Space, Nation and Identity in Lebanese Fiction 1970-2003
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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 vi 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. 1 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. 2 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. 3 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.