In her 2004 collection of essays, The Stranger’s Letters, Hoda Barakat recalls her conflicted sentiments surrounding a live performance of Fayruz in Paris: “I fell into the nostalgia that I hated...she is a woman and not a country. Yet when she raises her small hand to bid us farewell and disappears behind the musicians, I think of my daughter with sadness and I say to myself: who would we take our children to see should something happen to Fayruz?” (129) In both her epistolary writing and novels, Barakat places a thematic emphasis on Fayruziat al-hawa (Fayruz’ love songs) and on the violence perpetrated in the name of the “Rahbani Nation,” to borrow Christopher Stone’s term for Fayruz’ artistic partnership and the ideological substrate of her art. Rahbani musical theater typically featured Fayruz as a lover and miracle-worker who reunited the community-in-crisis. If we extend the programmatic aspect of Rahbani musical theater into the realm of public discourse, we begin to see the outlines of a redemption narrative in which the artistic return of Fayruz to Baalbek in 1998 coincides with the historical return of a community shattered by civil war. One of the most troubling aspects of this direct mapping of art unto history is the element of nisyan (forgetfulness or oblivion) in the construction of a post-war Lebanese identity. In this case, the act of forgetting is akin to turning a blind eye to the elite political and religious status of Fayruz and the Rahbani Brothers, whose artistic activities were deeply implicated in the rise of sectarian strife in Lebanon. I argue in this paper that Barakat, in both The Stranger’s Letters and her 1993 novel Disciples of Passion, narrates deliberate subversions of ritual behaviors associated with Fayruz and thus enacts a willful misremembering of cultural iconicity. In doing so, she situates listening as individual prerogative and reclaims the license to remember and recover one’s bearings. Listening to Fayruz “against the grain” serves to debunk the myth of Fayruziat al-hawa while acknowledging the enduring affective hold of Fayruz’ artistic legacy.