A fairly robust body of both popular and scholarly literature has considered the role of women’s symbolic and physical bodies in the Iranian State’s attempts to narrate its post-revolutionary self into existence. This extends to the place of women in state sanctioned discourses about the war with Iraq. For the most part, women have been subjects, rather than active narrators, in the state’s stories about the eight year conflict. While women’s narration is far outnumbered by their male counterparts who have written both prose and poetry about their wartime experiences, the breakout success of a number of works by and about women has changed this longstanding dynamic. Written in support of--and indeed often praised by--the Iranian state and various individuals in leadership positions, these women centered accounts nonetheless contain surprising disruptions to the state’s closely guarded official version of the Iran-Iraq war. To show how this is the case, the paper draws from several such works including the immensely popular Da (the memoir of Zahra Hosseini as told to Azam Hosseini), Eenak Shokaran (a series about air force pilots and chemical war victims as remembered by their wives), Man Zende am (the first person account of a female social worker captured and held by Iraqis), and Neeme Penhan Mah (the memoirs of the wives of men killed in the war). These very different works all privilege women’s voices, even when those being honored and remembered through the narration are veterans and the war dead. This fact alone distinguishes them from the vast body of literature that has been written about the Iran-Iraq war, and as the paper will argue, is one of the factors contributing the the potential of these works to shift, complicate, and perhaps even challenge the state narrative they were ostensibly produced to promote.

This paper investigates Hoda Barakat’s Ahl Al-Hawa (The Disciples of Passion) featuring a delirious male narrator and protagonist negotiating the disembodying effects of the violence of war. Rather than conceptualizing this novel in terms of a transgression of boundaries, I argue, through a psychoanalytic reading of this text, that modern subjectivity is wrested from the space unfolding between the self and the imaginary ego, the archaic and the modern, the androgynous and the masculine, madness and reason, hallucinated memories and the disorienting present. As a confused and delirious patient, this novel’s protagonist creates a woman out of his imaginary. This woman—coming from the other side of Beirut and belonging to another religious community—is necessary for the achievement of the unified self he lacks; she functions as a salutary imago and a unified figure that brings back together his splintered self by mustering, to use Lacan’s terms, the “kaleidoscopic structure” the male protagonist lacks to fill his being of nothingness. The psychotic delusional mechanism of projection functions, according to Lacan, in such a way that “something whose source is within the subject appears without.” This woman provides the narrator with an image onto which he projects a totality to which he aspires, and with which he becomes able to interact with the outside world. Ultimately, the male narrator kills this woman, who is in fact his other and ideal ego, and with whom he entertains an intimate relationship. This murder, recalling the Freudian connection between aggressivity and self-destructiveness, is an evocation of the Lebanese Civil War. As the protagonist’s imaginary other actualized in his psyche and necessary for his transition and integration into the symbolic order, this woman embodies “the fictive redoubling necessary to become a self [that] rules out the possibility of strict identity,” as the protagonist ends up denying that he murdered her, and declaring that his mind is disintegrating. By posing the parallel between the quest for selfhood in the formation of identity and the quest for truth through literature, Barakat also offers a meditation on the ambivalence of the self, the violence of the civil war, and the impossibility of community. Jacques Lacan, “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis.” 27. Judith Butler, “Psychic Inceptions.” 198.

Having suffered the fate of erasure, postcolonial, transnational writing resurrects historical figures, saving their lives through narrative from oblivion. Works as diverse as Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies, Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, socière, Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account, Samia Serageldin’s The Naquib’s Daughter, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved are examples of this distinct type of historical fiction that challenges “the intentional or unintentional racism of the historians that we shall never know” (Condé, Historical Note to Moi, Tituba, socière). Although these narratives convey vastly different colonial contexts and experiences, the problems of historiography and erasure recur, as do themes of migration, enslavement, and healing. Considering such texts as distinctly postcolonial, transnational historical writing, questions regarding not only the truths the narratives tell, but their broader implications about a postcolonial, transnational condition can be raised. Such historical fiction is an “aesthetic response to the cultural significance of history in societies established on the bases of colonial occupation—places where memories of past violence fissure the imagined community, and as such, become subject to contestation” (Dalley 10). In other words, they point to a crisis in truth and in the claims of History on the ownership (the French propre better encompasses the notion) of nations, states, and societies. In spite of this, these narratives do not make a claim to historical veracity. In fact, they assert that the characters and their experiences are entirely fictional. Although based on historical figures and events, they offer instead what one writer of historical fiction calls “existential veracity” (Dalley and Wilson 138). What, then, is the work of existential veracity and what could it mean for postcolonial, transnational subjects? What is the claim of existential veracity on community and belonging? Can these narratives do the work of atonement and healing? Can it be argued that these imaginative texts speak to a more global, postcolonial condition, unraveling first the privileged stability that takes for granted a home that is at the center and second the violent modern compulsion (demand?) for identity and return to an elsewhere? Works Cited Dalley, Hamish. The Postcolonial Historical Novel: Realism, Allegory, and the Representation of contested Pasts. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Dalley, Hamish and Rohan Wilson. “In Defense of ‘the Lesser Cousin of History’: An Interview with Rohan Wilson.” ariel: A Review of International English Literature. Vol. 45, no. 4, Oct. 2014, pp. 133-150.

As the world marks the centenary of the First World War, attention has turned to the remarkable literature spawned by the “War to End All Wars.” Unlike most research into Great War literature, which tends to focus on works by European soldier-littérateurs (e.g., Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Erich Maria Remarque, etc.), this paper focuses on the war writing of one of the most important figures in modern Arab letters, Mikhail Naimy, whose remarkable life included service as a “doughboy” with the American Expeditionary Force in France. This paper aims not only to recognize Naimy’s contribution to Great War literature, but argues that an Arabic short story he wrote in 1919 based on his wartime experiences, “Shorty,” (K?na m? K?n, Beirut: Mu’assasat Nawful, 1987, pp. 117-138) shows that Naimy was ahead of his time vis-à-vis other American war writers. That is, the story draws upon the metaphor of venereal disease in order to express the sense of disillusionment and irony that is today considered a hallmark of Great War writing, but which, in fact, emerged among Americans writing in English only a decade or more following the war’s end (e.g., Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929). The paper first explains why Naimy, a pacifist who was not a US citizen, submitted to the draft and wartime service. Next, Naimy’s writing about the war, which includes poems, short stories and autobiography, is briefly surveyed. Attention is then turned to “Shorty” in order to demonstrate that, insofar as Naimy’s writing is concerned, critics such as Paul Fussell (The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford, 1975) are incorrect in suggesting that American soldiers’ literary efforts lagged behind their European counterparts in expressing ironic disillusionment with the war. The paper shows how greatly “Shorty” differed from other American war fiction and memoirs of its time in this regard. The upshot of this paper is not only to argue for a place for Naimy’s story in the canon of Great War literature, but also to demonstrate that Naimy’s education, inclinations and literary sensibilities led him to produce a precocious and important work of Great War fiction. It is moreover a work that demands a reevaluation of American war literature published in the years immediately following that great conflict.

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” With this six-word story, Ernest Hemingway established a platform for this genre of compressed narrative, which is known as the short-short story, or by the commonly used term in America ‘flash fiction’. The definition of flash fiction genre originally included short-short stories of 750, or up to 1500 words. In the Arabic Literature, the short-short story started to appear in the middle of the twentieth century, with many scholars claiming that this genre can be traced back to Gibran Khalil Gibran in “The Madman” (1918) and “The Wanderer” (1932). In 1944, Tawf?q Yousef leaded the publication of this genre when he published his collection of stories “Al-?Ath?r?”. By the 1960s and the 1970s, this genre gradually expanded its popularity among writers from other Arabic countries, where it was usually published in newspapers, literary magazines such as in “Al-Kilmah” magazine where writers like Shukr? Al-?ayy?r used to publish their short-short stories. The short- short story relies more than most narrative forms on techniques such as allusion, metonymy, synecdoche, symbolism in order to achieve its extraordinary concision of form. The present paper, proposes to analyze post-2000 short-short stories from Kuwait, together with the readers' responses to them. In a survey lab, two segments of audience, one segment shares the same cultural background with the writers and the other is not, 20 participant in maximum, will be asked to fill out a questionnaire asking for their feedback on some of stories of three Kuwaiti writers: Layl? Al-?Uthm?n, Yousef Khalifah, and Ibrah?m Dasht?. The study combines narrative theory and reader response theory to analyze the writer-message-reader matrix as it applies to these Kuwaiti short-short stories. In particular it will examine elements of sarcasm and irony, as these are not so much verbally expressed as subtly suggested, and therefore prone to both "mis"-writing and "mis"-reading, even as they confound the critic. The findings of the study are revolved around four outcomes: to what extent the different cultural backgrounds can affect the writer-reader partnership, could the writer relies on the receiver’s interpretation based on his/her individual point of view, the impact of the reader’s cultural background on his/her expectation for a possible resolution, and finally the main characteristics of the short-short story that can be employed to achieve a better understanding of the hidden sarcasm.