MESA Banner
The Poetics of the Apartment in Lebanese Civil War Fiction
Abstract by Kyle Gamble On Session 210  (Reconfigurations of Modern Space)

On Saturday, November 19 at 4:00 pm

2016 Annual Meeting

Abstract
As bombs and gunfire rocked Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), domestic spaces were not impervious to the fighting on the streets. The space of the apartment in particular tends to take on multiple new meanings in novels written about the War. What was once a living space can become a refuge or a prison, a playing field or a battlefield, and even a monument to those that have departed. Inspired by the phenomenological approach of Gaston Bachelard in his The Poetics of Space, this paper will analyze and compare the shifting and overlapping spaces of the apartment as represented in novels such as Ghada Samman’s Kawabis Bayrut (Beirut Nightmares), Hoda Barakat’s Hajar al-Dahk (The Stone of Laughter), Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game, and Ghayas Hachem’s Play Boys. In such fictionalized accounts of the War, the confinement of women and children in particular leads to the multiplication of meanings and uses attributed to the apartment. While the occupied apartment becomes oversaturated in spatial significance, even the abandoned apartment remains haunted by the absence of its former occupants. The fragmented city outside is often reflected in this internal space, reproducing and commemorating the violence of war in the daily, lived realities of the apartment. In Deleuzian terms, by becoming-other the space of the apartment has been deterritorialized. In addition to Bachelard, Deleuze, and Guattari, this paper also draws from trauma and memory studies in order to highlight the devastating violence that has rendered the apartment an unsafe refuge, whose isolating confinement inspires the desire of escape. That being said, what sort of escape is possible or desirable in the context of civil war?
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Sub Area
None