THE LAST MIGRATION

Abstract

This article is a comparative study of post‐war anglophone Lebanese novels produced outside of Lebanon. It distinguishes between exilic and diasporic fictions. The former are characterized by the characters’ radical sentiments towards the homeland which whether nostalgic or critical are equally debilitating and thus foster a mental condition of exile. By contrast, Jad el Hage’s The Last Migration (2002) charts a new path in this corpus by portraying the Lebanese as inhabiting a diasporic state of mind, characterized by a balanced perspective on the effects that living abroad has on their identities. Therefore, I argue that this novel is a prototype of Lebanese diasporic literature.

Keywords:

• post‐war anglophone Lebanese novel
• Lebanese civil war
• exile
• diaspora
• identity

Notes

1 Lebanon was under French colonial rule between 1918 and 1943, the year of its national independence.

2 In addition to Israel’s Outlandish: Writing between Exile and Diaspora (2000), see, for example, Amy K. Kaminsky’s After Exile: Writing the Latin American Diaspora (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999), Zohreh T. Sullivan’s Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2001), and Juliane Hammer’s Palestinians Born in Exile: Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland (Austin: U of Texas P, 2005).

3 Alameddine was born in 1959, Hanania in 1964, Ward in 1969, and Jarrar in 1958.

4 Between 1976 and 1978 some 17,289 Lebanese arrived in Australia under a relaxed humanitarian immigration program, increasing the Lebanese‐born population by 34% (Humphrey, “Sectarianism” 458). The total Lebanese‐born community in Australia was approximately 100,000 in the early 1980s (Batrouney 431).

5 Hungarian psychoanalyst Michael Balint coined these Greek terms, meaning “to grab hold of” and “to walk on one’s hands”, respectively.

6 An endo‐diasporan leaves the homeland at any age; an ecto‐diasporan is born in the diaspora (as a second‐generation member) and has never lived in the homeland (Riggs par. 31).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Syrine Hout

Syrine Hout is Associate Professor of English at the American University of Beirut. Her publications include Viewing Europe from the Outside: Cultural Encounters and Critiques in the Eighteenth‐century Pseudo‐Oriental Travelogue and the Nineteenth‐century “Voyage en Orient” (1997), and chapters in Historicizing Christian Encounters with the Other (1998), Literature and Nation in the Middle East (2006), and Nadia Tuéni: Lebanon: Poems of Love and War (2006). Articles have appeared in Utopian Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Studies in Travel Writing, Studies in the Humanities, CEA Critic, and World Literature Today.