Ya ‘Ayb al-Shoum: Scenes of Auto/Bio/Graphy and Shame in Nadine Naous’s Home Sweet Home

ABSTRACT

Many filmmakers and people working in film projects in Lebanon over the last two decades are interested in gathering and telling the stories of their parents’ generation, towards understanding and acting on their present social, cultural, and political circumstances. Where literary autobiographical fiction and memoir has tended to be produced by an older generation that lived through the violence of the civil war years (1975–1990), documentary film is an expanding auto/biographical practice of cultural production by a younger, post-civil war generation. While such films consist of strands of biography, soliciting personal stories of their parents’ generation, they also contain impulses of autobiography, often foregrounding the filmmaker's own story in relation to their interest in tracking the stories they collect. In this essay I explore auto/bio/graphical impulses in the documentary film Home Sweet Home (2014), by Nadine Naous. By situating Naous’s film as a site of address and response, I consider to what extent the relational impulses of her father’s story and her’s implicate embodiments of shame as gendered modalities of decorous conduct.

KEYWORDS:

• Auto/bio/graphy
• shame
• Nadine Naous
• Lebanon

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Norman Saadi Nikro has Australian and Lebanese backgrounds and, since 2007, resides in Berlin where he is a research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient. He studied critical theory at the University of New South Wales, and finished his doctoral thesis in 1998 on art, literature and cultural production by migrants with non-English backgrounds in Australia. He has published essays in the journals Southerly, Postcolonial Text, Plurale: Zeitschrift für Denkversionen, El Shuara, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and chapters for various edited volumes, including ‘The Arab Australian Novel: Situating Diasporic and Multicultural Literature’, in Nouri Gana (ed) The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English: The Politics of Anglo Arab and Arab American Literature and Culture (2013). In 2007 he guest-edited a volume of the journal Al Raida at the Lebanese American University on the theme of Arab Women Writing in English. More recently, in 2014, he edited a special issue of the journal Postcolonial Text, titled Situating Postcolonial Trauma Studies. Currently he is finishing the draft of a book on the social life of memory and trauma in Lebanon. He teaches in the Department of English Literature and Cultural Studies at Potsdam University, where he gained his Habilitation degree in 2013.

At ZMO he is a member of the Trajectories of Lives and Knowledge group, and is undertaking research for a book on the auto/biographical impulses in the work of Edward Said. His book, The Fragmenting Force of Memory: Self, Literary Style, and Civil War in Lebanon, was published in 2012.

Notes

1 I have previously referred to Khoury’s preoccupation with ideology and political sensibility as a literary style of ‘post-commitment’ (The Fragmenting 115). Concerning the critique of sexuality and gender in literature, since Miriam Cooke’s Wars Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (1988) there has been a growing number of critical studies addressing these themes. In English, see Accad; Cooke; Ghoussoub and Sinclaire-Webb; and Aghacy.

2 Concerning cultural production in Lebanon, I have discussed these notions in a recent essay on photography in the cinematic and curatorial work of Zaatari. For a discussion of these themes in relation to Ghoussoub, see my chapter ‘History and/or the Traumatic Clamour of Memory: Mai Ghoussoub’s Leaving Beirut’ (Nikro).