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.

The two female characters in Hoda Barakat’s 1998 novel Harith al-Miyah (Tiller of Waters) share an unusual passion; separated by age, homeland, ethnicity, and religious background, they nevertheless both become obsessed by silk. In the family fabric shop, Niqula’s mother Athena and his lover Shamsa after her wrap themselves in the luxurious cloth, eventually detaching from family, relationships, and the world. While other characters quickly attribute their actions to some form of treatable hysteria or “women’s illness,” Niqula’s father sees the “curse” of silk as related to its long history and non-synthetic nature. Silk is not made; it is “born complete,” it travels, it has sound and life and history (162). The history of silk also describes the rise and fall of world empires from Rome to Byzantium to Persia. In situating this novel at the height of the Lebanese Civil War, Barakat also connects silk to the devastation of Beirut and subsequent rebuilding efforts. Silk implicitly critiques the synthetic, the reconstructed, the erasure of history, in favor of narrating a more comprehensive, ambiguous past. In 2002’s Touching Feeling, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes that “Texture seems like a promising level of attention for shifting the emphasis of some interdisciplinary conversations away from the recent fixation on epistemology . . . by asking new questions about phenomenology and affect” (17). This paper embraces Sedgwick’s methodological proposal by reading Barakat’s use of fabric and silk in particular as innovative historical narration. “Women of the Cloth” traces the way the novel narrates silk and characters’ engagement with the material in order to identify the practices of memory Barakat asserts in her depiction of the Civil War. I argue that rather than pathologizing or psychoanalyzing characters’ fixation with silk, readers should understand the detailed engagement with touch and material as a method for making the past tactile. As a material with a past, Barakat’s silk draws attention to the affective experience of history, loss, and transformation.

This presentation offers a comparative reading of Hoda Barakat’s The Stranger’s Letters within the context of the emergent themes in Arabic exile and diasporic literature in Europe. Unlike the majority of Hoda Barakat’s literary works which are set in Lebanon during the civil war, The Stranger’s Letters stages the writing and re-writing of a Lebanese exilic community in France. It is one of the many Arabic literary renderings of displacement, migration, and diaspora to challenge and transform the established postcolonial literary tropes of diaspora and exile, notably the focus on returning to the nation and the language of political commitment. Many recent Arabic literary renderings of migration to Europe have focused on the experiences of asylum seekers and clandestine migrants. While the positionality of The Stranger’s Letters diverges from these narratives by conveying a sense of cosmopolitan humanism from a center of European culture there are literary themes and writing strategies that resonate across these borders. In this presentation, I will focus on two themes in Barakat’s The Stranger’s Letters and consider how they resonate both within the text and in relation to emergent trends in Arabic diasporic and migration literature in Europe. The first theme is the staging of migration and displacement as a re-positioning of subjectivity that undermines a stable sense of self and community. The very first pages of The Stranger’s Letters establish a tension between the first person plural narration of the Lebanese diaspora in France and the repeated insistence that there is no we to speak of. The text’s emphasis on the transient and constantly shifting parameters of belonging resonates with broader trends in Arabic exile writing which emphasize, for example, translation as a re-positioning of subjectivity and the repeated re-telling of stories to make room for shifting perceptions and forgetting. The second theme is the text’s rendering of diaspora and displacement as embodied experiences, a theme that recurs in other Arabic literary narratives of displacement. In dialogue with the other papers on this panel which emphasize Barakat’s use of the body to navigate personal and collective traumatic histories, this presentation explores the complex ways that the The Stranger’s Letters simultaneously constructs and undermines a sense of a diasporic community. These themes provide ample opportunity for in-class conversations on shifts in contemporary Arabic literature and on changes in the way that diaspora is being theorized.

In her collection of essays A Stranger’s Letters (Risā’il al-Gharība), Hoda Barakat considers the role of forgetting in loss and exile, and she reimagines forgetting not simply as a void, but something that itself carries weight. Writing from Paris, where she sought refuge from the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s and never returned, she notes the gaps that appear in the memories of her fellow exiles. They find that they cannot or do not wish to recall the events they experienced in the Civil War, particularly at the request of well meaning friends who have never survived a war. She describes an urgent need to forget, but the Arabic term nisyān (forgetting, or the act of forgetting) is unable to capture the moments of forgetting, willful or otherwise, that well up within those who have left the home country. Instead, she coins the Arabic neologism nisyānāt, “forgettings,” a plural form of nisyān. While “forgetting” is an action, a process of removal or loss, “forgettings” acquire the status of objects, discreet items that, like memories, can acquire a weight in their own right. If, as Marc Augé argues in Oblivion, some amount of forgetting is necessary so that other memories may flourish, what implications does Barakat’s notion of forgettings as objects have for the construction of memory, particularly in exile? In this paper, I consider how Barakat’s concept of forgettings creates a form of memory particular to contexts of exile and loss. I argue that for Barakat, forgettings enable one to assert control over the process of remembering by channeling and limiting it. Her invocation of forgettings in response to the demands of others to remember is a means of claiming the power to narrate – or indeed not to narrate – for oneself. I also consider forgettings within the larger context of the Barakat’s articulation of the experience of exile. Namely, exile (ghurba) for Barakat is marked not by large events, grand narratives, or collective commemorations, but rather it accumulates slowly over time and appears in unexpected moments, as when a certain word triggers a recollection, or when one suddenly becomes aware of an event long since forgotten. It is an experience constituted by the ongoing negotiation of both memories and forgettings.