Bearing Witness: The Politics of Form in Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose

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Notes

⁴¹ I agree here with Ella Shohat that ‘[w]hile it is hazardous to “speak for someone,” that is, paradigmatically to replace them, it is something different … to “speak up for,” that is, to speak on behalf of, a group when that group is blocked from representation’ (Ella Shohat, ‘The struggle over representation: casting, coalitions, and the politics of identifications,’ in: R. De la Campa et al. (Eds) Late Imperial Culture (London: Verso, 1995), p. 177)

⁴⁰ For a discussion of American students' tendency to read the text ‘pluralistically,’ see Champagne, ‘Among good Christian peoples,’ pp. 173–174, n. 6.

³⁹ Accad privileges the narrator's feminist discourse because it corresponds to her theory that ‘war stems from an ancestral fear of women’ (Accad, Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East (New York and London: New York University Press, 1990), p. 67).

³⁸ Belsey, Critical Practice, p. 92.

³⁷ Donna Haraway, ‘Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspectives,’ Feminist Studies, 14(3) (1988), p. 583.

³⁶ Evelyn Accad, Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East (New York: New York University Press), p. 75.

³⁵ Quoted in Andrea Frisch, ‘The ethics of testimony: a genealogical perspective,’ Discourse, 25(1&2); (2003), p. 45.

³⁴ Adnan, ‘The non-worldly world,’ p. 16.

³³ In Ovid's Metamorphosis the Thracian king, Tereus, cuts out the tongue of Phelomela, his wife's sister, after raping her to cover up his crime. Locked away in the forest and speechless, Phelomela weaves the crime in a vestment in purple letters and sends it to her sister Procne, who after reading the written testimony exacts a terrible revenge on her husband Tereus. See Ovid, Metamorphosis 6 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 401–674.

³² Marie-Rose as subject and text is emphasized by Adnan. As subject, Marie-Rose is seen from different perspectives; she is also a speaker in her own defense. Marie-Rose is also a text. This textuality is emphasized twice in the title of the novel, ‘Sitt Marie Rose’ and in the title ‘Marie-Rose’ given to Time II.

³¹ Marcus uses this expression in relation to upper class English women who drove ambulances in the First World War and whose bodies became ‘forbidden, dangerous, polluted carriers of a terrible knowledge.’ See Marcus, ‘Corpus,’ p. 126.

³⁰ Quoted in Engdahl, ‘Philomela's tongue,’ p. 11.

²⁹ Felman & Laub, Testimony, p. 208.

²⁸ According to Margaret Higonnet, writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Louisa May Alcott, and Boris Pilniak seem to experiment with point of view in their fiction about civil wars because ‘the theme of civil war seems to demand a narrative violation of expectations.’ Adnan's experimentation with point of view in Sitt Marie Rose confirms and extends Higonnet's observation. See Margaret Higonnet, ‘Civil wars and sexual territories,’ in H. Cooper et al., Arms and the Woman, p. 93.

²⁷ Weine, ‘The witnessing imagination,’ p. 168.

²⁶ Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (New York: Routledge, 1980), p. 91.

²⁵ Weine, ‘The witnessing imagination,’ p. 168.

²⁴ I am borrowing the expressions ‘professional witness’ and the ‘witnessing imagination’ from Stevan Weine, a psychiatrist and co-director of the Project on Genocide, Psychiatry and Witnessing at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and playwright Karen Malpede. They use these terms in the context of their work on theatrical representations of genocide in Bosnia. See Stevan M. Weine, ‘The witnessing imagination: social trauma, creative artists, and witnessing professionals,’ Literature and Medicine, 15(2) (1996), pp. 167–182; and Karen Malpede, ‘Teaching witnessing: a class wakes to the genocide in Bosnia,’ Theatre Topics, 2 (1996), pp. 167–179.

²³ P. Englund, ‘The bedazzled gaze: on perspective and paradoxes in witness literature,’ in: H. Engdahl (Ed.) Witness Literature: Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium (London: World Scientific), p. 45.

²² Etel Adnan, ‘The non-worldly world: a conversation with Etel Adnan,’ Poetry Flash, May 1986, pp. 1–16.

²¹ Etel Adnan, Of Cities and Women (Letters to Fawwaz), p. 73 (Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 1993). Although Sitt Marie Rose is focused on male violence, it does not overlook ‘female complicity in warmaking,’ a complicity often ignored by the traditional war story (Helen Cooper et al., ‘Introduction,’ in: Cooper et al., Arms and the Woman, p. xiii). In Sitt Marie Rose women are complicit by being a passive audience to the destruction around them, by their more active relishing of ‘male victories’ (p. 67), and, by their exclusive love for their sons (p. 97).

²⁰ Some women did take part in the fighting. According to Kristin Schulze, ‘There were three Christian all-female militia units in addition to some mixed units. Between 250 and 300 young Christian women took part in combat, although 3000 had received military training in the preceding years. In 1982, during the Mountain War, women fighters constituted 7 percent of the Lebanese Forces' combatants.’ See Kristin Schulze, ‘Communal violence, civil war and foreign occupation: women in Lebanon,’ in: R. Wilford & R. L. Miller (Eds) Women, Ethnicity and Nationalism: The Politics of Transition (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 157.

¹⁹ Adnan's text confirms Jane Marcus's observation that ‘Civil war novels break from linear narrative, often invoking Kristeva's “women's time,” allowing more complicated temporal inversions, memories, and incestuous plots.’ See Jane Marcus, ‘Corpus/corps/corpse: writing the body in/at war,’ in: H. Cooper et al., Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representations (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press), p. 153.

¹⁸ The class relation of the female narrator to the Syrian workers is often ignored by critics who tend to focus on her relationship to Mounir, which is viewed in terms of gender. See Homsi-Vinson, ‘Voice,’ pp. 183–184; and Ofeish and Ghandour, ‘Transgressive subjects,’ pp. 131–132.

¹⁷ Mounir and his friends are doing to the Syrian countryside what the British soldier walking in the Indian countryside did in the 19th century. According to Spivak: ‘He is actually engaged in consolidating the self of Europe by obliging the native to cathect the space of the Other on his home ground [that is, he is obliging the native to experience his home ground as imperial space]. He is working their own work, which is far from mere uninscribed earth.’ Quoted in B. Ashcroft et al., Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 241.

¹⁶ Syrian workers in pre-war Lebanon suffered from exploitative work practices. In 1973, the Lebanese-Syrian accord promised a minimum wage, legal working hours, paid holidays, sick leave, family allowances, and retirement pensions. During the war the Christian militia's torture and killing of Syrian workers at the Beirut port touched off an exodus of all Syrian workers from Lebanon. The government's efforts to lure the workers back by giving them what was promised in the 1973 accord failed; see further Petran, The Struggle, p. 171.

¹⁵ Spivak, ‘Practical Politics of the Open End’, in: S. Harasym (Ed.) The Post-Colonial Critic (New York: Routledge), p. 110.

¹⁴ The relation between the two parts of the novel is often ignored by critics, with the story of Marie-Rose receiving all the attention and the first part usually marginalized as background. See further Mohomodou Houssouba, ‘Ever since Gilgamesh: Etel Adnan's discourse on the national unity in Sitt Marie Rose,’ in: L. S. Majaj & A. Amireh (Eds) Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), pp. 137–152; John Champagne, ‘Among good Christian peoples: teaching Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose,’ in L. S. Majaj & A. Amireh (Eds) Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), pp. 153–175; and Sami Ofeish and Sabah Ghandour, ‘Transgressive subjects: gender, war and colonialism in Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose,’ in L. S. Majaj & A. Amireh (Eds) Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), pp. 122–136. One exception is Pauline Homsi-Vinson who discusses the narrative voice in the novel and draws attention to the changes to the voice of the female narrator in the first and second parts; see Pauline Homsi-Vinson, ‘Voice, narrative, and political critique: Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose and Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero,’ in L. S. Majaj & A. Amireh (Eds) Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), pp. 176–196.

¹³ All references and quotations from the novel in this article are from Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose: A Novel (Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 1982).

¹² Horace Engdahl, ‘Philomela's tongue: introductory remarks on witness literature,’ in: H. Engdahl (Ed.) Witness Literature: Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium (New Jersey: World Scientific, 2002), p. 4.

¹¹ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?,’ in: Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (Eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 275.

¹⁰ Shoshana Felman & Dori Laub, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 2.

⁹ Shoshana Felman & Dori Laub, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 206.

⁸ Miriam Cooke, ‘Wo-man retelling the war myth,’ in: Miriam Cooke & Angela Wollacott (Eds) Gendering War Talk (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 183.

⁷ My use of the label ‘civil war’ is not meant to obscure the extensive international involvement in the conflict. Some historians use the label to describe the war in 1975–76, to distinguish it from 1976–90, during which there was Syrian, Israeli, French, and American intervention.

⁶ Darwish, Memory, p. 362.

⁵ Theodore Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1966), p. 362.

⁴ Darwish, Memory, p. 9.

³ For detailed accounts of the Lebanese civil war, see Tabitha Petran, The Struggle over Lebanon (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987); and Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (London: Oxford University Press, 1990).

² Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 154.

¹ Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 58.