Re-Locations of Lebanon: The Littoral and Extraterritorial Geographies in Postwar Francophone Writing

ABSTRACT

This article deals with transnationalism and Lebanese literature written in French from 1990, the date that marks the end of the Civil War and the beginning of reconstruction. Produced amidst the conflagration of the Lebanese nation, a substantial body of heterogeneous works which maintain points of contact with Lebanon—both real and imagined—have been produced from outside the nation, from conditions of either exile or immigration. Through innovative strategies of deploying trans-cultural referents, this literature attempts to remap a broader Mediterranean or global cultural field. In reflecting on the present partitions in the Middle East, it evokes coordinates of new and alternative imagined geographies which focus on the sea (ports, tidelines) as opposed to land. Postwar writings such as Les Échelles du Levant by Amin Maalouf, and Littoral by Wajdi Mouawad explore the relations between land and sea, the personal and the global, and embrace an as yet unmapped worldly subject. Despite their status as outsiders, these writers explore the weight of global immediacy and their proximity to the Eastern Mediterranean or Levant—they map an extraterritorial consciousness. In articulating a new relationship to the imaginary of the Levant, they attempt to re-locate Lebanon and its horizon of possibilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Lebanese literature
• Wajdi Mouawad
• Littoral
• Amin Maalouf
• Les Échelles du Levant
• Mediterranean

Notes

1. Miriam Cooke's War Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (Syracuse UP, 1996) and Evelyne Accad's Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East (New York UP, 1990) were the first comparative monographs on Lebanese literature published after 1990. They focus on women's writing and the Lebanese Civil War. Recent monographs on postwar writing have focused on the Lebanese diaspora with an emphasis on Anglophone and Arabic-language writing. See Bayeh, Jumana. The Literature of the Lebanese Diaspora: Representations of Place and National Identity. New York: IB Tauris, 2014; Hayek, Ghenwa. Beirut, Imagining the City: Space and Place in Lebanese Literature. New York: IB Tauris, 2014; and Hout, Syrine. “Cultural Hybridity, Trauma, and Memory in Diasporic Anglophone Lebanese Fiction.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.3 (July 2011): 330–342, and Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012. Other monographs on postwar Lebanon include works on memory culture and trauma by Larkin (see note 4), Haugbolle, and Seigneurie (Standing by the Ruins: Elegiac Humanism in Wartime and Postwar Lebanon. (Fordham UP, 2011)).

2. Agamben, Giorgio. Means Without End: Notes on politics. Vol. 20. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000.

3. See Mouawad, Wajdi. Le Sang des Promesses, Puzzle, racines et rhizomes. Arles & Montréal: Actes Sud/Leméac, 2009.

4. See Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation Of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29.1 (2008): 103–128 for more on the concept of postmemory. For discussions of the concept as it pertains to the Lebanese postwar situation, see Larkin, Craig. “Beyond the War? The Lebanese Postmemory Experience.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42.4 (November 2010): 615–635 and Memory and Conflict in Lebanon: Remembering and Forgetting the Past. New York: Routledge, 2012; and Meerzon, Yana. Performing Exile, Performing Self: Drama, Theatre, Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

5. See Le Bris, Michel, Jean Rouaud, and Eva Almassy. Pour une littérature-monde. Paris: Gallimard, 2007.

6. See Maalouf, “Les Figures de l'absence,” 16. English translation is mine.

7. See Mouawad, Wajdi. Incendies. Arles & Montréal: Actes Sud/Leméac, 2003.

8. See Haugbolle for further discussion of the 1991 Taif Accord and “state-sanctioned amnesia” (69).

9. See Horden, Peregrine, and Nicholas Purcell. “The Mediterranean and ‘the New Thalassology’.” The American Historical Review 111.3 (2006): 722–740.

10. For historical perspectives on modernity in the late Ottoman Empire, see Fawaz, Leila Tarazi, Christopher Alan Bayly, and Robert Ilbert, eds. Modernity and Culture: from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. New York: Columbia UP, 2002; see Makdisi for an analysis of the “contradictions of the modernity of sectarianism” (13).

11. Hanley problematizes nostalgia and “loss as a general trope in the history of Mediterranean port city cosmopolitanism” (1355).

12. During the Second World War, French Mandate powers were in the hands of the Vichy regime. The Free French Forces were also active in Syria-Lebanon; Lebanese independence ultimately coincided with the Resistance's success and the liberation of both France and Lebanon from the Vichy government.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nadia Sahely

Nadia Sahely is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Baldwin Wallace University. She earned her Ph.D. at Brown University. Her primary research focus is in twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature and philosophy, and she has published work on Georges Bataille and Colette Peignot. Her recent interest is in Francophone literature of the Machrek and she is currently completing a book-length manuscript entitled (Re)Locations of Lebanon: Francophone and Transnational Lebanese Literature and Film from 1990 to the present.