In Sitt Marie Rose (1977), Etel Adnan recounts the story of Marie-Rose, a Lebanese Christian teacher who was kidnapped and brutally murdered by a right-wing Christian militia for supporting the Palestinian cause and refusing to be exchanged for her Palestinian lover at the outset of the Lebanese Civil War. Upon being interrogated, the transgressive Marie Rose defies her kidnappers, lashing out at them for their internalized colonialism, sectarianism and xenophobia. However, Palestinians and their supporters are not the only targets of violence and othering in the novel. Rather, other women, disabled children, Syrian laborers—and the environment—have their own experiences of violence and marginalization as Beirut is split into East and West, and militarized masculinity becomes the new social order. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s conceptualization of “stranger danger,” embodied encounters, and migration, this paper provides a contextual analysis of Sitt Marie Rose, focusing on the novel’s engagement with intersectional violences, including colonial (and “postcolonial”), gender, environmental, sectarian and racialized violence. I show how in Sitt Marie Rose, orientalism and colonialism are not portrayed as the evils of an exclusively Western occupier; rather, it is the upper-class Lebanese who—in their advancement of the colonial legacy—internalize self-deprecating discourses of what it means to be “Arab”/“Lebanese” to violate and exclude disenfranchised “others” whom they deem as primitive, foreign, and subhuman. I demonstrate the novel’s relevance today, particularly in light of Lebanon’s recurrent political polarization, the Syrian refugee crisis, the ongoing oppression of Palestinians, and the country’s socio-economic meltdown. Finally, I draw comparisons between the novel and other cultural production, including contemporary films that engage with Lebanon’s lingering struggles with internalized colonialism, xenophobia and exclusion.