Fabulation and Fabrication: Constructing the Atlal in Anthony Shadid's House of Stone

ABSTRACT

Anthony Shadid's memoir House of Stone (2012) describes his return to a rural village in Lebanon and the rebuilding of his ancestral home after it had been left derelict due to the political turmoil of the country's fifteen-year civil war (1975–1990). This article explores the relationship between memory and ‘home’, and the ways Shadid depicts the ancestral house as a record of a conflation of memories, ranging from the personal to the ancestral and national. I argue that Shadid's project transfers the imaginary construct of home onto the physical site of the ancestral house. The memoir and the house function as sites of fabulation and fabrication. Shadid fabulates rich tales of an idealised Levant, encompassing romantic stories of Marjayoun's past and the house's role in his dream of fabricating a Levantine home. House of Stone illustrates the ways personal and national memory may be linked through the physical site of the house. This process of fabulation and fabrication is representative of an imagined collective identity, shared across time by family and nation. The article deconstructs Shadid's literary representations of physical and imaginary spaces in order to reveal ‘the home’ as a complex site of conflated memories.

KEYWORDS:

• Diaspora
• Lebanon
• memory
• life writing
• home

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Although Shadid completed both the renovation works on the family house and his memoir, he died shortly before the publication of it in 2012. His death did not take place at home in the U.S. or in Lebanon, but in transit as he was leaving Syria on his way to Turkey on a work assignment.

2 He won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2004 and 2010. In addition to his journalism, he published two books related to his work on the region: Legacy of the Prophets: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam (2002) and Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War (2005).

3 See Mahmoud Darwish ‘Standing Before the Ruins of Al-Birweh’ (2009).

4 See Umm Khulthum ‘Al-Atlal’ (1966).

5 The conflict between Israel and Lebanon started with the establishment of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon from the 1960s and reached an escalation during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War. Consequently, the closed borders between Israel and Lebanon were in place with the demarcation of the ‘Blue Line’ between southern Lebanon and northern Israel.

6 Lebanon's war erupted due to civil unrest between the various religious sects: the Maronite Christian minority held political power over the majority Muslim population after the French mandate was drawn in the 1920s which put new borders throughout the region of Greater Syria. The Christians were backed by France and other Western allies whereas the Muslims were backed by Syria. Consequently, Syria and Israel invaded Lebanon with Israel withdrawing completely in 2000 and Syria withdrawing only in 2005 (Goldschmidt and Davidson 2013).

7 Especially in the case of a future border clashes between Israel and Lebanon throughout the 2010s.

8 Although the events described in the memoir refer to his first wife and daughter, Shadid remarried Nada Bakri, also a journalist on the Middle East, in 2009. They have a son together, Malik, born in 2010.

9 Although Shadid's son is yet to be born at the time of writing the memoir, this yearning for the future would also have to include his son.

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Notes on contributors

Arththi Sathananthar

Arththi Sathananthar is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute (LAHRI). Sathananthar’s broader research interests include diaspora, postcolonial studies, Middle East studies, cultural studies, home, space and place, life writing, and memory studies. She is also a British HEA (Higher Education Academy) Associate Fellow.