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Abstract
This article examines post-war anglophone Lebanese fiction produced in the diaspora since 1998. Focusing on Rabih Alameddine’s Koolaids: The Art of War (1998) and I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters (2001), Patricia Sarrafian Ward’s The Bullet Collection (2003), and Rawi Hage’s Cockroach (2008), it underscores the connections between three common features: cultural hybridity or in-betweenness, trauma, and memory. With reference to critical observations about transnational writings in general and contemporary foreign-language Lebanese narratives in particular, it demonstrates how these features, visible in different degrees, characterize these stylistically diverse fictions as a transnational brand of Lebanese literature. It argues that these texts, whose main strategies are the portrayals of their characters’ recurrent movements from and back to Lebanon, in mind and/or in body, and of their processes of remembering war-related traumatic events, provide an anti-amnesiac and generation-specific testimony to the lingering effects of the Lebanese Civil War.
Notes
1. Contemporary anglophone Lebanese literature is a more recent phenomenon than its francophone counterpart.
2. In the last three decades, anxiety about the eventual loss of direct memories of the Holocaust has driven a flourishing of memory studies in both theory and fiction. Much work in relation to the formal and psychosocial features of Holocaust literature, by Geoffrey H. Hartman, Lawrence L. Langer, and others, has been done, including comparative studies, like Edkins’s Trauma and the Memory of Politics, which examines how some memories of the Holocaust and the Vietnam War are politically constructed.
3. In Family Frames and her article “The Generation of Postmemory”, Hirsch discusses postmemory by demonstrating the discursive power of photographs in fixing Jewish historical consciousness and remembrance for the descendants of Holocaust survivors.
4. Jarrar was born in 1958, Alameddine in 1959, Antoun in 1961, Hammoud and el-Zein in 1963, Hanania and Hage in 1964, Najjar in 1967, Mouawad in 1968, Ward in 1969, and Abi-Ezzi in 1972.
5. Quoted in ⟨www.wwnorton.com/rgguides/ithedivinergg.htm⟩.
6. It received the Hala Maksoud Award at the RAWI (Radius of Arab-American Writers, Inc.) conference in 2005.
7. It received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2008.
8. Quoted in ⟨www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200502/stories/bio22.html⟩.
9. See Hout, “The Predicament of In-Betweenness”.
10. PTSD, depression, and anxiety disorders may result from traumatic stressors (Resick 28). Sarah exhibits the “Macbeth effect,” which describes cases when a threat to one’s moral purity induces an obsessive need to cleanse one’s body. See Zhong and Liljenquist.
11. As a trauma narrative, The Bullet Collection has been compared to Ruth Kluger’s 1992 German-language memoir, translated into English as Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001). See Wolters.
12. These markers include the lira (Lebanon’s currency), the Phoenicians (its ancient inhabitants), Almaza (a local beer brand), and a high rock (Beirut’s iconic Pigeon Rocks).