Hoda Barakat writes the narrative of war and the Lebanese civil war more precisely in all its brutality. But what's more devastating than war in Barakat's work is the cruelty of belonging. Communities create imaginary barriers around themselves, reminiscent of those of Troy and Jericho, keeping the other at bay, shooting him/her from above their ramparts. Communities live confined, isolated and locked up inside mythical tribal, religious, and ethnic formation of belonging, reproducing the folklore of enclaves. Barakat describes this folklore and writes against it, retracing the historical and political forces that brought these communal spaces together while interlacing them with another fiction, that of belonging. How do we begin theorizing the cruelty of belonging and in what ways can we characterize its language? What type/s of cruelty it generates? At a time of great sectarian divides that breached the walls of their Lebanese context to engulf the rest of the Arab world, Barakat's project of descralization and deconstruction is all the more vital. The fictional staging of cruelty in her novels, tracing it to the origin of the self, breaks down the binaries in which war and violence are depicted differently. It is this ontology of the self and the other, which takes center stage in Barakat's novels that we invite you to reflect on in this panel, exploring structures of paranoia, anxiety, claustrophobia while problematizing notions of community, minority, and religious affiliation. How does Barakat restage love, memory, and belonging in her narratives that force us to rethink the fundamental categories of the human and community? How does Barakat develop and complicate her presentation of conflict and violence in her different text, including her most recent novel, Kingdom of this Earth? What issues of translation and readership beyond the Arab world could be raised in this fictionalization of belonging? We invite the participants to think of the relation between the literary and the historical, the personal and the collective, in Hoda Barakat's various accounts of belonging.