The Levant as a code of deterritorialization for Amin Maalouf

Abstract

The article makes an exploration of three motifs in the context of Lebanese-French Arab migrant writer Amin Maalouf’s fictional text Ports of Call (2001) by applying the theoretical framework of deterritorialization and reterritorialization as presented by the French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and expanded by the Indian-American theorist Arjun Appadurai. As suggested by the four key words of the writer’s introduction–namely ‘Lebanese’, ‘French’, ‘Arab’ and ‘migrant’–the three motifs being de-composed into their basic components are identity, especially the migrant identity, the Levant as a symbol of the migrant’s lost home and deterritorialization/reterritorialization in the context of globalization. Migrants are deterritorialized and departure from long-established origins causes a disruption in the conventional notions of ‘home’ and ‘identity’ turning them into something fluid rather than fixed. This leads to a revision of the postcolonial postulation which makes migrancy a locus for the reworking of nation’s primacy as a referent in the construction of identity. The intricate nature of relation between political and personal experiences highlights the tangling of ideological stances on nation and nationalism in the cultural production taking place at the site of migration.

Keywords:

• Migration
• identity
• home
• deterritorialization
• the Levant
• globalization

REVIEWING EDITOR:

• Oliver Nyambi, English, University of the Free State, South Africa

SUBJECTS:

• Literature; Postmodernism Literature; Literary/Critical Theory

Introduction

Identity, the Levant as a symbol of the migrant’s lost home and deterritorialization are the three motifs of this study. The main argument is being shaped by the concept of deterritorialization as presented by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1983, 1986, 1987), and expanded by Arjun Appadurai (1996). Transcending the stable, fixed, epistemologically-accepted norms is deterritorialization; decentralization of power and totality of the Oedipus is deterritorialization. The focus of the above-mentioned theorists is on getting the collectivities accentuated because only conscious and mass movements can make deterritorialization a revolutionary force. Hence it is in the field of migrant literature and sociology of migration that the notion of deterritorialization has garnered attraction as is obvious in the works of Arjun Appadurai (1996) and Caren Kaplan (2006). The term is applicable in the migrant context because through the act of migration the migrants are pushed to the margins of the host society while in their country of origin they have been at the centre. What makes ‘migrants’ able to penetrate and fathom the constructs of power, and the politics working under the conceptualizations of culture and identity is the fact that they exist at the margins, free from the domination of national territorialities. The consequence is a transformation in the sense of identity and home. What Appadurai calls deterritorialization is when identity is transformed as the result of an absolute disruption of the worn-out notion of identity as being irreversibly predetermined. And it is here that his definition of deterritorialization resonates with that presented by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1983, 1986, 1987). Globalization gives birth to such transformed identities; and in the context of globalization, diasporas are the focus of Appadurai’s interest. He makes investigations into the imaginings and reimaginings of the ‘migrants’ with regard to the newly-arrived homes and the newly-discovered pasts. Appadurai explores deterritorialization in the context of migrancy with the help of his constructed -scapes—ideoscape, ethnoscape, mediascape, financescape, and technoscape (Appadurai, 1996).

Though migration has become a global issue in the present age, yet it has always been there as a significant human phenomenon throughout human history existing even before the primordial times and finding itself being reflected in a great body of literary and visual art. From The Old Testament containing ‘The Book of Exodus’ which relates the migration of the Israelites with the prophet Moses from Biblical Egypt to Mount Sinai to the numerous films based on the theme of World War II—like Theo Angelopoulos (1935-2012)’ The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991) and Eternity and A Day (1998), Sylvain Estibal (1967-)’s When Pigs Have Wings (2011) and Michael Haneke (1942-)’s Happy End (2017)—are some famous stances of migrancy narratives. Illustrations concerning the subject-matter of migrancy make explicit the apprehensions, hopes, longings, resentments and disappointments of the displaced. Derek Walcott’s mourning in ‘Laventille’ best summarizes the wounded lives of the migrants and the pain of the dissolution of what was once their ‘home’: ‘We left/somewhere a life we never found,/customs and gods that are not born again,’ (1988, p. 85, lines 83–85)

The study makes an evaluation of the deterritorialization of migrants’ identity and home. Migrants are deterritorialized. When ‘leaving’ takes place, they are full of hopes: aspiring to survive and expecting to find and found a life better than the present one. Their quest is for new horizons and new territories. Nevertheless, what follows departure is generally the disillusionment with deterritorialization and the feeling of being stranded and having no possibility of ever returning to their erstwhile lives and homes. The migrants cannot even go back to their previous selves. The only possibility open to them is the chance to get reterritorialized or be nomadic forever. The time which has passed is no more than a futile recollection of a never-found life and of those gods and customs which can never come into existence again.

‘Refugees’ are the migrants who are confronted with even greater trials and tribulations. They are restricted to a division of places from the rest of the native population. Such partition prevents them from taking an easy part in daily life and keeps them at a certain distance by making them internalize the fact of being the other. There are millions of people undergoing such phases in their lives. This is a kind of flow resulting from globalization and the dissolution of the borders of national territories. In Zygmunt Bauman’s words, ‘Globalization means that the state no longer has the clout or the wish to keep its marriage with the nation rock-solid and impregnable’ (Bauman 2004, p. 28). Millions are changing their locations to metropolis, by means of which the marriage of the state with the nation is no more rock-solid and almost totally collapsed.

Identity is basically socially constructed. It is the encounter with the other through dialogue. It originates from relations with others, since it is something community-based. Hence, identity is a never-ending, evolutionary process which continues as long as one is alive. In a free-floating world of signification it is both a signifier and a signified. The fact of its always being in flux makes it the finest medium of simultaneous territoriality—territorializtion, deterritorialization and reterritorialization all at one time. Homi K. Bhabha points this out in a similar vein in his 1986 ‘Foreword’ to Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)’s Black Skin White Masks (1952):

For identification, identity is never an a priori, nor a finished product; it is only ever the problematic process of access to an ‘image’ of totality. The discursive conditions of this psychic image of identification will be clarified if we think of the perilous perspective of the concept of the image itself. (1986, pp. xxix-xxx)

In the light of Bhabha’s illustration, the conceptualization of the ‘image’ of totality gives birth to ‘identity’ which is also something imagined in itself dependent upon that ‘image’ of the total. This notion of identity repudiates and deconstructs those primitive essentialist beliefs which made identity something territory-bound, while in fact it is a heterogenous phenomenon constantly in the process of ‘becoming’. Hence, the essence of the concept of identity is nomadic: it is constantly changing, evolving, creating and recreating itself over time.

Keeping in view these concepts of deterritorialization and identity, this research makes a deconstructive study of Amin Maalouf’s fictional narrative Ports of Call (2001) taking into account Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri’s concept of deterritorialization (1983, 1986, 1987) and proves how Maalouf’s narrative strategies subvert the hegemonic codes of territorialization in a search for identity. The hegemony in Maalouf’s case is twofold: belonging to a Christian minority in the Arab world and moving to France as a refugee made him face the Arab as well as the Western territorialization. Born in the Lebanese metropolis Beirut in 1949, winner of Prix Goncourt, speaking Arabic, English and French but choosing to write in French is Amin Maalouf–a migrant from Lebanon settled in France. While working in the category of a journalist based in Lebanon, he was forced to witness the War breaking out in his country in 1975 and to immigrate as a refugee to the French metropolis Paris along with his family where he has continued living up till now. He was at a battlefield, and declining to take sides had decided to flee. Recalling that experience he says, ‘During my youth, the idea of moving from Lebanon was unthinkable. Then I began to realize I might have to go, like my grandfather, uncles and others…’ (Quoteded in Jaggi, 2002). Maalouf is a prolific writer: in addition to journalism, several novels and non-fictional works of prose are to his credit. With his experiences of Civil War and migration, it is his poise which is the hallmark of all his writings: the special aura he gives out is his making himself calmly balanced between two homes, various cultural traditions, and two or more languages. His characters are voyagers and itinerants who keep moving between religions and languages as well as between lands. Maalouf’s characters range across the Mediterranean and the old world of the Levant that’s vanished since the first world war when Greek and Italian mingled with Arabic and Turkish, and Druze rubbed shoulders with Christians, Jews and Sunni Muslims. The fact of Maalouf’s simultaneously being Christian and having Arabic, the holy language of Islam, as his mother tongue makes up the paradox which is the speciality of his identity. Yet it is the history, common to both the West and the Middle East, which illuminates his fiction. In a world full of fundamentalist identity seekers, Maalouf’s voice has become the herald of sanity and wisdom, celebrating the wonder as well as the complexity of multiple belongings.

Maalouf’s identity in this context has been formed through various cultural affiliations that contribute to his understanding of the idea of identity. Feeling close to the Christian cultures of the West was an easy possibility for him because of his having been raised in a Catholic Christian though Lebanese Arab family. At the same time, his familiarity with the Eastern cultures through his firsthand experiences in the East as a native speaker of Arabic, as well as his bond with both Muslims and Arabs, have made room for his keen understanding of Eastern cultures. With respect to his hybrid identity, Maalouf has addressed how his character and personality reflect and share some similarities in terms of their diverse intellectual, religious, cultural, and linguistic bonds. He remarks:

…when I think about either of these two components of my identity separately, I feel close either through language or through religion to a good half of the human race. But when I take the same two elements together, I find myself face to face with my own specificity. (2003, p. 17)

Being Lebanese, Christian, Francophone, and Parisian Arab, Maalouf galvanized his understanding of the idea of identity through experiences he acquired while working as a historian, novelist, and pamphleteer. Having multiple perceptions about the role of cultures in shaping one’s identity, his understanding of his own identity as a multitude of cultural bonds seems to be a natural outcome of experiences that he analyzed and then turned into an outstanding set of stories covering the common problems of identity. His own history comes to be an illustrious example of this. Being familiar with both Christian and Muslim civilizations, and Eastern and Western cultures, Maalouf as a person of multiple identities has devoted himself to understanding the complexity of identity both through experiences acquired in different cultures and through insightful inquiries that elaborate identity problems.

His works achieve a multicultural functioning, not a separation of cultures, and represent an insightful vision of the varied cultural values of the Western, Eastern, African and Mediterranean worlds. His characters, accordingly, revolve continually around East-West relations. Defining individuals with ‘multiple belongings’ (2003, p. 40) as border people, Maalouf as a border writer himself examines the idea of identity in his works, which are filled with characters having multiple belongings and affinities, affiliations learned mostly through horizontal inheritance.

Particularly in In the Name of Identity, with its definitions of vertical and horizontal culture, he clarifies the identity problem thus:

[E]ach of us is the deposit of two inheritances: one, “vertical,” comes from our ancestors, the tradition of our village, of our religious community; the other, “horizontal,” comes from our time, our contemporaries. It is the latter which, in my view, is more determining, and is more so each day that goes by. (2000, p. 79)

He highly values the role of the horizontal inheritance of cultures in forming our identities, insofar as horizontal inheritance is an active process that is experienced and learned concurrently from and along with our contemporaries every day. For Maalouf vertical inheritance comes to refer to a sort of acculturation that is highly related to our ancestors, traditions, local values, norms, and religious tendencies. On this basis, when compared to vertical inheritance of culture that is traditional, static, and ancestral, horizontal inheritance with its dynamic nature seems to provide more space for multilayered perceptions of identities as it makes room for the hope of the coexistence of differences.

Similar to Maalouf’s definition of horizontal inheritance of cultural identity, Homi K. Bhabha remarks in his book The Location of Culture (1994) that identity is neither stable nor constant. Therefore, it cannot be defined simply through an individual’s racial and lingual affinities. As identity is not steady, it tends to ‘undergo constant transformation’ (p. 394) in the course of an individual’s lifespan because of psychological, sociological, and historical causes. If it is not about one’s innate characteristics, then identity comes to represent some attributes that are fluid and therefore potentially can change according to one’s beliefs bound up with the aforementioned cultural factors. Hence the conceptualizations of identity presented by Malouf and Bhabha sound resonating with each other when Maalouf claims that ‘identity isn’t given once and for all; it is built up and changes throughout a person’s lifetime’ (2003, p. 23).

Identity as defined by Maalouf overall seems to foreground an analysis of identity that makes each individual unique. For an individual possessing a great number of affiliations, according to Maalouf, ‘no allegiance has absolute supremacy’ (2003, p. 13). Because of this, he posits that ‘every individual is a meeting ground for many different allegiances’ (2003, p. 4). However, he also argues that none of those allegiances are ‘entirely insignificant, either’ as they make up our ‘genes of the soul’ (2003, p. 11). Yet Maalouf highlights the fact that one should not forget that ‘most of them are not innate’ (2003, p. 11). Every individual becomes a carrier of various allegiances, although these allegiances are sometimes not in tune with one another. The fact that humans on individual level become a point for the mingling of multiple affiliations in this respect presents any individual ‘who harbours’ those allegiances with ‘difficult choices’ (2003, p.4).

Life itself inevitably provides individuals with many differences depending on when and where they are born. The fourteenth-century Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun in his TheMuqaddimah/Prolegomena exemplifies the role of geography as the true determiner of one’s destiny (2005, pp.125-27). Maalouf also foregrounds the inevitable role of cultural geography in shaping one’s diverse identity. While highlighting the natural outcomes of cultural belongings and how relations shape our identities, he still distinguishes his idea of identity from any globalized and hence mixed idea of identity. By means of differences, and diverse affiliations, his idea seems to be a call to celebrate our unique identities differentiating us from the others. He describes his own identity as follows: ‘My identity is what prevents me from being identical to anybody else’ (2003, p.10). For Maalouf, an identity made up of diverse affiliations comes to ‘represent an enriching and fertile experience’ (2003, p. 10) that helps an individual to embrace differences as much as similarities between the identities. In this respect, the piece of advice the teller of the tale gives to his son at the denouement of Leo Africanus best summarizes Maalouf’s understanding of identity. Generalizations and simplifications of the idea of identity may lead to ethnic violence, according to Maalouf, who calls that ‘a recipe for massacres’ (2003, p. 5). He remarks that the identity of each one of us is formed by many affiliations but instead of coming to terms with all of them, we usually choose only one—religion, nation, ethnicity or others—as a supreme affiliation, which we confuse with total identity, which we proclaim in front of others and in whose name sometimes we become murderers (2000, p. 80).

Hence, Maalouf is a nomad existing on the margins of territories. He represents a self which is both deterritorialized and nomadic. All boundaries become contingent and permeable for such self. Hence the nation-centred model informing both the western imperialism and the political cultures of decolonized states are directly challenged by Maalouf in his fictional narratives. He advocates a return to the essence of the Levant because in that Levantine world movement, cosmopolitanism, diversity, heterogeneity and multiple identities were not viewed as something perverse, as some colonial impostures aiming at tearing to pieces the presumptive antecedence of uniformity. He sees the Levant as a space where transformation, motion and mobility are the natural order of things, and brings to the fore an ‘other’ Middle East with a diversity of perspectives and a variety of voices. He celebrates his little piece of the Levant as a conjugation between seas and mountains, tradition and rootedness, constancy and endurance, as well as mutation, movement and fluidity. Although the name of Lebanon itself is seldom mentioned, it is nonetheless used by Maalouf as a template for the Levant of his literary creations. His Lebanon—a motley of ethno-religious groups, cultures and languages—consisted of happy disorder.

Ports of Call (1991) as the migrant’s locus of deterritorialization

Maalouf is like most of his fictional characters, having an identity which in all its multiplicity is formed by several affinities. Speaking both Arabic and French, living in France, he belongs to both the East and the West which makes him acquainted with the winds and gusts of cultures blowing and raging from both sides. The long-conflicted histories of the West and the East seem to have conceived him. When it comes to his point of viewing cultural identity, he comprises as well as compromises numerous features of language, history, nationality, race, place, religious orientation and beliefs. According to him all of these let people be element of one feature and the other simultaneously. Identity is not absolutely hereditary or singular. Rather it is the totality of sundry empathies. Joyful as well as painful ties felt and lived through on horizontal and vertical levels are included in it. It is the horizontal inheritance far more than the vertical one which gives the hope for human coexistence. The former is generated through one’s time and contemporaries; while the latter is more about ancestors and traditions. Ports of Call (2001) by Maalouf in fact discusses and explores the likelihood of cohabitation, bearing in mind what Maalouf thinks of cultural identity on the basis of the concepts of vertical and horizontal heritage.

Like most of his other works, Ports of Call is a hybrid tale which makes one recall its author’s identity. Elements of historical novel and fantasy are combined in it. The narrative starts in the East at the declining phase of the Ottoman Empire. At the surface level, it appears as a tragically romantic tale taking place between Ossyane Ketabdar, a Lebanese Muslim man, and Clara Emden, an Austrian Jewish woman. At the deeper level, the Eastern and the Western dichotomy of relations is highlighted. Its manifestation comes in the form of characters belonging to different ethnicities and in the portrayal of events taking place all through the initial fifty years of the twentieth century—World War I, the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish-Armenian controversy over populist history, the Nazis’ occupation of France during World War II, the Palestinian Nakba of 1948. The subject matter of the narrative centers on how people are torn apart against the backdrop of war. The context is multidimensional but centered around the traumatic motif of East-West relationships. This motif is recurrent in most of Maalouf’s works and here in Ports of Call it is used to represent an incessant quest for common roots through the means of a dramatic love story.

There is an unnamed narrator who comes across Ossyane in the streets of France. Ossyane chooses to tell the story of his life to this anonymous man; and the man chooses to narrate Ossyane’s story to the world. The tale begins before the birth of Ossyane and moves forward to a time when a weakened Ottoman Empire encountered a number of revolts. During that period of the Turkish history, the Christian minority Armenians had given helping hand in the coup against Sultan Abdul Hamid II. This led to the Ottoman countercoup of 1909 which in turn caused a series of anti-Armenian pogroms in the province of Adana. The narrative commences with details of a turbulent period caused by the Turkish-Armenian controversy. However, the story does not dwell on the conflict itself; rather it draws the reader’s attention to the peaceful coexistence of different ethnicities. The suggestion is that individuals of different ethnicities and religions may well live peacefully together if they are not indoctrinated through political narratives. Such coexistence gives individuals with multiple identities a context in which they can understand themselves and others.

Beginning with Ossyane’s Turkish Ottoman forefathers and his early years, the novel is a recounting of his life. Ossyane has both Armenian and Ottoman origins. He comes to represent the benefits of plurality. He is able to appreciate the idea of complex identity. He can see the ills of ethnic schisms which minimize human existence to a monolithic essence. He goes to Montpellier, France, for studies. There, shunning the burden of his father’s revolutionary ambitions aside, Ossyane explores ways to escape from local idealizations of identities. His search is like a journey of self-exploration which surpasses ethnic and religious borders and leads to self-recognition. It is plurality and not singularity which makes him reach that point. He is in France during World War II, involved in the resistance; there he meets and falls in love with Clara, a young Jewish woman. Their hatred for the policies of the Nazi regime during the war is the common vantage point of these characters. They meet and recognize their shared ground as comrades in their struggle against racism. Clara is Jew and Ossyane is Muslim; yet they are united in spite of their religious differences against a common enemy. After the war, Ossyane comes out as a war hero; the couple moves to Beirut and decides to marry. There come many obstacles in the way, but overcoming them all they get married. They live happily in Beirut until Ossyane’s brother Salem is released from prison. Having trouble with his brother, Ossyane moves to Haifa with Clara. This is the point where the novel turns out to be a story of loneliness and separation.

Ossyane’s life is turned upsidedown because of the significant roles played by wars and coups. All of them correspond to the great turning point of his life. Here in a sense Maalouf suggests that no matter how much an individual believes to be in charge of his life, in the course of a life at some point the outside factors intervene and come to dominate one’s destiny to a great extent. This suggestion reminds one of Ibn Khaldun’s idea that geography is destiny (Khaldun, 2005). The Ottoman-Armenian conflict of 1909 in Adana is the first turning point in Ossyane’s life: his family has to move from Turkey to Lebanon with Noubar, his father’s Armenian friend. World War II is the second turning point: Ossyane gets involved in resistance and comes across Clara. The Palestinian-Israeli war of 1948 is the third turning point in his life: he is separated from his wife and this causes the greatest trauma of his life. He is in Haifa when he learns about his father’s failing health. He has to return to Lebanon alone because his wife is pregnant at the time. The war between Israel and Palestine breaks out when he is in Lebanon. He can never go back to Haifa where Clara is trapped. His father dies and his situation worsens. Away from his wife and new-born baby, he suffers extreme loneliness. Here his criminal-minded brother Salem intervenes and admits Ossyane to a mental asylum in order to usurp single-handed the fortune left behind by their father. Ossyane loses all ties with life. Here secluded and damaged in the asylum, he suffers the loss of the self-recognition he had sought in the diverse encounters of his life. He has to spend more than twenty years in the sylum which becomes a prison for him. Finally when he manages to escape, he goes back to France in the hope of finding Clara and regaining his identity. In the asylum he is deprived of almost all his established ties because he is perforce trapped in a state of nostalgia where he cannot practise his identity as son, husband, father or brother. Being a Muslim, Christian or Jew holds no significance either. Even his ancestral affinities of Ottoman Turks and Ottoman Armenians no longer matter. His seclusion in the asylum grants him only one role: that is of a passive and weak patient who has lost all virtues the reasonable people can hold on to. For him nostalgia remains the only means to practise a virtual selfhood through contemplations.

Stressing the need for a dialogical relation among communities and nations, Mikhail Bakhtin says that the practice of two voices is the minimum for life, the minimum for existence (Bakhtin 1981, p. 4). From this point of view, the only dialogues which Ossyane can conduct in the asylum are his interior monologues. The monologues are reminiscent of the lost conversations he had carried out before being trapped in desolation. Having lost all his ties and his self-recognition, he must wait for a long time to regain his selfhood. So, the experiences of his childhood help him expand his exploration of questions about the importance of and need for affiliations. He also comes across the subsequent ills of oppressive administrations which deprive individuals of their inborn or chosen affiliations by means of socio-political suppression. It is interesting to note that the conflict he witnessed in France made room for self-recognition and self-achievement by bestowing on him the chance to meet Clara and the reputation of a war hero; but the Palestinian-Israeli conflict removed him from all his ties.

How political outcomes cast a pervasive influence on the lives of people belonging to different ethnicities and/or religions is elaborated by Maalouf with the help of events experienced by characters in the love story. In the context of ambiguity and doubt, the political events lurking in the background and the personal events experienced by characters in the foreground emphasize the coexistence of people from differing cultures, ethnicities and religions. The suggestion provided by the narrative is that neither the formation of identities nor the understanding of apparently simple-looking incidents can be analyzed separately from one another.

Relation between the East and the West as a common theme plays a vital role in Maalouf’s works. In Ports of Call however, the theme is expanded on multiple levels: it is about the relations of the Middle East with Western Europe, it is about a relationship between a Muslim man and a Jewish woman, and it is also about one of the well-known conflicts of the twentieth century. Maalouf makes use of the Turkish-Armenian conflict to highlight the fact that controversies are maintained through political agendas of modern nation-states.

The otherwise message of the novel is that communities had been living peacefully together before being torn apart by the policy-makers. Ossyane’s father had received a private, at-home education from numerous teachers of different religions and ethnicities. His Turkish teacher, once a priest, was an imam. His Arabic teacher was a Jew from Aleppo. His French teacher was a Polish man. Although Ossyane’s relationship with Clara is an example of coexistence of diverse ethnicities and religions, his father’s marriage to an Armenian Christian woman foreshadows it in the background. His parents’ marriage stands out as a model and represents the heritage that Ossyane culturally inherits. Hence he says,

What I loathe … is racial hatred and discrimination. My father was Turkish, my mother Armenian, and if they were able to hold hands in the midst of the massacre, it was because they were united by their rejection of that hatred. That is my inheritance. That is the place I come from. (2001, p.60)

He is raised in a community where the hybridity and coexistence of Levantine culture is of prime importance. With regard to Ossyane’s historical background, Jumana Bayeh, in her article ‘Diasporic Literature as Counter-History: Israel, Palestine and Amin Maalouf,’ makes connections between Ossyane’s situation and the idea of homelessness. Because he is ‘the son of two exiles from Turkey—his father is an Ottoman Prince and his mother an Armenian—the organizing principle of his early life is homelessness’ (2010, p. 171). Ossyane is born after his parents leave for Lebanon, and from Maalouf’s theoretical perspective, he learns more about his ‘home’ in a horizontal sense. His ‘home’ is more than Lebanon and includes all his vertical and horizontal inheritances which came to him through his parents’ ancestors, his new home in Lebanon and France. He inherited a heritage of embracing differences; and throughout his life his attitude towards foreigners from diverse ethnicities and religions represented this legacy. In The Particularity of Identity Alhaj Mohammad Sumaya comments:

Ossyane also refers to his comrades in France and himself with the pronoun ‘we,’ which proves that he belongs to them. Ossyane’s discourse implies how the novel condemns colonization and discrimination, as it calls for the purgation of the feelings of hatred accumulated from the past wars of the previous generations. (2014, p. 711)

Ossyane’s perception of home is not limited to a certain land and goes beyond physical space. In Bayeh’s opinion, Ossyane’s understanding of home ‘is not dependent upon territory or gepgraphy and is not bound by an idea of nationhood’. It is

…a concept of home that is coloured by anti-racist sentiments and does not rely upon a notion of collective or common cultures…. [It] is about place as a vantage point that allows the protagonist to be intensely critical of the violence between Jews and Palestinians in the 1940s. But also and most importantly, this view of home is unfinished and mobile. (2010, pp. 171–72)

The onset of the World War I makes Ossyane’s family leave Turkey. Their destination is Mount Lebanon. They make this choice because, in Bayeh’s words, Lebanon provides them with ‘fraternity between the peoples of the (Ottoman) Empire, Turks, Armenians, Arabs, Greeks and Jews’ (2014, p. 204). In fact, it is from Maalouf’s point of view that Lebanon becomes a representation of ‘the features of coexistence and hybridity that Levantine culture is defined by’ (2014, p. 204). Ossyane and Clara are made to reunify in Lebanon in an attempt to get involved in a process of constructing an ideal community where ‘all differences of race, tongue, faith are brushed aside’ in order to maintain ‘humility, civility and commonality’ (204). Ossyane himself says, ‘We wanted to stop the conflict, we wanted our love to be a symbol to another way out’ (Maalouf, 2001, p. 122). The Turkish-Armenian conflict, the Arab-Jews conflict and, on a larger scale, the East-West conflict all are employed intentionally by Maalouf to inquire into the nature of atrocities perpetrated by states through hundreds of years. How Maalouf responds to these calamities highlights ‘coexistence as a historical fact and emphasis[es] the common Levantine heritage’ that most of these people share (Bayeh, 2014, p. 28).

Maalouf’s objection is not only to historical conflicts which result in segregation and hatred, but also to ‘the central precepts of nation-states and argues for a bi-national state’ where Muslims, Arabs, Jews, Turks, Greeks and Armenians coexist ‘as they have for centuries in the same land’ (28). The original French title of Ports of Call is Les Échelles du Levant. It is interesting to note how accurately the use of the word ‘Levant’ in the original title reveals Maalouf’s idea of coexistence and a hybrid identity because in terms of East-West relationships the ‘Levant’ represents a particular place. With regard to the Ottoman-French relations which started in the sixteenth century, Bayeh explains the significance of the word Levant:

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century the ruling French and Ottoman authorities came to a series of agreements referred to as the Capitulations. The first took place in 1536 between Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and King Francis I and officially granted France the privilege to trade freely in all Ottoman ports. This is why the phrase “les éschelles du Levant” in the French vernacular refers specifically to several port cities of the Ottoman Empire, like Constantinople (modern Istanbul), Adana, Haifa, Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria, Aleppo and Damascus. (2014, p. 201)

Bayeh rightly believes that Ports of Call represents ‘a register of the historical interactions between France and the Middle East’ (2014, p. 201). Hence Maalouf’s work not only reflects historical reality but also represents East-West relations on a greater scale. In the picture he paints is included a region ‘Ports of Levant’ which is ‘indifferent to race and religion and where men of all origins lived side by side’ (2014, p. 201). Coexistence of differences is an essential part of Levantine culture, and it is effectively represented in Ports of Call. Maalouf gives his own explanation of the events with regard to East-West relations and expects his readers to look for the roots of the segregation explained by him. Maalouf essentially belongs to the Levantine culture; and as a part of it he comes to address the fact that the influences of political conflicts make identities vulnerable. Ironically the Levant itself, which is a vantage point for numerous cultural identities, had been shaped by means of the encounters of different cultures in different times; while very similar encounters during conflicts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries resulted in the segregation of communities. Jacqueline Kahanoff has the following to say about the pluralities and multilayered identities of the Levantine people:

Here [in the Levant] Europe and Asia have encroached on one another, time and again, leaving their marks … in the shadowy memories of the Levant’s peoples. Ancient Egypt, ancient Israel, and ancient Greece, Chaldea and Assyria, Ur and Babylon, Tyre and Sidon, and Carthage, Constantinople, Alexandria, Jerusalem are all dimensions of the Levant. So are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which … [constitute] the multilayered identity of the Levant’s people. It [the Levant] is not exclusively Western or Eastern, Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. (Quoted in Bayeh, 2014, p. 202)

Maalouf is in search for a remedy to the ills of political antagonisms which keep dividing people. In a world which is politically ruined by humanity for political benefits, Maalouf believes that a horizontal inheritance of culture is more valuable than a vertical inheritance.

Horizontal inheritance gives birth to multi-layered and never-ending perceptions of identities which can give hope for at least a prosperous future. Maalouf is of the view that an individual may have more things in common with a passerby in any place in the world than with any of her/his great-grandfather (2003, pp. 101-102). Maalouf perceives identity as something dynamic, evolving all through a person’s life in spite of its ancestral factors which are inherited through familial and geographical bonds. Hence when Ossyane asks the unnamed narrator, ‘[A]re you certain that a man’s life begins with his birth?’ (2001, p. 15), he appears referring to Maalouf’s idea of horizontal inheritance. As presented by Ibn Khaldun, geography undoubtedly plays a pivotal role in shaping one’s identity, so do the familial bonds. Still the achievement of coexistence can be hoped through Maalouf’s definition of horizontal inheritance. In other words, we are what we are becoming: that is, we are what we are practicing horizontally as much as what we have inherited vertically. If it is not so then it is only a tribal understanding of identity. With regard to a tribal understanding of identities, the words Maalouf puts into Ossyane’s mouth are significant:

A few days ago, in Paris, I had occasion to hear a discussion on the radio between an Arab and a Jew, and I confess that I was shocked. The idea of staging a confrontation of two men, each speaking in the name of his own tribe, vying in the displays of bad faith and gratuitous cunning I find shocking and revolting. I find such duels vulgar, uncivilized, in bad taste … and inelegant. (2001, p. 130)

What Maalouf indicates in ‘The Challenges of Interculturality in the Mediterranean’ is in keeping with Ossyane’s version of a tribal understanding of identity:

I believe that we all take on, out of habit rather than conviction, an old conception of identity, a limited and distinctive conception that I would call ‘tribal’ and that, although it was natural and tangible some years ago, no longer adapts to current realities; or to the realities of mixed societies, such as ours, or to the global realities. The historian Marc Bloch stated that ‘men are more sons of their time than of their parents’. (2000, p. 79)

In the light of this statement, Maalouf’s dislike for the word ‘roots’ becomes understandable: ‘I don’t like the word, and I like even less the image it conveys. Roots burrow into the ground, twist in the mud, and thrive in darkness; they hold trees in captivity from their inception and nourish them’ (Maalouf, 2009, p. 299). His Ports of Call is the materlialization of a dream: the dream for an ideal world where room is made for all differences, where Arabs, Jews, Turks and Armenians can live side by side despite their diversities. Rather, as Saree Makdisi puts it, the narrative can even be taken as a healing device with ‘its capacity to resist the mutilating logic of a social and political world’ (Quoted in Bayeh, 2010, p. 172).

Ossyane spends more than twenty years in a mental asylum. This can be considered as a period of stagnation in which he is made to lose his belief in the idea of an ideal home through the loss of his ties with all of his affiliation. The hollowness of his situation is revealed through the ironical use of the word ‘home’ for the mental institution. Here he comes to be ‘uncritical,’ ‘gives up the fight for coexistence’ and ‘accepts segregation’ (Maalouf, 2001, p. 174). No matter how much such a stagnant period corresponds to his hopeless situation in life, his daughter’s visit revives him. Nada, his daughter, represents hope for the future. She herself becomes a model for the coexistence of differences, as Ossyane puts it:

I, her father, am Muslim … her mother is Jewish…. She herself might have chosen one or the other, or neither; she chose to be both at once…. Yes. Both at once and more proud of all her bloodlines that had converged in her, roads of conquest or exile from Central Asia, Anatolia, the Ukraine, Arabia, Bessarabia, Armenia, Bavaria. (Maalouf, 2001, p. 167)

Conclusion

Ports of Call can be viewed as a call for embracing dissimilarities. There are hybrid characters with insightful and unique identities. These characters distinctly bring to the fore the role of politics and cultures with regard to the individuals’ reception of their identities. Maalouf highlights the significance of plurality and diversity. In his opinion, to be obsessed with the creation of a single and unified idea of a cultural identity through disregarding or keeping down the differences can be threatening to the well-being of all identities. What the individuals gain through horizontal inheritance helps them have faith in a future ability to reach the goals of multiculturalism and tolerance. The first example in the novel is provided by Ossyane’s father who along with his Armenian friend leaves Turkey for Lebanon, remarking that ‘the future does not dwell within the walls of the past’ (Maalouf, 2001, p. 28). For him, homeland is a place which embraces and welcomes all people, at variance with political conflicts which minimize people to single entities. Even the name he chooses for his son is significant. ‘Ossyane’ means ‘disobedience’ and it implies the urge to combat the cruelties of single narratives. Ossyane’s daughter, Nada, is another example of giving hope for the future. On behalf of her father she rebels against all limitations and comes searching for him to the asylum. Her gesture helps Ossyane restore his will to live. By getting married and moving to Brazil, she proves that, like her father and grandfather, she can go beyond borders and gain more through horizontal learning than through vertical inheritance she had received. In the asylum Ossyane learns that his wife Clara had been told to forget about him; this gives him hope; he manages to escape from the asylum and leaves for Paris to find her. It is in Paris that he encounters the narrator whom he chooses to tell his story. During the course of his life, he passes through numerous ‘ports of call’ such as the Middle East, Europe–Beirut, Paris, Haifa, the asylum. Still Maalouf does not finalize his story because his own life is also a constant search for the unknowns. The end of the narrative is stated by Ossyane in these words, ‘…life always finds its course, just as a diverted river will always hollow out a new bed’ (Maalouf, 2001, p. 172). The gaps are left open for the readers to fill, and all they are told is that Ossyane and Clara meet again. No clues are provided with regard to their future; but room is left for the hope of coexistence through multi-layered and never-ending perceptions of identities. Identity is something to be practised horizontally. Instead of remaining static, it should constantly evolve by means of an amalgamation of the time present and the time past.

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Notes on contributors

Saima Bashir

Ms. Saima Bashir, is a Ph. D. research scholar in the field of Postmodernism and the Middle Eastern Literatures and is currently working as Lecturer at the Department of English Literature in The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Pakistan.

Sohail Ahmad Saeed

Dr. Sohail Ahmad Saeed is a dedicated teacher and researcher, currently designated as a Professor at the Department of English Literature in The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Pakistan.