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I Am Not Naked: a Fictional and Theoretical Exploration of Home and the Flâneuse In

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I Am Not Naked: a Fictional and Theoretical Exploration of Home and the Flâneuse In I Am Not Naked: A Fictional and Theoretical Exploration of Home and the Flâneuse in 21st-Century Lebanon and Syria Sleiman Youssef El Hajj A thesis submitted to The University of Gloucestershire in accordance with the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Technology October 2016 2 Abstract This thesis mainly consists of two artifacts: a creative text followed by literary criticism. The research draws on the theoretical intervention of the flâneuse I have posited as a way of reading home in fiction. Not withstanding commentaries on the flâneur in the social sciences and cultural studies, no literary study yet has posited the connection between flânerie and home, let alone theorized the notion of the flâneuse as a subversive figure that can be deployed in creative, and then critical, writing to make intelligible the possible variants of home in the present-day fictions of Lebanon and Syria. I thus propose a redefinition of the term in a way that may also apply to readings of the trope in a literary text: I read the flâneuse as a determined woman whose acts of street-walking, or of movement from one place to another, are enacted on two levels in such a way that her physical journeys – in search of, or as a return to, her own conceived notion of home – intersect with an emotional itinerary that traces her development against, and resistance to, a backdrop of patriarchy and conflict. My PhD novel, I Am Not Naked, is a first in marrying the Lebanese and Syrian contexts and in appraising the subversive quests for home of their fictional female characters, both heterosexual and non-heterosexual, from the theoretical lens of the “flâneuse,” against the setting of two civil wars, the Lebanese Civil War (1975—1990) and the Syrian Civil War (2011— present). In the second section of the thesis, I shift rhetorical gear from creative to critical discourse in order to situate the novel, and henceforth its analysis of home and patriarchy that I read through the different theoretical imports that attach to the flâneuse, in relation to new creative narratives from Lebanon and Syria. Hence, in reference to three novels in which the trope can be culled – I Am Not Naked (Sleiman El Hajj, 2016, Lebanon and Syria), Cinnamon (Samar Yazbek, Syria, 2012), and An Unnecessary Woman (Rabih Alameddine, Lebanon, 2013) – I argue that the notion of the flâneuse I have postulated is reified in characters who defy patriarchy by employing flânerie as a multilayered vector for fulfilling the homing desire that drives their respective journeys. Necessarily, I hyphenate the intervention with relevant strands of criticism to better invigorate my reading of home-as-emotional-space, as opposed to a fixed place, in the three novels, hence 3 the feminist flâneuse, the postcolonial flâneuse, and the queer flâneuse, terms unused in previous scholarship. My thesis also contributes to the nascent body of creative writing on the Syrian Civil War and the refugee crisis, and supplements the growing interdisciplinary corpus of research on (mostly male) homosexuality from a queer-female literary angle, given my novel’s focus, in part, on same-sex female affects through its characterization of Teta – a queer Arab grandmother figure – a representation still unexplored in extant Lebanese and Syrian literature of the 21st century. 4 Author’s Declaration I declare that the work in this thesis was carried out in accordance with the regulations of the University of Gloucestershire and is original except where indicated by specific reference in the text. No part of the thesis has been submitted as part of any other academic award. The thesis has not been presented to any other education institution in the United Kingdom or overseas. Any views expressed in the thesis are those of the author and in no way represent those of the University. Signed: Date: April 30, 2017 5 Preface and Acknowledgements I have always been intrigued by the possibilities of purposeful, as opposed to aimless or merely leisurely, street-walking – the physical act of walking, not to be confused with streetwalking as prostitution1 – long before I learned the stylized sobriquet “flâneur,” a Baudelairian term appropriated by the Anglophone scholars who later commented on it. Different oral histories of my mother’s village in the mountains of Lebanon fascinated and haunted me as a child. One particular tale evokes indelible memories: In April 1915, swarms of locusts, tiny insatiable creatures, descended upon Lebanon eroding anything green, dry or not. The country at the time was under the control of the Ottomans who were in full swing of the First World War and prioritized what paltry food reserves were available for their soldiers. Most able-bodied men in the village had been enlisted to fight in the Turkish Army, which left women, children, and the elderly to fend for themselves as the iron paws of hunger descended. Unbeknownst to the authorities, and to the droves of starving vagrants who passed through, and sometimes remained there, no longer able to move as they lay dying on the streets, my great-grandmother and her four sisters had found a way to bring food to their hungry children. A small family-owned wheat field in a woodland at the outskirts of the village had been forgotten by everyone else, or at best was assumed to have been devoured, much like everything else that was edible, by the locusts. A plan was devised: taking turns, one woman would stay with the children at home, two others would go to the field during the day, and would alternate with their sisters who would keep a vigil at night – using straw brooms and kitchen towels they spent laborious hours of the day and night brushing away the locusts, making sure there would be something to eat, however little, for them to survive the war. They had to be creative in hiding the wheat, one time going so far as to pretend a sack they had put it in had a dead rat, which someone who approached them on the street then asked them to share. Another time, they were physically accosted by a raving emaciated man, driven mad by calamity, who asked them for a sexual favor before collapsing at their feet. Screams of “jo’ān ’am mūt” (I’m hungry, I’m dying) punctuated their journeys back and forth, but war deadens emotions and charity was not a choice. “A woman will always put her home, her own 1 The different grammatical iterations of “street-walk” are henceforth hyphenated in the thesis, for disambiguation purposes. 6 children first,” my great-grandmother said. “That is her duty.” The story, passed on by my great- grandmother, to my grandmother, to my mother, and finally to myself, articulates a harrowing tale of survival for which female flânerie, as I later theorize it, served as a route for sustaining both homes and selves. The Arab Spring movements of protest across different countries of the Arab Middle East, starting in 2010, engendered hopes for change that were quickly dismantled as regimes shifted from all-out dictatorships to fundamentalism, militancy, Islamicism, and civil war.2 The images of resistance shown by men and women on the streets brought to mind my own conception of the motivated, determined flâneur/flâneuse rewriting the space s/he inhabits. But as I witnessed, and researched, the gendered responses to women participants in these movements (the beatings, the virginity tests, the physical harassment, the sexual violence, the shaming, the humiliation),3 the exhilaration left by the image of the flâneur-flâneuse experiencing the street in concerted tandem was soon replaced with my former malaise with the older variant of the trope. As recent as 2015, cultural critics were not only still commenting on the flâneur as necessarily male, but also arguing the impossibility of a theoretical flâneuse on grounds of visibility. Luc Sante contends that since “[i]t is crucial for the flâneur to be functionally invisible,” the flâneuse simply cannot exist.4 This crystallized the need to theorize a flâneuse whose purposeful narrative gaze responds to the urgency of locating an alternative “feminine” home, as well as subverts, exposes, and negotiates the multilayered social and cultural constraints that devolve from patriarchy and proscribe the movement, both physical and emotional, of the flâneuse. As I delved into a program of theoretical readings on home and the flâneur, alongside recent creative writing from Lebanon and Syria, questions of space and place – reclaimed spaces, jettisoned places, and physical places re-presented as affective spaces – continued to interest me as I discovered other dimensions of the emotionally resonant topos of home in the fictions I would later examine as embodiments of purposeful female flânerie. I thus asked the following questions: 2 See Sa'adah, 153-68. 3 Mona Eltahaway states that even male protesters often acted abusively towards female demonstrators. She writes that this “is where the soldiers in our regimes and the men on our streets unite: they both sexually assault women to remind us that public space is a male prerogative.” Eltahawy, 17. 4 See Sante. 7 Can the extant notions of the flâneur be re-conceptualized from a literary angle? How does this intervention invigorate readings of female flânerie, in particular, as a vector for home in 21st-century novels of Lebanon and Syria? In what ways do fictional female characters in contemporary Lebanese and Syrian literature employ flânerie to inform their home-seeking trajectories and their resistance to patriarchy? I attempt to engage these queries both novelistically and theoretically. The mixed methodological route I followed involves both the production of a primary text, a novel, and a critical study exploring relevant literary criticism in relation to my conceptualization of the flâneuse.5 Equally important was an awareness of, and the need to reduce, scholarly bias; thus, I scaffolded the four sections of the novel in such a way that the emotional and physical itineraries of the different fictional flâneuses were conceived by the very character(ization) of each, feminist, queer feminist, or otherwise, and her own visceral, causative needs, rather than an imposed theoretical reading.
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