Lebanese Writing Beyond al-Ahdath
Panel 116, 2015 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 23 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
If Lebanon in early 2015 is post-war, (or more cynically interwar), then why has writing about Lebanese literature taken so long to catch up? Lebanese writing of and about the Civil War has been analyzed, translated, anthologized and canonized. The war is cast by authors and critics as generative of Lebanese literary modernism, and "Lebanese literature" is metonymically a Civil War literature. As the novelist and critic Elias Khoury has commented, "The Lebanese novel is the most experimental novel in the Arab world, and this has to do with the experience of the civil war." The Civil War--in either its representation, its augury, or its absence--has become part of the Lebanese literary contract. Without the war, in other words, ma fi shi.
This panel will bring together scholars studying Lebanese writing from different periods to interrogate what sorts of alternate frames of reference we can bring to the study of the Arabic literature of Lebanon--through discussion of alternative literary genealogies, the post-war aesthetics of the quotidian, emergent sexualities, and the persistence of narratives of estrangement. One paper will argue for an alternative origin for Lebanese narrative modernism, by discussing the recasting of the Mount Lebanon village topos in the 1960s and 1970s works of Yusuf Habashi al-Ashqar and Ilyas al-Dayri. A second paper will offer a discussion of the post-War recasting of Beirut as a space of everyday life in the novels of younger authors—such as Rabee Jaber, Sahar Mandour and Hilal Chouman. Offering a comparative analysis of Rashid al-Daif’s and Alexandra Chreiteh’s works, another paper argues that the contemporary Lebanese novel, in its exploration of evolving notions of Lebanese womanhood and manhood, gives voice to emergent subjectivities that are no longer subdued by previously dominant discourses of disavowal and exclusion. The final paper will explore the literary treatments of estrangement in wartime and postwar Lebanon through a comparative reading of two Arabic novels by Elias Khoury and Ghada Samman. As the War becomes more distant historically and our reliance upon it as the critical countertext recedes, this panel will serve to engage some of the new directions being taken by research into Arabophone Lebanese narratives.
If Lebanon in early 2015 is post-war, (or more cynically interwar), then why has writing about Lebanese literature taken so long to catch up? Lebanese writing of and about the Civil War has been analyzed, translated, anthologized and canonized. The war is cast by authors and critics as generative of Lebanese literary modernism, and "Lebanese literature" is metonymically a Civil War literature. As the novelist and critic Elias Khoury has commented, "The Lebanese novel is the most experimental novel in the Arab world, and this has to do with the experience of the civil war." The Civil War--in either its representation, its augury, or its absence--has become part of the Lebanese literary contract. Without the war, in other words, ma fi shi.
This panel will bring together scholars studying Lebanese writing from different periods to interrogate what sorts of alternate frames of reference we can bring to the study of the Arabic literature of Lebanon--through discussion of alternative literary genealogies, the post-war aesthetics of the quotidian, emergent sexualities, and the persistence of narratives of estrangement. One paper will argue for an alternative origin for Lebanese narrative modernism, by discussing the recasting of the Mount Lebanon village topos in the 1960s and 1970s works of Yusuf Habashi al-Ashqar and Ilyas al-Dayri. A second paper will offer a discussion of the post-War recasting of Beirut as a space of everyday life in the novels of younger authors—such as Rabee Jaber, Sahar Mandour and Hilal Chouman. Offering a comparative analysis of Rashid al-Daif’s and Alexandra Chreiteh’s works, another paper argues that the contemporary Lebanese novel, in its exploration of evolving notions of Lebanese womanhood and manhood, gives voice to emergent subjectivities that are no longer subdued by previously dominant discourses of disavowal and exclusion. The final paper will explore the literary treatments of estrangement in wartime and postwar Lebanon through a comparative reading of two Arabic novels by Elias Khoury and Ghada Samman. As the War becomes more distant historically and our reliance upon it as the critical countertext recedes, this panel will serve to engage some of the new directions being taken by research into Arabophone Lebanese narratives.
Disciplines
Participants
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Dr. Nadine Sinno
-- Presenter
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Mr. Zaki Haidar
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Dr. Ghenwa Hayek
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Dr. Nadine Sinno
War continues to occupy an undeniable presence in the Lebanese literary imagination. However, Lebanese authors are diverting more of their attention to the exploration of evolving notions of gender, sexuality, and national identity in contemporary Lebanese society. Rashid al-Daif’s Tistifil Meryl Streep (2001) depicts the trials and tribulations of Rashoud, a Lebanese man who finds himself emasculated by his wife’s seemingly transgressive behavior. Projecting his marital insecurities on the American actor, Meryl Streep, he challenges the Western concept of “women’s liberation,” which he credits for undermining tradition and eroding family ties. More recently, in Sikirida’s Cat (2014), al-Daif tells the story of the Ethiopian Sikirida and her son Radwan, who must deal with stigmatization because of Sikirida’s “foreignness” and her infamous promiscuity. Radwan, too, has his share of sexual adventures with the disabled Amal, whose paralyzed body is by no means a hindrance to her budding sexuality. By narrating the lives of protagonists who normally exist at the margins of Lebanese society, al-Daif stages issues of race/ethnicity, sexuality, and disability at the forefront of his narrative, while setting the text against the backdrop of a brutally sectarian war. Similarly, Alexandra Chreiteh’s Dai’man Coca-Cola (2008) hints at Lebanon’s volatile political situation, but the novel’s main concerns revolve around its protagonists’ struggles with femininity, unplanned pregnancy, and rape and the repercussions of these struggles on the protagonists’ subjectivities. Chreiteh’s most recent novel, Ali and his Russian Mother (2010), which takes place at the outset of the July 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war, is also less concerned with death and destruction as it is with Ali’s struggles with his homosexuality and mixed heritage. Drawing on critical studies of race, gender and sexuality, and subjectivity, this presentation offers a comparative analysis of al-Daif’s and Chreiteh’s novels. I argue that the contemporary Lebanese novel, in its exploration of evolving notions of Lebanese womanhood and manhood, gives voice to emergent subjectivities that—while still marginal—are no longer subdued by dominant discourses of disavowal and exclusion. Furthermore, no longer are the struggles of nontraditional, non-heteronormative characters foreshadowed by the text’s preoccupation with war and security (or the lack thereof). By interrogating the precarious discourses of virginity, homophobia, and xenophobia, and by deconstructing hegemonic notions of gender and citizenship, the Lebanese novel offers a constructive intervention that interrogates long-enduring narratives about it means to be an “authentic” Lebanese.
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Mr. Zaki Haidar
In the literary history of Arabic, modernism in the Arabic novel is generally attributed to the dislocating effects of historical and political events: the nakba, the naksa, and most aptly for this context, the Lebanese Civil War. The Civil War, in the telling of both authors and critics, was such a profound social rupture that it necessitated an adoption of new forms of representation. While these claims can certainly be justified with a reading of the development of Lebanese novel, in this paper I will explore a different hypothesis than that of modernism as a sort of political aesthesis or “response” to events in the world.
In my paper, I discuss two authors who began publishing fiction in the 1950s and 1960s, Ilyas al-Dayri and Yusuf Habashi al-Ashqar. Both of these authors adopted the settings and some of the stylistic modes of the tradition of fiction developed by Marun Abbud and Lahad Khatir among others—that of the folklore of Mount Lebanon, the sympathetic ethnographic gaze. However, in Ashqar and Dayri’s writings, the Mountain they depicted was one that was integrated in to and implicated in the political, ideological and economic transformations of the mid-twentieth century. The villages they represented in their works were in the process of emptying and transforming into petrified relics of estival tourism, and the protagonists were adopting new relations of political and social affiliation. Their striking adoption of modernist literary modes-such as stream of consciousness and pastiche, as well as the frequent references to European thought—was in may ways just as novel as the thematic transformations in their work. Using these authors’ works, I argue for another possible genealogy for “literary modernism” and indeed the modern novel in Lebanon. I argue that the growth of the modern(ist) novel was not a response to the Civil War, but rather as befits authors operating in an autonomous literary sphere, it arose, at least in large part, out of a studied reworking of established tropes and narrative forms.
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Dr. Ghenwa Hayek
In this presentation, I examine a range of novels written by a new generation of young Lebanese writers, and use these texts to argue that new writing practices and forms that emphasize the daily practices of everyday life in the city have emerged as Beirut and Lebanon continue to careen through turbulent, albeit relatively peaceful, times. In emphasizing the ordinary, mundane, and everyday activities of their young millennial protagonists, these novels produce a new form of literary resistance to the erasure of the past that they share with an earlier generation of writers. However, in a significant departure from earlier forms of contemporary Lebanese writing, young novelists like Sahar Mandour, Hilal Chouman and Rabee Jaber produce work that examines and interrogates Beirut’s and Lebanon’s recent past yet moves away from a rhetoric of blame or victimization prevalent in earlier fiction that focuses on the civil war and its aftermath. Yet, I also argue that this new type of fiction is not without its own anxieties, most specifically about the very real possibility of impending violence and the need for imminent departure in the future. Within the novels I explore in this presentation, I argue, this is often articulated as a strengthened attachment to continuing ordinary, everyday life in the extraordinary city of Beirut.
