Women Writing Gender, Sexuality and Violence in the Novel of the Lebanese Civil War
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Telling Stories of Pain: Women Writing Gender, Sexuality and Violence in the Novel of the Lebanese Civil War by Khaled M. Al-Masri A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Near Eastern Studies) in the University of Michigan 2010 Doctoral Committee: Professor Anton Shammas, Chair Professor Patricia Smith Yaeger Associate Professor Kathryn Babayan Associate Professor Carol B. Bardenstein For my parents ii Acknowledgements This dissertation could never have been written without the help and support of many people. First and foremost, I am deeply thankful to my advisor, Professor Anton Shammas, for his thorough guidance throughout this process. This dissertation was shaped by his thoughtful comments, insightful critiques and careful readings, both formally and informally during our many conversations. I am also very grateful to the members of my dissertation committee, who offered their help, support and understanding. I thank Professors Carol Bardenstein, Kathryn Babayan and Patricia Yaeger for taking the time to read my dissertation and aid me in the development of my ideas with their invaluable questions, suggestions and comments. I would like to thank Professor Raji Rammuny for being a great mentor, always ready with sound advice and enthusiastic encouragement. Many thanks go to Angela Beskow as well for her guidance, patience and logistical assistance. I am deeply indebted to Allison Blecker for her immeasurable help throughout the writing of this dissertation. She read numerous drafts and I am enormously grateful for her endless encouragement and unflagging support. Finally, my family holds a special place in my heart. I am eternally grateful for their unfaltering belief in me. I learned my love of stories from my late grandfather, Abu Khulqi, who helped shape my life in countless ways with his many tales. iii Table of Contents Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………iii Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………....v Chapter One. Introduction………………………………………………………………1 Chapter Two. Never at Peace, Always in Conflict: The Formation and Re-Formulation of Gender in Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra I. Introduction…….……………………………………………………………62 II. The Story of Zahra Part I The Orange and Its Navel: Zahra and Her Mother, and Zahra’s Early Psychosexual Development……………………………………...63 Zahra’s Relationship with Men and the Effects of Patriarchy on Her Development……………………………………………………..77 Race, Class, Politics, Nationalism and Male Sexuality………………….91 The Mad Woman in the Bathroom……………………………………..104 III. The Story of Zahra Part II Healing through War is only Skin-Deep……………………………….115 Men, the Civil War and the Male Gaze………………………………...121 Zahra’s Death as the Death of Female Resistance?: Reading the Novel’s Closure………………………………………………...136 Chapter Three. Deadly Pleasures: Gendered Aggression and Sacred Violence in Najwa Barakat’s Ya Salaam I. Introduction……...………………………………………………………….140 II. Roots of Violence: Patriarchy, the Civil War and the Primitive………...…142 III. Uses of Violence……………………………………………………………164 Chapter Four. Mothers and Daughters: Writing Rural and Urban Sexuality in Alawiyya Subuh’s Maryam of Stories I. Introduction…………………………………………………………………182 II. Women’s Lives between Storytelling and Writing…………………………184 III. Writing Urban Sexuality……………………………………………………209 IV. Writing Rural Sexuality…………………………………………………….219 Chapter Five. Conclusion……………………………………………………………..243 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………...248 iv ABSTRACT Telling Stories of Pain: Women Writing Gender, Sexuality and Violence in the Novel of the Lebanese Civil War by Khaled M. Al-Masri Chair: Anton Shammas Lebanese Civil War narratives by women writers received considerable attention in studies by Western scholars such as Miriam Cooke and Evelyne Accad. However, through my focus on three novels in this dissertation, Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra (1980), Najwa Barakat’s Ya Salaam (1999) and Alawiyya Subuh’s Maryam of Stories (2002), that are concerned with the pre- and post-war environments, I hope to contribute a more holistic understanding of Lebanese society as presented by women writers. I concentrate on the development of patriarchal structures of oppression as well as creative means of resistance by its victims through the study of representations of gender, sexuality and violence. Ya Salaam and Maryam of Stories , it should be noted, have not been studied, and scholarship on The Story of Zahra has focused on its second part, neglecting the first part that treats Zahra’s psychosexual development and provides important insight into prewar Beirut. I approach the explicit discussion of sex and v violence in these novels as evidence of their focus on the body, a contested site. I also discuss their interest in the relationships between women, a link explored through the centralization of female characters in the texts. My dissertation further explores traditional patriarchal structures and patterns of gendered oppression that demonstrate remarkable temporal and spatial mobility. I complicate my study by revealing the diversity among these three novels, evidenced by their varied treatment of gender, sexuality and violence. The Story of Zahra is concerned primarily with characters’ negotiation of gender, and it uses these processes to explore themes of sexuality and violence. In contrast, Ya Salaam utilizes violence as a lens, and Maryam of Stories approaches gender and violence through sexuality. Rather than employing a unifying theoretical framework in this dissertation, I link the novels thematically, utilizing psychoanalysis, and Feminist, literary and gender theory throughout, including the work of Freud, Jung, Cixous, Connell, Flax, Foucault and others. vi Chapter One Introduction The Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) vitalized the nation’s literary tradition, leading to the rise of an entire genre of Lebanese Civil War narratives. Here, women speak as loudly as men, shaping collective and individual memories of war. They imbue the fifteen years of conflict as well as their aftermath with new significance and undermine the stories that male political, military, religious and, yes, literary, voices wielded in their attempts to give chaos a meaning. Within these narratives and in cultural imagination more generally, the body of the state has often been rendered female and the civil strife that wracks the nation maps onto the body of woman, victim and traitor, saint and whore, all in a single imagining. The writing of Lebanese women authors, however, is concerned with the bodies of real women – complex, flawed, powerful, weak, submissive and rebellious. These women represent themselves and their experiences; they often represent other women – friends, sisters, mothers, daughters, neighbors – but in these narratives, the value of their personal struggles and the suffering of their bodies are never sacrificed in service of the nation. This dissertation tells the story of these women – those who write as well as those who are written into their tales – and how their experiences are shaped by gender, sexuality and violence. These are stories of love, imagination and hope, but more often, of violence, pain, oppression and, of course, civil war. Civil war, by its nature divisive and 1 physically, emotionally and psychologically destructive, becomes even more so when a city turns against itself, like Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. In this introduction, I first introduce the three novels treated in this dissertation, their authors, some shared themes that link them and the main criteria for their selection. Then I provide a brief history of Lebanon and its civil wars so as to contextualize the Lebanese Civil War narratives treated in my dissertation. This is followed by a history of the Arabic novel in general and the Lebanese novel in particular. I focus on the development of the Lebanese Civil War narrative genre, highlighting and briefly discussing its key novels while explaining my reasons for excluding them from this dissertation. Next, I explore the secondary literature most relevant to my topic. In the following section, I define the key terms employed in this dissertation: gender, sexuality and violence. I then turn to a discussion of the framework I have chosen to utilize, which is thematic, rather than theoretical. Finally, I provide a brief chapter outline. Hikayat Zahra (1980, The Story of Zahra ) by Hanan al-Shaykh 1, Ya Salaam (1999, Oh, Peace ) by Najwa Barakat 2 and Maryam al-Hakaya (2002, Maryam of Stories ) 1 Hanan al-Shaykh was born in 1945 to a Shi‘a family in the South of Lebanon. After graduating from the American Girls College in Cairo, Egypt in 1966, she worked as a journalist for the Lebanese daily al-Nahar until 1975. At the outbreak of the Civil War, al-Shaykh immigrated to Saudi Arabia, and then to London, where she lives today. She has published eight novels (and two collections of short stories), including Intihar Rajul Mayyit (1970) ( Suicide of a Dead Man ), Misk al-Ghazal (1989) (translated as Women of Sand and Myrrh ), Barid Beirut (1992) (translated as Beirut Blues ) and most recently, Hikayati Sharh Yatul (2005) (translated as The Locust and the Bird: My Mother’s Story ). The Story of Zahra , published in Arabic in 1980 and in English in 1986, brought al-Shaykh fast literary prominence in the Arab world and the West. 2 Born in Beirut in 1960, Najwa Barakat attended the Lebanese University and obtained