Sex and love as routes for border crossing and homing desire in anglophone Lebanese fiction

Abstract

This article marshals key concepts from studies of diasporic literatures and close readings of two post-civil war anglophone Lebanese novels – Koolaids: The Art of War by Rabih Alameddine and De Niro’s Game by Rawi Hage – to explain how sex and love, whether gay or straight, serve as both literary strategies and social/psychological border crossings. To do so, it examines both adolescent sexuality and love relationships in wartime Lebanon and more mature ones in western locations. It argues that, for male Lebanese characters living outside Lebanon, memories interact with diasporic realities in which sexual and amorous affairs form an essential part of their homing desire. Abroad, in multiple spaces and places, networks of physical and/or emotional liaisons generate opportunities for crossing borders-as-barriers that, in turn, help establish new feelings of being-at-home.

Keywords:

• Anglophone Lebanese novel
• sexuality
• gayness
• love
• border crossing
• homing desire

Notes

1. Transatlantic crossings feature in Alameddine’s The Perv (1999), I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters (2001) and Hakawati (2008) but not in An Unnecessary Woman (2014) or in Hage’s Carnival (2012).

2. See, for example, Roberts (2014), Herzog (2011) and Dippel (2010).

3. In The Lebanese Dishwasher, Sonia Saikaley (2012) exposes the taboos surrounding homosexuality among impoverished members of Montreal’s Middle Eastern community. Karim Dimechkie’s (2015) Lifted by the Great Nothing presents homosexuality between a Lebanese man and his American neighbour in the US.