In an attempt to resurrect pre-modern national histories and cultural memories of peaceful co-existence, Hoda Barakat’s The Tiller of Waters (1998) unearths the buried city of ancient Beirut through the protagonist’s exploration of the city’s underground tunnels and the history of fabric. The story of the buried city intertwines with the national narrative of destruction, dispossession, and domination. Furthermore, it reflects a refusal of the repressive, possessive, and essentialist form of modern day articulations of nationalism and statehood. By resurrecting the buried memories, the interchangeability of fabric, fabrication, and the claims of nationalism, this novel’s anti-hero resurrects multiple histories of the buried city of pre-civil war Beirut, thereby reconstituting an all-inclusive national history that, just like fabric, acknowledges the vertical and horizontal, in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s words, “rhizomatic” threads of national narrative. Unlike other studies that emphasized the one–dimensional historicity of the protagonist’s narration, or evoking in Homi Bhabha’s style, the “marginality” of his positioning, I contend that he articulates an effective, rhizomatic narrative stance. By tapping into the power of the rhizome in intersecting past and present, in forging national relationships based on alliances rather than ethnic affiliations, and in retrieving latent traumas, Barakat resurrects the lost memory of the peace-loving voice of pre-war Beirut. This articulation bespeaks of a desire to retrieve layers of lost cultural memory that predates war trauma and authoritarian regimes intent on erasing traces of difference, and on dominating the national scene. References to trauma theory’s employment of personal and national traumas as well as recent interviews with the author will inform the findings of this research.