Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora 9780748643431

Citation preview

Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction

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Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature Series Editor: Rasheed El-Enany

Gender, Nation, and the Arabic Novel: Egypt, 1892–2008 Hoda Elsadda Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel Ziad Elmarsafy Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora Syrine Hout www.euppublishing.com/series/smal

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Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction Home Matters in the Diaspora

Syrine Hout

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For Yasmine and Mona, for whom I wish lasting peace, and for all members of my generation who lived through the Lebanese Civil War

© Syrine Hout, 2012 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF 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 4342 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4343 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 6917 2 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 6916 5 (Amazon ebook) The right of Syrine Hout 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

vii

Acknowledgements

x

Foreword

xi

Introduction and Routes

Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Roots 1

Part I Homesickness and Sickness of Home 1

Koolaids and Unreal City

21

2

The Perv and Somewhere, Home

52

Part II Trauma Narratives: The Scars of War 3

I, the Divine and The Bullet Collection

75

Part III Playing with Fire at Home and Abroad 4

The Hakawati and A Girl Made of Dust

105

5

De Niro’s Game

128

Part IV Exile versus Repatriation 6

Cockroach and A Good Land

159

Afterword

199

Notes

203

Bibliography

217

Index

241

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Series Editor’s Foreword

new and unique series, ‘Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature’ will, it is hoped, fill in a 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 English-speaking 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 civilisation 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, and so on. Even series labelled ‘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 endeavour 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 opposed to the

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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 bring huge publicity to the short list and winner every year, as well as translation contracts into English and other languages – all this and more recently the events of the Arab Spring have heightened public interest, let alone academic, in all things Arab, and not least Arabic literature. It is therefore part of the ambition of this series that it will be increasingly addressing 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 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. Much has been written on the fifteen-year-long Lebanese Civil War (1975– 90), including the tremendous influence it exerted on the literary output of that little country of the Arab world that has traditionally contributed to Arabic literature far in excess of what its comparatively tiny area and population would suggest. At the forefront of the intellectual Arab renaissance or nahda since the nineteenth century when, like much of the rest of the Middle East, Lebanon was under Ottoman rule, it has never relinquished its pride of place in the making and dissemination of Arabic literature. Since its independence in 1943 from the Mandate given to the French after the defeat of Turkey in the First World War, Lebanon has had a colourful and dramatic history, with some highly tragic chapters, the most ferocious of which being the civil war. Some of the best fiction in the Arabic language written in the last thirty years or so was inspired by the Lebanese Civil War and was written by Lebanese writers who lived through the war in their youth or middle age either wholly or partly, before they fled to other parts of the world. A significant number of these works have been translated into English and to some extent studied. However, one of the by-products of the war was a great exodus from Lebanon, which resulted in a young generation of originally Lebanese nationals, mostly growing up in the West and acquiring English as their language of literary creativity.

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This is the category of writers that Syrine Hout sets out to study in the current volume, Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora. They are relatively young, compared with the more established older novelists who wrote about the war in Arabic; they write in English and some of them have become relatively well-known and gone on to win respectable literary prizes; and they have grown up in exile, which makes them neither eyewitnesses of the war, nor its aftermath, endowing their writing about their country of origin and its savage war a measure of detachment, of exilic or diasporic filtering that distinguishes their writing significantly from that of the older generation. The uniqueness of their experience is what Syrine Hout focuses on in her study, while contextualising that uniqueness in the larger body of Lebanese writing on the war in Arabic and English. Rasheed El-Enany Emeritus Professor of Modern Arabic Literature University of Exeter

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Acknowledgements

arts of the materials in this book were published originally in journals as well as in one collection of essays and have been incorporated in modified and expanded form. Sections of the Introduction appeared in ‘Cultural Hybridity, Trauma, and Memory in Diasporic Anglophone Lebanese Fiction’, in Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.3 (2011): 330–42. Sections of Chapter 1 appeared in ‘The Predicament of In-Betweenness in the Contemporary Lebanese Exilic Novel in English’, in Literature and Nation in the Middle East, edited by Yasir Suleiman and Ibrahim Muhawi (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 190–207, and in ‘Of Fathers and the Fatherland in the Post-1995 Lebanese Exilic Novel’, in World Literature Today 75.2 (Spring 2001): 285–93. Sections of Chapter 2 appeared in ‘Memory, Home, and Exile in Contemporary Anglophone Lebanese Fiction’, in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 46.3 (Spring 2005): 219–33. Sections of Chapter 3 appeared in ‘The Tears of Trauma: Memories of Home, War, and Exile in Rabih Alameddine’s I, the Divine’, in World Literature Today 82.5 (September–October 2008): 58–62, and in ‘Revisiting Lebanon: Testimony, Trauma, and Transition in Patricia Sarrafian Ward’s The Bullet Collection’, in Middle Eastern Literatures 12.3 (December 2009): 271–88. Sections of Chapter 4 appeared in ‘Growing Pains: The Portrayal of Young Warriors in 21st-Century Anglophone Lebanese Fiction’, in Al-Abhath: Journal of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (AUB) 57 (2009): 157–82. I would like to express my gratitude to the editors and publishers of the aforementioned volume and journals for allowing me to reuse those sections in this book.

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Foreword

his book is the result of a ten-year academic engagement with contemporary Anglophone Lebanese fiction. These texts captured my attention for several reasons, not least because their hard-hitting recollections of the Lebanese Civil War and its long-term effects on youth echoed some of my own experiences. In addition, the ever-increasing size of this corpus, coupled with mounting international acclaim, demanded that it be examined, in a comparative framework, as the product of an entirely new generation of fresh voices reflecting (on) the conflict from a post-war perspective and geographically distant, that is, diasporic, locations. I belong to the same generation of the selected authors, who lived through the war and left Lebanon at some point but returned to it via their literary works. I have been fortunate enough to meet three of the six authors and established contact with the others through email. Reading and writing about their narratives has been an immensely rewarding experience, both on a personal and a professional level. I extend my thanks to the American University of Beirut’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Center for American Studies and Research (CASAR) for its financial support of this project in the form of two summer research stipend grants (in 2010 and 2011), which allowed me to write large sections and complete a first draft. My gratitude also goes to the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the American University of Beirut, Dr Patrick McGreevy, for having approved a paid research leave in spring 2010 which relieved me of my teaching duties long enough to prepare and deliver a proposal for this study. I am indebted, too, to my graduate students in a seminar I taught in autumn 2010 – ‘The Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Narrative’ – for their genuine interest in this area of budding research, and for their vibrant class discussions and inspiring papers and presentations,

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which yielded a considerable number of astute observations about some of the novels covered in this book. I feel particularly fortunate for having been blessed with three very helpful research assistants over the past few years: Olga Habre, Luna Rishmani and Maya Sfeir. I also appreciate the moral support extended to me by my colleagues in AUB’s Department of English, including our Chair, Dr David Wrisley, and by individuals from other parts of the campus community. The support of my family has been unshakeable. I am grateful for the love and attention of my mother, Dr Bayan Nuwayhed al-Hout, my sister Hanine, my brother Hader, and my sister-in-law Rima. My father, Shafiq al-Hout, who passed away in August 2009, remains an inexhaustible source of motivation. I thank my ten-year-old twin girls, Yasmine and Mona, for understanding why their last few summer vacations in Canada did not include their mom. My sincere thanks to Marc J. Sirois, whose political acumen and painstaking editing of my manuscript have made a huge difference in both the style and the substance of what follows. The presence of excellent friends in my life, some of whom read different chapters, proved vital, as well, in sustaining me through the various stages of this study. They are Soud Allan, Manuela Atoui, the late Samy Atoui, Dima Ayoub, Jumana Bayeh, Alexander Dayekh, Marwan Gharzeddine, Sleiman El-Hajj, Raja Halwani, Ala Al-Hamarneh, Imad Hamze, Dima Haydar, Yasser Khorshid, Mona Makdisi, Fouad Gehad Marei, Jose-Miguel Martínez-Torrejón, Banan Masri, Razan Masri, Rima Pano, Karen Pinto, Cristiana Viorescu and Nabila Zbeeb. My heartfelt gratitude to Professor Rasheed El-Enany, the series editor of ‘Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature’ at Edinburgh University Press, for having believed in my project from the very beginning and for having offered indispensable advice at various stages. The professionalism and courtesy of all members of the EUP team, especially Nicola Ramsey, Eddie Clark, Jenny Daly, Michelle Houston and Rebecca Mackenzie, also are much appreciated.

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Introduction Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Roots and Routes ars have always acted as stimuli for writers. Mustapha Marrouchi describes the twenty-one years between 1982 (Israel’s invasion of Lebanon) and 2003 (the US-led invasion of Iraq) as having witnessed ‘a single explosive development in Arabic literature’ indicating a cultural shift marked by ‘an exuberant nastiness’ and ‘a violent rush of words’ (2010: par. 2). This rupture from literary tradition, he argues, can be seen markedly in writings by several Arabic- and foreign-language Lebanese authors, both established and emergent, such as Elias Khoury, Hoda Barakat, Hanan alShaykh, Ghada Samman, Etel Adnan, Mai Ghoussoub, Jad el Hage, Rabih Alameddine, Patricia Sarrafian Ward and Nada Awar Jarrar (note 3). The Lebanese Civil War, which erupted on 13 April 1975, lasted for fifteen years. The Ta’if Accord of 22 October 1989 is customarily cited as the reason for the end of hostilities the following year, but there is no agreed-upon date commemorating the precise onset of the post-war period.1 Like many cataclysmic events of similar scope and duration, the Lebanese Civil War inspired a generation of writers to respond artistically, in a variety of genres, to the destruction of lives, families, institutions and infrastructure. Elias Khoury believes that, paradoxically, the bloody conflict facilitated the birth of the modern experimental Lebanese novel because the protracted violence broke many social, sexual, religious and moral taboos and thus paved the way towards narrative innovation in both form and content (cited in Kacimi 2007: 15). Ken Seigneurie observes that literary realist conventions were shattered by the ‘war’s rapid ideological transformations, shifting alliances and rampant opportunism’, which destroyed ‘the notion of a knowable, objective reality’ (2003: 22). Regardless of political and/or sectarian allegiances, the result was a

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literature ‘tinged with the heavy burden of the war years’ (Manganaro 1994: 378) and ranging from feelings of alienation, dispossession and exile to cries of resistance and triumph. While male writers with more or less established reputations could not but enrich their productivity by addressing the war, a significant number of women emerged by penning their own views and concerns. Miriam Cooke’s War’s Other Voices (1988), Evelyne Accad’s Sexuality and War (1990) and Elise Salem’s Constructing Lebanon (2003), to name but three, are early examples of scholarship on Lebanese war narratives. Cooke and Accad argue that the chaos acted as a stimulus for women authors to define themselves vis-à-vis the war by narrativising it as a daily, not an abstract, phenomenon. Family, gender relations, social roles, peace, self-liberation and a humanist nationalism were among the many issues tackled by these new voices. Most underplayed in their narratives the senseless fighting as such and focused instead ‘on the traumas resulting from protracted and random violence’ (Khalaf 2006: 13). As Roger Allen had predicted in 1995, genderfocused texts by Lebanese women writers from the war period have continued to elicit attention for both Arab and Western feminist critics (1995: 132).2 In addition to literary critics, sociologists and political scientists also have praised post-war Lebanese fiction as monumental, even honoured in a nation whose public discourse has been characterised by a collective amnesia. Fostered by the government-sponsored general amnesty of 1991, the broadcasting censorship law of 1994 and the absence of either a dedicated criminal tribunal or a ‘truth and reconciliation committee’, this deliberate forgetting is deemed necessary by officials because of the volatility fuelled by Lebanon’s deeply rooted sectarianism and pronounced susceptibility to foreign meddling. Since there can be no agreement on a consistent war narrative, statesponsored forgetfulness becomes a strategy to suppress political memory. Until today, Lebanese public policy has been successful in omitting the civil war from history textbooks.3 Unlike the Palestine–Israel conflict, the Iran–Iraq War or Algeria’s war of liberation from colonialism, Sune Haugbolle argues that, in the absence of a strong Lebanese state, the Lebanese Civil War makes looking for alternative sources of memorialisation a necessary endeavour (2010: 6). He states that while legal, political and socio-psychological factors made memories of the civil war both ‘taboo and predicament’ (2005: 193), and thus impeded

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a much-needed national debate about the conflict and its consequences, the desire to discuss the methods and types of remembering materialised with increasing momentum after the turn of the twenty-first century. Furthermore, he explains that official amnesia covers a generational divide between those who lived through the war and have memories of guilt and shame to couple with those of suffering, and those who were too young to remember much or who emigrated and came back only after the war ended. Whereas, for the older survivors, amnesia is adopted to bury or exorcise traumatic memories, for the younger ones it serves as a reaction to an amnesiac society, which resists informing them about the past and provides no clear plan for the future. In both cases, he argues, the Lebanese are victims of gaps between personal memory and collective denial, since collective memory requires a ‘process of interaction between public and private memory’ (2005: 191). For example, many have critiqued the reconstruction of downtown Beirut as having contributed to the erasure of the war’s traces, that is, of Lebanon’s recent past, in favour of its ancient history and projected future.4 Memorialisation, operating on both public and private levels, is essential to any process of reconciliation following a national trauma such as the Lebanese Civil War. Today, both tendencies – to forget and to remember – coexist (Khalaf 2004–5: 53). Although there have been great efforts in recent years to counteract public amnesia,5 it has been mainly the artists – writers,6 filmmakers, documentary-makers, photographers and musicians – who have done so.7 As Ha Jin states, the main function of literature is to preserve; and ‘to combat historical amnesia’ it ‘must be predicated on the autonomy and integrity of literary works inviolable by time’ (2008: 30), ideally by writers who are not only chroniclers but also alchemists of historical experiences. In the post-war period, Lebanese literature has been thematically diverse, dealing with many issues still related to the civil war and its repercussions but also with modernisation, globalisation, the internet and sexuality (Aghacy 2002–3: 2).8 It displays the tension between the need for remembering and that for forgetting the atrocities. Many post-war fictions, as Roseanne Khalaf observes, are ‘concerned with sorting out the past’ (2006: 15). Most significant in the post-war period has been the rise of the diasporic Anglophone Lebanese narrative since 1998. Interestingly, the same year marks the beginning of what Lina Khatib calls ‘the renaissance period’ of Lebanese cinema

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(2008: xv).9 Contemporary Anglophone Lebanese literature is a more recent phenomenon than its Francophone counterpart, which flourished after 1975 when many authors, like Amin Maalouf, Ghassan Fawaz and Dominique Eddé, and much later Alexandre Najjar, emigrated to Paris, where they formed a literary community.10 It is also the most recent corpus, as I see it, within ‘a whole generation of anglophone Arab writers’ (Al Maleh 2009: 21) whose output, according to Layla Al Maleh, has been flourishing around the world in the last four decades and dealing, in many instances, with the question of identity as in most post-colonial narratives. It is not at all surprising that a new wave of English- but also French-language Lebanese literature has emerged, considering that 1.2 million Lebanese, that is, over a quarter of the population, left their country between 1975 and 2007 to settle abroad (‘Center’ 2008: 3). The psychological internalisation of armed conflict continues to prevail in post-war Lebanese literature, as it did during the war period regardless of language, and the workings of individual memory in relation to the traumatising collective past are also central in recent novels by Arabic-language Lebanese authors, including Elias Khoury, Rashid al-Daif, Hoda Barakat, Hanan al-Shaykh and others. However – and this is a significant point of distinction – in addition to the choice of Arabic and the older ages of these authors, most Arabic-language Lebanese writers, whether they emigrated, like Barakat and al-Shaykh, or not, still largely deal with internal exile as a psychosocial or a political phenomenon without addressing lives in the diaspora as such. A large number of Lebanese authors write and publish beyond Lebanon’s geographical and linguistic boundaries. In so doing, they have, as Elise Salem puts it, ‘broadened and complicated the notion of Lebanon’ (2003: 771).11 Surely, when an ever-increasing number of authors choose to express their experiences and visions in a foreign language, a fact resulting partly from their having moved away at some point from the war and/or the Arab Middle East, their products cannot but complicate, if not challenge, what it means to be Lebanese today. Most notable among these are Rabih Alameddine, Tony Hanania, Rawi Hage, Nada Awar Jarrar, Patricia Sarrafian Ward, Nathalie Abi-Ezzi, Abbas el-Zein, Dimitri Nasrallah, Mai Ghoussoub and Fares Aoun, who write in English, and Hani Hammoud, Alexandre Najjar, Dominique

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Eddé, Ghassan Fawaz, Amin Maalouf, Bernard Antoun, Wajdi Mouawad, Elias Abou-Haidar, Sélim Nassib, Elie-Pierre Sabbag, Ramy Khalil Zein and Roula Azar Douglas, who do so in French. Most now still live abroad; some visit Lebanon frequently, like Alameddine, el-Zein and Najjar; others much less so, like Ward and Hanania; while still others, like Jarrar and Hammoud, have repatriated. As Edward Said showed in 1992, English never developed roots in the colonised Arab Middle East, and writings in English from these parts were minimal compared to the output, for example, from India or Africa (2001: 405–7). Geoffrey Nash explains that Anglophone writers of Arab background may demonstrate an awareness of the migrant predicament, depending on their (re)locations, but for most of them the adoption of English is made freely and not forced on them as a result of colonialism and/or migration (2007: 20). In fact, it results in most cases from an upper-class Western education and is therefore the product of late twentieth-century globalisation (191). Yasir Suleiman states that ‘a nationally committed Arab writer can write in English or French without detracting from his identity’ (2006: 13), adding that ‘while all Arabic literature is Arab, not all Arab literature is Arabic’ (16). As Ha Jin argues, when ‘the mother tongue is an unavailable home’ (2008: 79), authors depend on estrangement from it while they opt for another in which ‘they have to figure out how to survive’ (80). For none of the Lebanese authors does writing in English (or French) diminish their ties to Lebanon. Rawi Hage declares: ‘I am a first-generation Arab Canadian or Québécois’ (2007: 7); ‘I kind of became an anglophone’ after also having lived in New York City (cited in Waters 2006: par. 6). He explains further: ‘Language is not an ideology for me, it’s just a tool like photography to express (myself)’ (cited in Stoffman 2006: par. 20). Jad el Hage says he switched to English after thirty-five years of writing in Arabic as a result of coincidence and of daily exposure (cited in Menassa 2003: 15). Norman Nikro argues that, alongside the predominant native Arabic, English has been significant in recent years in informing the cultural landscape of Lebanon. Therefore, not only has English become one of Lebanon’s diasporic languages but it also has come to participate in how Lebanese culture develops the capacity to structure and redefine itself. Writing in 1994, and referring to those she

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described as the new mahjar (emigrant) Lebanese-American writers of the years 1975–91,12 Elise Salem Manganaro thought it ‘necessary to examine the ever-broadening definition of what constitutes a Lebanese literature’ and argued for a ‘literary pluralism’ (1994: 374–5). Doing so following the emergence of post-war Anglophone Lebanese fiction in the diaspora at the end of the twentieth century13 – which is the main objective of this study – becomes even more urgent. Elias Khoury argues that one must change the direction of investigation and open a new chapter related to literature by Arab emigrants written in Spanish, Portuguese, English and French, [because this] can help us redefine the concept of World literature as an atmosphere where all the strangers, those who are outside their countries, and those who are strangers in their own countries, can meet and create from the diversities of their languages a human unity. (2006: 108–9)

In the case of Lebanon, Yasir Suleiman affirms that ‘Arabic literature is but one of the literatures within the Lebanese literary scene’ (2006: 18). In fact, a few Lebanese authors write – sometimes for different media and/or for various purposes – in two languages simultaneously, for example Etel Adnan (English and French), Jad el Hage (Arabic and English) and Najwa Barakat (Arabic and French). Geoffrey Nash contends that ‘there is a qualitative difference between Arabic literature, Arabic literature translated into English, and a literature conceived and executed in English by writers of Arab background’ (2007: 11). Indeed, the Anglophone Lebanese novel differs from the Arabic-language one translated into English. Several novelists, like Elias Khoury and Hanan al-Shaykh, have been widely translated into English and other languages, and have therefore helped introduce Western readers to issues related to the Arab world and to Lebanon in particular. However, the Anglophone Lebanese novel is unique in that it incorporates elements from both the literature and culture of its host country and those of its original place. As Zahia Salhi explains in reference to foreign-language Arab writings, this hybrid literature is neither entirely Arab nor fully English or French or anything else, but instead occupies ‘a place where both home and host cultures converge, intersect, and even clash, resulting in a third culture, which situates itself in a third

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space which is that of the Diaspora’ (2006: 3–4). Muhsin al-Musawi agrees that, although it may offer glimpses into its original cultural background, the foreign-language Arab text is conceived and produced with a different target audience in mind, that is, a Western one (2003: 8). Choosing to write in English both liberates and limits the Arab author. For example, Rabih Alameddine’s association of violence with male sexual aggression, in addition to the explicit depictions of incestuous and homosexual encounters, have been the main obstacle to getting his works, which are available in Lebanon, translated into Arabic. The language in which an author writes modifies not just content (and the consequences thereof), but also the style of the finished product. Several Anglophone Lebanese authors sprinkle their prose with Arabic words – like habibi (my love), jiddo (grandpa), jibneh (cheese), shish ta’ouk (barbecued chicken pieces) and Mufti (Sunni Muslim religious official) – without feeling the need to translate them, evincing a mood of de facto cultural syncretism. Viewing the accelerating mobility of people, goods, capital and ideas as the hallmark of globalisation, Ottmar Ette argues that twenty-first-century literature is international and will therefore have increasingly to be conceived and appreciated as ‘literature without a fixed abode’ (2006: 35). Instead of territorialising literary production, he argues that we should ‘vectorize’ it in order to understand the reality of cultures as being in motion (42). This ‘vectorization has comprised not only the themes and content of literature, their various presentations and representations of movement, but also their adoption by a wide spectrum of readerships on a global scale’ (42). Indeed, Arab literature produced in English with a Western readership in mind reaches this audience more effectively than translated Arabic literatures might (Salhi 2006: 1–10; Majaj 2006: 132–4). As Ette clarifies, since in the post-modern era the temporal bases of thought and writing have become weaker while spatial ones have become stronger, transculturality in many contemporary texts has necessarily increased. Therefore, one should focus on migration and movement as salient traits of world literatures. Despite the upsurge of transculturality, he believes that a fully fledged ‘Poetics of Movement’ has yet to emerge (2006: 42). Such literature is both local and global, or ‘glocal’ (glokal), because it is place-polygamous (ortspolygamisch), to use two terms coined by the German

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theoretician of globalisation Ulrich Beck (cited in Pflitsch 2004b: 191, 193). ‘Diaspora’ derives from the Greek word for being scattered, in Arabic alshatat, whereas ‘exile’ is Latinate and means to be banned from one’s place of origin. Although exilic and diasporic writings both involve a ‘rhetoric of displacement’ which displays the ‘struggle to assert identity out of place’ (Israel 2000: ix), there are important differences. Exile, associated with early twentieth-century literary modernism, presupposes a coherent subject and well-defined realities of ‘here’ and ‘now’ (country of current residence) versus ‘there’ and ‘then’ (original homeland); diaspora – connected to post-colonial, post-structuralist and post-modernist theories – accounts for hybridity and performativity which complicate notions of nation, location and identity in an age of globalisation (Israel 2000: 3). Diaspora, embedded in ‘global processes of de-territorialization, transnational migration and cultural hybridity’ (Kokot et al. 2004: 1), is ‘less inclined towards suffering and longing’ than exile (Hammer 2003: 185). As Avtar Brah argues, the ‘homing desire’ produced by migration leads to physical and/or symbolic acts which establish sites promising a certain existential security away from one’s foundation. So the concept of diaspora ‘places the discourse of “home” and “dispersion” in creative tension, inscribing a homing desire while simultaneously critiquing discourses of fixed origins’ (Brah 1996: 192–3, emphasis in original). James Clifford states that ‘diasporic cultural forms can never [. . .] be exclusively nationalist’ because ‘they are deployed in transnational networks built from multiple attachments’ (1994: 307). For many, but certainly not all, characters in diasporic Anglophone Lebanese fiction, it is such networks which redefine both their personal and national/cultural identities abroad. Andreas Pflitsch borrows the German term Ausserhalbbefindlichkeit (state of outside-ness, my translation) from Ottmar Ette14 to describe the advantage enjoyed by foreign-language Lebanese authors in reflecting (on) war-related and diasporic experiences from a geographically distant vantage point (2008: 1177). The fact that they enrich Lebanese literature not only by writing in a foreign language but also by doing so from a new perspective which allows them to look afresh at recent Lebanese history, he argues, endows this emergent group with a ‘double state of outside-ness’ (2005: 14, my translation). Pflitsch has celebrated an ‘entirely new tone’ (2004a: 251) of young Anglophone and Francophone writers from Lebanon characterised by

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their debunking of two myths: the return to a golden age of a romanticised Lebanon, and the slavish imitation of a supposedly superior Western lifestyle. As he puts it: ‘Nothing is holy to them’ (251–2). Displaced Lebanese characters neither idealise their country of origin nor shed their past to embrace unquestioningly a Western mode of living. Instead, cultural hybridity typifies this literature and manifests itself not only on the levels of languages, settings and themes, but most prominently in a state, or a predicament, of inbetweenness which reflects a complex consciousness characterised by mixed modes and moods, such as irony, parody, satire, nostalgia and sentimentality. Although cultural production provides writers, especially those belonging to the generation in my focus, with the narrative space to represent a common but also a personal unassimilated trauma, it is important to distinguish between the authors’ own psychic entanglements and those of the narrators/protagonists. While many of their characters are torn between cultures – showcasing what Edward Said calls a ‘contrapuntal consciousness’, that is, the inevitable double or plural visions due to awareness of two or more cultures (1994: 366), and expressing either predominantly diasporic or exilic outlooks – the writers themselves are transcultural, illustrating how cultural divides have been surmounted in their own lives. Speaking of Montreal, where he has lived since 1992, Rawi Hage asserts, on the one hand: ‘This is home. Finally’ (cited in Salvador 2006: par. 26). On the other, he sees himself as a ‘traveler’ who was, ‘fortunately, bound to become a global citizen’ (2008: ‘Acceptance Speech’ n. pag.). He believes that his novels are, among other things, ‘a satire of nationalisms’ which ‘appeal[s] to a global – and not a globalized – audience’ (cited in Sakr 2011: 346). Rabih Alameddine refuses the hyphenated identity label of ‘Arab-American’, stating: ‘I am American and I am Lebanese and I am Arab’ (2008: E-mail interview). Patricia Ward asserts that although the ‘Lebanese-American’ label would fit her the most, she does not necessarily see herself as a Lebanese-American author because of the diversity of her (some still unpublished) works (2008: E-mail interview). She adds: ‘I don’t know what I am other than being a writer [. . .] I have come to realize [that] my past of war and loss is a thread I pull through every tale; maybe that is a kind of identity.’15 As these authors affirm their affiliation with Lebanon as a source of continuous artistic inspiration, their novels become part of the cultural history of both the war and the post-war periods.

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Diasporic Lebanese narratives in English display an uneven focus on war versus post-war issues, and on survival at home versus life abroad. Some texts are set in a specific period, such as 1976 (when Syrian troops arrived in Lebanon) in The Myrtle Tree (2007), 1977 in One Day in April (2011) and 1995–6 in The Last Migration: A Novel of Diaspora and Love (2002),16 all by Jad el Hage; or 1981–2 (the period leading up to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon) in Beirut in Shades of Grey (2007) by Dana Kamal Mills. Here, character development remains minimal. Abbas el-Zein’s Tell the Running Water (2001) is a coming-of-age story, set between 1975 and 1980, of three teenagers whose life in divided Beirut and/or extended engagement in combat ends up either killing them or leaving emotional scars. Scholarship on post-war Anglophone Lebanese literature is, so far, relatively scarce. Apart from numerous book reviews and several articles, neither a comprehensive nor a comparative study of this body of writings has appeared yet. Elise Salem, Norman Nikro, Andreas Pflitsch, Roseanne Khalaf and Saree Makdisi have commented on the singularity of this corpus in book reviews, introductions to anthologies, lectures or more general-type articles. Particular interest in Anglophone Lebanese writings is fortunately growing but is still only visible in broader-based collections of essays, in this case, either on English-language Arab literature or on Lebanese identity.17 In this study, my goal is to conduct the first thoroughgoing examination of the phenomenon of the post-civil war Anglophone Lebanese fictional narrative in the diaspora. Since Rabih Alameddine’s pioneering and acclaimed 1998 novel Koolaids: The Art of War, more than twenty noteworthy and occasionally international award-winning works of fiction, in addition to autobiographies, narrative and graphic memoirs,18 have entered literary markets in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. Unlike novels from the war period, written mostly in Arabic along with a few in French, this body of contemporary Anglophone texts is in most instances not only produced in but is also substantially about the diaspora, thus tackling not only the fifteen-year civil strife but also its crucial and long-lasting by-product for this younger generation: expatriation.19 I argue that contemporary Anglophone Lebanese novels embody a distinctive transculturality manifest in the portrayals of their characters’ recurrent movements from and back to Lebanon, in mind and/or in body, and of

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their processes of remembering war-related traumatic events. In emphasising these narrative dynamics, I will show how they contribute a particular slant to Ottmar Ette’s concept of ‘poetics of movement’ in transnational literature and, in the process, also provide a diasporic, anti-amnesiac and generationspecific testimony to the long-term effects of the Lebanese Civil War. As Lebanese-American author Gregory Orfalea notes: ‘It is natural that falling into the trench of middle age, people begin to look back to their youth with a terrible fondness and not a little anxiety’ and so start ‘plumb[ing] the meaning of home’ (2009: 1). This statement is particularly true for those who exhibit repeatedly the urge to do so, even after having left Lebanon twenty to thirty years earlier. In delineating the permutations of the concept of ‘home’ – that is, the different places (homeland, host country) and spaces (geographical in-betweenness) but also mental states and ideals with which these may be associated – I will show why and how these texts, which are extremely diverse stylistically, characterise a distinctly new literary and cultural trend, and have founded what I predict will become a fuller-fledged variant of diasporic Lebanese literature. It is my hope, therefore, that this study will contribute to interdisciplinary scholarship on the hybridisation of personal and national identities, with emphasis on the Arab Middle East in general and on Lebanon in particular in the twenty-first century. Homi Bhabha’s idea of the hybrid, in which liminality opens up a ‘Third Space’ (1994: 39, emphasis in original) where new selfhoods are formed and articulated as alternatives to unitary conceptualisations of national identity, applies to many of the characters in the selected novels. Teetering on both literal (geographical) and figurative (emotional) boundaries between Lebanon and their new places, as most do, the protagonists remain ambivalent, pushed and pulled as they are towards both poles, ‘in-between the claims of the past and the needs of the present’ (Bhabha 1994: 219, emphasis in original) and the future. Depending on their self-identifications as primarily diasporic or exilic in the dialectic of belonging and not belonging, their renovated identities are nuanced, displaying various degrees and modes of hybridity, from the celebratory to the confrontational. Their experiences of ‘unhomeliness’– Bhabha’s term to describe ‘the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the World’ (1994: 9) – are defined in many cases by intersections of age, gender and class, as well as by reasons for departure and traumatic war memories.

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The six Anglophone writers selected, three men and three women, belong to the younger generation of war survivors and witnesses. They are Rabih Alameddine, Tony Hanania, Rawi Hage, Nada Awar Jarrar, Patricia Sarrafian Ward and Nathalie Abi-Ezzi. The total number of texts examined is eleven: Alameddine’s Koolaids: The Art of War (1998), The Perv: Stories (1999), I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters (2001) and The Hakawati (2008); Hanania’s Unreal City (1999); Hage’s De Niro’s Game (2006) and Cockroach (2008); Jarrar’s Somewhere, Home (2003) and A Good Land (2009); Ward’s The Bullet Collection (2003); and Abi-Ezzi’s A Girl Made of Dust (2008). Apart from The Perv, a collection of eight short stories, and Somewhere, Home, a tripartite novella, all of the books in my study are novels. Five are by Lebanese-American authors (four by Alameddine and one by Ward), two by a Lebanese-Canadian (Hage), two by Lebanese-British writers (one each by Hanania and Abi-Ezzi) and two by a Lebanese-Australian (Jarrar).20 I have based my selections primarily on the ages of the authors and the international acclaim which most of their works have received.21 The six writers selected share five key biographical characteristics. First, all were born between the late 1950s and the early 1970s.22 Second, they lived through the horrors of war, whether for short or protracted periods, but were too young at the time to translate their fears and hopes into writing, as the older generation of authors had done. Third, they all left Lebanon at some point during or after the war. Fourth, they all adopted English, quite familiar to them thanks to education and/or a bi-national identity, as a language in which to write. Fifth, they all focus on the experiences of war and/ or life abroad of their protagonists, whether in first- or third-person narrative modes. Possessing neither a mature adult’s mind capable of collecting memories during the mayhem nor what Marianne Hirsch calls ‘postmemory’ – typical of second-generation writers who grow up dominated not by the central collective trauma but by narratives that preceded their birth23 – these authors are unique because they can rely neither on undiluted recollections of direct experiences nor on purely imaginative reconstructions of the older writers’ testimonies.24 Notwithstanding occasional descriptions of war-time events, none of the Anglophone Lebanese novels claim to be historical or realist fictions. They focus not on narrating the war, that is, on the what, when and where of

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historical events, but rather on when, how and why selected war-related facts and experiences are remembered and by whom. In the opinion of Rabih Alameddine, departing is not necessarily ‘an attempt to escape the past, but to escape oneself’, because by leaving one gains ‘a distance of both space and time, which is essential for writing about family or home’.25 Redefining home, whether in connection with or separately from the family and the nation, is a hallmark of these Lebanese fictions, as it is of many other diasporic works. Patricia Ward says: ‘It’s hard to say [. . .] where the truth ends and the fiction begins,’ yet The Bullet Collection ‘speaks truthfully about growing up in war, suffering from depression, and what it is like to leave one’s homeland’; in this sense, it is ‘as “true” as nonfiction’ (2008: E-mail interview). Rawi Hage states: ‘Some things I lived through, some I heard about, some are purely imagined [. . .] I’d like to keep the ambiguity’ (cited in Stoffman 2006: par. 3). So it is not the truth of what actually happened that these novelists are interested in conveying, as some writers of the older generation had been, but rather acute observations about childhoods ravaged by war. Each text in this study is a fictional exploration of the complexities of personal identity, collective (national) identity and, except in A Girl Made of Dust, of belonging and/or not belonging in the cross-cultural web of diasporic existence and relocation, including possible repatriation. The texts allow for a dramatisation of exilic/diasporic experiences to take place within many of the characters’ psyches as well as within war-torn Lebanon, host countries and/ or post-war Lebanon. I read them therefore as representations of imaginative returns, as a body of narratives generated out of particular, sometimes even personal, experiences, each contributing in its own style to the collective endeavour of memorialising a contested and largely suppressed history of the civil war and its physical and psychological repercussions for a specific generation. Themes recurring more than once include drug and alcohol abuse, AIDS, rape, self-mutilation, suicide attempts, strained child–parent relationships, militarisation, sexual activity, gayness, anger, departure from war-shattered Lebanon to a safer Western country, nostalgia for the period of childhood/ early adolescence preceding or coinciding with the war, and the arduous task for many of these characters of retelling their life stories. The incorporation of these themes, albeit with different emphases and in various combinations, demonstrates what Raymond Williams has theorised as ‘structures of feeling’,

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a concept which is ‘as firm and definite as “structure” suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity’ (1961: 48). Put differently, these themes are played out within a ‘psychic space in which [the selected authors but also many of their characters] feel rooted and to which they feel they belong’ (Cooke 1995: 1076). They share a generation-specific awareness of a dichotomous existence, a life split and defined in terms of the here and now (the host country or second home) versus the there and then (Lebanon). Consequently, these fictions resemble ‘imaginary homelands’ (Rushdie 1991: 10). Whether nostalgic (desiring to return), nostophobic (fearful of return) or nostomanic (obsessively needing to return), they are all nostographic, that is, writing about return.26 Specifically, I will be teasing out the different meanings and reformulations of home, be it Lebanon as a nation, a particular dwelling house or apartment, a host country, an irretrievable pre-war childhood, a state of in-between dwelling, a portable state of mind, a utopian (political) ideal and/or the narrative itself. Through a comparative lens and by relating their specific narrative forms to the interrelated themes of war, childhood, militarisation, exile, nationalism, nostalgia, personal versus collective memory, trauma and others, I will show how this endeavour of remembering and/or redefining home is strongest among those authors whose memories are painful but whose understanding of the terrifying events at the time of their occurrence was limited by age. Aiming to connect and compare but not to homogenise, my approach can best be described as a close reading informed by theories of nationalism, exile, diaspora, cultural hybridity, trauma, memory, militarisation, nostalgia and others most suited to the text(s) in question. The four parts, as their titles reveal, are based on groupings determined by contrast and/or similarity, in terms of related sub-themes, style, setting and mood. The sequence of chapters also reflects more or less the chronological order of the texts’ respective dates of publication. Part I – ‘Homesickness and Sickness of Home’ – comprises Chapters 1 and 2, each dealing with two texts that present diametrically opposed notions of Lebanon as homeland, ranging from nostophobia to nostalgia. In this Part, I rely on an array of definitions and concepts, such as memory, the politics of home and nation versus place of exile/diaspora, provided by various critics, in my treatment of the four narratives. In Chapter 1, I show how in both

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Alameddine’s Koolaids and Hanania’s Unreal City national identity and the feeling of being at home are determined less by political ideology than by an emotional reality which, strongly affected by father–son relationships, stretches beyond the conventional definition of the nation as a homeland. To do so, I concentrate on the interplay of the novels’ post-modern features with the themes of alcohol and drug abuse, AIDS and political radicalism. Instead of pitting exile against the nation as conflicting realities, and therefore privileging one over the other, I argue that these two texts show both cultural in-betweenness and the exilic sentiment to be independent of geography by locating them within the individual, the nation and the host country. In Chapter 2, I illustrate how Alameddine’s The Perv and Jarrar’s Somewhere, Home approach the questions of exile, diaspora, home and identity from opposite angles. The memories of home and war which shape the expatriated characters’ relationships to Lebanon are disparate in tone and purpose. I compare the attitudes towards Lebanon in these narratives to show how recollections range from ‘sickness of home’ resulting from both an ‘ironic nostalgia’ and a ‘critical memory’ of the immediate past of the civil war to ‘homesickness’ derived from a ‘tender nostalgia’ and a ‘nostalgic memory’ of a timeless Lebanon. Part II – ‘Trauma Narratives: The Scars of War’ – comprises a single chapter (Chapter 3) dealing with personal trauma in the context of collective trauma. Drawing on recent theoretical and applied studies of trauma literature, I juxtapose two first-person novels – Alameddine’s I, the Divine and Ward’s The Bullet Collection – whose narrative styles, marked by indirection, fragmentation and temporal disorientation, bear the marks of trauma fiction. I also demonstrate how each author, through his or her female protagonist, uses traumatic textual markers, notably the concept of ‘belatedness’ typical of trauma writings, to deliver a covert critique of the Lebanese policy of public amnesia, and how this project of transcribing individual pain as a reminder of the traumatising past is waged belatedly yet fiercely by war survivors who were children or teenagers when the conflict started. Part III – ‘Playing with Fire at Home and Abroad’ – comprises Chapters 4 and 5, which expose the militarisation of Lebanese youth, emphasise the roles of socio-economic class, family relations and political indoctrination, and reveal the damage of participation in war, particularly when it derives

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from a narrowly defined sectarian/political creed defining only one slice of the nation as home. The ability to leave war-torn Lebanon, depending on financial means and time of departure, may or may not allow militarised youngsters to overcome the emotional impasse caused by their violent past. For the poor and misguided, Lebanon, however they define it, is the only homeland – and possibly the only grave – available. The affluent and educated, by contrast, flee and settle elsewhere, evolving into transnational figures and identifying with two or more nations/cultures as home. In Chapter 4, my reading traces the descriptions of two impoverished young men who join militias to demonstrate their manhood and achieve their nationalistic aspirations associated therewith, only to suffer devastating consequences. The fictionalisations of their devolutions in Alameddine’s The Hakawati and Abi-Ezzi’s A Girl Made of Dust acquire active roles in the post-war cultural exploration of the psychosocial consequences of the Lebanese Civil War. In Chapter 5, I discuss Hage’s De Niro’s Game as a confessional first-person narrative, similar in this respect to Unreal City, I, the Divine and The Bullet Collection, and sharing a depiction of military involvement and political fanaticism with Unreal City, A Girl Made of Dust and The Hakawati. The loss of innocence here is correlated with the loss of life for one combatant and the feeling of homelessness or internal exile for another, whether during battles in Beirut or while starting a new life in Paris. Home is only portable in the sense of one’s remaining haunted by traumatising experiences, and the new utopian home, metaphorised in De Niro’s Game by the city of Rome, remains out of reach. Part IV – ‘Exile versus Repatriation’ – comprises the last chapter (Chapter 6) in which, building on theories and studies of exilic, diasporic and immigrant literatures, I contrast Hage’s Cockroach with Jarrar’s A Good Land. I show why Cockroach, partly a sequel to De Niro’s Game with existentialist and magical realist overtones, cannot be subsumed under any of these categories. The unnamed Lebanese protagonist in Montreal is neither exilic in the traditional sense of wishing to return home, nor a diasporic or modern-day travelling immigrant with a homing desire – unlike characters in other novels – but lives in Canada trying to overcome a traumatic memory associated with a sister who died before he left his homeland. Lebanon, never mentioned by name yet omnipresent and to which no return is possible, is a haunting memory triggered by flashbacks in a frigid land in which there is no possibil-

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ity for self-renewal. A Good Land, by contrast, is a realist narrative of nostos, the homecoming of a young woman who had been forced as a teenager to leave for Australia during the war but is now determined to re-establish what she had lost. Most of its characters, belonging to multiple generations yet having all spent years abroad for personal or war-related reasons, retell different periods of Lebanon’s history. Lebanon only feels like home for repatriates if life therein is sustained by love and friendship among kindred souls. In the Afterword, I sum up the semantic permutations of home found in these examples of post-war Anglophone Lebanese literature. The connotative range of home is wide, extending from the concrete to the metaphorical, from the general to the personal, and interspersed by both elusiveness and idealism. I also raise, and try to answer, the question of whether this new foreign-language variant of contemporary Lebanese literature will remain so strongly steeped in memories of war(s).

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1 Koolaids and Unreal City

ecent sociological studies of diasporic representations of Lebanon by first-generation immigrants have yielded complex perceptions of home in reference to both Lebanon-as-homeland and various host countries. Dalia Abdelhady concludes that these immigrants’ personal connections to their homeland are but one among many forms of attachment and ‘ways of being at home’ abroad (2010: 146). Their cosmopolitan realities, she explains, reveal Hamid Naficy’s concept of moveable and therefore temporary homelands, which challenges conventional notions of belonging. Though still present, Lebanon ‘serves as a starting point for creating [new] homes’ (147) and so remains vital to redefining their national identities, but it is not necessarily a place to which they want to return. In short, their manifold images of home are ‘dynamic, temporary and inclusive’ (148).1 Similarly, Suad Joseph affirms that many Lebanese who secure decent livelihoods abroad ‘both love and hate Lebanon’ and ‘both want to return and never to return’ (2009: 141). More significantly, she concludes, they remain connected to relatives and to their home country, as well as to their adoptive countries, as much through their desiderative imaginations thereof as through their past and contemporary realities. In so doing, they generate ‘new concepts of family, identity, and community’ (142). Post-war literary representations of Lebanon from diasporic vantage points are equally nuanced, exhibiting different types of nostalgia, memory, homesickness, and even sickness of home, which includes resentment, anger and guilt. Like many Anglophone writers who left war-torn Lebanon at a young age and started producing fiction approximately twenty years later, Lebanon too, as a notion, had no choice but to travel with them and undergo various permutations. In 2000, before Anglophone Lebanese novels had

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acquired critical mass, Elie Chalala claimed that ‘writing from exile and in different languages marginalizes and limits the effectiveness’ of the work of intellectuals living abroad. Furthermore, he argued that ‘[s]egments of the literary and artistic communities have [. . .] failed to match the commitment of their pre-1975 predecessors,’ as ‘[s]ome have chosen a post-modernist, post-structuralist, and post-colonial approach, producing works accessible only to Western elitist audiences’ (2000: 24). While works in languages other than Arabic may be inaccessible to a strictly Arabic-speaking readership, it is erroneous to suggest that the aforementioned approaches to literature, especially the third, are peculiar to Western intellectualism and, therefore, fake and/or pretentious when adopted by writers of Arab origin. Chalala’s term ‘commitment’ betrays his penchant for realism as the only serious method of analysing the Lebanese war. What he fails to appreciate are the subjectivity, selectivity and self-referentiality of literature, irrespective of the language or region in which it is produced. Andrée Chedid writes that there is ‘in each Lebanese a double inclination for both Europeanization [and Americanisation] and Arabization; a complex situation, sometimes contradictory, often harmonized’ (cited in Accad 1990: 28). Saree Makdisi characterises post-1990 Lebanese literature, regardless of language, as possessing structural idiosyncrasies which help represent the lengthy conflict in an incoherent order by combining characters’ pre-war and war-related experiences and memories – oftentimes from within a post-war temporal frame and possibly also from a spatially distant perspective – with ‘the terrifying flux of the war itself’ (2000: 278). In his acknowledgements, Rabih Alameddine stresses Koolaids’s connection to – but implicitly also its deviation from – Lebanese war literature by paying tribute to Makdisi’s mother, Jean Said Makdisi, whose Anglophone autobiographical Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir (1990) ‘inspired a number of vignettes’ (1998: vii) for his own novel. This refers to the diary entries by Samir’s mother, whose twenty excerpts approximate a war memoir. What is the relationship between exile or the diaspora and nationalism in the post-war Anglophone fictional narrative? Almost all post-colonial Third World fiction raises questions about ‘the nation’. As a result of insurgent nationalism, international capitalism and cultural globalism, Timothy Brennan argues that post-colonial novels are unique in portraying the topics

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of nationalism and exile as two realities ‘unavoidably aware of one another’ (1991: 62). In one particular type of this literature, he contends that the contradictory topoi of exile and nation are fused in a lament for the necessary and regrettable insistence of nation-forming, in which the writer proclaims his identity with a country whose artificiality and exclusiveness have driven him into a kind of exile – a simultaneous recognition of nationhood and an alienation from it. (63)

Edward Said states that nationalism is ‘an assertion of belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage. It affirms the home created by a community of language, culture, and customs; and, by so doing, it fends off exile, fights to prevent its ravages’ (1994: 359). Unlike nationalism, he argues, exile is ‘fundamentally a discontinuous state of being’ (360). Both Brennan and Said view nationalism and exile as opposite realities. Furthermore, while nationalism is seen as an entity and exile as a particle ejected or self-expelled therefrom, the former acquires stability and centrality, while the latter becomes synonymous with anxiety and marginality. For both critics, the exile is always ‘out of place’ (Said 1994: 362) or ‘ec-centric’, someone who feels his or her difference as ‘a kind of orphanhood’ (Said 1984: 53). Other critics depoliticise the concept of exile by emphasising its philosophical and psychological, specifically its existential, dimensions. Naficy explains that after long having been associated with a present or absent home, or homeland, as referent, the idea of exile is ‘now in ruins or in perpetual manipulation’, free ‘from the chains of its referent’ (1999: 9). As a universal state of being, Martin Tucker equates ‘exilism’ with a ‘plurality of referents’ (1991: xi). In its post-modern guise, ‘exile’ itself seems to have been exiled from its original home or meaning. As a ‘discontinuous state of being’, to quote Said again, it fulfils one’s desire for displacements, dislocations and detours in post-modern culture. In Strangers to Ourselves (1994), Julia Kristeva contends that everyone is becoming a foreigner to himself or herself in a world that is increasingly heterogeneous and fragmented beneath its ostensible technological and media-inspired oneness. In this context, humanity as a whole is orphaned. Alameddine’s Koolaids: The Art of War (1998) and Tony Hanania’s Unreal City (1999) are perfect examples of textual schizophrenia. Each is

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a multi-layered narrative with a plethora of sub-themes inviting an array of interpretations.2 My aim is to provide a comparative analysis of the post-war exilic and diasporic sensibilities revealed therein. The questions are the following: how is nationalism (re)defined in the context of a civil war caused by, among other factors, the very absence of collective national identity and civic-mindedness? In such a fragmented nation, what constitutes ‘home’? How is one’s original home viewed from a geographical and temporal distance? And how do familial relationships, specifically those between parents and children, affect or modify diasporic Lebanese characters’ configurations of the homeland and definitions of home? Both narratives evince a degree of nostalgia in the very fact of having been published. Nationalism, defined in psycho-social terms as devotion to one’s own nation, assumes the sense of personal as well as communal belonging when it derives from some kind of conformity or continuity. If so, how does nationalist sentiment suffer or change when such conformity and/or continuity are neither possible nor perhaps even desirable? Borrowing from Rosemary George’s terms in The Politics of Home, I will show both Koolaids and Unreal City to be neither nationalist nor immigrant texts – similar, in this respect, to Rawi Hage’s Cockroach – as neither one deals with the nation exclusively as ‘object and subject’ (1996: 12) or entirely ‘unwrites nation and national projects’ (186, emphasis in original). Instead, both novels display the predicament of cultural and national in-betweenness. The same critic argues that several factors – such as home, gender/sexuality, race and class – act as ideological determinants of the human subject (2). In German, the etymological link between Heim (home) and Heimat (nation), signifying respectively the private and the public spheres, is much more obvious than in English. For George, ‘home-country’ is the ‘intersection of [. . .] individual and communal that is manifest in imagining a space as home’ (11). This intersection of the personal and the collective constitutes the focus of my reading and, specifically, how it largely determines the protagonists’ attitudes towards both their original (nation) and adopted (exile/diaspora) homes. As Eva Hoffman explains, ‘within the framework of postmodern theory, we have come to value exactly those qualities of experience that exile demands – uncertainty, displacement, the fragmented identity’ (cited in Tirman 2001). Koolaids and, to a lesser degree, Unreal City cannot but be

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read in relation to literary post-modernism.3 In both novels, living abroad neither dampens nor strengthens nationalistic feeling. Instead of pitting exile against original homeland as two diametrically opposed realities – as Said and Brennan do – and singing the praises of one or the other, Alameddine and Hanania show exile to be independent of geography by locating it within the individual, the nation and the host country. Feeling at home is associated with freedom, a sense of belonging and personal dignity, wherever and whenever these may be found. Exile, by contrast, is a state of cognitive and emotional dissonance, whether generated by war and/or political/sectarian division in one’s own nation or induced by physical uprootedness abroad. Both novels portray a complex relationship between self-love and love for a bleeding nation. Staying in Lebanon does not prove love for one’s country of birth any more than leaving it manifests indifference. Koolaids Koolaids is a non-linear, polyphonic and multi-generic collage of 244 fragments – on average almost exactly one per page – of varying lengths in the forms of newspaper clippings, news headlines and editorials, quotes from famous authors and philosophers, scriptures, emails, letters, diary entries, dialogues, personal commentaries, hallucinations and dreams. While most of the narrators/writers are either indicated or identifiable, others remain anonymous. With the exception of Samir’s mother, whose dispersed diary entries – from 4 July 1967 to 7 August 1996 – appear in a non-chronological fashion, and his sister, Joumana Bashar, who supplies one letter, most other narrators are gay Lebanese and American men. These characters, who feel largely marginalised, are ‘in the process of constantly creating a space from within which they define, and consequently articulate, their sexual and ethnic/racial identities’ (Fadda-Conrey 2005: 122). In addition, this space serves to facilitate ‘a critical analysis of the political failings in the Middle East’ (Rogers 2003: 145), as well as those in the US, by zooming in on hypocrisy, be it political, moral, religious, social and/or medical-pharmaceutical. As a novel which draws parallels between the Lebanese war and the AIDS epidemic in the US,4 thus displaying two cultures/nations ‘torn from the inside’ (Publishers Weekly, cited in Pflitsch 2006: 275), Koolaids has attracted attention in East and West alike.5 As Michael Denneny states, fiction responding

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to AIDS has become more ambitious by ‘seeing this epidemic in the wider context of humanity and history’ (1999: 21). He equates Alameddine with ‘the great Latin American masters of fiction [. . .] who confront the concrete historical dilemmas of their own people with a soaring, almost metaphysical imagination that irradiates the ultimately particular with universal meaning’ (21). Sarah Schulman’s comment that Koolaids’s ‘content reflects the need for justice’ (blurb)6 is compatible with Adnan Haydar’s reading of the novel as one engaged in an ‘endless critical process’ aimed at ‘a grammar of truth’ but whose content, in true post-modernist fashion, as he argues, is rendered absurd through irony and parody (2000: Lecture). Thus, the text is ‘not about the Lebanese civil war’ but rather ‘about conditions of war’, furnishing a view of ‘global history and common destiny’ (2000: Lecture). Steven Salaita appraises Koolaids as a pastiche which subverts dominant discourses about homosexuality, AIDS, the Lebanese war, Arab-American life and immigration, thus earning the designation as ‘a profoundly democratic work of fiction’ (2007: 80). He calls it ‘a milestone in the modern Arab American literary tradition’ (73), partly because Alameddine internationalises in it the portrayal of the Lebanese Civil War as one in which many nations, including the US, had high stakes. The internationalisation of this war, not only as a theme but also as a plotting device, features strongly in Rawi Hage’s first-person novel De Niro’s Game, as will be shown in Chapter 5. By contrast, Koolaids is polyphonic and relatively plot-less, a fact which, Salaita argues, helps it unveil old-fashioned definitions of both unitary personal and national identities, be they Lebanese or American. I agree with his view that it ‘privileges neither the Arab World nor the United States but rather locks them into a dialectic in which both can be defined only in relation to one another’ (2006: 141) but disagree with his designating it an Arab-American text with a ‘particular Eastward gaze’ (141), as this would mistakenly posit the US as the geographical reference point or the main narrative consciousness from which the East, here Lebanon, is being viewed. Like Salaita, Susan Muaddi Darraj sees Koolaids as innovative ArabAmerican literature but attributes its originality to its ‘adoption of homosexuality as a major theme’ (2005: 181). Dervla Shannahan disagrees, by stressing instead the queer perspective from which this text is written for the purpose of both ‘query[ing] the inherent stability of all sexual identities and classifica-

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tions of desire’ (2011: 130) and of offering resources for queer theological reflection (131).7 Katrien De Moor discusses four main narrative techniques of resistance/subversion – undercutting (when a subsequent comment or vignette undermines a preceding one), AIDS patient humour, critiques of mainstream cultural representations of AIDS and aggressive reader address – which bolster Koolaids as a literary masterpiece of queer cultural activism.8 My reading of Koolaids stresses the gay identities of the male Lebanese characters, particularly Mohammad’s, insofar as these identities force them to redefine their views of and attitudes towards their original homeland, that is, their nationalist desires or lack thereof, from the vantage point of a US whose acceptance of their sexual preferences stands in stark contrast with the condemnation they face in Lebanon. Layla Al Maleh uses the term ‘spiritual diaspora’ (2009: 36) to describe the main characters’ psyches and attitudes in Alameddine’s four works of fiction. This designation applies, with varying degrees of severity, to other characters in post-war Anglophone novels who, after being caught in the crossfire, left Lebanon to find themselves suspended between two worlds. A recurrent feature in Anglophone Lebanese fiction is the father–son relationship, which exerts heavy influence on the young protagonists’ sense of national belonging. I examine the overlapping concepts of home and nation to suggest that familial relationships are crucial in determining the maturing individual’s attitude towards his or her country. In Lebanese society, regardless of sect, all children have their father’s first name as their middle name, but, as in almost all patriarchal social organisations, only male descendants can pass on the family name, or surname, to their offspring. Neither Koolaids nor Unreal City provides a surname for the protagonists; in fact, only Koolaids specifies the main character’s first name (Mohammad). Both protagonists are Muslim, a fact which only partly affects their psycho-social formation and their lives and actions abroad. Since family ties in most Arab societies tend to be central to the development of personal identities/ideologies, it seems logical for Lebanese diasporic literature to deal, at least to some degree, with these issues in relation to the ‘nation’ and national identity. In both texts, as well as in other novels to be discussed later, the father is perceived as being either too domineering and intolerant or too weak and indifferent/absent. The mother is either altogether

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absent or too submissive to effect change in the strained relationship between husband and son. I argue that eventual alienation from the homeland, in this context more strongly perceived as the fatherland, is proportional to estrangement from the father (figure). This correlation complicates any traditional definitions of home versus exile. In these narratives, it is not Beirut which is ‘wounded’ – an expression used by Mona Amyuni to refer to the bulk of Lebanese literature from the 1980s and early 1990s – but the often guiltridden Lebanese individual torn between the original and host countries. I will begin by examining various notions of Lebanon-as-homeland and of national belonging appearing in Koolaids as fragments unrelated to the characters’ personal experiences. As Andreas Pflitsch argues, ‘[h]ome and homelessness are always ambivalent in the work of Alameddine’ (2006: 279). Furthermore, Alameddine possesses ‘an extraordinary talent for the demystification of anything sacred or hegemonic’ (Salaita 2006: 141). This author, Salaita writes, does not portray Lebanon as a romanticised alternative to the failures of American culture but as one revered in narrowly defined nationalist discourses reflected in a few fragments by anonymous speakers. For the most part, Lebanon is shown as an alternative to the US only ‘in the sense that it offers a different set of problems and failures’ (141). Leo Spitzer argues that in the twentieth century ‘nostalgia’ – which had been used earlier to describe the emotion of ‘homesickness’9 – came to signify ‘an incurable state of mind’ in which the feelings of ‘absence’ and ‘loss’ could no longer be replaced by those of ‘presence’ and ‘gain’ except through reconstructive memory (reprinted 1998: 376). In underscoring the positive aspects of what he calls ‘nostalgic memory’, Spitzer cites French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who views nostalgia as freeing individuals and groups from the constraints of time by allowing them to transcend its irreversibility and focus on the positive in their traumatised pasts. Nostalgic memory is crucial for the reconstitution and continuity of individual and collective identity of all kinds. By contrast, ‘critical memory’, according to Spitzer, incorporates ‘the negative and bitter from the immediate past’ (384); but this type of memory is equally significant to retrospective self-definition. Alameddine weaves both nostalgic and critical memory into his collage. Sweet and bitter memories of Lebanon exist side by side. Interestingly, unlike all other fragments, those expressing nostalgia remain anonymous. In one

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segment, the narrator states: ‘I pine for pine,’ a feeling triggered by either imagining or encountering the smell of pine trees, which ‘calls the [narrator] home’ (Alameddine 1998: 83). As Margaret Morse explains, the memory of home can be evoked by certain sensory experiences, the olfactory one being the most prominent. Thus, parts of home ‘can be chanced upon, cached in secret places safe from language’ (1999: 68). Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone argue that ‘[n]ationalist memory describes a geography of belonging, an identity forged in a specified landscape, inseparable from it’ (2003: 169). Pine trees stand in, metonymically, for the nation whose symbol on its flag is a cedar tree representing immortality. In this vignette, similar in its effect to a pre-war postcard of the verdant Lebanese mountains, the lost nation is fleetingly recuperated by sealing it off, as an image frozen in time, from the rupture that ensued. Elsewhere, the nameless narrator declares: ‘Lebanon is a piece of land [. . .] but it’s our land, our home (even if actually we are not living there). It’s our Sweet Home, and we love it. So we are called Lebanese’ (183, emphasis in original). The unidentified voice seems to speak for those Lebanese exiles whose love for their country is genuine and inclusive, that is, free of any political and/or religious bias, the kind of love most visible in Nada Awar Jarrar’s A Good Land, as will be shown in Chapter 6. In a fragment described as a letter sent on the Internet, Wayne Kasem, a Lebanese-American, writes: I agree with many of the writers that Lebanese are free to be Arabs if this is their cultural identity, and they are free to be Western if that is their cultural identity, or even Aramaic. This is the point. In Lebanon, one should be free to be different. This is the essence of being Lebanese and the essence of being American. (71–2)

Kasem’s proposal contains a hoped-for end to what historian Kamal Salibi terms the ‘war over Lebanese history’ (2005: 200) in describing the discrepant views held by the Lebanese of the nation’s historical origins and subsequently of its national identity, which have fuelled its sectarian wars. One of the writers on Kasem’s proverbial list would be Alameddine himself. In his acknowledgements, the author describes himself as ‘an errant nonconformist’ (viii). While perhaps referring to his gayness, this self-labelling may also be understood as a lack of commitment to a particular sect and/or

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ideology, and therefore as the freedom to pursue one’s life based on personal desires, ambitions and priorities. This is certainly one aspect of the novel’s ‘implied humanism’ (Salaita 2007: 72), which denounces all manifestations of ethnonationalism. According to Kasem and Alameddine, cultural identity is different from national identity in two ways: first, it is inculcated in the maturing Lebanese individual by his or her immediate social milieu; second, it should be secondary to, albeit larger than, that individual’s inherited nationality. Therefore, while cherishing one’s acquired cultural identity, including one’s religious beliefs, every citizen should be ‘a Lebanese first’ (Alameddine 1998: 71), that is, open-minded enough to be respectful of other Lebanese irrespective of their cultural allegiances. Only the distinction between these two types of identity would guarantee collective loyalty to the idea(l) of Lebanon as a pluralistic yet unified nation. Only then would the Lebanese nation no longer appear ‘smaller than the sect’ (Rizk 2006: 34). But unlike Kasem, and as may be gleaned from the novel as a whole, Alameddine does not view the war in retrospect as ‘a legitimizing event [. . .] the crucible in which the nation of Lebanon was born’ (Alameddine 1998: 70). Nor does he see wars in general as having any positive effects. The character Mohammad, who comes closest to representing the author himself, quotes James Baldwin by saying that [p]erhaps the whole root of [. . .] the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. (124)

Despite its atheistic, stoical and/or cosmopolitan spirit, this statement is neither anti-nationalistic nor anti-religious; it simply bewails the drowning of human life, happiness and freedom in the quagmire of jingoism and religious fanaticism. Like AIDS, war destroys one’s life, claims the lives of loved ones and kills large numbers of people at random. Therefore, AIDS is a form of violence in the same manner that war is a form of disease (Salaita 2011: 46). As Lynne Rogers argues, Koolaids features anonymous stories of ordinary Lebanese victims whose tragic fates would otherwise remain invisible. It does so by ‘fill[ing] in the human gaps forgotten by mainstream historical

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narratives and media reports’ (2003: 145). In this novel, the killing of several minor Lebanese characters is directly related to internal exile. As Susan Rubin Suleiman states: ‘All travelers are outsiders somewhere [. . .] but not all outsiders are travelers’ (1998: 3). Zygmunt Bauman corroborates this view by equating exilic existence with three modes: being literally ‘out of place’, ‘needing to be elsewhere’ and ‘not having that “elsewhere” where one would rather be’ (1998: 321); from this perspective, exile becomes ‘a place of compulsory confinement’, one that is ‘itself out of place in the order of things’ (321). David Bevan goes one step further, suggesting that ‘exile within a place is often still more poignant than exile from a place or exile to a place’ (1990: 3). Samia Marchi – a thirty-year-old Muslim wife and mother born on the Christian side of the so-called Green Line between Christian East and Muslim West Beirut – sees herself as ‘a true Beiruti [. . .] no matter what others say’ (85). But a militiaman at a checkpoint, speaking in French, insists that she is no longer from East Beirut, even though her French would allow her to fit in there. Her extramarital affair with Nicola Akra, a handsome Christian thug, is a symbolic crossing from West to East Beirut and a union of two religions, cut short by political division and moral corruption. Characters of all faiths and backgrounds are killed randomly or deliberately, on their way home or while visiting their hometowns. The loss of the safety associated with home turns the entire country into an exile with few exits. These tragic stories are strewn, like the bodies of their victims, throughout the text. The erratic sketches reflect the randomness of the war and offer glimpses into its unfathomable brutality against civilians. More significantly, they show the complementary, not the contradictory, nature of exile and nation; the civil war transforms life in one’s homeland into a state of exile, or a ‘discontinuous state of being’ (Said 1994: 360). Benedict Anderson argues that modern communications create what he terms ‘long-distance nationalism’, that is, the technological capacity of diasporic national groups to participate in the political life of their homelands (cited in Tirman 2001). Thus, a new or post-modern form of nationalism, namely diasporic nationalism, is born. The dates of the sundry letters and emails spread throughout Koolaids range between 19 March and 2 August 1996. They encapsulate concurrent, discrepant views on what constitutes

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Lebanese nationalism. Depending on the speaker, anti-Arab, anti-Syrian, anti-Muslim, anti-Hizbullah, anti-Christian or anti-Israeli sentiments are prerequisites for being a true Lebanese. While electronic correspondence facilitates discussion, some mailing lists are limited to like-minded recipients. The result is a cacophony – not a harmonious long-distance (or long-term) national exchange – in tune with the splintered narration of this mosaic novel. What Alameddine is showing us, again, are the immense danger and disastrous consequences of confusing cultural and national identities and mistaking the former for the latter. Positioning oneself with or against an external, larger national/cultural group (here, Arab, Syrian or Israeli), a religious one (Christian or Muslim) and/or a political one (Hizbullah) in the name of ‘true’ Lebanese nationalism is, in fact, the very negation of enlightened and tolerant patriotism. As Suad Joseph explains, ‘there can be no universal national subject’ (1997: 85) in Lebanon because personal status or family law is governed not by civil law but by eighteen different formally recognised religious sects. At best, she states, Lebanon represents ‘an extreme case of fragmented national imaginaries’ (2009: 132). Lebanon as a cohesive community does not exist, a fact reflected by the fragments in the novel, which do not reveal a democratic exchange of valid political and ideological differences among its constituents. What is unveiled instead is an unsettling absence of the nation, conceived by Anderson as a ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’ (2006: 7). Equally absent is the sentiment of basic commonality among the Lebanese, wherever they live. Confessionalism and political regionalism/internationalism defeat both nationalism and patriotism, which Walker Connor, in his study of ethnonationalism, defines as respective loyalties to the nation and to the state. The Lebanese voicing their opinions in these sketches situate themselves within vertical structures, for example, families/sects/ethnic groups, whose lifelines are sustained by remaining loyal to external, that is, non-Lebanese, political, cultural and/or religious forces and entities. In the absence of a ‘horizontally bonded society’, there can be no ‘identity of character between state and people’, and therefore no nation-state, which Adrian Hastings argues is the defining characteristic of this modern construct (1997: 3). Despite their different behaviours and attitudes, the conduct of all the Lebanese characters in the novel is tinged by the war. The physical exiles

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or diasporans among them exhibit ‘contrapuntal consciousness’ (Said 1994: 366). While Mohammad’s perception is dominant, Samir’s and Makram’s contribute to the novel’s polyphony. Their gayness aside, Mohammad (a Muslim), Samir (a Druze) and Makram (of a Maronite Christian father and a Muslim mother) represent not what the reader may think of as the (stereo) typical attributes of their sects but rather three possibilities of personal reactions to the war situation. Familial relationships, psychological makeup and physical distance from Lebanon – the last criterion applying only to Mohammad and Samir – shape their nationalistic sentiments, or lack thereof, in various combinations. Mohammad, born in Beirut in 1960, describes a ‘childhood of complete and utter confusion’ (8) as his family relocated to and then back from West Africa. After having ‘finally adjusted to living in Lebanon’ (8), he is pressured to join his uncle in Los Angeles and so leaves at the age of fifteen in 1975, following the outbreak of the war, ‘not knowing it was final’ (122) and leaving behind his parents, four older brothers and a younger sister. Financially insecure and dismayed by his father’s unwillingness to support his education at an art school in San Francisco, he never returns. After gaining financial independence as a painter, he ‘lost [his] roots’ (122). Mohammad’s decision to stay in the US is partly a reaction to his father’s disapproval of his career choice and gay identity. Samir Bashar, born in Washington, DC, in 1960, moves back to Beirut at seven, then leaves in 1978 for university in Paris. In 1983, he returns to Washington, his ‘hometown, so to speak’ (81), to pursue a PhD in history, and after resettling in the US, he visits Lebanon periodically. Unlike Mohammad, Samir is painfully aware before and after each visit that he ‘had separated [him]self for too long’ (208). Makram, supplier of only four fragments, is born in Beirut in 1970 and is killed (along with his mother) in 1989 without ever having left. All three men die, whether of AIDS or during the war. Also, Mohammad loses two brothers, and Makram his father, in war-related accidents. Although Mohammad and Samir avoid possible physical annihilation by departing, they do not end up ‘in ivory towers’ (Alameddine 1998: 219), as some of those who never left Lebanon might think. For unlike immigrants who start new lives in a new home, ‘exiles never break the psychological link with their point of origin’ (Pavel 1998: 26). Notwithstanding the possibility of

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returning home, expatriation – that is, voluntary exile – is quite similar to involuntary exit, if what ensues is the ‘pattern of exilic behavior’ (Tucker 1991: xv). Mohammad, described as ‘tall, dark, and handsome’ (195) with a ‘contagious’ smile (101), is thirty-six and dying of AIDS in an American hospital towards the end of 1996,10 a scene with which the novel begins and ends. He is surrounded by his sister Nawal, her childhood friend Marwa Habayeb, his Guatemalan cook and housekeeper Maria, and his African-American friend James. Other individuals he might care to be with are absent, either already dead (from AIDS or war) or far away in Lebanon. The AIDS-driven frame narrative set in the present – in which Mohammad describes the rapid deterioration of his health – provides the sole chronology in this mosaic text. In five fragments – the first, the last and three others in between – the reader learns about Mohammad’s sore back, increasing ocular pain and eventual blindness, insomnia, numbness in his fingers and finally his death.11 Aiding this chronology is the leitmotif of the Biblical four horsemen who appear in the same vignettes where Mohammad describes his bodily symptoms. It is the changing response of the fourth rider (‘Death’), on the pale horse, which indicates Mohammad’s journey from despair, anger, resentment and humour to acceptance. After being cursed as a ‘non-Christian homosexual’, ‘a fucking fag, a heathen’ (1), a killer of his best friend (Scott) for having performed euthanasia on him and a deserter of his country, Mohammad finally receives love and forgiveness when told by the fourth rider: ‘I love you, Mohammad’ (245). This declaration echoes Scott’s last words before Mohammad helped him die in 1990. Halfway through the text, a short vignette reads: ‘Remember me. Remember me, please. Please remember me. Please. Forgive me’ (138). Seeing as how Mohammad’s posthumous exhibit, detailing a ‘bittersweet account of a tumultuous life [. . .] will assure him immortality’ (184), it is clear that Mohammad, who tried to destroy all his paintings because he could no longer see them, wishes to be remembered not so much as a great artist but more significantly as a good man, a good friend, a good brother and a good son. After being branded a gay artist and consequently as the ‘voice of a new generation’ (39) at twenty-one, he called home, only to be informed by the housekeeper that his parents no longer wished to hear his voice. Suddenly,

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he felt ‘[o]bliterated’ and ‘[e]masculated’, with a ‘piece of [his] heart [. . .] forcibly taken out’ (40). After becoming ‘the enfant terrible of the art world’ (61), he became a terrible son to his shame-oriented parents, who were ‘stuck in a cultural warp’ (185). His father, ‘a tyrant’ (185) who had called him ‘a pervert’ (49) when he was only seven, has completely disowned him, while his meek mother refuses to visit and considers him as good as dead. Nawal’s numerous attempts to have them speak to the dying Mohammad fall on deaf ears. Denied access to his parents, Mohammad ‘sees’ them in two figures: Nawal, at twenty-five, and James, at thirty-nine, remind him respectively of his mother’s pretty face and of his father’s diminished handsomeness, when his parents were at similar ages. He admits painting his mother ‘all the time’ (131), as if to recreate her presence. The forgiveness which Mohammad desires is two-directional. In addition to wishing his father would forgive him – a wish echoed by the author’s dedication, which reads ‘To my father, May he forgive me once more’ – he hopes to forgive his father. Hearing that the latter has ‘softened up quite a bit with age’, Mohammad insists that his personal choice to be a gay artist was ‘never his [father’s] fault’ (185). Ironically, he notes that he ‘find[s] it hard to forgive him at times, until [he is] reminded how much [he has] grown up to resemble him’ (185). What further aggravates Mohammad’s ‘feeling of guilt’ (50) is his having been in California, ‘away from it all’ (175), when the war claimed the lives of two of his brothers: Ibrahim, three years his senior, died at nineteen while fighting for a Sunni militia in 1976; Hamid, ten years his senior, was killed at thirty-nine, along with his wife and three children, when their building collapsed due to a nearby explosion in 1989. Mohammad’s guilt also pervades his memories of Scott. Twice, he blurts out: ‘I killed him’ (131, 210). Maria’s plea that he forgive himself because he ‘did the right thing’ (193), at Scott’s own request, helps assuage his guilt. Mohammad draws a parallel between war and AIDS when he stresses how both have robbed him of time: the former prevented him from continuing his life in Lebanon, and the latter from simply continuing his life. Long after both the war and the virus had struck, respectively in his mid-teens and midtwenties, he muses sadly: ‘I thought I had more time’ (8). Immediately after Mohammad and Samir, beginning at age fourteen, had started enjoying their gay encounters and feelings, their parents sent them off to Los Angeles and

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Paris, respectively, because of the violence. But not all teenagers left the country. Samir remembers how, at a single party in 1974, he experienced vodka, hashish and love (for Karim) for the first time. More importantly, however, he recalls that some of these boys ‘seemed like a different breed’ because they ‘talked about politics like adults’ and were able to ‘put together a machine gun, and then dismantle it, blindfolded’, adding: ‘The war started not long after’ (67). Implied here is the eventual participation of many such teenagers in the war. Koolaids showcases the example of Georges – Mohammad’s bisexual neighbour and first lover, who later became a Phalange militiaman – in a few vignettes. Alameddine’s The Hakawati expounds on this reality by zeroing in, for long stretches, on a character named Elie, while Hage’s De Niro’s Game deals with this phenomenon extensively by including several young militiamen, as will be examined in Part III. Mohammad’s desire ‘to write an endless book of time’ which ‘would have no beginning and no end’, one that ‘would not flow in order’ and in which ‘[t]he tenses would make no sense’ (118), is sadly ironic considering the short time he has left. Yet, Alameddine’s novel – whose ‘first page is almost identical to the last, and all the pages in between are jumbled with an interminable story’ (118), and whose opening line is also ‘Death comes in many shapes and sizes’ (1) – matches the one that Mohammad envisioned for his work. Therefore, it may be read as a proxy for Mohammad’s unrealised project. Forced to leave Lebanon, like Aida in the second story in Somewhere, Home, Marianna in The Bullet Collection and Layla in A Good Land, he ‘wanted to scream’ (8) but succumbed to parental pressure. Echoing especially Marianna’s sense of belatedness, he declares while reflecting upon both the war’s outbreak and the virus’s entry into his body: ‘I did not really know the good old days’ (88). Estranged from his parents, Mohammad adopts and practises the belief that ‘[w]e build our own family’ (Alameddine 1998: 115). He devotes ten years of his life and some of his artwork to Scott – who used to call him habibi (my love) and whom he loved back, but with whom he never had sex – to the point of mixing his ashes, upon cremation, with paint for one of his paintings. Despite the love he receives from Scott, Nawal, Maria and a handful of like-minded American and Lebanese friends, Mohammad never surmounts his obsession with his original home and country. John Tirman states that the

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three core constituents of memory, which serves as the ‘emotional channel to the homeland’ (2001), are language, culture and history. In Mohammad’s case, his memory is revealed by his unconscious in three areas: his dreams, his paintings (culture) and his ‘slips’ into Arabic (language). As Gabriel García Márquez’s personal experience in his prologue to Strange Pilgrims demonstrates, some dreams in exile fulfil the dual purpose of allowing the expatriate, first, to bridge past (nation) and present (exile) and, second, to conscientiously examine his or her own identity (1994: viii). Similarly, although Mohammad ‘can’t touch home’ physically (Alameddine 1998: 166), his four dreams transport him to an earlier time in Beirut, once where he meets his adolescent self, and his family welcomes him without recognising his older version, causing him to decide once again to take off. As Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron explains, in a state of self-loss the exile searches for that which, in childhood, foreshadowed the exile to come (1998: 164–5). Arguing that visual language is more transportable than language to a place of exile, Linda Nochlin maintains that visual artists, using concrete materials, find it easier to translate their familiar worlds than writers, for whom the loss of native language is more devastating (1998: 37). In keeping with this theory, Mohammad, while traumatised, succeeds as a painter but fails as a writer. Scott and Samir, individuals with whom Mohammad shares respectively his sensibility and nationality, see in his work his ‘dreams [. . .] fears [. . .] mother [. . .] father [and] the war which tore [his] life apart’ (13). Azade Seyhan clarifies that transnational writings ‘cultivate an appreciation for the translatability of languages and cultures as well as for the untranslatability of certain forms of cultural specificity’ (2001: 157). One vignette shows Mohammad, at his own exhibition in 1988, switching to Arabic in conversation with Samir, a gay Lebanese whom he has just met, to exclude American art critics standing nearby. Unlike his compatriot, they fail to see the pre-war Lebanese village with its Druze, Christian and Muslim houses lurking in his paintings but insist instead on admiring it, grosso modo, as great abstract art by offering mythological, psychoanalytical, philosophical and metanarrative interpretations. Samir’s nativist reading of this painting, by contrast, includes recognising ‘a jackass’ (189) as a symbol of an outmoded means of Lebanese transportation, and the painting as a whole as

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‘mourn[ing] the death of a country’ (190). So he congratulates his compatriot for having realistically ‘captured Lebanon’ and told ‘the tale of [his] home’ (101). Nostalgic memory, to borrow Spitzer’s concept, permits Mohammad, through the medium of his paintings, to bypass the war years and reconnect himself to the untarnished image, if not the reality, of a simpler and religiously harmonious nation. This scene acts as a metanarrative moment in which Alameddine insinuates that his oeuvre, like Mohammad’s painting, displays markers which invite multiple, if not contradictory, interpretations. As Samir puts it: ‘It is possible everyone was right’ (190). Here, what to most Lebanese eyes suggests a familiar traditional village would (most likely) remain an untranslatable visual form of cultural specificity. As Svetlana Boym demonstrates, bilingual exiles can rarely shed an accent, and their ‘[e]rrors betray the syntax of the mother tongue’ (1998: 244). Mohammad’s accented English slips away entirely in moments of anger, drunkenness or illnessinduced delirium. Here, Arabic as a whole takes over, as he states on the first page, reattaching him to his linguistic roots. Mohammad – often called Mo, an ‘Americanized nickname’ (13) he ‘completely abhorred’ (41) – frequently refers to this linguistic condition as a predicament. The statement ‘In America, I fit, but I do not belong. In Lebanon, I belong, but I do not fit’ (40) epitomises his linguistic, emotional and mental state of cultural in-betweenness. Mohammad’s location of home keeps shifting. Critical memory, the opposite of the nostalgic kind, is exhibited when he declares that he hates his sister’s cooking because it ‘reminds [him] of home’ (17). Later, however, when she ‘talks to [him] of home’, he insists that he is ‘home’ (212). Here, the distinction between original and adopted home discussed earlier comes to mind. Although Mohammad insists that his happiest day was when he became an American citizen and tore up his Lebanese passport, in his last moments he curses Lebanese and Americans alike. Furthermore, he expresses his exilic mood as follows: I tried so hard to rid myself of anything Lebanese. I hate everything Lebanese. But I never could. It seeps through my entire being. The harder I tried, the more it showed up in the unlikeliest of places. But I never gave up. I do not want to be considered Lebanese. But that is not up to me [. . .] Nothing in my life is up to me. (243–4)

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Clearly, while it may be easy to extricate oneself from one’s home country, it is a lot harder to expunge one’s national traits from one’s appearance or psyche. Pflitsch compares Mohammad’s inner conflict as akin to schizophrenia, wherein a schismatic personal identity takes on the attributes of an inescapable prison or of a lasting burden (2008: 1171). Boym argues that there are two types of nostalgia, depending on whether the stress is laid on the ‘nostos’ – which implies the desire to return to a mythical home – or ‘algia’ – which is enthralled by the distance, and not by the referent itself. This ‘ironic nostalgia’ is fragmentary in that it ‘accepts (if it does not enjoy) the paradoxes of exile and displacement’ (1998: 241). Mohammad’s estrangement from Lebanon and later from America is symptomatic of his ironic nostalgia. Specifically, in his alienation, first, from his father and, by extension, from his fatherland, and later from the US, Mohammad exhibits in his life, as he had done in much of his art, what Boym calls ironic nostalgia. While he may believe that his country of origin wishes ‘to obliterate [him] from its collective conscious’ (Alameddine 1998: 78), it is obvious that he is neither willing nor able to obliterate Lebanon from either his conscious or his unconscious. By contrast, Samir manifests a modified version of tender nostalgia by shuttling back and forth between two homes. In this sense, he is closer to being diasporic than exilic. His good relationship with his father and mother, who comes to accept his gayness and illness, helps him in maintaining his physical connection to Lebanon. Unlike many Lebanese, whose professed love for their country shrank or remained tied to specific territories defined by their respective religious sects, Samir’s grew while continuing to be secular and apolitical. However, a letter he receives from his maternal great-greatuncle, Bashir Salaheddine, who opens up to him about his own (suppressed) gayness, reveals to Samir that his last visit to Lebanon had caused an ‘uproar’ (128) and instigated continuous gossip among extended family members, many of whom ‘refuse to have anything to do with [Samir] anymore’ (129). When Samir asks his father, Basil, with whom he never spent much time while growing up, if he forgave him for being gay, the latter affirms that ‘there was nothing to forgive’ (124). With his mother and his long-time American lover, Mark, at his side, Samir dies at peace with himself, ‘at home’ in the US. Makram, by contrast, dies at home in Lebanon but not in peace. The eventual

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elimination of Makram’s interfaith family symbolises the erasure of hope for a politically and religiously harmonious nation. Raised to practise tolerance and love, Makram dies too young to effect any positive changes on his own generation, let alone posterity. Luckily, hope for a better future for Lebanon resides in two of Makram’s female friends, Nawal and Marwa, born in 1972. Both are ambitious, principled and highly educated. Ironically, however, their academic success abroad lowers their chances of refitting into Lebanese society. In the US, they ‘were never able to completely shed their indigenous relationship with their culture’ (Alameddine 1998: 79). Conversely, they refuse to abide by patriarchal Lebanese customs, especially that of marriage. Mohammad wonders why his sister ‘kept going home at least twice a year’ but admits that, in doing so, she remained ‘the family bridge’ (156). In wishing to repatriate after Mohammad dies and thereby to carry the fruits of their lives abroad to a country which needs them, Nawal and Marwa represent ‘a new breed, a new species’ (79). Unlike Mohammad and Samir, who spend their AIDS-shortened lives reacting to one or two turning points, these two women manage to bridge the gap between home and abroad by evolving into responsible individuals. If anything, life in the US has strengthened their sense of duty to their homeland. Unreal City Like Koolaids, Unreal City is ‘a novel about division – cultural, religious, political, and physical’ (Vinten 1999: 22). It has been dubbed ‘a Lebanese War and Peace, with the personal and national tragedies intertwined’ (Padel 1999). Tony Hanania sees himself as ‘an exile’ who writes about ‘doomed youth [. . .] exile, alienation, loss, and the consolations of worldly sensuality’ in relation to ‘the false consciousness of politics, religion, and public ethics’. He states: ‘Through the idea of Lebanon, through Lebanon as an idea, I explore exile as alienation. To this extent, the modern everyman is a Lebanese’ (2000: Fax interview). This ‘postmodern rootlessness’ (Nash 2007: 106), displaying ‘mirrorings’ (Pflitsch 2004a: 253) of home country and foreign ones, is found in all three of his works: Homesick (1997), Unreal City (1999) and Eros Island (2000). The first two feature England and Lebanon as their settings in the 1970s and 1980s (and into the early 1990s in Unreal City), whereas the third delivers a Palestinian family’s movements – over sixty

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years – from Palestine, in the 1930s and 1940s, to Lebanon (following the creation of Israel in 1948), and later to the US, the UK and Spain. Hanania’s narrators in all three novels are young Anglo-Arab men torn between Arab/ Levantine and Western values. Geoffrey Nash sees Homesick, which is heavily autobiographical,12 as a prequel to Unreal City, whose juxtaposition of British and Lebanese settings, rendered in a hybrid style combining exotic words from both the English and Arabic lexicons, produces an ‘extended military conceit that connects the apparently disparate conflicts of English public school life and bloody warfare in the Middle East’ (2007: 103). In so doing, he argues, the novel manages to deterritorialise conflicts by reterritorialising them ‘within the symbolic terrain of late twentieth century [sic] global warfare’ (105). Pflitsch argues that the title ‘Homesick’ has two other meanings related to the obvious one of feeling pain because of distance from the homeland to which one wishes to return: these are the sickness of the homeland caused by war, and the sickness of home, that is, the suffering of the individual caused by the sickness (suffering) of the homeland (2008: 245). Unreal City, on which I focus because of its central concern with the war’s psycho-social ramifications, also features these three meanings. Unlike Alameddine, Hanania weaves the themes of exile and nationalism into the first-person account of an unnamed protagonist, refraining from any discursive and/or direct statements about either topic. Although Hanania has been known to identify himself as a Palestinian,13 his main character is a Lebanese Shiite; therefore, my discussion of nationalism and the homeland will relate to Lebanon. The novel’s three books – Sidon, Dark Star and Homecoming – are subdivided into sections indicating the place(s) and month(s) and/or year(s) of the narrated events. Sidon is the southern coastal city closest to the narrator’s ancestral village; the oxymoron ‘Dark Star’ (reminiscent of a black hole) designates Beirut, into which the narrator’s friends get sucked and where they are destroyed during the war, leaving no trace behind; and ‘Homecoming’ refers to his return to his village in spring 1990 but also to his envisioned self-redemptive suicide mission in London. The events – stretching from the pre-war years to July 1990 – are presented in a more or less linear fashion from the vantage point of one full day in the present – 3 February 1992 – which frames the text and on which the narrator is expected to assassinate a

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renegade Muslim writer living in London (possibly Salman Rushdie) after a ‘final drive’ (Hanania 1999: 258) in a car carrying ‘ninety kilos of Hexogen’ (19).14 Thus, all the narrative threads are made to converge on this anticipated climax. The day of 3 February is divided into three sections: Daybreak, Noon and Nightfall; these are three (out of five) times of Islamic prayer during which we see the narrator kneeling on a straw mat. The narrator’s memoir, written outside of Lebanon, contains metanarrative references to its genesis, evolution and approaching end as a ‘testimony’ (Hanania 1999: 19) to a life wasted but about to be redeemed in a final act of self-sacrifice for a legitimate cause. The narrator’s reliability and truthfulness are compromised, however, by years of drug use, as he ‘would discover pages [he] did not remember writing, in a hand [he] barely recognized as [his] own’ (197). Due to its ‘unbidden’ (197) nature, he keeps his manuscript hidden but ‘[t]o [his] dismay the text [finds] its way into the hands of [. . .] a Yemeni radical, and [is] copied, and circulated first among dissident student groups, and then among the wider expatriate community’ (198). Apart from being too high on opium to control his writing, the narrator cannot decide what influence his words will have on his own life. Initially intended as a cathartic transcription of his personal history and a search for some sort of meaning, the text, in an ironic twist of events, decides the narrator’s fate by paving his way towards a hoped-for meaning in death. The only child of a half-Palestinian, half-British mother and a Lebanese university professor, the narrator splits his time between Lebanon and the UK. Having lost his mother to illness at a young age, he suffered from ‘a lonely upbringing’ (Hanania 1999: 194) in a villa in Ein Mreisseh near the American University of Beirut, where his father taught. Between ‘the cold exile of boarding-school’ (196) in England and ‘those dreary [. . .] afternoons in the years before the war’ (221) in Lebanon, the narrator has led a sheltered and repressed childhood. Restrictions on food and drink, movement and behaviour make him wish not only to taste sweets he ‘had been forbidden as a boy’ (126) but also to savour freedom by rebelling against familial authority and going ‘beyond the boundaries prescribed’ (53). Rebellion manifests itself in many forms: addiction to opium and a sedative (Nembutal), the unveiling of emotions via writing, the contradiction of parental wishes, taking refuge in political extremism by joining Jihad al-

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Binaa – the division of the Shiite party Hizbullah concerned with relief and reconstruction in the South15 – and later contemplating a suicide mission. Doing so indicates profound change since the days when he viewed warfare as a spectacle by likening neighbourhood militiamen to ‘movie outlaws’ (115). What leads to defiance is primarily guilt deepened by regret. The narrator is a victim not of war but of ‘the remote insouciance that comes to those who have survived a war in which they have not participated’ (194–5). He feels inferior to ‘the names of former students of [his] father [. . .] who had died defending the strongholds in Tyre and Beaufort Castle’ (168). But cowardice underpins his passivity. He writes: ‘I would never have the courage to go out into the [Palestinian refugee] camps’ (142) and ‘would lose my nerve beyond the Commodore [Hotel]’ (179). At the height of the war, he reads his art books in a ‘house drifting silently away from the city that had forgotten it’ (133). To assuage his guilt, however, he gives money and cigarettes to his friends, squatters and poor villagers, and powdered milk, chocolate, old clothes, toys and even his Nembutal tablets to needy and wounded children. Guilt stems from several facts: the narrator’s privileged status as a member of two cultures on the one hand, and his belonging to an oppressive feudal family from southern Lebanon on the other. As a boy, he wished to know from his older friend Ali (later a Hizbullah official), whose ancestors had served his own, about ‘the crimes of the old beys [chiefs]’ (56), a subject later revived when his room at the Ealing Husseinya in London is ransacked by boys whose ‘families had suffered under the beys’ (259). After joining the Shiite organisation, the narrator is told by Ali’s father, Musa-al-Tango, how the latter ‘had always known [. . .] that the last of the beys [the narrator] would redeem the crimes of all his forefathers’ (253). The old bey had died the week the narrator was born, and although his son, the young bey, is referred to as a cousin, who later goes mad and is buried in France, he names the narrator in a codicil to his will as ‘his true son’ (194). The narrative reordering of the protagonist’s past from his point of view in the present makes one anticipate a teleological development of events despite his aimless and precarious existence. As he puts it, his ‘conversion has been the only child of fate’ (30). The road to redemption is not smooth but wrinkled by spatial and temporal gaps, as the narrator spends the war years shuttling between Beirut,

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London and Madrid in the pattern of a seemingly diasporic life. Three characters – his two opium-addicted British friends, Leighton and Verger, and later Ali, albeit as a ghost – help connect the narrator’s disjointed experiences by appearing in both Beirut and London. The narrator’s psychological mobility, deriving from his cultural and national in-betweenness, makes him spurn requests by his Palestinian girlfriend Layla, his father and Ali to stay in any one place. Since his mother’s death and his father’s remarriage to an American, the idea of a fixed home has been replaced for him by what James Clifford calls ‘dwelling-in-traveling’ (1997: 36). His self-indulgent travelling – facilitated by his possession of two passports and available money, but about whose costs his father starts complaining – is contrasted with the involuntary exit of many villagers who have fled famine and blood feuds to West Africa and South America and sometimes returned with fortunes. The narrator’s memories of Lebanon, resurfacing during the ‘almost seven years since [he] had been home [Lebanon]’ (197) and given narrative shape between 1985 and 1992, are nostalgic, not critical. Like Marianna in The Bullet Collection, he uses the phrase ‘before the war’ several times.16 He fondly remembers listening to the martyr plays commemorating Ashura – in which Zain, the son of Hussein, that is, Prophet Mohammad’s great-grandson, was played by Ali, and Khalifa Yezid by the bey – and to old Abu Musa’s tales, and touching the carved lions of the fountain in his uncle’s garden. Familiar sights, sounds, tastes and smells encountered during his childhood spell home for him, as they do for the anonymous narrator who pines for pine in Koolaids and for major characters in Somewhere, Home, The Bullet Collection and A Good Land. He frequents the Lebanese restaurant Al-Bustan in Ravenscourt Park to savour ‘Shish’Taouk in the old village way’ (15). The ‘sweet juices running over the gums and tongue’ evoke the ‘heraldic blue of the sky and the terraced hills and the distant margin of the sea, all that could never change there’ (16). According to Ghassan Hage, nostalgia can be active and always functions metonymically. Furthermore, it is not so much a yearning for a place as one for an intensely personal experience associated therewith (2001: Lecture). This alimentary experience triggers not just the recollection of that which is naturally and consistently beautiful due to its indestructibility by war, but also that of eating and drinking forbidden items – shish ta’ouk, lebneh (thickened yoghurt) and unbottled water – offered to him by Ali’s

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mother but never served at his uncle Samir’s house in Sidon. The memory is so precious and precarious that he shuns dessert at Al-Bustan lest it ‘take away the taste of what [he] had just eaten’ (17). Specific tastes and smells are also attached to certain childhood friends. For the narrator, Lebanon is never just a symbol or an ideal – as is sometimes the case in Koolaids – but a lived reality or, to reiterate Rosemary George’s term, a home-country in which the personal and the public overlap and contribute equally to ‘imagining a space as home’ (1996: 11). As Margaret Morse clarifies, home here is a repertoire of familiar sensory experiences. Later the war becomes associated in the narrator’s mind with a set of peculiar and unpleasant sights, smells and sounds: the ever-higher heaps of rubbish (alternately rotting and burning), the humming of generators and the din of explosions. Ghassan Hage clarifies that although the object triggering the memory may itself be disagreeable, the resulting recollection is always sweet (2001: Lecture). In the days of heavy shelling and restricted movement, rationing becomes necessary and hunger makes the narrator crave ‘foods [he] had always hated, some [he] did not know [he] had ever eaten’ (144). But life outside Lebanon, too, is associated with certain alimentary habits. At the supermarket in Beirut, the narrator buys ‘the last supplies of those staples [he] had developed a taste for at [his English] boarding-school’ and ‘which like the apples of [Layla’s brother] Harun seemed mysteriously to augment in flavour the further from England they travelled. Marmite, digestive biscuits, Cadbury’s Drinking Chocolate’ (126). The abnormal circumstances and daily deprivations of the war strengthen the desire for that which is not readily available. The narrator confesses that what he missed the most while in war-torn Lebanon was not ‘the England [he] had known, the mildewed country houses’ and the drinking and smoking in pubs, but ‘the electricity and looking out at the snow from a hot bath and the spiteful tidiness of the pavements in that little square off the Brompton Road where the Bey owned the house he never used’ (135). At night in Beirut he dreams ‘of a country [he] had never left behind, a bey’s England of summer hats [. . .] and garden parties where Layla strolls’ (135). When in England, as the opening and ending of the novel show, he dreams of Layla in the ‘land she has never left [Lebanon]’ (5). Ten years later, he still hears ‘the old ringing in [his] ears from the summer of the siege’ (14). Whenever he leaves his country,

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whether that is England or Lebanon, he never leaves it behind but carries it with(in) him in his ‘contrapuntal consciousness’. War-time atrocities compound the narrator’s guilt towards friends who, due to poverty, political commitment and/or national status, do not have the option of leaving. By contrast, the wealthy, like his uncle Samir and his wife Mona, and the bey, leave in the early 1980s. To assuage his culpability, he lapses into drug-induced numbness. Protected by the snow in Yorkshire (his mother’s birthplace) while attending university in 1982, he ‘no longer took the papers [or] watched the news’ (159), although he did continue attempts to communicate via letters with his friends. After learning of the Israeli invasion, he returns to Beirut for the summer before starting work at an auction house in Madrid. For the following five years he lives in Madrid and in London, where as a junior curator at the Tate Gallery he leads a ‘solitary [. . .] immured life’, immersed in ‘a discipline of forgetting’ (193). With no news from the Red Crescent offices about his friends after the massacre in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatilla Palestinian refugee camps, he ‘saw the newspapers in the kiosks, and looked away’, as all ‘the names that had played as refrains in the long song of [his] childhood return[ed] like strange blooms to these foreign walls’ (191). Before the war reached the camps, Layla had begged the narrator to take her to England with him, as Rana begs Bassam to take her to Rome in De Niro’s Game. Neither young man complies. Hanania’s narrator says: ‘I had already punished her in anticipation of her betrayal, and perhaps she would never have betrayed me’ – first with Jaffer, then with a Maronite businessman and collaborator with the Israeli military – ‘had I not’ (118). In his attempt to overcome his guilt towards Layla – whom he had ‘strung [. . .] along for three summers with gifts and visions and promises’ (118) and who is now rumoured to have turned to prostitution,17 he pursues ‘brief and barren affairs’ with fashionable women and succumbs to ‘the rigours of the pipe’ (195). Sex and substance abuse prove insufficient, however, to ward off his mounting ‘self-disgust’ (195). Despairing of finding Layla, and therefore of losing his sense of direction, he starts looking for an alternative atonement. Before joining the construction wing of Hizbullah, however, he shows hesitation by avoiding contact with the ‘bearded men’ (198) – who loiter around the bey’s house in London – and by escaping through a back window before

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returning to Lebanon in 1987. After returning to London in 1990, he avoids all his old acquaintances from the old days. The narrator reacts to the news of Asad’s (Layla’s brother’s) gruesome death in Beirut by joining Jihad al-Binaa in London, a turning point to which his father reacts by cutting off his allowance. Although their ‘contacts had been whittled down to almost nothing in the end’ (31), the narrator ‘never resented [his] father’s lack of communication’; the little time spent with his father after his mother’s death meant that he had been deprived of ‘his full attention’ (33). Yet, he states: I could never hold it against him for he had behaved in such a way that it had always seemed that his long disengagement had only tactfully mimed those sleights by which I had slowly slipped the knot of his care. (33)

While this may be the case, it is hard to believe that the narrator’s attitude towards Lebanon (his father’s homeland) has not been largely shaped by their strained relationship. His widowed father’s marrying an American, having several new children and starting a new life in the US widens the gap between them. Birthday and New Year’s cards sent by his father’s new family are kept ‘but rarely looked at’ (32). Due to his financial dependence on his father, the narrator is neither ready nor able to acknowledge the sense of loss he feels about never having had a strong father figure. The alternative figure becomes Ali, mentioned on the very first page and present throughout the text. For, upon hearing of his father’s death, the narrator feels ‘the last weight had been lifted’ (261), and in the same week, Ali, who had died in a traffic accident in Lebanon, appears to him at the cemetery. This apparition, which points to the house off Brompton Road – referred to earlier as the bey’s house (a point to be discussed later) – as the residence of the author to be killed, seals his radicalisation. In the wake of this surreal event, the narrator stops working as a nightshift cabdriver and stays in Leighton’s house, awaiting his mission but also his drug supplier. The narrator’s love for his wounded country, so far manifested in devotion to a few friends and attachment to certain locales, habits and objects – like his mother’s painting, which symbolises the pre-war years but is later destroyed by the conflict – is transformed into a partisan ideology whose idea of national loyalty is based on that of Islamic jihad. And so the secular,

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drug-addicted and womanising art connoisseur burns his books, begins ‘a new regime of washing’ (60), praying and fasting, and adopts the idea of martyrdom as the only means for his spiritual purification. Having done little besides ‘dream[ing] through the years of the war’ (266) – while those who never left Lebanon ‘slept and ate among the dead of fifteen years of war’ (202) – and fruitlessly searching for ‘the faces war and time had stolen’ (260) from him, he responds to what he now perceives to be his call of duty towards his suffering nation by assuming his newly discovered religious identity. As in Koolaids, the difference between cultural/religious and national identity comes to the fore. For the narrator, joining this sectarian but also political and military organisation allows him to accomplish two goals simultaneously: to reaffirm his (misunderstood) ‘Lebaneseness’ and to rebel against his privileged socio-economic class, which had partly protected him by offering him, in hard times, an alternative nation. If, as Rosemary George argues, home and class are two factors, among several others, which shape the individual’s ideological constitution, then what we see the narrator doing is undermining the latter in order to deepen, however fallaciously, his nationalistic roots. Looking back on his life, the narrator had perceived himself as ‘a comical imposture’ (27), devoid of substance and value. In a dream shortly before his contemplated suicide mission, he had seen his self – as the writer of a play about the civil war in which ‘each man [is] a stranger to himself’ – split between a ‘garish marionette’, with ‘features not entirely dissimilar to those of [his] own person’ (29), blaspheming on the stage and the actual playwright who congratulates him on his convincing performance of trying to control the disorder caused by the puppet. Like some of Mohammad’s dreams in Koolaids, this one reveals the narrator’s unconscious to contain contradictory selves. Thinking/wishing himself to be the author of a theatrical production, he discovers that he is but the unwitting star in someone else’s drama, like the clown he destroys in front of the audience. One may interpret the dream as expressing his desire to be in charge of his life (and art) but failing to be so due to the war and his chemical dependency. As one reviewer put it, the ‘narrator is mostly out of the action, and nearly always out of his head’ (Vinten 1999: 22). So, his antidote to drifting through life is politicised action against welldefined and easy-to-reach targets such as irreverent writers. Killing a scape-

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goat is a highly distorted example of active nationalism, not only because of its aggressive nature but also because of its religious motivation. The novel’s title is a line from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). The narrator is the modern ‘hollow’ man, to use Eliot’s metaphor, whose empty life in the ‘unreal city’ of his inner landscape finds eventual fulfilment, however brief, in a party ideology which allows him to prove his love for his country by proving himself loyal to Ali. While assassinating a writer for religious, and not nationalistic, reasons thousands of kilometres from Lebanon, and as ordered by one political group and not the Lebanese state, may hardly qualify as evidence of patriotism, it is certainly an act of allegiance to Ali, whose charisma turns him into a quasi-supernatural figure and a pseudoprophet, and whose dignified burial as a martyr contrasts with the narrator’s real father’s unceremonious demise in the US. Ali’s charisma had always held sway over the narrator, who grows up searching, whether consciously or not, for a surrogate father figure in the form of a mentor. This mentorship is most evident when Ali vows to the young narrator that ‘on the appointed day [they] would go together to the cave’ (56). This cave under the falls of Jezzine, mentioned three times in the text, is traditionally believed to have protected Fakhr el-Din, the dwarf Lebanese emir (prince), who evaded capture by the Ottomans by hiding inside. As foretold, the narrator’s curiosity to visit this spot is satisfied inadvertently years later when, as a Jihad al-Binaa member, he finds refuge from fellow Shiite militiamen of the rival Amal group in the same cavern. Like the emir, for years he ‘had hidden in his cave [his mind], and peopled the walls with his imaginings, and though he remembered the world he had no longer trusted his memories’ (266). In States of Fantasy, Jacqueline Rose discusses the enormous importance of collective fantasy in nation-building: ‘Fantasy is a way of re-elaborating and therefore of partly recognizing the memory which is struggling, against all odds, to be heard’ (cited in Tirman 2001). Reduced to a personal level, fantasy may be seen here as helping the narrator fill in his memory gaps about his home country. Again like the emir, he is now ready to step out of his proverbial cave into the sunlight by assuming his national responsibility and accepting his fate in the form of imminent yet dignified death. Earlier, the narrator had stated that people must exist a little less if they cannot be certain that others have remembered them. If living on in

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other people’s memories is a testimony to one’s existence, then dying with a bang cannot but serve as a reminder of a man whose fall was a fitting end to a purposeful life. The novel, however, ends with a twist. We do not see the narrator fulfil his suicide mission. In fact, we see him return to the house off Brompton Road – the bey’s, in which he lived and wrote earlier – at dawn. There, he peruses the lines he has written about his dream of Layla, followed by an ellipsis. These are the exact same lines with which the novel began narrating his dream, featuring both the past and present tense. This textual circularity contradicts the literal linearity and conclusiveness – the ‘final drive’ (258) – of a suicide bombing. Furthermore, if the writer he is supposed to assassinate lives off the same road, then he is arguably the blasphemous writer who has ‘betrayed the religion of the Prophet’ (258) in his ‘unbidden text’ (197). But since towards the end of the novel the narrator imagines Ali’s face as a mirror in which he sees Ali’s reflection and not his own, then he, at this point, has become Ali. He says: ‘High over the unreal city and the walls of fire I am rising light as a cinder on your [Ali’s] warm breath’ (259). If self-redemption is possible through self-identification with Ali, then this particular mission becomes unnecessary – or was, from the beginning, never more than a pipe dream. Conclusion Like Koolaids, Unreal City is post-modern in that it refuses to acknowledge a single objective truth about the Lebanese experience of coping with the war. Uncertainty and ambiguity also pervade the narrator’s account in Unreal City. He confesses: ‘I remember little of those times now, and what I remember is not fit matter to record’ (195). The discrepancy between experiences and their textual (re)construction is attributed here not to AIDS but to drug abuse. Ironically, however, in both texts, foggy and fragmentary memories portray acutely as well as broadly the inner complex reality of various Lebanese characters torn between two homes, two identities and ultimately two life choices. Both novels exemplify the Borgesian post-modernist notion that ‘historical truth is not what took place; it is what we think took place’ (Alameddine 1998: 12). The truth is indeed subjective and consequently multiple, contra-

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dictory and shifting. Human existence, as Nabokov maintains, ‘is but a crack of light between two eternities of darkness’ (cited in Alameddine 1998: 122). How bright or dim lives are, however, depends on decisions and actions. Perhaps no one is fully responsible as no one is fully exempt. But one thing is certain: deconstructing myths of religio-ethnic superiorities bidding for political supremacy would be the first step towards reconstructing the fragmented nation. Following Stuart Hall’s definition of diasporic identity, based on the ‘routes’ versus the ‘roots’ model of culture, wherein identities are not attached to a place of origin but reconfigure themselves in new forms and in new places (1995: 199), both Mohammad and Hanania’s protagonists most certainly ‘belong to more than one world, speak more than one language [literally and figuratively], inhabit more than one identity, [and] have more than one home’ (206). Nonetheless, their mental deteriorations, whether due to AIDS or opium addiction, aggravated by their strained relationships with their fathers and feelings of guilt towards specific individuals, prevented them ultimately from negotiating between their Lebanese Arab/Muslim and Western cultural identities. Despite achieving professional success abroad, they remained unable to speak from what Hall calls ‘the “in-between” of different cultures’ (206), and ended up either rejecting both, as Mohammad did, or surrendering to a militant fantasy in which one cultural-religious ideology hopes to vanquish another, as Hanania’s protagonist did. Both grappled with their identities, whether explicitly or not, being unsure where they belonged, and as Zygmunt Bauman explains, identity is in fact a label ‘given to the escape sought from that uncertainty’ (1996: 23). In both cases, only death, real or imagined, provided the final escape. Various expressions of individual states of mind with regard to Lebanese nationalism are presented in Koolaids and Unreal City. As I have argued, neither novel portrays exile (or the diaspora) and the nation as antithetical entities but as realities coexisting within the individual, the nation and the host country.

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2 The Perv and Somewhere, Home

he phenomenon of the Lebanese diaspora has received its share of attention, its literature generally being designated as ‘modern’ (recent) rather than ‘historical’ (established in antiquity) or ‘incipient’ (in the making) (Sheffer 2003: 75).1 The ratio of Lebanese abroad to those in Lebanon, about four million, is five or six to one (Cooke 1996: 269). Michael Humphrey asserts that the term ‘diaspora’ moves between the particularity of an historical experience and the existential condition which metaphorises postmodernity in its characteristics of ‘uncertainty, displacement and fragmented identity’ (2004: par. 4). Contemporary use of the phrase ‘Lebanese diaspora’ is therefore the by-product of national disintegration and subsequent resettlement (par. 5). Furthermore, Humphrey contends that homogenising this diaspora as a cultural, political or national community is impossible because these migrants ‘are the product of quite different migrations with their own very distinct relationships’ to contemporary Lebanon (par. 6). Differences in religious denomination, socio-economic status, political ideology, timing and reasons for departure, and the types of host societies into which they integrated prevent them from conceiving of the imagined present or past in the same way (par. 6). Since the significance of the war remains politically unresolved, and since Lebanon is yet to be restructured as promised in the Ta’if Accord that ended the conflict, diasporic identification remains primarily sectarian or communal (par. 44). In the Lebanese diaspora, Humphrey concludes, ‘recovery of the imaginary homeland [. . .] resembles the broader predicament of our times: social transience, fluid identities, and individual uncertainty’ (par. 54) rather than a ‘long-distance nationalism’, as defined by Benedict Anderson (par. 42). Depending on length of time spent abroad, novelists of Lebanese origin

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have expressed multifarious notions of Lebanon as their original homeland. But for almost all second- and third-generation authors, writing in mother tongues determined by their countries of upbringing, Lebanon remains mythical. In the words of Milton Hatoum,2 the acclaimed Portugueselanguage novelist and son of Lebanese immigrants in Brazil, for example, it constitutes ‘the memory of the imaginary homeland of [their] ancestors rather than a concrete place’ (cited in Wilson-Goldie 2003). In Hatoum’s novel The Brothers (originally published in 2000), when Yaqub, born in Brazil of Lebanese immigrants but who lived between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, during the Second World War, in southern Lebanon, is asked by his neighbour Talib in the diaspora many years later if he missed Lebanon, he responds with the question: ‘What Lebanon?’ Following Talib’s reply that ‘there’s only one Lebanon [. . .] Or rather, there are many,’ one of which resides in one’s heart, Yaqub defends his position thus: ‘I didn’t live in Lebanon [. . .] and I’ve forgotten the time I spent there [. . .] the village, the people, the name of the village, and the relatives. The only thing I’ve not forgotten is the language’ (2002: 95). Yaqub’s attitude, stemming mainly from his life experiences as a second-generation Lebanese immigrant, does not and cannot resemble those shown by Lebanese writers belonging to the civil war-displaced generation with deep memories, whether positive or negative, of time spent in their country of origin. While neither a second-hand nor a fanciful memory, and thus thrice removed from direct experience, the concretisation of this country manifests itself uniquely in their fictional works. Rabih Alameddine and Nada Awar Jarrar, born within a year of one another, have much in common. Druze by birth and now in their early to mid-fifties, they have spent their lives between Lebanon3 and several Western nations.4 Both left Lebanon in their late teens after the civil war erupted.5 Although neither experienced the atrocities of warfare for a considerable time, their texts bear the indelible marks of lives tinged with the pain of loss, exile and the impossible attempt to retrieve the past. Both locate their fond memories of childhood in the Lebanese mountains;6 it was a period of tranquility which ended abruptly. Alameddine says: [The war] permeates every corner of my life. I can’t seem to write about anything else. The war taught me how to deal with impermanence, how to

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sharpen my sense of the absurd, and how to function in a chaotic world. Wars and disease bring one closer to mortality. (2002: interview with Devlin: par. 5)

Similarly, Jarrar states: Those who have endured violence – in Lebanon, Bosnia, Rwanda, Algeria and in other hot spots of the planet – know it: war installs itself in the depth of one’s being and fuses itself with one’s skin. And right at the moment when you think you have forgotten it, it remembers you. (Cited in Ghandour Hert 2003: 6, my translation)

She adds: My life, like that of many Lebanese of my generation [my emphasis], can be neatly divided into two parts: before and after the civil war [. . .] Before was childhood and permanence; after has been exile and return, both of which are defined by a more accommodating notion of home. (Cited in Toby Eady 2003)

Speaking of his identity, Alameddine declares: ‘I’m both an Arab and an American, although I have a problem with hyphenated identities, so I don’t consider myself an Arab American’ (2003: interview with Fadda-Conrey 24). For him, feeling at home has to do with relationships. Therefore, San Francisco, where his best friends live, as well as Beirut, where his family lives, are possible homes; but he also confesses that he is ‘one of those constantly lost people’, adding: ‘I fit in no matter where you put me, in many ways, and at the same time I don’t fit anywhere’ (2003: interview with Fadda-Conrey 38). Jarrar disagrees: ‘I have always thought of home as a place. People are extremely important but the place has to be the foundation. And [Lebanon] is the only place in the world where I’ve ever felt the connection, where I feel home’ (cited in Farah 2003: 6). In this chapter, I focus on Alameddine’s second work, The Perv: Stories (1999), and Jarrar’s first, Somewhere, Home (2003). Both are collections of mini-narratives, respectively eight short stories and a trilogy. One reviewer’s reference to Alameddine’s ability to ‘fill in the tenuous spaces of exile and deracination with fascinating detail’ (Killian 1999: 17) applies equally to

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Jarrar. But whereas his characters embody ‘[t]he cultural displacement of a moneyed, privileged international elite’ (Stadler 1999) during and after the war, hers represent several socio-economic classes and are placed at different times in Lebanon’s twentieth century. Although adjectives such as ‘blunt’, ‘discomforting’, ‘confrontational’ (Dwyer 1999: 144), ‘morbid’ (Killian 1999: 16), ‘raunchy’ and ‘wicked’ (Foos 2003) have been used to portray The Perv, none of which characterise Somewhere, Home, Michael Denneny’s view of Alameddine’s stories as being ‘[s]uffused by a yearning for what has been lost’ (2003) would describe Jarrar’s with precision. Somewhere, Home received international acclaim,7 but critics have ignored The Perv, despite the success of Koolaids.8 Neither collection carries the political motivations of many post-colonial and post-war fictions, and neither is concerned with advancing a definition of nationalism or patriotism. As Alameddine explains: ‘It was not my interest to change politics per se. My interest was in changing human consciousness’ (2003: unpublished interview with Fadda-Conrey). In addition to separating his fiction from political ideology, he ‘do[es] not believe the purpose of literature is to represent people’ (2003: Personal interview) or, I would add, a people, the Lebanese or any other national group, but rather to depict actual as well as psychological states of diasporic and exiled individuals. The same assertions could have been made by Jarrar. I compare the relationship between home and exile/diaspora to show how homesickness ranges from critical memory of the immediate past of the civil war to nostalgic memory of a timeless and splendid Lebanon. Diametrically opposed in tone, attitude and purpose, the two works epitomise discrepant views on memory, home and exile/diaspora. For Alameddine, homesickness is more of a ‘sickness of home’, and ‘being at home’ is not about belonging to a piece of land but about having a peace of mind which can be enjoyed anywhere. For Jarrar, home is a location, usually a residence, associated with actual or substitute family members, thus serving as a storehouse of childhood memories from which a secure sense of selfhood is derived. The Perv The Perv is categorised by the US Library of Congress as ‘Lebanese, Emigration and Immigration, and Foreign Countries Fiction’. Kirkus Reviews dubs it

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‘multinational [and] multisexual fiction’. Laurie Foos calls it a collection ‘that defies categorization’ (2003). Although these designations are true insofar as this work has an international flavour and portrays characters with different sexual orientations, the stories depict what Publishers Weekly calls ‘Lebanon’s proverbial breakdown [being] the black margin around everyone, whether the characters live in that country or have emigrated elsewhere’. Denneny sees The Perv as exploring ‘the world of Lebanese survivors whom the crises of modernity have made homeless, whether they stayed in Lebanon or joined the diaspora abroad’ (2003). Alameddine’s injecting AIDS, as a further alienating factor, into some of the lead characters complicates and broadens the spectrum of exilic/diasporic existence.9 In The Perv, the war looms large. Many characters lose loved ones. Victims and victimisers belong to all religious, political and socio-economic groups. For example, the Muslim uncle who is tortured by Christian Phalange militiamen (‘The Changing Room’) is counterbalanced by the Christian father who is murdered by Muslim leftist combatants (‘Grace’). Nouveau riche gangsters (‘Grace’) and innocent aristocratic grandmothers (‘My Grandmother, the Grandmaster’) are killed and robbed of their possessions, respectively. Faced with despair, some either commit or contemplate suicide (‘The Perv’ and ‘Grace’). Many who stay alive lose their dignity and/ or their sanity. Alameddine implicates all factions in order to remain neutral, but one thing he is uncompromising about is equating violence with hypermasculinity. During the war, ‘[g]uns ejaculated blood’ (Alameddine 1999: 116) and ‘brother slaughtered brother literally’ (158). With two exceptions,10 all of the male characters in The Perv were forced to leave Lebanon, mostly by their parents, after the outbreak of the war. They represent a sectarian cross-section, from middle- and upper-middle-class families, who were lucky enough to escape the mayhem in their mid-teens. All but one (‘Grace’) decide to stay away even after the war. Therefore, close in age, socio-economic stratum and professional ambition, exhibited in their desire to become good writers, they exemplify a distinct category of expatriates for whom Lebanon becomes increasingly distant. I believe that placing the story titled ‘The Perv’ at the beginning of this eponymous collection is strategic. As the AIDS-afflicted character, who calls himself ‘Sammy’ and masquerades as a pubescent boy, declares:

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I have always been someone else, always. Even as a child, I was someone else. Every child has fantasy roles, but with me, they were [. . .] as real as my real life [. . .] Even though I am not very patriotic, I always fantasized myself as still being Lebanese. (56)

While dying of AIDS, he explains: ‘I get so bored in my room. I escape through fantasy. I live through metamorphosis [. . .] I am very good at being anything other than me’ (30). Based on these claims, I read the main characters in the following stories as ‘Sammy’’s inventions of multiple selves. As creators of fictional yet tangible characters, ‘Sammy’ and Alameddine are one and the same, albeit for different reasons. What is the role of memory in a new place away from home? How, when and why is memory complemented and/or supplanted by imagination? For ‘Sammy’, ‘[r]emembering is the disease [he] suffer[s] from’ because it ‘breaks [his] soul’ and ‘destroy[s] [his] body’ (54). The narrator comments that it is ‘incredible [. . .] how little effect the civil war [. . .] has had on [‘Sammy’]’ since ‘[m]ost people who experience a war become the walking dead [as] [t]hey shut down mentally and emotionally’ (30). Ironically, struck by AIDS and not by bullets or shrapnel, ‘Sammy’ is a ‘dead’ man walking or, more accurately since he can no longer walk, a ‘dead’ man confined to talking and writing. As stated in Chapter 1, Leo Spitzer argues that reconstructive memory is essential for replacing feelings of loss and absence with those of gain and presence (reprinted 1998: 376). Unlike nostalgic memory, which is positive and crucial for the continuity of both individual and collective identities, critical memory is negative and questions one’s past. Both, however, are needed for the retrospective process of self-definition. The Perv has no place for nostalgia.11 In one story (‘A Flight to Paris’), the AIDS-afflicted, forty-five-year-old American Jerry recalls his dead lover Tom, whom he met in Paris, ‘the city of nostalgia’, and quotes Marguerite Yourcenar,12 who defines nostalgia as ‘the melancholy residue of desire’ (cited in Alameddine 1999: 167). When desire for loving and being loved weakens with the death of loved ones, so does nostalgia. Cities lose their nostalgic appeal when devoid of those individuals deemed vital for one’s happiness and purposefulness. Places do not constitute home; they only gain this privilege by being associated with

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certain individuals. Since homes are portable, the significance of memory in reconstructing one’s past as rooted in a specific locale is diminished. As Jerry exclaims: It is said that one must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. The former I did not believe in, the latter I followed religiously. I had no use for memory. If left unburied, it festers, like an untreated wound. I was never able to deal with my past. Some mechanism must have been turned off within me while I was growing up. I would not say I ran away. I called it moving on, always looking forward, on the go, astir, engaging life fully, never dwelling on what I could not change. (165)

Although not as extreme as Jerry’s, Alameddine’s expatriates express comparable sentiments regarding the possibility of repatriation. Parental disapproval of their teenage desire to return, especially for the holidays, is slowly but surely replaced by their own realisation, as adults, of both the impossibility and the undesirability of resettling in Lebanon. In Returning Home, Amal Saleeby Malek quotes sociologist David Pollock, who defines a Third Culture Kid as ‘an individual who, having spent a significant part of the developmental years in a culture other than the parents’ culture, develops a sense of relationship to all those cultures, while not having full ownership of any’ (2001: 107). Malek argues that for many long-time expatriates, returning home is a challenging proposition. Since reintegration is never easy, repatriation is fraught with apprehension (87). In The Perv, the homeland is never an abstract entity but one whose significance, for the expatriates, is determined by the degree of intimacy they have with family members who stay behind. Reasons for not returning range from the intensely personal to the purely legal, and even visits are restricted to special occasions. In ‘Duck’, the AIDS-afflicted expatriate, now living in the US, is denied entry by the Syrian officers who essentially run Beirut’s airport, on account of his ailment, despite previous visits and continuous remittances. Although he offers to pay for his mother’s airfare and to meet her somewhere closer to Lebanon, presumably in Europe, she refuses, and he resigns himself to living, and dying, alone. Only three characters (‘My Grandmother’, ‘A Flight to Paris’ and ‘Remembering Nasser’13) are visited by relatives from Lebanon. But visiting grandmothers, mothers and cousins criticise, humiliate

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and even damn their hosts for being gay and, worse, for openly writing about it and thus bringing shame to their families. As one character living in San Francisco puts it: ‘I was out in the United States and closeted in Lebanon. My two lives were separate [. . .] Lebanon became this place I visited twice a year. To this day, I have not told my family’ (184). He adds: It was not that I disliked my family. I loved them dearly. I wanted a barrier, distance being the best I could think of, between us. I could not see how I could possibly be a complete person, let alone a gay one, if I hung around. (186)

For many gay expatriates, ties to Lebanon are initially maintained by befriending fellow Lebanese. Coming out, however, severs these ties and replaces homophobic compatriots with tolerant and/or gay Americans. The bridge to Lebanon is sustained thereafter by visits, phone calls and voluntary and/or involuntary acts of remembrance. Recalling Svetlana Boym’s nuanced definition of nostalgia, as stated in Chapter 1, is necessary here. The emphasis can be placed either on ‘nostos’, that is, the return to a dreamed-of home, or on ‘algia’, that is, the enchantment by the distance between the old and the new place, and not by the old locale as such. The second type is akin to an ‘ironic nostalgia’, which enjoys the very state of displacement (1998: 241). Nowhere in these stories is stress laid on a desire to resettle in Lebanon. The little nostalgia evident is ironic while seemingly tender, as indicated by the title of the last story, ‘Remembering Nasser’. The main character’s reference to Marcel Proust, whose memories in A la recherche du temps perdu were evoked by eating madeleines, is itself ironic since this expatriate’s recollections are mostly deliberate and occasionally involuntary, such as ‘when all of a sudden something [such as a flower or a painting] reminds [him]’ (183) of Nasser, or when he dreams of their times together. Only then do his memories of his dead but once admired cousin ‘c[o]me flooding back’ (183). Both types of memory, the nostalgic and the critical, intertwine to gradually show Nasser in his true colours, namely as a symbol of intolerance and violence which, as mentioned earlier, are linked to hyper-masculinity. The fact that Nasser ‘replaces’ him as his father’s son back home signals the utter impossibility and undesirability of ever fitting in again in patriarchal Lebanese society.

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By offering many advantages, the US (or any other Western nation), initially experienced as a country of exile, gradually transforms into a comfortable place for a diasporic existence, if not the only viable home(land), for many of Alameddine’s characters. One of these advantages is geographical distance from which to re-evaluate relationships and priorities. All prefer the freedoms available in the West to social conformity in Lebanon. European countries, in particular, are also where Lebanese of different religious persuasions and socio-economic strata are forced to become acquainted and to unite against stereotyping Westerners. As one character confesses: ‘This man and I had nothing in common. He was a workingman, poor, uneducated. We would probably never have talked if we were not Lebanese in a foreign country [the Czech Republic]’ (152). In ‘The Changing Room’, at an English boarding school, eight Lebanese students – five Christians and three Muslims – form a band after being called ‘wogs’ by numerous racist British boys, thus creating what the narrator calls a ‘paradox’, since interfaith tolerance, let alone friendship, ‘was obviously not the case in their homeland’ (69). They even start including other Arabs in their midst, a process the narrator sarcastically describes as ‘unnaturally tolerant’ (69). However, these ties are dissolved when the central character is discovered to be gay and subsequently dismissed as a ‘queer’ by the Lebanese and the British alike. Andreas Pflitsch terms this further or secondary intra-group differentiation – in this case the discrimination by the Lebanese students against the Lebanese protagonist based upon his sexual orientation – a ‘difference [among potential others] between [or within] differences’ (2005: 21, my translation). This young man discovers that there is a ‘difference between being called queer or wog’, depending on the viewer, when his equally ‘outcast friends’ become former friends for perceiving his gayness as a ‘big difference’ (77), or deviation, from their common heterosexual identities. Consequently, he starts hanging out with ‘other outcasts’ (70), like Americans, Spaniards, Pakistanis and South Africans. The message here is clear: sexual discrimination is just as foul as racial or national bigotry. Allegiance should be to accepting others, who treat one in kind, and with kindness, and not to any group. Nationalist sentiments should never be at the expense of respecting differences in sexual orientation. The protagonist’s sense of double alienation is transformed into personal triumph. In this context, I agree with Pflitsch’s argument that the title, ‘The Changing Room’,

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refers both to the actual room where students shower and change after sports – and where later in the story a thirteen-year-old gay Iranian boy, Cyrus, hangs himself to escape racism and sexual abuse – and, on a higher level, to England as a whole and to this boarding school experience there, that is, to the period of puberty (2005: 19), wherein the protagonist transforms from an innocent teenager into a mature, confident and professionally promising young man who departs again to join UCLA in the US. In On Identity, Amin Maalouf asserts that no individual possesses more than one identity; instead, each has only one, ‘made up of many components combined together in a mixture that is unique’ (1998: 3). Furthermore, each person is ‘a meeting ground for many different allegiances’ (5) which sometimes conflict with one another. In the example above, the protagonist experiences conflicting allegiances: one to his fellow Lebanese who refuse to accept his homosexuality, and another to an international group which does. In this case, the latter wins. Maalouf clarifies that each loyalty, regardless of its nature, links one to a large number of people, but ‘the more ties [one has] the rarer and more particular [one’s] own identity becomes’ (15). Joining this larger group demonstrates the formation of this protagonist’s more complex identity. Alameddine targets Lebanese and foreigners alike if they fail to respect other individuals’ freedom to make their own choices. Reciprocal national and racial stereotyping is also condemned. His teenage characters in The Perv are unabashed about their fascination with the West. As one says: ‘Like many Lebanese boys, I grew up thinking of myself as European. I thought of Lebanon as too small, not really big enough to leave a sustainable mark on’ (66).14 When these characters, however, relocate to the West, they face prejudice and loneliness. But as one Lebanese immigrant says: ‘We move on with our lives. Different things become important. My writing became the most important thing in my life. Beirut, and its memories, began to recede to the background’ (113). Neither the original homeland nor the adopted one is romanticised, but most of Alameddine’s characters opt for the West, which allows them to pursue their personal and professional lives more freely. In so doing, they try to maintain ties to their nuclear families but, more often than not, end up forming alternative ones made up of long-term lovers and likeminded friends, as was seen in Koolaids. Eventually, these immigrants start

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enjoying their ‘contrapuntal consciousness’ (Said 1994: 366) by leading a diasporic life which, compared to exile, is ‘less inclined towards suffering and longing’ (Hammer 2003: 185). In The Perv, being at home or dreaming of it from a distance is always accompanied by the dread of having one’s individuality diminished. Since home is a conflicted site, both politically and psychologically, Alameddine’s geography is ultimately affective. Feeling ‘at home’ is determined less by a spatial and more by an emotional reality that stretches beyond the definitional confines of one’s nation as homeland. Somewhere, Home In Jarrar’s stories, home, as it relates to family, is never a conflicted site. The author herself has suggested that it is unnatural for people to leave their homes and emphasised the urgency of the plight of those who have to do so. She has reminded Western readers that, as a result of the civil war, a whole generation of Lebanese feels displaced (Skailes 2003). To compensate for the physical loss of home, nostalgia plays a crucial role in reconstructing it with deliberate acts of recollection. In one reviewer’s words, ‘an almost sepia image of her ancestral home is at the center of the book’, although Jarrar’s own village is never mentioned by name; nostalgia, as infused with melancholia, has also been stressed, when Jarrar has been seen to be writing, like many post-colonial authors, on the ‘melancholy of loss and the inherent urge to reclaim smatterings of a past age’ (Banerji 2003: 17). More particularly, she presents ‘the melancholic drama of exile, both physical and emotional, and the insistent pang of homelessness that gnaws at so many of modernity’s abandoned and confused progeny’ (Al-Shawaf 2004: 8). Conceived as such, this work is ‘an exploration of the myriad associations we all attach to the concept of belonging’ (Flockhart 2003: par. 1) to a home, be it physical or spiritual (par. 2). In addition, Somewhere, Home’s approaches to identity, war and exile are innovative in comparison with writings by other (male) Arab and Lebanese authors, many of whom, according to Rayyan Al-Shawaf, deal with these issues ‘in a heavy-handed and moralistic manner’ (2004: 8). He sees Jarrar’s ‘female-centered narratives [with their] emphasis on home as a personal, filial and maternal concern’ (8) as superior to novels in which the definition

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of home remains inextricably linked to ideology. This judgement is partially correct since many, but not all, of the Anglophone Lebanese novelists in this study have created characters whose attitudes towards their nation are largely determined by familial situations and psychological makeups. In I, the Divine, The Hakawati, The Bullet Collection and A Good Land, all of which will be examined later, it is the microstructure of home as an affective ensemble which shapes the view of the macrostructure of the homeland, and not vice versa. Furthermore, as has been correctly noted by Maya Sfeir, unlike most post-war fictions included here, Somewhere, Home does not ‘angrily depict the war’s brutality’, voicing instead ‘the silence of the women who did not fight’ (2010: 13). Another distinguishing feature, Sfeir states, is the way in which the first story of this trilogy portrays ‘the loneliness and loss of the women’ who remain in the homeland and are ‘forgotten’ (13) by migrating husbands, fathers and sons, whose successful adventures continue to predominate in studies on Lebanese migration.15 In Home Matters, Roberta Rubenstein explains that [n]ot merely a physical structure or a geographical location but always an emotional space, home is among the most emotionally complex and resonant concepts in our psychic vocabularies, given its association with the most influential, and often most ambivalent, elements of our earliest physical environment and psychological experiences as well as their ripple effect throughout our lives. (2001: 1–2)

Furthermore, she argues that narratives involving notions of home, loss and nostalgia confront the past in order to ‘fix’ it in a double sense: first, they secure it more strongly in the imagination, and second, they correct it by revising it. In so doing, they traverse the gap between longing and belonging (6). I argue that Jarrar’s three stories – through the characters Maysa, Aida and Salwa – illustrate an evolution in this process. In the opening pages, the collaborative efforts of remembrance and imagination are underscored. While speech is recalled, silence has to be imagined to fill in the gaps of memory. In fact, memory and imagination ‘mix together [. . .] so that [one] can no longer tell which is which’ (Jarrar 2003: 13). Mita Banerjee sees the mixing of fact and fiction in Maysa’s notebook as a metaphor for Jarrar’s own text (2008: par. 11). Maysa, pregnant at thirty-two

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after six years of marriage, uses the ‘wretched’ (Jarrar 2003: 7) civil war as a pretext to leave her husband in Beirut, in 1975, and move into her ancestral house in the mountains. There she devotes herself to collecting and concocting memories in the form of a notebook, which she divides into chapters allocated to Alia, Saeeda and Leila, respectively her paternal grandmother, paternal aunt and mother. I argue here that Maysa’s physical presence in this house – ‘once a castle, alive and spilling over with energy’ (10) but now dilapidated, inhabited by the spirits of the departed and ‘encircled in shadow’ (79) – is essential for her to produce what Pierre Nora calls a lieu de mémoire or a site of memory (that is, her notebook as text) ‘because there [is] no longer [a] milieu de mémoire, [a] real environment of memory’ (1989: 7) (that is, the house). Whereas memory, as Nora explains, attaches itself to sites, history attaches itself to events (22). The Lebanese Civil War – often referred to as ‘the events’ – could be seen, in this context, as an ‘acceleration of history’ (Nora 1989: 8) which not only disrupts normalcy but also threatens to violate and distort Lebanon’s past. Maysa’s ‘[f]ear of a rapid and final disappearance [of her crumbling house and her own memories thereof and therein if she dies in the city] combines with anxiety about the meaning of the present and uncertainty about the future to give even the most humble testimony’ (Nora 1989: 13). By turning her back on a ‘Beirut smolder[ing] in a war against itself’ (4) to pen her family’s stories in situ instead of novelistic accounts about the dailiness of the (urban-centred) war, Maysa refuses, allegorically, to join the ranks of the emerging ‘Beirut Decentrists’ who, as Miriam Cooke argues in War’s Other Voices, voiced their critiques of male-generated violence by promoting peace, reconciliation and a humanist, as opposed to a statist, nationalism. Furthermore, by raising her child in a safer area, she spares her the anguish suffered by many youngsters who never left the city until much later and lived to record their traumas, as will be discussed in Part II. To Maysa, the present in the narrow sense of the term can never be captured, let alone understood, unless the past can be reconstructed first, starting with ‘a will to remember’ (Nora 1989: 8) and to imagine, in order to create a bond (via her text) ‘to the eternal present’ (Nora 1989: 19).16 In delivering a personal document based on a participatory form of memory which might help her national community, at some point in the future, learn about

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the past, she exemplifies the role of the private citizen, stressed by Richard Derderian, in preserving memories. The sub-genre of her notebook is ‘folkhistory’, a term used by Jill McRae to refer to the history of one’s family (1994: 218). As McRae explains, ‘whereas history, concerned with precision and rational interpretation, is intellectual in its apprehension of events, folkhistory relies on an intuitive, impressionistic organization of the same material’ (221, emphasis in original). Imagination, of which Maysa has plenty, is crucial to composing her, or any, folkhistory. Since her text features ‘stories of the women in [her] family’ (Jarrar 2003: 78), it is more precisely a folkherstory. Her feminist desire to empower women by narrating their stories ensures the completion of the project. Maysa hopes to create what Marianne Hirsch calls ‘an agent of memory’ through which her daughter Yasmeena can find a distant origin. Ironically, this text, concocted by memories, post memories17 and imaginings, gets buried in the closet when the seven-year-old refuses to have it read to her, claiming that ‘she already knew all the stories by heart’ (78–9), but might of course wish to revisit as ‘future memories’ (16) at a later stage. Therefore, this notebook as a lieu de mémoire is, like all others, ‘material, symbolic, and functional’ (Nora 1989: 19), being a site ‘concentrated in its own name, but also forever open to the full range of its possible significations’ (Nora 1989: 24). Unlike Aida and Salwa, who reimagine their homes while living abroad, Maysa literally dwells in the past by retreating to the edifice of her emotional archives. The house, as Gaston Bachelard writes, is the ‘theatre of the past that is constituted by memory’ (1994: 8), thus allowing her to make ‘distant voyages into a world that is no more’ (1994: 143). In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym states that excessive nostalgia can be ‘an abdication of personal responsibility [and] a guilt-free homecoming’ (2001: xiv). For sixteen years, Maysa does, in a way, abdicate her responsibility as a spouse. By turning away from her husband, who nonetheless joins her and Yasmeena in the mountains for seven years before returning to Beirut at the height of the war in 1983, she avenges Alia and Saeeda, whose husbands abandoned them for Africa and South America, respectively. Her mother, Leila, for whom Lebanon remains ‘a home without memories’ (Jarrar 2003: 52) – having relocated to it after growing up in Virginia – misses her American home but learns to cope with her nostalgia by focusing on her marriage and children.

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Although Maysa grew up in Beirut, she identifies herself with her ancestral house, seeing ‘Beirut [as] a recurring dream, at once elusive and familiar, a keepsake of a drifting mind’ (75). Unlike Marianna in The Bullet Collection, who is closer to Yasmeena’s age than to her own, Maysa has the repertoire of ‘a lifetime’ (6) of memories collected in this ‘translucent’ (57) city which no distance can deplete. The capital’s ‘insistent sense of ordered confusion’ (75) stands in contrast with the solid and solitary house, ‘where everything began’ (8) and whose life, reflected in those of its inhabitants, may be recaptured in her document. The notebook weaves variegated stories of exile. Men of the older generations leave for good or come back after long absences to tell ‘stories of adventure’ (Jarrar 2003: 41), and sometimes leave again to join families left behind. For the wives and children who stay in Lebanon, exile is an exotic place, at once ‘distant, hostile, [and] strange’ (18). Maysa’s maternal grandparents return to Lebanon after a thirty-year absence and go back to the US after marrying off their daughter. Maysa’s father receives his higher education in the US but never doubts his desire to return. As he proudly tells his American-born fiancée: ‘I’ll show you my Lebanon’ (55), one rich in history and nature. With travel becoming easier, cheaper and faster, the young no longer view Lebanon and foreign countries as antipodes but as equally familiar and liveable, depending on need and purpose. Maysa’s need, by contrast, is not to march forward in space but to travel back in time in order, as she insists, to understand herself better and derive strength from key female relatives. But her husband’s remark at the end that she has been writing these stories ‘because [she] [is] unable to embrace [her] own’ rings partly true, since she admits that her ‘attempts at belonging have always seemed half-hearted’ (78). After almost seventeen years, Maysa joins her family in post-war Beirut. The additional nine years she spends in her village house, after finishing her notebook, prove that writing was never the only reason for her withdrawal. Applying Rubenstein’s terms, Maysa ‘fixes’ her past, that is, anchors it, by etching it on paper. How much this helps her, however, to continue her own life with a revised sense of self in relation to others in the present or near future remains unclear. Jarrar’s second protagonist, Aida, is not so much attached to a domicile as to her childhood and adolescence, which ended abruptly when, at sev-

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enteen, she left Lebanon in 1975. Thus, her ‘search for home is temporal, rather than geographical’ (Flockhart 2003: par. 5). Rubenstein states that ‘[w]hile homesickness refers to a spatial/geographical separation, nostalgia more accurately refers to a temporal one’ (2001: 4). For Aida, home is concentrated into one person, Amou18 Mohammed, a poor Palestinian refugee who looked after her and her sisters and thus became her emotional reference point. Boym explains that nostalgia is an ache of temporal distance and displacement. Whereas distance is compensated for by intimate experience and the availability of a desired object, displacement is cured by a return to one’s home (2001: 44). Aida attempts to surmount her pain by accomplishing both, but while she manages to overcome distance, she fails to alleviate her displacement. The assassination of Amou Mohammed by a young militiaman in 1990, mere days after he had expressed hope, in his last letter to Aida, about the possible end of the war, triggers her memories so violently that they ‘stumble [. . .] over each other’ (Jarrar 2003: 86). Unable to return during the war as she had promised him, her ‘creative thinking’ and her ‘near-perfect memory for the minutiae of her past’ (83) resurrect him as an imaginary companion and interlocutor to help combat her isolation and assuage her guilt in the anonymous and safe ‘cities of the West’ (85). Separated from him by distance and later by death, Aida overcomes this rift by generating an ‘intimate experience’ with her ‘desired object’, to use Boym’s terms. Rubenstein calls this phenomenon ‘the presence of absence’: psychic pain can be so severe that ‘[t]he felt absence of a person or place assumes form and occupies imaginative space as a presence that may come to possess the individual’; in this case, nostalgia becomes a haunted longing as ‘figures of earlier relationships and the places with whom they are associated, both remembered and imagined, impinge on a person’s emotional life, affecting her or his behavior toward current experiences and attachments’ (2001: 5). The loss of a loved male figure during war by a young girl who can only partially recuperate by obsessively recollecting and imagining that desired object recurs in The Bullet Collection. Like Aida, Marianna, pulled out of war-time Lebanon by her parents, yet unable to overcome her adolescent romantic love for Ziad, shuns reality for the longest time by clinging to her ‘object of mourning even when reason dictates that the object can no longer be grasped’ (Mishra 2001:

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36). Like Marianna, Aida develops a fascination for a young man, Mark, a like-minded British high-school friend with whom she ‘could have stayed [. . .] for ever [. . .] [i]f it hadn’t been for the war’ (Jarrar 2003: 116), during which they both leave for Europe. The reason, however, why Aida’s object of mourning is Amou Mohammed – ‘the only anomaly in her adolescent existence’ (105) yet sort of ‘a second father’ (130) – and not Mark is because the former dies, like Ziad, of a bullet, making her feel guilty and ashamed for having left Lebanon when he, and many poor Palestinians and Lebanese like him, could not escape, except for temporary relocations to safer parts of the city. Since ‘her future in a resplendent Beirut’ (108) did not materialise as envisioned, Aida is incapable of moving on romantically beyond occasional shallow relationships. Aida’s emotional growth is stunted; her two sisters move on by having careers and children. Her parents, too, like Marianna’s, talk about their old home strictly ‘in terms of the past’, echoing Alameddine’s expatriates in declaring: ‘Our lives [. . .] cannot be postponed just because we had to leave Lebanon’ (102). By contrast, Aida ‘ha[s] no heart to waste on new beginnings’ (85), as her reminiscences prevent all of her personal and professional relationships from maturing. While determined ‘not [. . .] to put [her] life on hold while waiting for the war to end back home’ (120), her sister Sara also admits that ‘Lebanon’s the only place where [she] [has] ever really felt the earth beneath [her] feet’ (121). For Aida, feeling this earth as providing a sense of reality and safety depends on Amou Mohammed’s presence, such as when, as a child, she threw herself from a wall into his grasp and was then gently put down on the ground. Europe never becomes her second home; psychologically, she remains in transit until she returns to Lebanon in her early thirties, the same age when Maysa embarked on her journey of self-exploration. Malek elucidates that repatriates are always motivated to succeed because their move, unlike that of many immigrants and refugees, is mostly voluntary (2001: 113–14). Aida, in Arabic, means ‘she who returns’. Defining love as ‘an errant child finally come home’ (Jarrar 2003: 111), Aida returns, determined ‘to recover her knight in armor’ (131), but fails to do so. Post-war Beirut bears little resemblance to the one painted by her memory. Visiting Amou Mohammed’s family and revisiting all the places associated with him

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prove futile; in Lebanon he can only exist as a memory, not as an imaginary friend, because her need to compensate for distance has been fulfilled. Her nostalgia, defined by Boym in certain cases as ‘a romance with one’s own fantasy’ (2001: xiii), is crushed by reality. Neither her relationship with the doctor (Kameel) she meets – the same one who had helped Maysa deliver Yasmeena in the first story – nor her impulse to transform Maysa’s house into a nursery school go any further. Being in Lebanon does not cure her displacement. Finally, reality strikes so hard that she decides to leave Lebanon again to resume her ‘romance’ with Amou Mohammed. The narrator informs us at the outset that Aida’s reluctance to mature ‘had already fixed [itself] to her every aspect’ (83). Indeed, she has ‘fixed’ her past by reliving it at the expense of her present and future; in so doing, however, she herself was fixated and thus failed to ‘travers[e] the gap between longing and belonging’ (Rubenstein 2001: 6). In this respect, through Aida, Jarrar delivers an ‘intriguing smallscale psychological character sketch’ (Dooley 2004: par. 4) which resembles in some aspects Sarah Nour el-Din’s in I, the Divine, to be discussed in Chapter 3. In the third story, expatriation spreads across continents and the entire twentieth century. In telling her story as an elderly disabled woman, Salwa, nicknamed Sally in Australia, narrates those of many Lebanese who departed to ‘make lives for [them]selves in [any] country where [. . .] there are better opportunities for everyone’ (Jarrar 2003: 220); for example, South America, to which her father had travelled but was never heard of again until his obituary appeared in a newspaper. Whisked off at age fifteen by her older husband – first to Louisiana in the US and later to Adelaide and Kingston in Australia – Salwa, initially a poor Druze village girl, has no choice but to adjust to her new surroundings and raises a large family before she revisits Lebanon after twenty-seven years. Despite fulfilling social expectations and feeling somewhat fulfilled as a mother and grandmother, her personal desires, such as playing the piano and singing, remain unsatisfied in this patriarchal system. In Australia, she continues to speak Arabic to her husband but English to her children, who understand Arabic but never learn to speak it. When she instinctively utters Arabic words, they remind her that no one, except them, will understand her. The memories of her home provide emotional sustenance in the face of difficulties but never impede, as they do for Aida, her

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growth into a responsible person. In Australia, the memory of her wedding is triggered by the sound of a gramophone ‘play[ing] the music of home’ and ‘for that brief moment a certain joy is restored’ (169). She says: ‘I have pictured our home in a thousand and one different ways’ (162). When she fails to remember ‘years in between’ (169), she asks for help. Unlike Aida’s memories, which intrude upon her present, Salwa’s reveal what André Aciman calls the ‘diaspora of memory’, which is when the memory no longer has a single anchor in the native city but unfolds through superimposition of native and foreign lands (cited in Boym 2001: 258). Salwa’s revisiting Lebanon cures her of distance and of displacement simultaneously. Three events help her: her eldest daughter’s marriage to a Lebanese, the subsequent birth and upbringing of a grandson in Lebanon who visits her later in Australia, and reconnecting with her sister Mathilde and meeting the latter’s new family. Most significant, however, is her own recognition – during her second visit – that her childhood house, now ‘unattractive’ and ‘insignificant’, is ‘not how [she] remember[s] it’ (215). Her daughter’s consolatory response that houses ‘need to have people in them to stay alive’ (215) helps her to discern her own memory as fanciful and to modify her nostalgia on finally returning to Australia to die. Her last words testify to her realising the embellishing nature of nostalgic memory. Awareness of the difference between mistaking the beautiful for the real and wishing the beautiful were real shows that she has revised her view of her past’s symbol – the house – in light of life’s changes and has embraced an updated identity. Thus, she fixes her past – in Rubenstein’s double sense of the term – by securing the beautiful image in her memory while acknowledging its present reality. In so doing, she confirms Bachelard’s view of the ‘house image’ as ‘the topography of [her] intimate being’ (1994: xxxvi). Conclusion In The Politics of Home, as discussed in Chapter 1, Rosemary George argues that home, in addition to class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexual identity, determines the ideology of an individual (1996: 2). ‘Home-country’, she explains, is the site where personal and collective visions and endeavours overlap in creating or imagining a space as home (11). The Perv and Somewhere, Home approach the questions of home-country, exile/diaspora and identity

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from opposite angles, offering distinct versions of home. The regressive pull towards home as rooted in a geographical locus in Somewhere, Home contrasts sharply with the gravitation towards a state of mind where one can feel at home in The Perv. I have demonstrated that it is the employment of two kinds of memory – nostalgic versus critical – which accounts for this difference between home as place versus home as space. Rubenstein argues that, through their characters, authors attempt figuratively to restore or repair their own ‘emotional architecture of that multivalent space’ called home (2001: 6). Perhaps this is what Alameddine and Jarrar did. As we saw in these two texts, critical and nostalgic memories are major forces shaping not only the characters’ attitudes towards Lebanon but also their views of the relationships between the past, present and future of their personal lives. By and large, characters with a critical memory, being sceptical by nature and at times downright resentful of their war-conflicted past, tend to be well-rooted in a present spent away from Lebanon and to invest more in both material and emotional terms in a future disengaged from their birthplace. Others, whose lives are heavily coloured by nostalgic memories of the homeland left behind, tend to neglect their present and future in favour of dwelling on Lebanon as an idea or an ideal if incapable of being in it as a physical place. In addition to these two types of memory indicating a mostly negative or positive mood in which Lebanon is recollected, there is a third kind which has featured prominently in a few examples of Anglophone Lebanese writings, namely traumatic memory. Part II deals with two texts – I, the Divine and The Bullet Collection – whose female protagonists have sustained direct physical and emotional injuries during war and so find themselves, later outside Lebanon, struggling with the very process of digging up their traumatic memories from the recesses of their minds and converting them into memoirs. The textual symptoms of trauma in these two works derive from an intense, almost unspeakable experience of war-related incidents, followed by geographical displacement deemed necessary for both literary self-expression and a measure of personal healing.

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rauma theory emerged in the US in the early 1990s, a decade after PostTraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was first included in the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Geoffrey Hartman emphasises that the spectrum of trauma theory ranges from the personal to the collective due to its inclusion of ‘war and genocide’, ‘rape, and the abuse of women and children’ as well as ‘daily hurt’ (1995: 546). Traumatic stress is ‘caused by life-threatening or self-threatening events that are accompanied by fear, helplessness, or horror’ (Resick 2001: 28), and may result in a range of problems, such as PTSD, acute stress disorder, adjustment disorder, depression, anxiety and substance abuse. PTSD, in particular, has been seen as ‘fundamentally a disorder of memory’ (Leys 2000: 2). Trauma theorists argue that the impact of catastrophic incidents impedes free association, the ‘creative process through which experience, memory, and fantasy are woven into the texture of a life – or a culture’ (Radstone 2002: 457). Trauma breaks the continuity of daily life, and these disruptions are expressed in the stories trauma survivors tell or write about themselves and their lives (Tuval-Mashiach et al. 2004: 281). Interdisciplinary interest in trauma literature derives from the discourse of memory ‘as trauma theory becomes part of the ideology of history’ (Whitehead 2004: 81) and is situated within the contexts of post-modernism, post-colonialism and a post-war consciousness. Post-modern art thrives on trauma, often blurring the demarcation line between art and trauma theory. Hartman states that analysing post-modern writing through the lens of trauma theory can shed ‘light on figurative or poetic language, and perhaps symbolic process in general, as something other than an enhanced imaging or vicarious repetition of a prior (non)experience’ (1995: 540). Stef Craps

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and Gert Buelens go so far as to argue that ‘traumatic experiences can only be adequately represented through the use of experimental, (post)modernist textual strategies’ (2008: 5). In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth argues that traumatic narratives should be situated within particular historical-cultural contexts. In novels, traumatic events stem from collective experiences, such as the Holocaust,1 war or slavery, or from personal ones, such as rape or bereavement (Whitehead 2004: 161). In trauma writings, more momentous than what is remembered of the past are how and why it is recalled. PTSD has been recorded by psychiatrists and psychologists in Lebanon since the end of the civil war (Khalaf 2002: 253–8).2 Part II of my study focuses on PTSD in post-war Anglophone Lebanese fiction. Rabih Alameddine’s I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters (2001) and Patricia Sarrafian Ward’s The Bullet Collection (2003) are examples of characters attempting to translate traumatic memory into writing, thereby (unwittingly) taking part in narrative therapy.3 Both authors use a first-person female voice to recreate the difficulty of delving into a horrific past in a narrative form that mimics the very symptoms of traumatic experience – repetition of scenes and images, temporal disorientation and narrative indirection (Whitehead 2004: 3) – resulting in textual fragmentation, the hallmark of both post-modernist and trauma literatures. By focusing on the interplay of their post-modern features with the interrelated themes of war, exile/diaspora, individual pain and familial dysfunction, I show how both novels incorporate ‘the rhythms, processes, and uncertainties of trauma’ (Vickroy 2002: xiv) and can therefore be located at the intersection of trauma fiction in general and the post-war Anglophone Lebanese novel in particular. In so doing, the meanings of home and homeland, for both Sarah (in Alameddine’s novel) and Marianna (in Ward’s novel), will be explored. Eighteen-year-old Marianna ends her memoir in the late 1980s, one year after relocating to the US. By contrast, Sarah completes her manuscript at age forty, some twenty years after having left Lebanon in 1980. The wider temporal frame of this manuscript-as-novel allows Alameddine, through Sarah, to include selective moments from both the Lebanese war and its aftermath and to explore long-term trauma.

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I, the Divine ‘Our world was changing, even though at the time, we had no idea how destructive the change was to be. The [Lebanese] civil war was starting’ (Alameddine 2002: 61). This is what forty-year-old Sarah Nour el-Din records, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, in her memoir, which makes up I, the Divine.4 War engenders collective trauma whose psychological effects may continue to warp the lives of survivors long after the guns have fallen silent. As stated in the Introduction, many scholars have lamented Lebanon’s post-war policy of collective amnesia. Given this ‘representational vacuum’ (2002: 133) in public discourse, it is Lebanese authors, Hashim Sarkis argues, who have salvaged this extensive trauma from oblivion by experimenting with alternative forms. Superior among these works, Saree Makdisi opines, are those that ponder the intricacy, even the unfeasibility, of producing a narrative with causal continuity (2006: 207–9). Sarkis remarks further that trauma literature enjoys the privilege of confronting abominable historical facts by discreetly slipping them in as storytelling. Notwithstanding I, the Divine’s textual anarchy – manifest in its multigeneric composition of forty-three ‘first’ chapters (although a few of these are referred to as ‘Prologue’ and ‘Introduction’) distinguished by occasional section/chapter titles, various typesettings and even different languages – the author explains that ‘there is a definite arc’ (2002: interview with Devlin: par. 12) in Sarah’s creative meanderings. I contend that this arc resides in traumas resulting from both the particularity of the collective Lebanese war experience and the generality of personal human suffering, as well as in Sarah’s increasingly conscious desire to cope with some memories and uncover others by putting them into words. Furthermore, since trauma writing is oblique, temporally disconnected and repetitive, I show how this particular sub-genre allows Alameddine to slide incidents of harrowing violence into Sarah’s attempts to narrativise her past. Alameddine says the theme of physical and emotional dislocation – encapsulated in his question: ‘What is it like to be somewhere and feel that you belong somewhere else [?]’ (2009–10: interview with Aridi 39) – pervades his works. I, the Divine, he explains, is ‘not so much a reflection of a mind fragmented by civil war. Not particularly Lebanese. Yet how [Sarah] writes

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each chapter, where she leaves off, is caused specifically by her background’ (2002: interview with Devlin: par. 10). Sarah writes: ‘Setting my memory in time is easy. The first day of the war in Beirut, April 1975. I was fifteen’ (38). Interestingly, she associates this day, on which several Palestinian civilians were massacred in Beirut’s Ain el-Rummaneh suburb by Phalange militiamen, with her teenage neighbour’s ‘massacr[ing]’ (38) a pop song on his electric guitar.5 Infinitely more difficult, however, is verbalising the personal trauma that she suffered, between 6 and 7 pm, on one August evening in 1976: her abduction and gang rape by armed men, loss of virginity, and resulting pregnancy and abortion. The location of this crime is not as specific. Yet, the scattered bits of information point to a central area near the ‘Green Line’ then separating Christian East from Muslim West Beirut. Moreover, most abductions in 1975–6 took place along this marker (Wilson-Goldie 2005: 2, 4). Alameddine situates Sarah’s piecemeal attempts to articulate this event in the second third of the novel (that is, towards its centre). Furtively, however, he places the event itself in a physical area that became ‘the symbolic focal point of the entire war’ (Makdisi 2006: 204). In so doing, he commemorates all those innocents whose abuse at the hands of war criminals has caused unending anguish. Symbolic in this episode is Sarah’s French black linen dress with ‘colorful flowers, a happy motif’ (113). Her father had compared the ‘deflowering’ of a girl to white linen indelibly stained by spilt wine. The blood and torn flesh, signifying her sudden loss of pre-war innocence at sixteen, will induce tears for years to come. Furthermore, if ‘to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event’ (Caruth 1995: 4–5), then articulating later what is a non-experience at its moment of occurrence (Whitehead 2004: 5) is bound to be, like her sketchy memoir, discontinuous and circuitous. Writing in itself implies distance from trauma; for once something is written down, the effort required to remember it decreases (Hordvik 1999: 28). In addition, narrative memory improvises on the traumatic episode so that the account thereof varies from telling to telling, remaining ‘suspended between trauma and catharsis’ (Whitehead 2004: 86). Sarah revisits the crime at different junctures and from different angles. Her first foray, one-third into her memoir, starts describing that ‘merciless’ (113) evening in the first-person voice but stops before the abduction. What

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triggers this traumatic memory is the belated, and for this purpose necessary, ‘intense emotional crisis’ (Whitehead 2004: 6) Sarah experiences twenty years later, following her abandonment by her bisexual American lover David, to whom she had opened up ‘only to be skinned alive’ (112) again, as she so acutely puts it. Her trauma becomes evident, therefore, ‘in connection with another place ... in another time’ (Caruth 1991: 7), taking ‘the form of belatedness’ (Caruth 1996: 92). The second and third attempts come two-thirds into her narrative: both are from a fictionalised third-person perspective, but whereas the second, in French (apparently reflecting the provenance of her dress), is abandoned, the third, in English, manages to complete the story of how, in ‘only one hour, her life had come to an end’ (199). Referring to oneself by using the third person singular is a typical feature of trauma writings because, as David Aberbach explains, memories stemming from loss, like dreams, frequently reflect this trauma indirectly ‘in a screened, compressed, symbolic or elliptical form’ (1989: 71). Memories of childhood in particular, he adds, may act as a starting point for delayed mourning, or for writing in this case, with the creative use of these memories serving as a means of confronting and mastering the trauma, and especially the violent anger stirred up by it. Research confirms that the period immediately following a traumatic event is when the most intensive processing of that event takes place, both at a narrative and a cognitive level; furthermore, the cultural context in which the survivor lives is important in this phase (Tuval-Mashiach et al. 2004: 290). Fearing her conservative father’s reaction to her rape, Sarah is only able to confide in her friend Dina. Since ‘[i]n [her] family, love, like religion and politics, was to be avoided, a passion that vanquished reason and caused endless pain and heartache’ (46), discussing rape would be inconceivable, virtually ensuring that Sarah would experience pronounced anguish in the future. As she acknowledges, it took her twenty-four years and numerous trials to ‘finally get completion for that part of [her] life’ (117) by verbally sketching it on her computer screen. Her question of ‘[h]ow does one draw rape?’ (201) triggers her narrative project and resembles, on a personal level, the larger question of how to write traumatic history, which, according to Dina Al-Kassim, is morally incumbent on post-war Lebanese artists to ask, even if no final answer is

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delivered. In Sexuality and War, Evelyne Accad contends that women writers often describe war-time Beirut as a victim of rape, which, like armed conflict, is used to conquer, possess and control. By contrast, she states, many male authors view Beirut as a prostitute. Refreshingly, Alameddine seems to be equating the city with the pure female body, both of which are violated by warring men. Sarah insists that ‘there are certain things that transcend time’ (101) and space; these need to be literally recollected, if only by bits and pieces, in order to experience catharsis and closure. Perhaps unwittingly, in so doing she counters the amnesia of post-war Lebanese politics whose best example is the Solidère project of refurbishing the bombed-out city centre under the slogan ‘An Ancient City for the Future’. This profit-oriented plan of urban restoration, verging on ‘kitsch’ (Sarkis 2002: 133), ‘smooth[es] over the historical trauma of the war’ (Makdisi 2006: 212) by bypassing the tragedy and disregarding the pluralistic pre-war spirit of this metropolitan nexus in which all Lebanese had felt at home. However, the marks of the war’s lawlessness on Sarah’s body, or her ‘traumatism’ – defined as the consequences to the body of a violent attack from an external source (Grinberg and Grinberg 1989: 10) – cannot be erased so easily. Her itch, both in dreams and in reality, ‘to rub herself raw’, to get ‘out of her skin’ and thus to emerge as ‘a different person’ (82) is a symptom of PTSD, since ‘splitting off from one’s body or awareness can reduce the victim’s immediate sense of violation’ (Vickroy 2002: 13). Nonetheless, the lingering memory of her rape – when her purity, symbolised by the ‘whiteness’ of her skin, was suddenly stained by ‘dark’ (194) fingers – can only be exorcised if and when it is confronted. Sarah feels ‘disgust’ (195) and ‘shame’ (197) on seeing herself ‘filthy, covered in dirt and blood’ (198). Like the ‘grimy [taxi], needing a vigorous wash’ (194), in which Sarah meets her rapists, downtown Beirut will remain haunted if it merely cleans up its façade, as Sarah did, initially by putting her black dress back on her battered body and then, for years thereafter, by compulsively scrubbing herself. In the US, Sarah ‘scrub[s] herself [. . .] over and over, as if there was some dark stain and she [was] Lady Macbeth’, yelling: ‘Out damn spot’ (82). Thus, Sarah literally exhibits the ‘Macbeth effect’, which describes cases when a threat to one’s moral purity induces an obsessive need to cleanse one’s body (Zhong and Liljenquist 2006: 1451–2).

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Once Sarah has divulged this crippling secret, pathological symptoms, which previously had been described in random textual and temporal orders, fall into place: her inability to achieve orgasm and her habitual use of tranquilisers and anti-depressants. At eighteen, she suffers the loss of her fourteen-year-old half-sister Rana, killed by a disturbed teenage Syrian soldier. Nowhere is the impact of the political on the personal more evident than in Sarah’s entries – placed long before the recounting of the rape – from 1 to 7 July 1978. Listing the events of that week leading up to Rana’s shooting is Sarah’s attempt to account rationally for an absurd tragedy, but it fails. Her family’s refusal to discuss the matter compounds this failure: to ‘pretend a crisis never happened’ and hope that ‘if we don’t talk about it, it will disappear’ (68) is a family version of Lebanon’s self-induced post-traumatic amnesia, whose suppression of painful facts precludes long-term reconciliation. Al-Kassim argues that the war can be neither reduced to a chronology of documented facts nor presented as a series of purely impressionistic memories because both approaches pretend to leave intact the authority of experience, regardless of its locus. Alameddine agrees with this, I believe, by having Sarah comment indirectly on the disparate war-inspired writings of two of her sisters, Rana and Lamia. In her diary, Rana attempts to establish causal links among events in the hope of predicting and thus controlling random brutality, the phenomenon which, ironically, eventually kills her. By contrast, Lamia’s 452 letters to her divorced mother Janet, spanning thirty-seven years, are in non-linear prose and broken English, displaying a psyche embittered by the incomprehensible disappearance of a mother and rattled by a long war’s intrusive noises. Lamia, a nurse, later kills seven of her patients and is declared criminally insane. As Kai Erikson explains, trauma can result ‘from a prolonged exposure to danger as well as from a sudden flash of terror’ (cited in Vickroy 2002: 12). The five sample letters written by Lamia expose a mind traumatised by lengthy exposure to peril and not by a single, acutely painful, event, as in Sarah’s case. Inserting them in the middle of her memoir, thus framing them at equal distance between the two main parts of her recounting of the rape, shows the greater difficulty in fully narrativising an incident of personal terror. Trauma disrupts narrative processing on two levels. At a specific level, there is disruption of the narrative of the traumatic event; at a general level,

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there is disruption of the whole life-story of the individual (Wigren 1994: 415–23). Sarah’s crisis of authorship, related to the war in general and the rape incident in particular, is also related to her crisis of identity and consequently to her life-story as an Arab-American. Both her utterances and the novel’s structure replicate her state of cultural and national in-betweenness, reflecting the spatial back and forth of her movements between Beirut, New York and San Francisco. Her indeterminacy expresses itself in her denying the continuity of time and space in her chapters-as-fragments, through which we glimpse pieces of her life-story. Born to a Lebanese Druze doctor and an American mother, Sarah is named by her grandfather after the ‘divine’ French theatrical actress Sarah Bernhardt. At ten, Sarah discovers that her grandfather had lied about having met the diva; but she only acknowledges his other vices – namely religious bigotry, xenophobia and misogyny – at age thirty-five, when she is told by her mother, Janet (who later commits suicide), how evil he had been in convincing his son to divorce her when Sarah was only two. Sarah confesses: ‘It took me years [and almost three hundred pages of aborted narrative attempts] to accept the truth’ (293). After two failed marriages followed by a dead-end relationship, she moves from New York to San Francisco and becomes a renowned visual artist, thus exorcising some of her pent-up emotions. Forgiving her grandfather – to the point of dying her hair red, when feeling depressed, to look like ‘the Divine Sarah’ – and refusing to be thought of as a victim – the ‘black sheep’ in her family, as she did for some time – but instead taking responsibility for her decisions, all help her combat her chronic anxiety-depression disorder. Writing her memoir from a relatively detached transnational vantage point also contributes to the healing process. Cristina Garrigós argues that in this novel, an ‘excellent example of a postmodernist aesthetic’ (2009: 189), Sarah writes from a ‘post-ethnic perspective that privileges an anti-essentialist attitude, rejecting [. . .] cultural purity to embrace instead hybridity’ (188–9). Speaking of New York and comparing her attitude to that of her Lebanese first husband, Omar, Sarah writes: ‘I loved the city, he hated it. I felt at home while he felt like a foreigner [. . .] I was having a ball, while he was counting the days until we could go back’ (53). Her enthusiasm for life’s opportunities notwithstanding, especially after divorcing Omar and seeing him return to Lebanon with their son Kamal,

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Sarah realises at some point that she has ‘no one in America except for [her] best friend, Dina’, who has ‘adjusted better and much more quickly’ (83) than she has. Having ‘inherited’ her mother’s ‘Americanness’ (149), Sarah wishes ‘to identify with only [her] American half’, because being Lebanese means having no ‘sense of individuality’ (229). However, recognising that her ‘American patina covers an Arab soul’, she states: ‘Throughout my life, these contradictory parts’ – represented, literally in her case, by Lebanon as fatherland and the US as motherland – ‘battled endlessly, clashed, never coming to a satisfactory conclusion’ (229). Lebanon is associated with patriarchal rule, conformism, her family’s intrusiveness and social pressure, not to mention her memory of rape, all of which she turns her back on at twenty when she elopes with Omar to the US, the land of individualism but also of loneliness, as she sees it, away from loving family members, like her eldest sister, Amal, and her stepmother, Saniya. Andreas Pflitsch differentiates among three types of hybrid identity: the multicultural, the intercultural and the transcultural. The multicultural and the intercultural describe a mosaic-like identity of multiple components. By contrast, transcultural identity is ‘mobile, flexible, [and has] no fixed borders’ (2006: 281). Like Mohammad in Koolaids, Sarah forges new relationships of sexual love, friendship and business with Americans while maintaining ties to a few like-minded fellow Lebanese in the diaspora. Neither, however, maintains ties with active members of Lebanese-American communities. Like Mohammad, Sarah is rebellious, freedom-loving and largely anti-nostalgic. Unlike Mohammad, however, she survives and surmounts her war-related trauma by narrativising it and leading a transcontinental lifestyle through jet travel, emails, and phone calls to Lebanon. Her mobility and flexible mindset make her what Carol Fadda-Conrey calls ‘the epitome of [. . .] the transnational diasporic subject that cuts across the Lebanese and American cultures, but is nevertheless displaced in both and belongs completely in neither’ (2009: 165). Steven Salaita’s description of Koolaids as a novel ‘completely globalized even while remaining vigorously local’ (2007: 74) also applies to I, the Divine. Whereas Mohammad and Sarah find some form of salvation and enjoy financial ease in the US – making them feel and act, at times, like celebratory diasporans with multiple homes in the world, but at others like exiles – other characters who witness the war and relocate to North America

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remain confrontational and exiled, whether from/in the new location or from Lebanon and the new place equally, as in The Bullet Collection and Cockroach, respectively. Sarah struggles with her manuscript, much as she still does dodging bullets in recurrent nightmares. Fourth of July fireworks continue to cause her panic attacks, bringing back memories of shelling and of ‘the smell of cordite, of garbage, urine, and decaying flesh’ (39), all of which she tries to fight off by taking a ‘gardenia bubble bath’ (94) and ‘rub[bing] her face underwater’ (95). Multiple factors (mis)shape her personality, but the stain of rape proves toughest to remove. In a dream, she remarks: ‘I realized it was ironic I was not afraid of the gun as much as I was of the boy’s [the rapist’s] silhouette’ (235). In Lebanon to celebrate the new millennium with her family, Sarah secretly recalls her rape when asked if she would relocate to Beirut, thereby experiencing literally ‘the wound of return’ (Maruja Torres, cited in Grinberg and Grinberg 1989: 185). Her sentiment that ‘[w]henever she is in Beirut, home is New York [and] [w]henever she is in New York, home is Beirut,’ that is, that ‘[h]ome is never where she is, but where she is not’ (99), shows her ‘to be in the throes of de-exile’ (Torres, cited in Grinberg and Grinberg 1989: 184–5) wherever she happens to be. Until the end, Sarah ‘shuffle[s] ad nauseam between the need to assert [her] individuality and the need to belong to [her] clan’ (229). Home, far from denoting a fixed geographical location, is understood in relational terms. It is not the place to be, but the one to long for because of not being there. Pflitsch argues that Sarah’s definition of home as a blank space or a ‘non-place’ (2008: 1174) – because it is one in which her physical presence does not correlate with her feeling of being at home – is akin to a utopia whose value derives precisely from its imaginary nature. Sarah as victim yet survivor plays out psychologically the unfinished trauma of war. On experiencing trauma, if home is to be defined as a refuge from external adversities – wherein one also feels comfortable and sees clearer connections among the past, present and future – then one may be compelled to create a temporary one with ink and paper before deciding where to go next. In trauma writing, the burden of history somatises itself in the symptoms of sufferers. The pain released via writing recoups and comments indirectly on a segment of that history long suppressed. Obsessed with recapturing defining moments through shifts in time and space, first-person

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trauma fiction is perhaps the sub-genre that best embodies the existentialist adage: ‘To be is to have become.’ Sarah’s ‘imaginary reader’ (308) is the confidant who provides both the incentive for her narrative project and the focal point amid its textual fluctuations. I, the Divine, like The Bullet Collection, to which I turn next, exemplifies how post-war Anglophone Lebanese literature can be situated within the larger category of trauma fiction. The Bullet Collection Like Alameddine and Hanania, who spent their formative years in Lebanon but are now living abroad, Ward tries through her work to help herself and other Lebanese expatriates ‘to find a home within that middle space’ (Darraj 2004: 3), most conspicuously in the Arab-American novel, which began to flourish in the mid-1990s.6 Ward does not emphasise her bi-national or hyphenated identity as Arab- or, more particularly, Lebanese-American.7 Instead, she sees herself as a war survivor who reflects (on) that experience from multiple angles and in different genres, including poetry. She believes that wars leave in many individuals marks of anguish which are deep enough to create emotional and intellectual connections among them regardless of national, religious or ethnic specificities. The struggle to give a narrative voice to such traumatic memories can bring such individuals even closer together.8 From this perspective, ‘The Bullet Collection takes its place in that [world] literature which affirms our humanity in dehumanizing circumstances’ (Williams 2007: 62). In Gregory Orfalea’s opinion, Ward is ‘a master of image’, ‘an alchemist of suffering’ (2006: 121), and her novel ‘a striking testimony to the psychic damage of war’ (120). He attributes her ‘great achievement’ to her ‘searing portrayal of how the outer insanity invades the inner sanctum of a person, [and] how it brings the insanity home’ (121). Furthermore, as one critic argues, The Bullet Collection, based on actual experience, is a culturally authentic text, portraying the hardships of adjustment, assimilation and homesickness encountered by an adolescent Arab in American culture (Anati 2010: 70–1). Layla Al Maleh sees eighteen-year-old Marianna as someone who lives ‘only to yearn for a childhood that never was, a home that could never hold, and an exile that could not fulfil’ (2009: 43). The textual manifestation of war-related trauma in The Bullet Collection is informed by Marianna’s

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experience of and reflection on the war as a member of the generation born in the late 1960s. The author employs Marianna’s voice from the age of six to eighteen, which displays the narrative complexity of re-presenting a distressing past, producing a text that mimics the symptoms of traumatic experience stated earlier. The lack of linearity, the incompleteness of many scenes and the questionable accuracy of Marianna’s memories are all evident in both the novel’s structure and its narrative style. Furthermore, the confusion of personal or developmental events with historical ones is a distinct feature in war-induced accounts by or about children (Vice 2004: 2). For example, Marianna remembers 13 April 1975, the first day of the war, as the event which took place five months after Jiddo (Grandpa) died. Nonetheless, the reader is never left to doubt the emotions attached to Marianna’s recollections and/or reconstructions of defining events. What lies at the root of her personal and literary expressions of trauma, I argue, is a persistent sense of belatedness which can only apply to those who lived through such atrocities in their late childhood and adolescence.9 Random House Webster’s College Dictionary’s definition of ‘belated’ is ‘coming or being after the customary, useful, or expected time’. ‘To be late’ means also to be ‘delayed’ or ‘detained’ (1991: 124). In this novel, I delineate three distinct yet interrelated meanings of ‘belatedness’ on which Marianna’s traumatic text is predicated. First, as someone born in the late 1960s who started witnessing civil strife at the age of six, Marianna designates herself as a latecomer in the sense of having been cheated by this war, that is, for not having had enough time to enjoy a peaceful Lebanon and, therefore, for not being able, later on, to remember fully the cheerful days of her early childhood. Close to her author in age, she may be voicing Ward’s own experience and attitude, which differ, to a considerable degree, with regard to this issue from those of other Anglophone Lebanese authors at least ten years older than she. Alameddine and Jarrar, both of whom left Lebanon soon after the eruption of hostilities, have described the starting date of the civil war as one which abruptly ended their adolescence, setting it apart from a terrifying present and a grim future. For Jarrar, as was quoted in Chapter 2, her life can be divided into two parts: before and after the civil war. To say this, the person/ author/character has to possess a sizeable supply of joyful memories from a

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considerable period of time. However, to highlight repeatedly such a blissful but much shorter-lived and barely remembered existence, as Marianna does, becomes a protest against having been born too late. In short, the first meaning of belatedness refers to having come to life after the favourable time; in this context, it is having been in the right place (Lebanon) but at the wrong time, because the first six-year era of happiness was quickly clouded over by another, one marked by fear and sadness and lasting twice as long. The second meaning of belatedness, also evident in Marianna’s memoir, refers to her sentiment of having been ‘delayed’ or ‘detained’ in Lebanon for almost twelve years of war because her family decided to stay in the country despite having made arrangements to leave for the US in 1976. The traumas she experienced during the war are relived through memory in the form of PTSD upon recognising that she is to be ‘detained’ again, but this time in the US, after the family had finally left in 1987 and settled in New England. On this realisation, her feeling of being in the right place, now the US, but again at the wrong time (for having left Lebanon too late) resurfaces, causing her to regret ever having wished to leave and not having appreciated then what she does now, namely the preciousness of her former life in her home country, which continues to bleed. Here, the third sense of belatedness describes the awareness after the event, and it is through writing her memoir, and commenting on this very process, that Marianna tries to recapture in words what is otherwise bound to fade, thus achieving a certain degree of catharsis. This deeply rooted and multifaceted sentiment of belatedness, referred to explicitly and repeatedly by Marianna, becomes a leitmotif in her (self-)critical testimonial text, which carries out self-consciously the almost impossible mission of verbalising trauma. Laurie Vickroy explains that one major goal of trauma narratives is to ‘reshape cultural memory through personal contexts, adopting testimonial traits to prevent and bear witness against such repetitive horrors’ (2002: 5). In this light, Marianna’s memoir – representative of this younger generation’s experience of war – emerges as an outcry against the aforementioned public strategy of amnesia, typical of the older generation and here mainly represented by her parents. This protest has continued in fiction produced by even younger emergent Lebanese authors, as will be discussed in Chapter 4. I emphasise ‘belatedness’ as the major reason for the protagonist’s

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generation-specific perspective on the Lebanese conflict and on its long-term effects, which persist in her exilic post-war life in the US. Specifically, I demonstrate how the three aspects of belatedness, as defined earlier, are interrelated. To do so, I underline Marianna’s maturing yet resentful sense of belatedness as it reveals itself in her view of the war as a childhood-ending cataclysm, of her connection to her beloved Ziad, of her family’s hesitation about staying in or leaving embattled Lebanon, and finally of her relationships with her older sister Alaine (short for Magdalaine) and her parents (Stephen and Ani). It is her obsessive revisiting of these sub-themes which largely produces her text, one which mimics, on the structural level, the convoluted and untidy process of reconstructing her traumatic personal history in the context of the war. Underlying this attempt at rethinking the past is her more urgent need to establish the truth of what happened, that is, the historical reality of events, only to realise that the only certainty is that multiple versions of any given event coexist, fed as they inevitably are by imagination and dictated by the evolving fears and desires of a traumatised child growing into adolescence. First, it is important to note the resemblance between Marianna’s and her author’s family lives. Ward’s father was an American archaeology professor at the American University of Beirut and her mother a Beiruti of ArmenianDanish ancestry; in these terms, the protagonist’s kin’s details are ‘very much like Ward’s own family’ (Pierce 2004–5: 223). Elise Salem remarks that ‘Ward herself struggled with memory and language which is why she turns to narration, the novel itself, to construct her life’s meaning’ (2003: par. 4). This observation is supported by the fact that excerpts from the novel – which in an earlier version received an Avery Hopwood Award (University of Michigan) in 1995 – have appeared in different venues.10 As Salaita puts it: ‘Ward invents a world that doesn’t merely recreate an imagined landscape; an actual landscape instead acts as the basis of her invented one’ (2007: 106). Amira Pierce theorises that due to the ‘earth-shattering and seminal experience’ her book depicts, Ward needed sufficient time to ‘separate herself from the story enough to shape and hone her prose’ (2004–5: 225). Rewriting the novel must have been worthwhile, since the final version ended up reaping several awards.11 Some reviewers have underscored the topic of juvenile trauma in The

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Bullet Collection, specifically the ‘long-term traumas of young people who have grown up in war zones’ (Williams 2007: 62). What makes this ‘internalization of a massive amount of trauma’ (Pierce 2004–5: 225) unique is the manner in which the narrativisations of recalled events ‘fit [Marianna’s] particular age’ (Williams 2007: 62) when those events took place. Depending on what she describes and how she does so, Ward’s style has been characterised as ‘torrential’ (Williams 2007: 61), ‘impressionistic’ (Cornell 2003: par. 4) and ‘border[ing] on magical realism’ (Pierce 2004–5: 224). In my reading, I give examples of these different styles to show how they express a particular event or theme and the sentiments associated therewith. Traumatic markers punctuate the text throughout, not only in the many false or aborted starts to illustrate something significant, but also in the repetitions and the constant return to past images and arguments. Marianna, who designates herself a latecomer for having been born too close to the onset of bloodshed in 1975 to have had sufficient time to enjoy and remember a peaceful Lebanon, places the few but precious memories of her early childhood in italics to emphasise their qualitative difference from what followed. This (first) overpowering meaning of belatedness permeates her memoir in multiple ways. First, she brackets this golden pre-war era off as one allied with forward, linear motion, signalled by italics, thus shielding it from all war and post-war events set in regular font. ‘Before the war was real’ and ‘Before the war is real’ are the clauses starting off, respectively, the two-page prefaces to the first and third sections of her narrative. The three sections carry seasons’ titles: ‘Autumn’ (242 pages), ‘Summer’ (14 pages) and ‘Winter’ (40 pages). In addition to their uneven lengths, these sections are out of sequential order – and exclude ‘Spring’, the season most frequently associated with rebirth. Furthermore, except for the short middle section, which describes Marianna’s attempt to commit suicide with sleeping pills and waking up at a hospital in the US, the first and third incorporate events from her life before, during and after the war. The combined narrative disequilibrium and temporal disorientation reflect the arduous task of converting traumatic memory into narrative memory typical of a trauma survivor, whose ‘voice seeks to impose on apparently chaotic episodes a perceived sequence, whether or not that sequence was perceived in an identical way during the period that is being rescued from oblivion by memory and language’ (Langer 1991: 41, emphasis in original,

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cited in Vickroy 2002: 5). Interestingly, if one were to read the middle section (‘Summer’) last, the seasonal cycle would be somewhat restored and the lengths of the sections would be in decreasing order. In the first preface, Marianna begins three out of the five italicised paragraphs with ‘before the war was real ’, a clause followed by nostalgic recollections of childhood activities enjoyed in all seasons and locations, ‘when the world went on forever and we were allowed to think of going places’ (Ward 2003: 3). The lyrical style, employed to provide a picture of her idyllic childhood outings in the mountain village of Shemlan during the summers, the wonderful trips all over Lebanon in the springs and autumns, and the cosy winters in Beirut, is accentuated by the refrain ‘before the war was real ’. The italicised preface to the third section (‘Winter’) differs from that to the first in two significant ways: the same clause is now in the present tense, and Marianna refers to herself in the third person as the ‘girl ’ in love with the butcher’s boy, whose ‘sensed promise of adulthood ’ (268) at the age of nine – three years into the war (that is, 1978) – is about to be stolen forever. The present tense (in before the war is real ) indicates the war’s continuous effect, made visible in her reactions to its many memories while in exile. The Bullet Collection employs what Sue Vice describes as the ‘split narration’ of many accounts written from the viewpoint of child survivors of the Holocaust (2004: 12–28). Here, it features the present tense to portray the present and the past tense to illustrate childhood events from the perspective of Marianna-as-adult, but also the present tense to depict the past from her viewpoint as a child narrator. The middle section, as mentioned earlier, does not include any war-related events, and this may explain why Marianna does not preface it with a poem-like recollection of her childhood. Marianna’s usage of this indirect form of self-referral at the beginning of the third section indicates the greater temporal distance now separating her from her younger self, and is augmented by the geographical one between Lebanon and her place of exile. This antediluvian existence ends abruptly within this preface, when Marianna is just about old enough to remember certain loud noises, forcing her ‘from now on [to] live inside’ (268) the apartment, and later to exist within the confines of a circuitous tale of trauma. The war’s termination of her carefree childhood is also signalled by the use of this phrase to conclude the preface. The transcription of painful memories falls outside the borders

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of her early childhood linear narratives and converges on an eternal present, whose jarring prose and fragmented temporality, to be emphasised later, are symptoms of the manner in which trauma is long-lasting. Since survivors live in ‘durational’ rather than ‘chronological’ time, they continue to experience past terror through internal shifts backward in time and space, rather than seeing the past as distinct from the present reality (Vickroy 2002: 14–15). The first word following the first preface – her tribute to (a later disrupted) childhood – is ‘Again’ (5), indicating a forward shift in time and place as it refers to Marianna’s recurrent dream of that epoch, which from her exilic perspective is equated with ‘home’ and her ‘true life’ (5). In the first few pages, she establishes several pivotal facts, obsessively revisited as themes throughout her narrative: she and her family have been in America for eight months; although bi-national, she considers herself mostly Lebanese (since her father lived in Lebanon for thirty years); she attempted suicide in the US and very nearly succeeded; and she is repeatedly assaulted by images of specific people – dead, missing and alive – since ‘[t]here is no order to nostalgia’ (9). Marianna is overpowered by several images and events which she describes and retells differently throughout her memoir. Her inability to remember and/or understand certain events and issues due to cognitive immaturity at the time of their occurrence relates to the first meaning of belatedness. She can neither remember her early childhood happiness in full nor recall the day which ended it harshly, as she confesses early on: The ‘why and how’ and when the war began are ‘details that held no interest for me’ (12) because ‘[t]here is so little from before, but I invent how it must have been’ (16). One way in which Marianna invents is to appropriate another person’s memory and make it her own to fill in the gaps. For example, her older friend Amer’s memory of his family’s Sunday outing on 13 April 1975 becomes ‘a trip [she] now recall[s] as if it were [hers]’, that is, a borrowed memory which she consolidates with the help of her own family’s ‘photographs of such picnics’ (17). A fabricated point of departure is necessary, for it provides a vantage point from which to lament pre-war bliss. This laborious process of fusing memory with imagination is a conscious one, at least retrospectively, and is qualitatively different from the effortless remembrance of this tragic day by older war survivors, like Alameddine’s Sarah. Marianna was only six at the

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time and cannot but tell, or more appropriately manufacture, an altered tale of what augured to be the beginning of the end for all. Marianna holds on dearly to those memories which have remained intact because they were registered at an older age. For example, she distinctly remembers having met Ziad, when she was twelve, and Amer, when she was seventeen. Nonetheless, she is jealous of older people’s more numerous pre-war memories. She tells her mother: ‘If there hadn’t been a war, my life would have been like yours’ (67). Her mother’s weakly palliative response that ‘[o]ne life is like any other’ infuriates Marianna, who insists that her parents’ generation belonged to another world, one she ‘longed for [her] whole childhood’ (67). ‘Before the war’, for her mother, is a substantial and, from Marianna’s perspective, an enviable chunk of life, but for her only a speck of time. When their neighbour, Mrs Awad, reassures her that her parents took her ‘all over Lebanon before the war [. . .] [b]ut you don’t remember’, Marianna feels ‘frustrated’ (93). Even more aggravating is her inability to comprehend the conflict. In an attempt to lessen her irritation, the mother tells her twelve-year-old daughter: ‘You have to pick a few things [. . .] and work on them a long time’ (125). Although this advice is not fully digested at the time, Marianna’s narrative demonstrates how looking back on specific happenings sheds greater light on the subjective and multifaceted process of understanding than on the events per se. The best illustration of how Marianna comes to terms with a traumatising event is the sudden disappearance of Ziad, with whom she falls in love, but never dates, at twelve and loses at sixteen. The reason he becomes obsessively present in her memoir is again related to her sense of belatedness, specifically for having been too young for him or, as she puts it, ‘a child on the fringes of his vision’ (87). The war snatches ‘her first love’ (219) away from her, as it had stolen her happy childhood six years earlier, before she is old enough to attract his attention. His dream of building a discotheque out of a barn in the mountains at the height of the war represents, in his words, a ‘revolution’ (120), or an anti-violence project, which remains unfulfilled. So in addition to Marianna’s loss of Ziad as her hoped-for beloved, his premature death symbolises the demise of a communal wish for a respite from anguish and armed clashes. A major strategy in trauma fiction is the device of repetition, which

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can act at the levels of language, imagery or plot (Whitehead 2004: 86). Marianna confesses that her obsession with Ziad continues ‘long after he mysteriously died and long after [she] thought [she] had found the truth of that death and the lies it had bred’ (115). The fact that no one witnesses Ziad’s death, and therefore that no one can provide an authoritative account of what transpired, makes emotional closure impossible. Whether he died accidentally while cleaning his gun, lost at Russian roulette or was shot because of a bad business deal remains unclear. The traces of uncertain past incidents, Whitehead clarifies, or the ‘ghosts of those who died too suddenly and violently to be properly mourned, possess those who are seeking to get on with the task of living’ (2004: 6). Ziad appears throughout the text (between pages 9 and 304) in bits and pieces which include dialogues, fantasies and an excerpt from a serialised novel (authored by Marianna), in which she dies so that he can live. Interestingly, one reverie about him is enshrined in italics, much like her dream-like childhood, only to be brusquely interrupted by an intrusive reality set in regular font. She writes: ‘I can see his ghostlike horse stamping, and Ziad leans down to knock. Then the commotion, the noise of voices and crying and doors. Marianna, why did you get up? I want to help. Cut the gauze’ (127). In the same paragraph, two styles are juxtaposed: an impressionistic and a torrential one, each capturing a different mood and setting. Although Marianna tells us that he died in an incident involving a revolver, she postpones describing the actual moment of her receiving the news until two-thirds of the way into her memoir, where she also depicts her first suicide attempt, carried out in the hope of joining her beloved. At the moment of its reception, trauma is a non-experience and is therefore not wholly recognised, only becoming ‘an event at some later point of intense emotional crisis’ (Whitehead 2004: 6, emphasis in original). When Marianna hears about Ziad’s death, caused by a gunshot wound to the head, ‘the years of sorrow to come made themselves known in [her] body’ (214). Belatedness, again, is what drives Marianna over the edge: ‘I could have been true for him, and now it was too late’ (215–16). Towards the very end of her memoir, Marianna compensates for not having had the chance to say goodbye by daydreaming about sharing love with him on a boat: ‘We float here, Ziad and I, between the fierceness of his living and my memory of it [. . .] between lips and hands and ink that is smudged in anger. If we could

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only stay here long enough’ (304). In the following paragraph, Marianna insists that ‘[n]one of this can be remembered’, as she bitterly recites incidents of bombardment by various belligerents during the war which destroyed many family members’ homes; yet, she concludes by writing: ‘But now, none of this matters’ (304) and goes on to resurrect, in her mind and on paper, a final image of Ziad with his arms around her. Here, her fantasy of love, however painful, helps her to cope with the memory of war-time ordeals. As Cathy Caruth explains, what ‘returns to haunt the victim is not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known’ (1996: 6). So Marianna’s fantasy, or fictional memory, just as valid as a biographical one would be in times of stress (Aberbach 1989: 72), undoes Ziad’s demise to reduce her sorrow and rage. Her obsession with him throughout the text reveals what Caruth calls ‘double telling’: the vacillation between a ‘crisis of death’ (Ziad’s) and the correlative ‘crisis of life’ (hers after his death), that is, between the story of the intolerable nature of an event and the story of the agonising nature of having survived it (1996: 7). Another turning point, appearing repeatedly, disruptively and in different guises throughout Marianna’s narrative, is her parents’ decision not to leave Lebanon shortly after the war started. As stated earlier, the second meaning of belatedness relates to the sense of a ‘delayed’ action, leading to a feeling of having been detained. The timing of departure in Lebanon’s long war is crucial in determining the behavioural outcomes for those born in the mid- to late 1960s with very few pre-war memories. Whereas leaving shortly after the outbreak of hostilities might ensure their forgetting any war-related experiences, leaving a decade or more later would entrench them so deeply in their psychological make ups as to make fleeing to a safe haven result in extreme and unpredictable reactions. Before discussing the two sisters’ contrastive attitudes, during the war and later in the US, and the textual symptoms of this consequential issue, it is important to highlight some novelistic facts. The destruction of her mother’s relatives’ store and the damage to her grandparents’ Beirut apartment bring the war to Marianna’s doorstep. Changing schools, moving to another apartment in the same building and then moving to yet another flat on the university campus – all attempts at greater safety – cause further emotional turbulence. Some respite from

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‘poor Beirut’ (50) is provided by going to the mountains, seen as a ‘haven’ (51) before the war reaches them too. Twice during the war, Marianna is sent abroad against her will: first to Rome with Alaine to stay with their mother’s cousin Vartan during the Israeli siege of Beirut in summer 1982, then alone to a school in Greece in spring 1986. Twice, feeling ‘homesick and long[ing] for the familiar streets of [her] childhood’ (153), including the jarring noises and putrid smells of war-time Beirut – similar memories of which Alameddine’s Sarah tries to fight off – she returns to Lebanon. ‘To leave or not to leave’ as a family, however, becomes an existential question in the context of the ongoing conflict. ‘We almost left Lebanon at the beginning of the war,’ Marianna informs us one-sixth of the way into her narrative, ‘but at the last minute Mummy and Daddy changed their minds’ (51). When asked by an American TV journalist if she and Alaine – then six and eight years old respectively – were ‘afraid of the shooting’ (51), they ‘shrugged at the silliness of that’ (52). Nonetheless, feeling ‘trapped’ and influenced by a utopian vision of open spaces in the US, Marianna ‘nodded yes’ (52) to the possibility of leaving. By contrast, Alaine’s snappy ‘I don’t want to go’ shames her younger sister for ‘wanting the wrong thing’ (52). In the early phase of the war, these children enjoyed the disruption of school, inventing new games by ‘play[ing] militia’ (53) with imaginary weapons, and savouring the physical nearness of their parents as they all waited out torrents of gunfire in bathrooms and corridors. At this point, the ‘places that were only hours away were as distant as Europe or America’ (272). While the same warring streets of Beirut could provide mature women with sudden freedoms of movement and choice, as can be seen in older Lebanese women’s war fictions (Aghacy 2006: 567), they caused spatial and emotional deprivation for youngsters. Shortly after the scene with the journalist, the chronology is severely disrupted as the reader is catapulted into the early summer of 1987, when this family ‘still believed [they] would go back home soon’ (54). The link between these two historical moments is the same American journalist, whose face appears on TV eleven years later. In this instant, Marianna realises that they will not be going back to Lebanon any time soon and feels detained once again. The salient nature of these travel-related decisions – comparable in their emotional repercussions to her loss of early-childhood delights and,

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later, of Ziad – is signalled by italics. Bitterly and belatedly, she answers the journalist’s earlier question of ‘Why do you stay?’ with ‘We didn’t [. . .] A whole war [. . .] And now this’ (55). Marianna insinuates here that they should have left when they first decided to or never at all. In using this feature, she accentuates her family’s movements (or lack thereof) in the past through a stressful phase of collective trauma and uses narration in the present to dramatise her processing of that pain. So fundamental was the decision not to leave Lebanon back then that Marianna, now from another angle, replays on the same page the moment when they were ‘on the verge of going to America’ (55) in 1976, one day before the journalist first appeared. This time, however, she acknowledges that foreigners had already been killed, making her American father a possible target. The scene that follows is a half-imagined, half-realistic description of how her Lebanese mother was emotionally incapable of leaving her homeland, causing them to unpack that evening. This narrative refashioning of a singular scene mimics the effects of trauma because it implies not only the insistent return of the event but also both the disruption of narrative chronology and differing accounts of the same event. Very early on, Marianna informs us that she and her family had been in America for eight months when the idea of ‘[j]ust a little while and then we’ll go home’ (7) began to evaporate due to the continuation of the war. Later in the text, she confesses that she ‘existed in a state of euphoria brought on by the allure of a new life’ (59). This exuberance, however, fades ‘within weeks’ (59), and she falls into a depression, hitting rock bottom the following summer as she turns eighteen. Her mother’s admission that their ‘crime’ (130) as parents was not knowing the extent of the damage sustained by their children, before they finally decided to leave, is too little, too late. The notion of ‘better late than never’, ironically, does not apply to Marianna. A second round of suicide attempts is triggered by a new ‘emotional crisis’ (Whitehead 2004: 6) brought on by her realising that Lebanon-as-home may no longer be accessible. Exile becomes synonymous with the possible loss of cultural and national identity, generating a deep-seated pain aggravated by Marianna’s remorse for not having sufficiently cherished earlier moments – including many lived during the war – because she had not foreseen her future life abroad. Here, the third sense of belatedness refers to the awareness of what

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was not known then, or what Marianna calls the ‘predestiner of nostalgia’ (127). She writes: I turned my back to the crowds, and this movement, so precise it repeats itself under my skin even now, caused a flicker of emotion, a foreshadowing of what [my mother’s cousin’s] dying would mold inside me permanently, the sense of never having paid attention, of too late. (161, emphasis in original)

Many reviews have stressed the clinical nature of the two sisters’ ‘social pathology’ (Baxter, Back Cover), which leads eventually to the ‘disintegration of personality’ (Kirkus Reviews 2003: 179), and how cutting themselves relieves the pressure of psychic wounds. When Alaine finally emerges from her ‘depressive withdrawal’ (Williams 2007: 62) before leaving Lebanon, Marianna sinks into it. One reviewer adds that Ward ‘weaves that transitional moment into her narrative so subtly that it’s almost impossible to pinpoint it’, especially seeing as how this ‘role reversal spirals through the novel’ (Cornell 2003: par. 4). I contend that there is a compelling reason, one obscured by the fragmentary mode of narration, for the onset of Alaine’s trauma symptoms. Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, bits of information scattered in the first section (‘Autumn’), if assembled, would suggest that Alaine was raped at the age of eleven by a teenager called Fadi. Because Alaine never divulges to anyone ‘what he had done to deserve this treatment’ (46), Marianna wonders why her sister ‘had never stopped hating him’ (48). In my view, Marianna suspects what happened but does not wish to acknowledge it, either to herself or to others. Therefore, she resorts to indirection, a central device in trauma writings, to indicate the primary cause of her sister’s depression. On the first page, we are told that Fadi used to wink at the younger Marianna and stroke her hair upon returning from his bird-hunting trips, but mysteriously ‘disappeared later in the war’ (3). The same sentence reappears, forty-six pages later, as if to explain Alaine’s mystifying behaviour: her sudden refusal to go hunting with Fadi, her forbidding Marianna from being with him alone, and her nonchalance when told he was missing. Also, Marianna describes how her sister, at twelve, had mastered hitting targets with Uncle Ara’s pistol, which disappeared one day. The fact that Fadi’s body was never found, when we

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know that Alaine later developed the morbid habit of burying dead soldiers’ bodies, suggests that she may have taken the law into her own hands. Many pages later, Marianna adds that she ‘had heard a story once about a boy who attacked a girl in the mountains, [but that] his own father killed him’ (105). On yet another occasion, when Marianna asks Alaine why Huda, a thirtytwo-year-old woman, had become ‘crazy’ and tried to kill herself, her sister says curtly: ‘She was raped’ (83). Since, as stated earlier, trauma can result from either prolonged experience of peril or an unexpected instant of fright, rape would certainly constitute ‘a sudden flash of terror’ (Kai Erikson, cited in Vickroy 2002: 12), whose detrimental impact on the victim’s psyche would surface behaviourally at a later date, manifest in multiple symptoms. Some time following the rape, Marianna states that ‘[o]ne day [. . .] everything was different’, for it was ‘the beginning of everything, of blood on [Alaine’s] arms and face, of the psychiatrists and the pills [. . .] of her running in the night’ (75). This remark, situated immediately after the episode of the missing pistol, intimates ‘the intense emotional crisis’ (Whitehead 2004: 6) which triggered Alaine’s breakdown.12 Marianna’s observation – while looking at a family photograph – that her sister ‘by the age of ten [prior to her rape] was transmitting signs of the sorrows that would torture her for years’ (37) describes Alaine’s reactive depression in the intense early phase of the war, or what Freud calls ‘war neurosis’ (shell shock). However, Marianna’s depiction of Alaine’s ‘insomnia of a lifetime beginning now’ (38), stated one page later, pinpoints almost literally the onset of her sister’s personal ‘traumatic neurosis’. By placing these two diagnostic observations so close to one another, Marianna seems to be suggesting that her sister’s psychological pain stems from two sources – the general (the violence) and the personal (the violation) – a fact which compounds Alaine’s suffering. The alternating and radical nature of her bouts of depression, silence, verbal aggressiveness, disappearance and suicide attempts, all of which disrupt the family’s life for about eight years, is mirrored by the equally sporadic and disruptive textualisation thereof in the first (and longest) section of her younger sister’s memoir. I believe this section’s title, ‘Autumn’, the season often called ‘fall’, is chosen to reflect both sisters’ downward psychological spiralling, but particularly Alaine’s. On at least eight occasions, Marianna literalises her status/stasis as a

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spectator by comparing herself to a ‘window’ on, or an eyewitness to, other people’s movements, mostly her sister’s. She even convinces herself that she is immune to war-induced strain by being situated ‘[in] the window’ (255). This fantasy of passivity begins to dissolve when an actual window behind which she is literally attempting to ‘hide’ is shattered during a bout of intense shelling, and she reacts with her first attempt at self-mutilation, scraping her wrists along a jagged edge ‘to say, The window broke and I did, too’ (209). She explains her unorthodox view of windows, one-third of the way into her narrative, to her (third) psychotherapist in the US, who at this point ‘refuses to tell [her] what she’s thinking [as if] it is not for [Marianna] to know [yet]’ (88). The pages that follow are meant to reveal indirectly Marianna’s process of self-discovery by means of the introspection required for the writing of her memoir. Towards the end of the novel, the same counsellor crushes Marianna’s erroneous perspective by telling her: ‘You were the one, in the end [and not Alaine], who almost died. You were not in the window’ (255). The italics here signal a self-reflective moment crucial for composing her narrative. For until Marianna is confronted with this corrective professional opinion, finding her own voice, let alone imposing it on her past life in a textual frame, would have seemed impossibly proactive. While Salaita argues that North America in this novel ‘is given definition as the object functioning as counterpart to the Eastern subject’ (2006: 138), I would sharpen the discrepancy: it is the US, in particular, which serves as opposite pole to Lebanon. In the last section, ‘Winter’, whose title evokes images of a land blanketed by snow, Marianna continues to defy her sister’s and her parents’ philosophy of deliberate forgetfulness, or covering, of the past. In an unnamed town in New England,13 Alaine demonstrates renewed fortitude as she continues her project, begun in Lebanon, of suppressing, even erasing, all reminders of her earlier suffering. She does this by hiding her scars, terminating any discussion initiated by Marianna of ‘what happened’, and burning all her writings and war memorabilia, minus the bullets and shrapnel. ‘It was after the fire that she changed’ (257), says Marianna, who judges her sister’s radical attempt at self-purgation as disingenuous, cowardly and futile. To counter her family’s mounting amnesia, encapsulated in Alaine’s denial of her previous self – ‘I don’t remember [. . .] And I don’t want to’ (182) – Marianna’s ‘relentless’ (234) memory, evident throughout

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her text, reaches in the third section what Andreas Huyssen calls ‘mnemonic fever’ (cited in Whitehead 2004: 82), which consciously recreates connections with a past that threatens to dissolve. By confronting her own trauma repeatedly, unlike her sister, she ‘wak[es] into consciousness’ (Caruth 1996: 64, emphasis in original). By contrast, her family tries to escape from the terror of memory. Furthermore, Marianna rejects her mother’s view of the past. ‘She says the word past like it is a place full of things’ (128, emphasis in original), she writes. ‘I see a long, narrow hall, locked at both ends’ (128) and full of cobwebs. Later she admonishes Alaine: ‘now is coming from somewhere’ (174). Marianna’s feeling of estrangement from family members (a typical symptom of PTSD) who refuse to face the past is lessened by her reanimating the voices of the dead and the missing. The process of writing about them, however, transforms her melancholy into a state of mourning. In Freudian terms, her ego finally manages to detach itself from her departed objects of desire, especially Ziad, becoming ‘free and uninhibited again’ (Freud 1957: 245). Memorialising what Kai Erikson calls the ‘gathering of the wounded’ (1995: 187) makes moving beyond trauma possible for her. Ending her narrative with an element of magical realism, here the image of a winged horse moving between continents – a transformed image of the donkey which for her had symbolised her mother’s peaceful pre-war life – proves Marianna’s refusal to remain within trauma, unlike some other trauma writers, who are trapped by the fear that to move on is to betray dead loved ones (LaCapra 2001: 22–3). She also connects this horse, as a modified postmemory, to use Marianne Hirsch’s term, with possible future occupations and cities until she can safely return to Lebanon. Unlike Bassam, in De Niro’s Game, who fantasises about Rome as his final destination away from Lebanon, she considers the Italian capital the ‘only other imaginable world’ (280) in which she might reside until she can return to her homeland. Marianna’s account, which echoes the tragic fates of many individuals regardless of age, gender or nationality, concentrates nonetheless on the ways in which ‘[w]ar eliminates childhood’ (Ward 2003: 209). Secondary yet important characters include Jamil, Amer and an unnamed seventeen-yearold she meets in Rome, all of whom fought in the militias and were, respectively, killed, forced to stay at home by their parents and sent abroad. The

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theme of a war-sullied city – the ‘place of dark streets’ (158–9), as Marianna refers to it, albeit only briefly since as a female child and teenager she had no choice but to hide in corridors inside apartments during the fighting – is paramount in other novels to be discussed in Part III. Physically unable to reach her home country, Marianna cries as she recreates the feeling of home by recording her memories, insights and hopes. Now she spills tears and ink, rather than her own blood, to let out her pain. Autobiographical writing proves cathartic for her, since capturing one’s own life in words relieves the need to continually remember, preserves what might otherwise be lost and serves as antidote to a relapse into depression. Reciting a life-story, even if only in fragmentary prose reflecting its traumatic contents, proves that overwhelming occurrences have somehow been assimilated. Marianna moves in her narrative from believing that ‘[t]here has to be truth’ (174) to realising that ‘[n]othing is true’ (177), even declaring that she ‘will stop wanting to know’ (263). Her mother’s belief that one ‘can’t argue with the way someone remembers things’ (41) adds special credence to the paradox faced on realising that ‘massive trauma is [. . .] inherently incomprehensible’ (Suares-Orozco and Robben 2000: 7). Therefore, traumas cannot be challenged, only identified with – or not. In the ‘alien winter’ (8) of the US, Marianna becomes ‘the ghost of everything [she and her family] lost’ (92). Whereas Alaine collected bullets to impose order on her despair, only to discard them later, her younger sister rescues stories, memories and fantasies to do the same. Yet, she would not profess to have delivered an account of the Lebanese Civil War. As Leigh Gilmore demonstrates, trauma memoirs balance conflicting directives of uniqueness and representativeness, raising the question of how the experience of one survivor can stand for those of many (2001: 31). This novel’s achievement lies in portraying artistically a troubled personal history which accompanies and mirrors a national tragedy. In sharing its intimate memories, it helps untie what Sune Haugbolle laments as the ‘traumatic knot at the heart of [Lebanon’s feeble] collective memory’ (2005: 194). As a survivor who came of age as the war came to an end in 1990, Ward has produced a novel whose protagonist depicts graphically the causes and effects of the unfinished traumas typical of many of her generation. Marianna’s angry voice delivers a (self-)critical trauma narrative which combats public amnesia. Driven by a

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maddening sentiment of belatedness with regard to a country still suffering from political discord and intermittent violence, the implicit warning contained in her testimony is both powerful and timely. Conclusion Caruth avers that many trauma survivors carry ‘an impossible history within them’ (1995: 5), one with which both Sarah and Marianna try to come to terms by writing it down. Unlike Sarah, who is also half-American, Marianna considers herself fully Lebanese, not a ‘half-breed’ (Ward 2003: 60), and is therefore unable and unwilling to embrace a new life in the US as a ‘refugee’ (61). Vartan’s advice that she ‘should make [her] home wherever [she] go[es] and be pleased [she is] somewhere at all’ (152) is something she cannot heed. Instead, she yearns for her Beirut apartment since all the other homes in which she had lived in Lebanon have been destroyed. Sarah remains in the US, unsure of whether or not to return to post-war Beirut, whereas Marianna is ready psychologically to return, but the country is still at war. Furthermore, whereas the diasporic Sarah struggles to confront her war-related trauma by excavating it from the recesses of her memory, the exilic Marianna confronts those who try to suppress their own traumas so that even if she cannot resurrect Lebanon, she might salvage a few precious memories of the only country she acknowledges as her homeland.

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4 The Hakawati and A Girl Made of Dust

oss of innocence, as shown earlier a hallmark process hastening the end of childhood, is both a major topic and an organising principle in several post-war Anglophone Lebanese narratives. Having left immediately after the hostilities began in 1975, regardless of age, or having lived through the conflict as an adult with multiple coping strategies at hand (of which writing is one), is much easier than having witnessed the same brutalities and graduated from the ‘school of war’ in one’s teens or early twenties. This argument, taken from Alexandre Najjar’s 1999 autobiographical novel L’Ecole de la guerre (The School of War), describes the experience of many of his generation. Hanan al-Shaykh, who left almost as soon as the war broke out, describes The Bullet Collection as

L

vivid proof of the impact of a war which robbed children of their identities and left them dazed and confused. A war which has erased their childhood completely except for deep scars on their tiny wrists bearing the witness of their rage, anger, and helplessness. (2003: n. pag.)

Being ‘dazed and confused’ as a result of neither understanding nor adequately coping with the atrocities, resorting instead to aggression towards oneself and others, is an accurate depiction of the many young children and adolescents populating post-war novels by authors who were too young at the time to vent their frustrations artistically. Sentiments ranging from anger and dejection to a paradoxical sense of gratitude permeate these writings which, to varying degrees, deliberately fail to provide comforting answers. What happens if one is either unable or does not wish to leave the embattled nation but instead lives through the chaos? What unites most writers of this generation is their refusal to take sides, that is, to promote in their 105

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fictions a specific political vision and/or a religious sect over others. Instead, they protest loudly against the madness of warfare and the futility of factionalism. What is stressed throughout is the human cost, paid most dearly by the innocent as they find themselves engulfed by poverty, corruption and political/sectarian brainwashing in their developing years. Part III of my study raises three interrelated questions: How and why is militarisation the price paid by some youngsters remaining in the war zone? How does leaving versus staying influence both the narrators and those characters whose active participation in warfare they narrate? And how are home and homeland defined by those who leave versus those who stay? In this chapter, I focus on two young combatants, Elie in Rabih Alameddine’s The Hakawati and Naji in Nathalie Abi-Ezzi’s A Girl Made of Dust, both of whom join militias. Their respective portrayals are delivered by Osama, Elie’s expatriated brother-in-law, and Ruba, Naji’s younger sister. The two young men’s desire to enter armed conflict, mainly to prove their manhood and personal worth and to achieve their nationalistic aspirations related thereto, makes them suffer tragic consequences. In a civil war with no winners but only degrees of survival for groups and individuals, stories can only be told by those fortunate enough to live on (sometimes by departing, like Osama but unlike Ruba) and, some time later, to deliver accounts based on their observations. Most significant is their giving a testimonial voice to those who could not or would not speak up because of premature death, a dearth of financial or intellectual resources, a lack of opportunity for self-expression and/or an unwillingness to revisit a traumatising or shameful past. The importance of socio-economic class in relation to participation in warfare will be highlighted. First, however, some general remarks are necessary. In 2002, it was estimated that 300,000 children were active participants in thirty-six ongoing or recently ended conflicts around the world (DicksonGómez 2002: 327). This number is staggering when one considers that in 1989, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, whose first article defines a child as ‘every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier’. As Tanya Monforte wonders: ‘What is the age of majority to kill and be killed?’ (2007: par. 17). In other words, how does one draw a line between young victimisers and young victims?

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Historical, anthropological and legal scholarship on child-soldiers has expanded significantly in the past few years.1 Testimonies by children, whether real or fictional(ised), during and after warfare have become much sought-after sources for researchers of literature and oral history alike.2 Psycho-social studies – which have mostly focused on the influences of age and gender as risk factors for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other ailments stemming from harrowing experiences – have yielded inconsistent results (Udwin et al. 2000: 970). What recent research has proven, however, is that the brain areas which regulate emotions and deal with the aftermath of war-induced trauma do not mature physiologically until early adulthood (Bower 2006: 84). Interestingly, this fact can be a double-edged sword when attempting to correlate age with susceptibility to emotional harm inflicted by war. Whether older or younger children are generally more vulnerable remains uncertain because a higher level of abstract understanding can either increase or decrease one’s anxiety, depending on many other factors. Similarly, age aside, males and females in most cultures typically employ different coping strategies when faced with danger; for whereas most males tend to repress their feelings and/or resort to action, females tend to express them more openly, thus scoring higher on PTSD scales (Berman 2001: pars 26–7). Post-war Anglophone Lebanese literature abounds with examples of youngsters enduring fear, rage and depression, as well as other emotions associated with trauma, war and/or exile, as was shown in Part II. The same emotions can result from combat, as will be stressed in Part III. Age and possibly gender as factors determining the kind of life led during the war are stressed in the short story ‘The One-Eyed Man’ by Lina Mounzer who, born in Beirut in 1978, moved to Canada with her family just before the war ended. Her protagonist, Ali, was only a year old when the war started and emigrated in his late teens to Canada, where he spent eight years before returning to Lebanon to attend his father’s funeral. In post-war Beirut, he laments the fact that ‘older people do not talk about the war’ and asserts: It is only we [my emphasis] who repeat the litany of close calls, of near brushes with death, and even when we have heard them by rote, we do not tire of hearing them. It is our secret that we feel cheated out of this war, that we never strutted the streets with our Kalashnikovs held at proud attention.

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That our only experience was to lie like cowering dogs, robbed of our childhoods by the acrid taste of fear and sweat. (2006: 211)

This straight-from-the-heart outcry is directed against many elders’ deliberate forgetfulness. Specifically, Ali’s rumination describes the emotional reality and physical location of many young men during the battles as having been influenced by age and, to some extent, by gender. However, the full picture emerging from representative post-war novels with regard to these two factors is more complex. Gender lines, analogous to those separating shelters from streets, where some young males ordinarily fight away from the protected younger male and female children, can and are in fact occasionally crossed, however tentatively. For example, in The Bullet Collection, Alaine, in an attempt to control her helplessness, scours Beirut’s desolate streets at night, befriends militiamen, collects bullets, buries dead fighters’ bodies and plays militia with neighbourhood boys. The real or more comprehensive ‘secret’, as I show, lies in the victimisation of all those who were legally under-age during the fray. In addition to the young sufferers like Ali, who were too young to participate in the war, are those who crossed over during the war from the stage of naïve childhood into adolescence and beyond, and therefore did take part in the fighting, or at least tried to. Sweat, blood and dust cover the bodies and eyes of many of these youngsters, children and adolescents alike. Most blinding in some cases, however, is the (self-)destructive political/sectarian ideology which, inherited from elders and general surroundings, fosters a politically exclusive and therefore a skewed view of Lebanon-as-homeland. Both The Hakawati and A Girl Made of Dust were published in 2008, in the US and the UK respectively.3 Both emphasise, in the first-person voice of a non-combatant protagonist, the vulnerability of youth in the context of war by depicting and commenting on the psycho-social (d)evolution of two rebellious male figures from childish innocence to adolescence, and in one case to adult, corruptive militancy. Unlike other militarised youths in De Niro’s Game, Elie and Naji do question at some point the viability of their lifestyles and the veracity of their political sympathies, and seek some form of self-redemption in hopes of returning to normal lives despite, or because of, ongoing violence. Unlike Alameddine’s fictional novel, whose al-Kharrat family history

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stretches from the late nineteenth century to 2003, Abi-Ezzi’s, encompassing three generations of the Khouri family, is more directly inspired by the author’s intimate memories of war-related experiences, most notably during the early 1980s. My aim in highlighting the under-researched theme of militarisation, especially in connection with those of home and homeland, in these two texts is to reveal the evolving consciousness of the dangers, to oneself and to others, of joining the militias. This danger is visible in the actions, thoughts and words of both Elie and Naji, as recorded by their narrators, Osama and Ruba, who in turn influence both the outcome of these two characters’ participation in the hostilities and their attitudes towards Lebanon-as-homeland. The Hakawati In The Hakawati, as Lorraine Adams has noted, ‘searing political upheavals like the Lebanese civil war figure but don’t dominate’ (2008: par. 8). Political and family events run parallel to and are interwoven with legends, myths and stories culled, and revised, from multiple sources such as A Thousand and One Nights, the Koran, the Bible, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and many others. Ancient stories elucidate modern ones in the al-Kharrat family and vice versa. Thanks to novels like this and others in languages accessible to the West – including those translated from Arabic – Amy Tan insists that Lebanon and the Middle East are ‘no longer merely a fictional place, no longer a place you simply read about, or see on television, in the news’ (2008: par. 3). Adams agrees, stating that, as a work of timeless yet timely fiction, Alameddine’s novel is ‘powerful enough to transcend the mountain of polemic, historical inquiry, policy analysis and reportage that stands between the Western reader and the Arab soul’ (2008: par. 1). In a similar vein, Colm Tóibín argues that this novel, unlike De Niro’s Game, allows ‘geopoetics to flow over geopolitics’ (2010: par. 28) and personality to have precedence over politics (par. 30). Other scholars have focused on the novel’s transformation of The Arabian Nights and on its queering of Orientalist tradition.4 I focus on the framing narrative, that is, the overarching story, set in 2003, of Osama al-Kharrat’s return to Beirut from Los Angeles for a few days to be with his dying father during Eid al-Adha – the Muslim and Druze feast when the rich offer meat to the poor – and on the relevant war-related

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memories triggered by this trip. These memories, jumbled in time and space, are neither purely nostalgic nor purely critical, as discussed in Part I, but a mixture of the two. And traumatic memory, as examined in Part II, is simply not present. The novel consists of twenty-one chapters divided into four books. While most of the text is filtered through Osama’s own narration, his grandfather, Ismail al-Kharrat,5 who arrived in Lebanon from Turkey as a teenager, and his paternal uncle, Jihad, are also tellers of both fairy tales and family stories. Born and raised in Lebanon to an upper-class, Westernised Druze family, Osama is heir to multiple national, ethnic and religious backgrounds: English, Armenian, Albanian, Druze, Maronite, Protestant and Muslim. Like some of the characters discussed in Chapter 1, he suffers from a strained relationship with his father, Farid, albeit for different reasons. The latter is jealous of Osama’s attachment to his grandfather, that is, to his own father, and the latter’s stories. He also disapproves of Osama’s love for music, specifically his playing of the oud (a traditional Middle Eastern stringed instrument). Farid also resents him for not having spent more time in Beirut when Osama’s mother died in 1994. ‘If you leave now [. . .] you are not my son,’ the father declares; when Osama insists otherwise, Farid replies: ‘No son of mine abandons his father’ (Alameddine 2008: 460). Although Osama returns in the mid-1990s in response to his sister’s pleas, he remains in the US thereafter for the next eight years. Initially, Osama blames his mother’s unhappiness on his father’s philandering, an episode of which he witnesses in the US when Farid keeps the company of a young American woman. Later, he resents his father’s disdain for his own father, whom Farid considers an embarrassing ‘loon’ (227) specialised, as a professional storyteller in the service of the Druze bey, in circulating ‘lies and fabrications’ (500). The spiritual connection between Ismail and Osama is strengthened when he tells his grandson that an oudplayer, like a storyteller, is a ‘bestower of gifts’ (44). Osama’s happy pre-war memories are mainly associated with his grandfather, who died in 1973. Osama’s mother, who cannot deal with ‘suffering hands-on’ (416), finds these tales, retold by Jihad with a twist, occasionally entertaining but mainly indispensable in alleviating her boredom when cooped up in the building’s shelter during bouts of shelling. Osama grows up with a much stronger connection to his intellectual and life-loving gay uncle Jihad, who calls him ‘my little hero’

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(179), than to Farid. Although he ‘may have shared numerous experiences’ with his father, he discovers that they ‘rarely shared their stories’ because they ‘didn’t know how to listen to one another’ (450). Like Mohammad in Koolaids, Osama feels guilt as death approaches, although the catalyst is his father’s impending demise, not his own. To assuage this guilt, at the end of the novel, he starts telling his comatose father family stories originally transmitted by Ismail. In so doing, he resumes the chain of story-telling which was broken symbolically when Jihad died in 1977. More significantly, however, he reconciles with his father and helps the latter reconcile with his own. Unlike Koolaids and I, the Divine, The Hakawati dwells neither on its main character’s life in the US nor on the theme of cultural hybridity. Only a few pages describe how Osama’s contact with American college students was facilitated by sharing dope, playing the guitar and exoticising his war-related experiences. Although he befriends some Lebanese students, whom he calls ‘misfits’ (323), he admits he cannot ‘belong with them, either’ (330). From ‘hat[ing] [his] room’ (323) in the dormitory in 1977, by the early 1990s, Osama has moved on to become ‘a productive member of society’ (376) who owns a home in Los Angeles. These facts are delivered in a compressed fashion because the novel is much more concerned with the meanings of home than with the facts of his trajectory. The word ‘home’ – occasionally in connection with ‘hometown’ and ‘home city’, and rarely with ‘homeland’ and ‘homelessness’ – is used eighty-three times in the legends and eighty-five times in the contexts of Osama’s family history and of current events. The total is 168 times, so the word averages an appearance almost every three pages. While it is refreshingly true, as Adams contends, that this novel is ‘not about a jihadi [Muslim fighter in a holy war] but a hakawati [a storyteller]’ (2008: par. 1), I highlight the story of one such youth called Elie – never mentioned in the many reviews of this novel and only briefly in a recent reader’s guide (Salaita 2011: 57–8) – who grows up to be a misguided combatant during the civil war. Alameddine, who says he does not believe in good or bad (cited in Wilkinson 2008: 10), refrains from passing judgement on Elie. However, certain passages and conversations with the narrator place this young man in a larger socio-political context which allows readers to form their own opinions. To do so is to follow the advice of Uncle Jihad, who once told his nephew to never trust the teller, only the tale (206).

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Osama’s father’s imminent demise, which occasions a reunion of his extended family, intensifies Osama’s inconsistent sense of home. After having fled Beirut at sixteen in February 1977 to the family house in the mountains and shortly thereafter to the US to study at UCLA, the unmarried forty-twoyear-old Osama, now a successful software engineer, returns in 2003 to his old and still battle-scarred neighbourhood, once cosmopolitan and opulent. Since his initial departure, he has returned to Lebanon four times: in the second half of 1977, to attend his pregnant sister Lina’s wedding to Elie; in 1982, after his father’s car dealership was damaged by Israeli bombardment; in 1994, when his mother Layla died; and again shortly thereafter to be by his morose father’s side. After his father and uncle help him settle at UCLA, his wealthy parents visit him three times in Los Angeles in a fifteen-year period, and he often meets them in London and Paris. In describing Osama as a frequent traveller between the US, Europe and Lebanon, The Hakawati offers one example of the ‘transnational outlooks’ of the Arab-American community in post-9/11 Arab-American fiction (Fadda-Conrey 2011: 551, note 14). Osama’s fifth trip home, however, proves different because, ready to revisit the area of his childhood, he declares: ‘I wanted to find my way home’ to the fourth floor because ‘I want to remember’ (476). Osama’s need to be in this locale to recall parts of his seventeen years spent in Lebanon exemplifies Svetlana Boym’s notion of restorative nostalgia, defined as the ‘attempt to conquer and spatialize time’, as opposed to reflective nostalgia, which ‘cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space’ (2001: 49). Furthermore, as Samir Khalaf explains, individuals who have been displaced because they lost their homes during the war are ‘impelled by an urge to reassemble a damaged identity and broken history’ (2004–5: 55). If, like Afreet-Jehanam in Fatima’s tale in The Hakawati states, ‘[o]ne can never be free from the past and its pull’ (82), then Osama is literally drawn to his childhood haunts in the hope of excavating specific memories. Osama’s sudden ardent desire to see his old home again is mentioned three times: at the beginning, in the middle, and towards the end of the narrative, when it finally happens. By the time he acknowledges his emotional need to dig up his home-bound memories, most of what he ends up remembering has already been revealed in fragmentary passages scattered throughout the novel. The evolution, as a sub-plot, of the concierge’s son Elie from

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an underprivileged and rebellious thirteen-year-old to a disgruntled militia leader spans the length of the text, pieces of information being periodically added to complete his portrait. Some relatives find Osama filled with ‘American clichés’ (19), an ‘outsider’ (33) who ‘feel[s] superior’ (28) to them. As Osama says of Hafez, a cousin of the same age who never left Lebanon: ‘He was always more our family than I was’ (281). Feeling himself ‘a tourist in a bizarre land’ (7) yet paradoxically at home, Osama finds his dilapidated building populated by long-time squatters, that is, those less fortunate Lebanese who never had the luxury of leaving the country but were internally displaced. He does not recognise the dejected man with white hair at the entrance. This old man appears once again, 470 pages later, when he recognises Osama, forcing the latter to ‘awake from [his] stupor’ (479), his ‘depression’ (477) and from his sense of guilt as ‘a chronic coward’ (480). Until the much-delayed moment of Osama’s, and the reader’s, discovery that this old man, Joseph Hananiah, is Elie’s maternal uncle, Elie had mostly been dismissed by Osama’s family as a lowlife. Joseph’s view of his nephew as ‘a good-for-nothing fake-idealist bastard [. . .] bringing disgrace to [them] all, [and] forcing his parent into an early grave’ (480) seems to corroborate everyone’s judgement. Yet, the narrator’s response that ‘Elie was a good man’ living in ‘difficult times’ (480) betrays his certainty that Elie might have been reformed had Osama fulfilled his brother-in-law’s request, back in 1982, for financial help to let him start a new life. Instead, he had refrained out of a sense of class-based superiority, moral indifference and fear of having to confront his sister about it. As in A Girl Made of Dust, personal events in The Hakawati are told from the protagonist’s age-based perspective. As a six-year-old, Osama had admired Elie, seven years his senior, as a courageous teenager, eager to fight the Israelis since the 1967 war.6 Elie’s war cry of ‘We’ll never lose’ because ‘God is on our side’ (155), his cigarette smoking, his gun, his motorcycle, his impassioned rhetoric – all reminiscent of George in De Niro’s Game – and his budding masculinity made him too attractive, almost exotic, for some time to the bourgeois boys and girls of the neighbourhood. Young Osama’s first inkling of an American-backed Israeli threat to the region, and to Lebanon in particular – which is swiftly dismissed by his college-educated, secular, affluent and apolitical parents – takes place in the concierge’s humble

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apartment, then housing this poor family’s relatives-turned-refugees from Syria. Words like ‘napalm bombs’ and ‘American imperialism’ enter Osama’s consciousness. He also learns from Elie that the Lebanese are Arabs too. The concierge’s belief that ‘politics is important’ (146) – the opposite of Uncle Jihad’s conviction that Arab politics is ‘about lost causes’ (168) – is inherited by his thirteen-year-old son. Short on money, social prestige and even the age required to enter the Lebanese Armed Forces, Elie has no better choice for acting out his political anxieties and exercising what he perceives as his moral duty, in the hope of experiencing a measure of self-fulfilment, than to join the local leftist militia. As in De Niro’s Game, teenage military violence and sexual promiscuity are closely related in this novel. At sixteen, Elie asks a compliant Osama to use his bedroom for a tryst with the neighbourhood’s coquette, Mariella. A few years later he impregnates Osama’s sister Lina, whom he dutifully marries when she insists on keeping the child, but abandons following their 1978 wedding ceremony to join the battles then raging. Osama’s admiration of Elie, however, starts to wane before this date. Comparing nineteen-year-old Elie, during the encouraging early days of the 1973 war,7 to the then-optimistic Palestinian boys at school, Osama announces that he ‘looked as if he believed’ (210), but four years (and over 140 pages) later, he downgrades him to ‘a silly communist betraying the great cause’ (353). Sarcastic by nature and sceptical of all, but mostly of leftist ideological master narratives, sixteen-year-old Osama decries Elie’s futile political involvement. He describes the wedding festivities as a forced union between two worlds: the bride’s sophisticated and well-to-do family and the impoverished brutes represented by Elie’s drunken gun-toting cohorts, who indulge in ‘an ecstatic firing orgasm’ (354). Famous for rallying speeches delivered in fatigues, Elie, now in his bridegroom’s suit, avoids eye contact and conversation with Osama, muttering simply: ‘It’s not my fault. It was supposed to be just fun’ (361). Elie’s impregnation of Lina results from carelessness but pales in comparison, morally speaking, to Osama’s irresponsible conduct towards his brother-in-law while visiting Beirut at Christmas in 1982. The paragraph listing the cataclysmic events of that infernal year – the Israeli invasion in June, the subsequent siege of Beirut, the assassination of Bashir Gemayel, and the Sabra and Shatilla massacre – ends with Osama’s telling us that his mother,

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during a lull, insisted on going out for a manicure, asking him to take fouryear-old Salwa (Lina and Elie’s daughter) out for a stroll. He admits that ‘courage was never [his] forte’, perhaps because he ‘was no longer a denizen of Beirut’ (441) but a diasporan with multiple homes. In the ensuing scene, he resembles Samir, who, in one vignette in Koolaids, panics on hearing shelling during his first visit to Lebanon after a few years’ absence. Terrified of dying by a stray bullet or bomb at twenty-one, Osama hears Elie calling him from behind a wall. Himself afraid of being killed by ‘traitors’ and sporting eyes ‘brimming with the brilliance of insanity’, Elie begs him to meet the same night at a pub, making him promise to show up since he has ‘many things to tell’ (442). As Monforte states, the child-soldier (and Elie started as one) is akin to the archetype of the mad seer who displays ‘an unnatural combination of truth and irrationality’ (2007: par. 59), one which manifests itself in the scene at the bar. The scene at Trader Vic’s, in a stuffy room which ‘groaned and sweated, feverish amid an infestation of bamboo’ (443), recalls in a sense the classic meeting between the narrator Charlie Marlow and Kurtz, the die-hard corrupt ivory trader and imperialist, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). Osama finds a drunken Elie, angry about his own mother’s refusal to speak with him because he threw an ashtray at her when she tried to prevent him from going out to fight again. Shell-shocked, inebriated and sleep-deprived, Elie, still avoiding eye contact, moves on in his erratic speech to accuse most Maronites of betraying Lebanon, reciting paranoid scenarios of his being their target for assassination. When Osama reminds him that his own wife Lina is Maronite, Elie insists that she takes after her Druze father and was baptised Greek Orthodox to marry him. Even when his marriage is brought up, Elie is too caught up in despair to ask about his child, whom he has never met. He yells at Osama: Do you think it’s easy? You escaped. You ran away. The rest of us can’t. We’re not all like your family. When things get rough, they go to the mountains – or, better, they go to Paris. Your house gets destroyed, you buy another, or two. All I can do is kill, kill, kill. (444–5)

Here, for the first and last time in the text, the narrator, through Elie, stresses the socio-economic reason for the moral and mental deterioration of

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some young fighters. Nowhere does the classical fight-versus-flight paradigm fit better the poor-versus-rich divide in a war situation than it does here. The novel highlights this fact through the al-Kharrats’ new Beirut home and their summer house in the village, used as a refuge and a storehouse for their valuables, and through the family’s itinerant lifestyle to escape bouts of heavy shelling or seek medical attention abroad. Other wealthy individuals include Osama’s childhood friend Fatima – Mariella’s younger sister – the ‘demimondaine’ (379) who has the means to have maintained a home in Rome since 1975. Rome is the city of which, by contrast, the impoverished Bassam in De Niro’s Game dreams for years as his sanctuary away from wartorn Beirut. A cabdriver communicates the logic of those with modest means when he tells Osama: ‘Everyone leaves now, but no one returns. If I were you, I wouldn’t have come back, not even for a wedding’ (352). For Elie, by contrast, the mayhem becomes an opportunity, even an excuse, to vent deep-seated frustrations cloaked in political ideology, making it the only way to prove one’s worth, manhood and ability to secure a livelihood. When Osama tries to leave the bar, Elie grabs him and insists on telling him the story of the leftist fighters’ disappointment and sense of abandonment, verging on psychosis, over the turns the war took in 1982. Unlike Elie, whose dream of translating the ‘glory of the left’ (445), represented by icons like Trotsky and Che Guevara, proves sour on the ground, Osama simply sums up all Lebanese political leaders (and by extension most others too) as ‘a few unscrupulous mafiosi’ (446). Here, the political version of Osama’s grandfather’s conviction that ‘[w]e all need to believe’ because ‘[i]t’s human nature’ (93) seems to have applied to Elie up to a certain point in time, but never to Osama. The physical, emotional and mental drain experienced by Elie can no longer be refilled by ideological potions. Political frustration is further correlated with sexual repression. Elie goes on to describe how six hundred fighters, jammed inside a theatre during a lull in the fighting, indulged in mass masturbation while watching an American pornographic movie. Osama becomes the bridge between the reader and the otherwise voiceless fighters. No one would listen to, much less fully retell, Elie’s Kurtz-like ‘uninterruptible jabber’ (445) about the horror he endured were it not for Osama’s Marlow-like mediation. But providing a brief oral history of those

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who would otherwise remain unheard is not the same as trying to help. For when Elie asks Osama for some money to be able to start a family and lead ‘the normal life’ in ‘the Gulf or Brazil or Sweden’ (446), away from the scene of his lost years, the latter discourages him by informing him that it is his estranged wife Lina, now running the car dealership, whom he (Osama) would have to ask. Irritated by the fact that his brother-in-law never asked about his own child and too cowardly to face his sister about the encounter, Osama prefers moral lassitude and, knowingly or not, seals Elie’s fate. Whereas he enjoys the expatriate privilege of ‘two homes, Los Angeles and Beirut’ (495), Elie is condemned to stay, and possibly perish, in the besieged city. Had Osama interceded on his behalf, Elie might have changed his destiny and become like Bassam, in De Niro’s Game, who was able to tell his own story after leaving Beirut for Paris (with stolen money). Again like Marlow, Osama never relays to Lina, reminiscent of Kurtz’s fiancée, Elie’s last words or hopes or even the fact that he saw him that day. Twenty years later, both the reader and Osama learn that Elie was never reformed. Again, quoting Uncle Jihad, Osama believes ‘that what happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens’ (450). If events matter little because only the stories we concoct about them affect us, then allowing Elie a narrative space, however small and sparse, to speak up about the war’s dehumanisation of a whole group of underprivileged individuals gone astray cannot help but to affect the reader. Evelyn Shakir states that much of Lebanese-American fiction succeeds in demythologising the homeland as a sacred, fixed and nostalgic place. Alameddine, in her opinion, has delivered ‘the most merciless indictment of Lebanese society’ (2005: 363), a charge amplified by his post-modernist fragmentary style, which reflects a nation tearing its own fabric apart. While her judgement refers to Koolaids, it also applies to I, the Divine and to The Hakawati. Only in The Hakawati, however, does Alameddine go beyond depicting the triumphs and tribulations of the mobile members of bourgeois Lebanese families, during and after the war, to zero in on a representative specimen of the underprivileged young men for whom only the option of fighting exists. In so doing, through Osama, who insists until the very end that he is merely an observer, the author demands that the reader appraise the complexity of Lebanese society and politics so as not to judge individual

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acts as good or bad in isolation from one another but rather to visualise their interconnectedness within a broader social milieu. It is in this light and for this particular development in his fiction that Alameddine emerges, to use Tan’s description, as ‘a writer of conscience, of self-consciousness, of subconsciousness, [and] of the great big global unconscious’ (2008: par. 2). A Girl Made of Dust Unlike other novels in this study, A Girl Made of Dust does not depict international travel, cultural crossings or an exilic/diasporic consciousness. Nonetheless, the fact that a few secondary characters flee for other countries has an effect on those who stay. This coming-of-age novel combines folk tale and reportage (Kirkus Reviews). Divided into twenty-three chapters, it focuses on a lower-middle-class Maronite family’s life in Ein Douwra, Lebanon, between August 1981 and September 1982, as seen through the eyes of a precocious eight-year-old girl, Ruba Khouri. Abi-Ezzi chose Ruba because she wanted a ‘guileless narrator’ who cannot understand the causes of the war but can see their effects and ‘experience events on an emotional level’ (cited in O’Reilly 2009: 4) more directly than an adult would. Ruba’s language, saturated with sensory descriptions, metaphors and similes, reflects this unmediated approach. Also, being young, she sees ‘from a double perspective, assessing [her] own world as well as the apparent contradictions and hypocrisies of the ever-present world of adults’ (Teleky 2001: 205). Ruba, just a year old when the civil war erupted, struggles to comprehend both the enigmatic war’s catastrophic events and her own father’s mysterious silence and immobility. Instinctively, she knows that ‘everything was connected’ but ‘couldn’t see how’ (Abi-Ezzi 2008: 109). The difficult process of understanding political matters beyond her years is facilitated by her curiosity, evident in cautious yet relentless questions to adults to ease her apprehensions. Their answers (sometimes in the form of stories), supplemented by overheard conversations, provide pieces of political background. However, some of the casualties and perpetrators turn out to be people in her own milieu and part of her personal account. In an article on childhood and war in Francophone Lebanese literature, Myriem El Maïzi states that the poetics inflected by youth blurs reality and fiction; thus ‘war is represented as a spectacle, a film sequence or an oniric vision’ (2009: 50). This poetics, she

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argues, is ‘eventually undermined by the eruption of the naked reality of the war, which is inseparable from the loss of childhood’ (50–1). This nakedness manifests itself close to home in episodes involving three young males in Ruba’s world: Naji, Karim and Ali. The village of Ein Douwra overlooks Beirut, the devastated, divided capital mentioned about thirty times in the novel but never seen by Ruba and Naji except on TV, in newspapers and textbooks, and in passing during a school trip to Jbeil. Their father Nabeel deems Muslim-dominated West Beirut a no-go zone when his brother suggests taking Ruba and Naji to an amusement park there. Except for one instance to be discussed later, the word ‘home’, used about the same number of times as ‘Beirut’, always refers to the family apartment in Ein Douwra. This village, whose Muslim population starts declining, is a far cry from the days when it enjoyed sectarian harmony; as Teta (‘Gramma’) narrates, it was one in which ‘Maronites grow apples, Sunnis grow oranges and lemons, [and] Greek Orthodox grow olives’ (135). The grandfather, after years of working in Nigeria, returned to (t)his village because he ‘missed this country’ (99) as a whole, one that younger members of the war generation do not even know, let alone miss. To Ruba and Naji, two years her senior, the war initially means hearing distant noises and finding craters and bullet-casings in the once pristine forest. The novel begins with the (paternal) grandmother’s crediting the Virgin Mary for having saved Ruba’s life after a fall from a steep ledge, where she had found a glass eye. Her young mind’s predilection for fairy tales convinces her that it must be the ‘evil eye’ of the nearby ‘witch’, who had used it to lay the curse of lethargy on her father. At this point, Ruba conceives the ‘Blessed Virgin’ as no more than a ‘little yellow-haired plastic woman in a blue dress’ (2). Her attitude towards this Christian symbol, however, will change dramatically. The father’s home-bound presence, epitomised by the tattered armchair on which his children, wife and mother find him slouched most of the time, has worsened the family’s finances to the point of making leaving the country impossible. For some time, however, while the war seems to be fought only in Beirut and sung about on the radio, the village remains a relatively safe haven where time appears to stand still. The mother, Aida, overworked between taking care of her family’s needs and maintaining a small shop, has

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little time to watch her children’s, especially her son’s, every move. It is Ruba who notices and interacts with everyone. She is the first to register Naji’s mounting anger, which intensifies as he begins to associate with violent older teenagers and culminates in a confrontation with his father. Naji’s gradual loss of innocence is well captured by his sister’s systematic observations and serves as a major organising principle for her narrative. The young siblings hear a nut-shop owner answer a customer’s question by describing a common lot of impoverished teenagers during the war: What happened to [the Mansoor boy], my brother? What happens to any of them? He joined a militia, they picked a fight with some boys from the Lebanese Army and he was sprayed with bullets. When they’re young [. . .] they don’t think. (32–3)

Intrigued by rumours that his flamboyant uncle Wadih had a business relationship with a man who recently died of natural causes in their village, and increasingly identifying himself with this paternal figure rather than with his own father, as Osama in The Hakawati had done, Naji becomes openly defiant. He locates the problem in his father, stating angrily: ‘Him. He’s always talking about the war. Uncle’s not like that. He laughs and jokes and . . . knows how to be with people’ (43). Ironically, Naji starts losing his own sense of humour as he starts hanging out with two older teenagers, ‘already in the militia’ (120), who teach him how to use a rifle. Childhood’s limitations are central in this work, but so are its great advantages. The ways in which children affect adults, and adults affect children, permeate almost every page. Naji and Ruba (over)hear many conversations, mostly between Nabeel and their neighbour ‘the Rose Man’, making the daughter wonder why it is ‘always this way, with Papi blaming the Palestinians’ (26). Even after repeating verbatim his complaint that these refugees have set up a state within a state, she remains puzzled by the deeper reason for which he ‘hated [them] so bitterly’ (27). To children particularly, emotions speak louder than words and reveal more about the person voicing them than about those being spoken of. Nabeel’s annoyance by loud noises at Ruba’s birthday party and his aggressive reaction to seeing a child’s mask, worn by her friend Karim on St Barbara Day, prompt her to ask Naji when the last time was that their father had been happy. All he tells her is that one

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day, when she was five, their father came home from a business trip to Beirut, and that soon thereafter he turned into the ‘cactus’ (12) to which she had earlier likened him. Naji’s insistence that he does not know what happened that day, while drawing in the sand a picture of a rooftop and a person with a large head, indicates that he remembers some of what was said that evening without, perhaps, having understood it fully then. All Ruba remembers since that day is never having leant against her father and felt his physical warmth. Closeness to him before that tragic day, although confirmed to her by others, is a feeling she no longer recalls. Suffering from what seems to be some form of post-traumatic stress, the father is unable to provide muchneeded emotional support to his two children in this increasingly dangerous environment, a fact which, until a turning point in Ruba’s account, makes their adjustment to the war even more difficult. Although Ruba and Naji do not witness brutalities directly, Uncle Wadih tells them ‘stories about life in Beirut’, one of which is how the ‘young ones were bored and sat in shelled buildings looking out onto the other side’ of the city divided along the ‘Green Line’, ‘practising their shooting’ (44) by sniping at people. Ruba’s account covers a single year, so there is no way of ascertaining what long-term effects there might be on these children. Relative distance, measured as ‘just twenty kilometres’ (6) from where the major battles are being fought, shields them from immediate harm, at least for a while. Grey, battle-scarred Beirut, totally different from the beautiful pre-war city by the sea which Ruba sees only in her geography and history books, remains ‘a place worse than Ein Douwra’ (72). What further protects her, unlike her older brother, is precisely her fewer years of life, guaranteeing in her case the mitigating quality of cognitive immaturity and thus her adaptive capacity for relatively effective functioning in this stressful setting. Furthermore, her mother, grandmother, uncle and a few trusted friends – to whom she turns at different points for guidance, succour, information and even entertainment – help maintain her emotional stability. Certain stories can (mis)shape some young minds more powerfully than actual events. Osama’s uncle Jihad, as shown earlier, firmly believed that. Here, Uncle Wadih tells them: ‘Imagine, you spend your whole life fighting for your religion, and the moment you die they convert you’, from Christianity to Islam or vice versa, so that fighters, depending on where

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they fall, may be buried in the ‘appropriate’ (44) half of the city, divided into Muslim West and Christian East Beirut. Naji grows up believing that Muslims are legitimate targets. While soaking up yet another anecdote, about his uncle’s crossing into West Beirut at a Muslim checkpoint, he asks what an identification card is, to which his father responds that it mainly indicates one’s religious sect. Resuming his adventurous tale, the uncle describes how it was a child’s sudden shrieking in a taxi which saved his own life because it distracted the militiaman who was about to discover his Maronite identity. It is ironic to see how a story about a child’s saving a man’s life is doing just the opposite to its young listener. Growing up is not easy under the best of circumstances, let alone when surrounded by war and, worse, indoctrinated by an insidious home education which equates political righteousness with a particular sect. Complaining of muscle cramps in her legs, Ruba is not satisfied with her mother’s response, ‘[y]ou’re growing up, that’s all,’ and declares: Then I don’t want to. It’s painful being stretched big. Besides, I’ll have to be worried all the time like Teta, or sit all the time like Papi, or clean all the time like you, or be angry like Naji. (54)

Ruba sees adults as typecast figures chained to specific occupations and mental states. Naji’s earlier carefree attitude has hardened into (mis)perceiving Palestinians and non-Christian Lebanese as the odious reason for the war. Elie, as seen earlier, blamed Lebanese Maronites and the American-backed Israelis for the bloodshed. Regardless of which national and/or sectarian group(s) they accuse of causing collective suffering, these two opinionated young men lose their objectivity and the possibility of acquiring more nuanced views. Naji’s anger, fuelled by his determination to prove his manhood in the absence of a father as a role model, on the one hand, and by his incremental wariness of Muslims, on the other, makes him vent his frustration by seeking the company of militarised teenagers. Ruba says: ‘I saw Naji’s mouth working as if he wanted to speak, shout, or maybe cry, but he did none of those things’, just ‘turned and left’ (53). As the war progresses, Naji loses his childishness. In Chapter 10, he chastises his sister for still believing in witches. Silence and reserve mark his changing behaviour. In Chapter 12, at the

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exact centre of this novel, Ruba marks her brother’s turning point, when she notices how he has started ‘hunting for more than just snails’ in the woods, namely shell-casings, which he proudly collects inside a canister, an activity which makes him stand ‘a little taller’ (114). When his bullying friend in the militia humiliates Ruba’s friend Karim, calling him ‘a snivelling puny little coward’ for being a Muslim, Naji, now echoing his father and uncle, chimes in: ‘They’ve split Beirut to keep them apart from us. We should split Ein Douwra as well to keep them away’ (118). Later he proudly confesses to his sister: ‘[My two friends are] grown up enough to fight, and soon I will be as well’ (120). This statement shocks Ruba, who urges him to stop seeing these boys or she will tell their father. Naji offers a false promise to keep her quiet. The lie is soon uncovered, however, when as Naji and Ruba are flying a kite, his friends interrupt to invite him to target practice. Returning in terror after having come face-to-face with an Israeli helicopter, Naji receives a slap in the face from his father, who forces Ruba to tell all. An extended dialogue reveals the strained relationship between father and son. When Naji defiantly declares that the other boys’ parents do not interfere in their secret activities, Nabeel replies: ‘Other boys’ parents [. . .] are either too stupid or too heartless to care what their children do’ (146). Finally aware that his son is fraternising with ‘butcher-boys’ (145), he wonders what home has come to mean to him: ‘Where did those boys take you? Up to see their soldier friends? [. . .] Did you feel at home [my emphasis] there? What did they teach you [. . .]?’ (146). Here, feeling at home combines two meanings: feeling at ease within a group of peers whose fraternal bonds replace familial ones and being with people whose political ideology/course of action is to fight for Lebanon as a homeland for only one segment of the population, which is deemed superior by virtue of its religion. Naji explodes as follows: I’m not your son! I don’t care if I do look like you! And you’re not my father [. . .] You’re – you’re nothing! [. . .] You can’t tell me who I can talk to or be friends with or where I can go. Because you haven’t done anything for me in years! (147)

He crowns his outburst with resentment: ‘Fathers do things [. . .] They have a job and treat you like a man [. . .] I hate you. They all hate you’ (148). Nabeel’s confinement to the flat illustrates Samira Aghacy’s argument that,

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in Lebanese war fiction, the home, often associated with the feminine, also represents ‘the male characters’ desire for fixity and security in the midst of movement and change’; in order ‘to retreat from a nightmarish war experience, male characters seek the safety, stability and rootedness that the house represents’ (2003: 85). In so doing, Nabeel gives up part of his masculinity. For Naji, a father loses his moral authority once he stops being a provider, thus forcing his wife to do additional work. ‘You don’t even do as much [. . .] as women!’ (148) he snaps. His cathartic expression of pent-up anger reminds us of Elie’s outburst at Osama in the bar scene. Whereas Naji feels neglected by his father, Elie feels abandoned by those who can afford to flee. Here, this verbal eruption relieves Naji somewhat, but he remains resentful and stops talking to Ruba because she revealed his secret. The family’s impoverished status makes leaving impossible. Ruba can only wonder what it would be like not to endure shelling but cannot imagine it when her teacher tells her how quiet it is in Scotland, so she draws a picture of her teacher surrounded by ‘trees, butterflies and three smiling children, [herself], Karim and Amal’ (149). Alternatively, she visualises the moon and Mars as safe havens. When Karim comes to say goodbye before leaving for Abu Dhabi, her chest feels hollow, but she asserts that she would not go there because she does not know anyone there, or even where the city is located on the map. Her sense of emptiness is aggravated mostly, however, by her fear that Naji might become like his father, although her grandmother assures her that this will not happen. Desperate to understand why her father became so inactive, Ruba sits in his armchair, where she finds an envelope, tucked beneath the seat cushion, containing a three-page document which describes a six- to eight-year-old ‘girl made of dust’. Following the description are two lists of ‘Places Searched’ and ‘People Asked’ whose items are all crossed out. Her curiosity is finally satisfied by her grandmother, who, in Chapter 16, divulges the secret of how her father’s dismissal of a poor girl who only wished to follow him to feel protected resulted in her being shot by a Palestinian sniper. Since then, feeling responsible for her death, he has been unable to forgive himself, becoming an emotional invalid. Ruba never tells her estranged brother about her discovery. In Chapter 17, a highly symbolic twist of events sees Naji shot by mistake

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during a firing frenzy by ‘an excited group of boy-men’ (165), specifically of ‘young men dressed in green with big gold crosses round their necks [. . .] chanting an angry chant’ (167). No other scene in the novel condemns sectarianism, masquerading as Lebanese nationalism, as powerfully as this one does. Only Ruba, who implores her brother to return home, is there to witness his fall and ask for help. This time, after seeing her grandmother beseech the Virgin Mary to save Naji’s life, Ruba pounces on this ‘little woman in her blue dress, with both arms outstretched and a pink plastic smile on her plastic face’ (169), bites her crown off, and drinks ‘the holy water from her head, every last drop’ (170). Unable to express in any other way her frustration at what she now recognises as the root of evil, Ruba targets this symbol which, for the moment, seems no less fanatical than those shiny golden crosses on the militiamen’s chests. Ironically, Naji’s hospital bills are settled in cash by Uncle Wadih, who is involved in the selling of stolen ancient artifacts. Naji’s near-miss reanimates his father. Initially supportive of the Christian militias for keeping the village free of left-wing fighters, and grateful for Israeli firepower in support of efforts to cleanse Lebanon of any Syrian or Palestinian presence, Nabeel now yells ‘burn their religion’ (173) in reference to the Christians’, since it was their militants’ celebratory shooting, on Bashir Gemayel’s election as president, which almost killed his son. Furthermore, hearing how many children were killed by the Israelis’ indiscriminate use of force makes the father suddenly ask: ‘Who will judge those who kill children?’ (190). Both father and son heal some of their wounds when Naji asks him to dump the canister filled with his war memorabilia. Yet, unlearning false lessons is a gradual process. When Naji, on crutches, asks if he can go out to watch a ‘bad man’, that is, a Muslim, be dragged behind a car, Nabeel replies: ‘Ach, ya Naji, what have I taught you?’ (202). Later, Ruba learns from an elderly villager that it was Ali, the kind teenager, who had been tortured to death. She sobs hysterically, uncomprehending of this senseless hatred. When she screams at Naji, who ‘didn’t wince or cry’, that Ali is dead, he yells back: ‘So what? He was just . . . just . . . you know’ (211). Ruba, by contrast, expresses her respect by burying the only piece left of Ali: his glass eye, the same one she had found earlier and misperceived as the witch’s ‘evil eye’. Physical wounds heal faster than a sick mind can. The father’s realisation, in the penultimate chapter, that good and

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bad exist in all people cannot magically purge his son’s mind, saturated as it is with hateful teachings. The battles gradually close in on Ein Douwra, making time appear to accelerate, and space for Ruba’s and Naji’s movements is increasingly restricted until confined to the flat, which suddenly ‘seemed small’ (135). The war is at its worst at the end of the novel, where the family and its neighbours are forcibly brought together and confined to a single corridor of the Khouris’ apartment. Yet, Lebanon is not the grave that the mother, Aida, imagined it would be once all the wealthy had left. The meagre comforts of this crowded home manage to ward off death. In the absence of peace, inner peace proves vital. Here we see the fundamental transformation of Nabeel take place when he risks his life to rescue young Amal, Ruba’s friend, from intense shelling, thus reasserting his masculinity and overcoming his traumatic experience of having indirectly caused the death of the nameless poor girl in Beirut. His recuperation, or his return to his altruistic self, might have a positive effect on his children’s future development. No such information is provided by the narrative, except when Naji volunteers to join his father in the dangerous mission to save Amal. Perhaps this girl’s Arabic name, ‘Amal’, which means hope, is meant to suggest keeping the expectation for Naji’s moral rehabilitation alive. Equally suggestive is his own name, ‘Naji’, which means survivor. Yet, Naji’s chances of moving on from his sectarian fanaticism would be stronger if he had the financial means to leave Lebanon. The narrative emphasises this benefit to leaving when Ruba recounts a comment by her mother’s wealthy acquaintance Juhaina in describing her own plans for departure for Canada: ‘I have to think of my son’, she says, adding with a glance at Naji: ‘I can’t let him grow up like that, can I?’ (197). In this novel, children are both the victims and the saviours of adults. The eponymous ‘girl made of dust’ died by Nabeel’s moral negligence and a sniper’s merciless bullet. Karim and Amal (Ruba’s friends) respectively allowed Nabeel to face and, some time later, to surmount his emotional crisis. Naji’s flirtation with joining the militia reminded his father of his absence in his son’s life, in addition to the detrimental influence of his own spouting of sectarian hatreds, which must have encouraged the youth’s decision. Ruba’s verbal mediation between her brother and her father facilitated the recuperation of at least the latter. Through the loss of innocence during

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maturation, the novel describes the growth of maturity as a positive development but also warns that that of self-awareness, if cultivated on the basis of self-differentiation from politically undesirable ‘others’, forms the very basis of (self-)destructive war(s). Conclusion Both A Girl Made of Dust and The Hakawati illustrate the dangers of associating manhood with militarism. Elie was driven by a (mis)conception of heroism and by adolescent fantasies in ideological garb. Naji flirted with a romanticised concept of war as child’s play to defy his father and prove his (misguided) patriotism. In both cases, they were the victims of ‘miseducation’ in the form of political indoctrination. But whereas Elie fought long enough to become utterly disillusioned, Naji stopped just short of battle due to his family’s intervention. Like all those who die in war, fallen childsoldiers never grow older in the perceptions of others; as one critic has noted, however, even those who survive remain children on many levels because irrevocable damage prevents their full development into functioning adults (Walsh 2008: par. 35). Neither Elie nor Naji dies, yet their trajectories show how actual or even potential participation in war can lead to stunted emotional and mental growth. These fictionalised devolutions acquire an active role in the post-war literary negotiation of the psycho-social consequences of the Lebanese conflict on some youths. Delivering their stories emerges as a manifestation – both historical and human – of this disturbing phenomenon. Salah Hassan argues that ‘[i]t is not so much that the violence, violations, and victimizations in Lebanon are unstated as that the many statements have had little effect’, because they remain largely ‘unheard, muffled in the chambers of power politics and world affairs, where effective statements must be backed by force, a force that Lebanon does not possess’ (2008: 1622). Strong statements, like those discussed in this chapter, are being delivered through this nation’s post-war narratives. Like I, the Divine and The Bullet Collection, in particular, The Hakawati and A Girl Made of Dust are anti-amnesiac in the sense of their being positive contributions to the cultural debate about the war’s effects on individual psyches. De Niro’s Game, which will be examined next, goes even further in portraying the effects of militarisation on some Lebanese youths.

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5 De Niro’s Game

s seen in Chapter 4, Elie and Naji played with fire by joining leftist and rightist militias, respectively, and got burned, sustaining both physical and emotional injuries. The first-person narratives of family members – Osama and Ruba – carved out for these two young men a space in which to voice their anger, rebellion and political enthusiasm, as well as their eventual disillusionment and regret. Both were from poor families with no opportunity to leave the war zone and so fought for their visions, however skewed, of Lebanon-as-homeland. In addition to The Hakawati and A Girl Made of Dust’s shared concern with the effects of militarisation on young men, a theme also highlighted in Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game, they featured another equally significant trait, namely dynamic family relations across generations (and, in The Hakawati, across distinct geographical and cultural spaces). Furthermore, it was the hovering presence of fathers in The Hakawati and A Girl Made of Dust which occasioned the narrative acts: Osama’s ruminations and recollections were triggered by a visit to Lebanon to be with his dying father; Ruba’s account was partly fuelled by her curiosity to unravel the secret of her father’s emotional paralysis.

A

De Niro’s Game In De Niro’s Game, both Bassam’s and George’s fathers are dead, and it is their absence which partly explains the sons’ adolescent thuggishness. As in A Girl Made of Dust, this novel’s events are placed within a relatively brief but particularly intense phase of the Lebanese Civil War. Covering the bloody period of May–October 1982, the narrative includes the Israeli invasion in June, the assassination of President-elect Bashir Gemayel,1 and the subsequent massacre by Christian militiamen of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in September.2 128

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Hage received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2008 for De Niro’s Game (2006), a debut novel already translated into more than twenty languages (Sakr 2011: 344).3 Reviewers have praised it for synthesising multiple literary traditions to deliver a blunt yet lyrical portrayal of the detrimental effect of violence on Lebanese civilians, particularly adolescents, caught up in a seemingly interminable war which relentlessly reduces one’s options for survival. Written in English yet invoking Arabic classical poetry and French existentialist philosophy – particularly Albert Camus’s L’Etranger and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mains sales – De Niro’s Game has been hailed as a ‘trilingual hybrid’ (Beale 2008) and as a mosaic of cultural confluences which has enriched Canadian multicultural literature in general and stretched the horizon of Anglophone Arab-Canadian fiction in particular (Gana 2007: 196).4 Najat Rahman believes that writing in English permits Hage a necessary distance from which to tell a story about the identitarian/sectarian conflict of the war in its most intense period (2008: 293). Hage says he deliberately refrained from choosing a title ‘directly referential’ to Arab culture, fully aware of his Western title’s ‘unsettling hybridity’ (cited in Birke 2008). The title is inspired by Michael Cimino’s awardwinning 1978 film The Deer Hunter, about the friendship of two American men from Clairton, Pennsylvania, before and during the Vietnam War.5 Rahman argues that Hage recounts the Lebanese Civil War partly ‘through mediation of other representations of other wars’ (2009: 811), in this case the Vietnam conflict. While this interpretation is largely accurate, Hage performs his task with several twists. Although George, in this novel, carries the nom de guerre De Niro after the American actor Robert de Niro, who plays Mike in The Deer Hunter, his behaviour and outcome resemble those of Nick, played by Christopher Walken. Like the latter, George gets entangled in the chaos of war, becomes addicted to drugs (albeit cocaine rather than heroin)6 and plays Russian roulette to end his own misery. Whereas Mike travels back to Southeast Asia and ends up playing Russian roulette with the emotionally shattered Nick in a failed attempt to reconnect with him by reviving their shared trauma as prisoners of war, George’s mission is to deliver Bassam, believed to have indirectly caused the death of Gemayel, to the Phalange headquarters, but offers him a way out by forcing him to play the same game. Hage has noted that this deadly game, often accompanied by alcohol

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and drug abuse among militiamen, was ‘an extension of a life of violence that starts out directed at the other and then turns inward, as self-loathing’ (cited in Beale 2008). During his exile in Paris, Bassam, the protagonist and narrator, muses: ‘Would I leave myself only one bullet and roll the barrel, like so many young men had in Beirut during the war, after watching the movie The Deer Hunter? Many had died playing De Niro’s game’ (Hage 2007: 234–5). Then he recalls how Roger, a member of their circle, pulled the trigger on himself while high on cocaine yet was hailed as a war hero at his funeral. Initially, Hage says, he wanted to write a short story about an incident he recalled ‘of some kids who started playing Russian roulette after watching The Deer Hunter’ (cited in Christoff 2007: par. 2), which screened in Beirut during the early stages of the war. De Niro’s Game was chosen as the title, therefore, to highlight the link between militia fighting, drug addiction and this deadly game, that is, a battle-related phenomenon among a particular generation. A second, subtler, meaning, however, refers to the game George played, that is, his covert job, revealed much later, as a Mossad agent, unbeknown even to the commander of his Israeli-backed militia. The influence of this movie on Lebanese youth is also stated in Koolaids, when Mohammad recalls: ‘The Deer Hunter started a trend in Lebanon. The militia fighters, particularly the Phalange, started playing Russian roulette’ (Alameddine 1998: 33). Interestingly, in the same vignette he recalls a boy named Georges who, like George in De Niro’s Game, joined the same Christian militia, became a drug addict, took part in a massacre (the Quarantina massacre in January 1976, also mentioned in Hage’s novel) and died playing Russian roulette.7 Another aspect of this novel’s universal appeal can be attributed to the ‘secularist ethos’ (Hage, cited in Sakr 2011: 346), which it shares with Cockroach, and is expressed here through Bassam’s ‘contested’ identity (Hage, cited in Birke 2008). The author explains that he chose an atheistic/secularist protagonist because of his belief that ‘Lebanon has maintained an understated, undermined secular element throughout the past 100 years’ (cited in Christoff 2007: par. 10) despite the sectarian nature dictating its political structure. This secular spirit – expressed in Bassam’s sarcastic declaration that ‘God is dead’ (102) – not only blasts Lebanese political sectarianism as being responsible for initiating and maintaining internecine bloodshed but also attacks all doctrines and practices of organised religion as hypocritical,

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corrupt, oppressive and divisive. Evil, as one reviewer puts it, is the only god reigning in this city splattered by blood and dust and deserted by all except the defenceless, the gangsters, the madmen, and the dogs abandoned by the rich when they escaped to safe havens (Al-Halabi 2008: 14). Furthermore, like Koolaids, De Niro’s Game exerts global reach – most evident in Part III, titled ‘Paris’ – which depicts the war as a game played out by Lebanese factions whose strings are pulled by regional and overseas powers. The conflict is therefore a manifestation of long-standing local hatreds but also of shifting allegiances, as dictated by global politics and fuelled by the interests of neighbouring Syria and Israel, as well as others. Nouri Gana sees this novel as one ‘grappl[ing] with the representation of the violent making and unmaking of the Arab Middle East at the behest of Western and Zionist imperial midwifery’ (2008: 1580). The main contribution of De Niro’s Game, as he sees it, lies ‘not so much in the fictionalization of its historical context as in the historicization of its fictional frame, content, and enormity’ (Gana 2007: 197). In portraying the daily lives and interpersonal relationships of multiple characters within one section of Lebanese society, namely that of Christians living in overwhelmingly Christian East Beirut’s Achrafieh neighbourhood, the novel delivers an acerbic critique of political sectarianism, religious superstition, mafia-like local politics and foreign intervention. In this regard, Hage perceives his novel ‘as a small slice of the collective memory of Lebanon’ (cited in Christoff 2007: par. 15) that combats the perennial governmental policy of deliberate forgetting. Despite the work’s accuracy in relaying war-time events and psycho-social phenomena, its authenticity derives more from acute observations about the victimisation of various members of Lebanese society, with special focus on adolescents. Socio-psychological research into the effects of war on youngsters has been relatively scanty, but new research in this direction has been on the rise.8 Contemporary novels by authors from war-torn countries have been filling in this gap since the late 1990s by featuring child-soldiers and other young victims caught in the vortex of international or internecine wars.9 De Niro’s Game joins these ranks in its focus on selected adolescents’ experiences of war. I agree with Dina Georgis’s belief that this novel refuses to deny its young militants their humanity, to the point of invoking empathy, by ‘complicat[ing] the stakes that underlie the social and emotional conditions

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132 | post-wa r a ng loph o n e l e b a n e s e f ictio n that turn men into war thugs’ (2011: 135) and thus presenting them as ‘neither wholly victims nor wholly perpetrators’ but rather as ‘ambivalent creature[s]’ (139). Similarly, Dalia Mostafa sees George and Bassam as both victims and victimisers, describing their journey ‘through a structured process of violence’ (2011: 21) as a means of compensating for social marginalisation. However, I am troubled by Mostafa’s failure to differentiate between the two in terms of the degree and kinds of violence they commit. Most reviewers have noted this novel’s heterogeneous style, which is by turns bitter, angry, deadpan, poetic and hallucinatory. In comparing De Niro’s Game with Cockroach, to be examined in Chapter 6, James Lasdun describes Hage’s most salient feature as an ability to direct a ‘compulsive efflorescence of imagery at everything’ (2009: 11) on which his narrators settle their minds. Much attention also has focused on the story, told by Bassam, of his and George’s friendship and its inevitable break-up, followed by his escape to France, but particularly on the main characters’ Westernstyle ‘adolescent swagger’ (Jordan 2009), as they pursue adrenaline-pumping activities like motorcycling, womanising, carrying guns, killing, thieving and substance abuse, all of which represent the behaviour of many Lebanese adolescents as they grew up with little or no supervision during the war (Broum 1994: 12). The prime differences between Bassam’s and George’s respective goals and demeanours – encapsulated in the former’s desire to avoid military involvement and leave Lebanon versus the latter’s drive to get ahead by enlisting in the Phalange militia (Kataeb) – represent in Hage’s opinion ‘the bifurcating destinies’ (cited in Richler 2006: par. 7) that lay before Lebanese youth during the war. To leave or not to leave is not only the existential question answered positively by Bassam and negatively by George, respectively, but also one which becomes synonymous, in their cases, with physical survival thanks to departure or with moral degradation and mental deterioration to the point of suicide thanks to staying on. In this chapter, in addition to and in connection with these two characters’ attitudes to Lebanon as the only place in which they have ever lived, I examine the divergent and complex meanings of home to various constituents of this war-shattered country by paying close attention to the many seemingly incidental – and, in previous readings of this novel, barely mentioned

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– secondary characters, in order to provide a comprehensive analysis. Age, gender, socio-economic class, home environment and travel-related experiences are factors which I take into account in order to map out a larger terrain of this novel’s ‘predicament of homelessness’ (Rahman 2008: 293), which academics have so far applied mostly to Bassam. The number 10,000, which appears in the first of the novel’s three epigrams, is taken from ‘The Book of the Prophet Ezekiel’ in reference to the construction of the temple, that is, to measure distance: ‘And the breadth shall be ten thousand [reeds]’ (emphasis in original). This number, used as slang in Lebanon, is also employed by Bassam to depict the enormity and intensity of different things and events, such as bombs and shells falling on Beirut,10 cigarettes smoked, kisses laid on his girlfriend Rana’s body, coffins placed under the ground, how many years the batteries in his mother’s radio seem to last, innocent Palestinians massacred at Sabra and Shatilla, and many others. This poetic refrain helps structure Bassam’s otherwise chaotic narrative. According to Gana, it underscores ‘two contradicting but coexisting visions of the war experience’ (2007: 197), namely exhaustion and excess. Rahman sees it as possibly alluding to A Thousand and One Nights, since Bassam and George, like Scheherazade, have an urgent need to tell stories in order to remain emotionally, and perhaps even physically, alive, and for them, ultimately, the story is the ‘last thing left’ (2008: 294). Another reader sees it as an approximate statistic for the number of Lebanese and Palestinians killed during the Israeli siege of Beirut in summer 1982 (Christoff 2007: par. 19). A fourth views it as a device to enhance the connection between the radical nature of the events described and the radical language needed for this purpose, a feat accomplished by the mixing of different styles. In this regard, he argues, it also helps express the dark nature of human behaviour by stressing the twinning of Eros and Thanatos, such as when Bassam’s and Rana’s bodies during sex are likened to ‘dancing corpses’ (54), the intensity of the act rising with that of the conflict raging outside (Müller 2009). While these interpretations offer interesting insights, I see this recurring number as an oblique reference to Lebanon’s geographical size. My reading is corroborated by Bashir Gemayel’s slogan ‘10,452 square kilometres’, which aimed to emphasise his Phalange party’s opposition to foreign (and especially Palestinian) encroachment of Lebanese sovereignty. Gemayel – a hovering

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yet invisible presence in the text as he directs one part of the military show, and revered by virtually all in East Beirut, except for Bassam, as the saviour of the country – is referred to as ‘al-Rayess’, Lebanese slang for ‘the President’. From this perspective, the recurrent ‘10,000’ device serves to question what the politico-cultural entity called Lebanon means, not only to Phalange ideologues and sympathisers, but also to different characters whose common lot, ironically, is to see it burn. My interpretation is lent support by the author’s general view that ‘[w]ars are all about defining borders’ (cited in Salvador 2006: par. 15). Compared to other novels in this study, De Niro’s Game delivers the most trenchant and comprehensive critique of civil warfare and its psycho-social ramifications from a ground-level perspective. Using a variety of linguistic registers to give a surrealistic feel to a series of harrowing events, Hage comes closest to ‘representing the unrepresentable’ (Hage, cited in Sakr 2011: 348). According to Salah Hassan, in De Niro’s Game, which is neither a fully-fledged post-modern pastiche nor an undiluted political thriller (2008: 1626), Hage’s representation of the conflict ‘negotiates the destruction of the Lebanese state through figures of the unstated, whose very existence questions more generally the state form as the preeminent site of political authority and contributes to unstating the state’ (1621). While denoting the unutterable or repressed, usually because of its grotesqueness, the unstated also describes the condition of a nation-state, here Lebanon, which has little or no political or territorial sovereignty, and therefore no means with which to enforce the rule of law within or at its borders, that is, with Syria and Israel. Therefore, in spite of its de jure existence since 1943, Lebanon has always existed de facto as an unstated state from which issue, as Hassan explains, stateless subjects in the forms of migrants, refugees and exiles (1622). At this level, I therefore focus on the many stories of both internal and external migrations, forced and voluntary, out of and back to Lebanon, which partly define the history of this nation. Structurally, De Niro’s Game features twenty-one chapters divided into three parts: ‘Roma’, ‘Beirut’ and ‘Paris’, respectively containing six, eight and seven chapters. Perhaps the choice of twenty-one (chapters), commonly viewed as a milestone of maturity when denoting an individual’s age, is not coincidental in a text widely seen as a coming-of-age war novel, although the two main characters are only seventeen years old. The Italian capital is not

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usually spelled and pronounced as ‘Rome’, that is, in its Anglicised version, but as ‘Roma’, as it is in Italian but also in Arabic. It is Bassam’s dream city, the one to which he hopes to escape, his ‘promissory elsewhere’ (Gana 2007: 196). His seemingly irrational obsession with it, however, has its reasons. Beirut, known in antiquity as ‘Berytus’, was once renamed ‘Colonia Iulia Augusta Felix Berytus’ in honour of a Roman emperor’s daughter after his forces had occupied it. This invasion, which was not the first and would not be the last, is mentioned on the second page: ‘Beirut is an ancient Roman city’ (49), Bassam affirms. For him, Rome symbolises a secular heaven, that is, the absence of pain thanks to what he believes is a state of nothingness following death. After a girl bleeds to death in his arms, he calls her ‘lucky’ for ‘going to Roma’ (28), then, at her funeral, watches handkerchiefs of mourning being waved ‘toward the Leaning Tower of Pisa’ (30). Two more reasons, one mythological, the other factual, account for the choice of Rome-as-sanctuary. First, Bassam’s narrow and secretive escape by ship from the flames engulfing Beirut parodies Aeneas’s flight from burning Troy in a vessel that ends up in Carthage (itself founded by Phoenicians who originated partly in what is now Lebanon). But unlike the tearful Aeneas who, driven by destiny, initially leaves his wife Creusa and later his lover Dido (originally a Phoenician princess) behind to sail to Latium and found the Roman Empire, Bassam willingly leaves Rana behind in a ‘doomed city’ (275), lands in France, where he has a brief sexual affair with Rhea, George’s half-sister, and later buys himself a train ticket to Rome, where an unknown fate awaits him. Before leaving Lebanon, he states: ‘I did not greet anyone or cry. I was just leaving’ (176). The fact that Rana, Rhea and Rome are all proper nouns beginning with the letter ‘R’ highlights these three landmarks on Bassam’s path from chaos to the unknown. Whereas Aeneas finds a replacement for his ruined city-state by putting down roots in another which sprouts into an empire, Bassam remains territorially and legally a fugitive, an undocumented alien in Europe. Second, many Lebanese teenagers strongly identified with Italy in 1982 after its national football team won the World Cup on 11 July of that year in the midst of the Israeli invasion. Twice, Bassam mentions the posters of Italian ‘football players’ (23, 230) on the wall in his room. In practical terms, however, just about any city, including ‘Rome, Paris, [or] New York’ (116), would be acceptable to him.

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Born in Beirut in 1965, and so having been just ten years old when the hostilities began, Bassam has few pre-war recollections. Moreover, these memories are tainted by an impending war, on the one hand, and by the family’s financial hardship and his ‘broken’ home, on the other. At key junctures, Bassam recalls his childhood in private moments. For example, when George proposes that smuggling imitation whiskey to West Beirut would be a good way to raise money for his dreamed-of escape, ‘images from childhood’ anger him as he remembers two boys pissing in the corner of angled walls, shooting doves with wooden guns, thieving candles with little hands, and swinging wooden sticks to herd car wheels down the city hills, wearing cheap [my emphasis] open sandals [. . .] chasing Indians and African lions with slingshots and crooked arrows [. . .] while surrounded by flames that danced like [their] stolen cigarettes. (107)

As Maha Broum states, many Lebanese children found outlets for their war-time feelings in two ways: through war games and through social withdrawal and emotional regression (1994: 12). This passage indicates how, in the absence of money and watchful parents, impoverished boys use improvised toys as fake weapons to make them feel empowered in an increasingly militarised society. The second option, however, can also manifest itself as a natural by-product of such wayward childhoods, just as silence and harshness of tone come to dominate Bassam’s and George’s respective dealings with others. Bassam’s reticence and avoidance of eye contact infuriate both Rana and Rhea, albeit for different reasons. Quietness is his reaction to a war which ‘spreads silence, cuts tongues, and flattens stones’ (42). He imagines his glass of whiskey to be delivering this statement in a bar, a small space in which intoxication gains the upper hand as a way of coping with a war whose deafening noises may be temporarily drowned out by louder music. Later, on the bank of the Seine to retrieve a gun which he had hidden in the river, Bassam’s reflection by the water triggers a somewhat happier memory of a battle scene. He says: I saw myself as a kid, running behind Al-Woutwat, who was using his AK-47 to shoot from behind sandbags, and I saw myself running after

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warm, empty bullets and collecting them in my shirt, in a kangaroo-pouch shape. And I saw the joy in my face while hopping (like a kangaroo) back home, and later exchanging my treasure with the neighbourhood kids. (247)

This passage showcases how some younger males literally follow in some adults’ footsteps, especially if these ‘role models’ are of the same gender and display an aura of authority. It goes without saying that these youths run the risk of taking on the attributes of their older counterparts, including negative and self-destructive ones. Other childhood memories are shared with interlocutors, such as when Bassam tells Rhea about his and George’s mischievous activities like breaking into a church to steal the donation box and scouring their school’s garbage dump for copies of the French exam, but also about how ‘when the war started when [they] were still kids’ (212), they shifted their attention to collecting empty bullets and artillery shells in exchange for cigarettes. As related in both The Bullet Collection and A Girl Made of Dust, collecting bullets is a common pastime for female and male children during a war. Alaine and Naji did so to feel empowered and in relative control of chaotic situations, only to discard the ordnance later, either to erase all remnants/memories of the war or to resist the temptation of military involvement, respectively. Only George went from collecting memorabilia to actually fighting. Unlike many characters in novels discussed in this study, whose happy childhoods were disrupted by the outbreak of war and later lamented/ reconstructed by means of memory, neither Bassam nor George recognises ‘before’ and ‘after’ the war as distinct periods. Immersed in what seems like an eternal present, they do not perceive their pre-war past as clearly separate from their current lives. George’s comment, ‘We always killed, Bassam’ (183, emphasis in original), although applicable to him but much less so to Bassam, who only kills Rambo to avenge his torture at the latter’s hands, implies the essential sameness of their existence as youngsters whose formative years before and during the war do not seem to differ greatly. For example, whether described in the present or recalled from the spatial and temporal distance which Paris affords, the image of Bassam’s mother’s coming down from the roof with two buckets of water stolen from the neighbour’s reservoir remains

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the same, appearing at the beginning and towards the end of the novel. Whether Bassam is a child or a teenager, in Beirut or in Paris, and whether his mother is alive or dead, the hold of the past persists. Bassam’s recollections of his father as an alcoholic gambler and wifebeater are numerous. His father’s first name and year of death are not specified. We do learn from George, however, that he founded a radio station in the 1950s, that is, long before he was married. Bassam cares little about this since he can only remember how much his parents hated one another. Twice, he sums up his father as a ‘good-for-nothing’ (78, 260) whose only skill was at leaving his family every night. While being slapped by Rambo during his detention, a delirious Bassam repeatedly associates his beatings with the ones his mother suffered at the hands of her husband. Poverty, his mother’s life of sacrifice and dysfunctional family life have largely shaped Bassam’s nihilistic view of life, which the war’s absurdity only sharpens to the extent of seeing his mother’s death as emancipating him from the literal deadlock into which Lebanon had descended and from which he can now break free. Although Christian by birth and upbringing, Bassam is highly critical of Christian dogma. His first name, Bassam, is fairly common and bears no religious marker. Furthermore, unlike many Lebanese surnames, his last name, ‘Al-Abyad’ (meaning the white one), would not unambiguously identify this family’s corresponding religious sect and/or its likely political leaning.11 Born and raised in mostly Christian East Beirut of a Lebanese father and a Lebanese mother of Armenian origin – whose brother-in-law Naeem is denounced by Phalangists as a treacherous communist living in predominantly Muslim West Beirut – Bassam shows no sense of belonging, whether to his home country, to any specific religion or even to a political doctrine. After Bassam lost his father at a young age, however, Naeem showed compassion by buying him books and clothes – and gave him his first life-changing lesson: an assertion that God never existed except as ‘man’s invention’ (49). Later, Bassam’s atheistic tenet that only the here and now exist and that ‘[a]ll else is nothing but human vanity and make-believe’ (260) makes him dismissive of both religious fatalism and sectarian fanaticism as tools for political indoctrination and as justification of violence: as a fabrication of warring factions, God is ‘tribal’ (40), making any war waged in his multiple names blind at best and hypocritical at worst. For example, when Said, a Christian

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co-worker at the port, argues that Christians are victimised in Arab Muslim societies, Bassam surprises himself by replying that Lebanese Christians living in West Beirut are never bothered by Muslims. Said’s rebuttal that this is only so because these Christians are no more than ‘traitors, communists, and socialists’ (135), that is, only nominally Christian – like Elie in The Hakawati according to this politicised view – and his suggestion that Bassam should join their ranks, make this equivalence between Godliness and rightist-cumfascist political ideology doubly objectionable in Bassam’s eyes. In Chapter 11, halfway through both the novel and the summer of 1982, Bassam receives a letter from Naeem delivered by Ali, a Muslim boy from near the ‘Green Line’ dividing Beirut. In it the uncle wonders what his nephew’s life ‘is like on the East Side alone’ (140), that is, with no living parents, and invites him ‘to cross to West Beirut’ (141) and live with him and his family, whom Bassam has never met. The offer to be embraced by a loving family in the ‘other’ Beirut is thus placed at a textual, temporal and spatial midpoint in Bassam’s narrative. Accepting it would mean giving up his dream of leaving Lebanon, having stated on the very first page that ‘[i]t is time to leave’ (15), and either ending his narrative or continuing it in a very different vein. Having grown up in a poor and dysfunctional family and later during a senseless war, he feels no indebtedness to a home country which has given him nothing of value. Furthermore, his feeling of detachment is nourished by a benign hedonism. An earlier piece of advice offered by an anonymous man at a bar, ‘There is nothing in this world, my friend. Nothing is worth it; enjoy yourself’ (42), is one that Bassam seems to have been practising all along. Although raised in East Beirut, Bassam displays both concern and curiosity about the other half of a city to which he often refers as one entity. Having no access to the other side, he often climbs nearby rooftops in order to gain a panoramic view. At night the moon becomes a companion and a witness to the oneness of Beirut as it shines indiscriminately over what he calls ‘my city’ (36). When he feels himself to be suffocating, he takes refuge also in the hills surrounding the city, from which he can see a ‘long, mushroom-shaped cloud [springing] from the earth in West Beirut’ (77). The earth and the moon naturally enfold Beirut, respectively from below and above, despite its artificial division by politics.

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From afar, the demarcation line disappears, offering Bassam a view of the city as a single, undifferentiated grey mass made up of ‘a stretch of little cement hills, crowded buildings with no roads, no lampposts, no humans’ (77). Forced to live in Beirut, he comments sarcastically: ‘I walked in the middle of the street as if I owned it. I walked through the calmest city, an empty city that I liked; all cities should be emptied of men and given to dogs’ (40). The opposite of Bassam’s wish comes true when one phobic resident, afraid of catching rabies from these former pets, manages to convince Nabila, George’s maternal aunt, to ask Abou-Nahra, her former lover and a commander in the Christian militia, to exterminate them. The irrational killing, in Part I, of these displaced dogs, perceived as a mobilised foreign force about to lay a territorial claim to this unwelcoming Christian enclave, is a foreshadowing analogy to the massacre of Palestinian civilians narrated by George at the end of Part II. The sentence describing how the ‘chihuahua was missed twice because of his small size, but was finally shot at close range, under a car’ (66) bears an uncanny resemblance to George’s recollection of how when he ‘lifted the mattress; two small children were huddled in fear under there’ (182) before he shot them dead. Bassam’s cynical comment following this ‘[d]og massacre’ (65) that the ‘Christians won the battle [. . .] of the hundred dogs’ (66) is chillingly proleptic. The victimisation of abandoned dogs parallels that of Palestinians neglected by the world. In both scenes, Hage blurs the distinction between human and non-human subjects and reverses the conventional dog metaphor, as the perpetrators display savage canine qualities in the face of innocent refugee populations. On one level, Bassam hopes not so much to escape from Lebanon as from the songs of ‘the notorious singer’ (15) Fairuz emitted by his mother’s radio for as long as he can remember. He finds her ‘whining’ (16, emphasis in original) because the supposedly glorious and evergreen Lebanon of which she sings is one he never knew. The Beirut Bassam knows is dangerous, dusty, smelly and broken down, with little water or electricity. Hearing Fairuz again on the radio, ‘lamenting through the corridors’ (47) during his detention, becomes even more ironic. At this point in the narrative, the lyrics signal a huge gap between Bassam’s utter dehumanisation in the present and his country’s ostensibly grand history. The free, proud and prosperous Lebanon sounds like a myth, if not a lie, to Bassam’s ears. For his generation, it is at

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best a postmemory, that is, an indirect second-hand memory, as Marianne Hirsch defines the term. In an attempt to recover his dead mother’s presence by holding her battered radio in his arms and looking for Fairuz, Bassam discovers the latter’s sudden absence because, as he comically puts its, ‘she was singing in Paris’ (93). At this intense moment in the war, his comment strips Lebanon of its dubious legacy of peace and prosperity, symbolised by the literal departure of this long-time cultural icon. Nostalgic sadness may be induced in the hearts and minds of an expatriate Lebanese community in Paris, but at home nostalgic and/or melancholic songs can no longer reach ears already deafened by the crash of bombs. As discussed in Chapter 4, Samira Aghacy argues that the interior of a home can be a place of regression and marginalisation as well as a refuge that safeguards personal identity and social values during war. Oftentimes male characters trapped in war zones search their dwelling places ‘to achieve a stable, coherent and noncontradictory identity’ (2003: 83) and find a modicum of security. This view of the value of the home does not apply to this post-war novel. Bassam only uses the word ‘home’ or the phrase ‘my mother’s home’ denotatively to refer to the apartment in which he lives. This living space is purely physical, devoid of any emotional significance or protective potential. In the first paragraph of Chapter 2, Bassam offers a grim description of their kitchen, now partly shattered by one of the proverbial 10,000 bombs whose ferocity ‘had split the winds’ (21). The ‘wide-open hole in the wall’ and ‘the broken glass window’ (21), caused by the blast which had killed his father before the novel began, literalise the disappearance of this barrier’s potential to shield the private interior from the public exterior. Bassam comments sarcastically that this gaping hole offers ‘a splendid view of the vast sky’ and will not be fixed until winter, ‘until the rain fell and washed away the soil above all the corpses [they’d] buried’ (21). Towards the end of Part I, Bassam rejects his mother’s and her neighbour Nahla’s pleas to take refuge with them in the shelter during an artillery attack. Unlike the protagonist in Cockroach, who seeks anonymity and peace anywhere down below, far from sunlight, Bassam ‘always hated the underground’ (157) and refuses to hide in such a dark place, insisting that he ‘would die only in the open air above an earth of muddy soils and whistling winds’ (78). Ironically, while trying to deter Nahla from searching for her children outside, a shell ‘penetrat[es]’ (85)

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his bedroom, where he had defiantly wished to stay ‘between [its] two walls’ (84), killing his mother instead. This dwelling not only fails to provide for Bassam a safe space in which to collect his thoughts, as we see him doing on the very first page ‘lying on a blue sofa covered with white sheets to protect it from dust’ (15), but also becomes the site from which to collect his parents’ remains amid ‘pieces of broken furniture’ (90). This double loss of life is now symbolised by ‘the two large holes in the house’ through which ‘[o]nly the wind entered; only the wind could’ (90). In his study of the ruins motif in Lebanese war fiction, Ken Seigneurie argues that the standing-by-the-ruins, in reappropriating a common theme of classical pre-Islamic Arabic odes, ‘sets in motion the mental processes that condition the conviction [if not the reality] that human life is possessed of innate dignity’ (2008: 53) regardless of how an ongoing war may compromise it.12 Three features, he argues, typify this psycho-literary dynamic: it comes about as a response to brutalities; it is utopic because of its yearning for the impossible ideal of human dignity; and it is an effort of the conscious will to resurrect pristine pre-war scenes in order to maintain hope and provide the strength needed to endure misery in the midst of destruction (59). De Niro’s Game abounds in descriptions of atrocities but does not display any of these features. When George, before leaving for military training in Israel, asks Bassam how Lebanon is to be cleansed of Syrians and Palestinians, he responds: ‘I am fleeing and leaving this land to its devils’ (82). Accused of believing in nothing, Bassam replies: ‘Thieves and thugs like us [. . .] since when have we ever believed in anything?’ (82). Despite his thuggishness, which, according to Hassan, is a ‘romantic self-image that collapses lawlessness and freedom’ (2008: 1627), Bassam repeatedly acts in a humanitarian way towards innocent and needy individuals. But his nihilistic attitude towards life in general and towards Lebanon in particular makes him mourn nothing and no one. He does not wish to endure the present in hopes of better times which might resemble a decent past he has never known. Through dialogues, direct observations and personal mini-narratives, De Niro’s Game paints a large canvas of migrations, displacements and returns of characters of diverse ages and backgrounds. Many of those who stay do so because of a lack of funds and/or connections. Rana Damouny is ‘sick of the war and the people here’ (110) and urges Bassam to take her with him to

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Rome. When she gives up on this dream because of his mounting reluctance, she redirects her attention to George, on the rise in the militia, and becomes his sexual plaything. What motivates her first and foremost is her need for safety, which, if she cannot leave Lebanon, may alternatively be guaranteed, as she perceives it, by attaching herself to a man with weapons, political sway and money. Like Mariella and Lina in The Hakawati, for whom Elie’s sexual allure was magnified by his links to the militia, Rana falls for George in uniform, displaying a newly adopted militarised view that equates ‘manliness’ with the ‘legitimized’ use of aggression and violence (Myrttinen 2003: 37). Contrary to George and Bassam, some young men – unburdened by family problems, radical mindsets, political allegiances and/or drug addiction – manage to escape the war without losing their connections to their birthplace. For example, Saad, Bassam’s new neighbour who fled with his family when armed men began slaughtering farmers in his hometown, leaves for Sweden after obtaining an entry visa and throwing a farewell party attended by Bassam and George. Surrounded by supportive relatives, Saad hopes to make money abroad before returning to marry a local woman. Hearing Saad’s mother make him promise to return, Bassam muses that ‘those who leave never come back’ (33). Another example is Ziad, who left during the war and sends money from the US to his middle-class father, Samir Al-Afhameh, an attorney made unemployed by the destruction of his office in Beirut. Despite the distance, this close-knit family of a hard-working son, a father and a mother tries to stay in touch through patchy phone lines. Other fathers work abroad to support their wives and children, including one neighbour who toiled ‘in the burning fields of sand and oil’ (29) in Saudi Arabia, to which he could not relocate his family, then returned for the funeral of his daughter after a bomb had sent her, in Bassam’s words, ‘to Roma’ (28). Leaving is easiest, perhaps, for women who marry foreigners, like Souad, a former teacher who followed this path to France. The most interesting and extensive migration story is told in Chapter 10 by Laurent Aoudeh, an elderly repatriated Lebanese who made his fortune in diamonds in Africa until the impoverished natives revolted and forced him and others like him to leave. He tells Bassam that his plan as a young man from a Lebanese village was to join his French uncle in an unnamed Francophone nation in sub-Saharan Africa, make money quickly, return to

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the hill in his village, ‘build a house and get married to a decent local girl’ (125). His narrative forms part of a wider bitter-sweet reflection on the success of Lebanese businessmen at the expense of indigenous Africans. Back in Lebanon at an advanced age, he still hoped to marry a virgin and live on ‘that childhood hill’ (126). He therefore married Nicole (whom he aptly nicknamed Bébé), a much younger woman whom he met on that hill and, having nothing else to offer, lured with money before taking up residence in Achrafieh’s affluent Surssok neighbourhood. To him, she is ‘a home, a daughter, and a wife’ (126). Afraid that she might ask him to leave Lebanon (again), he is willing to purchase heroin from George, whom he obsequiously calls ‘un vrai guerrier’ (a real warrior) (101), to feed her addiction, and even to watch her perform oral sex on him. His nostalgic sense of having finally created a family in Lebanon resists acknowledging the reality of war. It becomes a selfish desire to ‘spend [his] last days close to that hill’ (127) at any cost. Despite feeling threatened by George and realising at some point that it may be wise to leave this neighbourhood because ‘c’est devenu vraiment dangereux ici’ (it has become really dangerous here), he remains, insisting instead that his destiny is ‘to be an exile, always an exile’ (144). Laurent’s long exile abroad in Africa has now been replaced by an internal one characterised by a spiritual homelessness due to a physical threat and a justified feeling of persecution. His African diamonds, which Bassam finds later in George’s car, have made him a target for murder in his own homeland. Laurent is eventually killed by George, who later kills Bébé too, as she wanders aimlessly on that same hill. George makes it impossible for Laurent, a member of a much older and now repatriated generation which did not grow up in war, to resettle in the homeland. As a drunken George had vowed earlier at a nightclub in Broummana, ‘an expensive refuge [town] for the wealthy’, ‘I will fuck them all’, in reference to a few rich clients whom he calls ‘sons of bitches’ and ‘whores’ (43). The main roots of his anger are revealed when he blurts out: ‘I have no father, and no mother, and no God’ (43). He lost his mother to cancer at a young age, ‘never [knew or] mentioned his father’ (38), and had a ‘distant uncle’ (61) somewhere with no ties to him. He lives alone with ‘a photo of his dead mother’ (38) on the wall. His feelings as an actual and spiritual orphan are compensated for by money and military power.

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George’s emotional and mental instability is partly reflected by his multiple appellations. Born out of wedlock to a Lebanese mother, Jamal, and a French diplomat, he carries his mother’s surname, Machrouky, but is referred to as George al-Faransawi (the Frenchman) and teasingly as ‘the bastard’ (212). Nabila calls him ‘Gargourty’ (loosely, my Georgie), ‘a nickname from childhood that made him feel uncomfortable’ (22), preferring his nom de guerre De Niro. Only in Part III is the name of his father, Claude Mani, a French Jew who had worked for the Mossad, revealed. George attempts to compensate for this parental void by adopting filial relationships with political father figures, like his fifty-plus-year-old district commander, AbouNahra, a former Arabic-language teacher, and remotely with Al-Rayess, the godhead whose death he avenges by butchering Palestinians. Violence in George and Bassam, as Dina Georgis argues, revolves around the father, whether real or symbolic (2011: 139). Fallen fathers, represented in this case by the assassinated Al-Rayess, as she explains, signify ‘the flimsiness of the symbolic law that is always subjected to history’s intensities’ (140). Yet, like filial loyalties, fraternal bonds with fellow Christian combatants and friends succumb to George’s selfish interests, such as greed and revenge. Hage expresses the nefariousness of war, in part, by portraying warriors from different age groups to underscore its generational/historical nature and expose its detrimental effect on youngsters. Based on UNICEF’s definition of a child-soldier as ‘[a]ny person under 18 years of age who is part of any kind of regular or irregular armed force or armed group in any capacity’ (cited in Rosen 2005: 9), Hage’s militarised adolescents would legally qualify as child-soldiers and not as adult combatants. His choice of making Bassam, George and their friends seventeen and not eighteen is to incriminate unambiguously the adults whose corruptive influence contributes to transforming them into thugs by exploiting their masculinities. Examples of older fighters include Abou-Tariq, a foreman at the port and an ‘old combatant’ (133) who fought in the battle of Tal-Alzatar in 1976; Abou-Nahra led the Quarantina massacre in the same year. Political ideology has divided many men of the older generation, like Abou-Nahra and Naeem Al-Abyad, who before the war had been on the same volleyball team but are now mutually hostile militia commanders. There are several reasons for the participation of child-soldiers in war,

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including pressure from adults, a desire for monetary gain and social prestige, a revolutionary ideal to overthrow a despotic regime and desperation to repel a foreign invader. However, these and other categories may overlap or apply to different phases in some youngsters’ military careers (Anyinefa 2006: 88). In the case of the Lebanese Civil War, Hage stresses additional motivations: boredom and a desire to become sexually attractive by proving one’s manhood (cited in Richler 2006: par. 10). Since this war was conducted by factions backed by regional and international powers with opposing political visions of Lebanon, the third reason for this phenomenon does not apply. As political psychologist Meredith Watts demonstrates, regardless of political content or direction, the tendency for aggressive expression rises in the early teens and peaks during adolescence, between seventeen and eighteen (1999: 478, 481–2). Indeed, George starts out as a bored, drug-addicted, impoverished and aimless troublemaker until he is press-ganged into volunteering for the militia by Abou-Nahra. Initially unpaid, he continues to make a living through petty theft and working in a poker joint. His progression continues until, as a paid and trained officer, he lures Rana away from Bassam, punctuating his military evolution as devolution from a delinquent teenager to a morally and mentally expired soldier. The significance of relatively small age differences made more important by the rapid development of adolescence is highlighted throughout. When stopped at a checkpoint by an AK-47-toting militiaman, Bassam sees that he is a ‘young kid’ (44), yet he demonstrates considerable experience and seriousness. When accused by this youth’s superior, a ‘man in his thirties’, of being a thief by virtue of his working at the port, Bassam answers: ‘We are all thieves in this war’ (45). Photos of ‘dead young men’ killed in combat are ‘framed in little shrines’ (40) as saintly martyrs and posted along the streets. At least three of Bassam’s classmates, Joseph Chaiben, Kamil Alasfar (both sporting beards to prove their manhood) and George, join the militia. In downtown Beirut, a fourteen-year-old Muslim named Hassan, interested in looting, points his AK-47 – which ‘looked twice his weight, and thrice his age’ (120) – at Bassam and Joseph. After the latter subdues Hassan, Bassam comments that the teen ‘sobbed like the kid that he was’ (121) and allows him to escape. The transient and ludicrous nature of war is also highlighted, such as when Joseph says he refrained from killing a Muslim fighter because

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they had ‘promised each other’ (59) to have a drink once the fighting ends, and when religion becomes irrelevant during business transactions like trading in whiskey. In fact, some battles in the downtown area were almost certainly staged, with enemy fighters crossing one another’s barricades and, with the help of alcohol, even embracing one another (Beyhum 2000: 94, 147). Occasionally, neighbours voice their honest opinions about Bassam, George and their ilk. Abou-Dolly, the grocer whose family Bassam threatens with a gun as he shops for sanitary pads for his neighbour Petra during her first menstruation, blurts out: ‘A thug! That is what you are, my son, a thug. And he spat on the floor and cursed my generation and my kind [my emphasis]’ (80). Perhaps no image of the growing pains of both male and female adolescents in the post-war Anglophone novel speaks louder than the following in which Bassam, referring to himself in the third-person mode, muses: ‘The thug walked [. . .] avoiding the falling bombs [. . .] He walked with a gun in one hand and a box of tender cotton in the other’ (80). A few pages earlier, during Khalil Al-Deeq’s funeral, the dead man’s sister screams at a uniformed George: ‘You people killed my brother. You are all thugs and criminals to take young men to war. He was seventeen [. . .] A baby, seventeen!’ (76). Two trenchant ironies are at work here: first, George is actually the same age as the fallen fighter; and second, it was he personally, not the Phalange party’s cause, who killed Khalil. Khalil’s poster, which commemorates him as ‘The hero [. . .] martyred on the front line defending his beloved country’ (69), is mocked by the fact that he died at the hands of a supposed comrade-in-arms. As one reviewer has casually yet rightfully stated, numerous are the mother figures without whom not a spark of optimism would exist in this dark novel (Al-Kahramani 2008: 19). Bassam’s mother and Nabila shower their affections on both Bassam and George, whether by offering food or money for education and travel, respectively. Speaking of Joseph’s mother, Bassam comments: ‘Her words echoed my mother’s’ (75). Nabila saves Bassam’s life by convincing Abou-Nahra to release him from captivity. She nurses him back to health, has sex with him, which he had always craved, and offers him money, which he refuses, as well as the address of George’s father in Paris. Nabila, who had habitually invoked the Virgin Mary, now curses Abou-Nahra, Jesus and his disciples in the same breath for allowing

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Bassam to be tortured. Her outcry of anger deriving from loss of faith in the protective power of Christian symbols matches in intensity a scene from A Girl Made of Dust in which a young Ruba smashes a figurine of the Virgin after learning about Ali’s torture by Christian militiamen. In De Niro’s Game, maternal figures play a role in lessening the void felt by orphaned youngsters, but they die or remain ‘all alone in a war’ conducted by men or, as Nabila puts it, by ‘dogs with guns’ (65). In many Lebanese war novels, as Aghacy has shown, Beirut is overpowered by the fear-inspiring, phallic dominance of masculine power, and for some women it is transformed into a hostile male body (2001: 507). Nabila’s view of all men benefiting from this war as simply different kinds of dogs illustrates Aghacy’s argument in a single paragraph. The loss of parents at an early age, whether due to war, divorce, illness or departure, has a huge effect on youngsters who stay in the conflict zone. In I, the Divine, Lamia’s total estrangement from her mother Janet following her parents’ divorce instigated a mental instability which was aggravated by the war, as revealed in her letters. Like George, she used her profession (in her case nursing) as both pretext and means to kill undesirable individuals before ending her own life. Similar to Lamia but also to Elie in The Hakawati, George has an irrepressible need to verbalise his horrid experiences. Since Bassam refuses to get involved in the militia yet is the one through whom the narrative is told, Hage uses George as an internal narrator, a participant observer, in order to provide an inside scoop on specific battles and massacres in the form of eyewitness accounts. This technique of inserting mini-horror stories within Bassam’s foreground narration serves to inform the reader of events taking place in the novel’s timeframe. Incidents of death and injury to individual civilians, as discussed earlier, are told by Bassam as eyewitness. Only once does he narrate a collective event, namely the massacre of Kurds at the Quarantina camp, as he and George ride a motorbike through the meadow where the camp once stood. George, on the other hand, supplies several stories of battle-related incidents of which both Bassam and the reader would otherwise remain ignorant. All include comments which define his view of Lebanon as a country which needs to be freed of all Arab presence. One narrative concerns the death of a fellow Phalange fighter in an ambush, and George warns that the tale is ‘a long story’ (128) to be told leisurely over bottles of beer. Once Bassam acqui-

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esces, George ‘talk[s] without stopping’ (128), as Elie had done to a reluctant Osama at a bar in The Hakawati. George says: ‘They are coming from all over the world to fight us, Bassam, here in our land. Palestinians, Somalis, and Syrians’ (132). As Salah Hassan shows, George’s political ideology, supported by Israel, aims to salvage a Lebanon seen as ‘unstated’ by intrusive Arab elements associated with leftist political and military forces in West Beirut. Georgis explains George’s fanatical loyalty to the Phalange party as a form of identification with ‘the absent presence of his French ancestry’, wherein his absent French father represents metonymically ‘the colonial phantom limb of Lebanon’ (2011: 143) that supports the anti-Arab, Phoenician-based and racialised Maronite Christian brand of Lebanese nationalism. By contrast, Bassam sees the Christian forces’ allies as the foreign invaders. At the beginning of Chapter 12, in reference to the June 1982 invasion, he declares: ‘Israeli soldiers entered our land, splitting rivers and olive trees’ (148). These two opposed positions, staked out by two friends, highlight according to Hassan ‘an ideological cleavage’ in Lebanon, which showcases ‘another version of its twoness’ (2008: 1627). Bassam’s description of George and himself as ‘horny Arabs [my emphasis] [. . .] with Marlboro packs [. . .] and long American jeans’ (17), that is, as Westernised Arabs, is one with which his friend would only partially agree, being himself a half-European who sees Arabs as political fiends to be defeated with American and Israeli support. As Miriam Cooke argues, there can never be one history or one story about war that has a greater truth value than another. Instead, it is the body of his(her)stories stemming from different perspectives on the same event that allows its most reliable reconstruction. Most significantly, she explains: Each story told by someone who experienced a war, or by someone who saw someone who experienced a war, or by someone who read about someone who saw someone who experienced a war, becomes part of a mosaic of many colours and shapes which make up the totality of that war. (1996: 4)

De Niro’s Game presents three such layers/levels of narration. Bassam, a besieged listener forced to hear George out, is one step removed from his friend’s war tales. In Paris near the end of the novel, he becomes the one to impose his narration, one part of which had been told by George – ‘the massacre at the camp’ (273) – upon Rhea, who is two steps removed from

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these tales and, like Bassam, initially resists hearing them. This is Hage’s way of showing readers how war stories, however bathed in blood, need to be told eventually, in their entirety, and to as many people as possible for the respective benefits of catharsis and edification to the tellers and the listeners. George’s insistence that ‘[n]o one is going anywhere, not before [he] finish[es] talking’ (181) echoes the author’s attempt to ‘tell it all’ (178), however selectively, piecemeal, and through task-specific narrators. Rahman contends that the story of the massacre, told by George while snorting cocaine, constitutes the central trauma of a war of dehumanisation in this apocalyptic novel. It is located strategically at the work’s centre, where the betrayal of friendship is followed by a final split. In the telling of the massacre story, the limits of narrative to apprehend and verbalise the experience of butchering Palestinians as villainous others in George’s ‘homeland’ are evident in his appeal to multiple discourses – heroics, Christian sentiment and Hollywood action movies – none of which he can sustain to fully represent the horrific deed (2008: 295). What these three discourses have in common is a ‘military logic’ which, as Danny Kaplan states, ‘works to accomplish its missions through a process of dehumanization’ (2000: 133) of those deemed undesirable and threatening. Fictionalising the reality of the massacre does not dilute its barbarism; however, Hage’s invoking of the final Russian roulette ‘scene in that movie [The Deer Hunter]’ (178) casts George as a victimising victim. He breaks into tears and regresses in a hallucinatory moment of ‘undifferentiation’ (Rahman 2009: 811) of identities, conflating a Palestinian woman whose children he had slaughtered with his own mother, because the former called him ‘my son’ (Hage 2007: 182) and asked him to finish her off. The narrative reconstruction of this horrific event cannot possibly ‘contain the full scale of sadness and craziness but also freedom and occasional euphoria experienced inside violence’ (Haugbolle 2010: 159). If violence, as Lee Clark Mitchell argues, is ‘less a means than an end in itself’, whose purpose is ‘less defeat or destruction than [. . .] display’ (1998: 169), then not only participating in but also narrating a specific event in which one participated becomes a spectacle, and one which might end with a literal bang, as it does here. For as both Rhea and the reader only learn in the last chapter, George follows up his recounting of the Sabra and Shatilla horror by insisting on a game of Russian roulette and demanding that Bassam fire first.

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After the latter clicks on an empty chamber, George finally gets his chance to re-enact the memorable scene from The Deer Hunter and to escape his own inner ‘torture chambers’ (183), which he does. And so, Lebanon, initially a playground, becomes his graveyard. Only in this scene, and even here only twice (180, 183), does Bassam refer to George as De Niro, manifesting the narrator’s own realisation of how far his friend has gone in implementing his theatrical (self-)destruction. After burying George under a bridge, Bassam steps into the Mediterranean Sea to cleanse himself of his friend’s blood, but also of his own ‘sins, of this burning land, [and] of [his] loved ones’ (276). This is an act of deliberate selfpurgation reminiscent of Sarah’s in I, the Divine. Like Sarah but to a much lesser degree, he exhibits the ‘Macbeth effect’, that is, the desire for moral and emotional purification through an overpowering need for bodily cleansing. On board the ship ‘mov[ing] away from [his] home’ (188), Bassam tries to spot ‘[his] neighbourhood’ (191), that is, his microcosmic home within a country largely unknown to him. ‘Home’ refers to Lebanon as a barren homeland, but the two parts of this compound noun are never joined in the text. Instead, Lebanon is designated in flippant terms like ‘my chunk of land’ (191). In an earlier scene, by driving ‘faster than the wind’ on George’s motorbike, Bassam had imagined himself to be ‘escaping time and space, like flying bullets’ (44). Later, as he is about to escape Lebanon-as-place, he sits ‘very still’ as he tries to make his mind ‘stay blank for a long time’ (187). Part III, however, will describe nothing like the clean break he so ardently desires. Contrary to his hopes, past experiences re-emerge in personal encounters, imagination, memories and nightmares. Elias Khoury states that civil wars can be erased from neither reality nor memory. Instead, they are ‘reborn or reincarnated’ (2002: 176); if ‘[e]rased from memory, they colonize the subconscious’ (176–7). With actual warfare finally behind him, war’s effects continue to manifest themselves in Bassam’s psyche and behaviour. Neither a legal immigrant nor a tourist,13 he remains exilic, combining the earlier figure of the rogue with the new one of the refugee, thus embodying ‘the unstated subject loose in the world and the Romantic antiheroic outlaw’ (Hassan 2008: 1622–3). The narrative style in Part III, which covers about one month in Paris, is alternately hard-edged and poetic. Bassam’s post-war illusions, however, are induced neither by

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hashish smoking nor by physical torture. He imagines heroic acts to ‘justify [his] existence’ and ‘legitimize [his] foreign feet’ (Hage 2007: 197), adopting the persona of a French Resistance member, that is, a ‘victorious soldier’ (209) fighting for democracy and freedom. Doing so allows him psychologically to efface the difference between citizens and illegal migrants like himself (Hassan 2008: 1628). These imaginings are consciously experienced. Bassam muses: ‘I sat and compared what I saw to what I had imagined from the stories about Paris my history teacher, Mr Davidian, had told us’ (207). This allows him to reconnect with ‘the phantasm of [his] youth’, thus lessening his alienation and offering him a belated chance to ‘defend this city’ (208) which, unlike Beirut, is worth dying for because of the legitimacy of its classbased, not sectarian, struggle. Afraid of being dismissed as insane, he keeps this vibrant inner life hidden from Rhea. In moments of immediate danger and/or acute anxiety, Bassam’s imaginary actions, used as coping mechanisms, become more intrusive and frequent. At first, Paris is contrasted with Beirut. Its streets are ‘wider [. . .] the building facades cleaner, and the cars almost never honked’ (207). While spaciousness and spotlessness are appreciated, quietness is not. Since it ‘has no falling bombs [,] Paris is a mute city’ (226), making Bassam miss his walks under bombardment. Somehow, the Jardin du Luxembourg conjures in his mind an image of his ‘deserted home’ (213), overrun by cobwebs. His nostalgia is for familiar sounds, not familiar sights. Earlier, during a hashishinduced hallucination in Lebanon, Bassam had enjoyed ‘a vision of trees and plains, and a house – an open house, and shadows and a sun that travelled in a straight line and not in a circle’ (82). Only mind-altering substances had enabled him to briefly escape the war by overcoming feelings of spatial constriction and experiencing freedom and joy. In conversation with Rhea, he takes liberties with the realities of the city he left behind: ‘when I saw how happy she was, I changed names, I planted trees, I painted the concrete houses in our old neighbourhood in tropical colours, I made people dance and laugh, even under the falling bombs’ (212). Beirut is pretty only if so painted by hashish or by deceiving words, that is, when unconscious desires or the conscious manipulation of facts make it so. Interestingly, George’s physical appearance is unveiled only in Part III upon Rhea’s questioning. We learn that George was skinny, had green eyes, dark skin, straight black

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hair and a hooked nose. Painting a true picture here serves to humanise, not aestheticise, this young man gone astray. Like Sarah in I, the Divine and Marianna in The Bullet Collection, Bassam displays symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder triggered in exile, specifically by his predicament in Paris, that is, by ‘an event at some later point of intense emotional crisis’ (Whitehead 2004: 6, emphasis in original) following traumatic experiences. However, unlike Sarah’s and Marianna’s symptoms, which were prompted by personal incidents and realisations, his surface in a new web of political intrigue which directly threatens his life. Looking through his hotel window, Bassam senses how the ‘sun shone strong and low, which made Paris slide into Mediterranean heat’ towards ‘North African shores’, making him feel ‘dizzy’, ‘sick’ and ‘deeply anxious’ (228). Involuntary memories of hot, dusty Beirut invoke Bassam’s miasmatic visions of personal heroism during the Second World War in sandy North Africa. Involuntary auditory memories of sharp noises, like the clanging of doors at the Phalange detention centre and that of the apartment door each night his father left to go gambling, are triggered by the sound of a cigarette lighter. He breaks into a profuse sweat and calls reception to ask for vinegar, hoping to ‘wet a piece of cloth [. . .] and lay it on [his] forehead, just as [his] grandmother had done when [he] was young and had a deadly fever’ (229). Similar to the recollection of French history lessons from school, he hopes it will revive in him a pre-war feeling of well-being from childhood. When the Algerian receptionist dismisses his request, all Bassam can muster is the single word ‘khall’ – Arabic for vinegar – before his interlocutor hangs up. Unable to secure vinegar, he suffers a severe bout of hallucination before falling asleep, waking thirsty and sweat-soaked. Although still confused about the border between reality and fantasy, he realises as he showers that his fever has broken. Despite having left the war zone, Bassam remains in possession of a gun that not only continues to symbolise his harsh past but also saves his life against racist thugs, whom he curses in Arabic, upon arriving in Marseilles. Without a weapon under his pillow, he feels vulnerable. As Irene Visser notes, symptoms of PTSD may appear almost ‘immediately or many years after the event’ (2011: 272). Bassam feels the full effects within a month, while for Marianna (in The Bullet Collection) it takes a year and for Sarah (in I, the Divine) more than a decade. PTSD symptoms include reliving a

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traumatic experience via recurrent dreams of the event (Lim 2000: 65). After attacking Moshe, a Mossad agent, for having assaulted Rhea, Bassam has a ‘series of nightmares’ (259) that night combining past and present threatening figures: George, Rambo and Roland (Moshe’s boss). After waking up ‘in a sweat’, ‘flashbacks’ (259) of traumatic moments invite his self-reassurance of two facts: the dead do not return as ghosts to haunt the survivors; and being able to smoke now, unlike during his detention, proves that he is in Paris and no longer in Beirut. Another manifestation of cognitive therapy as a means of self-healing is Bassam’s reading of Camus’s 1942 novel L’Etranger, which provides an intellectual, and particularly an existential, context in which to review his past and reappraise his personal agency in deciding his future in the midst of political intrigue which, like the war, reduces his options. Therefore, he is not a ‘Meursault in reverse’, as Gana states (2007: 198), but a war-traumatised adolescent, quick to defend his life against new aggressors and keen, at last, on assuming moral responsibility. Inspired by the novel, he imagines himself addressing a prosecutor in a courtroom: ‘We all agreed to participate. It was our choice [. . .] We all acted out of our own convictions, and out of passion’ (236–7), adding that ‘reason is a useful fiction’ (237). Here, reason refers to the ways in which any (political) motivation may be rationalised and justified when placed in a convenient context, thus becoming a tool for spinning stories about oneself to achieve a modicum of catharsis. While examining a newspaper photo of a street littered with wounded people following a carbombing in his Achrafieh neighbourhood, he tries in vain to recognise familiar faces. Placing the torn-out page on the desk and reading L’Etranger instead illustrates his attempt to understand human motivation more abstractedly, a process which the ‘disconcertingly factual’ article, ‘without story or investigation’ (242) and therefore emblematic of the war itself, cannot instigate. Conclusion While the ending remains indeterminate, Rahman contends that it implies a new beginning in a fictional work that ‘allows for a vision of history where the human’s quest for freedom and relation opens to a future’ (2009: 801). After getting the stories of his and George’s heavy past entirely off his chest, Bassam purchases a train ticket to Rome, ready to fulfil his earlier dream, but now as

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a light traveller with much less emotional baggage. If granted asylum, Bassam may find (or forge) in Rome a second home but in Italy a true first homeland, which he grows to know well, respect and even love, while Lebanon, the original yet nominal homeland, slowly recedes from consciousness as an unlamented wasteland.

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6 Cockroach and A Good Land

have chosen to juxtapose Nada Awar Jarrar’s third novel, A Good Land, with Rawi Hage’s second, Cockroach, because of their treatments of the respective themes of repatriation/homecoming and expatriation/exile, and the corresponding portrayals of lives spent, in the present, entirely in or outside of Lebanon. The epigram preceding A Good Land is a telling quotation from Austrian psychiatrist, existential analyst and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl:

I

For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.

The unnamed protagonist in Cockroach, convinced he never had a purpose in life to begin with and feeling neglected by the universe to the point of attempting suicide, finally finds the appropriate moment to infuse exilic existence with a meaning relative to him, one that brings him as close as possible to ‘being at home’. By contrast, Layla, in A Good Land, returns to Lebanon for the purpose of physically being at home and resuming a life interrupted by war and long years spent abroad in anticipation of this moment. Cockroach In The Writer as Migrant, the first-generation Chinese-American scholar and writer Ha Jin1 states that many ‘exiles, emigrants, expatriates, and even some immigrants are possessed with the desire to someday return to their native lands’; it is this nostalgia, he argues, which oftentimes ‘deprives them of a sense of direction and prevents them from putting down roots anywhere’ (2008: 63). Their physical displacements can be so painful as to impair their views of their present and future in the new habitat. 159

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In Cockroach (2008),2 the unidentified protagonist and first-person narrator from Lebanon (also never mentioned but unmistakably implied)3 challenges Jin’s view in more ways than one. The first peculiarity concerns his being both an immigrant and an exile. Although he arrived in Canada on a fake visa seven years before the novel opens, he subsequently obtained the status of a war refugee and therefore legal residency. Of the novels discussed in this study, only Hage’s focus on underprivileged characters forced to break one or more laws in order to escape war-torn Lebanon. All the others can and do emigrate legally and lead decent lives abroad, all thanks to having the necessary finances, education, family connections, chaperoning parents and/ or dual nationalities at their disposal. This character’s stay in Montreal has been long enough for him to acquire rights and benefits but also responsibilities and obligations. His status entitles him to employment and to a monthly welfare cheque but also requires him to attend court-imposed psychotherapy sessions after a failed attempt to hang himself. On the other hand, his narrative features the demeanour and ruminations of an exile, cut off from his native land, yet neither willing nor able to put down roots abroad like the stereotypically eager and grateful immigrant. He says early on: ‘I cursed my luck. I cursed the plane that had brought me to this harsh terrain’ (Hage 2009: 8) in ‘this northern land’ (4). So although technically an immigrant, he remains emotionally and behaviourally an exile, albeit one whose nostalgia, like his cultural/national self-identification, is peculiar. In A Forgetful Nation, Ali Behdad states that in the age of globalisation ‘the immigrant experience is increasingly marked by a lifetime of traveling back and forth between old and new “homes”’ (2005: x). Direct and continual reconnection with the native country, however, can only be maintained if frequent travel remains affordable. Poverty makes the original homeland accessible only indirectly, through communication with loved ones still living there, the sharing of memories and cultural items within one’s diasporic community, and/or personal acts of conscious and unconscious remembering. Only the last of these three applies to Cockroach’s protagonist, whose responses to this predicament are shaped by a highly unconventional psyche. With neither the financial means to return, provided he wishes to do so, nor the willingness to engage other diasporic Lebanese, his emotional ties, as revealed through his memories, are not to Lebanon per se but to his

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dead sister. These memories are stimulated and elicited, on the one hand, by the force of law embodied by the psychotherapist Genevieve and delivered directly in a somewhat systematic fashion, notwithstanding some manipulation on his part. On the other hand, spontaneous or involuntary memories, many triggered by forcible recollections at the clinic, are transmitted in a more candid and free-associative manner as confessions to two interlocutors hand-picked by the protagonist – his Iranian girlfriend Shohreh Sherazy and his Iranian friend Farhoud – and to the reader. This selection may stem from the fact that neither these two immigrants, as people familiar with similar situations, nor we, as ‘queasy accomplice[s]’ (Slate 2009: par. 8), are likely to misunderstand or pre-judge him. According to Canada’s official multiculturalism, immigrants can ‘fully participate in Canadian society’ while still being able ‘to identify with the cultural heritage of their choice’. The protagonist resists both, wondering instead how it might be possible ‘to exist and not to belong’ (210). In Chapter 3, he concludes that, ‘split between two planes and aware of two existences’, he ‘belong[s] to two spaces’ (119). These planes are not horizontal, that is, national, but vertical, one representing the life of a trapped human being on the earth’s surface, the other the underground life of an agile cockroach, able to acquire items stealthily, and resilient enough – in popular culture at least – to withstand all manner of world-ending scenarios. This existential selfperception provides the protagonist with a liminal space as one of possibility, not for becoming a culturally hybridised person – as several Lebanese characters succeed at to some extent in other novels examined in this study – but for coping, emotionally and materially, with life in exile. Even his namelessness may be interpreted as ‘a space of freedom and plurality, a generative place’ (Carter 2003: par. 7) for the purpose of self-fashioning. Unlike the exiles described by Jin, the protagonist never expresses a desire to return to his birthplace, which was the scene of an impoverished childhood and teenage years overshadowed by war. There is nothing and no one to return to in the present: his parents and sister are dead, as is his mentor, Abou-Roro, who taught him thievery and extortion as survival skills during the mayhem. His directionless daily life in Canada aims at physical survival in a country whose mainstream society, in his view, only welcomes him as an exotic figure, by turns entertaining and pitiable. His vision of his present

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and future, I argue, is clouded by suppressed anger at himself stemming from feelings of guilt over his sister’s death back in Beirut. For him, neither Canada nor Lebanon feels like home in the sense of providing a sense of security and promise based on either a new or an old sentiment of loyalty and belonging. Despite fluency in both of Canada’s official languages as well as in Arabic, the protagonist’s personal identity is in no way a harmonious mix of cultures. In fact, he has acquired very little, if anything, despite his many years in Canada. Many reviewers see Cockroach as a continuation of Hage’s first novel, De Niro’s Game (Whitlock 2008: par. 5). In the latter, another character tells Bassam (who is in Paris illegally): ‘You get on the plane, and when you arrive at the Montreal airport in Canada [where, as we know, he does not end up], you claim refugee status’ (Hage 2007: 241). Although not formally linked, these two novels act as ‘a pair’, according to Lynn Henry of Anansi Press, who has edited both: ‘It’s almost like taking someone from the world [of De Niro’s Game] and seeing what would happen if he came to Montreal, trying to build a new life’ (cited in McCabe 2008: par. 9). Cockroach deals ‘with the choices and chances that arise now that the protagonist has claimed such status’ (Tóibín 2010: par. 31), but the war this time is ‘going on within his soul rather than his city’ (par. 32). Bassam and his supposed fictional extension do have common features, including closeness in age, thuggish roles in time of war, gambling alcoholic fathers, dysfunctional families, poverty, an eventual escape from Lebanon with stolen money and no (legal) entry permits, and a nominal Christian denomination4 while possessing no faith in God, dismissed by Cockroach’s protagonist as a fictitious ‘man with a beard’ (77) whom he neither likes nor fears. There are, however, significant differences as well. Bassam was tortured during the war, whereas Cockroach’s lead character never sustained bodily injuries. Most significantly, Bassam does not carry the burden of a dead sister on his conscience. Many reviewers have praised Cockroach, not just as a standard-bearer for the relatively recent flowering of Arab-Canadian literature, but indeed as a new kind of immigrant novel altogether. Unlike most such novels, which describe the trials and eventual triumphs of newly landed immigrants, this one delivers a dark, anti-heroic narrative of an eccentric immigrant whose first-person narration cannot always be trusted. The protagonist provides

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perhaps the best reason for his story not being that of an immigrant’s journey towards successful integration: I wondered how I had ended up here. How absurd. How absurd. The question is, Where to end? All those who leave immigrate to better their lives, but I wanted to better my death. Maybe it is the ending that matters, not the life [. . .] Maybe we, like elephants, walk far towards our chosen burials. (160)

Hage denies that Cockroach is mainly about immigration, stressing instead ‘poverty issues, class, religion, fundamentalism, [and] displacement’ as ‘things to explore through immigration’ (cited in ‘Hage’s Cockroach Crawls’ 2008: par. 13). He adds: I’m not naive about cities, I’m not naive about nations [. . .] Just because a city has some culture and looks nice doesn’t mean it hasn’t got an undercurrent of violence. Montreal is a large military industrial complex. Under all that beauty there is something very ugly. (Cited in ‘Rawi Hage’s Book Cockroach an Existential’ 2009: par. 25)

Elsewhere, although speaking of De Niro’s Game, Hage describes a similar philosophical aversion to limiting a migrant character: In a lot of Western literature and maybe in Canadian literature too, you cannot portray an immigrant as somebody that’s evil, because the feeling is to do so might contribute to racism. But if you create characters who do only good, who are all oppressed, who were the victims of something and then come here and are saved, then you’re not presenting them as humans, you’re representing them as somebody to pity. I believe you should include the element of evil in every person [. . .] Once you omit that element of evil, you are no longer presenting a real human being. (Cited in Richler 2006: par. 16)

Hage has expressed concern about being seen exclusively ‘as a writer who lived through the [Lebanese] war’ (cited in ‘Rawi Hage’s Book Cockroach an Existential’ 2009: par. 26). He is grateful for the many opportunities he has had in Montreal, embraced as a ‘comfort zone’ (cited in Wagner 2008: par. 13) and designated as home, a few years after he arrived in 1992.

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Nonetheless, he could not help but worry that although Cockroach is not autobiographical, he would be portrayed after its publication as the ‘ungrateful immigrant [writer]’ (cited in ‘Rawi Hage’s Book Cockroach an Existential’ 2009: par. 19). Amer Taheri reflects on Hage’s justifiable fear by explaining that in this author’s novelistic universe, ‘east and west can never meet except in mutual suspicion, derision and, ultimately, hatred and violence’ (2009: par. 8). Nonetheless, neither East nor West is romanticised, as both receive their fair share of criticism. Rather than viewing immigration as a central realist theme, other reviewers have emphasised the surrealist usage of the cockroach as the novel’s organising principle and ‘governing idea’ (Lasdun 2009: par. 5), citing Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) as a major influence (Tóibín 2010: par. 48; Dawson 2009: par. 2), although the latter interpretation has been denied by the author (Alexander 2009: par. 7). Some readings focus on the protagonist’s ‘imminent psychosis’ (Sholten 2009: par. 4), progressively evident through hallucinations, paranoia, occasional sexual oddities and socio-pathological behaviour. Judged by many readers as openly hostile towards men, the protagonist’s behaviour towards women is deemed less crude but threatening nonetheless. In short, the novel is ‘a bleak, existentialist survival tale – the 21st century [sic] spawn of Dostoevsky and Kafka, replete with crime, drugs, and sex’ (Arnold 2009: par. 1). While these two lines of appraisal contain grains of truth, both deemphasise the underlying reasons which make this character feel greater safety in identifying with what is underground than with what lies above it. More importantly, they overlook what connects the metaphorical with the mundane aspects of his existence as an immigrant with a weighty past. My reading is more closely aligned with those few reviews which see Cockroach as a ‘character study of a stranger in a strange land’, and of a ‘very strange stranger at that’ (Redekop 2008: par. 5), or as a ‘character study, not [just] an extended metaphor – in which the priority is to get closer and closer to the narrator, strip him of delusions, unpack his history, and tear into him so that readers can see his guts’ (Fox 2010: par. 14). I highlight his experiences in war-ravaged and lawless Lebanon as a thuggish teenager whose failure to save his sister from her militia-linked husband constitutes the traumatic event, one still infiltrating his unconscious and weighing on his conscience, in order to

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explain his bizarre and aggressive behaviour in exile. In so doing, I show how and why he is, most accurately, ‘oddly sympathetic’ (Fox 2010: par. 15). In Colm Tóibín’s view, the novel, steeped in the nightmarish worlds of Kafka and Jonathan Swift, is ‘set in a place where exile itself [. . .] and learning what is meant by home become dark metaphors for knowledge and experience that run way beyond the merely political, and even beyond the possibility of redemption’ (2010: par. 48). I agree partly with this summative judgement of the character’s limited choices by arguing that his final act of self-sacrifice is an existential choice and, in his case, the only path to peace for his self-warring psyche. His attachment to Shohreh (who has a troubled past of her own) becomes a temporary refuge, even a portable substitute home abroad. In deciding to risk his own life to save hers in the final pages, he not only vindicates her and proves his capacity to love another human being, revealing an innate goodness ignored by most reviewers, but also relieves himself of the burden of not having rescued his sister. Thus, he overcomes both his earlier trauma and his current emotional exile from himself. The gap between his two worlds is bridged in this cathartic moment, manifest in the necessary killing of Shohreh’s Iranian former torturer/rapist and the latter’s Canadian bodyguard. Taking matters literally into his own hands frees him from a guilty conscience and allows him to recapture, however fleetingly, a feeling of pre-war innocence associated with reactivated love for his sister. These positive sentiments bring him closest to feeling ‘at home’ with and through Shohreh. In ‘Two Ways to Belong to America’, the Indian-born American novelist Bharati Mukherjee states that while the typical immigrant willingly submits to ‘the trauma of self-transformation’, the exile avoids it (1996: par. 16). Hage’s protagonist was badly traumatised by his failure to save his sister long before arriving in Canada. Although not a trauma narrative on the textual level like The Bullet Collection and I, the Divine, Cockroach showcases this unique character’s troubled past – marked by moral delinquency resulting from poverty, parental neglect and war-time chaos – and how formative experiences continue to dictate his behaviour in the new place, whether he is conscious of this or not. Therefore, the focus is not on a progressive selftransformation from Lebanese to Lebanese-Canadian. In fact, he clearly has no interest in acclimatising to mainstream Canadian culture – but nor is he

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keen on flaunting his origins. The emphasis is rather on his daily dealings, in a behavioural pattern similar to that of his life in Lebanon, until the opportunity for emotional self-transformation and moral redemption literally knocks on his door in the person of Shohreh. In ‘The Mind of Winter’, Edward Said equates the exilic mindset with the season of cold, barren drear. The ‘rigid prescription’ (Said 1984: 52) of exile, characterised by estrangement and solitude implying affective coldness, is literalised in Cockroach, whose events in the present occupy six chapters spanning about two months in the latter part of a frigid Montreal winter in the 1990s.5 Early in Chapter 1, on his way to the Artista Café, a bohemian hangout frequented by recent Third World immigrants, the protagonist blurts out: Where am I? And what am I doing here? How did I end up trapped in a constantly shivering carcass, walking in a frozen city with wet cotton falling on me all the time? And on top of it all, I am hungry, impoverished, and have no one, no one. (9)

The snow, ice and slush beneath his shoddy shoes, numbing his toes and denying him traction, become a metaphor for lack of connection to the new soil. As he says: ‘if you ask why the inhumane temperature, the universe will answer you with tight lips and a cold tone and tell you to go back where you came from if you do not like it here’ (193). In the opening scene of Chapter 6, while walking to his therapist’s office in the stolen boots of a deceased British officer who had fought in Asia, he confesses: ‘The grip of my boots’ soles anchored me more firmly than ever in the soil hidden beneath the street’s white surface’ (257). But this soil is reminiscent of the war back home, for shortly thereafter he muses: ‘Now that I had laced my feet into boots, blood, and mud, this health clinic had started to feel homier [my emphasis]’ (257). In Islam, Multiculturalism, and Transnationalism, Michael Humphrey asserts that the social space carved out in the host country is never freely given; instead, this home-away-from-home space is a social product ‘experienced, translated, and transformed’ (1998: 19) by willing members of a diasporic group. In Cockroach, the only thing resembling such a space is the Artista Café, which the protagonist frequents but only to steal, wheel and deal, pick fights, or antagonise the only other Arab immigrant, the Algerian

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professor Youssef, who poses as an intellectual consulting for the province but is actually on welfare. This Arab immigrant dazzles ‘with his stories and grand theories’, causing his listeners to flock around him like ‘nostalgic souls’ (116), offering coffee and cigarettes in return. Cockroach also portrays a tightly knit Iranian community whose members speak Farsi among themselves, so the protagonist communicates with them in English or French. Still, Hage inserts a few Arabic expressions, like Wa Allah alaazim (15) and Al-salaam alaikum (25), understood by both Arabs and Iranians, to illustrate a selective mono-lingualism based on a common, and largely Muslim, Middle Eastern cultural identity. For Jin, exile and solitude are two modes of existence that are not only interrelated but also intensify one another (2008: 71). Edward Said and Timothy Brennan agree, viewing exile as nationalism’s opposite, wherein the splintered and solipsistic mood and mode of the exile’s life are diametrically opposed to the collective, cohesive and public consciousness of any given national group. The protagonist mentions ‘my homeland’ (5) and ‘my country’ (135) but never identifies Lebanon by name. Thus, Lebanon and its civil war have been abstracted, rendered a metaphor for absurdity and violence. The protagonist engages, therefore, as quoted in Chapter 1, in ‘a simultaneous recognition of nationhood and an alienation from it’ (Brennan 1991: 63). Said defines exile as ‘the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home’, accompanied by an ‘essential sadness of the break [which] can never be surmounted’ (1984: 49). Although the protagonist hails from a nation devastated by war and rarely dwells on nostalgic memories, he feels no attachment to Canada, remaining utterly ‘out of place’ (Said 1994: 362) and experiencing exile as ‘a kind of orphanhood’ (Said 1984: 53), as previously quoted. He repeatedly uses the word ‘sadness’ in moments of intense loneliness. The stoicism he maintains at the clinic is lifted in privacy to reveal a multi-layered sorrow. While taking a shower, he tells the reader: ‘A deep, deep sense of fear and sadness overcame me’, and when ‘the sadness intensifie[s]’ (118), he drops the razor he is using to shave the whiskers he imagines to be growing from his forehead as part of his transformation into a cockroach. He tells the therapist that he never cries, but on several occasions outside her presence, he not only sheds tears but also comments on their origin and significance, listing ‘tears from laughter, tears

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from spicy food, tears from pain, tears from nostalgic memories, tears from broken hearts, [and] tears from poverty’ (143). In one scene, he weeps ‘for no reason, as if [he were] crying for someone else’ (119) – presumably Shohreh or his sister Souad, for whom they would be tears of pain or of nostalgic memory, respectively. Diasporic life lacks the pathos of exile, a condition ‘that is never without a deep sense of woe’ (Peters 1999: 20). Furthermore, in The Invention of Canada, Arnold Itwaru writes: The stranger in the name and label ‘immigrant’ is already invented as ‘immigrant,’ a distinctiveness which is also anonymous, upon arrival. This person is no longer only the bearer of another history, but has now become a particular other, the bearer of a label, invented by the ‘host.’ This person has become the ‘immigrant’ – this term of depersonalization which will brand her and him for the rest of their lives. (1990: 13–14, emphasis in original)

In Cockroach, the woes of immigrants are varied and vocalised. Many of these immigrants, the protagonist included, turn this ‘otherness’ into an advantage. Majeed, Farhoud, Reza, Shohreh, all Iranian, and the Algerian professor narrate stories of persecution, torture, imprisonment and rape at the hands of dictators, both secular and religious, endured before they fled to Canada. Condemning the hypocrisy of purportedly democratic Western nations’ supporting dictatorships in Third World countries in exchange for access to their natural resources, Majeed tells the protagonist: ‘You know, we come to these countries for refuge and to find better lives, but it is [ironically] these countries that made us leave our homes in the first place’ (223). As an insult added to earlier injuries, once these newcomers have been through ‘the desperation of the displaced, the stateless, the miserable and stranded in corridors of bureaucracy and immigration’ (13), they manage to survive out there but can never thrive. As Taheri puts it: ‘The immigrants live in a limbo formed by an archipelago of solitudes’ (2009: par. 9), a condition typical, as Said argues, of exiles whose loss of their native countries is never counterbalanced by the new ones, which remain figuratively closed to them. Aware that some Canadians ‘wouldn’t be able to resist anything foreign’, the protagonist plays the ‘part of the existentialist protagonist in a film noir’ (196) by fabricating stories about the scar on his face to ‘preppie’ men

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to reinforce their centuries-old collective image of the ‘noble savage’ (183) and to seduce their women with a (fraudulent) ‘sense of the real’ (199). Thus, he exploits the romantic Orientalist stereotype of the ‘fuckable, exotic, dangerous foreigner’ (199), knowing full well, however, that the ‘exotic has to be modified’ (20) by making sure it is not too smelly, too spicy or even too authentic, so that it may satisfy deep-seated Western fantasies and not be shunned as an irritatingly real and undesirable feature of Third World newcomers. Hage’s immigrants belong to the vast majority of migrants, described by Aijaz Ahmad, who are ‘poor and [therefore] experience displacement not as cultural plenitude but as torment’ (1995: 16). Poverty, however, has the benefit of bringing these ‘lost exile[s]’ together (Hage 2009: 297). After learning that taxpayer money pays for his therapy, the protagonist muses sarcastically: I should be grateful for what this nation is giving me. I take more than I give, indeed it is true. But if I had access to some wealth, I would contribute my share. Maybe I should become a good citizen and contemplate ways to collect my debts and increase my wealth. (65)

Discrimination against poor immigrants is well-illustrated. When, after a year as a dishwasher and busboy at a posh French restaurant, the protagonist asks Maître Pierre if he can be promoted to a waiter, he is told: ‘Tu es un peu trop cuit pour ça (you are a little too well-done for that)! Le soleil t’a brûlé ta face un peu trop (the sun has burned your face a bit too much)’ (29). The ‘herd of brownies and darkies’, having fled ‘dictators [for example, in Iran] and crumbling cities [for example, Beirut]’ (28), are not allowed to improve their status, no matter how well they may speak French, as the protagonist does, if their skin colour is not sufficiently white. Thanks to his ‘dark complexion’ (90), he is called ‘a filthy Turkish dog’ (37–8) and one of the ‘dirty Arabs’ (15), labels he answers by conceptualising middle- and upper-class Canadians as ‘[b]ourgeois filth’ (88). As he stands in the cold watching a couple eat dinner inside a fancy restaurant, the waiter comes out and orders him to leave. When he notes that he is in a public space in a free country, he is asked to move away from the sports car on which he is leaning. Then two female police officers arrive and ask to see his identification papers. Demanding to know what wrong he has committed, he is told that it is ‘unlawful to stare at

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people inside commercial places’ (87). Ironically, the bourgeois couple, as he observes, are entertained by what is happening outside, ‘as if it were live news’ or ‘some reality show about police chasing people with food-envy syndrome’ (87). Here the emphasis is on the immigrant as (unwilling) spectacle. The protagonist lives in a ‘shithole of an apartment’ (17) in a ‘slowly gentrifying neighbourhood’ (225) on Pinnacle Street, in a building inhabited by immigrants from several countries, who offer him food on occasion. He uses the word ‘home’ in the Canadian setting, as Bassam in De Niro’s Game does in the Lebanese one, only to refer to his apartment as a physical space lacking any emotional significance, except as an enclave in which to release tears and indulge in extended conversations with imaginary cockroaches while hunting down real ones infesting the kitchen. The first page of the novel establishes the premise of the story when the protagonist reveals three interrelated facts. The first, stated in the opening line, is a confession: ‘I am in love with Shohreh’ (3). This love, however impeded by occasional resistance on her part, promises an emotional foundation for his path towards a measure of self-healing. The second fact emerges in the following paragraph when, without mentioning the word ‘cockroach’, he describes his periodic metamorphoses into one – by developing antennae, a hunched back and a tendency to crawl – when lusting after desirable women. The next paragraph divulges the third fact, as he wonders whether it is time to return to his therapist, who had asked him on an earlier visit to ‘re-enact [his] urges’ (3) when delving into his past, that is, when being prompted by her pointed questions. These three facts establish the point of departure for the ensuing drama of rediscovering his capacity for self-healing by re-enacting – and, this time, completing – an act of defensive violence. This is the beginning for the reader, but the protagonist has been in Canada for seven years, although this is only revealed in Chapter 5, more than two-thirds into the narrative. As in the novels by Alameddine, Hanania, Ward and Abi-Ezzi, rage is a defining trait of many Lebanese characters whose relatively young age during the war caused them considerable frustration in the face of adult authority figures. This anger is revealed directly or indirectly, immediately or belatedly, and expressed alternately through trauma symptoms, radical political actions and/or verbal outbursts. In Cockroach, the protagonist is aware of the thera-

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pist’s catalytic effect on his inner transformation, initiated by her insistence that he harbours ‘a lot of hidden anger’ (4). Counselling has ‘brought on a feeling of violence within [him] that [he] hadn’t experienced since [he] left [his] homeland’ (4–5). His existence as an immigrant with an unresolved trauma complex is best symbolised by the scar on his face, which many had asked about but only Shohreh dared to touch ‘with her thumb as if trying to erase it’; it is fragile, like his life, ‘as if it was about to burst wide open and spray a fountain of blood’ (85). A few details interspersed in the text describe the protagonist’s life in Canada prior to the onset of the novel’s events: consistent poverty, the two menial jobs he has had – at the French restaurant, Le Cafard,6 and as a delivery boy at a gourmet grocery store – and using hashish and cocaine. He tells Genevieve that before arriving in Canada, he was ‘more courageous, more carefree, and [. . .] more violent’ (4). But life here has mollified him because ‘no one gives [him] an excuse to hit, rob, or shoot, or even to shout from across the balcony, to curse [the] neighbours’ mothers and threaten their kids’ (4). The events following this observation describe his repeated successes in stealthily entering people’s homes, including Genevieve’s, to steal and to deliberately make his otherwise invisible presence felt, albeit anonymously. After years of emotional dormancy, he is required to release some of his latent anger by remembering it and to watch Genevieve record the excavated memories. Contrary to her wishes, yet in tune with his own way of ‘working through’ his trauma, this clinical routine reignites aggressive tendencies, the energies of which will later help him achieve catharsis. For him, the mandatory nature of his therapy dooms it to failure because of the unbridgeable differences between his and Genevieve’s worlds. For him, she is ‘[g]entle, educated, but naïve, [. . .] sheltered by glaciers and prairies, thick forests, oceans and dancing seals’ (104). One reviewer describes her even more harshly as ‘a well-meaning but wildly naïve counselor who is a stand-in for the Anglo-Canadian [or French-Canadian] establishment that champions diversity but has little real understanding of or interest in difference’ (Dawson 2009: par. 1). One major point of difference, for example, concerns his sceptical view of any morality which does not take socio-economic class into consideration. As he was taught by Abou-Roro, stealing from the rich is justified by the hunger of the poor. Attempting to rationalise theft to Genevieve,

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he explains that poverty forces one to compromise on morality and commit felonies that the well-to-do would never even have to consider. The reference to A Thousand and One Nights is implicit but clear, as confirmed by the author: ‘In a way, Genevieve is the king and the narrator is Scheherazade [. . .] He’s a good storyteller, and stories can save your life sometimes’ (cited in Chong 2008: par. 3). This narrator takes advantage of the fact that the ‘doctor, like sultans, is fond of stories’ (Hage 2009: 102) and so decides to ‘tell her stories’ in order to avoid ‘going back to the madhouse’ (60). The therapist, therefore, functions partly as a narrative device to start each chapter and to facilitate ‘the controlled release of information’ (Lasdun 2009: par. 5) about his earlier trauma. The protagonist even cautiously asks Genevieve if the talking cure does not also have the added benefit of enthralling her. Here, of course, the roles are reversed: the female is the avid listener, and the male the creative narrator who needs to comply with the authoritative interlocutor’s wishes to avoid being returned to the psychiatric ward. If he does not literally risk losing his head, as Scheherazade did, he most certainly fears losing his freedom. This knowledge prompts him to manipulate the process in five ways: by occasionally stealing her notes; by lying, for example about how much he loved his mother lest he be kept in ‘this place for two hours’ (48) explaining the truth; by wondering if he should not simply stop talking when he sees horror on her face; by falling silent at cliff-hangers in his narrative; and by asking if their time is up in order to determine how ‘hooked’ (104) she is on his exotic tales. One reviewer states that these tactics make it ‘impossible to know which part of the story he is telling at any given time is true and which it is not’ (Taheri 2009: par. 5). However, recollections spilled directly to the reader or indirectly through dialogues with Shohreh and Farhoud seem to be genuine, providing another version of past events which corroborates, supplements and/or contradicts the officially recorded memories kept in Genevieve’s office. The narrator’s refusal to deliver a fully developed account of his feelings or mental processes in therapy is deemed regrettable by one reviewer, who opines that more openness here would provide a better understanding of this character (Dawson 2009: par. 1). But a scrutiny of both his official, albeit confidential, utterances and his private thoughts, in conjunction with the allegorical passages in which he transforms into a cockroach, provides

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an explanation of his overall state of mind. What remains unquestionably honest is his admission of his failure to save his sister. As discussed in Chapter 3, Marianna in The Bullet Collection also underwent psychotherapy, in her case at the insistence of her parents. In that circular and fragmented novel, however, mention of these sessions was sporadic, with Marianna having been in no position to manipulate their flow. Age limitations on one’s actions in times of war are a major theme and narrative strategy in post-war Anglophone Lebanese novels. On at least three occasions, Hage’s protagonist vents frustration to the therapist about how his youth at the time was an insurmountable obstacle to eliminating the evil incarnated in his brother-in-law: ‘Tony waved his gun in my face. Is that what you want, kid?’ (100); ‘Go out of the way, kid’ (137); ‘I wanted to kill him, but I was young and he was older and stronger’ (62). Tony uses the word ‘kid’ in a half-patronising, half-derogatory manner, similar to Abou-Nahra’s usage thereof when addressing Bassam in De Niro’s Game. The peculiar behaviour of the protagonist in Cockroach can be traced back to specific images and experiences from childhood and adolescence. His alienation reaches a point of saturation, of almost literal suffocation, after which it unravels rather rapidly as the ‘long dream of home’, to use Victor Hugo’s definition of exile (cited in Peters 1999: 19). What triggered his botched suicide attempt, he tells Genevieve, was threefold: a desire ‘to escape the permanence of the sun’, curiosity about a possible afterlife and a challenge to the cosmos itself; in short, because he was consumed by the ‘question of existence’ (4). Only to the reader, however, does he relate what he sees as the fundamental reason why he tried to kill himself, telling us: It was not that I was looking for a purpose and had been deceived [by the war or by immigrant life], it was more that I had never started looking for one [. . .] My problem was not that I was negligent towards life, but that somehow I always felt neglected by it. (32, emphasis in original)

Considering both sets of reasons for his attempted suicide, it is reasonable to infer that the protagonist is insinuating that although depression, anger and guilt are unavoidable when growing up in a war setting, they could certainly be made less agonising by competent parents instead of an alternatively abusive, alcoholic and absent father, who beat his son and wife and squandered

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the family’s money at the horse-track, and a cowed, neurotic mother. The narrator recalls an incident in which his drunken father, flush with cash he had won, ‘called [his teenage daughter Souad] by his mother’s name and kissed her on the mouth’. The girl ‘did not blink, did not move, when he caressed her hair’ in front of his ‘gambler friends’, his ‘silent’ wife (229) and a son too young to intervene. Children raised by such a father – and by a mother who calls them ‘dumb, square-headed, filthy, retard kids’ (48) and repeatedly threatens to abandon them – would only naturally look for outlets and alternatives. Abou-Roro, the ‘neighbourhood thief’ (24) and ‘miniFrankenstein’ (56) whom the protagonist meets in adolescence, becomes a surrogate father to him, and Tony, the local militiaman with whom his sister elopes, becomes her (poorly chosen) escape route. By marrying Tony, she exhibits the same need to be protected by a man in uniform as Rana did by sleeping with George in De Niro’s Game. In therapy, the narrator is frustrated by his ‘limited psychological knowledge and powers of articulation’ and by Genevieve’s conviction that his troubles derive partly from unhealthy ‘relations with women’ (4). The oppressive power of the sun is a constant thread in the text, but the reason for it is uncovered only towards the end, when he tells us: Suddenly I remembered how, after my sister’s death, I had avoided windows. I remembered sitting in the dark for days [. . .] measuring the length of my beard, inviting fleas and other little creatures to invade my hair [. . .] I found darkness in my bathroom and a cradle in my bathtub. I wept until I heard echoes in the drain [. . .] telling me to leave. I shaved and then I sailed away from that room, that house, that land, thinking that all was past, all was buried, all would come to an end. (299–300)

This paragraph explains why he feels threatened by sunlight, finds comfort in dark hiding places in which insects are closer to him than humans, and envisions his escape through drains and pipes. ‘As a kid’, he confesses, he was ‘fascinated by drains’ (22). His exilic life in Canada, as depicted, proves that while his departure from Lebanon was a necessary move, his past is anything but over and can only be brought to an end by his working through his guilt complex. As John Durham Peters states, exile ‘can be either voluntary or involuntary, internal or external’, and ‘generally implies a fact of trauma,

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an imminent danger, usually political, that makes the home no longer safely habitable’ (1999: 19). In the protagonist’s case, these distinctions are slightly blurred, seeing as how he did flee a war zone (external) but did so mainly to alleviate a personal affliction (internal) closely related to the war’s psychosocial ramifications. Furthermore, while the decision to leave seems voluntary, it qualifies more accurately as involuntary, that is, as a response to an inner voice. The narrator’s self-identification as half-human, half-cockroach has its roots in his pre-war childhood. It remained strong until he arrived in Canada but seems to have receded until he was ordered to be formally assessed. He informs Genevieve early in Chapter 1 that he was an insect in his youth because his sister made him one once during play and often called him ‘little cockroach’ (235), while she raised her legs in the air, as though they were antennae, and laid the back of his head between them. He reminisces: ‘We laughed, and crawled below the sheets, and nibbled on each other’s faces. Let’s block the light, she said. Let’s seal that quilt to the bed, tight, so there won’t be any light. Let’s play underground’ (6). In his autobiography, Roland Barthes uses the term ‘anamnesis’ to describe how thinking about home, or being prompted to reflect on it, is like being granted free licence to unearth certain images and scenes ‘which enthral [one] without [one’s] knowing why’ (cited in Morse 1999: 64). The protagonist’s self-identification as a cockroach and preference for dark, enclosed spaces stem from the memory of a deeply rooted sense of security and sensual joy felt as a young boy around his charming and protective older sister. This early memory of happiness and wholeness remains his only true definition of ‘being at home’, for henceforward, each time he felt threatened, he would ‘strip the world from everything around [him] and exist underneath it all, without objects, people, light, or sound’ (11). As a child, pretending to be a cockroach softened the blows administered by teachers, parents and priests. More poignantly, he confesses to the reader: ‘It was my need to unfold an eternal blanket that would cover everything, seal the sky and my window, and turn the world into an insect’s play’ (11–12). The quilt which once provided an actual cover of warmth and a feeling of security is eternised into a metaphorical shield against similar recurrent fears in adulthood. The protagonist’s visual and auditory phantasms involving cockroaches

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are exacerbated by habitual substance abuse or what he calls the ‘hallucinatory fumes [. . .] through the years’ (20), a fact confirmed by the therapist, who cautions that ‘heavy drugs’ might trigger ‘[e]pisodes of delusion or delirium’ (166). In the kitchen, he visualises a giant albino cockroach who reproaches him as follows: Let’s not open wounds and recite the past. I have known you since your childhood [. . .] Imagine: a barefoot child [. . .] in a hurry to go outside and play [. . .] when you stole candy from the store I was there, and when you collected bullets [like Bassam, George and Alaine in two other novels], and when you followed Abou-Roro down to the place of the massacre and watched him pull golden teeth from cadavers, I was there. (202)

Given the protagonist’s age, it is highly probable that the cockroach is alluding to the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatilla camps in September 1982, an event placed at the centre of De Niro’s Game. In the imaginary insect’s recital, the young protagonist, who witnessed this macabre scavenging in the aftermath of the barbaric deed, would occupy a middle position, in terms of actual and emotional distance, between George, who participated in the killings, and Bassam, who learned about them from George. The protagonist denies the cockroach’s presence, literal or figurative, at the time. Since this hallucination occurs at a moment when he, high on cocaine, admits feeling like ‘someone else’s double’ (200), the cockroach, witness to his troubled youth, appears to represent in this instance a collective moral conscience, an exteriorised internal voice digging up an unpleasant memory long suppressed. Unlike other memories of war, like running ‘through whizzing bullets’ (56) after stealing cameras from burning warehouses at Beirut’s port, this one is more painful and can therefore only be extracted, like the golden teeth of slain men and women, from the recesses of memory by applying an external force. Although the protagonist tells Shohreh in Chapter 5 ‘the full story’ (244) of his early life, including his sister’s death and his view of himself as halfcockroach, he withholds the personal reason for the latter, that is, his sister’s having made him one. His voyeurism, stressed in many reviews as a sexual abnormality, is in fact understandable if related to his latent nostalgia for home embodied by the dead sister. His interest in other women, apart from

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Shohreh, can be explained as a nostalgic scream for his sister. In Chapter 4, he asks sixteen-year-old Sehar – daughter of the owner of the Star of Iran restaurant where he works near the end of the novel – to masturbate under the sheets on his bed, promising to stare at the wall during her act, in order to resurrect the image of his sister, who as a teen indulged herself in a similar fashion. In Chapter 1, while comparing his Canadian bedroom to the one he shared with his parents and sister in Lebanon, he reckons: ‘I was no longer in the same room as a teenage sister coming of age, dreaming of Arabs with guns, ducking her left hand under the quilt, spookily eyeing the void, biting her lip, and rotating her index finger [. . .]’ (17). Now, furtively observing Sehar begin the same act, he says: ‘I imagined her fingers steadily rotating [. . .]’ (180). Sexual self-gratification, like his feeling of carefree joy when close to his sister, takes place in a safe, dark place, under the covers. Unable to perform all the way, Sehar admits as much and then looks at him, which is when she notices his tears. ‘Are you crying? Oh my God, your eyes . . .’ (180). These are, without a doubt, the tears of one specific nostalgic memory. In Chapter 2, while at a bar, the protagonist observes a woman dancing barefoot who reminds him of gypsies. When she asks him if he knows any, he replies: ‘Yes, my sister is one’, conspicuously using the present tense, adding: ‘I wish I was a gypsy like you or like my sister’ (73). Even a woman he remembers as a fellow patient at the psychiatric hospital, whom he recognises on the street, interests him to the extent of visiting her at the clothing store where she works only because it helps him relive the last day of his sister’s life. That day was partly spent at Joseph Khoury’s clothing store in Beirut, where she worked as a saleswoman. After leaving work, she was murdered by her husband, who was jealous of her sexual relationship with her employer, a kind old man. It is perhaps no coincidence that the abusive father is also called Joseph, and is replaced by this alternative father figure with the same name, whom the protagonist’s sister, a battered wife, needed for both physical and financial protection for herself and her baby daughter. Upon meeting Shohreh, the protagonist is struck by her good looks and seductiveness, but starts falling for her mainly, however, because he is ‘not used to happy women’ (58) – and she is decidedly not happy. His equally attractive sister also became miserable after eloping with Tony. Her name, Souad, is only revealed towards the end of Chapter 5 in response to a question from Shohreh. Souad, Sehar and

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Shohreh share the first initial ‘S’, thus forming a pattern which, like the RanaRhea-Rome chain discussed in Chapter 5, brings them closer together in the protagonist’s associative memory. The protagonist reveals the date of Souad’s death, ‘years’ (248) before he left Lebanon, to Genevieve only in the last chapter, long after he had falsely claimed in Chapter 3 that it was she who had called to break the news of their mother’s demise. Postponing this revelation, similar in its narrative positioning to Bassam’s divulgence of George’s suicide to Rhea towards the end of that text, maintains Genevieve’s curiosity. He avoids two fundamental questions – ‘What did you do after your sister’s death?’ and ‘Why did you leave your country?’ (258) – whose answers were given to the reader forty pages earlier. In addition, the Scheherazade-like narrator realises that telling more would not postpone but instead expedite the therapist’s professional recommendation that he be remanded to the psychiatric hospital where, in addition to losing his freedom, he would be prescribed anti-psychotic medications that would ‘transform [him] into what [he] is not’ (153). In Chapter 1, the narrator had formed a pact with the reader by asserting that he disagreed with the therapist’s textbook diagnosis of paranoia, and with her perception of him as someone with ‘an intimacy problem’ (59), that is, incapable of expressing love to a woman. Contrary to what many reviewers claim, the protagonist’s seemingly worsening symptoms of paranoia – more intense delusions and frequent acts of aggression, both physical and verbal – mask a personal initiative which, towards the end and in response to concrete external events, transforms into accelerated attempts to heal his scarred psyche by taking action to help those close to him. The protagonist also behaves defiantly when he meets Genevieve on the street, after having discontinued therapy, and she confirms his suspicion that she had recommended he see a psychiatrist. Enjoying a ‘euphoric sense of existence’ and a ‘rare mood’ (285), he informs her that he will go ‘underground’ (286), whose symbolic significance she fails to see but which the reader knows by now is the only path to preserving his identity. Gone is his earlier belief that if a patient can ‘sit, wait, behave, confess, and show maybe some forgiveness and remorse’ (231), he or she will be saved. Shohreh makes the possibility of simultaneous revenge for herself and catharsis for him quite clear: ‘My torturer and your brother-in-law are the

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same kind’ – to which he replies: ‘You and my sister are the same kind’ (248). In Chapter 6, the protagonist muses: The idea of conspiring with Shohreh intrigued me. I would help her. And I decided that I loved [my emphasis] her. I would give her whatever she wanted [a revolver, which he steals]. Lately I had an even bigger desire than before to be with her. (276–7)

The freezing cold, reflecting the bitter feeling of exile, begins to subside with the increasing ‘warmth of [necessary] violence’ (279) in early spring. Love ends for him the long waiting, the monotony of existence and the agony of daily struggles. Shohreh becomes an anchor, and longing for her transforms into a sense of belonging to her, of being ‘at home’ with her. Near the end of the novel, at the Star of Iran, Shohreh gets her chance for revenge against the man who raped and tortured her back home, now an arms dealer working on a deal to have the Canadian government sell weapon parts to Iran for huge profits. She fires at her target – ironically named Shaheed (martyr) – but misses, breaks down in tears, and is overpowered by the Canadian bodyguard assigned to protect him. At this critical moment, the protagonist muses: ‘I watched all of this happen as if it were taking place somewhere far away. Everything was soundless. Everything was unreal, distant and slow’ (305). Here, the protagonist’s ‘contrapuntal consciousness’ diverges somewhat from Said’s because of its intensely emotional bearing, reflecting more accurately Homi Bhabha’s notion of a third space fashioned ‘in-between the claims of the past and the needs of the present’ (1994: 219, emphasis in original) and the future. Shohreh’s inability to avenge herself replicates in his mind his own failure to either protect or avenge Souad. So he stabs the bodyguard in the liver with a cook’s knife, picks up the gun, and shoots Shaheed twice in the chest. The second bullet might be interpreted as an overdue one meant for Shaheed-as-Tony; either way, unlike Souad, Shohreh is both rescued and avenged. In Cockroach’s final paragraph, the drain, cherished since the narrator’s childhood as a symbol of escape, returns to the fore. As water ‘gathered and rushed towards the drain’ (305) in the restaurant’s kitchen, he tells the reader: I crawled [like a cockroach] and swam above the water, and when I saw a leaf carried along by the stream of soap and water as if it were a gondola in

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Venice, I climbed onto it and shook like a dancing gypsy, and I steered it with my glittering wings towards the underground. (305)

Several images overlap here. In Greek mythology, the oarsman Charon ferried the dead across the river Styx into the realm of Hades. But the protagonist, metamorphosed into his favourite insect and feeling closer than ever to the soul of his dead sister, is his own boatman, gliding towards a safe haven. Exile, for him, is a process which both in its origin, that is, his reason for departure from Lebanon, and in its development in Canada remains irreversible except in its psychological sense, which he achieves through an action that allows him to ‘recover’ by taking full advantage of a second chance. An absolute exile can be defined as a displaced individual who ‘continues to be at odds with both the world he has rejected and the one he has moved into’ and so ‘remains physically, spiritually, and intellectually an exile forever’ (Dahlie 1988, cited in Ward 2002: 15). While Hage’s protagonist does remain physically and intellectually an exile, his proverbial spirit detaches itself from its concrete surroundings at the dramatic climax as past and present collide, or rather coalesce. This allows him to leap in both the direction of the past and that of the future in a single moment of action that resolves an inner conflict in the present. Regardless of the double killing’s legal consequences, with which the novel does not concern itself, the protagonist’s mental escape through the drain – and presumably into a difficult life as a fugitive – is a symbolic return to an inner equilibrium, to a self finally relieved of a terrible burden, and to the only ‘home’ within whose boundaries he ever felt welcome and secure. A Good Land Layla in A Good Land 7 grew up in Lebanon and experienced the war for some time before she, like Marianna in The Bullet Collection, was obliged as a teenager to settle abroad (specifically Adelaide, Australia) with her parents.8 In Jarrar’s Somewhere, Home, Aida (in the second story of the trilogy) returned to Lebanon in her early thirties after having lived in Europe for many years but was unable to build meaningful relationships in post-war Beirut. Having never been attached to the family home or to the country as such but rather to childhood memories, most of them tied to a kindly Palestinian concierge

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killed during her absence, she failed to resume her life ‘at home’ and returned to a Europe where she had equally failed to find or forge a substitute or second home. In Dreams of Water (2007), Jarrar’s second novel, the ‘drifting protagonist’ (Cook 2007: 67) Aneesa shuttles back and forth between Beirut and London, decides eventually to stay in the former because her mother is there, and because ‘Lebanon is like a second skin that does not leave [her]’ (Jarrar 2007: 16), as stated in the text, but loses her lover Samir, who chooses to remain in England. This novel, like A Good Land, evokes ‘the human cost of war and the longing for love’ (‘Exile’ 2007: par. 10), for which only some are compensated, and then only partially: Waddad, the mother, ‘replaces’ her kidnapped son Bassam with a Druze boy, Ramzi, whom she believes to be his reincarnation and tries to adopt, while Aneesa remains emotionally adrift after resettling in Lebanon. Unlike Jarrar’s earlier female protagonists, Layla, now in her thirties, is determined to make a fresh start in post-war Lebanon by both reconnecting with memory-filled places and making new friends to smooth her readaptation. To use Roberta Rubenstein’s expression again, her mind is set on ‘travers[ing] the gap between longing and belonging’ (2001: 6). In achieving this, she completes Aida’s failed and Aneesa’s half-materialised projects of giving Lebanon, and themselves in it, a second chance. Of Montreal, Hage proclaims: ‘This is home’ because ‘I have friends here. And at a certain age, you get tired of wandering. If I went back to Lebanon or moved to some other place, I’d have to go through another immigration’ (cited in Wagner 2008: par. 13). Not so for Layla – or, for that matter, her author. Jarrar declares: ‘Beirut was home but sometimes we do not realize what “home” means until we cannot go there anymore’ (2007: Radio interview). For her, it is leaving Lebanon again – as many repatriates did following the outbreak of the Israel–Lebanon war in 2006 but as she and her protagonist refused to do – that would have constituted a second immigration. Layla refuses to play ‘the role of newcomer again’ by trying to sink roots in ‘an unfamiliar city’ because, as she explains, that would mean ‘being in between lives all the time’ (Jarrar 2009: 248). Jarrar agrees: ‘Lebanon is not a hotel you go to when everything goes well and leave [again] when it doesn’t’ (2007: Radio interview). Jarrar, like most contemporary Arab-Australian authors, was not born on Australian soil, but in Lebanon, and Layla Al Maleh argues that the marks of cultural ‘in-betweenness and hybridity’ (2009: 46)

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are especially visible in the writings of those Arab-Australians who arrived as adults or teenagers, as opposed to those born there to immigrant parents. Indeed, Jarrar, el Hage and el-Zein left Lebanon reluctantly during or after the civil war. Therefore, having significant memories of the homeland confers ‘an expatriate perspective’ rather than that of ‘fully internalized [Australian] citizenship’ (Al Maleh 2009: 45). Unlike Jarrar, who has repatriated, Loubna Haikal and Abbas el-Zein live in Australia, and Jad el Hage between both countries.9 Yet they all engage in (some of) their texts with the ‘rhetoric of displacement, exile, and diaspora, the dilemma of inclusion and exclusion’ (Al Maleh 2009: 46) in multicultural Australian society and with its attitudes towards ethnicity and marginalisation. As Amal Saleeby Malek explains in her study on repatriation to Lebanon, repatriates are in general greatly motivated to succeed because their return, unlike that of many immigrants and refugees, is mostly voluntary (2001: 113–14). Voluntary is perhaps not strong enough a word to describe Layla’s repatriation, since she resists her parents’ multiple entreaties that she return to Australia, where they are permanently based, after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005 and later during the 2006 war. A Good Land is a first-person novel divided into six parts titled ‘Layla’, ‘Fouad’, ‘Kamal’, ‘Prague’, ‘War’ and ‘Hope’, which indicate, respectively, three major characters, the birthplace of Margo (a fourth important character), the most recent conflict in Lebanon, and the emotion/virtue required to deal with its repercussions. The events described, taking place in the present, begin in February 2005 and end a few months after the 2006 war. Through extended dialogues among various characters, this novel provides an in-depth discussion of the semantic permutations of home. This thematic focus, yielding multiple conclusions as to what home means for individuals of different backgrounds, generations and life experiences, differentiates this text from the others covered in this study. No particular definition of home is favoured, since many characters are allotted copious narrative space in which to elucidate and even redefine their conceptions of the term. I zero in on numerous figures, both major and minor, and on their relationships and dialogues with Layla and with one another in order to flesh out this multilayered question. Naturally, the younger a person is at the time of a major upheaval which

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may result in departure from a troubled country, the more vital and vivid imagination becomes in filling in the gaps of both the necessarily few and possibly porous/vague age-related memories, and of the intervening time, that is, the length of absence, prior to repatriation. Having returned to her birthplace in her early to mid-thirties, a few years before February 2005, Layla cannot possibly know much of its history as a lived experience considering her age and long absence. Therefore, it is the personal experiences – in the form of testimonies and oral mini-histories, which read at times ‘more like memoir[s] than fiction’ (Hagestadt 2010: par. 2) – of older characters born in Lebanon which fill in the reader, through Layla. Other persons’ perspectives and (minimally) her own imagination are used to present a slice of Lebanon’s twentieth-century history, and what this country meant and means now to people living in it at different times of war and peace. In addition to Layla, Fouad, Kamal and Margo, whose lives intersect in Lebanon, have all lived abroad but have returned to search for fresh beginnings or to resume their lives in a country still recovering from one devastating war and forced to endure yet another before the novel’s end. The text opens with Layla’s observations of post-war Beirut, ‘the city of dreams, at once magnificent and fragile’, a place of ‘buried sorrows [yet] transcending joy’ (3). Past and present are intertwined in her memory, for she remarks that this overcrowded city ‘no longer possesses an obvious beauty’, as there is ‘[v]ery little of the lush greenness’ (3) she knew in her youth. Postwar construction is ‘haphazard and garish’, and ‘a real sense of community’ (3) is missing. However, as Layla affirms in Part 4, the genuine feeling of an inter-sectarian community does seem to prevail in the capital, however briefly, following the displacement of tens of thousands of Lebanese – mostly Shiites from the south – caused by Israeli bombardment of that region during the 2006 war.10 Layla remembers her middle-class childhood in Ras Beirut, near the coast, ‘as a breezy existence that was only interrupted when civil war broke out’ (8). Tender memories, of playing with other children in her neighbourhood and of conversations with an elderly fisherman on Saturday mornings, have remained more or less solid. More than twenty years later, walking with her friend Margo on Beirut’s Corniche, typically frequented by a crosssection of Lebanese, she wonders ‘what’s happened’ (50) to the fisherman.

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The same Corniche stirs up a different memory for non-Lebanese Margo, who sees it as a less polished version of the south of France. Layla is aware of the partial role imagination plays in the effort to recall distant place-related memories. Influenced by the ‘fantastical’ bed-time stories her mother used to tell her about ‘the adventures of a little girl who, like [her], lived with her parents in Ras Beirut in an apartment not far from the sea’, she admits that she, too, has taken on ‘the role of storyteller [. . .] adding details to mama’s accounts of the girl’s life, changing an ending whenever [she] felt it needed it and seeing [her]self as the heroine of an unyielding imagination’ (14). Layla carefully compares recollections of childhood haunts with what they have become after the passage of time and the ravages of war. As Margaret Morse states, sentiments and memories ‘linked to home are highly charged, if not with meaning, then with sense memories that began in childhood’ (1999: 63). Sense memories, she explains, include smells, tastes, textures, sounds, voices, postures and rhythmic ways of moving, colours and even degrees of brightness. Pleased that a shop she often visited as a child is still there, Layla remembers ‘fingering the stationery, lined notebooks, reams of white paper and pens and pencils of all colours’ (234). She also recalls reading newly purchased comic books ‘on the wide stoop of an old house with [her] back leaning against [its] black iron gate’ and biting ‘into the soft, already halfmelted pieces of chocolate, slurping in the thick, fruity filling and chewing slowly to make the bar last as long as possible’ (234). She ‘sees’ herself again as that ‘skinny young girl from a crowded city by the Mediterranean that was as close and as blue as the sky above it’ (234). Her sense memories here include texture, taste, posture and colour, all of which are stirred up despite some changes, such as the absence of an old house, demolished to make way for a parking lot. Walking past her old building and the petrol station once owned by her father, the ‘acrid smell of car fumes and a damp, pungent breeze blowing off the sea fill [her] nostrils’ (235). Compared to the other senses, smell is evolutionarily the most archaic. Morse explains that even ‘an unpleasant or acrid smell can evoke a joyous sensation, if only because of its capacity to trigger sudden recollection’ (1999: 66), as it does for Layla here but also for Marianna in The Bullet Collection and the protagonist in Unreal City. It is not surprising, then, that upon smelling the petrol- and garbage-infused air near her childhood home, Layla remarks:

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It all seems so familiar that for a moment I am transported in time, not to one particular period in my life but to a kind of amorphous past that continues to enfold rapidly passing moments, Layla here and now and all the Laylas who have ever been. (235)

Furthermore, Layla is aware of the evocative power of the senses, for she says later: ‘I am reminded of my childhood, when touch, smell, hearing, taste and sight defined existence’ (269). Like Marianna in The Bullet Collection, Layla endured several years (although far fewer than the former) of the civil war before being forced as a teenager to leave with her parents. While Marianna’s family went to the US, Layla’s ‘packed up all [their] belongings and moved to Australia to start anew’; her anger about not having had a say in the matter also echoes Marianna’s experience: ‘I was an adolescent then, awkward and unforgiving and unwilling to join in the grown-ups’ apparent enthusiasm for this new adventure’ (9). Unlike Marianna, however, who only dreamed of returning after the war ended, Layla actually does. The long and comfortable years in Australia are compressed into a few paragraphs in Part 1 which describe ‘the reality of being so far from the only home [she] had ever known’ (9). Again like Marianna, she resents the fact that her parents ‘seemed like different people [who] took on separate selves that had not been apparent before they left Beirut’ (10). Despite making friends within ‘a rapidly growing Lebanese diaspora’ and among mainstream Australians, Layla remained aware of her ‘illusory and undeserved’ (10) life there. Quoting Pierre Bourdieu, Ghassan Hage explains the significance of social reality in determining one’s perception of material surroundings. When the social environment fails to pull the individual towards what he or she considers the ‘necessities of life’, reality, in turn, ‘fails to impose itself on one’s senses’ (2010: 154), thus becoming inconsistent and illusory. Layla’s lack of interest in any long-term emotional and/or professional investment in Australia turned this country into a space where ‘social gravity [was] suspended’ (154). In retrospect, the best she can say about her hiatus there is that it provided a ‘reprieve, an opportunity to garner the strength’ required when she returned to Lebanon; during that period, she was acutely aware of her ‘dual existence’ (Jarrar 2009: 10), a mental/affective state similar to Said’s notion of ‘contrapuntal consciousness’, and wondered

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when and how she would awaken from her proverbial slumber to feel again the immediacy and intensity of life in Lebanon. Finally, equipped with a PhD in English literature and several years’ teaching experience, she returns despite her parents’ objections, insisting that an alternative existence cannot be fully embraced when the earlier one ‘still clings’ (10) to her in the form of ‘memories of a past [she] cannot leave behind’ (11). It is clear that Layla sees her Australian citizenship in ‘liberal procedural’ terms but her Lebanese one in ‘communitarian’ ones.11 As discussed earlier, the protagonist in Cockroach does not see Canada and Lebanon in such terms at all. Emotional cartography is defined as ‘the differential and intersecting sets of attachments to, and sentiments associated with landscapes, states, assemblages of social relations, networks and institutions, and to formal membership in nation states or national communities’ (Stasiulis and Amery 2010: 74). For Layla, Australia provides an ‘effective’ type of legal belonging, whereas Lebanon is the source of an ‘affective’ citizenship, which she hopes to prove by contributing to this latter’s post-war reconstruction, both as an educator (at the American University of Beirut) and as a loyal citizen.12 Australia allowed her to live in peace and complete her education, but it is Lebanon to which she feels an emotional commitment and in which she is willing to invest, not just emotionally but also practically. Only twice does she question her decision to return: following Hariri’s assassination in February 2005 and during the Israeli war on Lebanon in summer 2006. Both times, she finds herself resisting her parents’ pleas that she leave Lebanon again. Feeling a ‘growing stubbornness in [her] not so much to ignore what is going on but to keep going in spite of it’ (15), she informs them that she is not lonely and downplays the instability following Hariri’s assassination by reassuring them that Syrian troops have finally left after almost thirty years. Without telling them so, she sees their concern as having been intensified by ‘a measure of guilt’, shared by many Lebanese diasporans who have chosen not to repatriate ‘just when [their country] needs them most’ (16), and by exaggerated fears, compared to the normal fears of those living in Lebanon, who can therefore see things clearly instead of being carried away by the sensationalising Western media. Being in the crowds during Hariri’s funeral makes Layla feel that the Lebanese, herself included, can stand united.13 Only the reader is privy to her occasional ‘misdirected

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musings’ (16) and her inner battle to justify her return – and her remaining – by means of a measurable success, in professional and/or personal terms, despite ongoing challenges. Layla tells the reader: ‘It was difficult [to leave Lebanon] the first time round, I want to say to my mother, and it would be even worse now, I know’ (239). Instead, she only tells her father that she is ‘not going to run away’ – pointedly skipping the word ‘again’– ‘just because things happen to be difficult right now’ (240). Unlike the much more resentful and verbally aggressive Marianna, Layla actually apologises, feeling ashamed for having implied that her parents had acted cowardly in abandoning their country during the civil war. Her father indirectly defends his earlier decision thus: ‘You have a right [. . .] to keep yourself safe [. . .] Many Lebanese would love the chance to leave and begin new lives away from all the turmoil’ (240). Layla finally asks him what guarantees there are that she would not ‘be longing’ to return to Lebanon if she went back to their ‘adopted home’ (239), insisting that expecting to live without interruptions by external events is an illusion – and that she, at this mature age, makes her own decisions. Is home defined by a place, by the presence of loved ones, regardless of location, or by some personal philosophy of how to lead one’s life? This novel posits a variety of answers as Layla discusses the issue with several interlocutors. The fundamental decision of leaving versus staying during the civil war, a hallmark in Anglophone Lebanese fiction demonstrated repeatedly in this study, is a difficult one, as illustrated by the opposite attitudes and actions of her parents, and those of her paternal uncle’s family. Unlike her parents, who gave up on Lebanon as a viable habitat and emigrated ‘without looking back once’ (35), her father’s brother and his wife remained a ‘forward-looking couple, unwilling to hark back to the miseries of the civil war and enjoying the here and now of Beirut days’ (34). The uncle’s reason for staying is that Beirut ‘is still the best place to be’ because it has ‘everything and everyone [he] could ever need in it and more’ (34). Layla’s father, during her uncle and aunt’s visit to Australia following the war’s end in 1990, suggested they ‘set up home [my emphasis]’ (34) in that country. His view of home resembles that of Hamid Naficy, who states: ‘Home is anyplace’ (emphasis in original) because it is ‘temporary’ and ‘moveable’, so ‘it can be built, rebuilt, and carried in memory by acts of imagination’ (1999: 6). His brother rejects the

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offer, and implicitly this definition, declaring that he and his wife wish to ‘play a part in rebuilding Lebanon’ (34) and therefore could not be happy anywhere else. To Layla’s uncle, the original homeland is the only home to be had, one which needs literally to be rebuilt, not metaphorically as a new home, that is, a new life, away from the old soil. As Ha Jin sees it, ‘homeland’ has two meanings: one’s native land, and the land where one’s home is at present. For much of the past, the two meanings were reconcilable because ‘home’ also signified ‘origin’ when the present was simply a continuation of the past. Nowadays, however, as he explains, the two meanings form a dichotomy, as expressions like ‘new homeland’, ‘second homeland’ or ‘newly adopted homeland’ are very common. In short, ‘homeland’ is no longer a geographical location in a personal or collective past but a place deemed vital to one’s present and future (2008: 65). From this perspective, Layla’s father and uncle have a common national origin but belong to different homelands. Upon complaining to her uncle that her father ‘dragged his family away with him, without allowing anyone else a say’, the former defends his brother’s decision by stating that ‘[t]here’s no right or wrong’ (35), and that such actions are appropriate for the head of a family who feels responsible for the safety of children too young to have a say in times of crises. Layla’s uncle’s position played a major role in her longing to return to her ‘roots on this earth [which] were worth preserving’, because ‘in abandoning them [she] might also be losing the very qualities that defined [her]’ (34), as she says. Ghassan Hage distinguishes between two kinds of roots: those which keep one grounded, and those which move with us. He also distinguishes between two kinds of forces: those which push us, causing us to leave where we are, and those which propel us, providing a continuing impetus that stays with us, enabling us to bring our roots to new places (2010: 157). Because Layla was pushed out of Lebanon against her will, she was unable to carry her roots and therefore to move ahead with a piece of her land-based identity with which to start a new life abroad. Instead, she felt that her sense of identity, based largely on her memories, would eventually be eroded unless she returned to the actual roots and lieux-mémoires, discussed in Chapter 2, to revive them and rebuild her selfhood. Layla’s conversations with Margo, an elderly and mysterious European woman who lives in the same building and whom she quickly befriends, make her

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question, periodically, her belief that one cannot feel at home unless one resides in one’s native country. Margo’s fluid perception of home is partly reflected by the fact that her story is not housed in an eponymous part of the novel, like those of the three other main characters. She compares narrating her life-story to ‘peeling away the many layers of an onion’, thereby denying the existence of a single truth, a core identity or even a lone definition of anything, preferring instead to live ‘in the moment’ (44) of an ever-shifting reality. Personal identity is flexible, never fixed or fixated on a particular geographical spot called home. Despite her long friendship with Fouad, who originally invited her to stay in Lebanon, Margo tells Layla that she had set up home in it because, ironically, she felt that nothing and nobody in particular kept her here. When asked, ‘So where do you feel you belong, Margo?’ she replies: ‘Wherever I happen to be [. . .] whoever I happen to be with [. . .] With you here, now, and somewhere else later on’ (33). Layla feels threatened by this logic, insisting that Lebanon is everything to her because it is ‘where [she] grew up, where [she] became who [she is]’, to which Margo responds: ‘But perhaps one day that feeling too will change in you’ (34). Having lived in different countries, Margo has felt comfortable in more than one. Lebanon has acquired permanence, but only because of her advanced age. As she says: ‘The only way I’m leaving this place is in a box [. . .] This is the last home I’ll ever have’ (48). Margo’s concept of a changeable home resembles Naficy’s, thus standing in stark contrast with both Layla’s uncle’s and her father’s. Once the notion of home is divorced from materiality, their propositions – that either one’s native country or an adopted one is necessary to satisfy one’s need for territorial/ national belonging – lose all meaning. Believing that ‘[i]t never is about where you are or even the people you happen to be with’ (52), she adds: What matters [. . .] is not what you do but how you do it, whether or not you give life the passion and seriousness it deserves and whether you have the courage and honesty to do this, not just every now and then, but every moment, right until the very end. (53)

It is the last piece of this advice which Layla heeds, albeit in harmony with her own philosophy of the meaning of home, when she courageously sinks her feet deeper into Lebanese soil during the 2006 war, determined never to abandon it again. In his essay based on interviews with voluntary migrants, Greg Madison

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applies the label ‘existential’ to many of the motivations of those ‘individuals who choose to leave their homeland’ (2006: 238, emphasis in original). Having affinities far deeper with elements of cultures other than their own, they happily become ‘strangers in a strange land’ (240). For such individuals, migration can be self-protective because it cultivates flexibility to develop oneself according to an inner call. This process of ‘self-direction’ contributing to ‘self-creation’, as Madison shows, prevails over the importance of belonging to a fixed original place and the emotional need for land-bound security and self-identification (246). Margo would largely qualify as an existentially motivated traveller keen on what he calls ‘conscious living’ (247). She seeks out contact with unfamiliar cultures, and sees complementarities between her evolving personhood and different niches in the world for the purpose of ‘generat[ing] a temporary [yet recurring] feeling of being at home’ (247). This continual effort, displayed in her life’s movements, suggests, as Madison argues, ‘a new definition of home as person-environment interaction’ (247). He adds that it is possible that some of these existential migrants eventually settle somewhere. Indeed, Margo’s life-long ‘directionality’, as he calls it, or her ‘urge to travel again’ (166), as the novel does, leading her to spend time in the UK, the US, the West Indies, the Far East, Jordan and Syria, came to a halt, by choice, in Lebanon because of her advanced age. The peregrinations leading her to this last post demonstrate an art of survival in tune with her changing needs. In her travels, she makes good friends but also what she calls ‘intimate acquaintances’ (166). If ‘[e]xperiencing homelessness is a striving towards home’, as psychologist Dariane Pictet contends (cited in Madison 2006: 255), then Margo has succeeded in ‘housing’ her demand to be who she is at any given moment. By her own account, Margo’s life has been profoundly influenced by the Second World War, during which she worked for the French Resistance, and lost both her parents to the Holocaust and her mysterious lover John to combat. After his demise, she says, she gave herself over to excessive alcohol use and sexual promiscuity, including lesbian affairs, and even contemplated suicide. After Margo’s death, however, Layla learns that parts of her story are highly unreliable: her name, her nationality and her religion, for instance, were all contrived. While she long pretended to be a French Catholic named Margo, it becomes clear that her travelling was partly designed to hide her true identity, namely that of a Jewess, whose real name

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we never learn, from what was then Czechoslovakia. In Beirut, she found anonymity. Only after she dies, right before the 2006 war, does Kamal come across her identification papers in her apartment. Layla completes other parts of the puzzle by flying to Prague to meet with Margo’s relatives. As Madison asserts, perhaps the most significant feature of existential migration is that in it ‘we are not-at-home not because we have been exiled from home, but rather because we have been exiled by home from ourselves’ (2006: 255, emphasis in original). After the war and her parents’ murder at a concentration camp in Poland, Margo chose not to remain in Prague, her hometown, where she no longer felt ‘at home’, and eventually settled in Lebanon, where she no longer felt exiled from herself by the old memories of suffering closely tied to her original homeland. As she puts it to Kamal: ‘Maybe what we think of as our connection to a country is only our fear of being somewhere less familiar. Maybe a real sense of home is meant to come from somewhere within us’; she refuses the romantic epithet ‘exile’, deriding it as ‘too negative’ and ‘too fancy’ (131), seeing herself instead as a survival artist. More than any other novel discussed in this study, A Good Land includes many Lebanese characters of different generations who relate to their country from different perspectives based on their respective experiences. That collective memories are shaped by historical events, especially traumatic ones, unique to each generation in a specific location is a point emphasised in the novel. Listening to her friend’s grandfather in Adelaide narrate some of his war-related experiences, Layla muses: It was a while before I realized that he was not talking about the civil conflict in Lebanon that had so affected my own life but about the Second World War which, for his generation [my emphasis], had defined the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of their existence, the single event that had changed them and their world forever. (31)

Fouad, the eldest of the Lebanese characters, was born in 1930 to a Muslim Syrian father and a Protestant Lebanese mother who converted to Islam. Of a large, upper-middle-class family living in Ras Beirut, he grew up in a cosmopolitan ambiance and in prosperous times, attending an expensive private school and graduating from the American University of Beirut before obtaining a post-graduate degree in the UK. He leaves with two guarantees:

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a secure post, on his return, at a company in Beirut, and a future wife, May, with whom he had fallen in love at seventeen. Fouad’s definition of home derives from his secure identity as an Arab in a region ‘without borders’ (Jarrar 2009: 66), specifically ‘a borderless Middle East’, prior to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the onset of the ‘bitterness and despair of a [Palestinian] diaspora’ (85) in Lebanon and other Arab countries. The Lebanon he knows, based on his relatively privileged upbringing in Beirut, is that of a ‘mixed community of people from all of Lebanon’s sects woven into the colourful and intricate designs of the carpets they displayed in their homes, everyone playing a part, entwined and deeply conscious of their connections’ (78), paving the way to ‘a future filled with opportunity’ (63). This view of Lebanon contrasts starkly with the narrowly defined view of one’s nation as belonging naturally and rightfully to one’s religious sect, a perspective associated with a particular political ideology held by some members of the civil war generation in The Hakawati, A Girl Made of Dust and De Niro’s Game. Unlike Elie, Naji, Bassam and George, Fouad experienced Lebanon ‘growing into something greater than it had ever been before, man and country together shaping a less circumspect world’ (Jarrar 2009: 81). His Beirut is not a divided city or one taken hostage by warring factions, as it was for these young male characters in the 1970s and 1980s, but ‘a repository of dreams still to be fulfilled’ (82). At the age of twenty, when these characters (excluding Bassam) were unwittingly enslaved by various political doctrines, ruining both their own lives and those of others, Fouad felt ‘ageless’ in the midst of ‘the pulsating energy that was moving Lebanon and his generation [my emphasis] forward’ (87) in the heyday of Arabism. His college years in the UK, as described, resemble a mini-Bildungsroman, wherein he ‘waited anxiously for letters from home’ (91), obtained his degree, widened his cultural horizons, awakened to matters of sexuality, and discovered deep friendship, beyond family circles, with the older Margo, living in London at the time following her retreat from continental Europe. All accomplished, he returned to Lebanon to start the life he had envisioned. Now in his old age, living in the mountains overlooking Beirut, he tells Layla: I’ve seen this country go through its best and worst times [. . .] and I’ve always felt exactly as you do about it. But sometimes I think that my genera-

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tion [my emphasis] took advantage of the glory years of Lebanon and gave very little in return. (264)

Specifically, he blames members of his generation for having ‘settled for a political set-up based on sectarian loyalties’, being solely interested in making money instead of ‘building a spirit of community that might have helped us cope with the challenges we later faced’ (264). The challenges of the civil war, whose causes included deeply ingrained sectarian loyalties which helped mobilise many young and vulnerable constituents into combat and/or forced them to flee the turmoil, were felt most acutely by members of the generation that came of age during the bloodshed. De Niro’s Game and Unreal City showcase male protagonists – respectively traumatised by torture and brainwashed by a sect-related political ideology – who leave for European capitals, where they remain in limbo or die by choice, whether that death is real or imagined. By contrast, A Good Land portrays the repatriation of a few secondary yet similar characters who find themselves ‘in a totally different Lebanon’ which, after the war’s end in 1990, was stable enough to facilitate a new start for them as ‘rehabilitated’ (Jarrar 2009: 125) and more mature individuals. For example, Kamal’s friend Ghassan, who had once been involved with a radical political group and was almost imprisoned before he left for the US, returns with his wife years later to work and raise his children in post-war Lebanon. Unlike Fouad, who is certain of his attachment to Lebanese soil, Kamal, born in Lebanon of Palestinian refugees from Yafa, feels displaced and believes that ‘certainty, no matter how solid it might seem, is transient’ (Jarrar 2009: 103). His legal status as ‘a refugee with special dispensation to reside in Lebanon, though not to work or gain citizenship’ (103), makes him an inside outsider. Possessing what he calls the ‘fluid identity’ of ‘a man in transition’ (103), with a keener sense of perspective than of physical presence, he becomes the celebrated author of nearly a dozen books: two histories of Palestinian villages before 1948, four novels, one volume of poetry, a play and two volumes of children’s tales. He uses ‘the right measure of detachment to record the irony and splendour inherent in the human experience’ (103). He sees the world as being ‘off centre, askew, a picture that can only be looked at once before it is altered forever, a story that changes with every

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telling’ (104). Now living in the same building into which his family had moved in the early 1960s, he was raised on what Marianne Hirsch calls postmemories, which are typical of second-generation writers who grow up affected not by the traumatic event itself, here the 1948 Palestinian nakba (catastrophe), but by the narratives of survivors and eyewitnesses – in his case, stories of ‘aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins leaving everything behind them and fleeing towards the unknown’ (105–6) – that preceded their birth. These second-hand memories provide Kamal with an emotional and intellectual bridge to the land of his forebears, estranged relatives and pre-1948 life in Palestine. Furthermore, they become ‘the makings of a history that he would later explore and try to assimilate’ (106) into his own multi-generic writings, as if to solidify this precious material of oral history before it dissolves. His personal identity not only shapes but is also shaped by his writings, as he wonders what or who he would be ‘if writing were to leave [him]’ (116), seeing as how for him, Palestine exists as a cause for political justice via intellectual resistance while remaining a physically inaccessible place. A ‘future filled with hope’ (Jarrar 2009: 106) in Yafa did not materialise as it did for Fouad in Beirut but came to an abrupt end in 1948, and in their first makeshift home in Aley in the Lebanese mountains, while relying on UNRWA rations, Kamal was born ‘somewhere between his parents’ unspoken longings to return to Palestine and the eventual realization that this would not be’ (107). This in-betweenness results from the inherent tension within postmemory: that of a historic, and mediated, attachment to a place and the temporal dislocation from it. Kamal’s childhood and adolescence were happy enough, living as he did after Aley in a tolerant and mixed Beirut neighbourhood. Unlike other less fortunate Palestinians, his family did not have to live in a refugee camp. Nonetheless, when, as a schoolboy, he tells his father that their apartment is their home, the latter responds: ‘This apartment doesn’t belong to us and nor does this country [. . .] We’re only here until the day we go back to our own home in Palestine’ (114). Kamal’s desire ‘to be Lebanese’ (114), stemming naturally from his first-hand memories of one country only, is shrugged off by his father, a member of the uprooted Palestinian generation. Feeling the familiar apartment to be his only home in a country not supposed to be more than a temporary shelter, Kamal becomes a political journalist, then goes to Munich to complete his

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studies but returns many years later to live in the same flat, surrounded by memories. Kamal did not experience the worst of the Lebanese Civil War, having been in Germany for most of the time. Nonetheless, his anxiety about loved ones left behind made him feel ‘as though he were really living two half-lives, one present and the other just out of reach, each important in its own way but neither allowing him to be completely himself’ (Jarrar 2009: 120). The predicament of emotional in-betweenness is shared by all the diasporic and exilic characters in this study. Falling in love with a Czech woman, Christina, made Kamal feel more at home in Germany for a while, but when the war abated he felt compelled to return to Lebanon. ‘Returning to the only country that had been home [Lebanon] to him seemed the obvious choice’ (120–1). His readjustment period, which contained a few regrets, is compressed into a few sentences. He copes with continuing instability in Lebanon by falling into a routine of writing until Layla, his new neighbour, appears at his door for a signature on one of his works. Kamal’s relative insularity following his return from Germany lessens after meeting Layla and Margo. Through Layla he finds love and rediscovers his youthfulness, and Margo, in the short time he knows her, manages ‘to help restore his confidence and sense of self-worth’ (148). These feelings help him reconnect more directly with his physical surroundings, making Lebanon feel much more like home to him than it had ever been before. The 2006 conflict with Israel, described as ‘sudden’ and ‘brutal’ (Jarrar 2009: 193), is allocated an entire part titled ‘War’. The Glasgow Herald depicts A Good Land as ‘a powerful rebuke to the persistent brutality of war’ (inside front cover). So far, this is the only Anglophone Lebanese novel which might justifiably be called a post-post-war narrative for taking into its scope not only the long civil war but also the continuing upheavals of this nation, most notably the catastrophic effects of the thirty-four-day conflict in 2006 on both its infrastructure and the lives and livelihoods of its people, particularly the mostly Shiite inhabitants of South Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut.14 Again, two choices present themselves to the Lebanese: to leave or not to leave as a means of riding out this latest wave of violence. Beirut quickly becomes host to thousands of homeless southerners but also ‘a city of ghosts’ (Jarrar 2009: 196). A displaced family of four, close to Kamal,

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moves into his apartment, making him move into Layla’s, a fact which inevitably transforms their friendly relationship into a romantic and sexual one. When Kamal asks her if she wishes to leave, whether abroad15 or to the safer mountainous area where Fouad lives, Layla’s memory of her overwhelming helplessness in the face of her parents’ decision all those years earlier leads her to reject the option of abandoning her country, now in flames once again. Her existence in Lebanon since her return from Australia seems distant in the face of this immediate tragedy. Worried that displaced families might squat her apartment or that she might be unable to return to Beirut, she stays in the building. Tired of being cooped up amid depressing news and the deafening sound of endless air strikes, Kamal and Layla revisit different neighbourhoods in the capital with an eye on their respective childhood haunts to rekindle happy memories of free movement, undisturbed peace and undiluted joy. More useful in battling her frustration than escaping to the past is plunging into the present by offering her time and teaching skills to traumatised children at a school-turned-shelter run by a dedicated young man called Ziad. Like the feeling of unity she enjoyed at Hariri’s funeral, volunteering during this crisis makes her assert her Lebaneseness once more. Kamal, too, helps out by delivering relief supplies to a shelter in the southern city of Sidon. Mona, the woman in charge of this facility, shares Layla’s belief that the war will ‘have to end eventually [. . .] and plan[s] on being right here to help put this city back together again’ (221). Returning to Beirut from Sidon, Kamal is traumatised by the sight of Lebanese soldiers at a checkpoint being blown up in an Israeli air raid and by being unable to help. Worse still, he is unable to talk or write about this event, and so, ‘for once, words have no choice but to fail [him]’ (222), making him question both his identity as a writer and his purpose in life as a man. The last chapter, titled ‘Hope’, covers the period immediately following the 2006 war. The aftermath of the conflict, in human terms, becomes Kamal’s topic for a paper to be presented at a conference in Berlin. At first, he is hesitant about re-encountering reminders of his youthful self by going back to Germany and sceptical of being able to understand the latest round of brutality by simply writing about it: ‘How can war and hatred and so much violence’, he wonders, ‘ever make sense?’ (237). Perhaps Jarrar is commenting indirectly here on the differences between immediate, journalistic writing

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and novel writing. The latter brews longer, and on a smaller flame, enabling it – potentially – to distil a clearer version of what, where, how and/or why things happened. As Nathalie Abi-Ezzi says: We ‘know’ and understand many things that we haven’t witnessed at first hand. As for truth, it’s important to write about something you believe in, that you feel is true [. . .] It’s interesting, isn’t it, that truth can often be told so well through fiction. (Cited in O’Reilley 2009: 4)

When Kamal calls Layla from Germany about a job offer he has received at his old university, she realises that Lebanon, which she had vowed never to leave again, had felt even homier since she fell in love with him. She tells the reader: ‘[A]fter being alone all these years I finally feel that I have begun to find my way home’ (243). For her, at this point, home has acquired a more fluid definition, one which goes beyond the materiality of a country or cherished spots and structures therein that house one’s memories of a distant past; it is rather a web of concurrent facts with a view to the future, namely being where one wants to be, preferably in the company of a special person with whom one shares love and intimacy on multiple levels. Layla disagrees with the post-war logic of Kamal and others, like Bilal, a young doctor who, like him, is ‘tired of it all’ and needs ‘to think of [his] own future now’ (246) by leaving for greener pastures. And by emphasising the need for professional skills like theirs, Layla inadvertently makes them both feel guilty. Unlike Layla, Ziad shows understanding for Bilal’s and Kamal’s decisions to gain ‘a fresh perspective’ (247) and to pursue better careers abroad. He also assures her, however, that he himself is ‘not the type to make it overseas, [being] too attached to this country’ (247). Layla feels solidarity with Ziad, who is willing to stick it out, driven by a sense of duty as well as love for his homeland. Layla, too, is certain about her desire to stay despite the political uncertainty. She muses: ‘I have my doubts just like everyone else but I can’t imagine myself being elsewhere any more [. . .] Nothing feels certain or even real when I’m away from here’ (248). Accompanied by Fouad, Layla scatters Margo’s ashes under a young cedar tree at a garden in the mountains. Her friend’s final resting place is close to where Layla hopes to build her dream house. Asked by Fouad about her main reason for returning to Lebanon, Layla replies: ‘I know now that

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not coming back was never really an option for me, that if I hadn’t returned I would have continued to drift along without purpose as I had been doing for years’ (267). After a two-month stay in Germany, Kamal comes back to be with her. Lebanon-as-country has given Layla directionality and purpose, and Beirut has acquired added significance because there she unexpectedly found the love of her life: ‘Beirut is our refuge, the place where we all feel we belong [. . .] just as love is for all of us, wherever we are and whoever we may be’ (270). A Good Land closes with this couple, of different religions, on a plane to Cyprus to have a civil marriage ceremony, a procedure not available in Lebanon but acknowledged by its government. Lebanon has never felt more like home to either one of them than it does now. Layla reflects that feeling happy and complete in a relationship cannot replace the sentiment of being at home supplied by an actual homeland, but that this memory-laden place becomes a whole lot homier, that is, a livelier piece of an extended and intensified emotional geography, if and when one is fortunate enough to be in such a relationship. Conclusion Love for Kamal ends Layla’s loneliness, just as love for Shohreh ends the feeling of emptiness suffered by the protagonist in Cockroach. However, whereas Layla looks forward to a happy future with the person she loves in the place she calls home, Hage’s main character’s happiness is fleeting, crystallised in one moment which frees him from a burdensome past but leaves unanswered any questions about what comes next. Lebanon is the venue in which Layla tests her mettle, overcomes her nostalgia, and builds a future with a significant other. One cannot help but wonder whether Cockroach’s protagonist might not have benefited, on some level(s), from returning to a post-war Lebanon. Only then might staying in Lebanon or leaving again for Canada (or some other country) be a choice of his own making, one based on the needs of the present and the future, and not on those of the past.

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Afterword

ome, ideally, is where an individual or a group belongs ‘territorially, existentially, and culturally’ (Hedetoft and Mette 2002: vii). Although not the only criterion, nationalism shapes many people’s sense of identity and belonging (viii). A sense of ‘homeness’ is a major determinant of identity, that ‘elusive but still real psycho-sociological state of being in sync with oneself under given external conditions’; affectively defined, these two scholars argue, ‘home is where we feel we really belong’ (vii, emphasis in original). When the feeling of harmony between self and place is non-existent because of a mismatch between one’s cultural, ethnic, political and/or civic affiliations, belonging, as they explain, splits into ‘being’ in one place and ‘longing’ for another (vii). Thus, ‘be-longing’ becomes a ‘longing-to-be . . . at home’ (viii), a longing that creates a rift not only between the self and its true home but also within the self, as long as the home for which one yearns is gone, unreal or out of reach. As I have shown, home in Lebanon, or Lebanon as home, was for many characters simply gone, along with pre-war childhood haunts of which only memories remained, unreal when it was narrowly defined in ideological terms, or out of reach due to deeply entrenched traumas dating from the war. Yet, many tried to recapture it by various means. Embittered by absent or domineering fathers, some male protagonists sought to develop their personal identities away from patriarchal authority, partly associated with their fatherland. To do so, they searched for – and with varying degrees of success found abroad – alternative figures, such as friends, lovers and mentors, who allowed them to establish new networks for self-identification. While they demonstrated some form of topophilia, their interactions with their human environment in Lebanon were far more complex. Love–hate relationships

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with their fathers and the extent of their resulting estrangement influenced their sentiments towards their country of birth and of their formative years. In these narratives, feeling ‘at home’ was determined less by geography and more by an emotional actuality that stretches beyond the definitional boundaries of the nation as homeland. Immersed in the chaos of war, some youngsters-turned-fighters did not wish to leave while others, eventually, could only dream of escape. They took up arms to prove their manhood and to promote a partisan view of Lebanon, only to end up disillusioned and/or dead. Several male and female teenage characters fled the mayhem, happily or angrily, with or without their parents, and spent years or decades being successful, albeit not free from an occasionally painful state of in-betweenness, or feeling dispossessed and in limbo abroad but worse still, in some cases, trying to overcome war-generated traumas; they did so by penning their own memoirs, taking medications, seeing therapists, attempting suicide, reliving certain terror-filled scenes with hindsight and/or shuttling back and forth between Lebanon and the West, physically or mentally. Others still returned, with some only managing to resume their lives in post-war Lebanon. No single definition of home materialised; instead an array of possibilities for feeling at home was presented, and was often reformulated, as all these characters moved from childhood to adulthood, from peace to war, and in most instances, from Lebanon to elsewhere, and sometimes from elsewhere back to Lebanon in various scenarios. In Koolaids, an unnamed boy cries when he discovers that a travel book about Lebanon, read at school, names many mountain villages but not his own. The teacher explains that a literary book cannot include everything in a story, but his father believes that it is not mentioned because it is a non-Christian village, dismissing the work as having ‘nothing to do with Lebanon’ (Alameddine 1998: 29). Both could be right in this case. More significantly, this vignette explains perhaps why some grew up during the war and, two to three decades later, rendered their own stories about their sense of homeness in fictional form. All authors in this study produced texts which are about Lebanon in the sense of its being the starting point from which their writing journeys began and to which they returned imaginatively via their works. To use Michel de Certeau’s terms, while some authors, and characters, pinpointed home as a place, that is, a rather stable ‘configuration of positions’, on their narrative canvasses, others

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recast it as a space or a practice, with multiple vectors of direction, mobility, time variables and the element of foreignness (1984: 117). As demonstrated, many diasporic Anglophone Lebanese novels represent spaces in which characters inhabit ‘the rim of an “in-between” reality’ (Bhabha 1994: 13) largely shaped by the traumatic memories of this nation. The fact that many Lebanese, particularly those in the diaspora, believe that Lebanon is not a viable country makes this nation ‘more an idea or an emotion in [their] minds than a real place’ (Jarrar, cited in Zeineddine 2010– 11: 63). In reference to Lebanese transnationalism, Suad Joseph has recently observed that ‘[n]either bifocality, nor interculturalism [. . .] nor multiculturalism, nor hybridity captures the cultural fluidity that maps Lebanese social life’ (2009: 140). This was illustrated in all eleven novels in different, yet comparable, guises. Azade Seyhan writes that the emergent literatures of deterritorialised peoples beyond the parameters of national literature paradigms do not have, as yet, a particular name. Produced in the West, yet read around the world thanks to translation, it is best to qualify post-war Anglophone Lebanese literature as transnational, whether with an exilic or a diasporic flavour depending on its characters’ outlooks and behaviours. Will Anglophone Lebanese writers eventually move on to other themes? So far, the war and its consequences, both material and psychological, are predominant in this body of contemporary fiction. These factors express perhaps the social, economic and political instability which continue to permeate Lebanon more than twenty years after the end of its civil war. In the digital age, writing and publishing instantaneously one’s lived experiences of and thoughts about war in blog and online journal entries, as happened during Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, created what Carol Fadda-Conrey calls a ‘living archive’, one which started as ‘a private form of social memory’ but was quickly transformed into ‘a public form of social, cultural, and historical memory’ (2010: 170). If, as Phil Melling argues, it is the prospect of war which ‘creates a fixation with history’ (1997: 255), then it might unfortunately be wars that will continue to influence, and be retold by, Lebanese writings. Nada Awar Jarrar states: ‘I hope I don’t have to write about war anymore. I’ve had it’ (cited in Zeineddine 2010–11: 67). Surely, her wish is shared by most Lebanese authors and other citizens. Despite political uncertainty, one thing seems assured: until Lebanon emerges as a democratic,

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tolerant, peaceful and just nation, Lebanese diasporic literature will continue to be, for many Lebanese writers and readers everywhere, their substitute nation. Marianne Hirsch argues that literature based solely on postmemory is qualitatively different because it is connected to its object of study ‘not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation’ (1998: 420). In light of this definition, Lebanese literature deriving from postmemories alone cannot be expected to come into full force before the middle decades of the twenty-first century. Until then, however, the unfinished trauma of this harrowing experience for those who do remember, however little that may be, has predictably been showing its narratological symptoms in the post-war, here synonymous with the post-traumatic, phase. Remembering resists omission, making art in general and literature in particular a necessary channel for personal and historical agency in a time of deep emotional loss and suffering. So long as Lebanon deliberately fails to address its past, it is the conscientious and gifted members of this nation who will commemorate its recent history of war, even if their primary by-product has been and continues to be expatriation. By insisting, collectively, on expressing what has been silenced, repressed and even erased, the Anglophone literary constructions of their generation-based experiences amount to testimonies that will be required to achieve so much as an outline of this nation’s possible futures.

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Notes

Notes to Introduction 1. Many Lebanese still refer to the war as al-ahdas (the events) because it constituted a series of battles, in specific locales and at particular times, between ever-shifting alliances, often in the context of foreign interventions, rather than a clearly defined and uninterrupted war. Until now, there is vehement disagreement about the reasons for the conflict(s). Furthermore, intermittent violence in Lebanon existed well before 1975 and persisted after 1990. Nonetheless, the use of ‘post-war’ as adjective to designate the post-1990 period remains current and useful. 2. Evidence for this unabated interest would be, for example, the September– October 2009 special issue, titled ‘Women, War and Conflict’, of Women’s Studies International Forum. It features three articles: two on Francophone Lebanese novels (Andrée Chedid’s La maison sans racines (1985) and Dominique Eddé’s Cerf volant (2003)) and one on an Arabic-language Lebanese novel (Ghada Samman’s Beirut Nightmares (1975)). The editorial choice of including these three articles in the same issue illustrates, once again, Miriam Cooke’s operating principle in War’s Other Voices that the centrality of the civil war as a theme, backdrop and/or narrative device does much more to bring these texts closer together than any linguistic considerations could possibly do to divide them. 3. Benedict Anderson, among countless others, argues that uniform, not to mention updated, school textbooks are indispensable tools in nation-making ventures. 4. See articles by Miriam Cooke (2002) and Saree Makdisi (2006). 5. Craig Larkin notes that post-war silence has been challenged by what Jens Hanssen and Daniel Genberg call ‘hypermesia’ evident in a preponderance of

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‘seminars, conferences, workshops, films, books and art work’ in Lebanon. These challenges are informed by memory discourses of three types: personal healing, resistance (in the form of nostalgia to counteract the globalisation-friendly but locally alienating mode of reconstruction) and revolution (to undermine ruling elites and sectarianism) (2010: 618). The most recent example of hypermesia is the international conference – titled ‘Healing the Wounds of History: Addressing the Roots of Violence’ – which was held 11–13 November 2011 at the Lebanese American University in Byblos, Lebanon. Both Rabih Alameddine and Rawi Hage have asserted their roles as writers in combating official silence about the war. See Christoff (2007: par. 2) and Rached (2008: 20). In April 2009, to mark the thirty-fourth year of the onset of the Lebanese Civil War, a group called Memory for the Future erected in downtown Beirut memorials to what the organisers estimated as the 170,000 dead, 17,000 missing and 340,000 wounded or disabled during the war under the slogan ‘the past remains present’. About two-thirds of the country’s citizens were uprooted from their homes for at least some period during the war; over a decade after its end, more than one-third lives below the poverty line as a result of the conflict and related displacement (Khalaf 2004–5: 54). Authors of both the war and post-war periods include Youssef Habshi al-Ashkar, Hassan Daoud, Elias Khoury, Rashid al-Daif and the eleven women novelists, or ‘Beirut Decentrists’, discussed in War’s Other Voices: Emily Nasrallah, Ghada Samman, Huda Naamani, Hanan al-Shaykh, Nazek Saba Yared, Hoda Barakat, Leila Usayran, Jean Said Makdisi, Evelyne Accad, Etel Adnan and Andrée Chedid. Arabic-language post-war writers, born in the 1950s, include Iman Humaydan Younes, Alawiyya Sobh, Rafif Fattouh and Mohammad Abi Samra. Younger ones, born in the 1960s and 1970s, include Ali Nassar, Najwa Barakat, Youssef Bazzi, Rabee Jaber, Samer Abu-Hawwash, Ziad Kaj, Henriette Abboudi and Hala Kawtharani. Nazem Elsayyed argues that the younger Arabic-language authors, who were children and adolescents during the war and adults in the ‘cold civil peace’ period between 1990 and 2005, have produced far less fiction than poetry, unlike older writers (2006: 20). Four movies – West Beyrouth by Ziad Doueiri, Beirut Phantoms by Ghassan Salhab, Around the Pink House by Joana Hadji Thomas and Khalil Joreige, and The Civilized by Randa Chahal Sabbagh – won critical acclaim and were viewed by large numbers in 1998. Since 1975, Lebanese films have dealt with the war and what it means to be Lebanese (Khatib 2008: xx), thus serving as a form

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of popular memory or of ‘returning home’ (155) by confronting the war-astrauma. On the specific contribution of unearthing the dead and the missing in recent experimental videos and documentaries, see Mark Westmoreland’s article (2010). Lebanese literature was never post-colonial, and French was never used as its post-colonial language or what John Skinner calls a ‘stepmother tongue’ in the case of post-colonial literatures. Many Lebanese intellectuals wrote in French even before the French Mandate, which began in 1919. So the use of French has always been and still is selective and based on education, location and/or class, but was not a colonial inevitability. During May 2010, the French Institute in New York hosted a large number of Lebanese filmmakers, artists, playwrights and novelists who work in English, Arabic and French to celebrate the ‘genius of Lebanon and the Lebanese diaspora’ (Rasamny 2010: par. 2). To date, Jusuf Naoum, who emigrated to Germany in 1964, is the only Lebanese who has published (two novels, in 1996 and 2010) in German. They include Samuel Hazo, Gregory Orfalea, Elmaz Abinader and Ron David. In the US, early twentieth-century mahjar Lebanese writers include Gibran Khalil Gibran, Amin Rihani, Mikhail Naimy and Abraham Mitrie Rihbany; later ones include Vance Bourjaily, William Blatty, Salom Rizk and George Hamid. Edward Atiyah and Rima Alamuddin belong to the mid-century European Anglophone trend. Lebanese diasporic communities around the world constitute the largest groups of Arab immigrants (Abdelhady 2011: 5). Ette uses this term in ÜberLebensWissen: Die Aufgabe der Philologie (2004). Cited online at http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com. This novel, already translated into Italian and French, won the Presentation Prize at the Writers’ Festival in Sydney, Australia. See Arab Voices in Diaspora (2009) and Politics, Culture and the Lebanese Diaspora (2010). In a similar vein, Salah Hassan and Marcy Knopf-Newman argue that Arab-American literary production is much larger than related academic work, except for a few monographs and articles in journals and/or edited volumes (2006: 5). Autobiographies and memoirs include Stacia Hachem’s Tents, Towels and Men with Guns (1997), Abbas el-Zein’s Leave to Remain (2009) and Zena el Khalil’s Beirut, I Love You (2009). Graphic memoirs include Fouad Elkoury’s On War and Love/De la guerre et de l’amour (2007), which features photos, artwork and

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20.

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22. 23.

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a diary of the 2006 war, and Lamia Ziadé’s Bye Bye Babylon: Beirut 1975–1979 (2011), which juxtaposes pre-war and war photographs and reflects on a childhood lost in 1975 when the author was seven. Early 1980s films, like Beirut, The Encounter (1981), Little Wars (1982), The Explosion (1982), Lebanon in spite of Everything (1982) and A Country above Wounds (1983), depict exile as a wished-for place away from Lebanon. Later ones, like Letter from a Time of Exile (1988) and Zozo (2005), portray the experience of being in exile. I use hyphenated identity labels here, and elsewhere, to emphasise cultural and national hybridity. The current debate about whether or not a hyphen should be used to describe cross-cultural identities falls outside the confines of this study. Hage won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for De Niro’s Game in June 2008 and the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Cockroach also in 2008. Ward won the Hala Maksoud Award for Outstanding Emerging Writer at the first RAWI (Radius of Arab-American Writers, Incorporated) conference for The Bullet Collection in June 2005. Jarrar won the Commonwealth Best First Book Award for the South-East Asia and Pacific region for Somewhere, Home in 2004. Jarrar’s A Good Land was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (from South-East Asia and Pacific). Abi-Ezzi’s A Girl Made of Dust was shortlisted for the 2008 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, the 2009 Waverton Good Read Award and the 2009 Desmond Elliott Prize. The film script adaptation of Abi-Ezzi’s novel (by Steve Hawes and Monica Solon) was shortlisted for the Shasha Grant (offered by the Abu Dhabi Film Commission’s international screenwriting competition). A Girl Made of Dust, Alameddine’s The Hakawati and Hage’s Cockroach were on the long list for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Hanania’s Homesick (his first novel) was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Jarrar was born in 1958, Alameddine in 1959, Hanania and Hage in 1964, Ward in 1969 and Abi-Ezzi in 1972. Hirsch discusses postmemory by demonstrating the discursive power of photographs in fixing Jewish historical consciousness and remembrance for the descendants of Holocaust survivors. For more, see her Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, ‘The Generation of Postmemory’ and ‘Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile’. Postmemories belong to those born around or after 1985 and who therefore have neither a lived experience nor personal recollections of the Lebanese Civil

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War. For more on Lebanon’s postmemory generation and how it combats official forgetfulness, see Craig Larkin’s article (2010). 25. Cited online at http://www.wwnorton.com/rgguides/ithedivinergg.htm. 26. These four terms are used by André Aciman in False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory (2000) (cited in Pflitsch 2004a: 252). Notes to Chapter 1 1. For more on this topic, see Dalia Abdelhady’s The Lebanese Diaspora (2011). 2. General Books LLC issued a twenty-eight-page study guide for Koolaids in May 2010. 3. Alameddine does not see Koolaids as exclusively post-modernist (2003: interview with Fadda-Conrey 25). Although he acknowledges engaging in surface play, he does not consider himself a post-modernist because he ‘put[s] a lot of meaning’ into his writings and ‘cannot define [him]self as part of any group’ (Alameddine 2009–10: 45). 4. In addition to the loss of loved ones as the common denominator for both contemporary phenomena stressed throughout the text, five links between the war epidemic and the viral one are explicitly articulated. 5. It has been placed on the list of Selected Gay and Lesbian Titles for Spring 1998: Buyers’ Guide. But as Michael Bronski explains, novels with gay or lesbian content started being marketed as ‘literary fiction’ – ‘with an eye to their national or ethnic content’ – and not exclusively as ‘gay fiction’ around 1994 (1999: 38). 6. The blurb is from the 1998 Picador edition. 7. Citing David Halperin, Shannahan explains that whereas ‘a gay identity, which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object-choice’, a ‘queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or stable reality [and so] queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, [and] the dominant’ (2011: 62). 8. The novel’s subversiveness starts with its ironic title. ‘Koolaids’, as Shannahan explains, citing Paul McFedries, refers to the American expression ‘drinking the Koolaid’ which means ‘to become a firm believer in something; to accept an argument or philosophy wholeheartedly or blindly’ (Shannahan 2011: 133). This term dates from the Jonestown massacre of 1978 when cult followers committed suicide by drinking Kool-aid laced with cyanide. Mohammad, in the novel, says ‘You might as well drink Kool-Aid’ (99) to describe going through life blithely with no thoughts about death. The subtitle, The Art of War, is the

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title of Sun Tzu’s classical Chinese military treatise, mentioned on page 97 of the novel, to contrast its principles of sound strategy, satirically, with senseless Middle Eastern warfare, which is compared to a virus, specifically the tactic of firing blind in the hope of hitting the enemy in the eye. Thus, both title and subtitle, in context, imply blindness, whether literally or figuratively. Johannes Hofer coined the term in a 1688 Swiss medical thesis. Mohammad mentions that it is Thanksgiving, celebrated on the last Thursday of November in the US (40). The references to these symptoms are on pages 1, 53, 99, 166 and 245. See, for example, Haugbolle (2010: 102), Pflitsch (2008: 250) and Brendon (2009: 180 and 229), whose study focuses on English prep school history. Born in Beirut to a Palestinian father and a British mother, Hanania was brought up in both the UK and Lebanon. The protagonists in his first and second novels – Toby Shadrach in Homesick and the unnamed one in Unreal City – are halfLebanese, on their fathers’ side. One is Christian (Greek Orthodox), the other Muslim (Shiite). Although Hanania does include important Palestinian characters in both novels, his narrators/protagonists are Lebanese by birth, origin and/ or partial upbringing and experiences. His focus on childhood and teenage years partially spent in war-torn Lebanon have made some commentators call him ‘the London-based Lebanese novelist’ (Diab 2008). Hexogen is an explosive more commonly known as RDX. Earlier, in South Lebanon, Ali had shown the narrator ‘the turning in the road where a teenage virgin had driven her white Peugeot laden with Hexogen into an Israeli convoy’ (241). A similar event actually took place during the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. Hizbullah was formed in the early 1980s when some radical members, inspired by the Iranian Revolution of 1979, split from the Shiite but largely secular Amal party. See pages 5, 196, 213 and 242. Jumana Bayeh focuses on the ways in which the novel documents Beirut’s physical transformation during the war by the influx of impoverished Lebanese, from the South and from Beirut’s southern suburbs, as well as of Palestinian refugees who sought shelter in the capital when their areas/camps were no longer safe. Layla’s decline into prostitution, the critic argues, runs parallel to the city’s destruction and symbolises its betrayal of the Palestinian cause.

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Notes to Chapter 2 1. Lebanese emigration began in the 1800s during Ottoman rule. Between 1949 and 1988, close to 70,000 Lebanese emigrated to the US (Naff 1992: 162). Between 1975 and 1989, approximately 40 per cent of the multi-sectarian Lebanese citizenry, representing different socio-economic classes, found refuge abroad (Labaki 1992: 621). 2. Hatoum, born in 1952, grew up in Brazil. 3. Alameddine was born of Lebanese parents in Jordan and grew up in Kuwait, visiting Lebanon in the summers. Jarrar was born in Australia of a Lebanese father and an Australian mother of Lebanese origin, whose family has been residing in Australia since the end of the nineteenth century. She grew up in Lebanon. 4. Jarrar went on to London, Washington, Paris and Sydney. Alameddine went on to London and the US. 5. The longest time Alameddine lived in Beirut was five years (1970–5). Residing in San Francisco, he continued to visit Lebanon at least once a year; more recently, however, he has been living alternately in San Francisco and in Beirut. Jarrar repatriated after twenty years spent abroad. 6. Alameddine’s father is from the village of Aitat, and Jarrar’s from the village of Kornayel. 7. The novel received an international prize mentioned in the Introduction. It was also translated into German (by Barbara Heller) as Zu Hause, irgendwo in 2004 (Blessing Verlag), as well as into other languages, including Indonesian. 8. However, in 2010, The Perv was made visible again when reintroduced in an essay by Michael Graves in the anthology The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered, edited by Tom Cardamone. 9. As Frédéric Lagrange states, AIDS is unheard of in modern Arabic literature, while homosexuality is scarcely present (2000: 174). He explains that foreignlanguage Arab authors feel that Arabic cannot convey the freedom needed to write about homosexual passion (note 56, 197). Homoeroticism, as Samira Aghacy shows, is present in Arabic fiction but is often suppressed, politicised, spilling over into ‘the public sphere of war’ (2009: 14). 10. In ‘Whore’, the protagonist is female and the events take place in Lebanon; in ‘Duck’, the male character is Syrian. 11. The word is used a total of four times. 12. Alameddine admires Yourcenar’s fiction, which deals to a large degree with homosexuality.

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13. Nasser does not refer here to the former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser. 14. Alameddine admits his own fascination with the US: ‘I grew up infatuated with America. I had wanted to come for as long as I can remember’ (2002: interview with Devlin: par. 2). 15. Mita Banerjee argues that in chronicling the rich and contemporaneous cultural heritage of diasporic experience, Somewhere, Home, like Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, becomes the fictional equivalent of Hollywood’s ‘Oriental statues’, that is, ancient artifacts, which the movie industry, in its attempt to uphold the Orientalist ‘mummy complex’, has consistently portrayed Arab terrorists as destroying while Westerners as trying to preserve in blockbuster productions. 16. From this perspective, I oppose Dawn Mirapuri’s view that Maysa’s ‘bankrupt testimonies’, deriving from her memories akin to a ‘virtual prison-house’ (2009: 472), feature a ‘static memory’ (473) which, in its attempt to excise the memories of the war from representations of Lebanese history, constitutes a betrayal of the present in favour of the past, an act deemed regrettable, as she argues, by Jarrar. Maysa had told her husband Wadih that she wanted ‘to gather stories’ about her ancestors ‘very soon after [they had] met’ (47), which must have been in 1969, since their child was born six years after they were married, that is, long before the outbreak of the civil war. Also, her document is anything but static, seeing as how she adds coloured illustrations to it based on Wadih’s drawings for renovating the house. 17. Examples of postmemories, as defined by Marianne Hirsch, that is, of indirect memories/narratives/items transmitted by older generation members to younger ones who were not born yet at the time of these (traumatic) events, include stories ‘of the famine that struck [the region] during the Great War’ (4), as told by grandmother Alia to her grandchild Maysa. 18. ‘Amou’ means uncle but is frequently used as a term of endearment for any male measurably older than the speaker. Notes to Chapter 3 1. In recent years, anxiety about the eventual loss of direct memories of the Holocaust has driven a flourishing of memory studies in both theory and fiction. Much work in relation to the formal features – interruption, compulsive repetition, disjunction of style, tense and focalisation – and psycho-social factors of Holocaust literature, by Geoffrey H. Hartman, Lawrence L. Langer and others, has been done. 2. A 2008 study of long-term mental disorders in Lebanon by Elie Karam et al.

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states that ‘[m]ales were exposed to more war events and to those events that reflect greater mobility in wartime, whereas females were more likely to be civilians in a war zone or refugees’ (cited in ‘Study Links’ 2008: 3). Narrative therapy focuses on the patient’s life-story as the principal tool for treatment. By locating those parts in the story that hinder continuity and coherence, and by creating an alternative story, a better construction of one’s life and identity is promoted (Tuval-Mashiach et al. 2004: 281). It has been translated into Spanish, Dutch, Greek and Italian. As Pflitsch shows, in Koolaids, in one story in The Perv and in I, the Divine, certain life-changing days of the war are linked in the minds of three teenagers to auditory memories of specific pop music songs by The Beatles, Genesis and Deep Purple respectively (2005: 16–19). Arab-American literature has resulted from three major waves of Arab immigration to the US: 1878–1924, 1948–1967 and 1967–present. Ward’s short stories have appeared in both Lebanese and Arab-American anthologies, for example Hikayat: Short Stories by Lebanese Women and Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction. So far, the only academic article on The Bullet Collection is Wendy Wolters’, in which she compares the novel to Ruth Kluger’s 1992 German-language memoir translated into English as Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered in 2001. I use the term ‘belatedness’ in a literal sense and on multiple levels, as expressed in a literary fashion, and not in Freud’s (early) sense of the term – Nachträglichkeit in German – as retrodetermination, defined as the traumatic remembering in later life of repressed infantile sexual and erotic experiences or fantasies (in his Studies on Hysteria, 1895). In Post-Gibran: Anthology of New Arab American Writing (see Akash and Mattawa) and in numerous magazines. In addition to the Hala Maksoud Award (2005), it received the Anahid Literary Award (Armenian Center at Columbia University) in 2003, and the Great Lakes College Association’s New Writers Award for Fiction in 2004. Until the late 1990s, scholarship paid little or no attention to children’s stress reactions to a single, acute traumatic episode within the context of chronic violence (Macksoud and Aber 1996: 71). Although rape is hardly exclusive to war, in this case it is a severe affront to which Alaine responds during protracted hostilities; in this sense, Marianna’s account, however subjective and unreliable, serves partly as a qualitative (anecdotal) study of this research question. Ward’s family took refuge at the time in the New England state of Rhode Island.

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Notes to Chapter 4 1. See Peter Singer’s Children at War (2005), David Rosen’s Armies of the Young (2005) and Ann Davison’s article (2004). 2. See Egodi Uchendu (2007) and Deborah Ellis (2004). 3. The first printing of The Hakawati sold 40,000 copies, and the book has been translated into eighteen languages. A Girl Made of Dust has been translated into German, with rights having been sold for at least four other languages. Abi-Ezzi was selected for the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s 2009 New Voices list and is also the author of The Double in the Fiction of R. L. Stevenson, Wilkie Collins and Daphne du Maurier (2003). Born in Lebanon’s Metn district, she moved to the UK at age eleven in 1983. 4. This refers to two presentations at the RAWI conference titled ‘Arab American Art and Culture: Challenges, Reappraisals, and Possibilities’, which was held at the University of Michigan, 3–5 June 2010: Pauline Homsi-Vinson’s ‘Reconfiguring The Arabian Nights: Narrative Transformations in Rabih Alameddine’s The Hakawati and Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent’ and Waïl Hassan’s ‘Queering Orientalism: Rabih Alameddine’s Hakawati’. For more on homosexuality, story-telling and cultural translation in Alameddine, see Chapter 9 in Waïl Hassan’s Immigrant Narratives (2011). 5. In Arabic, Kharrat means both fibber and mapmaker. 6. In this Arab-Israeli war, Israel captured the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria. 7. In October 1973, Egypt and Syria attempted to regain territories that Israel had occupied in 1967. Notes to Chapter 5 1. Bashir Gemayel was a senior member of the Phalange party and the commander of the Lebanese Forces militia. He was elected president on 23 August 1982 but was assassinated, before taking office, on 14 September 1982 when a bomb exploded at the Beirut headquarters of the Phalange party. 2. Mischa Hiller’s Sabra Zoo (2010), like De Niro’s Game a coming-of-age story set in 1982, provides a fictional account of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre. It won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for South Asia and the Europe Best First Book Category in 2011. Of British and Palestinian descent, Hiller was born in the UK in 1962. 

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3. Before that, his novel had been shortlisted for the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2006 Governor General’s Award. Hage was also awarded the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the McAuslan First Book Prize. There are two French translations (by Sophie Voillot). While the English title was retained for the French Canadian version, the French title of the European one is Parfum de poussière. It was translated (by Fida’a Younes) into Arabic as Masa’ir al-ghubar, into German (by Gregor Hens) as Als ob es kein Morgen gäbe, and into Spanish as El juego de Niro. Katrin Moll and Julia Tieke adapted the German translation for German radio, adding sound-bites, including music (songs by Fairuz), gunfire, motorcycle engine noises, recorded political speeches (by Bashir Gemayel) and other sounds to accompany selected dialogues. The novel came out also as an audiobook (unabridged edition) by W. F. Howes in April 2009. 4. Other Lebanese-Canadian authors are Marwan Hassan, born in Canada in 1950, and Dimitri Nasrallah, born in Lebanon in 1977, who left in 1981 and lived in several countries before emigrating to Canada in 1988. Nasrallah is the author of Blackbodying (2005) and Niko (2011). Blackbodying won the Quebec Writers’ Federation McAuslan First Book Award and was named finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. It portrays contrasting stories of two Lebanese citizens forced by war to leave Lebanon and their routes to Canada. Niko tells the story of six-year-old Niko Karam, who, after seeing his mother die in a carbombing in Beirut, embarks with his father on a twelve-year adventure in search of a new home before he settles in Montreal. 5. The Vietnam War ended with the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, less than three weeks after the eruption of the Lebanese Civil War. 6. There are six references to the consumption of hashish (23, 38, 76 and 192) and cocaine (98 and 178). 7. A character by the name of De Niro, a disturbed man who claims to have been Robert de Niro’s bodyguard, appears in Maroun Baghdadi’s war film Outside Life (1991). 8. See, for example, Brian Barber’s edited volume Adolescents and War (2009) and Kendra Dupuy and Krijn Peters’ War and Children (2010). 9. Such texts include Libyan-Briton Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men (2007), Nigerian-American Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2005), AfghaniAmerican Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2004), and Francophone African novels, like Lucien Badjoko’s J’étais enfant soldat (2005), Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny chien méchant (2002), Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah n’est pas obligé (2000) and Tierno Monénembo’s L’aîné des orphelins (2000).

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10. In Koolaids, an anonymous narrator, detailing the cost of shells, states: ‘In one night alone, an estimated ten thousand shells had poured down on the city’ (167). 11. Al-Abyad could be the family name of Sunni Muslims or Maronite Christians. 12. For more on this subject, see Ken Seigneurie’s Standing by the Ruins (2011). 13. He pokes fun at ‘tourists’, laden with maps, guidebooks and cameras, and travelling in hordes to the ‘right’ places as advertised by packaged tours (247–8). Notes to Chapter 6 1. Ha Jin is the pen name of Xuefei Jin. 2. In addition to winning the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize (2008), Cockroach was nominated for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award and the Writer’s Trust Award. It has been translated into eighteen languages, including Arabic. 3. These markers include the lira (Lebanon’s currency) (Hage 2009: 238), the Phoenicians (its ancient inhabitants) (143), Almaza (a local beer brand) (236) and a high rock (Beirut’s iconic Pigeon Rocks) (169). 4. Unlike Bassam’s, this protagonist’s confessional denomination is merely implied. His father’s name, ‘Joseph’, his brother-in-law’s, ‘Tony’, and his education by priests strongly suggest that he is at least nominally Christian. 5. At the time of the 1991 Census, there were 54,605 people born in Lebanon living in Canada, representing 1 per cent of all immigrants (The Golden Who’s Who of the Lebanese Emigrants in the World, n. pag.). 6. Interestingly, cafard is French for ‘cockroach’ but can also be used to denote depression, as in ‘avoir le cafard’. 7. The original title of the novel was Unremarkable Acts of Kindness. In her ‘Author’s Note’ to A Good Land, Jarrar states that she had intended to write a story about ‘an extraordinary friendship between two very different women’, but that the 2006 war with Israel was ‘an experience that would completely alter the way [she] viewed the world’ (275), and so the ‘story [she] had originally conceived would have to change’ (276). 8. Between 1976 and 2006, the number of Lebanese-born immigrants in Australia grew from 33,424 to 74,850 (Tabar 2010: 297). 9. El Hage, born in 1946, relocated to Sydney in 1985 and currently divides his time between Lebanon and Australia. El-Zein, born in 1964, settled in Sydney in 1995 but visits Lebanon quite often. Haikal, born in 1954, emigrated to

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Sydney in 1969 and remains there. Of all four, Jarrar included, only Haikal insists on being acknowledged as Australian (Al Maleh 2009: 51). Many agree that this war ‘saw a rare moment of national unity for all Lebanese in the face of Israeli aggression against the people in South Lebanon’ (Sultan 2008: 3). This sentiment of oneness among the general populace, however, did not last long. For more on these two contrastive models among the several imaginaries of national citizenship, see article by Katharine Betts (2002). For more on these two types of citizenship and on emotional geography, see articles by John Urry (2007) and Daiva Stasiulis and Zainab Amery (2010). As was the case with the unity engendered by the 2006 war, however, this unity proved to be temporary. Three Anglophone Lebanese narratives also elaborate on the 2006 war: Abbas el-Zein’s Leave to Remain: A Memoir (2009), Zena el Khalil’s Beirut, I Love You (2009) and Rami Zurayk’s War Diary: Lebanon 2006 (2011). Dania El-Kadi’s Summer Blast: When War Threatens Lebanese Women’s Plans (2011) is a novel which focuses, in a comical and light-hearted fashion, on the impact of this violent interlude on interpersonal relationships and individual dreams. In summer 2006, the Australian government evacuated 5,300 of its citizens from Lebanon (Hourani 2006: 43). Most of these evacuees were also holders of Lebanese passports.

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Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen. 2005. ‘Digging for Fire: Contemporary Art Practices in Postwar Lebanon’. MA thesis. American University of Beirut. Wolters, Wendy E. 2005. ‘A “Bridge Between My Memories and Yours”’. Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy 16.2 (Fall): 118–26. W. W. Norton Reading Guides. Accessed 12 September 2005: http://www. wwnorton.com/rgguides/ithedivinergg.htm Zeineddine, Ghassan. 2010–11. ‘A Conversation with Nada Awar Jarrar on her Latest Novel A Good Land’. The Banyan Tree 2: 61–7. Zhong, Chen-Bo and Katie Liljenquist. 2006, 8 September. ‘Washing away your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing’. Science: 1451–2.

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Index A Thousand and One Nights, 109, 133, 172 Aberbach, David, 79 Abi-Ezzi, Nathalie, 4, 197 A Girl Made of Dust (2008), 12, 13, 16, 106, 108, 113, 118–27, 128, 137, 148, 192, 206n, 212n Abou-Haidar, Elias, 5 Accad, Evelyne, 2, 80 Aciman, André, 70 Adams, Lorraine, 109, 111 Adnan, Etel, 1, 6 adolescence, 13, 66, 86, 88, 108, 146–7, 173–4, 194 Aghacy, Samira, 123–4, 141, 148 Ahmad, Aijaz, 169 AIDS, 13, 15, 25–6, 26, 27, 30, 33, 34, 35, 40, 50, 51, 56–7, 58, 209n Alameddine, Rabih, 1, 4, 5, 7, 9, 13, 22, 25, 41, 53–4, 55, 68, 77, 77–8, 86, 204n, 206n, 207n, 209nn, 210n The Hakawati (2008), 12, 16, 36, 63, 106, 108, 109–18, 120, 127, 128, 139, 143, 148, 149, 192, 206n, 212n I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters (2001), 12, 15, 16, 63, 69, 71, 76, 77–85, 111, 117, 127, 148, 151, 153, 165, 211n Koolaids: The Art of War (1998), 10, 12, 15, 22, 23, 24, 25–40, 44, 45, 48, 50, 51, 55, 61, 83, 111, 115, 117, 130, 131, 200, 207–8n, 211n, 214n The Perv: Stories (1999), 12, 15, 54, 55–62, 70, 71, 209n, 211n alcohol abuse, 13, 15, 129, 138, 147, 162, 173, 190 alienation, 2, 23, 28, 39, 40, 60, 152, 167, 173 amnesia, 131 and anti-amnesia, 11, 127

collective/public/official, 2, 3, 15, 77, 80, 81, 87, 101 family, 99 Amyuni, Mona, 28 anamnesis, 175 Anderson, Benedict, 31, 32, 52 anger, 13, 21, 34, 38, 79, 93, 105, 120, 122, 124, 128, 136, 144, 148, 162, 170–1, 173, 185 Anglophone diasporic Lebanese fiction, 3–5, 6–7, 8, 10–12, 27, 201, 202, 206n authors and books discussed, 12 themes, 13, 14, 17 Antoun, Bernard, 5 Aoun, Fares, 4 Arab-American novels, 26, 85, 112, 205n, 211n Arab-Australian writers, 181–2, 214–15n Arab-Canadian literature, 129, 162, 213n Arabian Nights, 109 Arabic-language Lebanese authors, 4–5, 204n autobiographies/memoirs, 10, 205–6n Bachelard, Gaston, 65, 70 Baldwin, James, 30 Banerjee, Mita, 63, 210n Barakat, Hoda, 1, 4 Barakat, Najwa, 6 Barthes, Roland, 175 Bauman, Zygmunt, 31, 51 Beck, Ulrich, 8 Behdad, Ali, 160 Beirut, 54, 61, 68, 82, 84, 115, 117, 138, 152, 153, 154, 162, 177, 181, 185, 195–6, 198 divided city, 10, 31, 78, 119, 121, 122, 123, 131, 133, 134, 136, 138–9, 149

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242 Beirut (cont.) downtown, 3, 80, 146, 204n post-war, 66, 68, 102, 107, 109, 110, 180, 183, 187, 191, 192 pre-war, 33, 37, 66, 90, 136, 192, 194 war-time, 16, 28, 41, 43–4, 45, 46, 47, 64, 65, 78, 80, 94–5, 108, 112, 114, 116, 119, 121, 126, 130, 133, 135, 140, 143, 148, 176, 208n Beirut Decentrists, 64, 204n belatedness, 15, 36, 79, 86–8, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 102, 211n belonging/not belonging, 11, 13; see also longing and belonging Bevan, David, 31 Bhabha, Homi, 11, 179 Boym, Svetlana, 38, 39, 59, 65, 67, 69, 112 Brah, Avtar, 8 Brennan, Timothy, 22–3, 25, 167 Broum, Maha, 136 Buelens, Gert, 76 Camus, Albert, L’Etranger, 129, 154 Caruth, Cathy, 76, 94, 102 Chalala, Elie, 22 Chedid, Andrée, 22 Chénieux-Gendron, Jacqueline, 37 child soldiers, 106–7, 115–16, 131–2, 145–6, 213n childhood, limitations of, 120, 173 children and adults, effect on each other, 120–1, 126 Christian militia, 56, 125, 128, 130, 140, 148, 149 Christianity, 138–9 Cimino, Michael, The Deer Hunter (1978 film), 129, 130, 150, 151 citizenship, 30, 38, 65, 152, 169, 182, 186, 193 class, 11, 15, 24, 48, 55, 70, 106, 133, 163, 171, 205n, 209n Clifford, James, 8, 44 coming-of-age novels, 10, 118, 134, 212n Connor, Walker, 32 Conrad, Joseph, 115 contrapuntal consciousness, 9, 33, 46, 62, 179, 185 Cooke, Miriam, 2, 64, 149, 203n, 204n Craps, Stef, 75–6

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| in d e x al-Daif, Rashid, 4 Darraj, Susan Muaddi, 26 De Moor, Katrien, 27 Denneny, Michael, 25, 55, 56 deterritorialisation, 8, 41, 201 diaspora, 8, 14, 15 spiritual, 27 diasporic experience/perspective, 8, 9, 13, 21, 24, 39, 44, 62, 118, 168, 210n diasporic identity see identity diasporic writing, 8, 13, 16; see also Anglophone diasporic Lebanese fiction dislocation, 23, 77, 194 disorientation, temporal, 15, 76, 89 displacement, 8, 23, 24, 39, 52, 55, 59, 67, 69, 70, 71, 142, 159, 163, 169, 182, 183, 204n Douglas, Roula Azar, 5 drug abuse, 13, 15, 36, 42, 46, 48, 50, 75, 129, 130, 132, 143, 146, 150, 152, 164, 171, 176, 213n Eddé, Dominique, 4, 5 Eliot, T. S., 49 emotional geography, 186, 198, 215n English, use of (in writing), 6–7 Erikson, Kai, 81, 100 Ette, Ottmar, 7, 8, 11 exile, 2, 4, 8, 14, 15, 16, 22–3, 24–5, 28, 31, 37, 39, 40, 41, 51, 53, 54, 55, 60, 62, 66, 70, 76, 85, 90, 96, 107, 130, 144, 153, 159, 161, 165, 166–8, 173, 174–5, 179, 180, 182, 206n exilism, 23 expatriation (voluntary exile), 10, 34, 69, 159, 202 factionalism, 106, 131, 138, 146, 192 Fadda-Coney, Carol, 83, 201 familial relationships, 15, 24, 27–8, 33, 123, 128 fantasy (political or personal), 49, 51, 57, 69, 75, 94, 99, 153 father–daughter relationships, 79, 120–1, 128 father–son relationships, 15, 27–8, 35, 110, 122–4, 125, 128, 174, 194, 199–200 Fawaz, Ghassan, 4, 5 feeling, structures of, 13

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i ndex folkhistory/folkherstory, 65 Foos, Laurie, 56 fragmentation (textual), 15, 76, 91 Francophone Lebanese literature, 4, 5, 118, 203n, 205n Frankl, Viktor, 159 French, use of (in writing), 205n Gana, Nouri, 131, 133, 154 Garrigós, Cristina, 82 Gemayel, Bashir, 114, 125, 128, 129, 133, 212n, 213n gender, 2, 11, 24, 70, 100, 107, 108, 133, 137 generation of older Lebanese authors, 1, 12 of younger Lebanese authors, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13–14, 54, 101, 105–6, 202 differences between them, 4, 13 George, Rosemary, 24, 45, 48, 70 Georgis, Dina, 131–2, 145, 149 Ghoussoub, Mai, 1, 4 Gilmore, Leigh, 101 globalisation, globalism, 3, 5, 7–8, 9, 22, 26, 83, 131, 160, 204n Hage, Ghassan, 44, 45, 185, 188 el Hage, Jad, 1, 5, 6, 10, 182, 214n Hage, Rawi, 4, 5, 9, 13, 131, 181, 204n, 213n Cockroach (2008), 12, 16, 24, 84, 130, 132, 141, 159–80, 186, 198, 206n, 214n De Niro’s Game (2006), 12, 16, 26, 36, 46, 100, 108, 109, 113, 114, 116, 117, 127, 128–55, 162, 163, 170, 173, 174, 176, 192, 193, 206n, 212n Haikal, Loubna, 182, 214–15n Halbwachs, Maurice, 28 Hall, Stuart, 51 Hammoud, Hani, 4, 5 Hanania, Tony, 4, 5, 12, 25, 85, 206n, 208n Eros Island (2000), 40 Homesick (1997), 40, 41 Unreal City (1999), 12, 15, 16, 23, 24, 27, 40–50, 51, 184, 193 Hartman, Geoffrey, 75 Hassan, Marwan, 213n Hassan, Salah, 127, 134, 142, 149, 205n Hastings, Adrian, 32 Hatoum, Milton, The Brothers (2000), 53

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243 Haugbolle, Sune, 2–3, 101 Henry, Lynn, 162 Hiller, Mischa, Sabra Zoo (2010), 212n Hirsch, Marianne, 12, 65, 100, 141, 194, 202, 206n, 210n history, traumatic, 79 Hodgkin, Katharine, 29 Hoffman, Eva, 24 Holocaust literature, 210n, 211n home, 11, 17, 23, 27, 28, 48, 57, 76, 106, 109, 111, 119, 124, 132, 182, 199 adopted, 24, 38, 61, 187, 188, 189 feeling/being at home, 15, 21, 25, 39, 54, 55, 62, 71, 80, 82, 84, 101, 123, 159, 165, 175, 179, 189, 190, 191, 195, 198, 199, 200 fluidity of, 189, 197 original, 24, 25, 36, 38, 188, 189, 191 as place (geographical), 54, 55, 62, 71, 151, 170, 181, 187–8, 189, 192, 200 politics of, 14 redefinition of, 13, 14, 200 sickness of, 15, 21, 41, 55 as space (emotional reality/state of mind), 45, 54, 55, 62, 63, 70, 71, 84, 166, 180, 188, 189, 190, 200, 201 as utopia, 16, 84 war-time functions of, 141–2 homeland(s), 11, 15, 23, 24, 31, 37, 41, 62, 63, 76, 106, 109, 111, 200 demythologisation of, 117 and family relationships, 58 imaginary, 14, 52, 53, 84 Lebanon as, 14, 16, 21, 28, 71, 96, 100, 102, 108, 109, 123, 128, 144, 182, 198 original, 8, 25, 27, 53, 61, 155, 160, 188, 191 homelessness actual, 28, 62, 111, 133, 190 spiritual, 16, 62, 133, 144 homeness, 199, 200 homesickness, 15, 21, 28, 41, 55, 67, 85 homing desire, 8, 16 homoeroticism, 209n homosexuality, 7, 13, 25, 26–7, 29, 33, 34, 35, 37, 39, 59–61, 110, 207nn, 209n Hosseini, Khaled, The Kite Runner (2004), 210n, 213n Hugo, Victor, 173 Humphrey, Michael, 52, 166

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244 Huyssen, Andreas, 100 hybridity (cultural), 8, 9, 11, 14, 82, 111, 129, 161, 181, 201, 206n hypermesia, 203–4n identity, 4, 8, 61, 62, 71–2 bi-national (hyphenated), 9, 12, 54, 85, 206n cultural, 29, 30, 32, 48, 51, 96, 167, 206n diasporic, 11, 51, 52 fluid, 52, 193 geographical, 8 hybrid, 11, 83 intercultural, 83 multicultural, 83 national, 11, 13, 15, 21, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 48, 96, 206n personal, 11, 13, 26, 27, 28, 39, 57, 141, 162, 189, 194, 199 religious, 48, 122 sexual, 26, 27, 33, 60, 70, 207n transcultural, 9, 83 imagination, 21, 26, 57, 63, 65, 88, 91, 151, 183–4, 187 immigrant life, 163–4, 168–9 immigrant literatures, 16, 24, 162–4 in-betweenness cultural, 15, 24, 38, 44, 51, 82, 181 emotional, 179, 194–5, 200–1 geographical, 11 national, 24, 44, 82 indirection (narrative), 15, 76, 97 innocence, loss of, 16, 78, 105, 108, 120, 126, 165 Israel–Lebanon war (2006), 181, 182, 183, 186, 189, 191, 195–6, 201, 205–6n, 214n, 215nn Itwaru, Arnold, 168 Jarrar, Nada Awar, 1, 4, 5, 53, 86, 182, 209nn, 215n Dreams of Water (2007), 181 A Good Land (2009), 12, 16, 17, 29, 36, 44, 63, 159, 180–98, 206n, 214n Somewhere, Home (2003), 12, 15, 36, 44, 54, 55, 62–70, 71, 180, 206n, 210n Jin, Ha, 3, 5, 159, 160, 161, 167, 188, 214n Joseph, Suad, 21, 32, 201 journalistic vs novel writing, 196–7

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| in d e x Kafka, Franz, 165 Metamorphosis, 164 Kaplan, Danny, 150 Khalaf, Roseanne, 3, 10 Khalaf, Samir, 112 Khatib, Lina, 3–4 Khoury, Elias, 1, 4, 6, 151 Kristeva, Julia, 23 Lasdun, James, 132 Lebanese bilingual writers, 6 Lebanese cinema, 3–4, 204–5n, 206n, 213n Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), 1, 2, 3, 26, 53–4, 64, 86, 101, 128, 129, 146, 195, 203n, 204n effects, 11, 16 public/official amnesia about see amnesia Lebanese diaspora, 52–3, 185, 186, 205n Lebanese emigration, 3, 4, 56, 63, 107, 134, 142–4, 160, 181, 187, 209n, 214nn first-generation Lebanese immigrants, 5, 21 second-generation Lebanese immigrants, 53 Lebanese-American writers, 6, 9, 11, 12, 29, 85, 117, 205n; see also Alameddine; Ward Lebanese-Australian writers, 12, 181–2, 214–15n; see also Jarrar Lebanese-British writers, 12; see also AbiEzzi; Hanania Lebanese-Canadian writers, 12, 213n; see also Hage (Rawi) Lebanese post-war literature, 2–3, 3, 10, 21–2, 63, 105, 108, 127, 195, 204n Lebanon, 44, 132, 198 as idea, 4, 9, 14–15, 21, 32, 38, 40, 45, 53, 71, 140, 151, 181, 192–3, 199, 200–1; see also nostalgic memory longing and belonging, gap between, 63, 69, 181 Maalouf, Amin, 4, 5, 61 McRae, Jill, 65 Madison, Greg, 189–91 El Maïzi, Myriem, 118–19 Makdisi, Jean Said, 22 Makdisi, Saree, 10, 22, 77

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i ndex Al Maleh, Layla, 27, 85, 181–2 Malek, Amal Saleeby, 58, 68, 182 Manganaro, Elise Salem, 6 Márquez, Gabriel García, 37 memorialisation, 2–3, 13–14, 100, 204n memory, 14, 21, 37, 64, 151 childhood, 55, 137, 180 collective, 2, 3, 14, 101, 131, 191, 201, 204–5n critical, 15, 28, 38, 55, 57, 59, 71 involuntary, 153, 161 narrative, 78, 89 nostalgic, 15, 28, 38, 44, 55, 57, 59, 70, 71, 168, 177 personal, 3, 4, 14, 50, 201 reconstructive, 28, 57 sense, 29, 44, 45, 153, 184–5, 211n traumatic, 3, 16, 71, 76, 79, 85, 89, 110, 201 memory studies, 210n migration, 5, 7–8 existential (voluntary), 189–91; see also expatriation transnational, 8 militarisation of youth, 13, 14, 15, 16, 36, 106, 108, 109, 114, 122, 127, 128, 145 Mills, Dana Kamal, 10 Mitchell, Lee Clark, 150 Monforte, Tanya, 106, 115 Morse, Margaret, 29, 45, 184 Mostafa, Dina, 132 mother figures, 27–8, 147–8 Mouawad, Wajdi, 5 Mounzer, Lina, 107–8 movement, poetics of, 7, 11 Mukherjee, Bharati, 165 al-Musawi, Muhsin, 7 Nabokov, Vladimir, 51 Naficy, Hamid, 21, 23, 187, 189 Najjar, Alexandre, 4, 5, 105 Nash, Geoffrey, 5, 6, 41 Nasrallah, Dimitri, 4, 213n Nassib, Sélim, 5 nationalism, 2, 9, 14, 22–3, 24, 31–2, 41, 49, 51, 52, 55, 64, 125, 149, 167, 199 diasporic, 31 Nikro, Norman, 5, 10 Nochlin, Linda, 37 Nora, Pierre, 64

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245 nostalgia, 9, 13, 14, 21, 24, 28, 44, 57, 62, 63, 65, 67, 69, 70, 152, 159, 160, 176–7, 198, 204n ironic, 15, 39, 59 reflective, 112 restorative, 112 tender, 15, 39, 59 nostography, 14 nostomania, 14 nostophobia, 14 Orfalea, Gregory, 11, 85 outside-ness, state of (Ausserhalbbefindlichkeit), 8 paranoia, 164, 178 patriotism, 32, 49, 55, 127 Peters, John Durham, 174 Pflitsch, Andreas, 8, 10, 28, 39, 41, 60, 83, 84, 211n Pictet, Dariane, 190 Pierce, Amira, 88 political/religious indoctrination/ fanaticism/radicalism, 15, 16, 30, 106, 122, 126, 127, 138, 193 post-colonialism in literature, 4, 22, 55, 62 in theory, 8, 75 postmemories (second-hand memories), 12, 65, 100, 141, 194, 202, 206–7nn, 210n post-modernism in art, 75 in history, 7, 23, 31, 40, 50, 52, 75 in literature, 15, 22, 24–5, 26, 50, 75, 76, 82, 117, 134, 207n in theory, 8, 24 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), 75, 76, 80, 87, 100, 107, 153–4 poverty, 16, 43, 46, 60, 67–8, 69, 109, 114, 116, 124, 126, 128, 138, 139, 160, 162, 163, 165, 168, 169, 171–2, 182, 186, 193, 204n Proust, Marcel, 59 queer identity/perspective, 26–7, 60, 109, 207n Radstone, Susannah, 29 Rahman, Najat, 129, 133, 150, 154 rape, 13, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 97, 98, 168, 179, 211n

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246 reality emotional, 15, 50, 62, 108, 201 regression, 71, 136, 141, 150 repatriation, 5, 13, 17, 40, 58, 68, 143, 144, 159, 181, 182, 182–3, 193 repetition, 75, 76, 89, 92–3, 210n Rogers, Lynne, 30 roots original, 33, 38, 48, 51, 175, 188 putting down new, 135, 159, 160, 181 Rose, Jaqueline, 49 Rubenstein, Roberta, 63, 66, 67, 70, 71, 181 ruins motif, 142 Russian roulette, 93, 129–30, 150 Sabbag, Elie-Pierre, 5 Sabra and Shatilla massacre, 46, 114, 128, 133, 150, 176, 212n Said, Edward, 5, 9, 23, 25, 166, 167, 168, 179, 185 Salaita, Steven, 26, 28, 83, 88, 99 Salem, Elise, 2, 4, 10, 88 Salibi, Kamal, 29 Samman, Ghada, 1 Sarkis, Hashim, 77 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 129 Schulman, Sarah, 26 sectarianism, 1, 2, 16, 25, 29, 48, 52, 106, 108, 122, 125, 126–7, 130, 131, 138, 193 secularism, 130 Seigneurie, Ken, 1, 142 self-healing, 154, 170 Seyhan, Azade, 37, 201 sexual promiscuity, 114, 190 Sfeir, Maya, 63 Shakir, Evelyn, 117 Shannahan, Dervla, 26–7, 207n al-Shawaf, Rayyan, 62 al-Shaykh, Hanan, 1, 4, 6, 105 Spitzer, Leo, 28, 38, 57 split narration, 90 suicide, 13, 56, 82, 89, 91, 93, 96, 98, 132, 159, 173, 178, 190, 200 suicide missions, 41, 43, 48, 50 Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 31 Suleiman, Yasir, 5, 6 Taheri, Amer, 164, 168 Tan, Amy, 109, 118

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| in d e x textual circularity, 50, 173 textual schizophrenia, 23 therapy, 99, 154, 160–1, 169, 171, 172–3, 174, 178, 200 narrative, 76, 211n Tirman, John, 36–7 Tóibín, Colm, 109, 165 topophilia, 199 torture, 56, 125, 137, 148, 152, 162, 168, 179, 193 transculturality, 7, 9, 10 transnationalism in culture, 8, 16, 82, 83, 112, 201 in literature, 11, 37, 201 trauma, 14, 75,107, 129, 165, 211n collective, 3, 9, 12, 15, 76, 77, 96, 150 confronting, 77, 79, 80, 83, 100, 101, 102, 126, 165, 171, 205n effects of, 76, 81–2, 91, 98 juvenile, 88–9 personal, 9, 15, 64, 78 textual symptoms of, 71, 76, 77, 78, 79, 86, 89, 92–3, 96, 97 trauma theory, 75 trauma writings, 15, 75, 76, 77, 79, 84, 85, 87, 92, 97, 101, 165 Tucker, Martin, 23 unhomeliness, 11 vectorization, 7 Vice, Sue, 90 Vickroy, Laurie, 87 victimisation, 56, 108, 127, 131–2, 139, 140 Vietnam War, 129, 213n Visser, Irene, 153 visual language (art), 37–8 Ward, Patricia Sarrafian, 1, 4, 5, 9 The Bullet Collection (2003), 12, 13, 15, 16, 36, 44, 63, 66, 67, 71, 76, 84, 85–102, 105, 108, 127, 137, 153, 165, 173, 180, 184, 185, 206n, 211n Watts, Meredith, 146 West, lifestyle/values of, 9, 29, 41, 60, 61, 132, 149, 210n Whitehead, Anne, 93 Williams, Raymond, 13 women writers (Lebanese), 2, 80, 203n, 204n

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