DISLOCATIONS: SPACE, NATION AND IDENTITY IN LEBANESE FICTION

1970-2003

BY GHENWA HAYEK

B.A., American University of Beirut, 2000

M.A., Leeds University, 2001

A.M., Brown University, 2006

SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE PROGRAM IN COMPARATIVE

LITERATURE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY

MAY 2011

© Copyright 2011 by Ghenwa Hayek This dissertation by Ghenwa Hayek is accepted in its present form by the Department of

Comparative Literature as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor

of Philosophy.

Date______

Elliott Colla, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______

Réda Bensmaïa, Reader

Date______

Edward Ahearn, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______

Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

iii CURRICULUM VITAE

Ghenwa Hayek was born in Beirut, Lebanon on November 14, 1979. She attended the

American University of Beirut, where she obtained a BA in English literature with high distinction and Leeds University, where she earned an MA in Twentieth-Century

Literature. She received her A.M in Comparative Literature at Brown University in 2006.

She has taught in Lebanon and the United States. In Lebanon, she taught at the American

University of Beirut’s English Department and Civilization Sequence Program, as well as at the Lebanese American University’s English Department. In the U.S, she has taught in

Brown’s Comparative Literature department and in the Rhode Island School of Design’s

Literature department.

iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Elliott Colla, and my committee members, Professor Réda Bensmaïa and Professor Edward Ahearn for their patience as I slowly wrote my way through this dissertation, as well as for their amazing support. Elliott in particular for his comments, which didn’t always sink in the first time, but always proved immeasurably sound. Professor Ahearn kindly stepped into this project at a very late stage, and I am extremely grateful that he did. Thank you to Carol Wilson-Allen, for her kindness over the years, and her tireless accommodation of my insane moves across country and continents. I would also like to thank my parents, Nicolas and Najia Hayek, for their unwavering support and faith that I could – should – complete this project, and their long- distance unconditional love. Munya, my first, last and favorite roommate, thank you for always reminding me that you were a doctor first, and that you – unlike me – are a “real” one. And for cheering me up frequently this last year. To the many friends along the way who helped make the distance manageable and the road smoother: Bana Bashour, George Nadda, Sherine Shallah, Samia Naccache, Amy Vegari, Ariane Helou, Kathryn Chenoweth, Miryana Vassileva, Timothy O’Keefe, Tsolin Nalbantian, Fadi Bardawil, and Cristina Serverius. Nisreen Salti and Lina Mounzer doled out many cups of tea and lots of advice about writing at Rawda Café when I started on my first chapter. To my fellow Boston residents and academic predecessors Teresa Villa-Ignacio and Kelley Kreitz, who generously shared their invaluable wisdom and experience over many a dinner and countless bottles of wine this past year. Finally, to Rami, who I met as I started writing, and who has seen me through to this project’s end, and whose love and encouragement – and excellent cooking skills – make me look forward to future projects, inshallah.

I dedicate this dissertation to my family, old and new.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction From Mount Lebanon to Beirut: The Changing Landscape of Lebanese Fiction 1

Chapter One Inhospitable Spaces: City and Village in Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt and Ṭuyūr Aylūl 38

Chapter Two A City Divided: Beirut in the (1975-1990) Civil War 82

Chapter Three Commemorative Countermemories: Beirut in 1990s Lebanese Fiction 125

Chapter Four Tracing Beirut in Contemporary Historical Novels 172

Conclusion Beirut, 2005-2010 220

Works Cited 224

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INTRODUCTION

From Mount Lebanon to Beirut: The Shifting Landscapes of Lebanese Fiction

In Lebanese artist Mazen Kerbaj’s graphic weblog of the 2006 July war in

Lebanon, black broad brushstrokes form the background and shape for an abstracted pieta1. The Arabic letters Bā’-Yā’-Rā’-Wāw- and Tā’ cascade vertically along the length of the hollow white body of the mother clasping an infant: they are the content of this woman’s body, and together they form the word Beirut. In the top right-hand corner, is written, in colloquial Arabic, “It’s so hard to part from”, the text leading to the ‘Beirut’ inscribed upon the woman’s body.2 The difficulty of leaving Beirut is a preoccupation for much of the blog, as is the assertion of Beirut’s resistance, despite attempts to “erase” it.3

In fact, as the blog develops, Beirut becomes as central a character as Mazen himself4.

The connection between the artist and the city is emphasized, and even day trips up to the mountains are represented as a challenge, the artist pining for the city down below. The

1 http://warkerblog.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2006-07-20T13%3A38%3A00- 07%3A00&max-results=500.

2Kerbaj uses the image of the mother and child frequently throughout the 6 week long blog that he maintained during the war (between July 16 and August 27, 2006); sometimes, he deliberately subverts its Christian iconography by replacing the Virgin Mary with a chador-clad Shiite woman from the South mourning over the dead body of her martyred son. http://www.flickr.com/photos/72795424@N00/203713475.

3 http://www.flickr.com/photos/72795424@N00/209463755.

4 I use ‘Mazen’ to refer to the character drawn in the autobiographical blog; the artist I refer to by his full name.

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city’s image in Kerbaj’s representations keeps shifting, from the symbolic mother to a rudimentary sketch of a skyline, to an abstracted blackness outside Mazen’s window.

Yet, in all its manifestations, Mazen is connected to it not merely by the fact of his physical presence or absence from it, but because it is more than just an ordinary city: it is what gives him a sense of place.

The cityscape of Beirut has, in the past four decades, undergone massive physical transformation: destruction, reconstruction, demolition and construction have ensured that it is a landscape in constant flux. Some of the events that have most severely impacted the urban landscape include several wars; the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990 being one, but also the great migration of refugees from Southern villages into the city’s perimeter beginning during the 22-year Israeli occupation (1978-2000), and continuing throughout the subsequent Israeli assaults and campaigns across Southern Lebanon.5

Spaces that were used for one purpose before times of conflict were transformed and modified for other uses. During the summer war of 2006, abandoned shops in large retail complexes became makeshift apartments for refugees. Even more optimistic projects, such as the reconstruction of downtown Beirut in the 1990s – billed as one of the biggest urban reconstruction projects since WWII (Gavin, 1) – have had an indelible, and not always welcome, effect on the landscape of the city. And throughout the country’s recent history, from at least the mid-1960s onwards, artists and writers have continued to use the cityscape to evoke, interrogate and sometimes resist dominant national and sectarian narratives, political divisions, and the intervention of capital, developers and investors in the urban space, and consequently, in the public sphere.

5 The most recent of which, in July 2006, caused the displacement of approximately 1 million people from Southern Lebanese villages and towns.

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As I indicate in the tile to this dissertation, artists and writers discuss the cityscape in the language and metaphors of dislocation and disorientation. For example, in the first chapter of this dissertation, the figure of an individual at a crossroads is used repeatedly by Emily Nasrallah to evoke her protagonist Muna’s feeling that she does not belong anywhere, neither in her home village nor in the city. In Alexandre Najjar’s Le Roman de

Beyrouth, which I discuss in the final chapter, the two main characters – a very old man and a rather young one – both feel that they have lost their “points de repère”, their reference points, in the now-reconstructed Beirut downtown area. This rhetoric suggests a disturbance of what geographers term a ‘sense of place’, which is deeply connected to processes of making emotional and social meaning from relations to specific locations

(Dictionary of Human Geography, 732). In the novels discussed in this dissertation, the spaces of the country, city and the urban landscape are undergoing rapid changes. These novels are not just a central part of the historical record of these changes. I will argue that these changes were so traultamic that they compelled writers to take notice. The relation between urban change and novels about Beirut has been dynamic and even dialectical.

The transformation of the cityscape, through modernization and growing urbanization, war, and then reconstruction throws the characters of these novels off balance and exposes a deep layer of anxiety and tension about themselves and about – literally – the place they occupy. As I will discuss in detail throughout this dissertation, this dislocation leads to an alienation from the changing physical, cultural and social landscape of the city. And, I will argue, in the peculiar history of Lebanon, where downtown Beirut has served as the only space unmarked by sectarian identity; therefore, the shift in city space had profound significance for the nation.

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Recently, more scholarship has begun to focus on the critical relationship of space, in terms of both its production and consumption, to human culture and society.

Such scholarship has built upon the pioneering work of French theorists like Henri

Lefèbvre and Michel de Certeau whose work – in particular, Lefèbvre’s – insists upon the fact that space is neither empty nor neutral, but produced through similar processes of making meaning and signification as other social relations.6 Once this is understood,

Michel de Certeau asserts, “everyday practices, ‘ways of operating’ or doing things [of which, for example, walking around in an urban space is one manifestation, as de

Certeau’s famous example of walking in New York City shows] no longer appear as merely the obscure background of social activity” (xi). In fact, as Lefèbvre expostulates in the introduction to his The Production of Space, it is inconceivable that “space be nothing more than the passive locus of social relations, the milieu in which their combination takes on body or the aggregate of the procedures employed in their removal”

(11). In other words, as geographer Neil Smith explains, space, and particularly public space “is socially produced, is a matter of intense political struggle, and an object of historical change” (The Politics of Public Space, 7).

In Lebanon, especially in recent years, when it comes to Beirut, the politics of space and place have been constantly at play and frequently in tension. This has been studied in urban ethnographies, such as the recent work by Aseel Sawalha,

Reconstructing Beirut, in which she examines the interplay and struggles of political actors, real estate developers, individual landholders and neighborhood residents over

6 For a great summary of the indebtedness of contemporary human geography studies to Henri Lefèbvre, see Neil Smith’s introduction to The Politics of Public Space.

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defining and reclaiming the Beirut neighborhood of ‘Ayn al-Mraysa, as well as in the most recent of sociologist Samir Khalaf’s works, Heart of Beirut, a historical account of the Martyrs’ Square area of Beirut, once the urban center of the city, and now a key site of political protest, used for example, in 2005 and 2008 by partisans of both major political factions at the time. In fact, Najib Hourani has argued that in Lebanon, the

“urban is not to be understood as an outcome of a deeper logic, but rather an unstable field through which power operates and reproduces itself” (“Capitalists”, 38-39). Yet, social spaces – as Lefèbvre and De Certeau, as well as Michel Foucault point out – are not only sites of hegemonic practices, such as the appropriation of land by eminent domain, but are also sites of everyday resistance by individuals.7 In short, space is a dynamic component of human cultural and social formation, in Lebanon and elsewhere.

While literary criticism has been interested in cities and in such spatial issues as landscape for many decades – as can be seen from such foundational texts as Burton

Pike’s The Image of the City in Modern Literature or Simon Schama’s Landscape and

Memory, and even Walter Mitchell’s Landscape and Power – this has often focused on the symbolic or metaphorical representations of urban space and/or landscape, and less on cities as actual places8. But, as critics like Neil Smith and Nirvana Tanoukhi argue, such readings willfully suppress or ignore political, social and historical contexts while focusing on the abstract or metaphorical meanings of space9. Subsequently, in her article

7 In a later chapter, I will discuss Foucault’s notion of a heterotopia as a space of resistance to dominant social practices and discourses (see Chapter 3).

8 A notable exception is Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City, about which more will be said later.

9 Tanoukhi, in particular, does a close reading of a close reading – Kwame Anthony

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“The Scale of World Literature”, Nirvana Tanoukhi argues for a move away from

“metaphorical deployments of ‘space’ toward concrete discussions about the materiality of literary landscapes” (600). According to Tanoukhi, this “would enable a more precise formulation of the role of literature, and literary analysis, in the history of the production of space” (600). In short, by advocating for a reintroduction of geographic scale into criticism Tanoukhi makes a compelling argument for the reintegration of a specific historical, political and geographical context into literary analysis. She writes:

What better program for a geographically enlarged literary history than to conceptualize the dialectic of lived time and lived space in and around literature – in order to understand the entanglement of literature in the history of the production of space (613).

In the case of Lebanon, where space – particularly, in recent years, urban space – has been an especially combustible site of contestations over power, identity, memory and culture, Tanoukhi’s invitation to integrate both literature and literary analysis into ‘the history of the production of space’ seems both timely and necessary. While it is certainly not the only factor in the cultural production of space in the Lebanese context, literature can certainly contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the historical and geographical contexts of Lebanese identity.

In Lebanon, literature and popular culture have already played a major role in formulating and propagating a particular landscape of national imagery and identity. For example, a popular Beirut restaurant advertises itself through the image of a horse-drawn

Appiah’s text on a Nigerian sculpture “Man on Bicycle” – to expose what she sees as the contradiction behind contemporary literary analysis’s use of space in postcolonial literature, and especially its propensity “either to celebrate the reappropriation of a Western genre on the periphery or lament the perpetual struggle borne of cultural colonialism” (612).

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cart, and a sign that proclaims “For the first time, the village is invading the city!”, appearing to resist the urbanization of the Lebanese countryside through a return to an imagined rusticity. The project’s architect explains his design influences in an interview:

I was inspired by the books of Anis Freiha [a famous Lebanese novelist who has written extensively about Lebanese traditional village life]. I took all the descriptive elements from Freiha’s books and materialized them in built form, in architectural details, and through artifacts and objects. Here you have Abou-Ahmad [sic] house, and here you have Abou-Khalil [sic] house, this is the well of the village, this is the terrace (‘alliya), this is al-saha (the open space)… All the objects you see here are mentioned in his books. I want to show that Anis Freiha was right: the village life is the genuine true life that inspires good and generosity…This project is about the values of the Lebanese traditional village, and how these values will invade the city!” (Harb, 10) 10.

And although Mona Harb correctly points out that the architect’s project in fact hybridizes several different traditions from a number of sources, including Lebanese popular culture, “which largely privilege Christian representations of (Mount Lebanon) at the expense of other histories and Arab and Islamic culture”, it still remains the case that the architect explicitly uses literary references in order to articulate and support the authenticity of his project, and to place it within a specific cultural context that he contrasts with the “area known for its ugliness and urban pollution” where the site stands

(Pious Entertainment, 10).

Since this dissertation focuses upon the creation and articulation of the urban in

Lebanese literature, each chapter focuses especially on a different period in the nation’s and city’s history: the rapid urbanization of the 1960s and 1970s, the subsequent

10 Interestingly enough, this traditional Lebanese village has also been relocated to Qatar, where another branch of the restaurant has been opened (Harb,11).

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destruction of the city during the civil war, and the two succeeding decades of reconstruction of central Beirut and the ensuing raging debate around the meanings of urbanity in Lebanon. In effect, it charts the rise to cultural prominence of the urban as a socially significant place in Lebanese culture, and its displacement of the rural paradigm that had previously dominated Lebanese cultural production.

That said, such a literary and cultural history cannot ignore the role played by the rural – in the case of Lebanon, the mountain – in the cultural formation of Lebanese identity. As Raymond Williams testifies in his seminal work The Country and the City, these two generic types of human dwelling – the country village and the city, or the rural and the urban – are dialectically entwined in a signifying process, and the work of the critic is to “not limit ourselves to their contrast but go on to see their interrelations” (297).

Following Williams then, I assert that in Lebanon, it is very difficult to begin to understand the emergent cultural resonance of the city in the 1960s without first understanding the historical role of the Mountain as the signifier of (a certain kind of) nation and national identity. In fact, as I show later in this chapter, the rural paradigm – what has come to be known as ‘Mountain Romanticism’ – dominated the cultural landscape of Lebanon from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, and still has a considerable cultural impact, as demonstrated by the architect above.

Not only did Mountain Romanticism inform many of the ideological and canon- forming processes of the nascent Lebanese state, its influence upon popular culture, academia and other aspects of Lebanese social formation and formulations of national identity, has been considerable. Still, the architect’s very assertion belies a shift in symbolic dominance: for the architect, traditional Lebanese village values must be

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reinserted into the contemporary urban discourse of Lebanon, as they are no longer culturally dominant. In fact, by the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, the city – and in particular, Beirut – had displaced the mountains as the symbolic anchor for

Lebanese cultural identity: Beirut had become, in the words of Theodor Hanf, “the center stage in most acts” (199).

My use of the terms ‘dominant’ and ‘emergent’ is of course, not accidental, and owes a lot to another one of Raymond Williams’ contributions, namely to his parsing of the changing, yet intertwined relations between dominant, emergent and residual in his seminal work, Marxism and Culture. For Williams, while traditional cultural studies has often focused on dominant paradigms – he gives the example of ‘bourgeois culture’ – to understand cultural phenomena, it is crucial that this be understood as a dynamic process, rather than a monolithic fact (Marxism, 121). To avoid errors of generalization or the exclusion of what is perceived to be marginal to this culture, he introduces “terms which recognize not only ‘stages’ and ‘variations’ but the internal dynamic relations of any actual process”; namely, what he calls the ‘residual’ and the ‘emergent’, “which in any real process, and at any moment in the process, are significant both in themselves and in what they reveal of the characteristics of the ‘dominant’” (Marxism, 121).

What is valuable about Williams’ concept is that it acknowledges the different, successive and perhaps non-monumental processes that go into making culture. In situations where historical, political and geographical change has been as rapid as it has been in Lebanon during the past 40 years, being able to see these changes as part of a dynamic process is crucial. Williams correlates the dominant to the culturally hegemonic, but he acknowledges that the emergent – that which is “substantially alternative or

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oppositional to [the dominant]” – is trickier to identify (Marxism, 123). However,

Williams suggests a method to distinguish between the three modes: an analysis of form:

“what matters, finally, in understanding emergent culture, as distinct from both the dominant and the residual, is that it is never only a matter of immediate practice; indeed it depends crucially on finding new forms or adaptations of form”, he asserts (Marxism,

126). As this dissertation charts the emergence and eventual dominance of the urban over the rural in Lebanese literature and popular culture, it also maps out a changing formal landscape, from the realist novels of the pre-Civil War period (1962-1973), to the memoirs and experimental fiction of the war years (1975-1990), to the historical fiction of the early years of the new millennium. Though all can be broadly understood as the emergence of a new urban paradigm that interrogates and complicates the formerly dominant rural, traditional, mountain nationalism of pre-1960s Lebanese culture, when examined separately, they narrate a story of the process by which the city gained ascendency in Lebanese culture, as well as the forms used to articulate this throughout the last turbulent four decades of Lebanese history. But by paying close attention to these texts’ use of space, as I mentioned earlier, a more complex understanding of the nuanced relationship between individual and city emerges.

What will become clear from this introduction is that, even prior to existing as an independent state, the political entity that became the nation-state of Lebanon was (and remains) entangled in a complex politics of space, place and geography. In this, the mountain village and the city have been dialectically intertwined as synecdoches for a vast array of meanings. To return one final time to the architect: For him, the village is tradition, piety, openness, and an idyllic pastoral life that must not only be replicated, but

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also must be reintroduced into the urban suburb, for commercial as well as social reasons11. Moreover, as he sees it, this idyllic life is under threat, and must be upheld architecturally and otherwise, in a now-urbanized Lebanon. He recognizes this, hence his nostalgic tone; his insistence upon the recreation of village life is, as I show above, a resistance to an already-existing dominance of the urban. In Williams’ terms, the architect longs for, and aims to revive, what is now ‘residual’ 12. The pace of change has been so rapid in Lebanon that it is difficult to imagine that the mountain romanticism which the architect longs for and tries to replicate had been the dominant cultural paradigm only thirty years previously.

Thus, in order to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of what I have characterized as the emergence of a new urban-centric discourse, it is necessary to first begin with an examination of the rise and subsequent dominance of the earlier, mountain- centric discourse that influenced cultural politics in Lebanon from the large scale – such as state-mandated educational curricula – to the small-scale identity politics that continue to play an important role in this multi-sectarian country. Therefore, I begin this introduction with a brief background of the literary and cultural origins of the discourse some have called “mountain nationalism” and which others have termed “mountain

11 While he acknowledges that the restaurant is a tourist attraction that must compete for customers’ money and attention with other touristic sites, despite having neither mountains nor the sea, he also sees the mission of al-Saha to be educational (Harb, 10- 11).

12 For Williams, the residual is that which has remained from the past, but is still culturally relevant to some degree, and he explicitly describes the idea of rural life as one of the aspects of residual culture (Marxism, 122).

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Romanticism”, and in particular, with a brief critical reading of one of the form’s earliest examples13.

Mountain nation, mountain romance:

In 1898, a novella was serialized in the Beirut-based bi-monthly journal al-

Machriq. The story, Kharīdat Lubnān (“The Unblemished Pearl of Lebanon”) told the tale of the return of Hanna, a Lebanese emigrant, to his village after twenty years spent abroad in Europe and South Africa. The first part of the story maps out Hanna’s journey through the village and key scenes with certain characters in his attempt to reunite with his betrothed, Anīsa. Finally, he locates her, in the home of poor villagers who have taken her in after she has been blinded by an illness she contracted tending to their son. As they wait for her to return from a walk, Hanna learns of Anīsa’s life since his departure, then he is finally reunited with Anīsa, and the two reaffirm their love for each other. The second part of the text revolves around two young writers arriving in the village the day of Hanna and Anīsa’s wedding. Their curiosity at the festivities leads them to Hanna’s home, where he recounts the story of his past in South Africa leading up to his return to the village; the story ends with the writers drawing straws to see who will get to recount

13 These terms are used – sometimes interchangeably – by several writers, including Jens Hanssen in Fin-de-Siècle Beirut; Chris Stone in Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon and Elise Salem in Constructing Lebanon; see also, Sune Haugbolle, War and Memory in Lebanon (47). In this dissertation, the term ‘mountain nationalism’ will be used when describing the political ideology constructed upon a belief in the exceptionalism of the Lebanese mountain as a privileged space in the Middle East, and ‘mountain Romanticism’ to describe the literature produced by a group of writers who, inadvertently sometimes, became associated with this nationalism.

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Hanna’s story; the prose-writer wins; at this point, the narrative ends, with a direct address to the reader: “and that’s why, dear Reader, you have before you the story of

Anīsa in prose, not poetry” (332).

The novella’s tension is constructed around the fact that, to the emigrant Hanna, the village is no longer knowable; its inhabitants don’t recognize him, and their customs as well as the practice of everyday life have changed in the twenty-five years since he has been away. Initially, he is mistaken for a foreigner, specifically “an English wanderer”

(jawwal inglīzi) by the local innkeeper, the first person he meets upon his return. The villagers’ inability to recognize him, and the changes that twenty-plus years have wrought upon the village form the dramatic tension of the first half of the novel, which involves a double search: for someone who will recognize him, and for his beloved

Anīsa, to whom he was betrothed before his emigration. “Is there no-one who recognizes me? Is there no-one who’s going to tell me about her?”, Hanna wonders to himself at several intervals throughout the narrative (40, 89, 41).

The novel allegorizes emigration as a process of erasure from the collective memory of one’s community, a situation that causes Hanna extreme anguish. As noted,

Hanna’s problem is that he is unknown to the rest of his fellow compatriots/villagers; another, equally pressing issue is that the village itself, after his twenty-five year absence, is unknown to him, in its landscape, its architecture as well as its inhabitants. In fact, the only immutable object in that entire village is the village church, described as “kanīsat al- waṭan” (90)14. Only the stability, steadfastness and immutability of the Church – and

14 In The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, Sabry Hafez points out that the term ‘waṭan’, now synonymous with a territorial form of nationalism (in Egypt, especially), was a neologism coined in the mid-19th century to distinguish the nascent Arab nation-

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that Church’s inextricable link with the nation – manages to instill hope in Hanna, and enables him to recognize that this is still his village; in fact, upon recognizing the church,

Hanna drops the map that he had carried with him from the moment of his arrival to the village (89). Thus, Kharīdat creates a strong symbolic link between the Church, permanence, Mount Lebanon and the familiarity of home; more pointedly, it posits

Mount Lebanon as a Christian nation-space, which “God has watered […] and is indeed the source of utmost beauty and purity, the epitome of life and the purity of youth and joy” (326). Finally, when Hanna finds Anīsa, the paragon of Christian virtue, the village becomes truly ‘known’ to him again, and vice-versa.

The novel registers Hanna’s transformation from an unknown being into a known one through a shift in the use of his name; prior to his marriage, he is described as al- gharīb, the stranger, or al-musāfir, the traveler. After his reunion with Anīsa, he is finally referred to by his own name. It is his marriage to Anīsa that makes him familiar, part of the village once more: this is the paradigm of the national romance: he whom “time has taken away from his lands (awṭānihi)” returns to his birthplace after many years of absence, and regains his identity through marriage (41).

The tale of Hanna and Anīsa bears some relation to the national romances studied in Doris Sommer’s seminal work, Foundational Fictions. For Sommer, the mid- to late- nineteenth century romances of South America “fueled a desire for domestic happiness

space from the Ottoman, Islamic millah or ummah (97). In “Imagined Identities, Imagined Nationalisms”, Charles Smith points out that, in the case of Egypt, this in no way conflicted with a feeling of Egyptian cultural primacy (612). Here, it is clear that Kharīdat is imagining a nation-space within the strict territorial boundaries of Mount Lebanon, and Lammens uses the term waṭan as a marker of distinction; however, it is unclear that he gave much thought to the wider Arab nation-space outside Mount Lebanon.

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that runs over into dreams of national prosperity,” and Kharīdat seems to embody some of these very same qualities as Hanna and Anīsa’s marriage ushers in good fortune for the entire village, which has already been identified as a nation-space (7). After all, in the logic of this novel, Hanna’s homecoming is as much an erotically motivated event as it is an emotional one; Hanna returns to fulfill his promise to Anīsa, whose very name evokes the notions of both companionship and unmarriedness; both the Arabic word anīsa – which means ‘companion’ – and ānisa – similar in meaning to ‘miss’ – invites metonymical readings: she is the unmarried female, par excellence; their marriage will be the symbolic joining of (female) village and (masculine) nation. Kharīdat enables the union of village/woman and nation/man only through a return and a re-settling in Mount

Lebanon. Thus, through the marriage of Anīsa and Hanna, the village is welded to the nation, and the foundational fiction is complete. Moreover, after the marriage, Hanna becomes the village benefactor, his personal wealth the trigger for a variety of projects.

For example, he gives money to Sarkis the weaver, whose family has taken care of Anīsa since her parents’ death, to start a silk production factory,15 and he establishes schools, so that Sarkis’s son, the first person to recognize him in the entire village, and daughters can attend. His personal wealth is invested back into the village, and this investment prospers, unlike another investment mentioned in the novel – that of Anīsa’s brother, who loses the

15 Silk production was the major Lebanese industry, and silk was the primary export in the 19th century; initially introduced into the country by the French, by the 1860s, silk cultivation and distribution were dominated by Lebanese merchants; by the early 20th century, the industry had collapsed, mostly due to competition from Japan. There are several excellent historical works on the different aspects of the silk trade, including Leila Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants; Hourani and Shehadi’s Lebanese Migration, 24-40; and Dominque Chevallier, Mont Liban, 213-221. For the early history of sericulture in the context of Christian Mount Lebanon, see Richard Van Leeuwen, Notables and Clergy in Mount Lebanon, 63-94.

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family’s money in a failed investment scheme with Beiruti traders (189). Thus, the novel locates both domestic happiness and communal prosperity in the mountain village.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this Arabic-language novel is neither its theme nor its content16, nor the way in which it was disseminated through the Beiruti press at the time. By the late nineteenth century, the Beiruti press was thriving, and serialized fiction was so popular that al-Machriq’s editors, initially not very keen on publishing fiction, had been forced to do so in order to compete for the reading public.17

The most astonishing thing, perhaps, is that the village-centric Kharīdat Lubnān, so deeply rooted in the specific place identity of Mount Lebanon, was written by a Flemish

Jesuit priest, Henri Lammens. Moreover, in terms of place identity and location, as will become clear throughout this chapter, this story written in Kharīdat Lubnān set the template for Lebanese fiction well into the middle of the following century.

The contributions of the Jesuits in general and of Henri Lammens in particular in the formation of Lebanese nationalistic thinking has been very well-documented elsewhere18. The Jesuits used their academic institutions such as schools and the

16 In Ruwwad al-Nahḍa al-Ḥadītha, Marūn ‘Abbūd claims that Lammens’ text was translated from the French by Najīb Ḥubayqa and Rashīd Shartūni (178); however, there is no indication of this in al-Machriq, or in any of the other sources on Lammens.

17 For more on the Arab press in the nineteenth-century, see Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East (62). For more on the Jesuits’ relatively belated decision to begin to publish fiction, see Abdel-Meguid, The Modern Arabic Short Story (footnote, 72); Georgescu, Salim Bustani (59). A great bibliographic resource, with biographies of the founders of Arabic-language publishing in the nineteenth century is Phillipe Tarazi’s Tarīkh al-Ṣahāfa al-‘Arabiyya.

18 Lammens is spotlighted in particular as an individual who “became inseparably associated with Université Saint-Joseph and with the pro-Christian policy of France in Lebanon” (Kaufman, Reviving Phoenicia, 33). For a more extensive discussion on the

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Université Saint-Joseph, established in 1848, as well as publications such as al-Machriq, as tools in the European colonial power struggle for the lands of the already-weakening

Ottoman Empire, which is clear from the following excerpt of a letter sent from the

Jesuits in Mount Lebanon to the French Foreign Ministry in 185819:

[It is] humanitarian and prudent to maintain and develop the sympathies which she [France] already inspires in the Syrians, and to strive to establish among them a Catholic nationality which, growing as the Oriental Empire weakens, will find itself ripe for political existence on the day when the Empire, in crumbling, will open the door to the rival ambitions of the European powers. Of all the provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the one which could most easily be detached, without causing great injury to the Sultan, is doubtless Syria. The geographical position of this country cries for independence; enclosed within boundaries such as the Taurus, the Mediterranean and the desert…while there is not perfect homogeneity among all the sections of the Syrian population, there is, nevertheless, in its bosom an important core of nationality, and that is the population of Lebanon which, completely devoted to France20, only awaits its advice and its guidance to enter on the path to regeneration (qtd. in Spagnolo, 20)

role of the French in Lebanese national identity formation, see Kais Firro, Inventing Lebanon (15-17); Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age; Kamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions; Meir Zamir, The Formation of Modern Lebanon. For more on the role of the Jesuits specifically, see Kaufman’s chapter “First Buds: 1860-1916”, in Reviving Phoenicia (21-55).

19 In Artillery of Heaven, Ussama Makdisi makes an interesting intervention in the debate over French and American missionaries’ work in Lebanon. Without denying the role that these two missions played in the politics of Ottoman Mount Lebanon and Beirut in the nineteenth century – particularly in the latter half of the century – he also points out that “to reduce the missionaries in the Ottoman Empire to ‘mere cultural imperialists’ is to misconstrue the resiliency of the Ottoman Arab world and the originality of cultural spaces created by the intersection of American and Ottoman histories” (9). Nevertheless, he does concur that the “cultural imperialist” term “has resonated for the simple reason that Western, including American, missionaries did overwhelmingly justify the subordination, if not always the ethnic cleansing or extermination, of native peoples during a genocidal nineteenth century” (10). Makdisi’s call for more nuanced interpretation of Western missionaries’ work is certainly welcome, but in this case, it is also clear that the Jesuits purposefully saw their cultural work as an extension of French colonial power in Mount Lebanon.

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Notably, this letter explicitly relates the area’s geography to its people’s political potentiality and to French colonial interests in cultivating the ‘population of Lebanon’.

The Jesuits were by no means the only players in the fields of culture or politics – or indeed, cultural politics – in nineteenth-century Lebanon. Yet, their impact was immediate and enduring on the cultural formation of the country decreed by French mandate in 1920, which later became the independent state of Lebanon, in 194321. Their role in shaping the field of education cannot be denied, and resonates with studies of imperialist education policies, such as those detailed by Gauri Viswanathan in Masks of

Conquest22. As further support for such a view, Lammens’ attempt to translate his political vision and ideology – which was already being effectively disseminated in the classroom and his scholarly writing – through the medium of popular print culture into

20 This ‘devotion’ is dramatized in Kharīdat through a portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte, taken down when the novel’s hero emigrates, it is put back up when he returns and sets the village to rights.

21 The Jesuits were frequently challenged on the educational and cultural fields by the American Protestant missionaries, whose Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut) was – and remains – the USJ’s leading rival. For more on the competition for cultural dominance in Lebanon, see Ussama Makdisi’s Artillery of Heaven. Arguing that such histories focusing on the European powers’ influence erases local and Ottoman power-players, a new generation of revisionist historians, including Engin Akarli and Jens Hanssen, and the scholars behind the collective The Empire in the City has also contributed to a further deepening of the understanding of 19th century modernity in Beirut and Mount Lebanon.

22 Viswanathan’s work charts the process by which colonial Indian education curricula were shaped by the demands and requirements of the British rulers and the interplay between Anglicist and Orientalist forces within the British colonial system, and how in turn these shaped the formation of the English literary canon. The French Jesuits and American missionaries in Lebanon have together, yet separately influenced Lebanese private education for over a century through their schools and universities.

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the novel form, suggests the strong link between ideology, education, politics and literature for him and his colleagues.

But, literary populist ambitions aside, Lammens is best-known for being a scholar of the Orient, a historian, and a profoundly influential teacher, whose:

Students were strongly influenced by his ideas, and among them was the generation of Christians, mainly Maronites, to whom the French, in many cases upon his personal recommendation, entrusted the government and administration of Lebanon after 1920 [the year of the declaration of the modern Lebanese state]…Lammens’ remarkable achievement was to secure for the Asile du Liban [literally, the Lebanese Refuge; figuratively the Lebanese mountain], a special political status as an autonomous principality within Syria (Salibi, Modern History, 130,134).

In his capacity as a teacher and influential member of the Jesuit educational system,

Lammens came into direct and indirect contact with a young generation of intellectuals, thinkers and writers who were later to play key roles not only in the formation of the

Lebanese state after 1920, and later after independence from the French Mandate in 1943, but also in articulating and framing this state’s nationalist identity, often using tropes they had taken from Lammens, such as the idea of the asile du liban. Such “Francophone and - phile” figures include Charles Corm, poet founder of the Révue Phénicienne, Bshara

Khuri, the first president of an independent Lebanon and Michel Chiha, who is often credited as one of the key founders and ideologues of the Lebanese state, and who interestingly enough, was also a dynamic figure in the Lebanese press, through his

French-language newspaper Le Jour (Stone, 23).23 Given this network of influence, it is

23 For more on Corm, see Kaufman’s “’Tell us our History’: Charles Corm, Mount Lebanon and Lebanese Nationalism”; a good introduction to Chiha is Hartmann and Olsaretti’s “The First Boat and the First Oar”; a detailed analysis of Chiha’s role in the

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perhaps unsurprising that “after the First World War, ancient Mount Lebanon, not the modern provincial capital of Beirut, became the idealized historical template for a future as a Lebanese nation state” (Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut fn, 233).

In addition to its political influence, the notion of Mount Lebanon as a haven, a beacon and a source of inspiration predominated in the literature of the early twentieth- century in Lebanon, and especially resonated with Lebanese emigrant writers in the mahjar (exile) in North and South America. Writers such as Charles Corm in turn influenced a generation of other writers, including Amin Rihani, one of the key figures in the Lebanese mahjar literary movement and in the group known as the ‘Pen

Association’.24 In fact, Amin Rihani’s book Qalb Lubnān (the Heart of Lebanon) was dedicated to Corm25. The introduction of the collection, whose completion was interrupted by Rihani’s death, asks the reader to pause with its author, and contemplate a young man:

formation of a particular kind of Lebanese nationalism can be found in Fawwaz Traboulsi’s Ṣilāt bila Waṣl: Michel Chiha wa-l-Idiyulujiyya al-Lubnāniyya.

24 These men – “by a happy chance”, as R.C. Ostle puts it – met in New York, and quickly established a poetry society called the ‘Pen Association’, at “a vital stage in the development of romantic poetry in Arabic” (Ostle, “The Romantic Poets”, Modern Arabic Literature, 95).

25 Although Corm was undoubtedly an influence upon Rihani, it must also be said that, unlike Lammens and Corm, Rihani, Jibran and the others did not explicitly seek out to produce an exclusively Lebanese literature or identity; rather, in fact, they saw themselves as part of the nahḍa movement, the Renaissance of the Arabic language. For more on this, see Jihād Fāḍil’s introduction in Al-Adab al-Ḥadīth fi-Lubnān (11-14). Rihani, in particular, was an Arab nationalist as Akl Keyrouz points out in “Ameen [sic] Rihani: Promoter of Arab Unity” in Khalil Gibran & Amin Rihani Prophets of Lebanese- American Literature (197-213).

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Who, after spending half his life in the great city of New York, returned to his home land in Lebanon to sing the great Truths of Being, and found them in isolation, in nature, the clear and honest guide to them […] He realized then that he was in the sacred mountain (Qalb Lubnan, 2).

Rihani eschews Lammens’ Christian-centric discourse for a more secular, new-age spirituality heavily informed by the Transcendentalism of Whitman and Emerson, as well as by English Romantics, such as Wordsworth; nevertheless, the spiritual anchor of nature is firmly lodged in ‘the sacred mountain’26.

In addition to emphasizing the spiritual dimension of the mountain, and the connection between home and the mountain, both Rihani’s text and Lammens’ are also concerned with another experience: that of emigration and return. From the nineteenth century onward, Mount Lebanon saw vast waves of emigration, to such an extent that by

1900, 120,000 people had left, almost a third of the total population, much to the consternation of the Jesuits, among others (Hourani and Shehadi, Lebanese Migration,

31). As Akram Khater’s historical study Inventing Home has emphasized, these emigrants, and in particular those of them who eventually returned to Mount Lebanon played an important role in the formation of Lebanese modernity, in particular, by bringing the “debates and tensions surrounding the definition and articulation of

26 For more on this, see Khalil Hawi, Khalil Gibran, His Background, Character and Works (Beirut, 1972), 112-113; The published proceedings from the 1998 International Conference on Lebanese-American Literary Figures, Khalil Gibran & Amin Rihani Prophets of Lebanese-American Literature (Louaize, NDU Press, 1998) contains several essays that highlight the connection between Amin Rihani, Gibran Khalil Gibran and Western Romantic poets, including Abdul Aziz Said’s “Ameen Rihani’s Spirituality: Unity in Diversity” (222-227), and James E. Barcus’s “Wordsworth, Gibran and the Moral Landscapes of Romanticism” (228-242). See also Yumna ‘Id’s Al-Dalala al- Ijtima‘iyya li-l-Adab al-Rumantīqi fi-Lubnān, and Najib Zakka’s section “Sens poétique et nature” in Littérature Libanaise Contemporaine (379-391).

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‘modernity’ into the hinterlands”, and out of the cities (109). Moreover, Khater points out, these returning emigrants – such as Rihani and Nu‘ayma – “returned to Mount

Lebanon to create a middle class that was distinctly separate from the rural peasantry and the urban bourgeoisie” (188)27; its writers also elaborated upon the template laid out a few decades earlier by such figures as Lammens and Corm in order to produce a nostalgic, Romantic discourse that centered around Mount Lebanon and its perceived privileged status. In fact, Albert Hourani has explicitly linked the two phenomena, by suggesting that the Romantic “image of a pure and natural way of living was carried by emigrants to the cities of the New World, strengthened and perhaps distorted there by nostalgia, and reflected back from them onto Lebanon itself” (“Ideologies”, 37-38).

Of course, this brief summary of the rise to cultural dominance of mountain

Romanticism barely scratches at the surface of the monumental and complex social and political phenomena underlying that era, and which include the breakdown of the

Ottoman Empire and its division among the Allied victors in the San Remo agreement

(1920) and the imposition of a French mandate upon Lebanon, whose borders were now re-drawn to include not only the mountainous, semi-autonomous Mount Lebanon of the late Ottoman era, but also the coastal cites of Tripoli, Beirut, and Sidon, much to the chagrin of the local Muslim population, who were more inclined to being part of an Arab nation-state and were not enthused by the prospect of a Christian-ruled country28. And, of

27 Avoiding claims of Lebanese exceptionalism, Khater nonetheless points out that these dual trends of a mountain-based affluent middle class that brought its emigrant experience back to Mount Lebanon set Lebanese modernity apart from other Arab countries, where modernity was more cleanly divided along urban-rural lines, and where an educated native bourgeoisie set itself apart from the rural peasantry (109; see also introduction).

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course, much has been written about the Lebanese experiment in sectarian democracy, and of the failure of Chiha’s brand of Lebanese nationalism to incorporate and unify the country; as such, “mountain nostalgia fostered crucial (and problematic) identifications for Lebanese identity” due to its exclusion of the new country’s coastal communities

(Haugbolle, War and Memory, 47).

Yet, fail though it eventually did, it cannot be denied that there was an attempt to disseminate this perceived national identity through culture. As Jeff Shalan suggests,

“whether it be language, territory, race, religion, ethnicity, the presumed historical continuity of a people, or any combination thereof, which serves as the organic and unifying principle of the nation, the idea itself typically takes shape in and is transmitted by way of a cultural system’ (128). The work of Rihani, Jibran, and others, such as the short stories of Marūn ‘Abbūd, Mikha’il Nu‘ayma and others which dealt with village life were incorporated into the new educational curricula created after independence from the

French. Thus, through a combination of press and print cultures and mass education, the invented tradition of mountain nationalism, of a specific set of traits and characteristic particular to those inhabitants of Mount Lebanon became the dominant cultural idiom in

Lebanon.

The term ‘invented tradition’ is taken from Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s influential book, The Invention of Tradition. In the introductory chapter, also titled

“Inventing Traditions”, Hobsbawm explains that an invented tradition is a:

28 There are several excellent general histories of this period, including Fawwaz Traboulsi’s A History of Modern Lebanon, and Kamal Salibi’s A House of Many Mansions, as well as his earlier A Modern History of Lebanon.

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Set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition […] where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past” (1).

As Hobsbawm’s definition suggests, any system that ‘seeks to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior’ is complicit in the dissemination of invented traditions. In

Lebanon, academia has also been susceptible to the Mountain nationalist paradigm. For example, Fu’ad Frem Bustani, a prominent USJ historian who held particularly Christian- nationalist views, used the imagery of the mountain to create a racialized mythology of the uniqueness and distinctiveness of mountain-folk, as in the following paragraph:

The qualities of Lebanon’s mountain-folk […] have always had to fight against rocks, dryness, nature and the mountain terraces. The Lebanese were individual property holders, while the nomads’ property belonged to their tribes. Those indolent nomads were always content with just taking their livestock out; they didn’t have the endurance of Lebanese peasants who, from the beginning, produced complete work” (qtd. in Georgescu, 56).

But this mythology of the mountain was not only pervasive on the ultra-nationalist Right.

In a famous, often-cited essay titled, “Ideologies of the Mountain and the City”, respected historian Albert Hourani suggests that one of the reasons for Lebanon’s continued strife is a fundamental difference between ideologies of the mountain and their contrasting ideologies of the city. For Hourani, the mountain ideology is insular, superstitious, religious and populist, and “implicit in this mountain populism was a certain distrust of the city”, while the city ideology of Lebanon’s coastal inhabitants, Christian and Muslim alike, is pluralistic, one “in which communities, still different on the level of inherited religious loyalties and intimate family ties, co-existed within a common framework” (36,

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38). This argument has proven so compelling that it has frequently been used to ‘explain’ the reasons for the breakout of the civil war, such as in Elizabeth Picard’s Lebanon: A

Shattered Country, where she attributes part of the causes for the Lebanese war to a

“mountain culture” characterized by tribalism and violence (128).

Moreover, in addition to the role played in propagating and disseminating this

Mountain romanticism by the state and its institutions, such as the Ministry of Education, which was in charge of setting educational curricula for Lebanon’s school system,

Lebanese popular culture during the 1950s and 1960s was also dominated by a nostalgic, idyllic mountain-centered discourse. In his Popular Culture and Nationalism,

Christopher Stone studies the rise and impact of the Rahbani brothers and Fairouz, arguably the most successful and iconic Lebanese performers since independence. Stone examines how the Baalbek festival committee and the Rahbanis not only “reflected a certain vision of Lebanese locality”, but actively produced an idealized image of the

Lebanese nation-state that centered upon the imagined village life of an idealized Mount

Lebanon (37, 38). To some extent then, by the early 1960s, the project launched by the

Jesuits in the nineteenth century to create a national identity for the Lebanese people structured around the geographical site of Mount Lebanon had been quite successful. In fact, it had gained the status of fact, such that even its detractors were forced to take it into account in their attempts to articulate another version of Lebanon29.

The Mountain and the City:

29 Fawwaz Traboulsi writes how Chiha’s influence has impacted even his ideological opponents in the leftist, pan-Arab national movement (Ṣilāt, 13).

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Of course, while mountain nationalism and mountain Romanticism may have been the most dominant cultural discourses of Lebanese nationalism, they were not the only ones, particularly since they so heavily depended upon the exclusion of a sizable – even majority – portion of Lebanon’s population from their narrative (Stone, 38). After all, to return to Williams’ frame of reference “no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention” (Marxism and

Literature, 125). What Williams means by this is that even dominant paradigms are constantly shifting and, therefore, to varying degrees, unstable. Lebanon in the 1950s and 1960s was a particularly lively – and quite unstable – site of cultural and political exchange 30. The words of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who lived in Lebanon during the 1970s and 1980s, perhaps capture this instability the best; Darwish writes that

Lebanon was “transformed from a republic to a collection of positions” (134). Politically, the rise of Nasserist pan-Arab nationalism in the 1950s and the growing influence of the

Palestinian Liberation Organization in the 1960s, as well as local popular movements and parties, such as the Lebanese Communist Party and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party all began to chip away at the idealized notions of Chiha and his contemporaries. More importantly, as Beirut began to grow in both size and influence (thanks in part to the banking sector, in which both Chiha and Corm had influence 31), dominant political and

30 Not all of this exchange was non-violent; for example in 1958, considerable civil unrest led to President Kamil Chamoun calling in the Marines to help shore up his presidency.

31 Chiha was related to the Pharaons, an influential banking family since Ottoman times (to this day, their family bank is called Banque Pharaon-Chiha); Corm was the son of a

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cultural paradigms began to be challenged32. Even earlier social relations were transformed, as in the example Akram Khater gives of the children of those middle-class emigrants who had returned to their mountain villages. For this generation, Khater writes,

“the village dimmed as a point of social reference […] It was, for them, a place to visit occasionally and perhaps a place for spending the summer away from the heat of the cities but not a place where they lived for the greatest part of their adult years” (184).

Furthermore, in Lebanon in the 1960s, as I argue in the following chapter, a new literary mode was emergent, in the sense that “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship” were being produced (Khater, 184).33 And since so much of the dominant was intimately tied up with a particular type of place identity; i.e., with mountain nationalism or Romanticism, it follows then that this emergent literature, such as Tawfiq Yusuf ‘Awwad’s Ṭawahīn Bayrūt (The Mills of

Beirut) or Emily Nasrallah’s Ṭuyūr Aylūl (September Birds), would deliberately distance itself from – and, in fact, interrogate – some of the basic premises of this dominant cultural idiom through an invocation and exploration of the other side of this place dialectic: the city.

wealthy family who stopped his writing activities in order to found a very successful financial empire (Hartmann and Olsaretti; Kaufman).

32 Samir Khalaf has written extensively on the rapid urbanization of Beirut, especially in Hamra and Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon. For an interesting first hand ethnography of the rapid urbanization of Beirut in the 1960s and 1970s, see Fuad Khuri’s From Village to Suburb: Order and Change in Greater Beirut.

33 While of course this was not confined to literary work per se, or to prose fiction in particular, the limitations of this dissertation foreclose a deeper discussion of film, theater or poetry.

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Thus, the first chapter of this dissertation, “Inhospitable Spaces: City and Village in

Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt and Ṭuyūr Aylūl” explores the city-rural binary not as an opposition, as so many critics of Lebanese fiction have done, but as a dialectic. I argue in the chapter that both novels share an anxiety about the nation that is constructed as an anxiety about space and belonging. Specifically, the main characters in both these novels – significantly, both young women – cannot find themselves, cannot belong in either rural or urban Lebanon. Thus, in Emily Nasrallah’s Ṭuyūr Aylūl, the protagonist Muna frequently refers to herself as an ‘interrogation mark’. This symbol simultaneously configures both her confusion about her own identity as well as the interrogation, the challenge that she and others like her pose to Lebanese society, both in its traditional village and modern urban forms. A major point of departure in this argument from traditional critical readings of these novels is that I do not foreground gender differences as the main dynamo behind these changes, though of course, I take both novels’ use of gender into consideration as a deliberate strategy to emphasize characters’ marginalization from traditional Lebanese society, and their need to belong somewhere in this inhospitable space. I argue that a similar challenge to dominant narratives is also raised by Tawfiq Yusuf ‘Awwad’s Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt, which has often been read as one of the first examples of the urban novel in Lebanese literature. ‘Awwad’s protagonist

Tamima, a village girl from the Lebanese South, cannot find herself either in her village nor in Beirut; at pivotal moments in the novel, each space becomes a site of escape from the other. In the end, Tamima finds that she cannot truly be happy in either, and chooses a different route after rejecting both.

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Read together, I argue, these novels point to an anxiety about belonging that transcends the village/city dialectic, and becomes an anxiety about belonging to the nation itself. Written during a period where Lebanon – ‘The Switzerland of the Middle

East,’ due to its snow-capped mountains and its banking sector – and Beirut – ‘the Paris of the Middle East’, in an interesting reinterpretation of European geography – were both booming, and the city especially was perceived as one of the freest, most open spaces in the Middle East – Mahmoud Darwish described it as “a workshop for freedom, busy sticking out its tongue at the sand and the repression on all sides of it” – and as a global city in its own right, these novels question both traditional Mountain Romanticism and the new narratives of urban modernity, and pose interesting challenges about belonging

(52).

Unfortunately for Lebanon and for Beirut, a few years after that, the country and the city were caught up in civil war. In the chapter “A City Divided: Beirut in the (1975-

1990) Civil War”, I cover the fifteen-year period of civil war, a historical moment marked by a paradoxical burst of literary and artistic activity. As I explain in detail in the chapter, the literary analysis of the Lebanese civil war has touched on various ‘breaks’ with tradition. First and foremost of these is this literature’s formal break with the narrative tradition of historical romance and realism, and its increased formal experimentation. Another often-discussed aspect of this war literature is its thematic break with Mountain Romanticism and with Lebanese nationalism, which has often been conflated by feminist critics with a break from traditional patriarchy. In short, this period is – accurately – read as one in which the war created an epistemic break with a number of previously dominant traditions. However, as I argue in the chapter, a close reading of

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these novels, and in particular of the most canonical novels of this period, with an attention paid to the local and global politics of geographical scale illuminates a different series of issues. Firstly, such a reading allows one to look at the war globally, as a set of events that affected all Lebanese across the social spectrum, as opposed to privileging one social group’s experience (women’s, to give a common example) over the others.

Such a reading highlights the collective experience of warfare as it shifted the boundaries of the urban space. And, as they came to terms with the spatial divides that war had imposed upon the city, some writers – for example, Mahmoud Darwish and Etel Adnan – often propagated them, while others – like Elias Khoury or Jean Said Makdisi – challenged them. In the chapter, I point to the way in which literature not only reflects, but also produces new spatial understandings and divisions of collective space.

One such example of re-scaling occurs in Elias Khoury’s The Journey of Little

Gandhi, in which the changes to Beirut’s landscape are mourned through a global metaphor. Over the course of the war, Beirut becomes a “Third World City”: “look at

Beirut, transforming from the Switzerland of the East to Hong Kong, to Saigon, to

Calcutta, to Sri Lanka. It’s as if we circled the world in ten or twenty years. We stayed where we were and the world circled around us” (4). Khoury’s spatial metaphor suggests two conflicting pulls. The first is the image of Beirut as the center of the world, a substitution that evokes both a delusion of grandeur and the exaggerated importance of

Beirut to the (unnamed) narrator of the novel. The war-torn city is re-conceived as the center of the world; its geography is re-written to emphasize this. However, the second metaphor of Beirut is a more concrete geopolitical one, in which the city travels down the scale of global cities from the more desirable to the least. Significantly, human

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geographers use the concept of ‘scale’ most often to denote “place desirability”, in the context of residential areas (Johnston, 214-215); in Khoury’s transitional metaphor,

Beirut is becoming a less-desirable urban space. Unlike Sabah Ghandour, who in her introduction sees this as a sign of a “parodic confusing of metropolis and national space”,

I would argue that Khoury’s extended metaphor is in fact more lament than parody, and revelatory of a fear of Beirut’s devolution into a different kind of global city, known not for its prosperity and comfort, but for its crushing poverty, under-development and sectarian strife (Gandhi, xvii). In this chapter, a connection is reinforced between the breakdown of everyday urban life and the breakdown of a heterogeneous, public community.

The two final chapters are written in the context of Beirut’s reconstruction during the two decades after the end of the civil war in 1990. Almost immediately after the war, a private real-estate development company with direct ties to the (soon-to-be) Lebanese prime-minister Rafiq al-Hariri, la Societé Libanaise pour la Développement et la

Réconstruction – referred to by its acronym Solidere – acquired the rights to develop and manage the reconstruction of central Beirut’s business and commercial district, an area of

1.8 million square meters, some of which had been reclaimed from the sea, which had been cordoned off from the rest of the city during the civil war (Sawalha, 28)34. The project was controversial from the outset, and sparked a furious and impassioned public

34 In his dissertation “Capitalists in Conflict”, Najib Hourani discusses how this was achieved, and how the “properties of former residents, shopkeepers and craftsmen were appropriated and demolished between 1992 and 1994, [as] the company hired a host of young, western-trained Lebanese architects and urban planners to design the new city center under the direction [of] high powered American, British and French consulting firms” (9).

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debate in the Lebanese press and at academic conferences in Lebanon and elsewhere.35

Originally billed (in the early 1990s) as an urban project that would “engender Lebanon’s national reconciliation, tempering the urge to the development of modern placelessness through small-scale architecture of community, and the valorization of a shared historical and cultural heritage,” the project eventually transformed, as both Najib Hourani and

Saree Makdisi have pointed out, into:

The creation of an enclave for the super-wealthy of the region. It does rely upon imported urbanism in the creation of what is a symbolic space within which thin representation and spectacle predominate. Further, it is a space of consumption oriented toward not the Lebanese but the expatriate and the tourist, centered upon the paradigmatic urban form of post-modernity: the heritage themed shoppertainment center (Hourani, “Capitalists”, 346).

Given the context of the changing urban fabric and Solidere’s blatant attempts to re-write the urban history of Beirut, which is well-recorded in the literature, it is not surprising then that so many novelists in the 1990s return to the site, and that it becomes a signifier of a series of social issues36.

In “Commemorative Countermemories: Beirut in 1990s Lebanese Fiction”, I examine three Lebanese novelists of the 1990s. I link their particular emphasis on memory and recollection not only to a desire to find a language of memory distinct from

35 The books Projecting Beirut and Reconstructing Beirut, as well as Memory for the Future emerged out of the proceedings of conferences on the city. In them, critics of Solidere’s project, such as U.S-trained architect Hashim Sarkis and French-trained architect Jad Tabet present several arguments against both the method, the intention and the effect of Solidere’s activities.

36 See for example, Saree Makdisi’s articles “Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial identity in the Age of Solidere”, and his essay “Beirut, a City without History?”.

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the dominant recollective modes of Lebanese society, “between a critically probing discourse and nationalist nostalgia” that Sune Haugbolle records in War and Memory in

Lebanon (31), but also as a way to memorialize the transforming center of Beirut in a language that not only passively mourns, but also actively reconstructs the city as a historical site of everyday life, a life that is no longer a part of the new urban space being produced by Solidere. Thus, the fiction of Hoda Barakat, Rashid al-Da‘if and Hanan al-

Shaykh confronts personal and public memory and the re-writing and revision of personal history while also emphasizing the alienation that these characters feel from the new urban space being rebuilt.

In these three novels, the characters return to the destroyed city center, an encounter which propels in them memories of their various childhoods spent in the city center. After the war, in the 1990s, the symbolic – and contested – heart of Lebanon shifted to Beirut’s center – a claim sociologist Samir Khalaf alludes to in his book about the area, Heart of Beirut. The site became a popular location for cultural productions involving and invoking memory, such as Nada Sehanoui’s installation piece, I remember, a collection of paper documents of collected memories of the war strewn near the historic former major city square. And while these are certainly acts of resistance of the erasure of the memory of war, and its impact upon individual Lebanese, the choice of location suggests that they are also acts of resistance towards the erasure of a heterogeneous social, cultural and religious demographic from the urban space of central Beirut.

Furthermore, since the Solidere project “effectively suppressed some ideas of national history and exploited others in order to launch a new nationalist unifying project,” the

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textual resistance in these novels is also a rejection of such selective nation-building schemes; hence, they are commemorative countermemories (Sawalha, 28)37.

While the generation to which al-Da‘if, al-Shaykh and Barakat belonged engaged with the changes in the urban landscape by evoking personal memories of everyday life in the downtown area, a new generation that had no personal connection to that part of the city was emerging.38 Yet, they too, are drawn to the history of Beirut’s urban spaces, and in particular to the central part of this center, Martyrs’ Square. The major traffic and commercial, entertainment and popular hub of pre-war Beirut, this square has many names, a testimony to its age. Kamal Salibi explains the origins of the site’s many names in Crossroads to Civil War:

The Burj (Citadel) square was so called after a medieval fortress which stood there until the early nineteenth century. In 1860, the French expedition which arrived in Beirut to intervene in the Druze-Christian civil war which raged in Mount Lebanon in that year placed its cannons in the Burj area, which was strictly outside the city; hence the name Place des Canons. In 1916, the Ottoman authorities hanged several Beirut nationalists who were co-operating with the Allies in World War I in the same area, which by then was already the central square of the city; hence the name Place des Martyrs, which has been the official name of the square since the time of the French Mandate (125, fn).

In the last chapter, “Tracing Beirut in Contemporary Historical Novels”, I examine the work of a new generation of Lebanese novelists, and do a comparative reading of the work of Rabi‘ Jabir, and in particular his trilogy Bayrūt Madinat al-‘Ālam and Alexandre

37 For example, the Solidere publication Beirut Reborn pays homage to Beirut’s cultural past by talking about the Phoenician and Roman cities at length, but only dedicates a paragraph to the almost 500 year Ottoman history of the city (24).

38 Sawalha quotes one of her sources as saying “people have not yet forgotten the city center…[;they] are attached emotionally to their previous places” (Reconstructing Beirut, 29). Unfortunately, an entire generation of people born between after the late 1960s has no such memories to fall back on.

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Najjar’s Le Roman de Beyrouth. Both young novelists use the genre of historical fiction in order to re-create the downtown life of Beirut in and around Martyrs’ Square from the

19th and early 20th century, a commemoration of a cityscape and an urban lifestyle that they never knew. In the chapter, I use French historian Pierre Nora’s distinction between lieux de mémoire and milieux de mémoire to distinguish between the ways that each novel memorializes the city39; Najjar, I argue, builds his novel around a memorial imagination that uses as its lieu de mémoire the central monument of the statue of the

Lebanese martyrs in downtown Beirut’s Martyr’s Square. On the other hand, by intertwining downtown Beirut’s past with its present, in a clever back-and-forth that superimposes the historical city upon the present city, site of capitalist consumption,

Jabir’s novel maps out the old upon the new, and thus refuses the erasure of the ancient city by its newest urban planners, who proudly compare themselves to Paris’s Baron

Haussmann (Beirut Reborn, 27).

Recording the everyday city:

A final set of questions: what is at stake in the literary tradition of representing

Beirut? What are the significances of the shifts in this tradition over time? The short answer is that literature is a practice where cultural norms are both expressed and resisted. Literary practice, like any other cultural practice, is an intersection where private

39 For Nora, the distinction between a lieu de mémoire and a milieu de mémoire is that while lieux de mémoire are the sites in which “memory is crystallized […] in which a residual sense of continuity remains”, i.e., monumental sites, milieux de mémoire, are “settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience” (Places of Memory, 1).

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reflection meets public engagement, an institution in which relative political weakness can be transformed into cultural capital and even power. In Reconstructing Beirut, Aseel

Sawalha connects acts of bearing witness and commemoration to a lack of political agency: “City residents were incapable of protecting one of their childhood sites, but they insisted on witnessing, documenting and mourning its destruction” (30). Yet, despite their political weakness, Sawalha lists different sites of post-war resistance to Solidere’s project, from the Muslim sheikhs who issued fatwas forbidding trade in Solidere shares, or the participation in the project to those who resorted to political jokes and gossip

(Sawalha, 38).

As a generative, productive political force, literature is capable of shaping and influencing cultural and social politics, and contributes a strong voice to the debate over the nature of the city and the right to public space. And, that, as David Harvey argues in his essay “The Right to the City” is “one of our most precious yet most neglected of our human rights”, since “the right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city” (1). It is in this spirit and to these ends that this dissertation seeks to intervene in the conversation about the shape of Beirut as a city, and its place in the Lebanese polity. Showing how an increased privatization of urban space in global cities such as New York and Mexico City threaten “ideals of urban identity, citizenship and belonging”, Harvey calls for a reframing of our understandings of the collective right to the city (“Right”, 6). In the increasing privatization and homogenization of the once-public, heterogeneous places of

Beirut, contemporary literature is both an intervention and a reminder that such contestations over urban space pre-date the civil war. This literature rejects pre-war

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selective romantic nationalisms that marginalized a vast portion of the population, and postwar privatization schemes that likewise monopolize the rights to public space.

Reading it while paying attention to the space and place dynamics involved sheds a new understanding on Lebanese identity in the new millennium.

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CHAPTER ONE

Inhospitable Spaces: City and Village in Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt and Ṭuyūr Aylūl

It has often been noted that nationalism depends upon the mobilization of certain narratives of authenticity, particularly rural authenticity, “finding in the ‘folk’ the attitudes, beliefs, customs and language to create a sense of national unity among people who have other loyalties” (Brennan, 53)1. In an essay entitled, “The Transformation of

Reality and the Arabic Novel’s Aesthetic Response”, Sabry Hafez discusses how, in the period following the Second World War, as national independence movements sprung up across the Arab world, “a traditional rural or tribal vision dominated the scene, partly in reaction to the colonial incursion and as an assertion of continuity and national difference, and partly as the historical product of the state of social development prevalent in the Arab world at the turn of the century” (94). Throughout the Arab world, the figure of the peasant was utilized as the embodiment of nationalist ethics and ideals, particularly as a figure of ‘authenticity’ and virtue against the double threats of colonial and urban infestation2. While cultural historians like Akram Khater point out that

1 There is a well-known body of work on the relationship between nationalism and the ‘folk’; Stephen Sheehi provides a list of this scholarship in the Arab world in Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 96.

2 This has been extensively discussed in much work on Egypt; for example, Sabry Hafez writes that “the ‘self’ was identified with the country, often represented in literature as a beloved peasant girl […] with her familiar attributes, beauty and good nature; on the rare occasions when she was presented as an urban woman, she was still an idealized girl from the popular quarter of the city in which the rural ethos was very much alive” (“The

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Lebanon presented a slightly different case than the rest of the Arab world, mostly due to the large numbers of returning emigrants and their influence on society, it is also true that in Lebanon, in much of the work that dominated the early twentieth century, the locus of national authenticity was firmly situated in the non-urban areas, specifically in Mount

Lebanon3. As I already discussed in the introduction, after independence, mountain nationalism, of which Kharīdat Lubnān is one of the earliest examples, became the dominant cultural paradigm not only of the new Lebanese state, but also of the popular

Lebanese imagination. This nationalism privileged what Elise Salem has described as a

“supposedly simple, rural lifestyle” and is exemplified in literature by writers of the emigrant nahḍa movement, such as Jibran Khalil Jibran, Mikha’il Nu‘ayma and Amin

Rihani, and in popular culture by the world – and work – of the Rahbani brothers and

Fairouz (55). This writing frequently privileged the notion that the mountain – and the

Lebanon that it was a metonymic stand-in for – was a historical site of refuge4.

Eric Hobsbawm’s work has famously drawn out the relationship between nationalism and the invention of traditions by the state. More recently, thinkers such as

Benedict Anderson and Timothy Brennan argue that previously overlooked contributions

Transformation of Reality”, 94). See also, Samah Selim’s The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985.

3 Khater, Imagining Home, 109: “While in other parts of the Middle East the middle classes remained a small percentage in comparison with the overwhelming peasant and laboring classes, in Lebanon returning emigrants swelled the ranks of the middle class to make it far more visible and potent in the making of a “modern” Lebanon. Moreover, while this process remained centered in the major cities of most of the region, in Lebanon emigrants brought the debates and tensions surrounding the definition and articulation of “modernity” into the hinterlands”.

4 For many emigrés to North America, “Lebanon’ became a compensatory image of all things that they – as immigrants – did not have. See Akram Khater, Imagining Home, introduction.

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by the producers of cultural capital were equally instrumental in constructing a nation’s image (and imagery) of itself. Lebanon proved no exception: the rise of mountain nationalism was enabled by the newly independent Lebanese state. While hindsight affords Salem the ability to diagnose this state-sponsored national culture of post- independence Lebanon as “spotty”, the new state actively incorporated the short stories of Mikha’il Nu‘ayma, Jibran Khalil Jibran and other ‘Mountain Romantics’5, into its educational curricula.6

Not only in the literary works that were incorporated by the post-independence state, but in popular culture as well, Lebanon was being consolidated as a community imagined as rural. Christopher Stone’s work on the musical theater of the Rahbani brothers expands on their use of folklore that promoted the image of the idealized

Lebanese mountain village that paradoxically was both specific and general enough to be both exclusive and inclusive of “different nationalities within and without Lebanon”

(166). Stone’s thoughtful analysis claims that the Rahbanis “played a central, powerful and not unproblematic role in providing citizens of this nascent state with their new

5 See Yumna ‘Id, Al-Dalala al-Ijtima‘iyya li-Ḥarakat al-Adab al-Rumantīqi fi-Lubnān.

6 The link between this focus upon the mountain and the village as loci for nationalist sentiment produced by predominantly Christian writers during the early days of the Lebanese state in the 1950s and 1960s has been discussed in more detail in the introduction of Christopher Stone’s Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon: The Fairouz and Rahbani Nation. Hanssen also speaks of this in Fin-de-Siècle Beirut, when he asserts that it was “Mountain Romanticism [..] which formed the basis of a new Lebanese national idea formulated more systematically by the self-proclaimed ‘New Pheonicians’ after the First World War” , adding in the corresponding footnote that “after the First World War, ancient Mount-Lebanon [as exemplified by the work of Charles Corm, such as La Montagne Inspirée and L’Humanisme de la Montagne], not the modern provincial capital of Beirut, became the idealized historical template for a future as a Lebanese nation state (232-233).

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‘Lebanese’ identity”, since they also played into the exclusive, somewhat homogenous image of a shared rural past amongst all Lebanese (22). In this considerable body of work, the city is often conspicuously and deliberately absent; it is left almost completely out of the local imaginary. Salem writes that, “as Lebanon entered a conscious period of folklorization, the popular depiction of Beirut remained relatively untainted or was bypassed for more focused depictions of the idealized rural villages” (22).

Unsurprisingly, the dominant field of canonical – and canon-forming – cultural production, to use a term from Pierre Bourdieu, that emphasized the predominance of the rural over the urban, openly encouraged work that replicated and reproduced its values7.

For example, on the back pages of Emily Nasrallah’s 1962 novel Ṭuyūr Aylūl (September

Birds) is a letter addressed to Nasrallah from Mikha’il Nu‘ayma.8 Nu‘ayma, by then one of the grand old men of Lebanese letters, writes:

7 To extrapolate Bourdieu’s hypothesis for the Lebanese context is beyond the scope of this paper; however, Bourdieu describes the relationships between the representatives of the ‘dominant’ in the literary field and the mechanisms by which they resist or welcome new interventions in the field in The Field of Cultural Production (161-175). In this specific case, the newcomer, Nasrallah, is welcomed by the older, more established Nu‘ayma since her writing appears to continue within the tradition his writing is in; in other words, her writing is not perceived as threatening to the dominant cultural paradigm.

8 A formidable literary figure in Lebanon, Nu‘ayma is among the generation of writers that ‘Id describes as Romantics; in addition to writing several volumes of short stories in the ‘mountain nationalist’ tradition, he is also famous for being the biographer of Jibran Khalil Jibran, which adds to his symbolic worth as an authoritative cultural figure within the Lebanese canon. Nu‘ayma is generally grouped along with the writers of the mahjar, such as Jibran and Amin Rihani; for more on Nu’ayma in particular and his role in mahjar literature, see M.M. Badawi’s Modern Arabic Literature, p. 98-101, and Robin Ostle’s “The Literature of the Mahjar” in Hourani and Shehadi’s The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Immigration (209-226)

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Ṭuyūr Aylūl is an artistic exposition of the Lebanese village in all its facets. Because of the fact that you are formed from the earth of the village, and you have a vast repository of artistic sensibility, good taste, and sound observation, and a deep feeling for rhetorical, humanist and aesthetic values (al-qiyam al-kalāmiyya, al-insāniyya wa-l-jamāliyya), you have been able to depict the village in such a marvelous way...what adds to the greatness of your portrayal of the village is your ability to get into its inhabitants’ minds and reactions, whether slow or fast, to the modern developments that are encroaching upon them from the city that they cannot prevent.. Your book (kitābuki) is a bountiful gain to the story (li-l-qiṣṣa) in Lebanon...

Such praise for a first novel, coming from a well-established older writer and authoritative figure suggests what sort of writing in Lebanon was welcomed by those who were recognized as authorities in the field. Moreover, Nua‘yma’s choice of words, equating moral good to village life and rural origins, exemplifies the discourse of

Mountain romanticism. The letter ends on a fatalistic observation about the threat to this lifestyle posed by modern developments (al-taṭṭawurāt al- ḥadītha) and by the encroachment of the urban upon this pastoral lifestyle; this too, seems to suggest

Nu‘ayma’s realization that his particular idealization of the rural over the urban, and the ontological dualism imposed by Mountain Romanticism between the two spaces, was by then beginning to rupture. Usually, as I will discuss, this rupture is linked causally with the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975 and the years immediately preceding it9.

Of course, like all attempts to set a fixed date on literary eras, these are arbitrary – for example, Ṭuyūr, in which some of these tensions start to take form, was published in

1962.

9 One such example is, miriam cooke, who argues that war is the “context” that ensures “traditional order” gives way “to a new system that would accommodate the new people and new expectations” (“Women Write War”, 54). While the Lebanese civil war was perhaps the final death-knell for Mountain nationalism, as this chapter shows, its demise had started before then.

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If nationalism in some ways is dependent on some cultural dissemination by the state, as much of the scholarship suggests, then by the early 1970s, Lebanon was in trouble. By then, the socio-political upheavals in Lebanon, which included civil unrest in

1958, and several political crises in the government, in addition to the stockpiling of weapons and an increased militarization across the political spectrum, had all but eroded at the foundations of the state. 10 And, as Mary Layoun observes in Wedded to the Land,

“at times of national crises, people’s willingness to overlook contradictions and gaps in the nationalist narrative is often severely strained. The very premises on which the call of nationalism is based stand out as impossible or traitorous” (11). During this time, voices that challenged traditional textual representation on both the popular and more highbrow levels began to emerge. For example, in his work tracing the legacy of the Rahbani family, Christopher Stone describes how the second generation of Rahbanis, particularly

Ziyad, who became active in the late 1960s and early 1970s, parodied his parents’ work in his plays and songs, and chose to focus on the plights of workers, students, intellectuals, dissidents and revolutionaries in urban contexts11. This shift in representation has been analytically presented as a shift from village nationalism to a more modern, progressive, and often urban cosmopolitanism, in Rahbani’s work and elsewhere12. For example, writing of Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt (The Mills of Beirut), Mona

10 While several books on the civil war chronicle this period, one of the most timely is perhaps Kamal Salibi’s Crossroads to Civil War, written in 1976, at the end of what was then thought to be the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1976. Another good background source is Samir Kassir’s La Guerre du Liban: 1975-1982. See also Farid el-Khazen’s The Breakdown of the State in Lebanon. 11 This observation has not been confined to Stone; Salem notes the destabilization of the Rahbani myth as well, in Constructing Lebanon, p. 139.

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Amyuni claims that “[‘Awwad] diverges from an entire romantic literature that speaks of alienation in the city and upholds a nostalgia for a rustic and pure village lifestyle”;

Amyuni points out that Ṭawaḥīn makes this break even with the author’s own earlier work13 (Amyuni, 110).

However, as my discussion of ‘Awwad’s work hopes to show, readings like

Amyuni’s and Aghacy’s, while somewhat accurate, also repress very vivid textual moments in which what is seemingly an enthusiastic embrace of urban modernity is interrogated. In its attempt to articulate a new space for the individual within the nation,

Ṭawaḥīn takes up, then rejects, several models: the traditional rural environment, yes, but also the unfettered capitalism of the city; ultimately – ironically – the ‘solution’ it offers is its heroine’s severance from all places – is echoed in Emily Nasrallah’s Ṭuyūr, a much earlier novel that has also been read within the context of an urban/rural binary that privileges the modernity of Beirut over the backwardness and traditionalism of the mountain villages. Yet, by doing so, such readings ignore larger questions raised in both novels, about the place of the individual – and particularly, the marginalized individual, such as women – within Lebanese society; and therefore, within the nation, and the ways

12 See Mona Amyuni, Ville Source D’Inspiration and Samira Aghacy’s “Lebanese Women’s Fiction: Urban Identity and the Tyranny of the Past” (503). As another example, see Stone’s reading of Ziyad Rahbani’s play Nazl al-Surūr (Hotel of Happiness), which parodies what Stone describes as the “numbing effects of Rahbani- esque ‘folklore’ in a play set in Beirut “the very seat of government” – albeit a Beirut of “widespread strikes, demonstrations [and] intermittent water service” (Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon, 99-107).

13 ‘Awwad published Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt after a considerable hiatus from writing – of more than 30 years. Prior to that, he had published two short story collections – al-Ṣabi al- A‘raj (1937) and Qamīṣ al-Ṣūf (1937), and a historical novel al-Raghīf (1939).

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in which these novels both interrogate earlier foundational nationalist myths of Lebanon, especially the idea of Lebanon as refuge.

In addition to being read along an urban/rural dichotomy, Ṭawaḥīn and Ṭuyūr are often read as an indictment of patriarchy and a call for female emancipation14. Both kinds of readings have their merits, and afford interesting insights onto the novels; however, this chapter is concerned with going beyond both kinds of readings by combining both a rural-urban reading with a gender-sensitive reading and allowing aspects of each type of argument to evolve into a more spatio-political reading of the positions of individuals within the city and the nation-space in the novel. As the editors of Between Woman and

Nation argue in the anthology’s introduction, there is an incontestable link between the figuration of women’s bodies and the imagined nation; yet, “the figure of ‘woman’ participates in the imaginary of the nation-state beyond the purview of patriarchies” (12).

A similar claim is made by Eveylne Accad regarding Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt. Accad connects the female characters’ lives to the political events occurring in 1970s Lebanon. She writes that the novel “shows how women’s lives, delineated through oppressive patriarchal traditional customs, are closely connected to the violence and political events occurring in the country” (Sexuality and War,100). While a feminist reading such as Accad’s is a fruitful starting point, it is not enough; there is another dimension to this novel; the use and representations of the spaces that these characters, both male and female, occupy.

This chapter will attempt to move away from a strictly gendered reading, or a strictly spatial reading, in the understanding that both these aspects of the novels are connected

14 Starkey: “Tuyur Aylul explores the fate of women seeking to tread an independent path in the modern world” (130); see also, miriam cooke, “Women Write War: The Feminization of Lebanese Society in the War Literature of Emily Nasrallah” (58-60).

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as part of a larger concern that Ṭawaḥīn tries to articulate about Lebanon and the ambiguous feelings towards it in the early 1970s. Nasrallah’s earlier novel, while unwilling to make the same sort of radical break with national form that ‘Awwad’s does, seems to foreshadow this later break. And, in both novels, special attention must be paid to the imagery of violence, and in particular, of violence done to women’s bodies.

The violence in Ṭawaḥīn has most frequently been read either in terms of a patriarchal power struggle, as the above quote by Accad indicates, or as an act of uncanny prescience on ‘Awwad’s part, foreshadowing the civil war that was to erupt a few years after the novel’s publication.15 But there is more to the matter than that.

Textually, violence is not just done to women’s bodies, but also to the nation; in fact, these women’s bodies are linked to the land by common suffering. In particular, Ṭawaḥīn

Bayrūt is almost overwhelmingly fixated on violence; more than this, acts of violence are the catalysts that hasten change along in the novel. These violent moments of rupture connect the spatial discourse about country and city with the discourse about patriarchy and gender. Thus, instead of treating the issue of gender in the novel as independent from the issue of space, as critics have traditionally done – and which has led to certain contradictions in analysis and interpretations of this text – the two must be read in conjunction. Read and understood together, in relation to each other, the two articulate a

15 Some of those who have read this novel as an indictment of patriarchal tradition include Mona Amyuni in La Ville and Eveylne Accad, who has already been mentioned. There is a brief mention of the novel’s sterotype-shattering female characters in Joseph Zaydan’s Arab Women Novelists as well as in Elise Salem’s Constructing Lebanon. Amyuni says that “son oeil prophétique avait deja perçu le cataclysme à venir” (his prophetic eye foretold the coming disaster) and she recounts an anecdote about meeting the author, who told her that he had observed Beirut bubbling away like a casserole (La Ville, 105,107); Accad attributes some of the novel’s original acclaim to its “prescience in the author’s forewarning of his country’s troubles to come” (Sexuality and War, 100).

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commentary on the nature of the changing nation, and the role and place of the individual, in particular, the (marginal) female from the (peripheral) rural areas within it.

The rural female’s body in these novels contests both traditional patriarchal politics and the dominant urban-rural polarization, and challenges these two foundational myths of the nation-state.

Interrogating the nation-space:

‘Awwad’s novel, told in the third-person, but rarely straying away from Tamima, begins with a trip to the city by Tamima and her mother to visit her brother, who is ostensibly a university student in Beirut; her father is in Guinea. When they do not find him at his boarding house, she goes off to look for him at the university and gets injured in student protests, and saved by a young student, Hani.16 She returns to the village to complete her schooling, then comes to Beirut for her university studies, staying at the same boarding house as her brother; this also doubles as a brothel, and the madame who runs it, Rose Khūri, tries to recruit her. She is seduced by another boarder, a famous writer, Ramzi Ra‘d, who writes polemical articles inciting the young to revolution, and begins a relationship with Hani, who is from a Christian village in the mountains. A client of her landlady’s, a deputy in Lebanon’s parliament, proposes to her, but she refuses him. Through him, however, she finds employment at the Port Worker’s Union,

16 The backdrop of the student protests is an interesting choice for ‘Awwad. During the 1960s and 1970s, Lebanon’s universities were often the places where civil unrest – and civic protest – ignited. In his study of student unrest in Lebanon, Lebanon in Strife, Halim Barakat directly correlates the protests with issues of national identity: “In Lebanon, student strikes have occurred most often in times of fermentation of national movements, national struggle for independence, and national calamities” (181).

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and continues her studies, while becoming active in Hani’s “Party of Friends”, a student group influenced by the writing of Ramzi Ra‘d. She moves out of the boarding house into her friend Miss Mary’s house, and things seem to be going well for her. But then, she is followed by Hussein Qammū‘i, a thug from the village who claims he is concerned about the shame she is bringing upon her family. Qammū‘i attacks her, leaving her disfigured and suicidal; eventually, he succeeds in convincing her brother to kill her. Instead, they kill Mary; Tamima, rejected by Hani for not being a virgin, eventually joins the

Palestinian resistance alongside one of the porters from the Union. Throughout the novel, political agitation rumbles along, often intersecting and intervening in the lives and personal stories of the characters. 17

Ṭuyūr Aylūl’s plot is less convoluted. Told in flashbacks by Muna, it comprises three anecdotes of village life from Muna’s past; with Muna’s story, this brings the total up to four stories of adolescent girls transitioning to adulthood. All four stories are stories of departure from the village, one of which happens through the girl’s death at the hands of her beloved, who has not been allowed to marry her; the other girls emigrate with their husbands or, in the case of Muna, leave the village alone, seeking higher education. Muna writes from “the city” “al-madīna”, where she is “permanently exiled” (25), where people remain “strangers, looking into strange faces” (51)18. The city in Nasrallah’s

17 Mona Amyuni has described ‘Awwad’s writing in the novel as “nervous and dense”; the novel is packed with sub-plots featuring one or more of the characters, as well as with written material from other sources, such as newspaper articles from the period, which are often copied and repeated verbatim (La Ville, 107).

18 The translations from Ṭuyūr Aylūl are my own, but the quotes from Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt are taken from the English translation, titled Death in Beirut, by Leslie McLoughlin. I use the Arabic title throughout this chapter because I believe certain elements are lost in the translation (I will explain these later on).

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novel is never identified; neither are any of its inhabitants named. This is one way in which Nasrallah’s text represents its character’s alienation from the urban space where she finds herself.

At first, Nasrallah’s work seems to fit very comfortably within the literary tradition that idealizes village life and rejects life in the city. For example, Muna’s first encounter with the city is represented as a sexual assault:

The city crawled towards me, looking like an unkempt woman, her hair covering her naked breasts and her arms stretching out to hold me and then to throw me into one of its darkened crevices, one of the many points scattered over her acne-scarred body, an interrogation mark standing before many crossroads. I was young and inexperienced. The woman approached, rubbing my face, scratching my chest with icy kisses, marking me as a new branch among those other amputated branches, branches torn from mulberry and oak trees on those high mountains (171-172).

In Nasrallah’s metaphor, the city is feminine, scarred, violent, bloodthirsty to the arrivals from the villages, who in turn are described not as human beings, but as branches, as parts of nature. The urban landscape is symbolized as a sexually aggressive and predatory; paradoxically, as something feral – a wild woman – and unnatural. The fact that this depiction of the city is so negative and so gendered complicates readings of

Nasrallah’s text as feminist. As the connection is drawn between the female body and the urban space, the subsuming of Muna’s body into the body of the city poses the first challenge to her identity.

The second image framing this encounter between the village girl and the urban space is an ecological one: Muna, and those “branches” like her are “natural” beings – amputated from their mountain roots, they can only wither and die. In this sense,

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Nasrallah’s work does indeed fit in with an earlier tradition of Mountain Romanticism that idealizes the mountain for its perceived closeness to a certain kind of soothing, domesticated, understandable nature – the recurring images of village life are of tilling the soil, farming and harvesting – contrasted with the city’s feral, undisciplined (female) nature.

However, there is a third figure of speech at this crucial encounter between the two female bodies – Muna and the city – that reveals a certain anxiety of belonging. It is a rhetorical metaphor, in which the young girl is described as “‘alāmat istifhām”, “an interrogation mark”. The image recurs at the end of the novel. Seeking refuge from the city, where she can no longer bear her life, Muna returns to the village. However, she finds that “the village was as I had left it, but I had changed a lot. Their welcome was like violent blows. Their faces confirmed rejection rather than acceptance. The village had rejected me the minute I had withdrawn from its presence, to sink my feet into soil that was not its soil” (185). In Ṭuyūr, the village community that had seemed throughout to be so ‘knowable’, in Williams’ sense of the word19, ruptures Muna’s assumptions of her ability to return and rejects her. Once more, the confrontation between individual and place is expressed through the figures of violence, in this case of physical ‘blows’.

Ṭuyūr Aylūl articulates the anxiety of return, suggesting that the border between village and the outside world, be it capital city or abroad, is impenetrable. As Muna’s friend Mirsal, who has emigrated to America with her husband, writes, “my love for Raji

[who has also emigrated, and whom she has just seen at a dinner in America with his

19 Williams describes country fiction as an “epitome of direct relationships, of face-to- face contacts within which we can find and value the real substance of personal relationships” (Country and the City, 165).

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American wife] was born of those moments within the village borders. And it remains there […] I was mistaken when I tried to drag these moments from their context […] our love is a hostage of that place and time” (178). Writing towards the end of the Mountain

Romantic tradition, Nasrallah still writes within its binary of “village/city”; there is no middle choice in Ṭuyūr Aylūl, and no ability to cross borders back and forth, although

Muna and her generation are being pulled from the village in search of different lives.

Yet, the village is not a hospitable space; it is an area marked by the emigration of its youth that rejects them when they return. Unlike the September birds of the title, the return of those who have left is unnatural, and their emigration – even to the city – means that they are never allowed back; in Mona’s own words, it is “permanent” (25). In a country whose foundational myth is that of the asile du Liban, which represents the mountain in particular as a refuge for persecuted minorities since time immemorial, this is also a repudiation of some of the more persistent tropes of mountain – village – nationalism.20

Interestingly, Ṭuyūr Aylūl represents alienation as a rhetorical problem, a metaphor that literally disembodies Muna. In her first encounter with the city, Muna describes herself as “an interrogation mark standing before many crossroads” (171). At the end of the novel, as she returns from her unhappy visit to the village, Muna is described as being at a literal crossroads, as a “ball between a city that crushes me and a village that disowns me...an interrogation mark on the face of the earth” (186). Unlike

Henri Lammens’ hero, Hanna, Muna, a woman, who does not wield Hanna’s authority or

20 The notion of the “asile”, as we have previously seen, was promoted heavily by Henri Lammens and his students, who are also – not coincidentally – among the first articulators of Lebanese mountain nationalism.

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capital, cannot impose or restore her own order onto her village upon her return; as a result, her encounter with her native village is described in an identical manner to her encounter with the city: the effect of both on Muna is disembodiment and confusion; faced with multiple choices, Muna is ultimately turned into a rhetorical question of belonging – an interrogation mark – that Ṭuyūr cannot answer. Displaced from the familiar and the traditional, but unable to acclimatize to the unfamiliar, the novel leaves its tragic heroine at the crossroads. Through Muna’s experience, the novel suggests that the price of modernity is a displacement so intense that it strips one of identity. Without a strong sense of place-identity, of belonging to a place, and of public recognition of that belonging, Muna becomes nothing but a disembodied question, a destabilized identity that nevertheless cannot be articulated into an alternative assertive statement. The novel’s use of the imagery of the interrogation mark successfully captures the question that

Muna-as-interrogation mark poses to the notion of identity, and to belonging to the nation in a form that transcends the urban/rural binary. Muna transforms into a question that confounds the earlier, dominant nationalist narrative of home and away, of exile and return, and of boundaries; she remains an enigmatic challenge that the novel cannot, or will not, answer.

Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt’s Tamima more successfully crosses back and forth between village and city, but she too, like Muna finds herself in a space that is neither by the end of ‘Awwad’s novel. However, unlike Muna, who is the passive victim of these changes,

Tamima actively chooses to reject her ties to country and city as they are in the present, in search of another space. The two novels, a decade apart, mark a change in literary bearings which suddenly allows a different perspective, previously marginalized, and

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only timidly expressed, to be brought about. In other words, what appears as a rhetorical question in Nasrallah’s novel becomes an emphatic declaration in ‘Awwad’s.21

Gender and the City:

Mona Amyuni and Samira Aghacy, whose work charts the movement in Lebanese writing from the romantic pastoral tradition of the short story and rural novel to a more realist novel form that consciously opposes the city to the country, both make the case that the great distinction between rural (traditional; backwards) and the urban (modern; progressive, liberating) is often invoked with relation to gender; the struggle for female self-determination (and self-representation) is often constructed in terms of a spatial move from the countryside to the city. In this new type of narrative, they claim, the village is always depicted as a repressive space, and the (usually female) protagonist escapes to the city, which welcomes her and allows her to develop. So, for example,

Aghacy writes, “women see the nurturing city as a symbol of well-being, independence, and freedom from shackles” (503), and Amunyi writes of Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt that “la femme s’épanouït dans la Ville [Woman flourishes in the City]” (Ville, 113).

21 The female protagonists’ displacement could perhaps be understood as a Deleuzian deterritorialization from Lebanon as a nation; however, the counter-movement of re- territorialization does not happen in either novel, which pushes the limits of a Deleuzian interpretation. See Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Towards a New Minor Literature for a discussion of deterritorialization. Furthermore, while Muna’s transformation into an interrogation mark could potentially be conceived as a deterritorialization from the major language, as I indicate in the body of the text, neither novel offers a solution – nor are these novels particularly linguistically experimental, in the way that Deleuze and Guattari show Kafka being.

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This reading generally accepts that the village’s heterotopia is the city, the space where a patriarchal tradition can be contested and fought22. The urban/rural dialectic dominates these articles, and the positive emphasis is heavily skewed in favor of the urban. Samira Aghacy writes that, in Lebanese women’s fiction, and in fiction about

Lebanese women, “the city and the village [are] in ontological opposition between repression and freedom, backwardness and ignorance, and past and present”, adding that the city “gives them [female characters] the opportunity to escape the narrow confines of home, family and traditions that have relegated them into a corner and associated them with a nostalgic past” (503). However, even novels that initially seem to be making the same argument, such as Emily Nasrallah’s Ṭuyūr, which miriam cooke has described as a novel that portrays Lebanon as “a two-tiered entity neatly divided geographically and demographically between modern Beirut and rural Lebanon”, complicate this binary

(“Women Write War”, 58). Ṭuyūr does not consciously challenge the opposition between modern city and traditional village, but Muna’s similar experiences of alienation in both imply that the break between the city and the village is not as clear-cut as critics suggest; moreover, the novel’s conclusion – as mentioned earlier – complicates this facile binary.

In fact, both Nasrallah and ‘Awwad’s novels speak to the assertion made by the authors of the anthology Between Women and Nation, who claim that “women are both of and not of the nation. Between women and nation is, perhaps, the space or zone where we can deconstruct these monoliths and render them more historically nuanced” (12). By combining metaphors of gendered sexual violence and space and place, the two novels

22 Here, I am using the term heterotopia not as it is most often used, in relation to Michel Foucault’s article “Of Other Spaces”, but as it appears in Henri Lefèbvre’s The Urban Revolution, in which he proposes that, more simply, the heterotopic space is “the other place, the place of the other, simultaneously excluded and interwoven” (130).

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emerge as critiques not only of gendered relationships, but also of nationalism and nationalist belonging through a critique of the place of bodies, female bodies in particular, in the national space.

Initially, Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt does seem to be making a clear-cut distinction between the two spaces, rejecting one (the village) in favor of the other (the city), in a seemingly transparent narrative of teleological progress. Then, however, the novel goes on to draw out the intricate relationships between the female body and national spaces, which complicates the rural-urban binary that characterizes most readings of the novel. As mentioned before, earlier Arabic fiction frequently embodied the national self within the figure of the rural peasant girl; but as Sabry Hafez points out, in the literature of what he calls the ‘second period’, from the 1960s onwards, “the symbol of the country ceased to be the beloved country girl, and became the controversial middle-class urban woman”

(“The Transformation of Reality”, 95). In Tawaḥīn Bayrūt, Tamima and the other female characters literally embody both; the novel maps out the rural, village origins of each of its female characters, located in the novel’s present in Beirut. Tamima, the novel’s protagonist, is from a village called Mahdiyya in Southern Lebanon23, Madame Rose, her landlady is from Maqlab in North Lebanon, and Zannoub the servant girl is from ‘Akkar,

23 Amyuni enthuses, “que Tamima soit une chiite du Sud est un choix magistral de la part de l’auteur, car elle represente ainsi la condition d’oppression de la femme, de la communauté, de la classe et de la région au Liban” [Tamima’s Southern Shiite identity is a great choice on the author’s part, since she embodies the oppression of women, community, class and region in Lebanon] (La Ville, 109). Lebanon’s Shiites had become, by the 1970s, the largest religious community in Lebanon, as well as its most socially deprived. For more on the Shiites in Lebanon, in particular South Lebanon, see Kamal Salibi, Crossroads to Civil War (62-63); Farid Khazen, The Breakdown of the State in Lebanon (40-45); for even more detail, see Rodger Shanahan’s The Shi’a and Lebanon.

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in rural North Lebanon. 24 At the beginning of the novel, all three women are busy with their new lives in the city.

By novel’s end, however, all the women have been violated in one way or the other by the male characters, and the novel, in its didactic manner, has unequivocally portrayed all the male characters – with the sole exception of the fidā’i fighter Abu

Sharshur – of hypocrisy towards women, whether they are village thugs like Hussein

Qammū‘i, who wants to punish Tamima for violating the honor code, but has no qualms with living off his prostitute-girlfriend (180-181), or urban sophisticates like Ramzi Ra‘d, who writes one thing and acts in opposition to that which he writes, and Hani, who rejects

Tamima for not being a virgin, despite his claims of being progressive (181-182)25. As the novel ends, Tamima has disappeared after having been the victim of two attempted murders and an attempted suicide, Zannoub is dead, having committed suicide after being gang-raped while trying to decide what to do with the child she is carrying, and who is also the result of another sexual violation by Jabir, Tamima’s brother. Miss Mary,

Tamima’s friend, has been killed by accident while preparing for her wedding, and Rose

Khūri has been felled by a debilitating stroke; even Tamima’s mother, who has never left

24 Aside from Hani, whose position as Tamima’s problematic love interest requires the novel to reveal that he is from a Maronite Christian village in the Metn region, and who is deeply attached to his village of origin – in describing him, we are told that his “home was in the village […] but at the moment he was living in Beirut” (14). Of course, we also know that Jabir and Hussein are from the same village as Tamima, but the other male characters’ origins are not highlighted in the same way the female characters’ are.

25 Even Tamima’s half-sister in Guinea, Aisha, has not been spared; she is raped by Jabir, and is described as “a creature who had been insulted, scorned and wounded in a way for which she had no name, no balm, no consolation” (134). This is the distinction that the novel makes between Aisha and Tamima, who will eventually be able to both identify the problem and find a way to overcome it: the novel cannot grant Aisha even the articulation of her suffering; unlike Tamima.

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the village for the city, becomes hemiplegic after a violent argument with her son, Jabir

(159). The novel visits unrelenting violence upon its women; so excessive is this violence that it threatens to overwhelm the reader. In all cases, it must be examined more carefully.

The violence done to the women’s bodies – particularly Tamima’s – in the novel has a parallel in the violence done to the land, and particularly, to the village; in fact, it is this parallel that troubles the facile binary of rural:bad/urban:good that at first seems to dominate this novel, and certainly dominates most readings of it. While it is true that

Beirut initially emancipates and entrances Tamima, as Evelyne Accad points out, whenever she is confronted with an unsavory event (her first sexual encounter,

Qammū‘i’s attack on her and her attempted suicide), she goes to the village to recover

(103). Beirut is a site of both pleasure and opportunity, but also of danger and pain; the village is always a space for recuperation. It remains a space of refuge from the violence and danger of the city, of the outside. As the novel progresses, and the violence against

Tamima increases, her relationship with the village develops further. Essentially alienated from Mahdiyya at first, Tamima grows to love it as she begins to identify with it as a fellow wounded being after an Israeli raid on the village;

The evil assault on Mahdiyya was like the slash of Hussein Qammū‘i’s razor. But it was more treacherous and more contemptible. And this time, just as before, the victim was silent and submissive. And in just the same way, the victims were human beings and their laws. For the first time, she loved Mahdiyya (120).

Tamima’s place identity, her loyalty to the land, is created from a sense of shared victimhood; the Israelis are akin to the men whose traditions have inflicted harm upon

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these victims. This moment of common victimhood forges a bond between Tamima and

Mahdiyya, and begins to sever her ties with the city that had initially represented an alternative to the village. The two victims, Tamima and the land, are described as “human beings and their laws”; thus, Tamima is textually linked with not only the land of the village, and the land itself is anthropomorphized, but also with legal codes. The place of refuge becomes a victim, just as the woman who seeks refuge in it does. Mahdiyya as a vulnerable site interrogates and problematizes the myth of the strong, proud mountain- refuge. Yet, it is its weakness and vulnerability that create the strongest bond between it and the novel’s heroine, its moral compass. Strangely, the novel’s insistence on

Tamima’s newfound love for the village is ignored in most studies of this novel; in their insistence of placing the novel as a clear break with an older tradition, much of what the novel eventually suggests about the tenuousness of this dualistic approach to rural and urban – and the alternate vision of nationalism – is elided.

Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt 26 is often read as the breaking point between the literary pre-war model of the normative rural setting, which I describe in the introduction, and the ascendancy of the urban space in Lebanese literature27. In doing so, as I have already alluded to earlier, they usually impose a reading that functions within one of the terms of this binary (generally privileging the urban) and willfully ignore the fact that ‘Awwad’s novel, while having a problematic relationship with the rural areas that many of the novel’s characters come from, ultimately does not allow Beirut to emerge as an alternate

26 Technically, “The Mills of Beirut”, but this has been translated in English as Death in Beirut. I believe that this omits a certain dimension from the novel that, while perhaps not crucial, is still significant.

27 See Amyuni, Ville Source D’Inspiration, introduction; see also Accad’s Sexuality and War.

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space; in fact, its portrayal of Beirut is almost as harsh as its portrayal of Lebanon’s rural hinterlands. The novel’s anxieties about both the village and the city are most often embedded into descriptions of political economy, and are projected onto the body of

Tamima, the female protagonist, as well as onto some of the other female bodies. These women are safe in neither space. In fact, by the end, Tamima can only come into herself by abandoning both spaces for a place “under any sky”, an undifferentiated space where she can struggle “against all legal codes and traditions sanctioned by society” (184).

‘Awwad’s novel is a deconstruction, through the experience of the marginalized figures all the females in it, whether rural immigrants, urban poor, students, and even more entrepreneurial figures like Rose, of the myth of Lebanon as a safe haven. It exposes the harsh cruelty of patriarchal nationalism; and interrogates easy assumptions of emancipation and progress in cities; by rejecting both sides of the urban/rural binary, the novel calls the ideology of earlier Lebanese nationalism into question.

The Grinding Mills with Nothing to Grind:

In Ṭawaḥīn particularly, the power dynamics between the male characters and the female characters seem at first to be an indictment of traditional patriarchal violence, and, on many levels it is; however, adding a more spatial reading of the novel reveals another dimension of the text in which some of the problems of postcolonial modernity and emigration are brought to light. Ṭawaḥīn avoids representing the village as the site of authenticity, but it also refuses to place the city as a locus of positive modernity; as the

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novel progresses, both spaces are revealed, essentially, to be similarly bleak – as is the other counterpoint, the other option afforded to Lebanese villagers that the novel has earlier suggested, Africa – and the only real hope is the offer of a non-defined, non- differentiated space beyond the codified norms of society, the “under any sky” utopia of

Tamima’s final letter (184).

Writing specifically of Tawfiq Yusuf ‘Awwad’s Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt, Mona Amyuni states that by novel’s end, “Beirut shines with her thousand lures beyond the end of the story” (“Image of the City”, 30). 28As Raymond Williams argues in The Country and the

City, attention must be paid to the changing materialist contexts and conditions of landscapes described as either rural or urban. Williams explains that:

The country and the city are changing historical realities, both in themselves and in their interrelations[…] Yet the ideas and the images of country and city retain their great force. This persistence has a significance matched only by the fact of the great actual variation, social and historical, of the ideas themselves. Clearly the contrast of country and city is one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society. But when this so, the temptation is to reduce the historical variety of the forms of interpretation to what are loosely called symbols or archetypes (289).

In other words, there is no such thing as ‘the’ city or ‘the’ country; the meanings of these terms and the spaces they convey fluctuate from one era to the other, but always in relation to each other, and with the material conditions that they emerge from. In fact, the

28 To some extent, by the end of her article, “Lebanese Women’s Fiction: Urban Identity and the Tyranny of the Past”, Aghacy is forced to re-evaluate her introductory claims and conclude by saying “the past and present, traditional and modernization, and country and city are not separate entities [..and…] the lines of division – whether spatial, mental or psychological – are artificial and permeable” (520). Mona Amyuni’s work, however, continues to reproduce this dichotomy, and in fact, takes it further, such as when she asserts that it is the “dialectic of Man and the City that pushes history forward” (Ville, 108).

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dominance accorded to the first term of the binary urban/rural in much Lebanese criticism, as it does in Amyuni’s and Aghacy’s work – and even to some extent, in

Salem’s – makes for a heavily one-handed reading of the novels they claim represent this new break with the pastoral Romantic tradition best, such as ‘Awwad’s Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt.

From its beginning, Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt eschews nostalgia about the breakdown of

‘traditional’ rural culture and village life; its representations of village life are tinged with a seeming distaste, that connects the village with an intolerant culture. In fact, the representatives of this traditional culture, Hussein Qammū‘i and Jabir in Mahdiyya and the mukhtār of Hani’s village who does not want a Muslim to be hired as the local school’s teacher, are described as “throwback[s] to the days of Hikmat Bey and the

Ottomans. Back to 1860” (77)29. Of course, as the novel progresses, even Hani, whom

Tamima initially sees as a paragon of revolutionary modernity, is revealed to be as reactionary as those he derides for their backwardness; when Tamima confesses to him that she is not a virgin, he slaps her and breaks off their engagement, sending her off into the night alone. Ultimately, ‘modern’ urban life proves as disappointing for Tamima as life in the ‘traditional’ village.

But at the beginning, the novel sheds a scathing look at village life, particularly in its representation of Tamima’s village in Southern Lebanon, Mahdiyya, which is described as “a nice cosy place – for humiliation and degradation. From floor to ceiling the gloomy old house was nothing but a tomb. Time had only made more repulsive that damp concrete room and the veranda with its blackened pillars” (2). The contraposition

29 1860 is the Christian date of the first sectarian war in (then Mount) Lebanon’s history, between the mountain’s Druze and Christian communities. This date was catalytic in the growth and development of Beirut. See Hanssen, Fin de-Siècle Beirut, and also Leila Fawaz “The City and the Mountain”.

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of images of cosiness against those of humiliation and degradation is powerful and effective. Indeed, the m-dash dividing both sides of the sentence together emphasizes the tension wrought between them. The beginning of the sentence is a model of the type of traditional writing about the village that the second part of the sentence deconstructs, and imposes itself onto. The rest of the passage strengthens this sense of bleakness further, when the description moves outside, from private to public space: “thirty houses or less, half of them in ruins, and the other half soon to be lamenting the deaths of those who built them” (3). Together, the point is clearly made that the problem is not the problem of individual families, but that the village’s poverty and hardship is embedded in the entire social fabric. These images of death, decay and degradation mark the deaths of these villages and these communities. The evocation of humiliation, degradation and repulsiveness strongly contest idealized portrayals of pastoral life.

In her book, Al-Dalala al-Ijtima‘iyya li-Ḥarakat al-Adab al-Rumantīqi fi-Lubnan,

Yumna ‘Id points out that colonial modernity in Lebanon tied the economy to a Western system of capitalist production and severed the traditional relations of local production, without necessarily breaking down the essential structure of the rural landowner system and replacing it with a new capitalist structure. This led to a situation of cohabitation between agrarian landowning economies functioning under the new conditions of western capitalist models (25). ‘Id describes a sort of socio-economic limbo, in which the new imposition of western capitalist production never fully displaced the old model; the empty mills and desolate villages of Ṭawahīn Bayrūt, seem to be a commentary on the post-colonial consequences of this situation, this between-ness that was never resolved

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one way or another, whose villagers, like the villagers in Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt and Ṭuyūr

Aylūl were left with no option but to leave.

After all, the novel makes clear that the neglect and abandonment of the villages are not the result of urban industrialization, and a migration to the cities for work – indeed, the only industrial symbols attached to Beirut in the entire novel are the mills of the Arabic title, which, it becomes clear, do nothing but “grinding and there is nothing to grind” (116) – but rather as a consequence of the fact that “Africa had claimed the greater part of the population and Kuwait accounted for the rest with its offer of easy work and quick fortunes” (3). The novel confronts head-on the consequences of generations of emigration from Lebanon, and refuses to romanticize the spaces that are left behind.

Ṭawaḥīn emphasizes the private and public economies of those people and places left behind, who are dependent on the labor and output of those who have left and the mercy of those who disburse these funds in Lebanon, such as the unofficial money lender, Hajj

Fadlo. For example, the domestic economy of Tamima and her mother depends on the remittances sent from Guinea by her father; these funds are stolen by her brother Jabir and spent on women and gambling in Beirut. The women have no agency over this money, which leads Tamima to look for work in Beirut (she, like her mother, does not have the option of emigrating; at one point, as she and Hani speak of eloping, the hope is that she will travel with him to Boston, but that option is lost when he rejects her). The economy of Africa, fragile as it proves to be in the novel as Tamima’s father gets wrongfully accused and arrested in Guinea, sustains the economy of Lebanon’s villagers and their way of life.

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As so often is the case in Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt, the personal is often projected onto the social; which is, in return, refracted back onto the bodies of the characters. So, like

Tamima and her mother, Tamima’s village also depends on emigrant money; a new road is built, water pipes are installed and a school is planned for by a villager who has returned wealthy from Africa, who is also constructing his home in the village. The narrative sarcastically describes these as the “activities and heroic exploits of” the village’s “champion, Jamil Mawali” (32). That these basic amenities are dependent on the munificence of a private benefactor, and that this wealth is generated outside of Lebanon, poses a dilemma in the text that becomes embodied – literally – in Tamima; she learns that Mawali, whose exile has physically been imprinted onto him, so that he is described as “really black, as if he was carrying Africa around on his face,” has asked for her hand in marriage, and while admitting that “his projects in Mahdiyya [..] were marvellous, he deserved a medal”, she also acknowledges that “she didn’t want to be the medal!” (33)30.

Tamima’s body literally becomes the space through which the emigrant wants to try to regain his authenticity, by marrying a local woman; the fact that her family expects

Tamima to offer herself to Mawali is the first in a series of attempted transactions involving the female body in the novel, a repetitive device that accumulates into a critique of both the social and economic conditions of pre-war Lebanon.

In several ways, the text’s anxieties about Lebanon are often reinforced with comparisons to ‘Africa’, a term often used interchangeably with, and as a synecdoche for

Guinea, and that weaves in and out of the text. In ‘Awwad’s novel, the textual economies

30 While the scope of this chapter does not allow for further investigation of this, the novel’s representation of race, and particularly of Africa and Africans, is frequently problematic.

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also depend on the use and abuse of an Africa that exists in the background to Ṭawaḥīn, an Africa whose women are also caught up in a similar patriarchal tyranny over their bodies. As Edward Said points out, “these signs of ‘abroad’ include, even as they repress, a rich and complex history” (Culture and Imperialism, 93)31. In the case of Ṭawaḥīn, they shed light on the complex historical relationship of Lebanese emigration, to Africa and elsewhere, and in the novel, the changing values and habits of an entire generation. As I have already mentioned, Tamima’s African half-sister, Aisha, is raped by their brother

Jabir, which Tamima learns of from a letter written to her by her father. Upon learning of her plight, Tamima’s instinct is to hide her father’s news from her mother; “All of them in Africa had their Aishas, wronged and ill-treated, and they all had their scores of

Fanta’s [Aisha’s mother] sisters” (135). But, the letter makes clear that the scale of abuse is not confined to one bad apple. The father writes to Tamima of the gangs of diamond smugglers and their use of local women for their trade, writing “these women undertake tasks which are an exact equivalent to the work of whores; they hide the precious stones in the most intimate parts of their bodies and transport them across frontiers” (132). This wholescale plunder of the land as well as of the bodies of the women resonates with the violence, rape and murder in Lebanon. In fact, the novel makes a direct correlation between both, using the voice of the defeated patriarch, Tamir, and his fear of Jabir’s rapacious behavior and its consequences in Lebanon as well. Tamir tells Tamima, “my daughter, I don’t know what Jabir did with the fruit of the sweat and blood of his father in

31 For more on the Lebanese emigration to West Africa, see Didier Bigo “The Lebanese Community in the Ivory Coast: A non-Native Network at the Heart of Power?” (509- 530) and H. Laurens Van der Laan “Migration, Mobility and Settlement of the Lebanese in West Africa” (531-547) ; both in Hourani and Shehadi’s The Lebanese in the World.

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Africa. The only thing I am afraid of, as I told you, is what he may do to you and your mother over there, after what he has done here to Aisha and me and her grandfather”

(134). What is articulated here is a sense of shared suffering; a concern that the plunder and rape in Africa could be repeated in Lebanon, that the distant will become actualized in the nation. In the sentence, the father’s labor and time in Africa is tied up in the body of Aisha, and Jabir’s act affects both the woman’s body and the father’s toil. 32

The position of the (benevolent, though flawed) patriarch in all of this is also relevant to the events of the novel, and to the bleak portrayal of Lebanese society that it presents. As mentioned before, Tamir, Tamima’s father, is absent throughout the novel, discussed only with relation to the money he sends and to the letters he has stopped sending at first. His absence, the absence of the traditional father figure from Tamima’s life – and the absence of patriarchal figures from the country – allows Jabir and Hussein

Qammū‘i to run amok, taking matters into their own hands as they see fit. In this novel, family ties have dissipated and families themselves are torn apart: the characters are all part of families broken apart by emigration, rural-urban migration to look for work – as in the case of Zannouba, whose father sells her to Madame Khuri – or divorce, like the politician who hires Ramzi R‘ad to write a series of flattering articles about his benevolence. This is a stark contrast with earlier Mountain Romances, which feature tight-knit, rural families with benevolent, wise fathers, kind, sacrificing mothers and

32 Before continuing, it is important to stress that, despite this ‘shared’ concern over the fates of both sets of women, the patriarch clearly states that an attack by Jabir on the bodies of Tamima and her mother, would be “still worse and more cunning” than “what he has done here [to Aisha]” (133); the Lebanese female body is privileged over the African body; for more on this from an anthropological perspective, see Didier Bigo, “The Lebanese Community in the Ivory Coast”.

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loving children33. Additionally, unlike Lammens’ novella which ends with a marriage and a return to a prosperous social and economic order in the village, the one marriage in

Ṭawaḥīn between Tamima’s friend Miss Mary and the politician never occurs because

Mary is stabbed to death by Qammū‘i and Jabir. Thus, ‘Awwad’s novel portrays a collective foundering of families that belies a greater social malaise about the health of the nation as a whole.

The connection between the breakdown of family and the unraveling of social values in Lebanon’s communities at home and abroad in the novel is made apparent in a letter Tamima receives from her father. Towards the end of the novel, Tamima receives the letter in which her half-sister’s rape is announced, and Jabir’s reputation as an evil force is solidified. This letter also delineates a larger, generational problem, one focused on the fact that the old ties of kinship and village relations have been severed; upon first arriving in Africa, he is helped by “one of the old emigrants”, who puts him to work managing a banana plantation whose previous supervisor has died from sleeping sickness

(129). At this point in his story, the ties of belonging are still solid, and there is still a relationship of mutual help that functions according to set norms. But, his undoing comes when, “I showed hospitality to one of the [diamond smuggling] gang who is from our district in South Lebanon [..] I, in all innocence, gave a big party one night for him and his group.” (132). Tamir is then arrested; his undoing comes from the fact that he has retained these old village values, but that they are not transmutable to the new Lebanese emigrant community abroad, whose lifestyle leads them “either in the depths of a prison

33 There are many examples of such fiction, such as Anis Freiha’s Isma‘ ya Rida, a collection of stories about father-son conversations and Mikha‘il Nu’ayma’s short story collections about village life.

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or in the loftiest of villas they are building in Africa and Lebanon” (133). Of course, what Tamir does not know is that his values are no longer relevant in Lebanon either, as the novel portrays through his daughter’s experiences.

The political unrest manifest in the novel is underscored by the material and economic conditions of the spaces depicted within the novel itself, whether rural or urban; in Lebanon, or elsewhere, such as in Africa. On one level, then, the novel seems to represent a space in which economic factors and circumstances manifest themselves in struggles over female bodies. So, in the village, Tamima is literally perceived to be up for grabs by the wealthiest male, and in the city, the only economic activity for women represented within the urban landscape is prostitution. The lifestyles of the younger generation, particularly Hussein Qammū‘i and Jabir, Tamima’s brother, are wasteful and literally rapacious; they both spend money they have stolen (or never had in the first place) on women and abuse other women, such as when Jabir rapes Aisha and Zannoub, the servant at Madame Rose’s boarding house, or Hussein’s two assaults on Tamima. The novel’s equation of the female body with the land, and its repeated representation of assaults on these female bodies within the text suggest that, within Ṭawaḥīn there is no site of escape from these over-determined fates, not even in the city, which itself turns out to be a death trap for most of the novel’s female characters. As I have mentioned before, the novel’s Arabic title is more evocative of this empty production; the mills of the Arabic title are symbols, after all, of industry and production; the recurring statement that Beirut’s mills are grinding nothing; that they are in fact empty simulacra of ‘real’, useful, mills suggests a dejection and frustration with the city that the “death” in Beirut of the English title cannot convey; it is these ominous mills that encapsulate the

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representation of the city space in the novel. It is through these mills that the novel foreshadows its dejection with the hollow signs of a false modernity.

The novel’s critique of the mills of empty production have another textual echo in its depiction of writers and writing. In this, the figure of Ramzi R‘ad becomes especially relevant, since throughout the novel, he produces and reproduces incendiary articles that are consumed by students who chant slogans but do not act; in fact, the only action comes from the disenfranchised Palestinian workers and freedom fighters at novel’s end, and not from those who “had faith in the intellect and science, in development and evolution, in the principle of the revolution against the self, that is to say, faith in the organization and planning” (139). Initially entranced by Ra‘d’s writing, Tamima later becomes frustrated with him, as she becomes increasingly mobilized to act after each violent confrontation that happens to her in the novel. In parallel, comes Tamima’s disenchantment with

Beirut; what initially appears to her to be a truly modern city, throbbing with life, eventually, in a literally nightmarish episode, proves to be a disappointment as well. It is this transition and transformation that I will take up next.

From a Place of Promise to a City of Rats:

In many ways, Beirut is at first represented in terms that seem to compare it favorably with the rural spaces of the novel, and Ṭawaḥīn appears to be an epistemic shift from earlier Lebanese pastoral writing. At the novel’s outset, the city is represented as literally “dazzling [Tamima] with its bursting life and color” and intellectual activity, in stark contrast to Mahdiyya; the city seems to be a place of potential, of youth and energy

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(Aghacy, 5). But such a vision is complicated in two ways by the novel. The first is that, simply, the village cannot be separated easily from the city; Tamima’s life – and the lives of the other female characters, such as Zannoub – is often disrupted by the encroachment of the village onto the city. In fact, oftentimes in the novel, when the urban and the rural do meet, there is a violent clash. The second is the novel’s representation of the urban space as it unfolds throughout the novel; as Elise Salem points out, the novel maps out an urban landscape that is “violent and fragmented, and it is fraught with political, social and sexual tensions” (Salem, 85).

On one hand, Beirut, which Tamima at first considers to be a site for her liberation from the village, is often represented as a claustrophobic space, precisely because Tamima cannot escape being followed by certain repressive elements from her village life, such as her brother and Hussein Qammū‘i. Her friend Mary, an independent working woman who lives happily in her ‘lovely’ apartment, is killed in her own home protecting Tamima from these village men who have come to exact their revenge on her for staining their ‘honor’, that the novel has already – heavy-handedly – exposed to be non-existent. The village encroaches further onto Tamima’s urban lifestyle, following her more even more intimately into the private realm. In the scene where she loses her virginity, she feels that “the bed was in the main square of Mahdiyya, and she was in it, with eyes fixed on her from all directions. She started violently, like someone possessed, trying to escape”; however, she is literally pinned down by Ramzi R‘ad’s “erect manhood”, and prevented from doing so, incapable of anything except “scream[ing], like someone being murdered” (29). The violence of this scene, essentially of a young woman being raped by an older man, is exacerbated by the feeling that it is a public spectacle;

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one that Tamima’s village is privy to. Sexuality becomes a public act, the values that

Tamima has grown up with internalized and made manifest in the image of the public bed. And, of course, it is the fact that her sexual behavior is not kept private that provokes

Hussein Qammū‘i’s first attack on her.

Until now, it would seem that the novel’s critique is not so much of the urban itself, but of the presence of ‘rural’ elements of backwardness, intolerance, chauvinism and violence, within the urban context of Beirut. This representation resonates with certain scholarship on the city; particularly that which represents the urban space as a privileged site with respect to the rural, and which insists on reading rural backwardness into what is represented as the more ‘open’ space. For example, In Du Rural à L’Urbain, specifically in a lecture titled “Humanisme et Urbanisme: Quelques Propositions”, Henri

Lefèbvre declares that the real urban subject has not yet emerged, and that

Urban life has not yet started. We are taking inventory of the ruins of a millennial society in which the countryside has dominated the city, where ideas, ‘values’, taboos and proscribed behavior were for the most part agrarian in origin, predominantly rural and ‘natural’ […] rural society was (and still is) that of non- abundance, of penury, of privation whether accepted or refused, of edicts fixing or regulating these privations.” (my translation, 154-155).

The adjectives which Lefèbvre attaches to rural life, all connoting deprivation and miserliness, echo in ‘Awwad’s first descriptions of Mahdiyya as a desolate, abandoned place ruled by archaic ‘regulatory edicts that fix these privations’, particularly as related to the female body and the female self, and lend fodder to the claim that ‘Awwad is denigrating village life in favor of a more abundant, free, life in the city – the antonyms that Lefèbvre’s adjectives suggest abound in a ‘true’ urban context. It is obvious, within

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this Lefèbvrian binary, which space is privileged above the other; at first glance, it would also seem to be true of ‘Awwad’s text. However, as we have seen earlier, ‘Awwad’s text ruptures this initial, facile binary through its depiction of violence, particularly the violence done to women’s bodies by men, and the equation by the text of the female body with the wounded body of the village. Initially separate from Tamima by her disdain for it, the village ultimately becomes an intimate part of the girl, internalized within her body within a complicity of shared victimhood after the Israeli attack.

On the other hand, Ṭawaḥīn also makes it clear that the city space is not as alluring as it first appears to be to Tamima. I have already mentioned the ominous, repeated, violence implied by the Arabic title – and the even more ominous end implied by the English one, which links the city directly with death. From the outset, the city is depicted as an exclusive space; Tamima’s mother, for example, has no place in it, since

“what was left of her, at any rate, would not do for Beirut” (4). The city is not an open, welcoming, or accommodating place; as we have already seen, hardly any of the women who arrive in it young and ambitious get out alive. It is far from being the site of liberation and emancipation for women that Amyuni and Aghacy see in it. Through this, the novel seems to suggest that true change involves more than a change of space; and that modernity is far more than just enjoying its superficial trappings. Jabir, here, becomes the ultimate proof of this debilitating contradiction for society: he is the character most versant with the superficial manifestations of urban life, as they appear in the novel: restaurants, nightclubs, prostitutes; yet, at the same time, he is also one of the most reactionary characters in the novel. In Jabir, and in the other male characters, the novel suggests that urban modernity is more than just its manifestations on the surface;

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nowhere is this more clearly marked than in Tamima’s nightmare about Martyrs’ Square and the novel’s ending. Ṭawaḥīn’s representation of Beirut as a non-productive site of pure consumption – all real labor is placed on the city’s margins, such as at the port where Tamima and Abu-Sharshur both work – is an implicit, almost Marxist-inflected critique of commodity fetishism and consumption.

In addition to the scene where Tamima and the village become inexorably tied together through their shared experience of violence, there are two key scenes, one which foreshadows the next, that mark the changing nature of Tamima’s relationship with the city and, particularly, with its inhabitants. In the first scene, Tamima has a nightmare.

Significantly, she begins by being disoriented as to where in the city she is: “Was she in the Hamra area, or Bab Idriss or Raouche?” (105). She is being called to by Madame

Rose, who is offering her flowers that turn into rats. Swimming in and out of consciousness, she dreams that she is being followed by the rats from her work to a space she infers is Downtown Beirut “she must be in the suq [sic] at the Maarad. No doubt about that, otherwise what were these arches?”; the dream once more emphasizing her disorientation (106). The rats take over government offices, banks, and churches and mosques: the three pillars of government, capital and religion. Then, another symbol of death, crows, descend on Tamima, and the rats and crows converge on the Square, which is:

Emptied completely – there were no people, no cars, no horns sounding, no whistles blowing….the rats poured down from the mountain or rose, with their sharp teeth bared, from the direction of the sea. They came from the north, the south, spreading out around the feet of the Martyrs, slipping through their legs, on to their shoulders and heads, wrapping themselves around their necks, snapping and biting at their eyes […] ‘The square is ours’, they squeaked’ (107).

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Tamima is only saved from a giant rat’s jaws by Abu-Sharshur, who “lifted his gigantic arm and met him with his baling-hook. Tamima stared. His rope had coiled itself around the Martyrs and on the horizon its shadow described an astonishing rainbow” (107). The central scene of this nightmare is set on a statue that symbolizes Lebanon’s struggle for independence from the Ottomans; in the dream, the ‘rats’ that invade the square have come from all over the country, and from all over the world; furthermore, the words they squeak embody the appropriation of public space for themselves, the denial of Tamima’s right to even the smallest bit of it. The literal center of the city – of the nation – and

Lebanon’s most symbolic public memorial, is over-run by a plague of self-serving vermin, and the only way that Tamima escapes is by being physically lifted out of the scene. This movement foreshadows the last scene in Ṭawaḥīn, in which Tamima disappears with Abu Sharshur as several mobs descend simultaneously upon Martyrs’ square.

At the novel’s end, marchers in a funeral procession for Abu-Sharshur’s martyred son converge with “a monster procession” being held in Martyrs’ Square; this scene, in the novel’s final few pages, is cited as a sign of ‘Awwad’s prescience in predicting the war that would erupt a few years later34. In the book, this sets off a metaphorical conflagration: “the effect was as if oil had been poured on a fire. Beirut was alight from one end of the city to the other” (182). The last action in the text is Hani and his friends

“rushing through the side streets to the burning heart of the city” (183). After all that has happened to her, Tamima disappears with Abu-Sharshur just as “Beirut turned into a

34 See footnote 15.

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roaring sea,” (182). The deliberate juxtaposition of crowds rushing into the same space as in Tamima’s dream emphasize the rather forced analogy that ‘Awwad is making between the rats in Tamima’s dream and the masses of people with competing agendas also flooding into the square.

At this moment, as Tamima’s violated body disappears from the action, her voice emerges on the page. On the very last page, the novel’s register shifts from the third person omniscient narrator to Tamima’s diary that she has left behind for Hani; the woman’s voice is finally heard. Lit up from end to end, burning, this ending vision of the city is far from being the “brightly illuminated and clearly outlined” city that suggest more than a bit of wishful thinking on Amyuni’s part (“Image of the City”, 28). The novel’s solution to the encroaching, competing tides of oppressive nationalism is for its heroine, and her equally marginalized protector, to remove themselves from the nation.

However, far from being a tragic gesture, it is an emancipatory one, a rejection of traditionalist – patriarchal and nationalist – boundaries.

If one reads the novel from Accad’s perspective; i.e, with an exclusively gendered reading, or from Amyuni’s; i.e., one in which the urban is privileged as a site of emancipation, the ending is problematic. Amyuni resolves the ending by resorting to an overdetermined stereotype that reduces Tamima to her sectarian identity and simultaneously undermines most of her earlier argument about the city’s potential to liberate its inhabitants from their pre-modern, primitive lives. Amyuni explains Tamima’s choice by claiming that she has no other, as a “fille du sud libanais tragique” [tragic daughter of the Lebanese South], and insisting, without offering much explanation, that

“la femme s’épanouit dans la ville meme si celle-ci l’écrase de toutes ses meules”

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[woman blossoms in the city even as it crushes her under its mills] (Ville, 112). Thus, the double resolution is that Tamima is a victim of her overdetermined rural origin and that

Tamima is “épanouie”, in Beirut despite being crushed by its grinding mills; Amyuni also inserts a bizarre reading of the novel’s ending, in which she asserts that Tamima

“transportera [la ViIle] en elle la ou elle ira. Elle y reviendra certainement si elle survit a l’Israélien” [Will take the city with her wherever she goes. She will certainly return if she survives the Israeli attack] (112). Accad, for her part, does not attempt to impose another ending upon the novel. She, does, however, express dissatisfaction with the novel’s ending, because ‘Awwad’s novel returns violence with violence; asking “why not have her [Tamima] organize a peace march?” (109). In Accad’s reading, ‘Awwad does not go far enough in his representation of this moment of female liberation; he gives

Tamima a choice that is equal to that of a man’s (Abu-Sharshur, presumably), instead of creating a character who can bring about a radical change because of her gender. I would like to suggest that neither reading is able to fully encompass the complexity of

‘Awwad’s story because it does not accommodate the relationship between the body and space in Ṭawaḥīn; a careful reading of the moments in which Tamima’s body is spatialized in the novel, and the ways in which the gendered violence is eventually tied to a violence against the land, makes the novel’s ending almost inevitable.

From Reader to Writer: Tamima’s Trajectory

At the beginning of this chapter, I noted that ‘Awwad is often situated between two moments in the literary history of Lebanon; as the mediator between what had

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passed, i.e, the ‘Mountain Romanticism’ of an earlier time, and what was to come; the literature of the war. In this particular context, Amyuni describes ‘Awwad as one of the last formal classicists, before the advent of the postmodern formal textual rupture of writers like Elias Khoury, Rashid al-Da‘if and Hoda Barakat. Throughout this chapter, I have described how this tension between the two plays out in Ṭawaḥīn; my contention has been that the novel rejects the nostalgia and pastoral emphasis of earlier works, but does not succumb to – contrary to what critics have said – a substitution of an urban nationalism for a rural one. In fact, by novel’s end, the very identity of the nation as a social construct is brought into question by Tamima’s letter to Hani, in which she writes that she will “fight under any sky against all legal codes and traditions sanctioned by society” (184). The letter proceeds to justify this statement by saying, “because, in their name, under the sky of my own country, society has denied me the right to life” (184).

She continues by saying, “and this is my way – different from yours in the end” (184).

Tamima, the novel’s clear heroine, as a result of the culmination of violence upon her body and the bodies of her (female) friends, cannot see a solution within a nationalist model; as the novel enacts all these scenes of violence upon these women’s body and links this sexual violence to a nationalist violence, the only solution that the novel offers its heroine is to abandon nationalism altogether for a pan-national struggle against oppression, which at the moment that Tamima is writing, is intimately connected with the

Palestinian struggle. In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams points out that often, “a change in literary bearings” allows a previously unseen or neglected aspect of working class life to be seen for the first time; Ṭawaḥīn literally maps this out in the

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evolution of Tamima’s literary habits and her growing exposure to, and awareness of, the greater world outside both village and city (166).

But Tamima’s letter also marks another important shift, this one textual: it is the first time that Tamima’s writing voice emerges. Early on in the novel, Tamima is presented as an avid reader, who has memorized a lot of poems (2). She is also a fan of

Nu‘ayma, who appeared earlier in this chapter, and Jibran (106), both, as we have already seen, are foundational reading within the Lebanese state-mandated educational system; as a schoolgirl, she also reads Ramzi R‘ad’s prose and poetry, she is described as ‘devouring the chapters’ of his book Masters and Slaves35 “in secret” (16). In addition to reading voraciously, Tamima also keeps a diary; it is described as a “‘notebook of jottings’. What she put in it was only scribblings. She scribbled things down as they came to her, just like that, things with no meaning” (51). Her writing is of no value to her; moreover, she is so ashamed of putting her thoughts into writing that she refers to Hani in code, then berates herself “why am I afraid to name him? I called out his name when we were in the sea together. The sea heard me and the earth and the sky” (51). The inability to write what has already been said aloud, to express herself, frustrates Tamima, and she denigrates her own work, preferring to read the work of others, like Ramzi Ra‘d’s, whose work literally physically immobilizes her, even before his body does.

But all that changes once the double attack on her body and on Mahdiyya takes place. At this pivotal moment in the text, which marks the beginning of Tamima’s severed ties with the city and all it represents, and the severance of the national myth

35 The obvious Hegelian reference, and Ra‘d’s subsequent exposure as a hypocritical figure, is perhaps a sly rejection of the dialectical thinking that ironically characterizes critical readings of ‘Awwad’s work.

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from its geographical boundaries and its rearticulation through the collective experience of violence, Tamima is frustrated by the fact that there is “not the slightest hint of resistance, by word or action” (108). In the new paradigm caused by the experience of almost-simultaneous collective and personal violence, Tamima’s reading and writing habits are transformed. Convalescing, she sits in her room in Mahdiyya and “devoured newspapers, morning, noon and night”; the repetition of the word consolidates the shift from one type of reading to the other; previously, she devoured theoretical or literary works, but now she has been transformed into a ‘devourer’ of a very different kind of writing, in “Arabic, French and English” (108-109).36 She becomes the secretary of

Hani’s student political group, “The Party of Friends”, and transcribes their meetings but also begins to summarize newspaper editorials for them.37 This is the transitional step from her vision of writing as something purely personal to the emergence of her voice in the novel’s ending: Tamima reads her summaries to the group and is praised for this ability to translate the writing of others and her “excellent delivery”, at which she wonders, “was it true that she read aloud well?” (139). Her letter, the only public piece of her writing that the reader sees, is, of course, not read aloud by her, but by Hani. With it,

Tamima has finally become the author of her work; and, of course, of her destiny as a resistance fighter, free of all territorial constraints.

36 It’s interesting to note, in this context, the argument that Benedict Anderson makes about the relationship between a print-culture and nationalism in Imagined Communities; of course, Lebanon in the 1970s had a century-old newspaper tradition, but the emergence of Tamima’s new ideas is very much related in the novel to her increased consumption of newspapers.

37 ‘Awwad uses actual newspaper articles from the period (December 1968-February 1969) in his novel, for different purposes. He also incorporates articles from student publications, such as the American University of Beirut’s Outlook.

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Conclusion:

Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt is frequently cited as one of the seminal texts in the Lebanese novel’s shift from a classical period, formally Romantic and thematically focused on the village, to the predominantly urban contemporary literature; critics also claim that it is also an indictment of traditional, patriarchal – and parochial – social behavior. But its conclusion, in which there is a denunciation of all existing national spaces, and a transcendence of national boundaries in favor of a universal, humanist cause complicates these views. Its similarity to the ending of the much earlier Ṭuyūr Aylūl suggests a difficulty in conceptualizing the place of the individual in the modern Lebanese nation, torn between the decaying Romantic imagery of the mountain, and the unachieved potential of the city. Read together, these two novels problematize the totalization of the nation-space by figuratively imagining the disengagement of subaltern groups, namely women, through metaphors of deterritorialization. They both seem to conclude that if these marginalized characters can not conceive of a sense of place in any of the country’s human settlements, then the outcome is the violence that consumes the city in ‘Awwad’s novel. Thus, by negation, the two correlate a sense of belonging to a place, and gesture to the identity crises of those dispossessed who are left out of dominant cultural narratives and who do not feel that they belong anywhere.

David Harvey has written of the seismic “shifts in systems of representation, cultural forms and philosophical sentiment” that take place when disruptions occur within the establishment (The Condition of Postmodernity, 239). It would seem that the political

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and social buildup to the civil war in Lebanon created a cultural space for the interrogation of traditional representations of the space of the nation, and the place of the modern individual – particularly the female – within it. Mary Layoun’s hypothesis is that such “crises can generate exceptional insights into social and cultural organization and possibility” (Wedded, 12). In this particular case, an even bigger rupture of the national and social fabric was about to take place, leaving the two disembodied voices of Muna and Tamima far, far behind.

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CHAPTER TWO

A City Divided: Beirut in the (1975-1990) Civil War

The tensions that had been brewing for almost a decade in Lebanon finally erupted into systematic fighting in the Spring of 1975.1 Most scholarship on the war subsequently divides it into three major phases, early (1975-1976), middle (1977-1982), and late (1983-1990)2. The early phase is generally characterized as being a war of Right against Left, with the Maronite Christian Katā’ib (Phalangists) and their allies fighting a coalition of Leftist and Palestinian groups, known as the National Movement. Some of the bloodiest, and most memorable, battles of the war took place in this period, which was marked by mass ethnic killings of Muslims by Christian rightwing militias, and revenge attacks on Christian villages in the areas controlled by the National Movement,

1 The date generally taken to be the starting point of the civil war is April 13, 1975. Historians often point out that there had been clashes in the city and the South leading up to this; one explanation, offered by Samir Kassir and Elizabeth Picard is that these events had been collectively thought of as skirmishes, or incidents “ḥawādith, aḥdāth”, and not as the prelude to war (Salibi, Crossroads, 97; Picard, Lebanon, 105; Kassir, Guerre, 103).

2 There are several very good sources on the early and middle stages of the war (1975- 1982), including Kamal Salibi’s Crossroads to Civil War (1976), which was followed up by his A House of Many Mansions (1988) and Walid Khalidi’s Conflict and Violence in Lebanon: confrontation in the Middle East (1979). More recent scholarship on the period between 1975 and 1982 includes Samir Kassir’s La Guerre du Liban. One of the most comprehensive sources on the entire 15-year war is Theodor Hanf’s Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon; Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation is one of the most well-written overviews of the 15-year war for a general audience, although it, too, emphasizes the earlier phase more than the remaining 8 years of conflict (1982-1990).

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among others. Also during this period, the center of Beirut was sacked, and by the time of the first ceasefire was enforced in November 1976 by an Arab-League formed peacekeeping force, much of the city center had been heavily damaged3.

After the ceasefire brokered in 1976 fell apart, the fighting spread outwards from

Beirut to the entire country. Summarizing the middle phase of the war, Elise Salem describes it as being marked by:

More intermittent warfare, punctuated by major political and military events, such as the March 1977 assassination of Kamal Joumblatt [sic], the March 1978 Israeli invasion of South Lebanon [ power consolidation by the Kata’ib through the systematic wiping out of rival Christian militias ], 1978 Syrian and Kata’ib warfare, and the 1979-1982 Palestinian/Shi‘a confrontation (124).

This period, despite the warfare, was calmer than the previous one, and many thought that the war had ended. However, in the summer of 1982, the Israeli government used the pretext of the assassination of its ambassador to London to launch a massive assault against Lebanon, aimed at terminating the activities of the Palestinian resistance movements and the Lebanese National Movement. This culminated in the siege of Beirut, which lasted seventy days, by the end of which 18,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians were killed and over 30,000 were wounded (Salem, 134). After the Palestinian

Liberation Organization fighters left Beirut in September, 1982, following the declaration of a truce, the Israeli army and their Lebanese proxies, mostly members of the South

3 Although commonly thought to have been destroyed completely during this period, this was not the case, as Samir Kassir and Saree Makdisi show (Guerre du Liban, 418; “Reconstructing History”, 23-24). In fact, Makdisi points out that after 1976, the old souks “were damaged, but salvageable” before succumbing to “mysterious demolitions in 1983, 1986 and then a final wave of demolitions” in 1994 (“Reconstructing History, 23- 24). Nevertheless, as early as 1976, the souks were no longer accessible to civilians, and after the shops had been sacked, were no longer very interesting to militia fighters either.

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Lebanon Army and the Lebanese Forces, entered West Beirut and perpetrated one of the bloodiest massacres of the entire war, against unarmed Palestinian civilians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.4

Most accounts, historical and otherwise, of the Lebanese war taper off at this juncture or very soon afterwards; unfortunately, the fighting in Lebanon continued, albeit in different form5. What had once been clearly understood as an ideological battle between right and left, with the corresponding local, regional and international alliances that invoked, became more chaotic, and less comprehensible, as erstwhile allies became enemies, and vice-versa.6 As the 1980s went on, “most of the earlier combatants of the war resumed their battles – this time with a different set of enemies […] Whatever reasons for fighting in the first place seemed altogether lost as the battles, like so many forest fires, continued to spurt haphazardly across the horizons” (Salem 151). In 1990, after 15 years of fighting, a final ceasefire and agreement to end the fighting was brokered in the Saudi town of Ta’if. By then, the toll of the destruction on human lives

4 For an eyewitness report of the events at Sabra and Shatila, see Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation. For a collection of testimonials and analysis, see Bayan Nuwayhid al-Hut’s Sabra and Shatila: September 1982.

5 For example, one of the most popularly accessible sources for information on the Lebanese civil war, the al-Jazeera production Ḥarb Lubnān [War of Lebanon], devotes the bulk of its 15-episodes (12) to the events leading up to 1982. One notable exception is Theodor Hanf’s exhaustive Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon.

6 Even the explanation proffered by Samir Khalaf in Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon, that ideological affiliation was supplanted by confessional identity, with the younger generation taking up arms in defense of a sect, cannot, for example, address the various inter-sectarian battles that raged during the mid-1980s between Shiite co- religionists Amal and Hizbullah, or the Maronite-Maronite warfare between Michel ‘Awn’s supporters and the Lebanese forces (Khalaf, 23-37). For an interesting critical interpretation of the limits of structural understandings of the civil war, see Najib Hourani’s “The Militiaman Icon”.

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was enormous: approximately 170,000 dead, twice as many wounded, and almost two- thirds of the population had been displaced.

The traumatic experiences of the civil war in the country and the city are registered in the artistic output of the era, in particular, in poetry and visual culture, where

Beirut is frequently depicted as the beautiful young female victim of physical and psychological violence, such as theft, or mutilation, or rape.7 For example, in the poetry of Nizar Qabbani collected in the diwan, Ila Bayrūt al-Untha…ma‘ Ḥubbi [To Beirut, the woman, with my love], many of whose poems – for example, Bayrūt ya Sitt al-Dunya – became popular songs during the 1980s, Beirut is a young woman whose jewelry has been stolen and whose hair, a symbol of femininity and beauty, has been cut off; causing the poet to ask a series of distressed rhetorical questions about the identity of the people who could have perpetrated such a heinous crime.8 In Naji al-‘Ali’s iconic series of caricatures, she is a beautiful, sad and wide-eyed young girl, usually surrounded by destruction – in more than one image, she is consoled by Ḥinẓala, the young boy in a kaffiya who has become an icon of Palestine and its resistance. Usually portrayed with his back to the reader, as a watcher of events, in these drawings, Ḥinẓala is active; in one, he is handing Beirut a flower; in another, he is kissing her arm, as she weeps, the text beneath him reading “I apologize to Beirut”9. The fact that Qabbani is Syrian and al-‘Ali

7 For more on some of the writers, mostly poets, on this theme, see Mona Amyuni’s “Wounded Beirut”.

8 For a more detailed reading of Qabbani’s Beirut poems, see Salem, who describes Qabbani’s Beirut in the following way “Beirut is Ishtar, the Phoenician goddess, as much mystified in her fall as she was in her supposed days of glory” (132).

9 http://najialali.com/drawings/displayimage.php?album=3&pos=8; http://najialali.com/drawings/displayimage.php?album=3&pos=0.

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Palestinian just reinforces Elise Salem’s observation that, during the Lebanese civil war,

Beirut was no longer merely a Lebanese trope, but a pan-Arab one.10 In novels, too, such as in Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose, Beirut is feminized, a city ravaged by patriarchy, “the city is like a great suffering being, too mad, too overcharged, broken now, gutted, and raped like those girls raped by thirty or forty militia men, and are now mad and in asylums because their families, Mediterranean to the end, would rather hide than cure…”

(20).

Yet, there is another side to this representation of the city, what cooke refers to as the ‘whore’ side of the victim/whore binary, in which Beirut is represented as a threateningly hypersexual woman (War’s Other Voices, 16). As it was in Ṭuyur Aylūl and

Ṭawahīn Bayrūt, Beirut’s sexuality and femininity are depicted as being so dangerous that they have somehow provoked this destiny. In Mahmoud Darwish’s prose memoir of the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut, which is also a series of “reflections, analyses, and laments” about Beirut, Darwish speculates on the city’s downfall, suggesting it was caused by the fact that “Beirut offers herself to a casual passerby” (Salem, 261; Darwish,

91). In Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose, Beirut’s destruction is the result of her promiscuity.

Beirut, Adnan writes, “was heedless to the point of folly. She gathered the manners and customs, the flaws and vengeance, the guilt and debauchery of the whole world into her own belly. Now she has thrown it all up, and that vomit fills all her spaces” (20). Even in other, less anthropomorphic metaphors, Adnan and Darwish repeat the same point: that the city was torn apart because of its openness. “The city is an electro-magnetic field into

10 “Poets from around the Arab world competed to lament the tragedy of Beirut. From the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish to the Syrian/Lebanese Adonis, works were composed on Beirut, the new symbol of the Arab tragedy” (Constructing Lebanon, 137).

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which everyone wants to plug himself. It is no longer a place of habitation, but a being which resembles a runaway train”, Adnan writes (13); Darwish describes Beirut as “a global transformer station, that converted every deviation from the norm into a program of action” (54). In much of this writing, then, Beirut is characterized by a stream of superlatives that eventually led to its downfall: the city was too beautiful, too open, too alive, too accepting, these writers seem to suggest, and the price it had to pay was high.

Beirut is a central character in these tragic accounts; anthropomorphizing metaphors undergird the key rhetorical images used to represent the imagined city. In War’s Other

Voices, miriam cooke argues that the contradictory and sometimes ambivalent representations of Beirut all co-existed simultaneously, that “writers often addressed this muse, sometimes as a queen, sometimes as a prostitute, sometimes as an ascetic”; in all these representations, Beirut is feminized (16).

So, while a feminist reading of Lebanese literature is clearly called for, and as I have already shown, well-established as a successful paradigm for thinking about

Lebanese literature, in this chapter, I will develop another aspect of the representation of

Beirut in wartime novels; namely, the representation of the urban spaces and practices of everyday life in the divided city. By focusing on the urban dimension of the war, I aim to expand the debate beyond a dichotomized, reductive interpretation of the conflict, in which men fight and women suffer or resist. After all, the war affected the entire population of Lebanon, urban and rural; it follows then, that writing about the war – and in particular, the war in the city – is as diverse as the urban population was during those

15 years.

By 1991, following the Saudi-brokered ceasefire that brought the fighting to an

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end, the damage caused by the Lebanese civil war had spread to most of the country, from North to South. The conflict’s first – and most visible – victim, however, had been the cityscape; and this physical division had as much psychological and symbolic effect as it did physical. In another of Naji al-‘Ali’s drawings, Lebanon is being strangled by a scarf; one side says ‘East’, and the other ‘West’; to strangle him, the scarf ‘s ends criss- cross each other, but they are deadly nonetheless11.

As I have already indicated, Beirut’s urban configuration was irreversibly modified as early as the first ceasefire of 1976. Writing soon after that, historian Kamal Salibi describes the new divisions inscribed by the fighting:

The city, to begin with, had lost its unity as an urban complex. It now consisted of two separate and distinct residential sectors – a Christian sector to the east and a predominantly Muslim sector to the west – between which regular communication had become difficult, and in some respects, hardly possible (Crossroads, 136).

The new logic of divided urban geography could not be not overcome by the brief intervals in fighting, and most of the merchants whose shops had been in the center moved their businesses out of the now-desolate area and into the areas controlled by their respective co-religionists. The physical and psychological division of the city into East and West was now complete; in fact, as the following passage from Samir Kassir’s

Histoire de Beyrouth emphasizes, even the traffic was re-directed:

Even during the most promising lulls in the fighting, the city would not stop living abnormally. In spite of the reunification attempts (in November 1976 and October 1982), the city could not be seen in its entirety. Instead of “Beirut”, there was East Beirut and West Beirut, two hemispheres with their backs turned to each other. Even if people “passed” from one end to the other, when they could, and not without great personal risk, urban logic had replicated itself; with the relocation of

11 http://najialali.com/drawings/displayimage.php?album=3&pos=45.

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businesses and administrative offices, even traffic directions went in opposite ways on each side of the city (33).

In her 1989 memoir of the war Beirut Fragments, Jean Makdisi isolates the moment of the city’s division as “the most traumatic of the many changes that the war produced in our environment” (74). Reflecting on the division of the city in his book on the Lebanese civil war between 1975 and 1982, La Guerre du Liban, Samir Kassir interprets the physical division of the city as a key break with the historical national past; he writes,

“the transformation of the downtown area, traditional site of cross-exchange into a battle field marked the end of Islamic-Christian coexistence as it had been lived until that point

(Kassir, Guerre, 135). The language of division and fragmentation dominates descriptions of Beirut during the war, and the fragment has been seen as the hermeneutic tool par excellence of the scholarship on the period.12 As Samir Khalaf notes in Heart of

Beirut, during the 1980s “it became fashionable to depict Lebanon as a ‘precarious’,

‘improbable’, ‘fragmented’, ‘torn’ society; so divided and fractured, in fact, that it was deemed impossible to piece together again” (14).

In this chapter, I will read several texts from the period between 1976 and 1989, in order to tease out the changing relations between text and city during that time period.

Taking into consideration some traditional critical approaches to the subject of Lebanese civil war writing, I argue that, read together, these novels chart a changing relation towards the urban spaces of the war-torn city that is worth investigating. For example, while the novels that pre-date the 1982 Israeli war often replicate and reproduce the

12 Two examples from the literature on the civil war are Maha Yahya, who describes Beirut as “a fragmented city” (“Reconstituting Space”, 128) and Elizabeth Picard, who describes the war as reducing the country into “cantons”, in her book Lebanon: A Shattered Country (148).

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ideological and physical divisions of the period, and re-inscribe wartime urban divisions into their texts, later novels are less committed, more ambivalent about the war and its effect on the everyday lives of city dwellers. The shift from ideological narratives of the war to the more subjective, individualized experience of the war can be registered in the changing representation of Beirut.

Another transition captured by the cross-section of books in this chapter is the new imagined space produced during this era. Within the broader context of Lebanon’s cultural history, the war marked a break with the rural mountain novel of an earlier time and the urban-rural dialectic at play in novels such as Tuyūr Aylūl and Tawaḥīn Bayrūt, discussed in the previous chapter, and a transition into an almost purely urban imagined environment. In Elise Salem’s words, “one saw the gradual shift from imagining Lebanon in terms of its villages to focusing on Beirut as the psychological center of the country”

(131).

The transition from national – sometimes international – to hyperlocalized, urban registers of belonging is captured by Hassan Sabra’s preface to the 1983 publication

Bayrūt: Iḥtilāl ‘Āṣima ‘Arabiyya (Beirut: Occupation of an Arab capital), whose first paragraph begins:

And in Beirut…in the shadow of the [1982 Israeli] siege, all standards and descriptions disappeared, such that there were no longer any leftists, rightists, nationalists, or internationalists, and everyone who remained in it was a Beiruti, a badge of honor earned by each person who had loved Beirut at peace, and remained loyal to her during war…The Southerner who remained became a “son of the country” [ibn al-balad], a title usually reserved for those born and bred in it; so did the Biqa’i and the Arab from Palestine or Egypt, Syria, Libya, Tunis, Yemen, Sudan or Iraq…all became “sons of the place” (6).13

13 My translation; unless otherwise noted, all translations in this chapter are mine (see footnote 8).

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While this formulation of a new urban identity encapsulates the re-articulation of political, religious and place identity as an urban one, it is also an example of a certain, somewhat paradoxical wartime spatial logic: the Beirut that the writer posits as a new transnational space is that (Western) part of the city that was under siege during the summer of 1982, and not the entire city of Beirut as it had been prior to the war. Sabra’s imagined Beirut collapses all former differences and distances between its inhabitants; however, simultaneously, it excludes the other half of the city, the Eastern side. This is a gesture replicated in some of the texts I will be discussing in this chapter, in particular

Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose and Mahmoud Darwish’s Dhakira li-l-Nisyān (Memory for

Forgetfulness).

The texts that I discuss in this chapter were all written and published during the years of the civil war, between 1976 and 1989. My argument in this chapter depends on reading a number of wartime texts together, rather than performing a close reading of two novels; as a result, this chapter is a discussion of three central novels, and then three supplementary texts. Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose, Elias Khoury’s al-Wujūh al-Bayḍā’

(White Masks) and Mahmoud Darwish’s Dhakira li-l-Nisyān were written and published during (or exclusively about) the early years of the war14. In addition, at various points in

14 When referring to Adnan and Darwish’s texts, I will be referring to their respective translations into English by Georgina Kleege (Sitt Marie Rose), and by Ibrahim Muhawi (Memory for Forgetfulness). Khoury’s Wujūh has only very recently (July 2010) been translated; however, all references to the text in this chapter are my own translations. Although Darwish is not Lebanese, and his text was written and published after 1982, Memory for Forgetfulness is a completely appropriate text in the context of trying to understand representations of Beirut during that time, a point which I hope to elaborate further in the chapter.

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the chapter, I integrate three other texts – two novels, and a journal – from the late war period (between 1986 and 1989); these novels are Elias Khoury’s Riḥlat Ghandi al-

Ṣaghir (The Journey of Little Gandhi), Hanan al-Shaykh’s Ḥikayat Zahra (The Story of

Zahra), and Jean Makdisi’s Beirut Fragments.15

Since I have already spoken about the urban division brought forth by the conflict, at this point in the chapter, it is perhaps worth mentioning that all the texts in this selection – and all the wartime prose from Lebanon that has had a critical impact in

Lebanon and internationally – is centered around, and produced from, the western part of

Beirut. While some practical explanations exist for why this may be the case, such as the fact that most of the publishing industry in Lebanon was historically based in what came to be the western part of the divided city, there are no truly satisfying answers for the question of why most of the war’s critically acclaimed and popular prose was produced in or about west Beirut.16

Further, as the considerable body of work on these texts attests, these six works are quasi-canonical in the study of Lebanese war literature. However, while much of the critical material on these texts gestures towards the city, and emphasizes the connection

15 I will use the English translations of Khoury’s novel, The Journey of Little Gandhi (trans. Paula Haydar) and al-Shaykh’s, The Story of Zahra (trans. Peter Ford, with Hanan al-Shaykh).

16 Both sides of the political spectrum were active in other forms of cultural production; recently, some work has been done on political posters produced during the war by Zeina Maasri (Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War), and Yumna ‘Id mentions the proliferation of alternative media (songs, posters, theater) on both sides of the war in the context of the 1982 war in al-Kitāba (p.29). In Constructing Lebanon, Elise Salem mentions the newspaper Lubnan produced by poet Sa‘id ‘Aql and written in transliterated Arabic as one example of cultural production from the Eastern side of the country (131).

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between the war in the city and the fragmentary nature of these texts, sometimes even describing the city as a major character in these novels, it generally does not address the textual representations of the urban spaces within these novels beyond the surface level.17

One of the exceptions is Elise Salem, whose Constructing Lebanon has already been cited in this passage for her observation that the psychological center of Lebanese cultural narrative moved from the mountain to Beirut (131). Yet, for Salem, the city is interesting merely because it is a symbol, “that warranted extensive commentary and lament”, and she does not really develop her argument about the relationship beyond insisting that the literature of the war played a reactive role in its depiction of Beirut

(138).18 Following Nirvana Tanoukhi’s urging to move literary analysis away from

“metaphorical deployments of “space” toward concrete discussions about the materiality of literary landscapes”, in this chapter I aim to move beyond the symbolic descriptions of

Beirut into a more in-depth discussion of the effects of the changing urban landscape on

17 For more on Beirut as a central character, see Sabah Ghandour’s introduction to Elias Khoury’s The Journey of Little Gandhi, p. xvii; see also Mona Amynui’s La Ville, Source d’Inspiration and “Wounded Beirut”. Although this will be developed later, it may be worth noting some of the major critical currents in discussions of these texts. Sitt Marie Rose and Memory for Forgetfulness are often read as testimonials (see, for example, Amireh “Bearing Witness in Sitt Marie Rose”, Foster, “Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose”, miriam cooke War’s Other Voices; for Darwish, see Shakir, Maḥmūd Darwish nāthiran, and Youmna ‘Id’s al- Kitāba). Zahra, Sitt Marie Rose and Beirut Fragments have been discussed as feminist texts, presented as evidence of a new kind of women’s writing engendered by the war (see miriam cooke, War’s Other Voices and Evelyne Accad’s Sexuality and War).

18 In fairness to Salem, representations of Beirut do not form the crux of the point she is arguing in Constructing Lebanon, which is namely that Lebanese literature played an integral role in forming national identity, and that the novels of the war and post war period “offer new ways of perceiving Lebanon and can be hence be useful in constructing Lebanon now.” (102).

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literature from wartime Beirut (135). However, before proceeding with my argument, I would like to present some of the basic ways in which Beirut has been covered in the critical literature on the war.

One of the most dominant themes of critical writing on Lebanese novels during this period is the relation between textual form and the perceived disintegration of earlier social patterns due to war. Earlier, I introduced the topic of urban and national fragmentation as a trope which characterizes descriptions of the city at war; oftentimes, the breakdown of the urban fabric is correlated to a breakdown in normative, dominant textual modes. This viewpoint, of which the following passage from Sabah Ghandour is an example, argues that the fragmentation of Lebanese society, and the destruction of the city mandated and brought about a new form of textuality:

In Lebanon, this change in discursive practice can be linked to the disintegration of the social structure of the state. With the collapse of civil society and the emergence of various political and power entities, and hence the disappearance of a singular truth, writers have come to experience not only a frustration with the political structure and its mechanism operating in the state, but also a disbelief and doubt in everything that goes on around them, even a disbelief in their own identity and subjectivity. Writers are left with bits and pieces from which to draw, and around which to build their fictional worlds in their search to comprehend their continuously changing reality (233).

In such readings, the deliberately fragmented, often dialogic, frequently self-reflexive and critical writing of the period is represented as a sort of textual resistance to ‘dominant’ narratives, whether these are patriarchal, socio-economic or colonial. miriam cooke, for example, whose work has been discussed in this dissertation, interprets the body of work produced by Lebanese novelists during the war by arguing that women writers work

“seemed to preclude the possibility of arranging the chaos into a coherent narrative,

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whereas most men’s war stories lined up oppositions” (Women and the War Story, 16)19.

In her work on Elias Khoury, Samira Aghacy reads post-colonial power relations into his novel, Journey of Little Gandhi, and what she describes as its polyphonic voice, which

“lacks a fixed center and lays no claim to a final irrevocable truth” (“Gandhi”, 163-

164).20

More recently, such assertions have been disputed by critics such as Elise Salem, who while admitting that, as a whole, a new form of fragmented textuality indeed emerged from the civil war era, the old language of literary production endured, albeit in a transformed state (Constructing Lebanon, 9). In general, however, this critical body of work views writing as a mechanism through which these fragmented identities are both represented and shared, and the wounds of war can therefore, begin to be healed, as

Shereen Abou el-Naga explains, “Writing, thus, had a therapeutic nature for a fragmented ‘I’ that suffers from many fissures on different levels. Writing becomes synonymous with healing in such tragic contexts” (89). Yet, while writing may have been therapeutic in re-constituting the self as whole in these situations, it did not attempt a similar holistic approach to the urban spaces; instead, the logic of fragmentation, atomization, and loss of cohesion permeates fictional accounts of Beirut at war. But the war also imposed a new understanding of the city, and its spatial divisions played a role in forming new meanings for Beirut’s inhabitants. For, as Hashim Sarkis points out in his work on the reconstruction of Beirut, “Space develops its own logic, its own practices which in turn reproduce other spaces. Space propels its inhabitation. It

19 Other critics who have also read these novels from a gendered perspective include Eveylne Accad, in Sexuality and War, and Joseph Zaydan, Arab Women Novelists.

20 Aghacy claims that imperialistic power relations permeate the novel, and points to the example of the American professor re-naming the main character Gandhi: “Americans were and still are giving us names, which means that they possess the knowledge and the power." (“Gandhi”, 166).

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precedes, resists, yields to, and survives those who assume it to be a neutral site for their control” (104). In Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory, it is ironically the war that brings out the sense of Beirut as a material urban space, which the text contrasts with the city-as- symbol and the city-as-metaphor. “Movement, arguments, crowds, and the hubbub of commerce used to hide this prescription, transforming Beirut from a city to a concept, a meaning, an expression, a sign”, Darwish observes; now, however, at war, he notices the city as a city, “For the first time, I’m seeing the sidewalks: clear sidewalks. For the first time, I’m seeing the trees, visible trees with trunks, branches and perennially green leaves” (52). This new discovery of the urban context re-frames his experience of the city, and leaves him wondering, “is Beirut beautiful in itself?”, (52).War, Darwish’s text seems to suggest, is responsible for a major conceptual reformulation of the relationship between the individual and the city.

Furthermore, in Memory, the material reality of the Israeli siege of Beirut catalyzes a new material relationship with a city difficult to represent spatially or rhetorically:

Is it a city or a refugee camp of Arab streets laid out with no plan? Or is it something else altogether? A condition, a thought, a change in state, a flower born from a text, or a young woman who unsettles the imagination. Is it for this reason that no one has been able to compose a song for Beirut? How easy she seems! Yet how she resists the joining together of words, even those with similar meter and rhyme: Beirut, yaqoot, taboot – “Beirut, sapphire, coffin!” (91).

Notably, the passage rhetorically links spatial representation (the laying out of streets) with symbolic representation, in particular with metaphor in a rhetorical question about the difficulty of artistic representation (song) dealing with Beirut. Functioning on multiple, seemingly distinct levels of representation, Darwish’s text creates a link

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between them; and that link, is Beirut. The material reality of war also causes Darwish to yearn for a new kind of language:

I want to find a language that transforms language itself into steel for the spirit – a language to use against these sparkling silver insects, these jets. I want to sing. I want a language that I can lean on and that can lean on me (52).

Darwish’s emphatic ‘I want’, direct and clear, amplifies the materiality of the metaphors used to describe this desired language: Darwish desires a language like steel, one that is a weapon, one that is solid enough to lean on. It is as if his realization of the new materiality of the city commands a new language, one which can only be expressed through metaphors of the raw material of urban construction and solidity. Memory seems to suggest that this is the only language that can reclaim the city back from the enemy warplanes. While it is often tricky to make claims about Memory’s language, due to its constantly shifting use of metaphor, oppositions, and paradox (such as the ‘memory’ and

‘forgetfulness’ of the title), nevertheless in this sequence, Darwish’s yearning for the support of a solid language is immediately related to his experience of war in the city.

In her article, “Reconstituting Space”, Maha Yahya argues that there is a dialectical, rather than causal, relationship between the fragmentary urban space produced by the war and the spatial practices and representations of the city’s inhabitants.

Like Sarkis, Yahya states that, due to (and during) the war,

The unified image of Beirut is lost in a maze of boundaries carving through it. This destruction is both physical and spatial. It is a physical fragmentation which creates a change in the meaning and perception of boundaries and barriers between different spaces. It generates and is generated by a reorganization of Beirut’s urban landscape, the use of its spaces, access into and through various territories” (128).

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It is this dialectical relation between the space of the city and its perceived and constructed meanings that I hope to develop in this chapter, which is why I choose to read a wide selection of texts that have not always been read together.

In this chapter, as I did in the previous one, I aim to reframe the already-existing critical debate about writing and the city towards an interpretation that is more space- oriented. I argue that the relationship between literature and Beirut at war is not merely a reactive, mimetic one, in which the role of the writer is to find a language to express the fragmentation of the nation and the death of the city. Although this argument is valid, compelling, and to a certain extent, true, the relation is also a dialectical one: by writing about the city at war, these novelists and their texts also contributed to producing a narrative of the city that reinforced its divisions and wartime topography, a point which can only be made when these texts are read as a body of work on the city, and not opposed to each other along binary oppositions, such as gender. This link is self- consciously emphasized by Elias Khoury in his article “Modern Arab Fiction and

Memory”, when he describes how “writing in times of transition takes the form of a journey towards what we do not know and towards the shock of writing what we know, which will lead us to discover how writing changes things and does not only reflect them” (8). Whether by resorting to a discourse of Otherness to describe the inhabitants of the next neighborhood over, as the early novels do, or by atomizing the city into its smallest constituents: the house, the street, as the later ones do, the effect is the same:

Beirut is divided and dissected; its three parts, East, West and center, seemingly irreconcilable.

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Taking Sides: Geographies of Otherness

The changing urban landscape produced its own effects on the city’s inhabitants; in many cases, the new reality of division is initially rejected, then begrudgingly, it becomes absorbed into the language and practices of everyday life. In her account of the

Lebanese civil war, Jean Makdisi attests to the imposition and subsequent internalization of a new urban logic onto the cityscape. She points out that, whereas the barriers “that divide the city, once entirely artificial, have only partly achieved the intention of those who erected them, there now is a difference between East and West Beirut that never existed before” (76-77). Makdisi’s point is interesting for several reasons, but mostly because it demonstrates that, while recognizing the artificiality of the war-imposed boundary, she also acknowledges the potency of intention in actually propagating and enforcing the division between both sides of the city. In fact, urban scholar Maha Yahya actually contends that this division was initially psycho-social and later became physical,

“an invisible barrier between the inhabitants of the same city, [that] was rendered visibly present through its scenes of destruction, its snipers and numerous military personnel on either side” (132).21 Moreover, the division of Beirut into two distinct components – the shar’iyyeh (East) and gharbiyyeh (West) – outlasted the war, and endures today.22 In her novel Beirut Blues, written in the mid-1990s, Hanan al-Shaykh complains, while

22 For example, a cab-ride from Hamra in West Beirut to Sassine in the East costs twice as much as a similar, more-congested and therefore more time-consuming trip from Hamra to Mar Elias, which is in West Beirut. While this was more prevalent during the 1990s than it is today, one occasionally rides with a cab driver who will not “cross” into the East or vice-versa.

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distancing herself rhetorically from the those who do such things, that such divisions have been normalized, and “everyone says ‘the eastern sector’ and ‘the western sector’ and your divisions have become a fact of life” (274).

Geographers make a distinction between physical distance and psychological or conceptual framings of distance in their definition of the term ‘scale’; certainly, this conceptual framework sheds considerable light onto the practices and representations of urban division in these wartime novels. While the Dictionary of Human Geography defines scale as “levels of representation, experience and organization of geographical events and processes”, it makes a distinction between three kinds of scale, the cartographic, the methodological and the geographical (724). Expanding upon the third category of geographical scale, it adds, “geographical scale is in no sense natural or given. There is nothing inevitable about global, national or urban scales, for instance.

These are specific to certain historical and geographical locations, they change over time, sometimes rapidly sometimes slowly” (725). Moreover, “specific events may embody destructions and reconstructions of various scales at the same time” (726). In short, scale can be used to relate physical space to literary (and other) modes of representation and production of space; as such, it has become of interest to literary scholars, like Nirvana

Tanoukhi, who argues in her article “The Scale of World Literature that a

“geographically-enlarged literary history” that pays attention to issues of scale, would

“conceptualize the dialectic of lived time and lived space in and around literature – in order to understand the entanglement of literature in the history of the production of space.” (613). One of the main aspects of such work would be, according to Tanoukhi, for literary scholars to pay special attention to “the articulation of distance within a

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particularly spatialized system of social relations” (605).

Following such an understanding of the changing nature of scale, which is intimately connected to place, and the relation of such spatial conceptualizations to representation, and in particular, the organization and understanding of social patterns and networks in times of change, I believe that bringing a geographical sensibility to critical readings of the novels of the early Lebanese war, sheds a new light on the ways that spaces were demarcated and divided. For example, in the work of Mahmoud

Darwish and Etel Adnan, scale is used to emphasize ideological, religious and national difference within Beirut and Lebanon.

In Sitt Marie Rose and Memory for Forgetfulness, the small physical distance between both sides of Beirut is scaled upwards, the distance exaggerated, such that it appears as large and unbridgeable as the ideological divide between right (East Beirut) and left (West Beirut); and also, a symbol in these texts of the divide between global East and West. Commenting on the fragmentation of Beirut, Darwish writes:

And Beirut herself realized that she wasn’t one city, one homeland, or the meeting point of neighboring countries; that the distance between one window and another facing it could be greater than that between us and Washington; and that internecine fighting between one street and another parallel to it could be more intense than that between a Zionist and an Arab nationalist (93).

By projecting the physical distance between one window and the other onto a complex geopolitical scale, Darwish’s imagery exaggerates the divisions of Beirut during war.

Darwish further exacerbates the divide between neighboring windows and adjacent streets by comparing it to the especially bitter struggle between Zionism and Arab

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nationalism; given the context and background for Memory, one can hardly read this particular comparison neutrally. In the passage, the urban landscape becomes a symbol for a social and political divide that is insurmountable; the city is too divided to be reconciled.

Similarly, in Sitt Marie Rose, one side of the city is placed within a broader geopolitical context that literally distances it from the other side of the city. In the novel,

East Beirut is represented as a site of both fascist sterility and of violence but also as an intrusion, as not belonging to the rest of Beirut. Sitt Marie Rose implies that the war is a clash of civilizations between the westernized eastern Beirutis and the orientalized western ones. Marie-Rose, Sitt Marie Rose’s tragic heroine, sacrificed for transgressing the boundaries between Christian and Muslim, but also for crossing the border and choosing to remain on the other side of the city, explains right before dying that, “this war is a fight between two powers, two powers and two conceptions of the world” (63).23

Although controversial, the novel’s authorial voice imposes a dominant reading of cultural binaries, which is often conveyed through spatial representation. In her article on

Sitt Marie Rose, Lisa Suheir Majaj asserts that “[In the novel], Lebanese identity is predicated upon the establishment of clear boundaries between Christian and Muslim,

East and West, Lebanese and Palestinian, “civilized” and “primitive” – and upon the

23 In the novel, this dualistic interpretation is frequently linked to what Amal Amireh describes as a “psychosexual interpretation that views the war in terms of an opposition between men and women, the masculine and the feminine” (261). While this is true – for example, Adnan’s novel suggests that both the right-wing Christian militants who murder Marie-Rose and the Palestinian fighters on the other side, as Arabs, “see greater virtue in their cars than in their women”, and “have to bring women back to order, in this Orient at once nomadic and immobile”, it nevertheless is also the case that the novel in all its voices – whether Marie-Rose, the unnamed narrator, the children – contrasts East to West Beirut, the division transcending all interpretations (66,100).

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implicit relocation of the Christian Lebanese to the “Western” side of the divide”, and that this is established by the strong authorial voice narrating the novel (Voice,

Representation and Resistance”, 214). Despite Amal Amireh’s assertion that the polyphonic voices of the novel make Adnan’s an ‘interrogative text’, “which therefore refuses the hierarchy of discourses of classic realism, and no authorial or authoritative discourse points to a single position which is the place of the coherence of meaning”, I find Majaj’s reading is more accurate: there is an authorial voice, and it certainly imposes a dominant reading of certain binaries, which is often conveyed through spatial representation (262). For example, Adnan’s text detaches East Beirut from its Western counterpart, and metaphorically aligns it with Mediterranean – but, more importantly,

Christian – Europe, hundreds of miles further away, suggesting that it does not belong in the Middle East:

More westernized and efficient in war as in everything, the Christian quarters have a sort of austerity which links them to certain “pieds-noirs” neighborhoods in Nice or Marseilles, or to little towns in Sicily and Greece. The Moslem [sic] enclaves still retain the disorder of the Orient which is still the last good in these essentially bastard countries which have no precise culture except for the one that developed from a pell-mell of values in a state of disintegration (21).

Thus, the Christian areas of Beirut are given a Mediterranean identity, and the Christians are identified with the pieds-noirs, signaling that these Christian populations do not belong in this city, just as the French colonial pieds-noirs did not belong in Algeria.

Adnan uses this metaphor to emphasize both the historical links between the

Christian Lebanese and the French and to exclude the Christian communities of Lebanon from any native authenticity. Furthermore, by describing the “disorder of the Orient” in the Western part of the city as “the last good” that remains in “bastard countries” like

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Lebanon, Adnan’s narrator is clearly setting up an opposition between the authentic, disordered Orient in the West of Beirut and the fascist, ordered, westernized East that does not belong in the city, and is the effect of its absorption of other values. While

Marie-Rose is punished by the Christians on the Eastern side of the war for being

Christian and for crossing over to the other side; in West Beirut, Christians are welcome, and “it’s a beautiful day on the other side of the city, and the streets, even with bullets flying, are still lively” (85)24. In fact, in contrast to the deaf mute witnesses to her suffering (her students) in East Beirut, whose voices are literally silenced and cannot tell of the murder they have witnessed, in West Beirut, the news of Marie-Rose’s kidnapping brings together an improvised community whose voices rise in concern about Marie-

Rose’s fate:

Telephone calls became more numerous, people went out into the streets to question each other, stunned and carried to the point of rage. Everyone knew how horrible this war was, but this woman’s capture brought to light a feeling of revolt against the injustice of the war which up till then had been held clenched inside (73).

The image of community forming together “in the various western quarters, in the sectors allied to the Palestinians” around a shared grief, and a shared love for the alleged

‘outsider’ Lebanese Christian Marie-Rose exacerbates the isolationism, racism, and obsession with purity that Adnan aligns with the Eastern side of the city, where no remorse is shown for one of theirs who has crossed over (73). Adnan’s novel often contradicts itself: Marie-Rose and the unnamed narrator frequently criticize the Christian

24 There is a certain amount of historical accuracy to this; while East Beirut became homogenously Christian with the expulsion of its Muslim residents, parts of West Beirut remained relatively mixed. See Elizabeth Picard, Lebanon: A Shattered Country, 150.

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fighters for forgetting that they are Middle Eastern25; yet, it also seems to ascribe to this division itself through its representation of the spaces of the other side of the city as foreign.

The exaggerated ideological difference between Christian East and Muslim West

Beirut in both novels is also represented by another play on spatial metaphor, namely by inverting the older mountain/city binary of early Lebanese nationalism. Where earlier canonical texts idealized the mountain as the site of purity and the placeholder for

Lebanese identity, in these two novels, the mountain is a metonymy of otherness, and clearly associated with menace and violence. In Memory, the mountains are figured as violent and aggressive, and Mahmoud the narrator has to tell himself while making his morning coffee, “Don’t look at the mountains spitting masses of fire in the direction of your hand. But alas, you can’t forget that over there, in Ashrafiya [sic], they’re dancing in ecstasy” (18).26 The mountain and Christian East Beirut are combined in violence, positioned in an elsewhere ‘over there’ that is very far from the actuality and presence of the narrator, in his apartment trying to accomplish the everyday task of making coffee. 27

Similarly, in Sitt Marie Rose, the mountain is associated with the right-wing, isolationist

Christian ideology of Marie-Rose’s killers, one of whom is her former love-interest,

25 “You don’t come from France or England”, a young Marie-Rose objects to Mounir, who believes himself to be a Crusader (48).

26 Here, Darwish is referring sarcastically to the warm reception that the Israeli army received in East Beirut upon its arrival. In the body of the text, a footnote tells the reader of the English translation that “Recurring throughout, ‘there’ and ‘here’ represent two major poles of experience in the text” (fn.4, p. 13).

27In his introduction to Memory, Ibrahim Muhawi points out that, for Darwish, “the effort to maintain the primacy of the quotidian becomes a challenge to the bombs” (xv).

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Mounir, who thinks of himself as European, because he is Christian, and the priest Bouna

(Father) Lias, who urges Marie-Rose to “come back to the community. You’ll inhale the aromas of baking bread and of the mountains”; the mountains here are contrasted with the death that awaits her if she remains on the ‘other side’ (64). By representing the city as irreconcilably divided into two sides, the novels continuously reassert this urban division, and reinforce the social divisions of the city and its inhabitants.

In the novels of Darwish and Adnan, the ideological divides of the early war years, between Palestinian left and Lebanese Christian right emerge on the urban landscape and in the text. In Memory, Darwish claims Beirut had a different identity than

Lebanon, and that it was not part of the imagined, folkloric Lebanon sung by Lebanese artists and poets, described in the introduction: “Beirut was excluded because it had ceased to be Lebanon’s Beirut. In the sectarian view, Beirut was not Lebanon; it had become Arab and was sung by the Arabs” (134). These writers, imbricated in the ideological struggle of the time, replicate the divisions of the physical city. In fact, they do more than this: they seem to suggest that the divide is inevitable, a result of the unbridgeable ideological differences of the warring factions. While Darwish’s text, to his credit, does attempt some perspective – especially in trying to understand the tension between Palestinians and Lebanese over Lebanon28 – Adnan’s does not. And therefore, in

28 For example, early on in Memory, Darwish admits, “We saw in Lebanon only our own image in the polished stone – an imagination that re-creates the world in its shape, not because it is deluded, but because it needs a foothold for the vision” (45); later on in the text, he states that those who came to Beirut and appropriated the city for themselves created a “standard which defined even for the Lebanese, and with their support, the degree of their right to their country, because their homeland had been transformed from a republic to a collection of positions” (134).

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the words of Elise Salem, the novel is reductive, “heavily ideological, it tends to simplify rather than capture complex Lebanon; and because it is accusative rather than participatory, it is set outside and beyond the Lebanese experience itself”” (113). It is interesting that one of Salem’s critiques of Adnan’s text is that it is not inside what she describes as ‘the Lebanese experience’; the accusation gestures to one of the major accusations of the Lebanese conflict: that it was in fact, the war of others fought on

Lebanon’s territory.29 And it is true that to some extent both Darwish and Adnan’s novel globalize the Lebanese conflict. The first section of Adnan’s book compares Lebanon to

Syria and Europe; as noted earlier, the Lebanese conflict is often represented as a struggle between global Christianity and Islam, or West and East. Darwish’s text, on the other hand, places the city within the framework of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Complicating the Division:

Whereas Beirut – and Lebanon – is divided along ideological lines in the work of

Adnan and Darwish, in Elias Khoury’s al-Wujūh al-Bayḍā’, a more complex relationship

29 The phrase “la guerre des autres” is thought to have been coined by the editor-in-chief of Lebanon’s most prestigious newspaper (an-Nahar), Ghassan Tuwayni, who first makes this claim in a series of editorials collected as Kitāb al-Ḥarb 1975-1976. Although a considerable number of historians have adopted it as an interpretation and explanation of the civil war (see, for example, the introduction to Benassar’s Anatomie d’une guerre et d’une occupation) many others, particularly from the left, have criticized it for absolving the Lebanese of responsibility for the conflict (see Samir Kassir, La Guerre au Liban, Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon). The more convincing explanation is probably Theodor Hanf’s, who ascribes agency to both internal and external players (181).

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between individual and place emerges.30 The novel, as in much of Elias Khoury’s writing about the Lebanese civil war, begins by denying its own form, its narrator, an amateur archivist who works in a travel office, insisting that “this is not a story”, and emphasizing that any reader of the text is wasting their time in reading it (1).31 Khoury creates a collage of story, in the guise of testimonies from a variety of different people into the death of Khalīl Aḥmad Jābir, a former post office employee who is found murdered on the five-year anniversary of the 1975 war, on April 13, 1980. Some of the narrative voices include Khalīl’s wife, his daughter, his neighbor, Fatima, the widow of the murdered caretaker of a nearby building, an acquaintance who lives in that building, and a fighter at the office of the militia in charge of Khalīl’s area.32 They all recount their memories of Khalīl and his slow degeneration after his son’s death in the 1975-1976 fighting, and through this telling, their own stories emerge. Like much of Khoury’s work this narrative technique connects the characters, their stories and the city, since as the reader “pieces together the unconnected stories of his characters and reassembling them, he creates a montage of a city going through war” (Mostafa, 103). For example, one of

30 While politically, Khoury is aligned with the left, and is a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause, he makes a distinction between his political and literary writing, rejecting “commitment literature”, arguing “I write a political article as a citizen ad I write it to the full, but literature is something else” (qtd. in Seigneurie, Crisis and Memory, 15). In this chapter, then, I do not suggest that Khoury’s writing is not political, just that it is not ideological in the way that Adnan or Darwish’s is.

31 Similarly, Khoury’s Journey of Little Gandhi draws attention to its own unreliability as text by saying, “All stories are full of holes. We no longer know how to tell stories, we don’t know anything anymore.” (7).

32 Khoury’s use of the polyphonic technique is discussed, in the context of his The Journey of Little Gandhi by Samira Aghacy, who writes of Khoury’s insistence upon breaking “with the tradition of the single narrator and embrace a variety of discourses. He rejects the oppressive and dictatorial stance of the single narrator who dominates the scene and insists on writing novels with a variety of discourses” (“Gandhi”, 166).

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the first signs of Khalīl’s eventual breakdown is his retreat further into the home due to the inaccessibility of his former workplace, then the inaccessibility of his new work place, as recounted by his wife, Nuha:

Khalīl stopped going to the central post office in Riad al-Ṣulḥ square. Then he began work at the post office in Mazra‘a, saying that he couldn’t stand working at home like women, then he was forced to stay home, bombs and death raining down, how could he go out? I begged him to stay and he accepted (20).

Nuha’s account connects the spatial to the individual in a narrative of emasculation that is directly related to access to public space and to the workforce.

In the novel, the division of the city disrupts other everyday spatial practices, particularly those associated with labor, whether it be manual or otherwise. In another story from the novel, Zayn, the municipal garbage collector, and a refugee from East

Beirut, who finds Khalīl’s body complains that, with the city divided, the garbage trucks in West Beirut no longer have access to the Karantina garbage dump on the East, and now have to make do with an improvised dump in Shwayfat, to the south; he laments the loss of the municipal dump, and of the former professional aspect of his labor, now gone:

This is not a job; Shwayfat has nothing on Karantina. In Karantina there’s a proper landfill. An entire area, with a name, where we throw sorted rubbish; mountains of garbage everywhere, but it is not harmful because it is organized, everything in place. It brought us great joy to see children dancing with joy as if the garbage truck was bringing them gifts (171).

The stories of Zayn and Khalil suggest that there is a human, emotional and economic cost to the city’s division that has an impact on the everyday lives of people in the city

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beyond – though related to – the fact of war. These characters are not resistors, like

Marie-Rose, and they are not fighters.33 The physical division of the city has affected their lives, but they have not been able to accept the ideological dimension of the division, and continue to pine for their earlier lives.

Through its nuanced representation of the relation between individual and place,

Al-Wujūh complicates the reductive, clean division of Beirut into east and west, in different ways, and mostly through the figure of the refugee who has been forcibly thrown out of East Beirut, but retains conflicting feelings towards it. The first such individual is the Kurdish caretaker’s widow, Fatima. As a child, she is brought to work in the home of a well-to-do family in Ashrafiyya, in East Beirut. Initially homesick, she longs to go back “hunāk”, over there, where her family is; her father, who visits occasionally, promises her with each visit that he will take her back ‘over there’ next year. When she gets married, her husband also promises to take her “hunāk” next year, but this trip is also deferred. At this point, Fatima’s imagined elsewhere, her home, is an un-named, ill-defined place that she has a vague recollection of, but which exists in opposition to her employer’s house in Beirut. But, when the war starts, and her family is forced to move to West Beirut, the referent shifts. The much-longed for “hunāk” becomes

Ashrafiyya – “it was better over there”, Fatima complains, despite the fact that the move

West is also a move towards upwards social mobility for Fatima, who for the first time

“is at home, no-one demanding of her to work in his house” (104). The new urban logic

33 As such, they complicate feminist readings of war literature such as cooke’s or Accad’s that claim that men’s work celebrated the war and the fighting, unlike women’s. Khoury’s novels – besides his Little Mountain, which is an account of the siege of the Palestinian camp of Tal al-Za‘tar in East Beirut – provide a perspective that cannot be ignored onto the lives of civilian men in the war, and makes a point that men were as victimized by the war as women.

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of division forces a shift in Fatima’s projected desires and understanding of place belonging, even while she does not seem to recognize the fact of the war; it also calls into play a belonging that transcends an improvement in lifestyle.

Fatima’s curious contradiction of displacement, and her shifting conceptualizations of longing and belonging are replicated in the case of Zayn, also a refugee from East Beirut, specifically from the extremely poor Eastern suburb of Nab‘a.

Zayn and his family have moved to West Beirut, to the middle-class Hamra district. Once more, despite the move towards an ostensibly more comfortable place, Zayn has contradictory feelings:

Ḥamdilla, we left Nab‘a during the war before they invaded it and all those atrocities happened, we went to the village, then came back to Beirut, and lived in Hamra, I mean…Nab‘a is better than Hamra, no it’s not possible, yes in Nab‘a it was our house and we paid rent, here we are refugees and don’t pay rent, but this is better…But Husayniyyah says that Nab‘a is better, and that people there were more real. But what can we do, we can’t go back to Nab‘a, and it’s impossible to live in the village (156).

This short passage gestures to several aspects of the changing urban and national landscape: the dissociation from the rural village – Zayn and his family would prefer to be refugees in the city than live in their village, the displacement of Muslim Lebanese from the Eastern side of the city, and the complicated emotional ties to these places, the inability to make the type of clean break so easy to achieve in Sitt Marie Rose.

Khoury’s text, while acknowledging the impossibility of Fatima or Zayn’s return

East, does not sever the emotional ties of that part of Beirut for the people on the other side: it is still a living place to them, a repository of memory, as much a part of their lives as their new homes and adopted neighborhoods. Nevertheless, it is also represented as

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“hunāk”, a far-away elsewhere that is discursively linked to a village that Fatima cannot even name, let alone remember, which reinforces the impossibility of her ever returning.

As in Sitt Marie Rose and Memory, despite the short distance between areas, the scale of the imaginative space between West and East Beirut is enormous. But, unlike the other two texts, Khoury’s East Beirut retains an emotional significance for its former inhabitants. As such, Khoury’s text underlines, and does not simplify, the complicated relations between individuals and place identity.

Shrinking Spaces:

In her work on the urban spatial practices formed as a result of prolonged life under warfare, Maha Yahya postulates that the physical division in the urban landscape precipitated a modified understanding of boundaries and limits, some of which are obvious from the representations of the divided urban space in the novels we have already seen. But Yayha also shows how, in addition to the personal re-ordering of urban topography and the relation to the city, the war also imposed its logic upon the spatial practices of everyday life in Beirut. The streets, for example, were no longer public spaces; in fact, Yahya points out, there were no longer many open public spaces, which forced Beirutis “inwards into their homes” (136).34 For Yahya, the problem this caused is twofold: “the city ceased to be everybody’s domain as one’s world shrunk to one’s

34 In Beirut Fragments, Makdisi correlates the retreat inwards with a fear of dispossession: “crushed and pulled and pushed from all sides, we have a tendency today to retreat into our own houses. If there is a reigning symbol of the war, it must be the refugee, and those of us who have not – yet – lost our homes cling to them, self- consciously hanging on to what we recognize as the most elementary of human requirements” (213).

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immediate surroundings”, which leads to the fact that “the limitation of space turned into a radical separation” (135). It is therefore unsurprising that so much of the war literature, from early to late, takes up the issue of enclosure and entrapment. “Beirut is a port. Never has a port been so blockaded”, Sitt Marie Rose’s narrator complains, the brevity and simplicity of the matter-of-fact statements forming an unexpressed, yet obvious, syllogism of confinement (85). In Beirut Fragments, Makdisi describes freedom of movement as a distinct element of the past, “every now and then, [we] remind ourselves of the old days when we would drive for hours to get somewhere far away. Now we are confined, not only each to our own city and town but even to our own quarter in the city”, the distinction between the past and the narrated present direct and succinct (212).

In Memory for Forgetfulness, the shrinking of space and place becomes an allegory of Palestinian dispossession from the Arab world, and then, finally, from Beirut, which gets broken down into increasingly smaller increments: by district, by refugee camp, by street, until finally it can no longer be partitioned into anything larger than a traffic circle:

The names of places get narrower and narrower, and shrink. From the great Arab homeland, stretching from the ocean to the Gulf, to something more restricted: Sharm al-Sheikh, Mount Hermon, the West Bank of the River Jordan, the girl’s school in Nablus, the Shuja’iya Quarter in Gaza, Gallerie Sam’an, As’ad al-As’ad Street in Beirut, Taba hotel in Sinai, Bir al-Abed here, Shatila Refugee Camp, the airport traffic circle, to the final barricade beyond which is desert or sea (49) .

In all these texts, the language of diminishing space is used to emphasize alienation from and frustration with the changed urban landscape of the wartime city. Furthermore, this language is often spare, direct, unadorned; almost as if, along with the cityscape, the language that they used to convey this was narrowing down. As the novels spaces

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diminish and retreat inwards, a sense of social community forged by sharing common spaces is lost.

Correlated to the shrinking spaces of these novels is the redrawing of the uses of public and private space. Earlier, I used an example from Elias Khoury’s Wujūh to describe the character Khalīl’s increasing alienation from the workforce and, consequently, his pre-war everyday life due to the fact that he can no longer go to his former workplace in downtown Beirut. Khalīl is finally “forced to” stay at home, “like a woman” because of the danger outside. While there has been some writing about the re- constitution of gendered spaces that this brought about, what is more interesting for me at this point is not so much the representation of domestic spaces in these wartime novels, but the representation of public ones, and in particular, the representation of the street.35

In the following section, I will pay particular attention to the novels of Elias

Khoury and Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra. Contrary to miriam cooke’s assertion, dependent on somewhat crude binary distinctions, that the war erased “any difference between the experiences of the home and the street. Private and public merged; more, they were wrenched into each other” (54), I follow Hashim Sarkis’s assertion that what the war did was “[render] visible the shades in the clear-cut distinction between public and private, between the state and individual property” (120)36. Thus, although

35 See miriam cooke’s War’s Other Voices; Lamia Rustom Shehadeh’s Women and War in Lebanon. See also Joseph Zaydan’s Arab Women Novelists, p. 206-223.

36 For example, both Makdisi and Khoury note the rise of the basta, the merchants who sold their wares on the street; these individuals had often been displaced from the burj area by the fighting, and had literally squatted in new areas of Beirut to continue their trade. Makdisi writes, “you can see people trying on clothing in the middle of the street as though they were in a private changing room” (81). In Khoury’s Wujūh, these displaced shopkeepers infuriate Zayn with their complaints of their descent into poverty.

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cooke’s point about the destructiveness of the war upon people’s everyday life is valid, these novels draw quite a large distinction between the home and the street. cooke’s distinction between the ‘experiences of home’ and ‘experiences of the street’ imposes a gendered division between the two spaces; for example, her metonymy of home is “the calm of the boudoir and the kitchen”, both feminized domestic ‘private’ spaces, which by implication suggests that the streets are masculine, ‘public’ spaces. But in these novels, the streets are shared public spaces, not necessarily exclusively male; therefore, the loss of the shared public space of the street is mourned as a loss of a certain type of collective urbanity that transcends class, religious and social structures and not only as a form of emasculation. In Gandhi, Wujūh and Zahra, the lost street life of Beirut becomes an allegory for the loss of community, and sometimes, the re-drawing of new ones.

In Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra, as Joseph Zaydan points out, the war initially provides its protagonist Zahra temporary respite from the anxiety of her pre-war life, which is filled with physical and sexual abuse.37 At the start of the war, Zahra returns to her family home in Beirut from a terrible trip and a failed marriage in Africa. Her neighborhood has been taken over by a sniper, who has imposed his presence onto its landscape, such that “our street, once ruled by the spirit of life, now has death for its overlord” (113). Al-Shaykh’s work provocatively erases the difference between the fighters on the eastern and western sides of the city38; the following exchange between

37 Arab Women Novelists, 212. However, as Zaydan also points out, when she becomes pregnant out of wedlock, Zahra is astute enough to realize that “the war has not eradicated the cultural mandates for women” (212).

38 In his work on Lebanese film, Najib Hourani argues that the figure of the sniper or militiaman often becomes the narrative ‘Other’ against which the postwar nation is

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Zahra and her brother, a fighter, bragging about his newfound power, demonstrates this, as he tells her,

The whole of Beirut is ours. We, on the western front, and they, our opponents on the eastern front, command between us the buildings and the streets. Nothing that moves or doesn’t move is outside our control. We are the force and power and everything (139).

Through Aḥmad’s words, al-Shaykh’s novel traces the new networks of power across the urban space, and clearly separates between those who have access to the city and those who do not; even while Ahmad distinguishes between ‘we’ on the western front and the

‘they’ on the eastern front, he asserts a collective ownership over the city, and a panoptical power over its inhabitants in the name of all the fighters. 39 In contrast to

Ahmad, Zahra represents herself as confined to “this apartment and […] that window, my only link with the city and the war, and hence with life” (142). Yet, Zahra does leave the apartment, beginning an affair with the neighborhood sniper; walking along the streets and wondering why noone stops her from walking through the streets, she muses on her new-found power by association, which gives her a feeling of immunity 40; in fact, when the sniper promises to marry her after she has told him she is pregnant, the street, though still empty, no longer feels aberrant; “it seems as if the war has suddenly come to a stop

constructed; these movies construct the fighters “as predators who thrive on the exercise of arbitrary power against the nation”, thereby producing an enemy who can be contrasted to the cosmopolitan protagonists of these films (“The Militiaman Icon”, 299).

39 Maha Yahya describes how “the militias thus became the new tools for urban integration and social reordering of the population, yielding a new urban geography” (136).

40 Zahra describes herself as “the Queen of Sheba amid their disquieted stares” (156).

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with his promise that we will marry. Everything seems normal” (181).

Shereen Abou el-Naga argues that the war enables Zahra’s access to the public space as and modifies her relation to private spaces. For Zahra, whose refuge of choice even prior to the war, in Beirut and elsewhere, has been the bathroom, the street is an exciting, tantalizing place; even the sniper is not as isolated from the community as it would appear due to his presence and guardianship over the street – he finds out information about Zahra from the neighborhood men41. Thus, even in war, the street functions as a gathering place of sorts for those who have power over it. Yet, Zahra’s sense of regained normality is illusory and short-lived, and she dies in the street, in public, shot by a sniper, who may or may not have been her lover (182). However, for example, the war’s reorganization of public and private spaces allows her to see her home as a place of comfort, as opposed to a space of pain and abuse which it was prior to her trip to Africa and the war (“Al-Bayt”, 173).

In Elias Khoury’s two novels from this period, The Journey of Little Gandhi and

Wujūh, the street is a metonymy for urban life; the expulsion or eradication of the civilian population of Beirut from public spaces, most frequently symbolized by the street is a recurring theme in both these novels. In Little Gandhi, like Wujūh, an unnamed narrator collects a series of stories from a prostitute named Alice. She disappears after Gandhi’s death in an Israeli bombing raid in the summer of 1982. As in Wujūh, the narrative develops in a disjointed form, almost like a montage, which is linked in some writing to

41 For example, he mistakenly believes that Zahra cannot get pregnant (175), and knows that she has been divorced.

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the city and to the nation.42 There is some evidence that Khoury himself, in the case of

Gandhi, deliberately chose to focus upon a particular aspect of Beirut’s landscape, as a metaphor for both city and nation:

The Ras Beirut of the novel, as Khoury described it in an interview with al-Ittihad [sic], is "the area considered most cosmopolitan ... a place where universities, intellec- tuals, political struggle, bars, conspiracies, churches, and mosques are concentrated. It is like a miniature model of a city which is, in turn, a mirror of the country. (Aghacy, “Elias Khoury’s The Journey of Little Gandhi”, 164).

In the novel, the streets of Ras Beirut, near the American University of Beirut, where

Gandhi sets down his shoe-shining box and begins to work, having eliminated other parts of the city as potential sites for his establishment, are spaces of assembly, which Henri

Lefèbvre argued was the most fundamental of all signs of the urban (Urban Revolution,

116). And assembly there is: through his outdoors work, Gandhi meets professors, priests and prostitutes, and is given a new identity (his name is originally ‘Abd al-Karim; he is re-named Gandhi by an American professor).43 A new community is constructed, based on the sharing of public space, that seems to co-exist in spite of class, gender, ethnic and religious differences. Despite the earlier fighting, this urban microcosm endures until the

Israeli invasion of Beirut, when Gandhi is killed, Alice disappears, and the “stories died

42 Elise Salem argues that Khoury’s work is “wholly related in the Lebanese context”, and that he “provides new ways of conceiving Lebanon, now coincidentally engaged in war, and he does so primarily through structural and stylistic, not thematic, innovations” (Constructing Lebanon, 106); Dalia Said Mostafa claims that the fragmented structure of Khoury’s novels force the reader to “to link fragments of stories in order to imagine the city itself” (106).

43 Samira Aghacy reads this in the context of neo-imperial power relations in “Elias Khoury’s The Journey of Little Gandhi” (166).

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beneath [the narrator’s] pen” (191). Indeed, in the epilogue to Gandhi, the deaths and lives of Gandhi and the city are intertwined in a textual metaphor:

He knew why he died, he knew the bullets weren’t aimed at him, but rather at the heart of a city that destroyed itself, because it was like Gandhi, it was trying to make a story out of its name. And the story is a game of names…When we knew the names, the story began, and when the names were extinguished, the story began (194).

Although the concluding sentence of the novel can be read as an affirmation of the endurance of story-telling under any circumstances, it is also a stark contrast to the preceding sentence, in which the city and Gandhi are compared, as subjects attempting a reinvention, a self-motivated textual becoming that fails. When Gandhi dies, the community that populates his stories and the neighborhood disappears; more specifically, it turns out to be fictional, a literal imagined community that cannot exist beyond Gandhi and Alice’s stories. It is unclear what Khoury seems to be suggesting in his link between

Beirut and Gandhi: it is almost, in his text, as if he is suggesting that pre-1982 Beirut was nothing more than a collection of stories; a “Tower of Babel”, as the narrator describes it at one point, populated by speakers of many different languages, including Greek, classical Arabic, English, Assyrian, and Kurdish (27). With the invasion, however, this bustle becomes emptiness, and there is nothing left but death on “the streets of an abandoned city” (87). The contrast between bustle and assembly and wartime emptiness, silence, and the recurring association of this with writing, with the ability to write stories, relates Khoury’s sense of loss of the city to an attempt to find an interpretation or an explanation.

Similarly, in Wujūh, which predates both Gandhi and the Israeli invasion, the

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empty street is a symbol of the unease about the war, most notably the insistence that it has ended. Gary McDonagh’s work offers insight into the many constructions of emptiness in the urban context, and he points out that the designation of space as empty most often suggests conflict (4). Indeed, much of Wujūh is constructed around denial, the denial of the fact of war, the characters’ attempts to rationalize the violence outside the context of war; yet, the empty street punctures this narrative of denial, and gestures to an enduring conflict. For example, Nuha, Khalīl’s wife, insists that the war had nothing to do with Khalīl’s unemployment, and his retreat into the home: “No no the war has nothing to do with this, nothing changed in the war, the war has nothing to do with it, it’s just that Khalīl stopped going to the central post office in Riyaḍ al-Ṣulḥ square”, she repeats, almost like a litany of denial (20). But then, the streets of the city remain empty, contradicting Nuha, and contributing to the unease of Maḥmūd Fakhru, Fātima’s husband, taking care of a building in the now-deserted, once-upscale Kantari district.

Like Nuha, Maḥmūd’s story contains repetition; the two most repeated phrases are waḥduhu (‘on his own’) and shari‘ muqfar (desolate streets), the individual and the urban connected by abandonment. Maḥmūd is astonished, since he is alone, and “the streets are empty, but the war is over. ” (120).

The emptiness and loneliness of the street – i.e. the complete absence of any return to normal everyday life in the city – emphasize the absurdity of Maḥmūd’s belief that the war is over. And in fact, Maḥmūd is later gunned down on another street, on suspicions that he has stolen some valuable jewelry from the house that he was ostensibly guarding. In Wujūh, the street, once a public space accessible to all, is transformed into a site of danger; the ‘normal’ everyday life of the city cannot happen without access to its

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shared public spaces; since these are dangerous – both Maḥmūd and Khalil die on the street – then it is obvious that the city is not normal. Khoury’s work defamiliarizes the urban space by emphasizing its abandonment and desolation.

As the Lebanese war endured, and continued to redraw boundaries, the Lebanese were forced to inscribe and re-inscribe a new national and urban topography, but also new communities were drawn and re-drawn by forced migrations from other parts of the country or city, by death, as they are in both Elias Khoury novels, and by the changes in the cityscape. Yahya describes this best, in her article on wartime Beirut: “the city ceased to be everybody’s domain as one’s world shrunk to one’s immediate surroundings. Thus, the limitation of space turned into a radical separation” (“Reconstituting Space”, 135).

And, while the novels of this latter part of the war do not necessarily promulgate the urban divisions with the same ideological fervor of Sitt Marie Rose and Memory for

Forgetfulness, their images and symbols speak to an already-inscribed division of the city whose urbanity is increasingly lost as the war continues, and individuals are ever more isolated from each other, and from the traditional sites of community, such as the street, the marketplace, and the neighborhood.

Writing the Wartime City:

Moreover, as the war continued, it became clearer that the radically altered cityscape not only demanded a new form – the fragmentary novel – but also mandated a new language, such as Darwish’s ‘language of steel’ that could resist the Israeli fighter jets. Closing Jean Makdisi’s Beirut Fragments is a dictionary that directly links language

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to the city from its title, “Beirut: An Alphabet”. Remarking on the fact that one of the

“greatest sources of pride in Beirut has been the frequently affirmed claim that the alphabet, which provides language with a controlling order, was invented here”, Makdisi asks, “is it possible to hope that from the rubble of the war […] a new form might arise and permit future creativity?” (249-250). She then launches into her new ‘alphabet’, which begins at z, for zbaleh [garbage] and ends at B, for Beirut, for which Makdisi provides two entries. In the first, she writes, “Beirut: poor, ugly, stricken Beirut, broken

Beirut, unloved city, lost Beirut, like the child in the tale, torn between two mothers, but no Solomon here, no true mother”, simultaneously invoking and inverting former descriptions of the city as a beautiful, wanton woman (252)44. In Makdisi’s text, the city is an unloved child, one which in the second ‘definition’ of the city, “pleads to be redeemed” (252).

Yet, oftentimes, the new language was used in order to navigate the changing landscape of the city and the entire country. As Jean Makdisi writes, “We had to draw up a new map of our world, and we had no instruments to assist us except our wits and our senses. And our lives often depended on the accuracy of our construction, so it was a serious business, drawing up this map” (77). The image of redrawing the urban topography out of necessity resurfaces in a later account of the war, discussed in the following chapter: Hanan al-Shaykh’s Beirut Blues. In the novel, as the protagonist Asma is being driven through Beirut, she makes the following observation:

The old names have faded in importance, names that seemed to have been there for all time: Jounieh, Jbeil, Al-Dawrah. New names have become prominent: Tariq al-

44 Miriam cooke has written of the mothering impulse towards the city and the nation in Lebanese women’s writing in War’s Other Voices.

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Franciscan, Sudeco, the Museum with its mud and water, the smell of urine, and the people crossing from one sector to another with sorrow in their faces, a heavy weight on their shoulders, and the sense of frustration which escalates if this route is suddenly closed (274).

It is interesting here that al-Shaykh gestures to the fading of memory, and the imposition of a new topography onto the landscape of Beirut, but also of Lebanon. The three places that she mentions, once taken for granted, are all in the East, to the East of the new divisions in Beirut, and since becoming inaccessible to those on the western side of the city and of the country, they have become forgotten. The quote from al-Shaykh introduces a new element, memory, into the equation of the relation between cityscape and language, which as we shall see in the following chapters, becomes a major concern for post-war literature.

As they navigate the changing cityscape and the trauma of war, the writers featured in this chapter certainly react to and produce new understandings of the divisions and everyday life of Beirut at war. One thing that distinguishes their work from the writing of both the previous and the following generation, however, is that whether at the beginning of the 15-year conflict, or towards the end of it, these texts seem to accept the logic of a divided city, and adjust accordingly. Geographer May Davie observed in 1983 that Beirut’s civilians developed “a new mental geography, a very elaborate perception of space”, an observation validated by much of the literary work of that period in this chapter (“Comment”, 38).45 Rather significantly, this new mental geography often omits

Beirut’s center. The space is neither commemorated nor mourned, as it will be in the novels published after the war, nor is it criticized, as it was in Death in Beirut, where it

45 “Comment fait-on la guerre à Beyrouth?”, Herodote (1983) 38.

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was a symbol of the destructive policies of the political and economic worlds. The center is, in short, absent from these accounts of Beirut. No longer significant as a site of symbolic power, and not yet significant as a symbol of memory and of collective belonging, or as a contested site of power, as it was to become, the city center was a physical and symbolic no-man’s land.

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CHAPTER THREE

Commemorative Countermemories: Beirut in 1990s Lebanese Fiction

“The essential aspect of the urban phenomenon is its centrality” – Henri Lefèbvre

In 1994, the Lebanese singer Fairouz sang in Lebanon for the first time since the beginning of the civil war in 1975. The concert was sponsored by Solidere, which also chose its venue1: Martyrs’ Square in downtown Beirut, a focal site of Solidere’s reconstruction effort, and an extremely symbolic space in the Lebanese collective imaginary2. Solidere heavily promoted the event’s symbolism: Fairouz’s status in

Lebanon – and the rest of the Arab world – is quasi-mythological, and the company’s public relations arm deliberately correlated the concert to the end of the civil war, promoting the event as the singer’s “first public appearance in the country since the

1 Solidere’s acquisition of much of the land of central Beirut, and subsequent development project was hardly uncontroversial. A (critical) summary of the processes of this acquisition can be found in cooke’s “Beirut Reborn” (408-112). Some of the fiercest critical pieces can be found in Jad Tabet’s articles in Recovering Beirut and Memory of the Future, Saree Makdisi’s “Laying Claim to Beirut”, Critical Inquiry (Spring 1997), and Albert Nacchache’s “Beirut’s Memorycide” in Archaeology Under Fire.

2 For a history of the symbolic importance of Martyrs’ Square, see Samir Khalaf’s Heart of Beirut. Interestingly, however, Hashim Sarkis distances the space’s significance from the Lebanese state: “it is important to note that the old city center was not understood to be the symbol of the Lebanese state before the war. Iconographic thinking was not absent before the war. It just was not the way the state understood the territory” (“Territorial Claims”, 103).

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outbreak of hostilities and marked the end of her long, personal campaign of silence against the war and its aftermath” (Gavin and Maluf, 35).3

Angus Gavin and Ramzi Maluf, two architects commissioned by Solidere to produce the glossy coffee-table publication Beirut Reborn, also emphasize the event’s momentousness and monumentality in Lebanese national culture: a small caption underneath the photograph of the concert in Beirut Reborn proclaims, “Feyrouz [sic] sang in Beirut’s war-torn center, against a backdrop recalling the city’s maritime heritage. The event attracted crowds from all over Lebanon and began to re-establish Martyrs’ Square as the nation’s public arena” (35). On one hand, the caption highlights Solidere’s desire to mediate in the relation between the re-appropriated city space and the public through a selective re-writing of Lebanese history. For example, the caption purposefully refers to the city center as ‘war-torn’, while gesturing towards one aspect of the city’s past as a port. While true that after fifteen years of civil war, the entire city was, indeed, ‘war- torn’, the adjective smoothly elides over the fact that much of Martyrs’ Square had actually been demolished by Solidere’s bulldozers, and not by the war4. In fact, on this

3 For more on Fairouz in particular – and a brief discussion of the acrimonious debate around her 1994 concert – see Christopher Stone’s Nationalism and Popular Culture in Lebanon, The Fairouz and Rahbani Nation. Remarking on Fairouz’s almost mythological symbolic status in Lebanon, Stone says, “If the characters she plays in these works tend to take on male-oriented metonymic characteristics of the nation or community, the offstage Fairouz comes to be a metaphor for the nation” (146). Stone understands the Fairouz phenomenon within the greater context of the postcolonial, nationalist era worldwide, and describes how female stars “were an integral part of national subject formation”, playing the symbolic role of national bride or national mother, depending on that performer’s age (139).

4 Saree Makdisi points out that, even as the Solidere project was being debated, and had not been legally approved, bulldozers were demolishing space in Beirut’s downtown, and that “more irreparable damage has been done to the center of Beirut by those who claim to be interested in salvaging and rebuilding it than had been done during the course of the

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and several other occasions, Solidere had actively engaged in re-writing Beirut’s history to suit its own purposes5. In short, the company – well-connected to powerful figures in the government and political circles6 – was attempting to create what Yael Zerubavel describes as a new master commemorative narrative of the city and nation, “a basic ‘story line’ that is culturally constructed and provides the group members with a general notion of their shared past” (6). Solidere’s commemorative narrative, which underscores certain aspects of Beirut’s history, such as its maritime mercantilism, while omitting others, such as its Ottoman history, reproduces what Najib Hourani describes as an elite mythology of

Lebanon as a ‘merchant republic’.7 Zerubavel notes that such commemorative narratives do not need to be historically or factually accurate, since “the power of collective memory does not lie in its accurate, systematic, or sophisticated mapping of the past, but

preceding fifteen years of shelling and house-to-house combat” (674). Jad Tabet’s “La mémoire des pierres” in the Beirut, Memory for the Future anthology corroborates Makdisi’s claims.

5 One such example is Beirut Reborn’s omission of approximately 400 years of Ottoman history from its narrative of Beirut’s development, thereby ignoring some of the most productive – and collaborative, between Ottoman authorities and local Beirut merchants – urban redesign efforts in Lebanon’s history; in fact, the moment in which Beirut emerged as a modern city. For more on this, see Jens Hanssen’s Fin de-Siècle Beirut, and Engin Akarli’s A Long Peace.

6 The company was, as mentioned, started by Lebanese businessman and three-term prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri; other stakeholders included the Lebanese banking sector. For more on this see Najib Hourani’s dissertation on Solidere and its Lebanese and international networks, “Capitalists in Conflict”.

7 Hourani: “The national mythology of the elite holds that Lebanon is the exceptional product of an energetic and cosmopolitan merchant elite. Their efforts and Lebanon’s fortuitous location as the gateway “between east and west,” enabled the prosperity of the “Merchant Republic”” (199).

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in establishing basic images that articulate and reinforce a particular ideological stance”, in this case the neoliberal ideology of Solidere (8).8

The same Fairouz concert ends Hoda Barakat’s novel Ḥarith al-Miyāh. In the scene, the novel’s disorientated protagonist Niqula emerges from within the city’s destroyed center, where he has lived since the beginning of the civil war, and makes his way through the now-unfamiliar downtown area towards the sea. As Niqula proceeds, instead of the familiar line on the horizon, he sees “a sea of empty chairs, arranged in lines that made up large squares, like block formations of infantry. In parallel lines, they all faced the shore” (175). They are there because there is a concert planned, a concert given by someone “bearing the likeness of the singer Fairouz” (175). The language of this passage is deliberately ambiguous, mirage-like, nothing is as it seems; a plastic sea has replaced the real one, and even the familiar image of the famous Lebanese singer, the symbol of Lebanon and Lebanese nationalism, is a simulacrum, untrustworthy. Niqula sits down on a chair, among the many that remain empty, but the concert never starts, even as night falls. Despite the fanfare, and preparation for a major event, nothing happens, and no-one comes. Niqula’s inability to participate in this collective act – his inability, in fact, to even perceive that it is taking place – emphasizes the disjunct between Solidere’s desire to monumentalize and artificially re-insert the space within a discourse that attempts to produce a clean break with the past, and the Lebanese individual, who cannot forget – and does not want to.

In 1990s Lebanon, the debate over collective national identity frequently intersected with arguments over the future of the city center. One such example, which

8 See chapter conclusion.

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both summarizes and encapsulates the intensity of the debate, follows, in an excerpt from

Saree Makdisi’s 1997 article “Laying Claim to Beirut”:

Blank or not, the city center is a surface that will be inscribed in the coming years in ways that will help to determine the unfolding narrative of Lebanon’s national identity, which is now even more open to question. For it is in this highly contested space that various competing visions of that identity, as well as of Lebanon’s relationship to the region and to the rest of the Arab world, will be fought out. The battles this time will take the form of narratives written in space and time on the presently cleared-out blankness of the center of Beirut (664).

Makdisi elegantly correlates national identity to a textual ability to inscribe narratives onto a specific place: the now-blank city center. This quote simultaneously sketches out and underlines the momentum of this chapter: How Lebanese novelists in the 1990s participated in this narrative inscription, and therefore, in the debate over the collective imagination. On one hand, I argue, these novelists struggle to find the appropriate commemorative language to remember the city. Furthermore, this multi-faceted struggle is an essential component of a rising tide of countermemory, “essentially oppositional,

[standing] in hostile and subversive relation to” the master commemorative narrative

(Zerubavel, 10). The struggle over the representation of downtown Beirut highlights its importance as a commemorative space, what Pierre Nora would describe as a lieu de mémoire.9 Hanan al-Shaykh, Rashid al-Da‘if and Hoda Barakat’s mid-1990s novels

9 For Nora, lieux de mémoire are “sites where a residual sense of continuity [with the past] remains”. Nora contrasts these sites with milieux de mémoire, “settings in which memory is part of everyday experience” (Realms of Memory, 2). This definition draws out Nora’s important distinction between popular memory, which he seems to suggest is almost organic (he describes memory as “always embedded in living societies”, and history, “which is how modern societies organize a past they are condemned to forget because they are driven by change” about which more will be said later (Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1, 1,3).

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dramatize the relationship between citizenship and memory through writing about central

Beirut, a place which had by that point, to quote architectural theorist Hashim Sarkis, become “overcoded with political and religious demarcations” (103).

As I indicate in the preceding chapter, from the very beginning of the civil war in

1975, downtown Beirut was sealed off from the rest of the divided city and from the collective imagination as a site of everyday urban activity, becoming instead a symbol of the breakdown of society. Metaphors of Beirut and Lebanon’s death abound in the interdisciplinary discourse about the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war, which frequently singles out the downtown Beirut area as especially desolate, its destruction as particularly resonant 10. For example, André Bourgey describes the area as “inaccessible”,

“completely circumscribed and excluded from the every day travels of Beirutis” (25).

Another common description was of “no-man’s land”, such as in the following excerpt from Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation11:

Round the corner to our right was what we journalists like to refer to as “No Man’s Land”, into which no man had ventured for more than a year….what we saw was not a street in any real sense of the term. It was an avenue of crumbling, collapsed masonry” (89-90).

10 A small slice of this follows; One recent article discusses the question of the “urbicide” of Beirut (Sara Fregonese, “The Urbicide of Beirut? Geopolitics and the built environment in the Lebanese civil war (1975-1976)”), while another book’s subtitle announces, “The death of a state and the rise of a nation” (Theodor Hanf, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon). See also Farid Khazen’s The Breakdown of the State in Modern Lebanon, Albert Naccache’s “Beirut’s Memorycide”. In French, the adjective “éclatée”, which evokes a centrifugal scattering away from a central core, is frequently used to describe the city, such as in Andre Bourgey’s article, “Beyrouth, Ville éclatée”.

11 For a discussion of the social constructions of ‘no man’s land’, see Gary McDonogh’s “The Geography of Emptiness”.

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Fisk’s description strips the city center of its urban qualities – the street ‘is not a street in any real sense of the term’, for example – and exacerbates the difference between a ‘real’ city and destroyed Beirut. Such thinking forces a complete break with Beirut’s past as an inhabited city; that past, Fisk’s writing seems to suggest, is gone, and everything must be re-imagined anew.

To gage the predominance of the cultural trope of Beirut’s death during the 1980s, one needs to look only as far as some radical feminist discourses that not only reproduce this trope, but also elaborate on it by describing the destruction as a clean epistemic break with a totalizing past. miriam cooke’s War’s Other Voices is the paradigmatic work in the genre, and cooke’s term for the women she studies is almost-self explanatory: she calls these female writers ‘Beirut Decentrists’. Explaining that these women during wartime

“began to write about their particular experiences as women, and to recognize through articulation their previous oppression and marginalization”, cooke suggests that this led to them questioning “the selfness of the ‘center’”, that, “intensified, […] became the first step in the deconstruction of a dominant discourse” (11). Thus, these women’s work, by being ‘decentrist’, cooke suggests, resists this now-obsolete ‘centeredness’12. However, as the reader makes their way through cooke’s argument an elision of meaning arises between Beirut’s urban center and patriarchal discourses at several junctures in her work.

For example, for cooke, what joins these women writers is not only their subject matter, but also their position: “voices in myriad forms [that] express similar themes – from

Beirut but outside the expected, now dead, center”. Here, her deliberate ambiguity

12 In cooke’s telling of it, the death of this particular center is due to the fact that men have either gone off to fight in the war, leaving a space for women’s writing to emerge; alternatively, they may have taken ideological sides in the fighting and are therefore too involved to be able to produce non-committed art.

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conflates the city space with patriarchal tradition(11)13. In her readings, cooke disregards the ‘outside’, particularly ‘the center’ completely, focusing instead on the domestic spaces and relationships that she associates with the female experience; in fact, her analysis is in several ways dependent upon this center’s ‘death’, since it enables her to associate women’s writing with subaltern, once-marginalized resistance and the emergence of a previously stifled voice, and to create a distinction between masculine and feminine narratives of the Lebanese war, as I have shown in earlier chapters. 14 cooke’s rhetorical use of the metaphor specifically points to the reductive consequences of decontextualization; after all, as much work has shown since, both men and women’s writing about the Lebanese conflict complicates cooke’s hermeneutic of gendered writing.15 More generally, it shows the pervasiveness of the urban death metaphor in all manner of discourse about Beirut and Lebanon.

13 Recall that in the previous chapter, the same space was, in ‘Awwad’s Tawaḥīn Bayrūt, also targeted as the site of unappealing political, bureaucratic and economic practices, symbolized by the rats of Tamima’s dream. This suggests that the center was very much linked to ‘centralized’ dominant social practices. As Khazen points out, however, state centralization was one of the key complaints of several influential figures on the Lebanese scene, and decentralization was a strategy actively promoted by the state in the late 1960s (The Breakdown of the State in Modern Lebanon).

14 As I have already pointed out, cooke’s reductive argument willfully ignores the work of central male writers, such as Elias Khoury and Rashid al-Da‘if, who were as concerned as female writers with the breakdown of language, form and tradition that cooke sees as a purely female concern. Mona Amyuni’s “Wounded Beirut” offers up a reading of some of Elias Khoury’s work, and in Elise Salem’s Reconstructing Beirut, Salem incorporates both al-Da‘if and Khoury’s work into her analysis of Lebanese war literature.

15 This has already been discussed in the previous chapter. In his “Beirut: A City without History?” Saree Makdisi implicitly disagrees with cooke’s assertion that this was an exclusively female experience, and points out that behind most Lebanese war-time and post-war fiction is a “restless series of experimentations with alternative forms and structures of narrative, of remembering, of temporality, of subjectivity and identity” (209).

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Indeed, recently, scholars have begun to critically interrogate the lexicon of the war. Samir Khalaf notes that the use and perpetuation of such metaphors, which at the very least were reductive and essentializing, were somewhat deliberate, and that

“Lebanon was reduced in the global media to an ugly metaphor: a figure of speech that conjured up images of the grotesque and unspoken” (Heart of Beirut, 14). Khalaf seems to suggest that the city’s ‘death’ became shorthand for a number of tropes: barbarity, internecine violence, sectarianism, and the vaguely threatening downfall of a once- cosmopolitan, vibrant city16. Najib Hourani implicates academic discourse in this as well, and shows how academic accounts of the Lebanese conflict directly fed into the 1990s discussion over reconstruction:

The association of violence, sectarianism and the chaos of war with the traditional, the rural and the poor – each often standing in for the other, all representing the pre- modern – had a profound influence upon the debates concerning the reconstruction of the city center (192).

Unsurprisingly, images and descriptions of the city’s destruction were deliberately mobilized and disseminated by Solidere, the private company charged with the area’s reconstruction. For example, the Solidere publication Beirut Reborn, a coffee-table book filled with pictures and architectural diagrams of the projected city, describes the center as an area “that had almost died while life went on all about it”, and writes that the

16 In Histoire de Beyrouth, Samir Kassir notes somewhat cynically that the war in Lebanon was the first in which portable video camera recorders could be used, and suggests that a morbid voyeurism, combined with the end of the Vietnam conflict, may have played in role in the hugely televised early years of the war (17). In “Beirut Reborn: The Political Aesthetics of Auto-destruction”, miriam cooke echoes this, noting how “during the war and afterwards the urban violence was obsessively photographed and packaged in increasingly expensive and glossy formats” (393).

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challenge Solidere faced was “how to bring it back to life” (56). The language of revival gestures to Solidere’s constructed image as sole resuscitator of the morbid city, and posits the private company as a benevolent force, rather than as a profit-making monopoly that had maneuvered its way into sole ownership of a vast swathe of prized real estate.17

As I will explain in this chapter, the tension between the privatization of urban space and the perceived public right to it is central to the debate about the future of Beirut and Lebanon during the 1990s. Frequently, this debate flared up over Solidere’s selective re-writing of urban history, and its changes to facts on the ground that would allow it to, in Saree Makdisi’s words, “claim to represent the past and the history and collective memory of the old Beirut souks in its own spatiality” (“Laying Claim to Beirut”, 687).

Academics, journalists, documentary and feature film-makers spoke out about what they saw as violations of cultural memory and collective history, which were often condensed into virulent arguments over the space of central Beirut18. Given this, it is unsurprising that so much of Lebanon’s cultural and literary output in the mid-to-late 1990s addressed

17 Or, as Saree Makdisi describes it, a neo-colonial power that practices the “decisive colonization of the former [public interests and the interest of the former property-holders in the center] by the latter [private capital]” (“Laying Claim”, 672). In fact, Solidere sometimes made no show of hiding this; in his foreword to Beirut Reborn, the company’s chairman Nasser Chamaa sums up the appeal of the Beirut reconstruction project: “The Central District enjoys a geographical location at the very heart of the city and a unique history as the seat of government, trade, culture and communal living. It also has the resource of substantial new reclamation land and the benefits of an innovative concept in private-sector regeneration that secures adequate finance for reconstruction and resolves complex property rights” (i).

18 For a list of the types of public activities (academic conferences and publications, plays, etc) on the topic of public memory and the city, see the section titled “Memory in Art and Culture” in Sune Haugbolle’s “Public and Private Memory of the Lebanese Civil War” (195-196).

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the intertwined relations between memory, commemoration and the city. In al-Jazeera’s hugely popular documentary series, Ḥarb Lubnān, for example, the Lebanese flag is superimposed onto a black and white image of Martyrs’ Square before the war. The documentary’s tagline is “so that history does not repeat itself”, and the tagline and credits work together to emphasize the link between urban space, collective memory and national identity.19 In each of the three novels discussed in this chapter – Hoda Barakat’s

Ḥarith al-Miyāh, Hanan al-Shaykh’s Barīd Bayrūt and Rashid al-Da‘if’s ‘Azīzi al-Sayyid

Kawabāta, the space of Beirut’s center is a symbolic trigger for discussions of personal and collective memory and the role of the city – symbolized in these novels as the city center – in the collective life of the nation20.

Commemorative countermemories:

In one of the major classical texts on nationalism, Ernest Renan famously asserts that “forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality” (11) 21. For Renan, as long as the different social

19 The documentary is based on footage and interviews with several actors in the Lebanese civil war, often juxtaposing different narratives of the same events. It was a major television phenomenon in Lebanon when it aired on al-Jazeera in 2000, and the DVD box set was a best-seller (Haugbolle, “Public and Private Memory of the Lebanese Civil War”, fn. 16, p. 193).

20 In this chapter, I will use these novels’ English names and English translations: al- Shaykh’s Barīd Bayrūt is Beirut Blues, trans. Catherine Cobham, Da‘if’s ‘Azīzi al-Sayyid Kawābāta is Dear Mr. Kawabata, trans. Paul Starkey, and Hoda Barakat’s Ḥarith al- Miyāh is The Tiller of Waters, trans. Marilyn Booth. All page numbers correspond to the translated works. I will also use the name spellings used in these translations.

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components of any nation were unable to suppress their group memories for the sake of the whole, and also to forget traumatic events, then the nation could not survive. To this day, as if proving Renan right, many countries dealing with the legacy of civil conflict actively repress certain traumatic events; this is frequently attributed as a public good, a way of moving on past the collective trauma 22. In Lebanon, the state has played an active role in this repression, due to the fact that “Those responsible for the war—for massacres, theft, war crimes, and displacement of civilians—became responsible for rebuilding the country (Haugbolle, “Public and Private Memory of the Lebanese Civil

War”, 192). As a result, Haugbolle continues, “these people have had no great desire to shed further light on the past”, and have, in fact, actively promoted what he describes as an “infamous amnesia” (192-194).

There is ample evidence that attempts to promote public amnesia have served the political interests of particular Lebanese stakeholders; however, these attempts have also met with considerable resistance. 23 Haugbolle contends that, in fact, “the politics of

21 From “What is a Nation?”, trans. By Martin Thom, Nation and Narration (8-21). Renan’s statement, in turn, aids Benedict Anderson’s assertion that a nation is an ‘imagined community’ (Imagined Communities, 6). Maurice Halbwachs echoes this, asserting that “society tends to erase from its memory all that might separate individuals, or that might distance groups from each other” (On Collective Memory, 182).

22 For more on the suppression of certain forms of historical memories in post-conflict societies, see the introduction to the fourth section, “Marked and Unmarked” in Walkowitz and Knauer’s Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space. Of course, some countries, notably South Africa, have opted for the alternative route of meticulously recovering and recording the past, via such mechanisms as the Truth and Reconciliation Committees set up at the end of apartheid.

23 In addition to Haugbolle’s own work, War and Memory in Lebanon, critics of Solidere have been vocal about such practices. cooke writes “the new Downtown has been made to absorb the history of the war and in the process has emptied it of meaning” (Beirut

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remembering in postwar Lebanon emerged mainly through cultural production, by which various nonstate actors disputed the ethical, political and historical meaning of civil war”

(War and Memory, 4). While he notes that, in the absence of a hegemonic collective national memory, a “decentralization of memory” occurred, in which “smaller narratives emerged”, Haugbolle nevertheless connects these disparate countermemories in a common concern with downtown Beirut:

Silencing or at least downplaying the memory of the war was a conscious strategy in the reconstruction of downtown Beirut. For this reason, critics of state- sanctioned amnesia aimed much of their anger at the reconstruction project and the person of Rafiq al-Hariri. Because of downtown’s former symbolic and practical role as a mediating space for the Lebanese, the reconstruction process attained a symbolic meaning (84).

Throughout this chapter, individual and collective memories of the downtown area confront and contest the present space of the city. In fact, the recurrent evocations of the site suggest that the visit to downtown Beirut itself became a commemorative ritual, through which groups “create, articulate, and negotiate their shared memories of particular events” (Zerubavel, 5). In post-war Lebanon’s complex environment, where no narrative dominated over others, a plethora of literary voices participated in the debate over downtown Beirut’s past and future. The question of memory is inextricable from this issue. The novels in this chapter all interrogate the relations between individual and collective memory, and question certain processes of commemoration, while struggling with their roles, as writers, in producing collective memory.

In Rashid al-Da‘if’s Kawabata, individual memory directly challenges certain

Reborn, 412); see also Jad Tabet’s work in Memory for the Future and Saree Makdisi’s “Urban narrative” in Critical Inquiry (Spring, 1997).

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collective acts of commemoration of the city’s downtown area. Al-Da‘if’s narrator, also named Rashid al-Da‘if, is a wounded Leftist fighter relating his life to the dead Japanese

Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata24. Rashid’s most salient feature is his prodigal memory: he claims not to have forgotten a single detail of his life. Confidently, Rashid tells Kawabata that “my memory is a firm support for me, a support untouched by doubt”

(12). Yet, despite his own uncanny ability to remember and his faith in his memories,

Rashid is critical of certain practices of remembering25. For example, he is critical of public or cultural discourses fashioned around nostalgia, asking, “Why is it that we, the ordinary people, or at least the ordinary elite, can only talk about the past with nostalgia?

Why can’t we simply talk about it in a neutral way?” (13). In the English translation of the novel, there is a rhetorical distinction drawn also between ‘memory’, which is

Rashid’s personal memory, accumulative and ineradicable, and ‘Memory’, which Rashid describes in the following manner:

Then again, as you probably know, my fellow-Arabs’ lack of belief in me is not because they are convinced of the merits of forgetting, or of its necessity for the sake of progress. They are generally fed on memory, on Memory in fact – the Memory that we Arabs were once masters of the earth […] My fellow-Arabs know the future well, because the image of it is already in their minds, it is the past as they like to see it, and as they would like it to be” (17).

Thus, this cultural memory only serves to reinforce a willfully nostalgic distortion that affects not only readings of the past, but also visions of the future. In the face of

24 From now on, when I refer to the author Rashid al-Da‘if, I will either use his full name or his surname; when I refer to the character, I shall use Rashid.

25 And, occasionally, like Renan, argues for the necessity of forgetting “I am convinced of the merits of forgetting, of its necessity for the sake of progress” (19).

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collective nostalgia and cultural fixation on one narrative of the past that is projected onto the future – recall that Solidere’s slogan for rebuilding Beirut was Beirut: Ancient City for the Future26 – Rashid insists upon the validity and the indelibility of his personal memory, the authority for him and the reader27.

But Kawabata also critiques other, alternative commemorative practices and, much like earlier writers struggling with finding a language to describe the war, the novel struggles with the need to find a new lexicon of commemoration for downtown Beirut. In

Kawabata, as it is in so many of the films and novels of the 1990s, visiting the area prompts the conflicting desires of sharing memories of the space with others, and the inability to do so. Rashid tries to articulate his dilemma:

I wish I could speak to you at greater length about this square and the area around it, but I find myself extremely upset. Nor is this the first time that I find myself upset from speaking about this square…I have often tried and not been able to. I have often been asked and not been able to. And I always wonder about the reason!...What I am certain about is that something is upsetting me. It is not easy to explain (117-118).

The English translation italicizes the inexpressive generality of what Rashid is trying to say. And, in fact, Elliott Colla describes how much of the fiction about the Lebanese war insists upon the “sublime inexpressiveness for the magnitude of violence and destruction”

(“The Image of Loss”, 312). In Kawabata, however, it is not the war that taxes Rashid’s

26 More will be said about this in the next chapter; miriam cooke takes up and critiques Solidere’s re-imagining and reformulation of a classical past for Beirut in “Beirut Reborn” (412-421).

27 Saree Makdisi points out that, although we see “the stable narrative self of Azizi al- Sayyid Kawabata [sic] breaking down in the first lines of the novel” this does not mean that Rashid is an unreliable narrator, just that “other forms of narrative and of chronology must be invented” (“Beirut: A City Without History?”, 209).

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abilities to articulate his memories, it is the transformed space of Martyrs’ Square. By bringing attention to Rashid’s inability to express his feelings about the square, these feelings are put under erasure, and become themselves a statement of the tug between wanting to share, while also being unable to28. After all, Rashid is telling us that he cannot speak about the space while he is speaking about it. The novel circumscribes and highlights the discursive, collective silence around the ruined center by gesturing to

Rashid’s inability of sharing, or speaking about it. The character who cannot forget a single detail of the site and Lebanese contemporary history ironically cannot commemorate the space because something obstructs his ability to do so. This leaves the public space open to other commemorative discourses, not all of which are welcome.

Kawabata highlights Rashid’s turmoil, his struggle between wanting to contribute his own personal narrative of Martyrs’ Square and his inability to do so, by contrasting it with other forms of collective commemorative practices. These forms of nostalgic commemorations are produced not only by Solidere, but also by the cultural elite. Elise

Salem describes a “generally unspoken and insidious consequence of Lebanon’s wars: the capitalization of the tragedy by entrepreneurs. The numerous journalists’ accounts, artistic renditions, academic studies, and documentaries on Lebanon’s war are also salable products inspired by Lebanon’s demise” (214). Writing from an observer’s perspective of this consumption, al-Da‘if’s Rashid says, critically:

I still feel extremely upset when Martyrs’ Square is being talked about.

28 This idea of testimonial silence itself being as meaningful as speech is very common in discussions of other traumatic events, most frequently the Holocaust; see, for example, Giorgio Agamben’s “The Archive and Testimony”, in The Archive.

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I don’t like it when a man tries to achieve greatness for himself too easily. Film-makers have taken shots there, photographers have taken pictures there, and journalists written articles about the place. Visitors pay visits, tourists travel there and there is now an improvised café at the feet of the statue of the martyrs in the middle of the square (116-117).

Referring to both the above and the concerts that have taken place in Martyrs’ Square,

Rashid tells Kawabata, “Reports of these events stirred in me a desire to disappear, I mean to melt away into nothingness, to become a thing forgotten” (117). The image of ultimate withdrawal – into nothingness – from participation in this public spectacle is striking.

While disengaging from certain blatantly voyeuristic commemorative practices,

Kawabata also simultaneously registers its uneasy complicity in them. For example,

Rashid feels extremely guilty at acknowledging an aesthetic pleasure derived from the site of Beirut’s destroyed center. When a French companion says “c’est beau, c’est poetique”, Rashid admonishes her for exoticizing the ruins, but then confesses to

Kawabata that he agrees, that despite the fact that:

I would now like the earth to swallow me up, Mr. Kawabata, as I write these words. C’est beau, c’est poétique! These words expressed exactly how I felt also! (118)

Rashid’s plight dramatizes the conundrum of representing the ruins, and the tug between aesthetic objectivity and subjective engagement with the site, as a repository of cultural memory.

Rashid’s guilt over participating in public acts of commemoration is echoed by

Jawad, a writer and central character in Hanan al-Shaykh’s Beirut Blues. Jawad confesses

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to his girlfriend Asma that “I pick the bitter fruits of war and write in a Western language about the emotions which lie between my language and my conscience. The more successful I am, the more my conscience troubles me” (359)29. Al-Shaykh’s metaphor detaches commemorative language from subjective emotion, but also points to the struggle created by this almost impossible detachment. Together, these elements dramatize the writer’s rhetorical conundrum: how does one commemorate this public space in a manner that doesn’t make one want to disengage from the collective?

Moreover, it raises the related question: if the last generation of people to remember the area as it was before the war are reluctant to participate in the site’s commemoration, what will remain besides the commodification that repulses Rashid and Jawad as they self-loathingly participate in it?

Hanan al-Shaykh’s Beirut Blues also dramatizes the challenges of retaining and sharing memories of downtown Beirut as a lived space, in light of its present reality. The novel is composed of a number of letters its protagonist Asma writes to others; its longest letter is written “To my dear Beirut”. Asma and her lover Jawad enact the commemorative ritual of visiting the destroyed city center30. Standing at the site, Jawad, a

Lebanese expatriate writer, is forced to adjust his lexical understanding of urban space.

Prior to actually seeing the site, Jawad referred to it as ‘downtown’; he remembers it as a bustling city, and repeats the word ‘downtown’ “constantly until he saw the ruins”

29 Hanan al-Shaykh claims that Jawad is the character she identifies with the most, in an interview with Yusra al-Amir in al-Ādāb (83).

30 Significantly, Zerubavel writes that “through commemorative rituals, groups create, articulate and negotiate their shared memories of particular events” (5). In this fiction, the visit to the ruined downtown is a ritualized act of commemoration.

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(263)31. Faced with the new reality of the urban space, Jawad falls silent.

Like Rashid, Asma and Jawad struggle not only with the incongruity of the city’s present form with their memories of the past, but also with the problem of sharing these memories with others. In Beirut Blues, even as Jawad and Asma stand together looking over the ruins of Martyr’s Square, each is lost in their own, private memories. For example, as Jawad reminisces about buying books with his father, Asma is thinking “of the Capitol Hotel and Omar Sharif” (273). Physically together, they are mentally separate as each relates to the demolished center as a personal artifact of their own memory. Ann

Marie Adams observes that Beirut Blues circumscribes “an intensely personal sense of

‘space’ and of ‘nation’” [that] is "moving beyond an essentialist notion of space as transparent which can and should be mimetically represented" toward a refigured geography that not only addresses "the multiple and complex construction of subjectivity but also of space itself" (213). Adams suggests that such mapping is problematic for the ability to imagine a community; these memories are difficult to share, thus unable to function as collective narratives.32

But Adams’ point is undermined by the text itself, which emphasizes how the subject’s isolation is unavoidably penetrated by the Other, seemingly reinforcing

31 Hanan al-Shaykh has reportedly claimed that this section, in which “she attempted to capture the Beirut she remembered before the war altered it forever”, was originally over 300 pages long, but was trimmed in the editing, so that it is “only marginally reminiscent” (Salem, 218).

32 Adams writes that “Asmahan's new "imagined community" also tends to negate collectivity outside of an individualized voluntaristic desire. Asmahan's vivid memories and colorful "pictures" may be able to construct an alternate nation, but the nation is hers alone […] In her rejection of centralized and unifying causes, Asmahan seems to valorize the localized vision of the (privileged) individual (214).

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Halbwach’s notion that society plays an inevitable role in individual memory.33 As Asma and Jawad continue their journey around the ruined center: “Jawad is studying the roads again, no doubt trying to recognize them. His silence, punctuated by deep sighs, speaks clearly to me, his thoughts burn straight into my mind and interfere with my memories”

(275). Thus, while the same sight/site carries different significations for each of Jawad and Asma, there is no escaping the fact that the space engenders shared memories for them both. In other words, Beirut Blues seems to imply that there can be no isolated memories of a public space. But the quote also emphasizes the role of the Other in re- writing an individual’s historical memory, and highlights the dynamic interplay between an individual’s memory and the group’s in the practice and articulation of collective commemoration.

As in the other two novels, Hoda Barakat’s The Tiller of Waters complicates the relationship between individual and collective memory, and the role that memory plays in commemoration. Additionally, however, Tiller articulates the process formation of individual memory through the family and the wider social group. On one hand,

Barakat’s Tiller emphasizes the importance of the transmission of memory as the enabling device for a coherent sense of community, in which, “when the words of our grandfathers begin to be forgotten, the knots and threads in the weaving begin to come undone and the world ends in fragments, shapeless, a dust cloud in the nebula” (129).

Yet, on the other hand, through a continuous play of dualities throughout the text,

“between the real and the imaginary, past and present, life and death, illusion and reality, the everyday and luxury” and between different kinds of historical narratives, Barakat

33 Halbwachs writes that “the mind reconstructs its memories under the pressure of society” (51).

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complicates the relationship of the transmission of memory (Boustani, 234). The narrator of Barakat’s novel is a cloth-trader, Niqula Mitri, who, through a series of events precipitated by the war, loses his home to squatters and winds up living in the middle of the ‘no-man’s-land’ of Beirut’s city center, in his father’s old shop. The novel intertwines his lifestyle in the present, foraging for food and negotiating life with wild dogs, with his memories of his beloved servant-girl Shamsa, and his family history.

In much post-war fiction and in Tiller, memory – and indeed, identity – is intimately intertwined with the city. As the novel’s formal and thematic structures shift, so does the nature of Niqula’s relationship to the city. At the very outset of the novel, the two are welded together by ‘events’ that neither parent could have predicted (9). The war creates a vacuum, which in turn becomes a space for Niqula to thrive, away from “the land of the wars” beyond it (108). Inside the abandoned space of downtown Beirut,

Niqula finds his comfort and solace, which enables him to – for the first time – have a home separate from both his father and his mother; this allows him to “ live now as I always hoped to live” (9). Niqula’s life in this new space is simultaneously strange and familiar, nostalgic and generative; he orients himself in the newly changed city from memory, but also realizes that he must draw for himself, “a new map of these sites that had changed so much, losing their original features” (62). As Niqula delineates the boundaries of his city above-ground, the violence forces him downwards, into Beirut’s catacombs. And, as he delves deeper into his family memory, Niqula also enters deeper into the bowels of ancient Beirut; the imagery of excavation and exploration serving to further tie the joint fates of the man and the city. Thus, the recipient of so much transmitted history becomes a creative agent, as passivity gives way to action and Niqula

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becomes the master of his own desires and imagination, finally allowed to come into his own, for at least a short while (35).

In Tiller, the collective memory of the group overshadows and contains those of individuals. The novel articulates this dynamic chiefly through the binding figure of the relationship between Niqula and his parents. In How Societies Remember, Paul

Connerton suggests that through the stories that are transmitted from one generation to the next, “images of the past and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained”, and in Tiller, Niqula receives this collected history from both parents (39-40).

Not accidentally, his relationship to each parent resembles that of storytellers and audiences. In this way, the novel creates a set of conceptual links between on the one hand, memory, history and storytelling, and on the other, (individual) artist and

(collective) audience. Through this relationship, the narrative explores different techniques of remembering and retelling history, from family histories to more formalized ‘Histories’, while complicating this facile distinction.34 After all, as Maurice

Halbwachs reminds us, family memories “not only reproduce [the group’s] history, but also define its nature and its qualities and weaknesses” (59). In addition, family memories are not only culturally significant because they situate the individual in relation to his or her family, but because they enable the family to situate itself vis-à-vis society35. In

Barakat’s novel, competing historical narratives within the same family emphasize the

34 The theoretical body of work on the false distinction between fiction and history can be traced back to the work of Hayden White, in particular to Tropics of Discourse.

35 Halbwachs explains that, “During our entire life we are engaged at the same time both in our family and also in other groups. We extend our family memory in such a way as to encompass recollections of our worldly life, for example. Or we place our family recollections in the frameworks where our society retrives its past” (81).

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social construction of human memory, and highlight the processes by which one commemorative narrative comes to dominate over others within the context of a family, but also within the framework of society.

Niqula’s personal history is produced from the conflict between two competing forces, which Pierre Nora would describe as memory and history: his mother’s retelling of history as personal memory, and his father’s more analytic historiographies. For Nora,

“memory accommodates only those facts that suit it”, like the “changeable” stories told by Niqula’s mother (Realms of Memory, 3)36. At first, Niqula resists his mother’s stories, but then he begins to accept them as historically valid: “Soon I began to listen to her stories in a different way”, he writes, “questioning myself, skeptical of my own presuppositions […] Who could say that her tales, as variable as they were now in her old age, were not for the most part true, that they did not record events that actually took place?” (3,7). Niqula’s demand for absolute truth in history become less strident, and as he grows, Niqula realizes that there is a space for his mother’s stories; he becomes a more tolerant listener, not searching in them for truth necessarily, but able to tolerate her fictions, even enabling this process: “I helped her to create her fanciful roles, her changing narratives about herself and us, so that she could cross over into that world of the imagination peacefully and reside there, in the illusion of that world and its sweet lightness” (165).

Yet, as it registers Niqula’s growing acceptance of his mother’s stories as a valid

36 To Nora, history on the other hand is “an intellectual, non-religious activity [that] calls for analysis and critical discourse” (Realms of Memory, 3). Niqula’s patrilinear histories are constructed not only from family memories, but also from intellectual or pseudo- intellectual artifacts like astrology and scientific hearsay.

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form of commemorative narrative, Tiller also seems to undermine them as building blocks for collective memory. Despite Niqula’s growing tolerance for his mother’s stories, he still distinguishes between the personal nature of her memories and the more social, collective memories of his patrilinear heritage. The mother’s tales are undermined by being the products of a troubled mind; as the novel progresses, we learn that the woman “goes into a state of delirium; she invents for herself lives and roles. Perhaps she is trying to escape this destiny that she appears to recognize” (163). Like Nora’s definition of memory as “a phenomenon of emotion and magic”, oblivious to all but the facts which suit it, the mother’s narrative is an inward-facing narrative of escape, a fantasy created by her need for fiction (Realms of Memory, 2); but, to those on the outside

(her audience, as it were), it is somewhat dangerous, out of control, something whose motivations can be understood, but which is socially and culturally insignificant.

On the other hand, the patrilinear stories that Niqula learns from his father link

Niqula to his family and to Beirut, which features in all of these inter-generational tales.

In an elaborate metaphor in which weaving cloth – recall that cloth trading is the family trade – is compared with telling stories, we learn that, “the weaver entrusted with the secret is a man”, and that this is “the secret of life and peace, a secret forever menaced by the victory of death and war” (129). Soon afterwards, the imagery of weaving becomes a metaphor of urban planning: “the techniques that go into cloth-making are in essence like the planning and construction of the city”, Niqula tells Shamsa, in which human beings mark their spaces through cloth, and “the home grew by accumulation, its outer margins expanding” (131). Niqula’s family narrative emphasizes the link between city and collective memory, since what ties all these homes together is “the columnar memory of

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the grandfather, [which] expands the rings made by the homes of children and grandchildren, always held within the magnetic field of kinship and inheritance” (132).

The metaphors connecting weaving, urban construction and storytelling all share an ordered, methodical quality to them, and compound the image that all three are essentially constructive and progressive forms, that build upon the past incrementally37.

Furthermore, by combining his family trade with urban history, Niqula’s family story locates its tellers and listeners firmly within the social group.

As it continues to explore the subject of individual and collective memory formation, Tiller dramatizes the hold that a successful narrative has on its audience.

Niqula’s attention is captivated by his father’s and grandfather’s stories; unlike his mother’s stories, in which he has to take an active, unwelcome, enabling role, “the words of my father held me in their power”, leading him to passively “forget everything too”

(25). The patrilinear storytelling tradition, powerful as it is, makes him into a passive listener, fully absorbed by the narrative, “bewitched by my memory of my paternal grandfather’s words” (66). What extends these stories’ relevance beyond the family unit is their power over others as well. For example, when Niqula tells Shamsa his father’s stories, she too physically succumbs to their power. She tells him, “the parts of my body relax, so I can forget them and so that I can train the alertness of my ears, my imagination, my understanding onto the thread of your long and lovely tale” (130). In fact, so powerful are these family histories that they displace official History: Niqula’s father’s stories are “lessons […] which took the place in my head of the lessons I learned

37 Yael Zerubavel notes that oftentimes, nationalist narratives focus on a group’s historical development and its movement through history, which “often implies a linear conception of time” (7).

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in school” (9)38.

For a while, then, it would appear that the novel rejects female narrative modes and women’s histories in general in favor of the more social, nation-building Histories that men pass on to each other, and which serve a didactic function for the younger generation’s conception of itself and its place in the collective. This seems to be substantiated by the move that Niqula makes from the female environment of his mother’s home to the masculine environment of his father’s shop in the abandoned city center, which is where he finds that he can “live in a state of happiness and ease” (9).

But, just as this is a more complex move than first meets the eye – Niqula, after all, moves from a social environment into a completely solitary existence – Tiller does not allow the authority of the dominant narrative of patrilinear history to triumph.

While Tiller teases out the complexity and power of master narratives such as the father’s and grandfather’s throughout, it ends with their complete disruption. As I have already indicated, one aspect of Niqula’s patrilinear family history places him and his family firmly within the collective history of downtown Beirut’s suq, or marketplace. But the other element of this narrative is its content: the father’s and grandfather’s stories are total narratives which incorporate astrology, scientific information and historical fact in order to frame the history of Beirut as a “self-evident rhythm” of glorious excess and then fantastic collapse (31). In short, the Mitri’s family stories create a mythology which presents the city’s history as a cycle of destruction and reconstruction, gesturing to one of the most common myths of the city – that of the phoenix rising from the ashes. As the

38 Zerubavel also notes that collective memories formed in early childhood “might persist even in the face of a later exposure to history” (6).

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novel progresses, it seemingly underscores the validity and power of this family mythology through Niqula’s faith in it.

But, in a completely unexpected, violent rupture, the novel ultimately destabilizes the authority of this patrilinear narrative, thereby calling into question all possible forms of collective memory formation. As the novel’s form begins to abruptly unravel, we find out that Niqula is dead, and the unnaturalness of his death is placed in stark contrast to the “natural” past cycles of life, death and rebirth in the city that the father’s stories insist upon. Barakat’s novel ends with the complete rupture of the cyclical, transmitted, shared

(national) history and with the suggestion that this current phase calls for a new form of collective memory. The stories of the grandfather and father fail, because in this present context, they do not apply. They are “simply a matter of fine rhetoric shaped into the metaphorical vessel of wisdom sayings that the generations inherit and pass on without finding their own truth in them […] it was futile to try to benefit from the lessons of the grandfathers. The advice was too remote for the coming days, and we draw on the lessons of experience only when it is too late” (165). In present-day Beirut, Tiller implies, all historical memory is both obsolete and redundant.

What finally undermines Niqula’s faith in history and memory is not forgetfulness

– “I did not give in to forgetfulness, Papa”, he insists, but rather the changing nature of the city. Killed by Israeli soldiers, he wakes up in 1994.39 An out-of-body experience after his death wakes him up, but he is lost in a place with “Nothing. No rock, no vegetation, no beast pawing at the ground” (174). He keeps moving in this “smooth desert without the sand”, looking for a landmark, insisting that from the sea “I will try to

39 The Israeli presence in Beirut lasted from 1982-1984 (although their presence in Southern Lebanon continued until 2000).

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see where I am, pinpoint my location. And from there I will figure out the direction the shop lies in, or I’ll see some landmark, something to guide me, so I can reorient myself to go on” (174). However, he never does; the landscape has changed so drastically since the

Israeli invasion that, in Soubhi Boustani’s words, Niqula loses all his “points de repère”

(234). Crucially, it is not the war that disorients Niqula, but the post-war landscape of the city. Soubhi Boustani associates Niqula’s disorientation not only to the destruction of his past, but also with an anxiety about the future: “all the memory of a city reconstituted by the hero is suddenly irretrievably effaced forever. The future is completely unknown, and we have no idea what future Beirut will look like” (234).

In her exploration of the dynamic processes involved in collective commemorations, Yael Zerubavel argues that historical transitions produce what she describes as “turning points”, moments “that changed the course of the group’s historical development and hence are commemorated in great emphasis and elaboration” (9). Yet,

Zerubavel also posits that it is precisely during these liminal historical moments that countermemories emerge to contest previously unchallenged hegemonic narratives.

Unsurprisingly then, the end of the Lebanese civil war and new phase of reconstruction precipitated many debates about memory and commemoration, each vying to impose its own narrative viewpoint upon the situation, producing a number of competing histories of the community. In Tiller, Solidere’s erasure of Beirut’s downtown, and its consequences for both individual and collective memory symbolizes one such turning point. Like Rashid, and Jawad and Asma, Niqula’s historical and geographical markers are effaced by the city’s new reality. For Lebanese novelists in the 1990s, this debate was often framed in a series of questions about the forms such commemoration should or

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should not take, and a struggle between wanting to participate in this commemoration and an ambiguity towards some of its more public, commodified aspects. They engage in it by attempting to find a new commemorative language that incorporates the personal, the collective and the urban.

The language of (collective) commemoration:

When the object of commemoration is a site of loss – whether by defeat, or death, or destruction – rather than victory, the language of commemoration tends towards the melancholic. Several critics pick up on this trend in Lebanese fiction. For example,

Soubhi Boustani describes the post-1990s generation as “impotently participating in the disappearance of a capital“ (234), while miriam cooke and Elliott Colla both write about the melancholy of Lebanese post-war fiction40. And, in several ways, post-war Lebanese fiction seems to be melancholic. After all, as Freud defines it, melancholia, like mourning is, “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one's country,” and, as I have already shown, these novels are reacting to the perceived loss of their city (“Mourning and Melancholia” 3). Yet what separates one from the other is that the melancholic struggles with and becomes absorbed by the loss differently from the mourner; turning inwards, “he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished” (Freud, 4) 41. In Kawabata, for

40 In “Beirut Reborn”, miriam cooke writes: “Beirut is lost, and the poets, filmmakers, and photographers are weeping at the traces” (405). Writing on the work of several Lebanese filmmakers in that same period, Elliott Colla describes it as embodying a “melancholic sublime” (“Image”, 314).

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example, Rashid seems to critique but also participate in a collective cultural, self- recriminatory melancholy: Why “can we only talk about the past with nostalgia?,” he asks, while wishing for cultural objectivity (13). While this is a compelling avenue for further research, it is unclear to me whether, so soon after the end of the civil war and the perceived collective loss of the city, one can successfully separate mourning from melancholy in Lebanese post-war fiction. After all, according to Freud, one of the greatest distinctions between the two is that the mourner can eventually recover and move on, whereas the melancholic is unable to. In short, the mourning process takes time, and without further investigation, it is difficult to tell whether these late 1990s novels are working through the mourning process, or are in fact, the artifacts of a pathologically melancholic generation.

A more compelling frame for understanding the language of commemoration in these post-war novels can be found in the much older, classical Arabic poetic tradition42.

Again, both cooke and Colla gesture to this in their work on post-war Lebanese photography and film, respectively, although cooke does so indirectly, describing how these “poets, filmmakers and photographers are weeping at the traces” of lost Beirut

(“Beirut Reborn”, 405). Unlike cooke, Colla directly correlates the post-war representation of loss to its classical Arabic counterpart, arguing that, in this particular case, the latter is a more useful interpretative framework than a traditionally Western one

41 Freud explains the distinction as one between consciousness and unconsciousness, in that melancholia is in “some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious” (“Mourning and Melancholia”, 4).

42 Interestingly, Colla also describes how Islamic poetry informed by this pre-Islamic tradition uses the imagery of the ruins and the poet’s melancholy to extract lessons (‘ibar) (Conflicted Antiquities, 82).

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which focuses on a “sublime inexpressiveness” of loss because it simultaneously gestures to the difficulty of representing what has been lost while also acknowledging a

“generative notion of loss in representation” (Image, 313, 314). Writing of Lebanese filmmaker Jalal Toufic specifically, Colla says:

The problems addressed in his writing resonate with those that have been central to so many artists within the traditions of Arabic literature, especially poets: poets, whose lamentation of loss recognized the fragility of imaginative resurrections; and poets who, in recognizing the failure of those resurrections …allowed for loss itself to be registered as an image... Likewise the task of poetry for them was to make present that which is absent, a task which, even in the failing, somehow succeeds (“Image”, 314).

To understand how Lebanese post-war novels develop this classical tradition in their representation of the city, I must digress to a brief summary of this poetic tradition.

In Arabic, the predominant form of poetry for over one thousand years has been the qaṣīda, a “metered poem in monorhyme, usually of fifteen to eighty lines”, that traditionally incorporates three thematic units, the nasīb, the raḥīl and the fakhr

(Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak 3,4). Of the three main components of a traditional qaṣīda, the one that is most relevant in this context is the nasīb, which usually begins the poem. In the nasīb, the poet and his travel companions stand at a distance from an abandoned encampment and the poet invites his companions to share in his commemoration of those who lived there, especially his now-departed beloved.43

Significantly for this chapter, Susan Stetkevych connects the nasīb’s ritualized

43 The other two parts are the raḥīl, the poet’s description of a journey, and the fakhr, the poet’s praise of himself and his tribe. For more, see Susan Stetkevych’s introduction to The Mute Immortals Speak.

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performance of commemoration with the poet’s separation from society, and in particular with his distance from “his past as lived in these [now-abandoned] dwellings” (18). As noted above, the novels connect the ruined city space with their past everyday lives by gesturing to the latter’s irretrievability. They also underscore the characters’ disdain for certain other forms of social, public commemoration. For example, in Tiller, before physically separating himself from “the land of the wars” by moving into the city center,

Niqula distances himself from the other members of society by refusing to participate in their ritualistic consumption of the ruins, and their willingness to forget the city center’s recent past:

When the battles had stopped after what they came to call the Two-Year War, I had not gone to walk around the city center as so many others had. I had not strolled through the city as so many folk had, dressing their children in Sunday best, making sandwiches and packing cold drinks and roasted seeds, and going off to sightsee in the silent wreckage that so shortly before had been a scene of unceasing tumult and unbearable crowds. I found them appalling (24).

Niqula’s solution is to separate himself from these collective rituals by isolating himself in his city center and his memories.

But poet and literary critic Adūnis argues that the nasīb also depends on a transition from the personal into the collective sphere of commemoration44. In his description of the archetypal qaṣīda, the mu‘allaqa of Umru’ al-Qays, Adūnis writes,

44 Although Stetkevych, following Victor Turner’s view of ritual, sees the nasīb as a moment of separation from the social group, she also notes that the qaṣīda as a whole encapsulates a ritualistic rite of passage that enacts social separation (the nasīb) – liminality (the raḥīl) – and social aggregation (the fakhr) (8).

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Umru’ al-Qays announces his presence by talking of an absence; i.e., through weeping-memory. And the weeping happens upon a stage where he asks his friends to share in his sorrow. And while the poem ostensibly evokes only two people, it embraces all who empathize with the poet in his experience, and all who have experienced something similar (78).45

As Adunis suggests, the classical tradition of interpellating the poet’s companions is a gesture of transition from the personal to the public; from private memory to a shared, common one. In all these novels, a similar gesture is made, in which personal memory is shared, both with a textual other and – by extension – with a greater audience. In some cases, this happens out of necessity, such as in Barakat’s Tiller, where a collective effort goes into remembering the specific details of downtown Beirut’s landscape, and the novel’s acknowledgements (in the front of the Arabic version, the back of the English) thank “all of the friends in Paris and Beirut for their help in recalling places that no longer exist”, which gestures to the collective, yet telescopic act of memorialization at stake for Barakat and writers of her generation. In Kawabata, Rashid brings Kawabata into his reminisces about Lebanon, then Martyrs’ Square by addressing him directly, at various times throughout his evocation of central Beirut, as “Mr. Kawabata” and “you”

(116-117). Rashid shares his memories of Lebanon, Beirut and the war with Kawabata, who, like Beirut is absent, yet brought into presence by Rashid’s speech act. Likewise, in

Beirut Blues, Asma’s visits to Martyrs’ Square are shared with Jawad, Hayat and Simon

(263-266).46 Moreover, the structure of al-Shaykh’s novel, as a series of letters to

45 In Kalām al-Bidayāt, my translation.

46 However, Ann Marie Adams points out that these others “are included in this refigured Beirut because Asmahan's desire demands that they be included. There is nothing to say,

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addressees, enacts the same action of reaching out textually to an outside other. Paul

Connerton asserts that, often, the formation of collective social memory is simply,

“communication between individuals”, and the novels reduce this to the most basic relationship between a storyteller and his or her companion (38). The poet and his companions are at a distance in both time and space from the site; it can only be accessed again through the sharing of memories. In turn, these shared memories produce a new countermemory of the city’s history.

But, as I have already shown, these commemorative processes are not simple; they are impeded not only by conflicted emotions, but also by the challenge of describing a completely transformed space. Consequently, these writers not only gesture to the classical tradition, they re-write its paradigms for a contemporary city. If the language of the old nasīb, “is the language of what is tangible, the language of things. It is the language of the present, direct”, the language of the new nasīb, the prose nasīb of postwar Beirut, is fantastical and figurative (Adūnis, 76). In Beirut Blues, for example,

Silence hung over the long grass and monstrous plants, which would have looked less strange had they been trees with thick roots, growing individually, but they were springing out of the floors and walls and up through the roofs of the melancholy shops and offices. Jawad closes his eyes, wanting to believe that things are as they were and that he’s merely gone deaf or has distorted vision. Images buried in the convolutions of his mind rise to the surface. The top floor of the building like an elephant lying on its side used to house an eye clinic (263).

though, that this "community" exists outside of Asmahan's imagination or that the various subjects of her national discourse would be content being placed together in such a way” (“Self and Nation”, 214).

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The improbable jungle imagery of wounded animals continues in another passage shortly following this one, in which “the collapsing buildings” are “like spotted leopards crashing to the ground” (266). The imagery of these paragraphs transforms urban destruction into primordial jungle; ruined architecture is compared to wounded animals.47

Tiller also records the change between the city’s past and its present by using the imagery of overgrown nature overtaking and subsequently defamiliarizing the city landscape.

Once Niqula has crossed over into the city, he enters a world where nature has taken root.

Niqula survives because of this newly feral landscape, which sustains him:

I came upon the fruit of half a field of Indian figs in front of the Restaurant Ajami […] If it had not been for the apricot tree in the Souq Bazarkan and the wild blackberry bushes at the Municipal Building whose fruits had grown to the size of the mulberries at the Mosque of Amin, the constipation would have poisoned my blood and finished me off (135).

Together, these two novels reinforce the image that Beirut’s center is no longer comprehensible as a part of its natural environment. Not only has nature overtaken culture, as in the classical tradition, it has completely transmogrified it, turning the city’s landscape into the landscape of a distant, unfamiliar environment.

Yet, in the classical nasīb, the ruins also symbolize “an intractable problem of culture, namely the interdependence of memory and forgetfulness, writing and erasing”

(Colla, Conflicted Antiquities, 81). As we have already seen, in these novels, the ruins – temporary as they may be – prompt meditations on the role of the writer in

47 In The Mute Immortals Speak, Stetkevych shows how Labid’s mu‘allaqa, an archetypal qaṣīda raises the issue of the culture/nature dialectic; she argues that “essential to this dialectic is the ephemeral and transitory quality of all that is cultural or cultivated – that is, human – as opposed to the permanence and perpetuity of the natural” (18).

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commemorating this loss. However, the unnatural environment also challenges representation. In Beirut Blues, the ruins produce “strange colors for which people had no names, as they stood watching overwhelmed by the spectacle of the dismemberment of what had constituted everyday life” (266). Representation is completely shattered by the geographical reality of the new urban landscape and the post-war nature of Beirut, whose ruined landscape generates so much conflicted emotion and contested commemorations.

It is to this ruined urban landscape that I now turn.

The Landscape of commemoration:

In Realms of Memory, French historian Pierre Nora suggests that as memory becomes threatened, attachment to place increases. “Places”, he writes, “become important even as the vast funds of memories among which we used to live on terms of intimacy are depleted, only to be replaced by a reconstructed history” (6). In Lebanon, a country where history is literally being reconstructed onto the urban space, particular attention must be paid to cultural and literary representations of this space. After all, as

Aldo Rossi observes, “the history of the city is always inseparable from its geography; without both we cannot understand…the physical sign of this ‘human thing’” (The

Architecture of the City, 97). In the previous section, I refer to Beirut’s downtown area as a ‘ruined landscape’, and indeed, in some ways, the novels represent it as a site where the everyday has been ruptured and the urban dislodged by an unnatural nature. All these novels resist, challenge and undermine hegemonic histories of the area through the oppositional gesture of resisting dominant practices of commemoration and presenting

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their own memories, structured around the commemorative ritual of standing at the traces of the city center. Nevertheless, they understand the cityscape and the urban space in different ways, with different implications for the discourse of urban memory in

Lebanon. Whereas some, like Beirut Blues, mourn Beirut at a distance – ‘a stage’, as

Adūnis would describe it – inaccessible linguistically and physically, jarring in its unfamiliarity and from which they feel estranged due to inappropriate acts of public commemoration, others, such as Tiller, literally and figuratively enter right into the heart of central Beirut.

In Beirut Blues, the signs of the urban are necessarily the signs of everyday life; their absence from contemporary Beirut only undermines the city’s distance from its own past and from the past of its inhabitants. As they walk through the ruins, Jawad and Asma recall medical clinics and booksellers, drycleaners, bars and restaurants, an inventory of what al-Shaykh describes as “what had constituted everyday life”, that is evoked by the

“temporary return” of the signs of everyday life, including “hurrying pedestrians, blaring horns, and distinctive smells of coffee, grilled meat, garlic” (265-266). In fact, Ann

Marie Adams directly links Asmahan’s sense of place to her personal past, to “memories of her grandparents, in remembrances of her friends and lovers, as well as in her experiences of the present and hopes for the future” (“Self and Nation”, 212). As Asma says, “It’s impossible not to have vivid memories of the past here” (265).

However, in Beirut Blues’ present, the ruined landscape can only be apprehended from a distance, just as it is in a classical nasīb. For example, when Asma first sees the ruins, it is from a rooftop:

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From the roof of the Azariyya [sic] building I saw the buildings collapsing like dominoes. The ones that resisted seemed to be waiting their turn, observing the splendid collapse of those around them; it was as if they preserved within them the memory of the past […] An advertisement for a film surviving as a reminder of the city in the days when it used to swallow lights and spit them out like a fire-breathing dragon. The remains of a neon arrow pointing to Aazar [sic] coffee (266).

The quote emphasizes the notion of surveying the area from afar both physically – from a height – and temporally. In other words, gazing down at the ruined landscape, Asma becomes like Michel de Certeau’s visitor to the World Trade Center, one whose

“elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance” (92). Asma’s physical distance from the ruins creates a totalizing vision, one in which all that can be seen in the present are the ruins, which are understood in relation to the remains and traces of the bright, effervescent, transformative everyday of the past. Even when she comes down to street-level, Asma still sees the present-day city in relation to its past, as is the case when she finds herself near her childhood home: “I have to strain to see Shari‘ Mohammad al-

Hout, where I was born. It branches off Shari‘ al-Sabaq, where we are now. I look at it, and at Shari‘ Hiroshima, and see an image of myself walking along the sidewalk where the restaurant was, following my father” (276). The imagery of straining suggests that, even at ground level, physically seeing the street is difficult; and, immediately upon looking at it, all Asma can remember are childhood memories, which further exaggerates the distance between past and present. Life in Asma’s Beirut, like the landscape of

Adūnis’s poets, is nothing but “absence and memory” (76).

On the other hand, Tiller is marked by the action of walking, which Niqula does repetitively, circumscribing and claiming his space within the city. In Barakat’s work especially, the space of Beirut’s center can be seen to embody a form of Foucauldian

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heterotopia, those spaces that are:

[S]omething like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. (“Of Other Spaces”, 4)

Niqula’s Beirut is ‘outside of all places’ – distinct from the “land of the war” outside

(108); through its representation of central Beirut as not only habitable, but welcoming and sustaining, Tiller inverts the paradigm that insists upon seeing the ruins as ruins; distant, impenetrable, alien. Instead, the streets and neighborhoods are re-appropriated, and re-inserted into an – albeit unusual – everyday life.

Niqula’s first act of appropriation is an act of re-orientation that is also a commemorative cartography of the center’s former landscape. When Niqula finds himself alone in his father’s shop in the heart of downtown Beirut after having been evicted from his own home by a squatter family, he begins to wander around the city center; “standing in front of the chasms that had once been shops in Souq Tawile. It was not an easy matter to recollect their names or owners – even for me, who had grown up there” (24). The latter phrase is repeated more than once in the text; Niqula emphasizes that this is the city and place where he was raised; and that even he has trouble recognizing now – at several points in the novel, for example, he gets lost, confused by the absence of any familiar landmarks. Slowly, however, Niqula begins to reconstitute his cartography of Beirut’s central district, by walking around in the city center, from one place to the other. In the novel, there are not only references to these walks, but they are

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mapped out in painstaking detail. For example, “from Rue Allenby I will turn into Rue

Abdallah Beyhum, not into the avenue where the City Hall sits, as I did last time”, and

“This evening, my route will take me by the façade of the Restaurant Ajami. I’ll walk down Rue Khan Fakhri Bek as far as the Majidiye [sic] Mosque, or south to the Samatiye

[sic] cemetery.” (35), and, “I took my departure from Souq Ayas, going out to Rue

Allenby and then to Rue Weygand and on to the high end of Avenue Foch. I passed in front of the shwarma shops near the establishment of Theophile Khoury … I pressed on until I reached the Rivoli” (102). A verbal map of central Beirut is reconstructed on the pages of the novel, a network of roads, directions, and alleys that archives these street names as well as reminds readers of the existence of these places.

In his wanderings around the city, Niqula thus creates what Michel de Certeau described as “pedestrian speech acts”, which involve the: “appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian” (97-98). Alone in the center, Niqula begins to imagine the entire area as his: “I am its only sovereign. I preside over all that is above earth and what lies beneath the surface” (61). As the novel progresses and his

(possibly imagined) struggle with the wild dogs begins, Niqula literally marks his territory by urinating every few steps, explaining that he is trying to reach “some sort of accord, a possible symbolic code by which we could begin our coexistence peacefully”

(102).

Following de Certeau’s idea that topographical acts are discursive, then the novel’s insistence on mapping out the streets of the city does more than set the scene for Barakat to create a realistic background for the fate of her character and the city, as Sobhi

Boustani suggests (227). After all, de Certeau insists that as pedestrians walk across the

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city, their walking becomes an enunciative space, in which the relations between different positions are drawn (98). As Niqula wanders about the city, he recalls not only the landmarks of street names, but also highlights the shopkeepers’ and tradesmen who occupied these stores:

I convinced myself to take a serious walk to the further end of the Place des Martyrs, as far as the Café Parisiana and, opposite, the shop of Qaysar Amir, king of fireworks […] Then I made a turn at Zayn, the fresh juice seller[…] I passed in front of the Café Laronda, then the theater of Shushu the comedian, and went on to Gaumont Palace, the famous cinema I had not yet entered” (43).

Niqula’s remembered cartography of the city is also a cartography of the small businesses and entertainment venues that had made up the area, a nod to the city’s past as a mercantile center. In fact, as has already been pointed out, one of Niqula’s first acts when he finds himself in the city center is to stand in front of the ruined shops trying to remember their names and owners (24).

Crucially, these novels do not display any nostalgia for a pre-capitalist era, which has sometimes been confused with the fact that they do not display any nostalgia at all.48

As I pointed out earlier, these novels operate outside the urban-rural binary of earlier

Lebanese novels. Their referential space is the city itself – even when the village is mentioned, as it is in Beirut Blues and Kawabata, it is a place that the protagonists have fled from, and reject. Therefore, these novels are not nostalgic for a pre-capitalist utopia, the small farming village of earlier Lebanese fiction, as much as for a small, mercantile capitalism in which shopkeepers helped each other, as did Niqula’s father and his

48 Salem writes, for example, that in al-Shaykh’s work, “there is no time or place for nostalgia, for fixating on a past that never was, nor could have been, ideal” (218).

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neighbor Hajj Abu Abd al-Karim49. Niqula’s commemoration of the shops that used to line Beirut’s streets are a more detailed version of Rashid’s list of “markets, banks, cinemas, popular theatres, hotels and red-light district, and its bus stations and taxi ranks served by vehicles from every part of Lebanon” that characterized the “heart of

Lebanon”, (Kawabata, 115). Moreover, during a period when these same owners and shopkeepers were being forced to sell by Solidere, this textual reminder of their history and location in the heart of the capital reinforces the novel’s critique of the present.50

Thus, while Boustani suggests that Barakat’s use of the fantastic is her instrument that enables her to express what otherwise cannot be spoken, that it is in other words her way of placing the present under erasure, I would argue that in her realist literary reconstruction as well, a critique of the present through the evocation of the past emerges

(232).

Although at first Niqula’s arrangement is idealized as the best possible outcome of his situation, as the novel progresses, his contentment is destabilized. At the outset of the novel, Niqula is portrayed as living a Robinson Crusoe-like existence: he gathers food and water from different parts of the souk, makes blankets from the cloths he finds in his

49 Leila Fawaz’s work has played an influential role in relating the rise of mercantile capitalism with the development of Beirut in the late nineteenth century. See for example, Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth Century Lebanon. In the novel, this nostalgia is figuratively expressed in metaphors of cloth, and the deterioration of this practice begins prior to the war, with what Niqula’s father describes as the “Age of Diolen” (synthetic fabric).

50 Of course, this phenomenon is not confined to Beirut; David Harvey’s “The Right to the City” charts these changes in several towns and cities in North and South America, and concludes “the right to the city, as it is now constituted, is too narrowly confined, restricted in most cases to a small political and economic elite who are in a position to shape cities more and more after their own desires”, New Left Review 53, September- October 2008, 9.

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shop basement, and begins to scavenge for useful objects on his daily walks. He even begins to stake a topographical claim on the city; for example, he decides that “I will give new names to streets and markets that I did not recognize. In my head I would draw a new map of these sites that had changed so much, losing their original features” (61-62).

Yet, while initially happily at a distance from the ‘land of the wars’, as the novel progresses, Niqula’s idyllic existence – and sanity – begins to disintegrate, mostly due to the encroachment of other creatures onto his space.51 He begins to get lost frequently, despite being able to remember the street names and directions he wants to go. He becomes more anxious, wary of the dogs, doing his best to avoid them and to protect himself from them. And, most relevantly, he begins to retreat deeper into the catacombs of the city and into his memory, and in particular to an interlocking series of narratives, in which he remembers how he shared his father’s – and grandfather’s – stories with

Shamsa. Ultimately, the retreat inwards into personal history proves to be destabilizing for both Niqula’s character and the novel itself.

As I have already mentioned before, Tiller ends with the erasure of Niqula’s spatial memories of the city, and the loss of his sense of direction, in a place that is described as barren and empty, as a desert, with “Nothing. No rock, no vegetation, no beast pawing at the ground”, in stark contrast with the wartime space that had been fertile enough to provide him with both sustenance and rich fodder for his reminiscences (174). At the

51 It is at this point, Soubhi Boustani argues that realism gives way to the fantastical in Barakat’s novel. Boustani writes, “la confrontation du narrateur avec ces phénomènes survenus dans sa vie de solitaire au centre-ville a conduit comme dans le roman fantastique à une sorte de désintégration du personnage” [The narrator’s confrontation with these impositions upon his solitary life in downtown leads to a disintegration of his personality, as in fantastical novels”] (232).

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Fairouz concert, the signs of the assembly – which Henri Lefèbvre directly associates with urban life52 – are all there: the seats have been arranged, the stage has been set; however, a crucial element is absent: the crowd, the people who will turn empty, prepared space into an urban space. In a similar moment in Beirut Blues, Asma is in a club, where she remarks, “the people make a city, and these were strangers. Although they filled the room, I could only see empty space” (310). The imagery of the barren desert appears as well in earlier critiques of the construction practices of Solidere in the city center, such as Jad Tabet’s complaint that “Du plein du centre….il ne reste rien. Rien qu’un vide serein ponctué d’iles eparses. Un desert ou flottent quelques monuments preserves.” [There is nothing left of the plenty of the center. There is nothing but emptiness, punctuated by sparse islands. It is a desert, where a few preserved monuments float] (239). Recently, Aseel Sawalha has shown how the category of ‘emptiness’ defies

Solidere’s attempts to represent the city center as a vibrant community. 53 Crucial to this is the assertion that the opposition between former abundance/ current scarcity is not between the pre-war and post-war city center, but between the pre-1990 city, war-torn as it was, and the post-reconstruction city center. These countermemories present this reconstructed city as a non-city, as an empty site lacking all the elements that would make it a true urban space.

Earlier, I suggested that Beirut’s center in Tiller is a heterotopic site, in the

52 “The signs of the urban are the signs of assembly: the things that promote assembly (the street and its surface, stone, asphalt, sidewalks) and the requirements for assembly” (Urban Revolutions, 118).

53 Sawalha records how images of downtown Beirut as an empty space persist, despite Solidere’s attempts to imagine the site as well-populated, in all its renderings and models. Reconstructing Beirut (11).

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Foucauldian understanding of the term: an alternative site – paradoxically at the heart of the city, not at the peripheries, like the mental hospitals and cemeteries that Foucault speaks of – through which the novel contests the post-war appropriation of space by private capital. However, the ambiguous ending of the novel gestures to one of the critiques of Foucault, made by David Harvey in his Spaces of Hope. While acknowledging that Foucault’s notion of heterotopia is attractive, Harvey argues that it is based on the presumption that all sites of ‘Otherness’ are attractive, and reminds the reader that concentration camps, factories, shopping malls and barracks “are all sites of alternative ways of doing things and therefore in some sense ‘heterotopic’”; yet none of these spaces can honestly be perceived as a site of resistance to official discourses of power (185). The ruined city center in Tiller is definitely a heterotopic space, in which the individual’s past and memory of the city center as a site for everyday life defies the present appropriation and use of the center as a site of private urban planning, and controlled monumentality. However, Niqula’s social isolation, descent into madness and subsequent unreliability as the custodian of the city, and his inability to engage in any of the public life of the reconstructed city also push at the limits of Foucault’s optimistic conception of these sites. The new city is no longer a place for those with long memories, as Niqula and his father have, and there is something artificial in the plastic sea of those who have forgotten too easily, yet Niqula can do nothing about either. Tiller registers

Niqula’s resignation towards the appropriation of Beirut’s past, and its regurgitation as simulacrum. Sitting alone on the chairs, facing the sea, for the final time, Niqula asks

“Have I not spent my entire life tilling the water?”, then connects his story to his history for one last time: “Isn’t that what we always did, father?”, he asks (175). And on that

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rhetorical question, which frames the uncertainty and hesitation of Niqula towards his present and the future of the city that he was so connected to, the novel ends.

The Right to the City:

For Aldo Rossi, ruined cityscapes evoke the inevitable dynamics of urban change, but also “the interrupted destiny of the individual, of his often sad and difficult participation in the destiny of the collective” (The Architecture of the City, 22). In these post-war Lebanese novels, characters resist some forms of collective being in public space while simultaneously yearning for others, as they try to find the balance between what to forget and what to remember. For example, Kawabata’s Rashid, who is incapable of expressing his thoughts about Beirut’s city center in the present, proudly remembers its past:

We called our capital’s main square Martyrs’ Square by official decree, but it was popularly known as ‘Downtown’ or ‘Burj Square’. Before the war it was the heart of the capital, with its markets, banks, cinemas, popular theatres, hotels and red-light district, and its bus stations and taxi ranks served by vehicles from every part of Lebanon. It was the heart of Lebanon (115).

This passage from Kawabata establishes agency and involvement not only on the popular level, but also on the political – “we” named the place ‘by official decree’. The passage evokes meeting-places and public spaces, the signs of assembly and symbols of urban life, according to Henri Lefèbvre (The Urban Revolution, 118). In contrast, the language of the present in these novels, as I have pointed out, frequently utilizes the imagery of emptiness, of desert-like barrenness or jungle-like threat, to highlight the unreality of this

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urban space, and the dislocated, disoriented and disenfranchised feelings of its inhabitants. As in the classical Arabic tradition, the ruins of Beirut’s center – temporary though they may be – serve “as figures of memory, writing, and the possibility of culture”, and they prompt alternative memories of the city space that oppose and resist

Solidere’s new facts on the ground (Colla, Conflicted Antiquities, 81).

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CHAPTER FOUR Tracing Beirut in Contemporary Historical Novels

In the preceding chapter, I showed how, for a generation of writers in the 1990s,

Beirut’s destroyed center became a site of commemorative countermemories that contested Solidere’s attempts to re-write urban history. Novels written in the immediate aftermath of the civil war, like Beirut Blues, Tiller and Kawabata attempted to come to grips with the changing urban landscape. Frequently, they invoked a remembered, personal everyday geography of the city center, in which ruined landscape left behind by the war functioned as the enabling device for such meditated memories.

By the early 2000s, central Beirut’s landscape had changed dramatically from the previous decade. Although slower than initially anticipated, Solidere’s development had picked up, and the city center was less devastated than it had been a decade earlier.1 But as critics like Saree Makdisi bemoaned, reconstruction had come with a hefty price, so that “lost in the development of central Beirut is a sense of history” (“Reconstructing

History, 25). For Makdisi and others, this ‘authentic’ sense of history had been replaced by Solidere’s re-imagined history, which was seen as “an attempt to short-circuit the historical experience and the memory of the war itself” (“Reconstructing History”, 25).

1 See Najib Hourani’s “Capitalists in Conflict” for more details on the actual pace and scope of reconstruction in the 2000s.

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As I have already discussed, the creation of a collective narrative is predicated on the selective re-writing of history; in Lebanon, Solidere’s narrative re-wrote Beirut’s past to suit its purposes. Yael Zerubavel explains that:

The construction of the master commemorative narrative exposes the dynamics of remembering and forgetting that underlie the construction of any commemorative narrative: by focusing attention on certain aspect of the past, it necessarily covers up others that are deemed irrelevant or disruptive to the flow of the narrative and ideological message (Recovered Roots, 8).

Solidere’s Beirut Reborn often places Beirut within an almost utterly decontextualized, dehistoricized context. In a seven-page chapter on history, unironically titled “A Rich

History”, only one page is assigned for the period between 1850-1975 (and this section is mis-labeled “The Last 100 Years”). The four centuries of Ottoman rule are hardly mentioned; there is no account of the 1860 war, which had played a major role in expanding and mixing the urban population of Beirut.2 In the same small section, the book’s authors state that “the first modern efforts to organize Beirut along civic lines, including policing, hygiene and quarantine laws, were also implemented in the 19th century, during the long reign of Bachir II (1789-1840),” deliberately re-writing historical fact as nationalist myth, in order to attribute urban agency to the symbolic ruler of Mount

Lebanon – a nod to Lebanese mountain nationalism – whose political power hardly extended beyond the mountain, let alone reached the city that wasn’t even a part of his

2 In “The City and the Mountain”, Leila Fawaz describes the role played by the emigrants from the mountains in not only swelling the city’s population, but also in creating a sectarian imbalance that was to remain persistent into the next century. Yet she also remarks that the 1860: “events of the civil war constituted a turning point: on the one hand, they illustrated dramatically Beirut's political ascendancy and, on the other hand, they set into full motion the price the city paid for it” (491).

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dominion at the time (Beirut Reborn, 26).3 Moreover, in a gesture that is almost transparently an exculpatory nod to the contemporary practices in the area, Beirut Reborn triumphantly compares French Mandate-era “clearing of the medieval city fabric” to

Haussmann’s urban redesign of Paris (27). Finally, the recent history of post-Mandate

Lebanon (1943-1975) gets one paragraph in the section.4

Solidere’s deliberate erasure of Beirut’s Ottoman history and the latter’s urban legacy is more than just a denial of historical complexity, or a reformulation of history as nationalist myth. It is also an attempt to wipe from the collective memory the agency of

Beirut’s nineteenth-century inhabitants in – basically – transforming the city from a small town into a thriving provincial capital. Significantly, historian Jens Hanssen attributes

Beirut’s ascendency as a premier port-city in the nineteenth century to “the acute sense of political geography of its intermediary bourgeoisie,” who were able to avert “wholesale surrender to international capital, and by and large, managed to twist capitalist penetration to enhance their own vision for the city”, through a united effort by “Ottoman governors, the municipality and local merchants” (86). Since what Solidere had

3 The Ottomans granted vilayet status to Beirut in 1888; prior to that, it had been part of the vilayet of Saida (Sidon). Mount Lebanon was run as a separate, semi-autonomous region. The misrepresentation of the Ottoman history of Beirut is not unique to Solidere: in recent years, however, some revisionist historians, such as Engin Akarli, Jens Hanssen and Stefan Weber have begun to question the Arab- and Lebanese-nationalist, anti- Ottoman narrative of Lebanese history. See for example, Akarli’s The Long Peace, Hanssen’s Fin de-Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital, and the anthology The Empire in the City.

4 Saree Makdisi pithily sums up the status of history education in modern Lebanon, which Beirut Reborn seems to fit into: “The Republic of Lebanon gained its independence in 1943; its history came to a sudden end in 1946” (“Beirut, a City without History?”, 201).

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effectively done was a unilateral ‘surrender to international capital’, it follows that its narrative would prefer to forget this moment in Beirut’s earlier past.

As Zerubavel shows, “remembering and forgetting are thus closely interlinked in the construction of collective memory”; interestingly, then, as Solidere strove to efface memories of the nineteenth century from the urban fabric and collective memory, a new generation of Lebanese writers began to write about this era (8). The early 2000s saw a growing rise in historical novels set in nineteenth-century Beirut, such as the two novels discussed in this chapter: Alexandre Najjar’s Le Roman de Beyrouth, and Rabi‘ Jabir’s

Bayrūt Madinat al-‘Ālam5. The uncanny contemporaneity of both novels to other works, such as Carole Dagher’s series on the silk trade in nineteenth century Mount Lebanon Le

Couvent de la Lune (2002),6 suggest an emergent interest in the fictionalization of

Lebanon’s and Beirut’s history. Collectively, they seem to indicate the development of a new genre of contemporary Lebanese historical fiction. Following Raymond Williams, we could describe this as a ‘structure of feelings’, that “can be related to the evidence of forms and conventions – semantic figures – which, in art and literature, are often among the first indications that such a new structure is forming” (Marxism and Literature, 133).

For Williams, recognizable changes in literary forms were the indications that a new

5 Referred to henceforth as Beyrouth and Bayrūt respectively. All the translations in this chapter are my own.

6 The novel’s title is a translation of the Arabic Dayr al-Qamar, a village in the Shouf region that flourished during the 19th century, due to the silk trade. It is noteworthy that Amin Maalouf had already been established as the Lebanese writer of historical fiction par excellence, his Le Rocher de Tanios having won the prestigious French-language Goncourt prize in 1993. However, Maalouf and Dagher’s work, while interesting as part of a growing trend of Lebanese Francophone historical fiction, is outside the scope of this paper.

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cultural moment was emerging; in the case of Lebanese fiction, this would suggest a correlation between the newfound popularity of the historical novel and the great post- war social and cultural changes in the country. 7 With memory discourses as fraught as they are in Lebanon, it is perhaps unsurprising that young writers like Najjar and Jabir engaged directly and actively with writing – and perhaps, re-writing – the nation and the city’s history.

Unlike the writers of the previous generation, whose work is firmly situated in the post-war present and immediate past; i.e., within the remembered past, the work of these young writers begins in the reconstructed city then leaps back in time, to the late nineteenth century. Both novels in this chapter begin at a moment when Beirut, emerging from an earlier civil war, began to self-consciously articulate its own form of urban modernity; the very moment that Solidere’s selective history suppresses. While these recent novels do not ignore the 1975-1990 civil war, they do not dwell on it as much as the previous decade’s novels do. Rather, their focus is on a Beirut split by one century of historical time that is nevertheless conjoined by its urban history. Reinforcing Tamsin

Spargo’s diagnosis that “arguments about the past are often explicitly, and […] always implicitly, interventions in debates about the present and the future” (2), in the early years of the new millennium, Jabir and Najjar both published historical novels that simultaneously situated themselves in the old and extremely new hearts of Beirut, and

7 The rapid change of the political situation after 2005 seems to have hindered the development of this emergence; in fact, Najjar and Jabir have both left behind the historical novel form: Najjar has gone on to write a biography of Jibran, and Jabir has also moved on (see fn. 9).

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which actively strove to construct as well as maintain a connection between distant past and present.8

As I argue in the previous chapter, the novels of 1990s Lebanon countered amnesiac discourses by invoking personal memory as countermemory, and by re- inscribing these personal memories onto the devastated space of central Beirut; for the following generation, such personal memory is impossible. This generation can only apprehend and contextualize the city through what Marianne Hirsch terms

“postmemory”; i.e., through the mediated memories of others.9 In these novels, the choice to skip a generation and to introduce older male authority figures suggests a distrust of the war generation, perhaps for its perceived involvement in the 1975-1990 fighting, but also, perhaps, from a desire to include other voices in the imaginary collective10. Although these novels, perhaps problematically, seem to ignore, or repress, some memories of war – the same accusation is, of course, leveled at Solidere – they also perform a significant commemorative gesture of refusing to memorialize the war as a complete break with Beirut’s past. Furthermore, this generation of novelists distances itself from both dominant 1990s cultural voices: unlike Solidere, their novels present the war as a significant event in the lives of the main characters; yet, unlike the previous

8 The first volume of Jabir’s 3-volume epic Bayrūt Madīnat al-‘Ālam and Najjar’s Le Roman de Beyrouth appeared in 2003; the second and third volumes of Jabir’s Bayrūt trilogy were published in 2005 and 2006 respectively. In the books, Jabir’s narrator (also called Rabi’ Jabir) claims that there will be 7 volumes of the series, but to date only three have been published, and Jabir has moved on to other genres, including science fiction.

9 See next section.

10 As noted earlier, Paul Connerton links the successful transmission of social memory to the storytelling ability of the oldest members of a social group (39).

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generation, they do not represent the 1975-1990 civil war as the singular event of

Lebanon or Beirut’s history. Subsequently, these novels call into question both these historical narratives, and raise a new set of concerns about individual and collective belonging to the city and the nation.

Placing the Self in the City:

I have already discussed how a sense of place is not only intimately connected to an individual’s well-being, but also to that individual’s ability to situate him or herself within the social sphere. In his extremely influential The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch describes this as ‘cognitive mapping’:

In the process of way finding, the strategic link is the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual. This image is the product both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience, and it is used to interpret information and to guide action. The need to recognize and pattern our surroundings is so crucial, and has such long roots in the past, that this image has wide practical and emotional importance to the individual (my italics, 4).

Importantly, Lynch connects successful mapping with the immediate present as well as with memory; the implications being that individuals without access to memory are unable to accurately situate themselves in their environments. This is significant because, in addition to its crucial role in the development of the individual’s relation to urban space, the recognizability of an urban landscape is also a social matter, since “a vivid and

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integrated physical setting, capable of producing a sharp image […] can furnish the raw material for the symbols and collective memories of group communication” (4).11

While earlier generations of Lebanese could situate themselves with respect to

Beirut’s center through personal recollection, which also mediated collective memory, the younger generation, lacking both memory and immediate perception, simply cannot.

Architect Robert Saliba’s work on cross-generational mental maps of post-war downtown

Beirut shows the clear gaps between each generation’s ability to draw the urban space and their connection to the city. The generation that was aged 36-45 in 1991 drew more elaborate mental maps of the city; Saliba found that they were the ones most invested in re-building the downtown area as it had been, since “they had greatly interacted with the city center during the 1960s and the 1970s, and the city center formed an integral part of their mindscape”; in short, their personal memories of the space motivated their desires to see it rebuilt as it had been. This is the generation which so eloquently resists Solidere’s intervention in the urban landscape through its commemorative countermemories, as discussed in the previous chapter.

In contrast, the generation born immediately before or during 1975, to which both

Najjar and Jabir belong, are in a curious, in-between predicament. They have no recollection of the city center as it was before.12 But they also seem to understand that an

11 Lynch’s work has impacted other fields. In a short essay entitled “Cognitive Mapping,” Frederic Jameson takes the basic premises of Lynch’s argument and extrapolates them into the political realm, concluding that “the incapacity to map socially is as crippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban experience” (Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 353).

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inability to cognitively map their urban history is problematic, and is hampered by

Solidere’s reconstruction, which has re-designed the urban space. Beyrouth’s young, anonymous narrator complains that nothing remains of the city to ground him to its past:

This morning […] I tried in vain to reconstitute la Place des Canons – also known as Martyrs’ Square, or Al-Bourj Square – to find vestiges, landmarks that could reconcile me with the past of my country…What became of that place that war – and the bulldozers of reconstruction – ravaged? Nothing. Nothing survived. (14)

This short quote lays out the crux of the problem at hand: because no recognizable urban landmark or monument exists to enable the narrator to construct a sense of place in

Beirut, the narrator simply cannot locate himself in the city or the nation. Because he is deprived of this crucial urban experience, Beyrouth’s young narrator has no sense of place. The two novels’ different attempts to imaginatively re-construct the urban practices demolished both by war and by the bulldozers are the main focus of this chapter.

Each of the novels in this chapter sets out to construct the map of downtown

Beirut for the new generation. They re-historicize the city space by delving into its distant past, and moving forward in time into its contemporary present. If, as miriam cooke suggests and Saree Makdisi implies, one of the projects of Solidere’s reconstruction of

Beirut was “to tame this lieu de mémoire”, which entails that “the traces must be eliminated or made to represent another kind of history”, then both Beyrouth and Bayrūt appropriate this practice and re-write it as their own (“Poetic Beirut”, 417).13 Moreover,

12 Ironically, although those over 45 drew the most vivid mental maps of the city, they were not as nostalgic as the earlier generation, Saliba found (“Deconstructing Beirut’s Reconstruction”, 3).

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by divorcing urban memory from exclusively personal memory, these young writers give their generation a participatory voice in the articulation of Beirut’s past and present. By reinserting the historic traces of old Beirut onto the contemporary city, the novels draw a new cognitive map of the city that connects its past to its present, and resituates both the individual and the collective in the city center, and in the national past.

On one level then, these novels attempt to counter the spatial and historical aporia of contemporary Lebanon by recovering the roots of an older Beirut. Yet, as Yael

Zerubavel points out, the acts of recovering and re-covering are connected14; in short, as this chapter proceeds, we must be sensitive to the histories being suppressed as well as to those being recovered15. For example, Najjar’s Beyrouth uses the device of the authoritative historical voice of Phillipe to, problematically, present a singular vision of

Lebanon and Beirut’s history from 1860-2000 that represses the voices of women as well as a considerable portion of the Lebanese population, namely its non-Francophone constituents. For its part, by telescoping back into the mid-1800s and abruptly discontinuing his seven-volume historical saga Bayrūt in its third installment, which ends

13 cooke borrows this term – of course – from French historian Pierre Nora’s work of the same name.

14 In fact, Zerubavel’s entire book hinges on exploring “the process of recovering and re- covering roots” in modern Israeli society (9). Elsewhere in the same work, Zerubavel points out that “by focusing on one aspect of the past [any commemorative narrative] necessarily covers up others that are deemed irrelevant” (8).

15 Andreas Huyssen gives a provocative reason for this, grounded in the epistemological consequences of a postmodern consciousness: “Once we acknowledge the constitutive gap between reality and its representation in language or image, we must in principle, be open to many different possibilities of representing the real and its memories”; Huyssen modifies this somewhat alarming statement by re-inserting a high modernist critique of quality: “This is not to say that anything goes. The question of quality remains one to be decided case by case” (19).

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in the late 1800s – i.e., before Lebanon’s modern history began – Jabir omits many aspects of Lebanon’s troubled recent past, including the Mandate period and the twentieth-century Civil War. Such omissions raise questions about the relationship between historical memory and fictional commemorations that I will address in the next section. But they also raise a greater set of questions: Firstly, how does a generation without personal memory begin to grapple with its urban past in a nation that has silenced its memories? Moreover, how are symbolic sites of memory recovered and represented by such a generation? Lastly, is there any value to such historical representation, or is it always condemned to repeat the practices of other commemorative narratives? These are some of the principle questions that I set out to answer in this chapter, through a close reading of Beyrouth and Bayrūt.

Between Memory and History:

In Family Frames, Marianne Hirsch introduces the concept of postmemory to describe a particular sort of memory, “distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection” (22). Hirsch elaborates further, saying that “postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated” (22). Hirsch herself is particularly interested in the children of

Holocaust survivors and their relationship to photographs of that experience, but admits that the term “may usefully describe other second-generation memories of cultural or

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collective traumatic events and experiences” (22). I believe that Hirsch’s notion of postmemory is a useful and productive one for thinking about the position of the young generation of Lebanese writers that emerged in the decade after the Civil War’s end.

After all, they grew up in the shadow of the collective trauma of war and the narratives of human and urban loss that engendered. Yet, as I have already pointed out, they are separated from personal memories of the city by ‘generational distance’; still, they are invested in the urban space by more than a sense of history: they are interested in this space as a heavily symbolic space in their nation’s collective imaginary.

However, by far the most interesting thing about how Hirsch’s definition of postmemory relates to these second-generation novels is its relation to acts of imaginative creation, such as fiction. For Hirsch, postmemory necessitates a creative intervention in history, since “its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation” (22). The relation of Jabir and

Najjar’s novels to the city of Beirut is constructed through an imaginative act that is between history and personal memory, which figuratively and literally blurs the relations between fiction and history.

In Writing History as a Prophet, Elizabeth Wesseling argues that one of the focal ways that the modernist and postmodernist historical novel differs from classical historical fiction is in the former’s disruption of traditional narrative patterns through the inclusion of “an additional narrative level, situated between the represented past and the primary narrator” (84). This produces what Wesseling describes as a ‘self-reflexive’ attitude towards the writing of history, in which a mediating figure – in this case, a young writer – is placed between the events and their narrator. Moreover, this young writer

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figure often expresses an anxiety about, and unease with, the practice of history16. As a result, the transmission of historical memory is placed in a mise en abîme that allows the narrative to expose the multiple layers of knowledge that undergird history. Each of the novels in this chapter complicates the relationship between historical narrative and fiction through exposing the tenuous divide between historical and fictional narrative, what

Wesseling describes as the “borderland between fiction and historiography” (120).17 To varying degrees, Najjar and Jabir “make the production process visible” using “the now familiar ploys of the historian-like character or external narrator who comments upon his own endeavors as he goes along” (Wesseling 119).

Beyrouth tells the story of Phillipe and his family, beginning with his grandfather

Roukouz [sic], a translator for the French embassy in nineteenth-century Beirut, his father

Elias, a doctor and ending with himself, a journalist by profession, as the men live through the epochal moments of modern Lebanese history. Phillipe recounts his family history, from the Mount Lebanon war of 1860 until the present, to a young narrator, who appears in the novel’s first and final chapters, but whose voice is otherwise dominated by

Phillipe’s authoritative narrative. It is during the moments that Beyrouth sets up its

16 The fact that these novels have both been read as history is compelling: it suggests, perhaps, that this revelatory gesture is not as obvious as Wesseling believes; see Hughes Saint-Fort’s review of Roman, and Kamal Salibi’s Bayrūt wa-l-Zaman. It also possibly gestures to the hunger for history in present-day Lebanon; for more on this, see Saree Makdisi’s “Beirut: A City Without History?”.

17 Wesseling points out that many of the same issues have been discussed in critical work on the relation between history and fiction. While she does not cite them as references explicitly, the work of Hayden White in Tropics of Discourse and Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative, vol. 3 is especially relevant to bringing into question the previously clear distinction between historiography and fiction, by calling attention to the discursive nature of historiography and also to the ways in which both deal with the matter of time.

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narrative frame, and dramatizes the exchange between Phillipe and the young anonymous narrator, i.e., between story-teller/historian and audience, that the novel’s anxiety about memory as history comes to light.

At first, Beyrouth seems to suggest that social memory depends on the intergenerational transmission of stories, in which the identity of the individual is formed by his inclusion in the group’s narrative. Notably, the young narrator remains anonymous throughout Najjar’s novel, but he gains legitimacy through his participation in Phillipe’s story. As Paul Connerton writes, “the narrative of one life is part of an interconnecting set of narratives; it is embedded in the story of these groups from which individuals derive their identity” (21). Therefore, social memory is passed on through a process of asking for, and receiving, stories, especially from those of the oldest generation. Compellingly, in Beyrouth, whereas Phillipe’s stories recount family histories, no kinship ties connect the narrator to the storyteller. The two are only brought together by a will to listen, and a need to tell, a symbiotic relationship where each side needs the other, the younger for the memories and the ability to connect with the past he does not know, and the older man so that his story will survive. To me, this suggests a desire to include an outsider’s voice in the young narrator’s conception of himself and his place in Lebanese society; in some ways, it marks a conscious split from the histories of the primary social group (the family) in favor of another authority.18

18 Merely speculatively, this could be Najjar’s rejection of a particular form of family formation. In his work, Samir Khalaf has frequently correlated much of the present polarization and militarization of Lebanese society to deeply ingrained family and tribal loyalties (Civil and Uncivil Violence, Heart of Beirut); See also, Michael Gilsenen’s Lords of the Lebanese Marches for an interesting discussion of tribal and familial loyalty in the rural villages of ‘Akkar.

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Both socially and geographically, Beyrouth anchors itself with the symbols of centrality. Roukouz [sic], the first member of his family to settle in Beirut, chooses a home literally at the heart of Beirut, which itself is represented as a midpoint, an

“intermediary city between sea and mountain, between East and West, between tradition and modernity” (51). Moreover, Phillipe’s authoritative voice in Beyrouth is literally and figuratively a central one. The narrative action of Beyrouth inserts itself and its characters squarely within a chronological nationalist narrative of Lebanon’s history in which Phillipe’s family are the mediators, though rarely the agents, of national change.

The narrative is divided between pivotal events in the history of modern Lebanon such as independence, and everyday events like a football game played by a young Phillipe against a rival school. Yet, whether in aspects of their everyday lives or at pivotal moments, the three major male figures in Phillipe’s narrative – his grandfather Roukouz, father Elias and himself – are always brought into contact with and indirectly influence prominent figures from actual Lebanese history, such as when Elias treats the future

President of the Lebanese state, Bshara al-Khuri on the eve of independence, thereby assuring his presence at a crucial juncture of Lebanon’s history, or Phillipe’s round table at the newspaper with future rightwing Christian militia leader, Bashir Gemayel.

Moreover, their respective professions – translator, doctor, and reporter – are all mediating roles. Their professional roles ensure that the men are all respected authority figures in the community; and, also, that they are trustworthy narrators of national history, since they have experienced so much of it first-hand.

But, even as it posits Phillipe as an authoritative historical voice, Beyrouth seemingly undermines his status as historian by alluding to the delicate relationship

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between history and fiction. At first, the narrator insists that Phillipe “n’invente pas”, claiming that he is merely “reconstructing in detail events he has witnessed, or which were experienced by those to whom he was closest” (Beyrouth, 13). Nevertheless, as old

Phillipe begins to tell his story, he uses “the sacramental formula: ‘kane ya makane fi qadim el zamane [sic]’, lapsing into one of the few uses of Arabic in an otherwise proudly Francophone novel, but also alerting his reader to the fiction of history; that remembering is necessarily reconstructing, ‘filling in the blanks’, as Phillipe describes it, and that every history is also always a story, linked in this case to the oral storytelling tradition in Arabic literature. Significantly, Wesseling notes that such fictional

“commentaries upon historiography in the making still represent the retrospective retrieval of the past as an endeavor worthy of serious consideration” (119).

The novel also self-reflexively links commemoration to violence. Despite his authoritative presence, Beyrouth also posits Phillipe as an uneasy, self-conscious historian, mindful of the processes of erasure and repression, and the potential violence involved in narrating history. Flattered that the young narrator cares enough to listen to his stories, Phillipe nevertheless points out:

Returning to one’s roots is never simple: forgetting, […] nostalgia, and moral queasiness transform memories. Narrating my own life presupposes that I empty my memory without fear of rekindling ancient pains, but narrating the lives of others requires the help of imagination. After all, how can one grasp the thoughts, feelings or secrets of someone else when one hasn’t shared them? How can one penetrate, rape, a lifetime’s sanctuary? How do you write in the blanks that our fellows have, knowingly or not, left behind them? (15).

Phillipe first expresses the difficulty of narrating history, and evokes the traditional binary between history and fiction, in which the latter often suffers at the expense of the

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former’s perceived accuracy and truthfulness. Notably, in addition to bringing up the formal problem of writing history – how to write authentically, untainted by nostalgia –

Phillipe also expresses historical writing as an ethical dilemma. In the quote, the necessary fictionalization of others’ personal histories is described in violent sexual terms, as “penetration”, then as a “rape”, transforming the issue from one of mere technique or ability (being able to transcend forgetfulness and avoid nostalgia) into an ethical dilemma. By extension, both the narrator and the reader are projected as human beings willing and capable of forcing another person to commit an act of supreme violence against history. This statement is then both a condemnation of a certain failure by any written attempt to recover the lived pasts of others and also a realization of the inadequacy of commemoration. Unfortunately, despite the emphatic performance of resistance to history, this tension is not explored any further in Beyrouth. It merely surfaces for a moment before being subsumed by the rather straightforward narration of the events that follow. Nevertheless, even its temporary presence betrays Beyrouth’s anxious attitude towards knowing the past. It also – albeit temporarily – self-awarely gestures to the challenges of re-writing history.

While Beyrouth quickly represses its anxieties about Phillipe’s narrative in favor of re-producing his authoritative voice, Rabi‘ Jabir’s Bayrūt openly exposes its anxieties about writing Beirut’s history from the present. Like Beyrouth, Jabir’s novel is built around a frame narrative, in which a young novelist called Rabi‘ Jabir sets out to write the history of a notable Beirut family, the Barūdis19. Unlike Najjar’s novel, however, the

19 From now on, when I refer to Rabi‘ Jabir the novelist, I will either call him Jabir, or Rabi‘ Jabir; when I refer to the character in Bayrūt, I shall use Rabi‘.

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boundaries between the frame and the story are fluid and collapsible: Bayrūt ricochets back and forth between Rabi‘ and the Barūdis. The past, Jabir’s novel suggests, cannot be hermetically separated and contained; the relation between (re-imagined) past and

(imagining) present can only be dynamic.

Bayrūt’s acknowledgement of the inevitable re-writing of history emerges from its re-writing of the paradigm of the older authority figure. Initially, like Najjar’s protagonist, Rabi‘ receives the help of an older man: the Barūdis’ last surviving relative,

Count de Bustrus. Almost immediately, however, the novel undermines Rabi‘’s mission by killing off the Count, leaving Rabi‘ completely flummoxed: “Now, I don’t know what to do,” Rabi‘ confesses, unsure that the records of the interviews he has conducted with the old Count will be enough to write a novel, and unsure even where to begin now that the Count can no longer guide him (16). Yet, he does pick a place to start his historical story, and launches into it; from this point, the historical tale of the Barūdi family becomes Rabi‘’s to tell. The historical part of the novel – while intertwined with Rabi‘’s commentary and narrative – begins with the arrival of the Barūdi family patriarch

‘Abduljawad in Beirut from Damascus in the early nineteenth century; it ends with

‘Abduljawad’s eldest son Shahīn going off to fight in the Crimean war alongside the

Ottomans. The second volume of Bayrūt takes place after the Egyptian army leaves

Beirut, in 1840, and ends in 1865, with Shahīn’s death (of cholera; after his return to

Beirut from Crimea). The third volume is set between 1865 and the final years of the nineteenth century, and its protagonist is ‘Abduljawad’s third son, Salīm.

Also, unless I explicitly mention another volume of the novel, all references are taken from the first.

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The self-awareness in Jabir’s novel operates not only on the thematic register, but also on a formal one. Not as straightforwardly nostalgic as Beyrouth, Bayrūt’s playful, yet serious tone resonates with Linda Hutcheon’s definition of a ‘postmodern nostalgia’, in which:

Nostalgia itself gets both called up, exploited and ironized. This is a complicated (and postmodernly paradoxical) move that is both an ironizing of nostalgia itself, of the very urge to look backward for authenticity, and, at the same moment, a sometimes shameless invoking of the visceral power that attends the fulfillment of that urge. (“Irony, Nostalgia and the Postmodern”, 205).

Jabir’s text, an ambitious attempt to write a family saga that encompasses and mirrors

Beirut’s history, is also self-reflexively, and humorously aware of the pitfalls of such a project in reconstructed Beirut:

How do you write about a mother living in Beirut before the Egyptian invasion [of 1834] while you’re staring at a woman with short orange hair eating pizza with a fork and knife?…your back hurts and you want to see that distant town buried in the obscurity of history, you want to see it [my italics] (190).

The playful juxtaposition of the contemporary, orange-haired woman’s incongruous appearance and eating habits with the writer’s desire to write about a very different kind of Beiruti woman calls attention to Rabi‘’s awareness of the difficulty of historical writing. And while the urge to capture this history is as yet – and perhaps will remain – unattainable, Rabi‘’s desire for it is as visceral as Hutcheon describes.

Jabir’s novel continues to play with the tensions between writing fiction and writing history, and it simultaneously ironizes and calls attention to the role of the author in historical fiction. For example, in the first volume of Bayrūt, Jabir complains that, “if

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we were now reading a fictional tale”, he could have changed certain events in the narrative (84). Jabir here uses the plural “na”, joining the readers as one of them. Rabi‘ does not present himself as a writer of fiction, but rather as a historian, rhetorically distancing himself from narrative agency: he is reading history, and not writing a story.

But, soon afterwards, Rabi‘ is confronted by his friend Walīd, who wants a happy ending that Rabi‘ cannot provide for him because Rabi‘ is “trying to be as accurate as I can”

(Bayrūt, 228). Walīd objects to this, however, and points out that Rabi‘ is “writing a novel, not history” (Bayrut 228-9). The exchange between both friends playfully, yet obviously brings into question the role of the writer of historical fiction: Is he a historian, with a responsibility to accurately represent the past, or is he a novelist, who can manipulate the story as he wishes? By mobilizing “the now familiar ploys of the historian-like character or external narrator who comments upon his own endeavors as he goes along”, Jabir calls attention to the textuality of all historical writing, and blurs the fictional boundaries between fiction and historiography (Wesseling, 119).

The blurring of boundaries between fiction and history in Bayrūt occurs not only on the fictional, but also on the metafictional levels; namely through the inclusion of historical documentation in the narrative.20 One of the distinctions that Paul Ricoeur makes between historical and fictional texts is the fact that historians have an ethical debt to the past which they must fulfill by taking into account historical documents, whereas novelists do not need to deal with such issues. For Ricoeur, although one may dispute the

20 This is, in fact, common in contemporary historical fiction. See Wesseling and also Olga Steimberg de Kaplan, who argues that “in contemporary historical novels, fiction and metafiction combine to varying degrees: the author integrates the recounted history with commentaries on the role of the artist, and of his doubts and objectives as a creator (“Le Roman Historique: Interpretation et connaissance”, 13).

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methodologies or narrative forms of historiography, “the recourse to documents does indicate a dividing line between history and fiction” (Time and Narrative, vol.3, 142).

This is one of the features of historiography that allows it to claim that it is the only field capable of reconstructing the past as it actually happened, as “standing-for” the past in

Ricoeur’s terminology, thereby distinguishing the field from fictional narratives that are imaginary and are not necessarily inflected by a similar indebtedness to an ‘actual’ historical past. Ricoeur’s position, in fact, is dramatized in Bayrūt in the exchange between Walid and Rabi‘ discussed above.

Bayrut’s self-aware inclusion of actual historical documentation further calls into question the validity of Riceour’s distinction between history and fiction. As Rabi‘ begins to ask another series of rhetorical questions about everyday life in nineteenth-century

Beirut, the text turns to the reader; and addresses him directly:

What was life like in Beirut in those faraway days? How did its people live, and who were they? The reader does not need to go searching in books to find the answers. The following list of books (and a handful of manuscripts) set down here can be ignored, can be overlooked, and not one thing will change in ‘Abduljawad Ahmad al-Barūdi’s life, which is gone (39-40).

Once more, questions about the lifestyles of people in the past, of being able to understand them prey upon Rabi‘’s mind, and he assumes, also upon the reader’s. As

Elizabeth Wesseling argues, “self-reflexive historical fiction detracts from the claim to objectivity, but it still grants the possibility of authentic historical knowledge the benefit of a doubt” (119). The text, in fact, follows this quote with an eight-page detailed annotated bibliography containing memoirs, travel narratives, history books,

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missionaries’ journals, and letters, with mention of their places and dates of publication.21

Ricoeur’s history, it seems, has invaded Jabir’s fiction.

Jabir’s novel suggests that, although history and fiction may not blend, their coexistence is nonetheless necessary, and the text can neither privilege nor silence one at the expense of the other. The two sentences “the reader...the following” seem, upon multiple readings, to be juxtaposed, and not to follow one after the other in any sort of sequence. They are the borderline at which the fictional and metafictional parts of the novel intersect. The first sentence, coming after the series of questions about life in the past, at first appears to question the possibility of historical knowledge; it is followed, however, by the apparent implication that the reader’s questions have an answer, and that this answer will be furnished by the novel. However, that expectation is almost immediately undermined: not only is the reader told that the narrator will not answer the question, but he is also told that the next eight pages of text are actually irrelevant to the plot.

Jabir’s inclusion of the bibliography lays bare the historian’s tools not only to augment his authority, but also to challenge readers’ complacency and highlight the critical role played by the historical novelist in translating the raw material of history into story. Rabi‘ issues a challenge to the reader (whom he has already directly addressed as

“you”) who is merely seeking narrative details, how the plot will unfold, by admitting that the next pages have nothing to do with the story of ‘Abduljawad’s life, but that he has included them anyway. The academic historical documents Rabi‘ anchors into the text (they are described in Arabic as “muthabbata”, i.e, placed in a fixed spot) are, firstly,

21 The annotated bibliography is genuine, in that the texts and manuscripts mentioned in it exist.

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proof that documents about the everyday lives of Beirut’s nineteenth century inhabitants exist – that history, in fact, has not been completely erased – and that these documents are available to whomever is willing to make the effort to find them. On one hand, then,

Jabir’s act exposes an archive of Beirut’s history; he makes it visible22. If there is indeed

“no political power without control of the archive and of memory”, and one of the primary qualities of the archive is its “to shelter itself, and sheltered, to conceal itself”, as

Jacques Derrida explains in Archive Fever, then Rabi‘’s act reclaims power, by exposing

Beirut’s deliberately forgotten, archived memory (3-4).23

In addition to being an act of reclaiming power by exposing the bibliographic archive, Jabir’s decision to include the bibliography as is also underscores the role of the writer in creating commemorative narrative. Jabir exposes how, without his intervention as historical writer, flawed and anxious though he may be, the act of transforming this material into story could not happen. In this way, Jabir underscores the importance of historical fiction as a participant in the formation of collective memory; because he is the one who transforms the raw material of the archive into commemorative text, Jabir sketches out a role for himself in the dialogue over Beirut’s memory.

While Bayrūt seems to emphasize the writer’s singular role in creating collective history, it also insists that, in Beirut, the desire for historical knowledge is a collective one. As I have already pointed out, the novel frequently expresses the challenge of

22 Writing of the art world in the early 2000s, Hal Foster describes the resurgence of an archival impulse in contemporary art, through which “artists seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present” (4). Foster associates this art with a utopian impulse.

23 Of course, the question of the archive in Lebanese memory and art is an interesting one; see Saree Makdisi’s “Beirut: A City Without History?” for a discussion of the fake archives created by the art collective known as the Atlas Group.

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representing the past; however, just as frequently, this challenge is framed as a challenge for a group, not just the individual writer. “‘Abduljawad Aḥmad al-Barūdi’s ‘now’ is difficult for us to imagine ‘now’ in the 21st century” (24), Rabi‘ writes at one point, emphasizing the distinct difference, and possibly unbridgeable cognitive gap, between the

“nows” of the respective presents of the imagined community of the contemporary writer and his readers, whom he refers to using the first person plural, “na” and the present of the first volume’s nineteenth century protagonist. This quote reveals a sense of shared contemporaneity between readers and the narrator; both are in the 21st century, and both are separated temporally from the novel’s events. It is hard for all of “us” to imagine the

Beirut that al-Barūdi saw in the 1820s. Rabi‘’s anxiety also resurfaces later on in the text, again intruding upon the Barūdi clan’s story. “Can we imagine the lives of our ancestors in that long-ago, distant imaginary time?” Rabi‘ asks himself and all his readers a few pages later (63). These moments not only function to recall the ‘borderland’ between history and fiction, but also contain an anxiety about knowing the past that can neither be repressed nor suppressed.

But Jabir’s rhetorical questions about the possibility of commemoration are not just abstract questions about the challenge of capturing history; they have direct ramifications on the ability of contemporary Beirutis to situate themselves vis-à-vis the historical past of their city. Rabi‘ asks: “Can we today, 165 years after we hosted the

British soldiers, imagine Beirut in the 1840s?” (vol. 2, 123). Here, like in the quotes above, the collective “nun” is used, referring to the collective challenge of people in the present imagining the past. The question is whether anyone in the present community can actually achieve an imaginary connection with the past. But this is not just any past, it is

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the past of our ancestors – aslāfina – and our city – madīnatuna. Additionally, Jabir uses the possessive first-person plural “‘indana” to forge a link between the city of the past and the inhabitants of the present. The same space belonged to all the inhabitants of nineteenth century Beirut and the inhabitants of contemporary Beirut, the latter sharing with the former the responsibility of “hosting” the invading British army, whose soldiers are described as guests, inverting the common paradigm of invasion, where the invaders are represented as an imposition24. The binary host/guest further underscores the idea that certain people have a binding connection to the city across time, while others are transitory. By linguistically reinforcing contemporary Beirutis’ investment in the past,

Jabir’s novel creates an imagined community connected temporally, if not spatially, with their urban past.

What is at stake in Jabir’s assertion that the city belongs to all, and in Bayrūt’s insistence upon temporal and historical continuity between nineteenth-century and twenty-first century cities, becomes clear when read against the spatial practices of

Solidere in Beirut. In the early 2000s, as the perceived ownership of the city passed from the people to a corporate oligarchy, a “‘deep-rooted middle class struggles to retain

Beirut and its ‘inherited space’ against the capitalist projections of a new global city”

(Hanssen 269)25. In fact, Saree Makdisi’s assertion that what is being “lost in the development of central Beirut is a sense of history” relates the geographical and historical, and undergirds the historical project undertaken in both novels

24 It could also be read as a joke about traditional Arab hospitality.

25 Throughout “Capitalists in Conflict”, Najib Hourani explicitly underlines the fact that all of the disputes over central Beirut’s reconstruction were, essentially, disputes between elite groups with considerable capital; it is just the identity and form of capital that is different.

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(“Reconstructing History”, 25). In one way, re-historicizing Beirut and its inherited spaces is precisely what these novels are doing so self-consciously. It only remains to be seen what kind of city is being fantasized about, and how the space of the historical and contemporary Beirut is being imagined.

The City as Monument – Beyrouth’s nostalgic totality:

Alois Riegl’s classic turn-of-the-century “The Cult of the Monument” first brought to attention the social processes of signification involved in the designation of objects as monuments, and the latter’s intrinsic relation to the collective imaginary. Riegl divorces a monument’s value from an objective aesthetic ideal, and correlates it with a cultural moment. Moreover, he diagnoses an increased interest in monuments as commemorative objects within a specific cultural trend of modernity:

The interest in specific intentional monuments, an interest which typically tended to vanish with the disappearance of those who created them, now was revitalized, as an entire population began to regard the achievement of earlier generations as part and parcel of their own. Thus the past acquired a present-day value for modern life and work (26).

Riegl’s work is echoed in the work of historian Catherine Bishir, who correlates war monuments to national identity: “Once we start paying attention to monuments,” Bishir writes, we become increasingly aware of their defining power in civic places and national identity.” (62). Beirut does not have many of what Riegl would call “intentional monuments”; structures built explicitly to commemorate an event in the life of the nation; even less does it have a monument to the civil war. In fact, as miriam cooke points out,

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the one public memorial of the civil war is outside Beirut, in the mountain town of Yarze

(“Beirut Reborn”, 401)26. The most symbolic public monument in Beirut is the statue commemorating the men hanged for treason by the Ottomans in 1916, who in Lebanese history are represented as the first martyrs of Lebanese independence27. The statue’s location in downtown Beirut ensured its centrality in the Lebanese imagination; this also, unfortunately, ensured that it was extensively damaged by the fighting during the

Lebanese civil war. 28 Since Solidere took over Beirut’s reconstruction, the memorial’s history has been caught up in the current politics of memory: while it was not completely renovated, as was feared in the early 1990s, and remains marked with bullets, as Saree

Makdisi points out, it no longer has “an inscription, or even a passing record of its origins” (“Beirut: A City without History?” 204). In short, like other aspects of Beirut and Lebanon’s history, the monument became decontextualized from its earlier association with the heyday of Lebanon’s national project.

I have already shown how Alexandre Najjar’s Beyrouth establishes, then imposes an authoritative historical voice – Phillipe’s – as the spokesperson of urban and national memory. In the novel, Phillipe’s narrative totalizes Lebanon’s history, and encodes his personal history as national history. In short, Phillipe’s story is what Pierre Nora would

26 Even this, as cooke points out, is a re-writing of Beirut’s war; the memorial itself is “a ten story concrete edifice in which are embedded Soviet tanks…Tanks are emblematic of wars fought at fronts, their trenches filled with men. But this was a war of skirmishes and sniper fire and car bombs” (“Beirut Reborn”, 401).

27 The history of the statue itself is an interesting narrative of the colonial and post- colonial struggles in Lebanon since the turn of the last century; See Samir Kassir’s Histoire de Beyrouth for a detailed history.

28 In fact, in several articles over the past decade, Saree Makdisi has suggested that it should be consecrated as a war memorial; see “Reconstructing History” and “Beirut: A City without History”.

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call a lieu de mémoire: “A turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn – but torn in a such way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists” (Nora, 7). Nora’s definition suggests both that a rupture has occurred, and that, consequently, a memory-object has replaced organic memory itself. In the novel, which situates itself in Lebanon’s amnesiac present, there are two such sites: one is

Phillipe himself – Nora did not doubt that people, stories and events could be lieux de mémoire – and the other is the geographical site of Martyrs’ Square, which the novel monumentalizes as the physical embodiment of a national ideal, and as an anchor for

Lebanon’s past and its future.29

The idea of a symbolic, monumental anchor for history is central to the very idea of monumentalization itself, and illuminates Najjar’s attempt to fix Phillipe’s story as national history 30. As Andreas Huyssen points out, the rise of the monumental imagination in the nineteenth century was firstly related to a search for a national identity that “created a deep national past that differentiated a culture from its […] counterparts”; secondly, the national monument “came to guarantee origin and stability as well as depth of time and space in a rapidly changing world that was experienced as transitory, uprooting and unstable” (41). I have already spoken of the young narrator’s distress at the erasure of historical landmarks from the landscape of Beirut’s reconstructed downtown, in which the distress at disorientation is directly linked to the inability to imagine the

29 Recall that Nora describes lieux de mémoire as the sites in which “memory is crystallized” (1).

30 Apparently quite successfully, since in fact, Hugues Saint-Fort’s review of Najjar’s novel for French Review openly wonders whether the novel should even be called a roman, since “In fact, Najjar’s text is a history of the city of Beirut” (1416).

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national past. In a later segment of the novel, Phillipe visits downtown only to find that it has become emptied of content, and has become a site of pure consumption with no authenticity to it:

fashionable people occupy the restaurants and cafes, tourists wander down aseptic streets; the artisans from long-ago have been dislodged; the regulars have lost their bearings (repères), the sites of memories (lieux de mémoire) don’t exist anymore (351).

The contrast between artisans, regulars and tourists – producers of authentic goods and consumers of the aseptic, plasticized world – is portrayed as a struggle of authenticity against emptiness, against the sign (the city) emptied of all its content (in this case, all its memories). The new city is nothing but a façade now that its spaces have lost all significance.31 Significantly, Beyrouth hungers for the geographical – and, by implication – national stability that such lieux de mémoire would provide. Phillipe reclaims the site of Martyrs’ Square by his final request to have his ashes strewn over the monument, and the novel reclaims it through its monumentalization of the urban space, through Phillipe’s memory.

In his writing about the architecture of the city, Aldo Rossi describes monuments as “the physical signs of the past,” and correlates a monuments’ persistence with the

“result of its capacity to constitute the city, its history and art, its being and memory”

(59). In Beyrouth, Martyrs’ Square takes on this monumental quality. In fact, almost immediately, through Phillipe’s authoritative voice and the young narrator’s immediate affirmation of what the older man has said (“Mr. Phillipe is telling the truth”, [14]) the

31 Interestingly, this is also how Saree Makdisi describes Solidere’s project, as a “a corporate attempt to spectacularize history” (“Reconstructing History”, 25).

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novel constructs the site as a synecdoche for Beirut and for Lebanon, as the following quote accentuates:

[The Place des Canons] was unique in the world; it symbolized the country. The Lebanese, all confessions and classes, mixed there: the Christians mingled with Muslims and Jews, the rich with the poor. Now, there’s nothing left: the Place des Canons has disappeared! (14)

Beyrouth reveals its nationalist fantasy through its representation of the centrality and symbolism of the square. By highlighting its disappearance as a landmark, the novel stresses that the mixed community it imagines in its past, is also now impossible.

Furthermore, in Beyrouth, the novel’s geography is clearly delineated by the confines of the square, and aside from a few significant events in the mountains, all the action takes place in Beirut’s central square, which the novel calls the Place des Canons, using the French name. 32 The square is a reference point, the magnetic north vis-à-vis which everything else is situated, either to the east or, much more rarely, to the west. The narrative maps out its characters’ urban lives using the square as a compass. Thus, the

Café de la Republique, where Phillipe and his friends love to spend their afternoons, is situated “East of the Place des canons”, and Pierre Gemayel’s pharmacy is “situated at no. 86, Place des canons”, and the “Café des verres”, a traditional teashop, is situated “to the west of the Place des canons” (85, 145, 169).33 There are more examples of this, such

32 The mountains begin and end the novel. As noted earlier, Roukouz escapes the 1860 war by leaving Mount Lebanon and settling in Beirut. By novel’s end, Phillipe has moved to Mount Lebanon, escaping the civil war in Beirut.

33 Pierre Gemayel was the founder of the rightwing Christian Katā’ib (Phalangist) party. In Beyrouth, he appears as a football coach “impressed by the order and discipline of young people in [1930s] Italy and Germany” in addition to an Independence era leader (146). His son Bashir, who founded the Lebanese Forces militia, also appears in Najjar’s

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as the cinema south of the square, where Phillipe gets into his first fight, or the national art school in the Azariyeh [sic] (Lazarite) building in the square that Phillipe’s younger brother Joe matriculates at (136, 196). Notably, all of these are also sites of entertainment and social aggregation; yet, the novel represents them as more authentic than the new downtown cafes. The map of Beyrouth’s narrative action is centered by the square, that the novel intentionally monumentalizes as the symbol of Lebanon’s mixed, prosperous and peaceful imagined community.

However, the novel itself undermines its own nostalgia for this multi-sectarian mixture through its imagining of a culturally dominant Francophone Lebanese community upon the national and urban landscape, and its marginalization of Lebanon’s non-French speaking majority. 34 In Beyrouth, French is the common cultural denominator of those Lebanese whom Phillipe’s authoritative voice deems worth of admiration. As I have already pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, the choice to describe the city’s central square as the Place des Canons already clearly imposes a lexical and cultural distinction from the local Arabic sāḥat al-burj (Kassir, 95).

Moreover, the Arabic language in the text is used by marginalized characters: street urchins, villagers, strongmen (who are also referred to by the Arabic abaday [sic]), women and especially, to comic effect by the mother (60, 105,107,174). If the subaltern does speak in the novel, then her language is definitely proverbial Arabic. Violence, aggression, mistrust of the other are also all concentrated in the Arabic-speakers, while

novel, as a young, rightwing university student at a roundtable discussion between leftist and rightist students hosted by Phillipe at the newspaper where he works (278-281).

34 Ironically, in his review of the novel, Hugues Saint-Fort describes Najjar’s French as “classic, conservative and sometimes depreciated” (1417).

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education, tolerance and pacifism define the other characters. In fact, the narrative indicates that even the uneducated Egyptian concierge in the central building on the Place des Canons uses “la langue de Molière” in order to communicate with the building’s residents (83). The novel thus presents French culture and the French language as the glue that holds Lebanese society together. At the school and university run by the French

Jesuits that both Elias and Phillipe attend, the benevolent fathers teach their Lebanese charges to unite as a (Francophone) nation, despite their sectarian differences. At an interschool football game between Phillipe’s university – the Jesuit, Francophone

Université Saint Joseph – and the rival American University of Beirut’s varsity team, the winning goal (for Phillipe’s side) is scored by Phillipe’s Muslim friend, Ziad [sic], and the chant goes up that “Ziad is one of us!” (157).

The novel’s fantasy of imagined community through Francophone culture and values is further elaborated in the romance embedded into the story. The Muslim girl- next-door, Nour [sic], marries Phillipe, falling in love with him after he tutors her in

French literature and philosophy, the French cultural legacy enabling their cross-sectarian love – and eventual marriage. Their marriage sours briefly when Nour begins to sympathize with the leftist Palestinian cause at the beginning of the Civil War, but then on the eve of the Israeli invasion in 1982, she comes back to her senses, and to her husband, abandoning all her ‘extremist’ views and sympathies and living with him into their old age. Therefore, the novel suggests, the Lebanese nation could come together under the legacy of French culture, which contests the sectarian ideologies of

Arab/Muslim nationalism by simply presenting the latter as unviable, a momentary lapse of judgment. Its nostalgia for the urban past is monumental, in the sense that it reduces

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the history of the city – and the nation that this city explicitly stands in for – to one space and, more importantly, to one cultural group, while unironically mourning the loss of heterogeneity.

The novel consolidates its monumental imagination in Phillipe’s final interaction with the present urban space. By novel’s end, Phillipe begins to lose his eyesight. As his blindness develops, he visits the city one last time, and standing on the roof of his family home, he takes in a panoramic vision of all the city’s suburbs and neighborhoods, in a symbolic gesture of appropriation. But, as Michel de Certeau reminds us, in every such act of voyeurism from above, there is also “an oblivion and a misunderstanding” of the practices of everyday life (93). Rewriting the history of the city through the history of just one monumental space silences and represses all the other urban spaces and experiences of the city, both past and present. In Beyrouth, Phillipe’s desire for the city – compared to both his mother and his wife – which he describes as the “desire of a sponge to be impregnated with water”, gives away the intimacy of Phillipe’s perceived relationship to the city (361).

Mapping urban memory through Phillipe’s authorial and authoritative voice is certainly one act of resistance to the act of de-memorialization being undertaken in the city center, but despite the novel’s best efforts, it remains a singular view and a singular opinion. The monumental act, as Forty and Kuchler point out in The Art of Forgetting, allows “only certain things to be remembered, and by exclusion cause[s] others to be forgotten” (9). Ultimately, Phillipe’s tale is his – as he himself admits to the narrator at the end, he has left many moments in the history of Lebanon undescribed, because “they did not mark me as much as other episodes” (365). Yet, the novel still insists on equating

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Phillipe’s story with Beirut’s with the nation’s, glossing over the individual, the everyday in favor of the monumental. In trying too hard to capture and fix a lieu de mémoire,

Najjar’s novel inadvertently empties the space of all significance outside of Phillipe, and his limited imagined community. The center becomes what Rossi would describe as a

“pathological” monument, intimately tied to the city, yet also isolated from the signs of urban life (59).

Interestingly, in his distinction between history and genealogy, Michel Foucault describes the “true historical sense” – by which he means the genealogical one – as one that “confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference” (“Nietzsche, History, Genealogy”, 155). By contrast, for Foucault, history’s

“function is to compose the finally reduced diversity of time into a totality fully closed upon itself; a history that always encourages subjective recognitions and attributes a form of reconciliation to all the displacements of the past” (152). Following this definition, it becomes easy to read Najjar’s novel as one Foucault would describe as historical;

Beyrouth imagines and fixes the place des Canons as the symbolic and literal heart of his representation of Beirut, and presents Phillipe’s family and individual history as a teleological link between national past and present. If Najjar’s monumental imaginary creates a lieu de mémoire out of the central district, and in particular out of Martyrs’

Square, then what Jabir’s Bayrūt attempts to do is to articulate the city as a milieu de mémoire, where the everyday present and everyday past are continually in dialogue with each other, nowhere more so than in the mapping of central Beirut’s landscape.

Bayrūt, our global city:

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In contrast to Najjar’s monumental re-imagining of Beirut’s urban space and

Lebanon’s history, Jabir’s novel brings Beirut’s past into its present through a different evocation of spatial relations and spatial memory; specifically, through imagining Beirut as an urban palimpsest. In his work on post-reconciliation Berlin, Andreas Huyssen invites his reader to read the city-space as a palimpsest:

We have come to read cities and buildings as palimpsests of space…An urban imagery in its temporal reach may well put different things in one place: memories of what there was before, imagined alternatives to what there is. The strong marks of the present space merge in the imaginary with traces of the past, erasures, losses and heterotopias (7).

Of course, one cannot bring up the palimpsest, as Sarah Dillon remarks in her book of the same name, without necessarily evoking the key notions of writing, erasure, re-writing and making the traces of the past visible, i.e., producing a genealogical understanding of urban and national history.35 Conscious of this, Huyssen nevertheless argues that, without reducing architectural space to text, “literary techniques of reading historically, intertextually, constructively and deconstructively at the same time can be woven into our understanding of urban spaces as lived spaces that shape collective imaginations” (7).

I have already described the metafictional self-awareness of Jabir’s text that puts into play the relationship between the historical and present-day narratives of the Barudi-

35 Dillon: “the palimpsest is thus an involuted phenomenon where otherwise unrelated texts are involved and entangled, intricately interwoven, interrupting and inhabiting each other” (The Palimpsest, 4). It is also worth remembering that in its first appearance as a metaphor, in Thomas de Quincey’s “The Palimpsest of the Human Brain”, the palimpsest is intimately linked to memory.

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Bustrus clan and Rabi‘, as he struggles to find a way to write about them. But Bayrūt also imagines downtown Beirut as a palimpsestic text within its metafictional interplay. For example, present-day Rabi‘ maps the historical city for his friends Walid and Ibrahim by locating it on top of the present city they are walking through on their lunch break:

This street used to be called, in the 19th century, souk al-‘attarin [the perfumers’ souk]. The street near Parlamento [an Italian restaurant] was the entrance to the Bazirkan. The alleyway near the mosque that now says George Acouri [sic] used to be souk al-sarami [the shoe souk] (67).

While neither Ibrahim nor Walid is particularly interested by this information, each one caught up in his own concerns – Ibrahim in a discussion of classical Arabic music, and

Walid in a list of the different cuisines they can eat – as they continue their walk, Rabi‘’s improvised lesson in urban geography triggers Ibrahim’s memory of working with his father on the calligraphy of a mosque that is currently being rebuilt in the area. Rabi‘ then goes to see the inscription, and finds half of it faded away, illegible. When he returns to the construction site a few months later, he can see the entire inscription, the past being made legible again through restoration. Significantly, it is the act of walking around the city that leads to this serendipitous palimpsestic discovery of the past in the everyday life of a city where young lovers embrace, cars honk and hungry friends chatter into cellphones on their lunch breaks (63-67).

But Bayrūt also makes the traces of the city manifest in other ways as well inside the text. One of these is visual; at various moments in the novel, some content is set aside in tables within the text (64-70). Inside the tables are plaques and signs for restaurants

(“IL PARLAMENTO”, “SCOOZI”, “SEATTLE’S BEST COFFEE”) that Rabi‘ has read on the city’s walls; these plaques hold street names (“Rue 58 de la Mosquee al-Omari,

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SECTEUR NAJMEH 11), the dates of a building’s inauguration (“ASTRAL 1929”,

“OPAL 1931”) and information laid out for the public – in accordance with Lebanese law

– by contracting firms charged with the reconstruction of certain sites, which include the project’s name, its donors, the chief engineer and his contact information, the contracting company and its address, and the names of the site engineers. Rabi‘ reads all of these signs placed across the downtown cityscape, and Jabir brackets them, rendering visible what is passed by everyday inattentively, calling attention to these sites, and to the fact that the present cityscape is a site of both construction and re-construction, simultaneously.

In another process of rendering visible the historic traces of the city within the text, Jabir literally juxtaposes and interchanges the present with the past. As Rabi‘ and his friends walk through the city, the names of the streets they are walking on are placed side-by-side with the bracketed names of these same streets as they were in the nineteenth century. So for example, as they try to find a restaurant to eat in: “I suggest we cross

Weygand (that was souk al-fashkha in the 19th century) and go down Abdulmalak street

(that was ‘Abduljawad street)” (67). This palimpsestic act continues on the next page, but the names are inverted: instead of the old names being bracketed, this time, the new names are: “I find myself before the Mansūr ‘Assaf mosque (the Saray). I light a cigarette, then cross al-fashkha and make my way down the cotton souk (Foch)” (68). In the following paragraph, the order is inverted once again, “I reach Ṣiddīq mosque (this was the al-Dabbagha mosque)” (68). The act of bracketing these street names within the text not only implants the historical city beside the current one, it creates a mental map of

Beirut that joins present to past without necessarily privileging one over the other.

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And while these palimpsestic acts occur within the contemporary part of the narrative, they also – though less frequently – occur within the historical part as well. For example, as the narrative action reaches the point where Shahīn, ‘Abduljawad’s son, is standing on a rooftop watching the Egyptian army march into Beirut, the narrative is once more broken by a bracketed note that mentions that these rooftops will be the sites of

“Dunkin’ Donuts and Scoozi in the dark and mysterious future” (180).36 Bayrūt maps the downtown Beirut area through the everyday lives of its present and past characters. In fact, Bayrut makes the past city visible textually by a palimpsestic performance. Here, the temporal is interesting: while palimpsests are usually thought of as being remnants of the past in the present – which they are – in Jabir’s text, they are used to reinscribe the past onto the present; in this sense, they are palimpsests-in-reverse, contesting the attempt to make Beirut’s future and the past seem “all but indistinguishable, the one a replication of the other” (Makdisi, “Reconstructing History”, 25).

The palimpsestic technique of placing the historical city in the contemporary landscape of the novel, however, also underscores a considerable distinction between

Beirut-in-the novel’s present and Beirut-in-the-novel’s past that is manifest in the tension around consumerism. In mapping its way around the old and new city, the novel brings certain pairings into play: of the Italian restaurant Parlamento with the old Bazirkan souk, where ‘Abduljawad had his thriving business establishments, of the rooftops of the boys’ homes in the nineteenth century with Scoozi (another Italian restaurant, part of a regional chain) and Dunkin’ Donuts (180). More examples include the pairing of the al-fashkha souk with Grand Café (a chain of successful hookah lounges) and Caffe del Centro (yet

36 Ibrahim Pasha led the Egyptian army against the Ottomans and into Syria and Palestine in 1831, but the Egyptian army was forced out in 1840.

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another Italian restaurant) with the city’s old synagogue (177, 185). The repetitive substitution of domestic and religious spaces by a different, more homogenized, space of consumption happens throughout Bayrūt. In the twentieth century, the local is displaced by the global, the ancient souks replaced by international chains, the entire urban economy shifted towards contemporary consumption.

Importantly, the historical part of Jabir’s novel is situated at the moment in

Beirut’s history when it emerged onto the global stage, as a port city directly enriched by the opening up of its economy to the world’s.37 The depiction of local agency over the changing cityscape, and the incorporation of the local into the urban context in the historical city contrasts with present attempts to exclude the city’s lived past. The reminder that Beirut used to be more than a series of chain restaurants and shops through the juxtaposition of the historical sites with the contemporary ones resists the erasure of historical memory from the cityscape that Saree Makdisi accuses Solidere of carrying out:

This new shopping mall [the Solidere masterplan for the old souks] will claim to represent the past and the historical collective memory of the old Beirut souks in what will be a genuinely new space, a space that has been disemboweled literally and cleansed of its past. It will be marketed as a recreation of what was there before, rather than as something that is entirely novel, something that has no historical depth. It is, rather, part of a much broader process that has from the beginning stripped away the past and laid bare the surface of the city as sheer surface – spectacle – and nothing more (“Reconstructing History, 25).

37 Writing about the same period when Bayrūt’s historical narrative begins, Jens Hanssen also draws the connection between the local and the regional; during that time (the period between 1830-1840), Beirut changed from a tax farm of the regional overlords to a port- city that served the expanding Mediterranean economy” (Fin de-Siècle Beirut, 264).

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In his essay, Makdisi is concerned that once the generation with personal memory of

Beirut dies, there will no longer be a record of this space that existed and the types of practices carried out there. What Makdisi holds against Solidere is not merely the erasure of history, but the denial that the erasure has even happened, such that “history itself has been fully absorbed in the visual field and it has become the spectacle par excellence”

(“Beirut: A City Without History?”, 212). For Makdisi, Solidere’s practices of historical erasure are particularly egregious because they “substitut[e] image for narrative and eras[e] the last traces of that messy, uneven, discordant lived life that the war itself destroyed” (“Beirut: A City Without History?”, 212). I believe that it is here that Bayrūt redeems itself, and becomes more than the literary counterpart to Solidere’s material acts: through undertaking the massively ambitious project of a multi-volume family epic based in Beirut, Bayrūt is essentially creating a narrative – albeit a selective one – of a large group, and it is re-inserting this narrative of lived life onto the existing surface of reconstructed Beirut.

While Bayrut insists that the past can neither be completely repressed nor completely effaced, it shares his concern about the future of Beirut’s cityscape. The commodification of the contemporary urban space depicted in Bayrūt contrasts with the novel’s representation of the city’s past, and brings to light anxieties about the city’s future. In the novel, it is the latter that is more worrisome than the past. The past, after all, can be known through the transmission of generational tales and the palimpsestic mapping of historical and geographical knowledge. Furthermore, it is a shared past, a past with which all those who claim Beirut as their own can identify with. The future,

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however, is a different matter. As Rabi‘ looks out at the horizon, he notices something in the landscape:

I didn’t know at the time that I was looking at the infamous Normandy dump, which would become, in the obscure future, the sea front – with trees and towers – of Solidere’s reconstructed city (vol.2, 230).

The quote begins with the same construction (“lam akun a‘lam ‘inda’idhin”/ I didn’t know at the time) used earlier whenever ‘Abduljawad or Rabi‘ or the reader’s ignorance of a certain aspect of Beirut’s cityscape is brought up. However, what differentiates this ignorance from the earlier one is temporality: this is not a space that was, which can be brought into the present through the palimpsestic imagination, but a site that will become something in the future. Although the current dumpsite is projected to become a more pleasant space, the language used to describe this possibly verdant future is anxious. In fact, the metaphor of future obscurity (“al-mustaqbal al-ghāmid”) contrasts heavily with the idyllic urban landscape projected by Solidere.

Most significant, however, is what has happened to the identity of the city in this quote. No longer Beirut, and no longer belonging to the collective “na”, the city has lost its most basic identity, and has become Solidere’s city. In this context of anxiety over the fate of the city, then, the novel’s title – Bayrūt Madīnat al-‘Ālam – must be read as a double-sided act of resistance, due to its play on the double meaning of the Arabic word

‘ālam. In standard Arabic, the word literally means ‘world’, and so the title could be translated as “Beirut, the City of the World”. In many ways, the novel recounts the story of Beirut opening up to the world, going from a small town in the first volume, which begins in 1812, to a proper city by the end of the second, which breaks off at the start of

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the Crimean war in 1853. The world also flows into Beirut, where even military occupation is transformed into a local success, such as when the Egyptian army brings in fava beans and the Lebanese, including the Barūdi family, add lemon, garlic and oil and make a fortune selling fūl to the soldiers, making a culinary delicacy and several fortunes in the process. Throughout the novel, new objects arrive in Beirut and become appropriated by the local culture, which adapts them to its purpose. Therefore, in one sense, Beirut is the world’s city, the port-city of Bilād al-Shām (the Syrian hinterland), where everything new arrives first (vol. 2, 256). Opening up to the world transforms

Beirut from a tiny town into a city present on the global map, and the novel celebrates this as ebullience – the word “fawra,” or ebullience, is used often to describe the nineteenth-century city’s development (Jabir,vol.2 183, 189).

But there is also another meaning to the word “‘ālam”: the word also means

‘people’, in the sense of ‘the masses’. Read in this way, the title would imply that Beirut is the people’s city, a popular space in the full meaning of the word. In fact, in the novel, the nineteenth-century city is often represented as such, the city of the people who live in it and call it their own. While invading armies and foreign dignitaries bring innovative items with them, these are rapidly appropriated and modified to fit local interests by the city’s inhabitants. It is the local population that is responsible for the city’s expansion, forming committees and pressure groups to lobby the Egyptian or Ottoman governments, and undertaking construction projects such as the port (vol.2, 267). Thanks to these local groups acting in the public interest, Beirut becomes a site of modernization and urbanization, due to local initiative working with the outside (vol. 2, 344)38. The locals

38 See Jens Hanssen’s Fin de-Siècle Beirut.

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also expand Beirut’s limits, and turn it into a city, as they go outside its walls in search of commercial and residential space. In fact, they transform the city (vol 2, 344). Yet, that city remains theirs and ours in the present (“madīnatuna”). Bayrūt contrasts this episode in Beirut’s urbanization with the present-day appropriation of the urban landscape by a for-profit private company owned by a handful of investors. Through the superposition of the old and the new cities, the novel performs a resistance to the erasure of the city’s popular history.

Becoming Beiruti:

In both novels, the anxiety about beginning to comprehend and appropriate

Beirut’s imagined past and the collection of ancestral histories converge in one major issue: the process of becoming Beiruti, which itself is intricately connected with issues of belonging. The historical parts of both novels begin when the protagonist seeks refuge in

Beirut; in Bayrūt, ‘Abduljawad al-Barūdi escapes from a heinous act committed in

Damascus and re-establishes himself successfully in Beirut, while in Beyrouth, Phillipe’s grandfather Roukouz flees Mount Lebanon after his involvement in a failed republican insurgency, arriving in Beirut. Here, both texts channel into a well-established stereotype of the city as haven; which itself is a re-imagination of the earlier notion of the mountain refuge.39 Yet, although both novels mobilize earlier images of the city as refuge, their

39 This has already been discussed in the chapter on ‘Awwad and Nasrallah; it is a meme that war novelists exploit to great effect, as they often represent the former refuge as no longer safe.

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explorations of the subject matter reveal contemporary, competing ideologies of belonging, nationalism and contesting visions of the function of urban space.

In Bayrūt, the image of refuge is used to emphasize the possibility that, even if one is not born in the city, it is possible to become Beiruti. The novel depicts waves of immigration into the city, and although these new arrivals do not know Beirut at first, they eventually come to know it. But the novel represents the relationship between the immigrants and the city as even more complex than this; in fact, Bayrūt suggests, it is a dialectical one. Through their participation in urban life, these immigrants transform its landscape, and in time, the city transforms them as well, into Beirutis. The phrase “he did not know at the time” is repeated as is more than once regarding ‘Abduljawad’s ignorance of the city; but the temporality of the term is significant, because it indicates a learning process: what he may not have known at the time, he eventually learned as his knowledge of the city increased (39). And, it is this knowledge added to the time he lived in Beirut that eventually makes him Beiruti. The implied link is thus made between contemporary young Lebanese who are being introduced to a cityscape that they do not know and the strangers to Beirut who rushed to it in droves in the late nineteenth century, and helped make it into a city: “Quickly they all became sons of Beirut. They didn’t turn

Beiruti overnight, they became it with the passing of the years” (Bayrūt, vol.2, 174).

Becoming part of the city is not the result of birthright or coincidence, it is the result of will, just as it is for ‘Abduljawad, who “like many others before him became a Beiruti once he decided to live in Beirut and die in it”, and as he grew ever more familiar with it

(85). As the center of the city entered into private ownership and development in reality,

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the fiction adjusts, and belonging shifts away from owning land or real estate to attach to a sentiment or the practice of everyday life in the city.

In Bayrūt, the city is rendered as a welcoming, international, cosmopolitan space that transcends birth or nationalist belonging for a more inclusive, trans-historical geographical loyalty which is willed by the individual, and not imposed by outside authority. Belonging is fluid, but strong, ‘Abduljawad grows to love the city and to be an influential and integral part of it – becoming a wealthy businessman and eventually a member of the municipal council – through his actions and with his growing knowledge of it. The link between the narrated past and the narrative present in Jabir’s text is further effected in the first volume of the novel by the analogy between a present-day reader and the main character of the first volume, not a local but an adopted Beiruti originally from

Damascus.

The reader of these words (yes, you) is like ‘Abduljawad Ahmad al-Barūdi. Both don’t know old Beirut: A town of five thousand inhabitants, surrounded by a wall, looking out onto the sea in one direction and onto fields, hills and plains in the other three (39).

The reader is redeemed because, just as Barūdi learnt about the city and eventually became Beiruti, the reader can also learn to know and belong to the ‘old’ city through the novel’s textual mediation.

Najjar’s text, which is ideologically nationalist from the beginning (even the mid-

19th century characters speak proudly of Lebanon and their Lebanese identity, technically inaccurate at the time), takes a different approach both to the concept of belonging and to the city itself. “If we are born somewhere, then it is to belong to that place”, Phillipe tells

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his young listener, after a short conversation about the emigration of Lebanese youth

(366). Belonging here is directly tied to birth, the italics emphasizing this formally, implying that this is an incontrovertible action unrelated to choice or desire. The theme of being born into a fixed identity that one cannot lose, despite leaving, is a leitmotif throughout Beyrouth. Earlier on in the text, Phillipe describes himself as being inhabited by Beirut (15). The sentence plays on the French verb ‘to inhabit’, or ‘to live’, habiter, and so instead of the expected, “j’habite Beyrouth/ I live in Beirut”, one reads the inverted, “Beyrouth m’habite/ Beirut lives in me”. The narrator is metaphorically inhabited by the city, he is therefore the passive agent while it is the active one. By extension, then, Beyrouth seems to suggest that belonging is not an individual’s choice, it is rather, a birthright.

While Beyrouth takes the view of national identity as birthright and Bayrut prefers to figure identity as fluid, urban and localized, both discussions of identity in the novels dramatize the anxiety of the contemporary urban Lebanese. Beyrouth barely represses this anxiety: “They will not take Beirut away from me!” Phillipe cries out at the very beginning of the novel (13). The statement belies a multifaceted paranoia: first, that there is a group of people who intend to take Beirut/Lebanon away from its true sons, those who were born in it. The second anxiety is an anxiety of powerlessness, of not being able to stop these plural Others from their nefarious task. Therefore, the novel’s assertions of personal identity as ineradicably tied to a birthplace is a textual act of resistance in the face of this potential threat. It is an assertion of Phillipe’s place in the city despite his presence elsewhere. In Bayrūt, the repeated assertion that belonging to a space is about the acquisition of knowledge relating to its history and geography and not about

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ownership or state acknowledgement also, with repetition, builds up into a rejection of the contemporary marginalization of Beirut’s current residents from everyday practices in the city.

The reconstruction of post-war Beirut is interesting not only for its specific nature, but also because it offers an extreme example of a global anxiety about the future and fate of urban spaces. In his foreword to Henri Lefèbvre’s Urban Revolution, Neil Smith links

Beirut’s reconstruction to a global phenomenon of urban change: “From Shanghai to

Beirut, Kuala Lumpur to Bogota, the reconstruction of urban centers has become the means of embedding the logics, threads and assumptions of capital accumulation more deeply than ever in the urban landscape.” (xxi). As he concludes the article “Laying

Claim to Beirut” Saree Makdisi makes a similar point:

Lebanon may be seen as a kind of laboratory for the most extreme form of laissez-faire economics that the world has ever known. And moreover, Beirut itself, especially in view of the reconstruction project, can be seen as a laboratory for the current and future elaborations of global capitalism” (695).

The Beirut novels in this chapter dramatize this encroachment of a new form of global capital, implicitly and explicitly, and position the individual vis-à-vis these practices.

Perhaps then, it is understandable that they so often evoke and explore memory. Yet here too, they also speak to a contemporary, late capitalist phenomenon of (possibly futile, yet nonetheless present) resistance. In his introduction to the anthology War and Memory in the 20th Century, after contending that “the 1990s have seen a boom in memory”, Geoff

Eley suggests that this represents:

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An anxiety about the loss of bearings and the speed and extent of change, in which representations of the past, the narration and visualizing of history, personal and collective, private and public, spell the desire for holding onto the familiar, for fixing and retaining the lineaments of worlds in motion, of landmarks that are disappearing and securities that are unsettled. In this understanding, ‘memory’ becomes the crucial site of identity formation in the late 20th century” (War and Memory in the 20th century, vii).

Eley’s rhetoric gestures to a metaphorical cartography that is made manifest, and literal, in these novels, as Beirut’s urban landscape, and with it questions of Lebanon’s identity and character, entered into a new phase.

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CONCLUSION Beirut, 2005-2010

“The ‘sense of place’ is of great economic value” – Angus Gavin and Ramez Maluf1

By 2008, it was apparent that the issue of public space in Beirut was enveloped in a network of struggles over power and political control. Contrary to Solidere’s initial claim that downtown Beirut would be a site of interconnected nodes that “combine to form a high-quality pedestrian environment within the city center”, or, in short, a pedestrian-friendly urban space, large parts of the downtown area were off-limits to both pedestrians and motorists, cordoned off by barbed-wire and – in some cases – watched over by armed guards (Beirut Reborn, 56). For the three years since Rafiq al-Hariri was killed by a massive explosion near the city center in 2005, the area had been the site of competing attempts to gain and retain control over the heavily symbolic space. For example, during the anti-Syrian occupation demonstrations in February and March 2005,

Martyrs’ Square became “the focal point of a massive mobilization of Lebanese society”, and was occupied by a makeshift campsite of people who refused to leave until the

Syrian army left the country, and who – unsuccessfully, in the long run – tried to rename the site sahet al-hurriyyeh, or ‘Freedom Square’ (Haugbolle, War and Memory, 206).

That year, the visit to Rafiq Hariri’s resting place, the ‘ḍarīḥ’ as it is referred to locally, prominently located across the street from Martyrs’ Square, was compulsory for visiting

1 From Beirut Reborn, 59

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politicians and dignitaries. In 2006, following the Israeli war that summer, many buildings and previously publicly accessible areas – such as the gardens in the Roman baths – were cordoned off with barbed wire, including the United Nations building and the exit to the airport road. Then, in late 2006, opposition partisans descended upon downtown in an attempt to bring down the government. They too set up camps – sometimes using UN tents that had been distributed as part of the relief effort following the 2006 war – and remained in Martyrs’ Square and several surrounding areas for around 18 months, until May 20082. Throughout this three- year-period, the visitor to downtown Beirut did not experience a functioning, dynamic city – as Solidere’s planners had promised – as much as a polarized, divided, and difficult-to-navigate space.

Even people who profess to feeling a certain sense of optimism towards the future of this heavily symbolic space in the ‘heart of the city’ nevertheless are forced reluctantly to acknowledge that this objective remained largely unachieved. One such example can be found in Lebanese sociologist Samir Khalaf’s recent Heart of Beirut. Khalaf describes the area as an urban playground, a term he finds useful since it encapsulates various aspects of “fair play, teamwork, equal recognition, and the sheer exuberance of doing one’s thing without encroaching on the rights and spaces of ‘others’” (234). Yet, inevitably, in the examples he gives of this site as a space of inclusion, Khalaf simultaneously not only gestures to, but also distances those who are excluded spatially and socially from it, and to the wider spatial and social divisions within Lebanese society.

So, for example, as he celebrates the convivial, jovial atmosphere prevailing in the Burj

2 The tents’ removal was part of a deal reached at the Doha talks, which were held to put an end to the violent conflict that had erupted in Beirut between the two major political parties, known as March 8th and March 14th – a reference to the dates in 2005 upon which they had marched in downtown Beirut.

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in the wake of Hariri’s death, he mentions that across the street, in the exclusive Saifi village, “was a more soothing and aesthetically pleasing public sphere” (152). As he mentions the fears of some that the Solidere reconstruction would only cater to a bourgeois consumer audience, Khalaf notes that, in fact, the opposite has happened; “the apprehension might well be in the opposite direction. Already, in fact, upper-class and prosperous groups seem uneasy that, given this irresistible encroachment of lower-class and unanchored groups into the area, it might become much too populist, common and ordinary” (148). The social tensions underlying many of Khalaf’s arguments belie his celebration of the area as a collective space, and highlight many of the contradictions brought forth by the particular situation in Beirut, where formerly pluralistic spaces – such as the Burj – are being privatized.

Urban space is a complex, dynamic, multifaceted system which depends on multiple networks formed of a variety of interrelated social activities and agents, as well as economic and political factors. As such, the production of meaning from spaces is also sensitive to the fluctuations in the meaning of spaces, what Neil Smith terms “scale- bending” (“Scale Bending and the Fate of the National”). For Smith, the concept is useful to understand what happens when traditional scalar models (the city, the nation, etc) are challenged by individuals or groups of people. One example he gives is the appointment by Disney of Henry Kissinger as its “ambassador to China”, a move which transcends traditional understandings of national representation (“Scale Bending”, 192).

Furthermore, Smith argues that scale bending begins to take place when “an inherited territorial structure no longer fulfils the functions for which it was built, develops new functions, or is unable to adapt to new requirements and opportunities” (201). More

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relevantly for us, he continues, connecting the spatial and the social: “It is not just that the spatial arrangements of social activity are being reorganized but that the basic territorial building blocks of the social geometry are themselves being restructured” (201). Since the 1970s, the spatial rearrangements of public and private spaces in Beirut have been reorganized several times over; in turn, each reorganization has been an indication of the shifts in the ‘building blocks of social geometry’ behind Lebanese society.

In places like Beirut, which has undergone such great physical and social transformations in the last four decades, the recognition of the dynamic interplay between changing spaces and the creation of new social meaning – whether this is produced through literature, as we have seen in this dissertation, or through other processes of making cultural meaning, such as political protest, as discussed in Khalaf’s Heart of

Beirut, or the creation of monuments, as suggested in Lucia Volk’s forthcoming

Memorials and Martyrs in Modern Lebanon – sheds a new critical light on the complex and dynamic ways in which the city and the country have been represented and understood. “It is useful”, Raymond Willliams writes, “to stop at certain points and take particular cross-sections: to ask not only what is happening, in a period, to ideas of the country and the city, but also with what other ideas, in a more general structure, such ideas are associated” (The Country and the City, 290). This dissertation has attempted to analyze some of these cross-sections in light of Williams’ injunction; many more, of course, remain.

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