 Beqaa area, 42 Bhabha, Homi K., 171 billboards, 102, 116, 117, 119, 185 Bīrītūs madīna taḥtā al-ʾar∂ (Rabīʿ Jābir, 2005), 6, 15, 26–7, 161, 162–73, 183, 199–200 affective memory, 164 acoustics, 15, 166, 185 bombs, 15, 166, 185 cinema, 4, 19, 163, 164, 167–8 concrete spaces, 163 deceased father, 166, 167 domestic gadgets, 165 haunting, 6, 165, 167, 169, 172, 199–200 healing process, 171–2 massacres, 166 “Mud People,” 171 necropolis, 166 obsolete map, 168, 183 old linked with new city, 23 painful remembering, 171–2 rejuvenated Beirut, 162 “smellscape,” 171 underground city, 6, 26–7, 161, 162–73, 199–200 body as metaphor of city, 20–2 bombs, 64, 85, 149–50, 152, 156, 166, 185 Bongos club, 194 books, 13, 39, 54, 82, 84, 86, 89, 99, 195, 197 boxing as subversive act, 113–14, 115 branding, 40–1 Brīḥ, Shūf area, 189 British Army, 35 brothel, 25, 33, 41, 45, 96, 97, 98, 131 Brummānā, 191 al-Burj, 24, 25, 45 Būrj al-Barājina refugee camp, 26, 139 Būrj al-Murr area, 27 Burj Square, 102, 104, 109, 131 Butler, Judith, 114 Butler, Toby, 27 Buzayʿ, Shawqī, 31 cafés American University of Beirut, 195 Café de Paris, 4, 64–5, 87, 182

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i ndex Café Laronda, 182 Dolce Vita Café, 142 generally, 19, 25, 56, 58, 67, 93, 139, 150, 193, 197–8 Hamra, 26, 28, 39, 43, 64, 87 Horseshoe, 25 Modca, 25, 142 Starbucks, 19, 25, 112, 115, 192, 193 Wimpy, 25 Cairo, 143, 151 Calinescu, Matei, 117, 190 Camp David Accords, 86 Camus, Albert, 157 car bombs, 64, 85, 152, 156 Carlton hotel, 56 Carpenter, Edmund & Otto, Eberhard, 14–15 Carroll, Lewis Alice in Wonderland, 164 Casper and Gambini restaurant, 4 cell phones, 52 checkpoints, 54, 119, 156, 157, 190 Chekhov, 145 Chicago gangs, 82 Chiclets, 28, 153 Chreiteh, Alexandra, 14, 19, 29 Dāyman Coca-Cola, 94, 111–22 Christians, 5, 36, 73, 97 area, 79, 169 costume, 87 factions, 87, 170 hybrid identity, 178 massacres, 169 militias, 73 women, 36, 78 Cinar, Alev & Bender, Thomas, 137 cinema, 79, 83, 85, 88, 93, 102–4, 109, 145, 155, 167–8 alternative way of life, 103, 107–8 Byblos cinema, 182 City Palace cinema, 4, 26, 162, 163, 164, 199 Gaumont Palace, 182 Piccadilly cinema, 83 underground, 19 voyeuristic spectacle, 18 see also films Coca-Cola, 14, 19 billboard, 85, 116, 117 bottle as metaphor, 116–17, 120, 122, 124 cocaine, 195, 196, 197 cognitive mapping, 16 Companions of the Cave, 117, 125 Concord Center, 197 Corniche al-Mazraʿa, 112 country–city movement, 7–10, 32–8 Courvoisier cognac, 195 cross-dressing, 116, 176 Cuba, 48 culture, 140, 141, 159 asphalt, 115, 125 “stone pavement,” 125 Curry, Michael R., 202 Cyprus, 189

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al-Daif, Rashid, 12–13, 23 Fūsḥa mustahdafa bayna al-Nuʾās wa-l-Naum (1986), 12–13, 21, 60 al-Mustabidd (1983), 6, 127, 151–7, 159– 60 Taqaniyyāt al-buʾs (1989), 4, 12, 15, 60, 61–71, 82, 85, 90–1, 96, 146, 160, 192, 193 trauma of war, description, 153 Damascus, 128, 129, 130, 143, 144, 166 Damūr, 87, 92 Daoud, Hassan, 13, 28 Sanat al- ʿūtūmatīk, 5, 13, 28, 93, 94–100, 122–3 Darwish, Mahmoud, 1, 15, 17, 126, 133 Dāyman Coca-Cola (Alexandra Chreiteh, 2009), 94, 111–22, 124, 176, 188, 190, 200 advertising slogans, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120 anonymity, 112, 124 body fixation, 117, 118–19 boxing, 113–114, 115 Coca-Cola symbol, 116, 120, 122, 124, 203 cross-dressing, 116 female aggressiveness, 113 flower metaphor, 111, 120 menstruation, 115–16, 122 mobility, 113 modernity, 113, 119, 120, 121, 124, 203 poster, defaced, 117, 120 pregnancy, 112, 114, 119, 121, 122 precedence of setting, 111 public and private settings, 115, 120 rape, 121–2 Romanian model, 111–12, 118, 119, 120, 124 tradition, 115, 117–18, 120, 124 traffic jams, 112–13, 114, 119 Dayr al-Qamar, 166 Dead Sea, 137, 140 de Certeau, Michel, 5–6, 26, 63, 82, 146, 161 Deir al-Mutill, 46 de Lauretis, Teresa, 108 demarcation lines, 144, 145 deprivation, 133–5 Derrida, Jacques, 172 Ḍhūr al-Shwayr (mountain town), 195 Dīb, Kamāl, 8, 22, 206 Diolen yarn, 179, 187 discursive Beirut, 82–90, 91–2 dogs, 11, 150, 159, 169, 183, 184–5, 187 Dolce Vita nightclub, 28, 85, 91 Donald, James, 15, 66, 103, 192 Douma, Syria, 128 Downtown Beirut, 19, 25, 33, 78, 93, 97, 102, 163, 170, 173–4, 176, 200, 205 Solidere project, 22–3, 164 drinking, 20, 33, 47, 52, 54, 55, 56, 59, 89, 172, 194, 195 drugs, 37, 41, 136, 143, 194, 195, 196–7, 198 Druz communities, 8, 169, 189 Druze leader, 81, 87, 92, 150 al-Dūwayhī, Jabbūr, 13, 25 al-Dūwayhī, Shawqī, 25, 64

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earthquake, 30, 167, 175 east Beirut, 11, 87, 88, 89, 112, 113 Egypt, 48, 86, 143, 175 electricity, 61–2, 63 Elimination War, 189, 201 Embassy supermarket, 167 episodic memory, 47, 59 erasure, official policy of, 170 Exotica flower shop, 117, 118 explosions, 139, 152, 156 Fairūz, 199 Fakhānī, 11, 142 Fakhānī refugee camp, 139 Farkūh, Elyās, 18 Farouk, King and Queen Nazli, 175 al-Fayyūm, Upper Egypt, 143, 145 films, 47, 195 comedy, 107 documentary, 5, 87–8 education, as, 106 Egyptian, 48 Layla, Daughter of the Desert, 106 pornographic, 19, 168 The White Rose, 103, 105 see also cinema First World War, 9, 32 flower metaphor, 111, 120 flower shop, 62, 111, 117 flowers, 53, 66, 120, 145, 176 Fontana nightclub, 97 Forty, Adrian, 23 Foucault, Michel, 1, 3, 19, 109, 113–14 France, 24 Fraser, Mariam & Greco, Monica, 21 free indirect speech, 143, 160 Frisby, David, 115, 142 Fuʾād Shihāb Bridge, 164, 169, 170 funerals, 145, 146 funereal city, 165, 166, 167, 169, 172 funereal practices, 51–2, 56 Furayḥā, Anīs recording old traditions, 7–8 Fūsḥa mustahdafa bayna-l-nuʿās wa-l-naum (Rashid al-Daif, 1986) body as metaphor of city, 21 public spaces, 12–13 Gaonker, Dilip Parameshwar, 6, 28 garbage, 15, 16, 63, 65–6, 67, 70, 71, 79, 82, 83, 143, 150, 192, 193, 196 Gelfant, Blanche H., 4 Gemayyīl, Bashīr, 87 Gemayyīl, Pierre, 88 Gemmayzeh, 115 gender identity, 20 Ghandūr, Ṣabāḥ, 81 al-Ghazālī, Nāzem, 48 Gilroy, Paul, 6 Gordon, Avery, 161 Great al-ʿOmar⁄ mosque, 51, 53, 182 Grosz, Elizabeth, 20, 21, 109

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Habermas, J., 177 Habib Abi Shala monument, 72, 73, 79 Óalāwī, Jinān Jāsim, 17 Halberstam, Judith, 147 Hamra area, 10, 11, 45, 65, 79, 83, 84, 94, 120, 122, 131, 139, 140, 149 boutiques, 28 cafés, 26, 28, 39, 43, 64, 87 Hamra Street, 4, 11, 39, 56, 64, 87, 192 Hannoyer, Jean & Shami, Steney, 137 Hanoi, 140 Hanssen, Jens-Peter & Genberg, Daniel, 23 harassment, 112, 120 Haraway, Donna, 19, 117, 120 Óārith al-miyāh (Hoda Barakat, 1998), 4, 6, 161–2, 173–87, 191, 193, 200 amphora girl, 181, 186 anthropomorphic city, 184 auditory geography, 184–5 cathedral and crypt, 180–1 cognitive map, 182–3, 200 cross-dressing, 176 deserted areas, 177–9, 182–4, 191 dogs, 183, 184–5 fabric, father’s love of old, 174–5, 178 father’s shop, 177–8, 179–80, 200 flowers, 176 garment design, 176 human remains, 184 labyrinth, 179, 183, 184, 185–6, 187 linen, sexual associations with, 186 male impotence, 185–6 necrophilia, 181, 186 no-man’s land, 178, 183–4, 201 personal memory, 173 raiding and destruction, 173 ruins as fabric of city, 161–2, 173–87, 200 sexuality and control, 178, 180, 181, 186 singer, operatic, 175, 176 textile business, 174, 177 textile shop, derelict, 177–8, 179–80, 200 underground, 180–1, 185, 200 urban individualism, 177 urban jungle, 179 Hart, Kevin, 83 Hāṣbayyā, 166 Haugbolle, Sune, 23, 75, 119 Hawwa’s Beauty Salon, 119 al-Óayik, René Bayrūt 2002 (2003), 12, 24, 25, 162, 187–99, 200–1 al-Óāyik bakery, 4 Hayy al-lijā, (Balqīs al-Óumāni, 1969), 4, 8, 31, 32–8, 57–8 communal values, 34, 35, 36–7, 57 community courtyard, 32–3, 57 country–city boundaries, 8, 32 evolving modernism, 37–8 female empowerment, 36 forced marriage, 33, 36 male oppression, 33–5

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i ndex rural Beirut, 8, 32–8, 57 urban sexuality, 35, 57 Óayy Wādī Abū Jamīl, 168 Hazmieh, 120 heterotopic spaces, 19 Hetherington, Kevin, 19, 103, 105, 109, 114 hijab, 44, 120 Óikāyati sharḥun yaṭūl (Hanan al-Shaykh, 2005), 25, 93–4, 100–11 billboards, 102 cinema, 102–4, 105–6, 107, 108, 123 dressmaker’s house, 105 female empowerment, 100–11, 123 love affair, 25, 105–6, 108, 110 modernity, 25 103 music and song, 105 pomegranite, 101 rural to city, 101 schooling, 101, 104 shop displays, 104 superstition, 106 walking, 93, 102, 123 Hirsch, Marianne, 27, 205 homosocial relations, 94–100, 122–3, 158–9 Honey Hotel, 131 Huggan, Graham, 83 al-Óumānī, Balqīs Hayy al-lijā, 4, 8, 31, 32–8, 57–8 Humaydan, Iman, 15, 80, 161 Hussein, Imam, 104 Huyssen, Andreas, 110 hypochondria, 198–9 Ibrahim, Sonallah Bayrūt Bayrūt (1984), 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 18, 28, 60, 61, 82–90, 91–2 Idrīs, Suhayl, 9 inner and outer space, 63, 76, 77, 78, 100, 116, 134, 159–60, 170, 204–5 Ilghāʾ war, 189, 201 Internet, 52 Ionesco, Eugene, 24 Israel, 46, 49, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 127, 130, 138, 139 Israeli invasion, 15 Israeli planes, 11, 142 Israeli prison, 140 al-Jabal al-ṣaghīr (Elias Khoury, 1977) body as metaphor of city, 21–2 country–city polarity, 9 Jābir, Rabīʿ Bīrītūs madīna taḥtā al-ʾar∂ (2005), 6, 14, 19, 26–7, 161, 162–73, 199–200 Taqrīr Mīlīs (2005), 4, 27 Jaguaribe, Beatriz, 28 Jal al-Dib, 122 Jameson, Frederic, 16, 141 Jassem, Abu, 80–1 Jean D’Arc Street, 190 Jizzīn, 166 Joint Forces, 80

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Jumblatt, Kamal, 81, 87, 92 Druze leader, 150 Junieh–Tripoli road, 73 Kantari zone, 78 Karantīnā, 9, 27, 87, 92 Karm-al-Zaytūn, 9, 10 Kassir, Samir assassination, 4 country–city boundaries, 8 Kawtharānī, Hāla al-ʾUsbūʿ al-akhīr (2006) 24, 27 Khalaf, Samir, 23 Khaled, Cheb, 112 al-Khandaq al-Ghamiq, 9, 102 Khān Zāda (Līnā Kraydiyya, 2010), 9, 31, 32, 47–57, 59 alcohol, 52 54, 55, 56, 59 family, 50, 51, 54, 56 feast periods, 50–1, 57 films, 47, 48 funereal requirements, 51–2, 53, 56 lilies, 53 male freedom, 54–6 marriage, 50 memories, 47, 56–7, 59 modernity, 52, 56, 57 myths, 53–4 regressive city, 47–57 repudiation of progressive ideologies, 48, 59 sectarian geography, 9, 47, 51 tradition, 50–1, 52, 53, 56 village within city, 47 Khoury, Elias al-Jabal al-ṣaghīr (1977), 9, 21–2 al-Wujūh al-bayḍā (1981), 4, 26, 60, 61, 71–82, 91, 92, 147, 192 King, Anthony D., 32 Kraydiyyā, Līnā Khān Zāda, 9, 31, 32, 47–59 Kristeva, Julia, 172 Kubursi, Atif, A., 22 Kulthum, Umm, 48, 141, 160, 164, 199 labyrinth sexual meaning, 185–6 La Damascene, Rue Weygand, 176 landmarks as reference points, 70, 83 language of war, 119 Larkin, Craig, 27, 191 Las Vegas, 50 Lebanese Army, 79 Lebanese Civil War, 2, 32, 39, 49, 53, 87, 151, 189 documentary film, 87 Lebanese Deuxième Bureau, 88 Lebanese independence, 72 Lebanese University, 72, 80, 151, 152, 157, 163 Lefebvre, Henri, 107, 155 The Production of Space, 5 Liberation War, 189, 201 lilies, 53 Luʿaybī, 17

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Lebanese refugees, 14, 83 locality studies, 38 Lubnān wa- l-Mahjar Bank, 4, 163 Mahdiyya, South Lebanon, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 46 Majidiyya Mosque, 179 Makdisi, Jean, 22, 60 Makḥūl Street, 197 Mālik’s Bookshop, 197 Manāra, 139 Mansour Assaf Mosque, 182 maps, 10, 16, 70, 83, 84, 88, 168, 182–3, 200 maqāhī, 19, 25, 64–5 maqāma, 143, 159 Maʿrad Street, 163 Mar Elias area, 94, 111 Mar Jirjis Cathedral, 180, 181 Maronites, 8, 189 martyrs, 75–6, 80, 88, 91, 147 Martyrs’ Square, 40, 59, 131, 158 masculine dominance, 38–46 massacred gods, 144, 159, 203 massacres, 27, 87, 92, 127, 151, 166, 169, 189 Massey, D., 5, 38 al-Mazraa area, 72, 73, 114 Mejcher, Sonja, 9 Mejcher-Atassi, Sonja, 80 militias, 21, 29, 73, 78, 81, 82 Mīnā, Óannā, 10 Mitchell, Timothy, 6, 115 Monoprix supermarket, 167 Monot area, 166 Mort, Frank, 116 muggings, 152, 156 Mulvey, Laura, 18, 93 al-Murābiṭūn, 84 al-Muṣaytabā district, 31, 53, 56 al-Mustabidd (Rashid al-Daif, 1983), 6, 127, 151–7, 159–60, 190 car bombs, 152, 156 cars, 152, 154 checkpoints, 156, 157 effeminacy and impotence, 153, 155–6 hallucination, 153 location by sound, 14, 152, 156 loneliness, 155 marginal encounters, 160 muggings, 152 nomadic movements, 6, 151–7 psychological landscape, 151–7, 159–60 tradition, 154–5 underground shelter, 151–2 university, 151, 152–3 music and song, 48, 54, 105, 112, 118, 175, 199 Muslim, 35, 73, 87, 89, 97, 109 Muslim area, 73 Muslim/Sunni, 47, 49, 52 al-Mutanabbi Street, 25, 41, 45, 131, 132 al-Muṭṭalib, ʿAbd, 48 Nabaa area, 79 Nabatiyyeh, South Lebanon, 100, 101, 106, 109

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Nabatiyyeh Square, 104 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 48, 86, 98, 141 Nasserite militia group, 84 necrophilia, 167, 181, 186 necropolis, 166 Nietzsche, 144, 161 nightclubs, 25, 109, 143, 191 Dolce Vita, 28, 85, 91 Fontana, 97 Talk of the Town, 139 Nizār Bʿalbakī publishing house, 86 non-places, 40, 69, 71, 108, 193 non-space, taxi as, 108 Nora, Pierre, 22, 100, 164, 178 nostalgia, 47–57, 85, 86 Nuwayhiḍ, Walīd, 162–3 October War, 86 olfactory sense, 15, 18, 171, 193; see also garbage al-ʿOmar⁄ mosque see Great al-ʿOmar⁄ mosque Ottoman rule, 53 Palace d’Etoile, 182 Palestine, 7 Palestine Liberation Organization, 40, 92 Palestinian refugee camps, 88, 139 Palm Beach hotel, 45 Pannewick, Friederike, 80 Paris, 11, 140 Park, Robert E., 34 Patisserie Socrates, 197 pavement café, 26, 39 dangerous, 119–20 maqha, as, 26 pavement vendor, 85, 97 rubbish dump, as, 66 seat, as, 79 “stone pavement” culture, 115, 125 see also asphalt Pfohl, Stephen, 25 Phalange Party, 88 phallic Beirut, 38–46 phallic signifiers, 95, 96, 97, 101, 194 Phoenicia hotels, 14 photographs, old, 24, 86–7 Piccadilly cinema, 83 Pike, Burton, 195 Pile, Steve, 56 Pillemer, David, 6 Pizza Hut, 197 Place des Martyrs, 42, 58, 182 policy of erasure, 170 pomegranate, 101 Popular Nasserite Organization, 14 Popey’s restaurant, 131 pornography, 19, 79, 85, 168 Porteous, J. Douglas, 171 postmemory concept, 27 posters, 9, 10, 71–6, 88, 91, 117, 119, 120, 147, 150, 185 Prince Bashīr street, 163

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i ndex prison, 41, 138, 140 private space, 1, 13, 14, 18, 39, 60, 100, 123 private sphere, 19, 20, 93, 205 proletarization of Beirut, 17–18, 65, 85 prostitution, 19–20, 55, 69, 84, 112, 131, 132 public–private space, 1, 13–14, 18, 20, 26, 34, 43, 64, 76, 115, 120, 123 public space, 13, 77, 112, 123, 140, 170, 186 public sphere, 6, 18, 19, 25, 35, 42, 58, 93, 94, 96, 114, 120, 123, 124, 139, 155, 205 publishing, 82, 84, 86, 89 Qur’an, 101, 103 Raban, Jonathan, 16, 42, 182 rape, 9, 44, 58, 76, 82, 121–2, 140 as trope, 21 Rās al-Nabiʿ, 55, 105, 196 Ras al-Naqurah, South Lebanon, 110 Rāshayyā al-Fakhār, 148 al-Razzāz, Muʾnis, 16 ʿAḥyāʾ fī al-baḥr al-mayyit (1982), 11, 17, 21, 126–7, 135–43, 158–9 Rawsha area, 11, 13, 19, 56, 93, 109, 131, 139, 141, 142 Rawsha rock, 85, 108, 172 refugee camps, 88, 139, 150 refugees, 88, 139, 145, 170 regressive Beirut, 47–59 Restaurant Ajami, 24, 178 Revill, George, 34 Riad al-Solh monument, 72 Rich, Adrienne, 19 Riviera hotel, 56 Riyād al-Ṣolḥ Square, 85 Rizk Hospital, Ashrafiyya, 198 Rizqallā, Professor Ralf, 163 Robinson Crusoe, 184 Rodaway, Paul, 171, 184–5 Rose, Gillian, 18, 19, 55, 93, 104 Rue Abdallah Bayhum, 178 Rue Allenby, 178 Rue Foch, 178 Rue de France, 177 Rue Husayn al-Ahdab, 182 Rue Khan Fakhri Bek, 178 Rue Weygand, 173, 176, 182 rural Beirut, 32–8 Sabah, 118 Ṣabrā, 11, 104, 142, 151 Ṣabrā refugee camp, 88, 139 al-Sadr, Imam Musa Shi ʿa Amal movement, 150, 160 St. George Hotel, 14 St. George’s Bay, 28 Sakr, Rita, 23 Salem, Elise, 63, 87 Samāḥa, Joseph, 162–3 Samatiyya cemetary, 179

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al-Sammān, Ghāda Bayrūt 75 (1975), 127–35, 139, 157–8 Kawābīs Beirut (1976), 14, 28 Sanat al- ʿūtūmatīk (Hassan Daoud, 1983), 5, 13, 28, 93, 94–100, 122–3 acquisition of power, 99–100, 103 bakery as homosocial space, 94–100, 122–3 bathroom, 98 bookshop, 99 brothel, 96, 97, 98, 123 feminizing the city, 93, 94–100 male sexual awakening, 94–100, 122–3 perspective of rural men, 94 phallic signifiers, 95, 96, 97, 101 roof as safe refuge, 5, 99–100 voyeurism, 97, 99–100, 103, 123, 204 al-Ṣanāyiʿ Garden, 98, 192 Sāqiyat al-Janzīr, 197 Saqqaf, Abdelaziz Y., 24 Saudi Arabia, 195, 196 Sawalha, Aseel, 26 al-Ṣayfī area, 164 Second World War, 35 scopophilia, fetishistic, 18, 93, 204 sectarian geography of Beirut, 10, 47 selective amnesia, 22, 23 sexual freedom, 38–46, 58, 89, 189–90 sexuality body fixation, 116–17, 118–19 control, 177, 178, 180 cross-dressing, 116 effeminate boxer, 114 eroticizing space, 18–20 fetishistic scopophilia, 18, 93 male impotence, 185–6 necrophilia, 167, 181, 186 phallic signifiers, 95, 96, 97, 101, 116–17, 120 public affair, 112, 115 sexual awakening, 94–100, 122–3 sexual exploitation, 129–33, 135, 158 sexual identities, 20 subversive, 18, 114, 115, 116 urban sexuality, 35, 41, 45, 127–8, 131–2 voyeurism, 13, 18, 97, 99–100, 103, 123, 204 al-Shahroura (singer), 118 Shātīlā, 151 Shātīla Café, 56 Shātīlā hospital, 150 Shātīlā refugee camp, 150 al-Shaykh, Hanan Barīd Bayrūt, 8, 10, 28 Óikāyati sharḥun yaṭūl, 18, 93–4, 100–11 Shibāru, Ghassān, 26 Shūf area, 163 Sibūl, Taysīr, 143 sidewalk see pavement Simmel, Georg, 12, 40, 68, 95, 147, 177, 205 Skype, 52 Smuggler’s Inn restaurant, 86, 88 Snubra area, 114 Ṣobḥ, ʿAlawiyya, 44 Solidére project, 22–3, 164

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Sombart, Werner, 115 Souq Sursock, 182 Souq al-Tawile, 174 South Lebanon, 83, 94, 100, 102, 110, 122 spectral city, 161, 162–73, 199–200 Spinneys supermarket, 167 Starbucks, 19, 25, 112, 115, 192, 193 “Star of the East,” 141, 160 “stone pavement” culture, 125 student, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46, 80, 120, 162, 187–99, 200 student demonstrations, 39, 40, 86 suicide, 143, 163 Sūq al-Gharb, 47, 48, 52 Syria, 127, 128 Tabet, Jad, 22 tabbouleh, 119 Taḥrīr war, 189, 201 Tal-al-Zaʿtar, 87, 92 Talk of the Town nightclub, 139 Taqaniyyāt al-buʾs (Rashid al-Daif, 1989), 4, 12, 15, 60, 61–71, 82, 85, 90–1, 96, 146, 160, 192, 193 architectural surfaces, 66 bartering, 62 electricity, 61–2, 63, 66, 71 garbage, 15, 16–17, 63, 65–6, 70, 71, 90 mental distancing, 12, 90 migrational city, 63 reference points, 4, 70 service taxis, 66, 69 strategies of navigation, 61–71 suspicious pedestrians, 67–8 telephone, 63, 70 voyeurism, 68–9 water supply, 61, 62, 63, 69 ˝awāḥin Bayrūt (Tawfic Yusuf Awwad, 1972), 8, 26, 31–2, 38–46, 48, 58, 71, 140, 158, 188 branding as badge of shame, 41, 58 cafe as urban space, 26 journalist, 42–3 male oppression, 38–9, 40–1, 58 phallic Beirut, 38–46, 58 public and private, 26 rape, 44 village–city bond, 8, 38–46 violence, 40–2, 44, 58 women as sexual conveniences, 44–5, 58 taxis, 40, 67, 69, 83, 108, 119, 120, 127, 133, 137, 146, 147, 152, 157, 196 Traboulsi, Fawaz, 23 tradition, 8, 47–59 traffic jams, 112–13, 114, 119 Tripoli, 53 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 24

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“Turkish cloth,” 52 Tūyūs militia group, 170 “two Beiruts,” 24 Umar al-Zooni, 107 Umm Kulthum, 48, 141, 160, 164, 199 underprivileged areas, 133–5, 143 United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 72 university students, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46, 80, 120, 162, 187–99, 200 demonstrations, 39, 40, 86 Urry, John, 171 ʿUsayrān, Laylā, 23–4 al-ʾUsbūʿ al-akhīr (Hāla Kawtharānī, 2006) old and new Beirut, 24 postmemory, 27 Vale, Lawrence J. & Campanella, Thomas J., 23 Van Gogh, 145 Verdun area, 11, 94, 119, 120 Virgin Megastore, 4, 163 voyeurism, 13, 18, 97, 99–100, 103, 123, 204 Wadi Abu Jmil quarter, 173 walking the city, 10–13, 60–92, 119 strategies of navigation, 61–71 wartime conditions, 61–71 water supply, 61, 62, 63 West Bank, 188 West Beirut, 11, 78, 83, 88, 89, 91, 111 Williams, Raymond, 7 Wirth-Nesher, Hana, 74 al-Wujūh al-bayḍāʿ (Elias Koury, 1981), 4, 26, 60, 61, 71–82, 91, 92, 147, 192 Chinese box technique, 75 cosmopolitan area, 26 martyrdom, 75–6, 91, 147 posters, 71–6, 91, 147 testimonies to murder, 74–82 white paint, 77, 79, 92 women in public sphere assertive presence, 18, 25, 139 Wolff, Kurt, 147, 177 Woolf, Virginia, 143 Yahya, Maha, 23, 49, 51, 170 Yana, 14 Zaḥla, 166 zamzam water, 52 Zara’s boutique, 197 Zaytūna, 55, 143 Zeitouni, 45 Zʿinnī, George, 86 Zūghartā, North Lebanon, 198

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