Discipline and Disorder in Women's Fiction Through the Lebanese Civil
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Discipline and Disorder in Women’s Fiction Through the Lebanese Civil War THESIS Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Brent Alexander Biglin Graduate Program in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures The Ohio State University 2013 Master's Examination Committee: Youssef Yacoubi, Advisor Nada Moumtaz Joseph Zeidan Copyright by Brent Alexander Biglin 2013 Abstract The focus on both psychological disorder and total institutions in fiction written by Arab women during the Lebanese Civil War demonstrates the inherent relationship between the two in the modern nation-state. The particular of case of Lebanon and its capital, Beirut, is distinct because of its history as an ethnically and religiously diverse colony. Vestiges of the discipline and order imposed by former colonizers remain in the form of institutions, although their influence is not total and all-encompassing. The Lebanese Civil War was in part a manifestation of the contradiction between Beirut as an integral part of a unifying national project and as a city composed of various ethnically and religiously motivated sects with differing political goals. Hoda Barakat, Ghada Samman, Hanan Shaykh, and Iman Yunus are four novelists who wrote through the war depicting its drama, senselessness, and brutality through its everydayness as well as the formerly imposed modern institutions, even as their authority is undermined and their domains of influence reconfigured. The discipline, order, and representation of both colonialism and institutions rely on psychological discipline and its internalization by the subject — by force and by threat of explicit violence in the colony and by the conditioning, regimentation, and surveillance inherent in modern institutions. When the organization of the modern city, as a system of institutions, is reconfigured and the legitimacy and authority of the institutions of which it is composed are contested, the result in the novels is the proliferation of psychological disorder. ii The choice to focus on novels written by women is strategically deliberate to combat the flattening of non-Western women into a monolithic group and as a humble attempt to live up to Mohanty’s call for “careful, historically specific generalisations responsive to complex realities” (Mohanty 1988). My aim is not to represent or speak for anyone, but to analyze their artistic works in their political and historical contexts. In fiction written by these particular Arab women the depiction of the relationship between psychological and political disorder in the context of the modern nation-state and its sectarian systems is clear and significant — it suggests a trend of intuitive connection. The historical context is Beirut’s past as a colony and the ways that it was represented and regimented by its colonizer and more importantly its modern sectarian political configuration, which is a vestige of this colonial past. The ethnic and religious differences that make up the different sects were emphasized, exaggerated, and weaponized by the colonizers to avoid collective resistance against its rule. Ironically, it is this same political configuration that undermines Beirut as a national project — the foundation of which are its institutions. The psychological factor in the experiences of the modern subject and the institutions of the modern city are directly related — social and psychological disorder reflect one another. The institutions discipline and invent the subject, which is critical to understanding the phenomena of disorder and its cause in novels written through the civil war, as well as why characters continually find themselves in and relate their experiences to the prison and the hospital as places alternately of refuge or terror. iii Dedication Dedicated to Umm Muhammad in Tartous and Abu Ahmad in Damascus. iv Acknowledgments I truly thank Professor Yacoubi for his passion and support and Professor Moumtaz and Professor Zeidan for their challenges and guidance. I am endlessly grateful to be able to confide in my graduate colleagues in our small victories and miseries. Without my father, mother, grandparents, and brothers I would have achieved nothing. I thank my partner Ren who is an inspiration to me in every way possible. v Vita June 2005 .......................................................St. Peter’s High School 2009................................................................B.A. Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, The Ohio State University 2011 to present ..............................................Graduate Teaching Associate, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: Near Eastern Languages and Literatures vi Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... v Vita ..................................................................................................................................... vi Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Colonial City .................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 2: Postcolonial City ............................................................................................. 20 Chapter 3: Therapy City.................................................................................................... 39 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 56 References ......................................................................................................................... 59 vii Introduction The Lebanese Civil War was a critical point in history and has produced a rich body of fiction. A number of Arab women wrote through and about the war — among them the Lebanese Hoda Barakat, Hanan Shaykh, and Iman Younes; and the Syrian Ghada Samman who moved to Beirut and lived there during the war. Hoda Barakat wrote The Tiller of Waters, which deal with one man’s isolation and abandonment in which she muses upon the complex history of the city; and The Stone of Laughter, which similarly examines the solitary life of a compulsive man shut in his apartment during the war. Hanan Shaykh wrote The Story of Zahra, a girl who has difficulty relating to others throughout her life, culminating in her death at the hands of her own lover. Iman Younes detailed the lives of several Lebanese women who live in one apartment building and the effects the war has on their lives in B As in Beirut. Ghada Samman critically profiled the culture of Beirut through two young, ambitious newcomers in Beirut ‘75 and fictionalized her own experience trapped in her apartment close to the fighting in a series of vignettes she called Beirut Nightmares.1 Miriam Cooke, a professor of modern Arabic literature who has written extensively on Arab women’s fiction written during the civil 1 These novels most effectively demonstrate the dailiness of the war and psychological and political disorder and depict the institution as an essential part of the urban landscape. The novels were chosen to reflect this pattern in Arab women’s fiction written at the time, but these features are not to be regarded as totally characteristic of this body of fiction or specific only to it. See Ghandour 1990 and 1991. 1 war, attributes Arab women’s perspective with an eye to the dailiness of war to their role typically as non-combatants. As such, the works of these authors are particularly significant because they capture the everyday processes and structures which compose the city. Through these observations, a pattern emerges: a character imagines she is being wheeled on a stretcher through a hospital though she is really being evacuated in a tank from her home, which she likened to a prison. The character Farah has violent hallucinations in the hospital, escapes in terror, and places the “Hospital for the Mentally Insane” sign over the “Welcome to Beirut” sign at the entrance to the city while another character, Khalil, loves the hospital and doesn’t want to leave it. Militiamen undermine and kill doctors, and people imprison themselves in their own homes. Why do these “total institutions,” (Goffman 1961) as places where people are formally enclosed, surveilled, and controlled, feature so prominently within these novels? The nature of the institutions is to compulsively and effectively order and discipline human bodies and to create citizens according to its own logic — it either negates or organizes disorder, which would be any processes or structures outside of itself. In the case of the civil war, the agents of disorder are the non-state actors — particularly sectarian militias.2 The compulsion to counterpoint sectarian actors and institutions within these works of fiction is an intuitive observation. Within the city of Beirut, they are a part of 2 Although the Lebanese Civil War occurred in a global geopolitical context, I am reigning in analysis to remain inside the borders of the modern nation-state.