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The Narrating Eye: Identity as a Structure of Vision and its Problems: Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose
Abstract
Writing about Englishness, Stuart Hall talks about the “English Eye” that “sees everything else but is not so good at recognizing that it is itself actually looking at something… It is… a structured representation… that is always binary. That is to say, English identity is strongly centered; knowing where it is, what it is, it places everything else” (Hall, “The Local and the Global”). This implies that while identity might be shared history, place, and repeated system of rituals that produce a sense of belonging, identity is also a structure of vision. It consists of the position of looking and a sight. While the way the position of the looking eye places “everybody else” is problematic, how is it constituted and what does that process say about the supposedly unified position from which “everybody else” is seen? Furthermore, how does this structure of identity normalize the way of looking at everyone else and the way of perceiving one’s looking position as “right” and unified? Given the context of the Lebanese civil war where different groups warred to assert one’s own position of looking as the Lebanese identity—the “Lebanese Eye”—the narrative structure of Etel Adnan’s French novel Sitt Marie Rose discloses how identity is manufactured as a position of looking. The story is told by at least seven different narrative voices that watch and narrate the kidnapping, interrogation, and murder of a woman named Marie Rose. Interestingly, all the looking and narrating eyes are male while the object of sight, the “everybody else”, a woman. How, then, does the narrative structure of the novel expose the violent workings of identity construction, its anchoring in positions of looking, and being looked at, and the sexualized and necessary gendering of those positions of looking that are embedded in the constitution of identity?
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies