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Journal of Postcolonial Writing

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Cultural hybridity, trauma, and memory in diasporic anglophone Lebanese fiction

Syrine Hout
a a

American University of Beirut, Lebanon Version of record first published: 14 Apr 2011. To cite this article: Syrine Hout (2011): Cultural hybridity, trauma, and memory in diasporic anglophone Lebanese fiction, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 47:3, 330-342 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2011.569376

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Journal of Postcolonial Writing Vol. 47, No. 3, July 2011, 330342

Cultural hybridity, trauma, and memory in diasporic anglophone Lebanese fiction

Syrine Hout*
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American University of Beirut, Lebanon
syrinehout@yahoo.com; Associate Francis 0000002011 00 2011 Article of (print)/1744-9863 (online) 1744-9855Professor Journal& Francis SyrineHout 10.1080/17449855.2011.569376 RJPW_A_569376.sgm sh06@aub.edu.lb Taylor andPostcolonial Writing

This article examines post-war anglophone Lebanese fiction produced in the diaspora since 1998. Focusing on Rabih Alameddines Koolaids: The Art of War (1998) and I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters (2001), Patricia Sarrafian Wards The Bullet Collection (2003), and Rawi Hages Cockroach (2008), it underscores the connections between three common features: cultural hybridity or in-betweenness, trauma, and memory. With reference to critical observations about transnational writings in general and contemporary foreign-language Lebanese narratives in particular, it demonstrates how these features, visible in different degrees, characterize these stylistically diverse fictions as a transnational brand of Lebanese literature. It argues that these texts, whose main strategies are the portrayals of their characters recurrent movements from and back to Lebanon, in mind and/or in body, and of their processes of remembering war-related traumatic events, provide an anti-amnesiac and generation-specific testimony to the lingering effects of the Lebanese Civil War. Keywords: Lebanese Civil War; post-war anglophone Lebanese fiction; diasporic identity; cultural hybridity; trauma; memory Lebanon is a piece of land [ ] but its our land, our home (even if actually we are not living there). Its our Sweet Home, and we love it. So we are called Lebanese. (Alameddine, Koolaids 183)

Wars have always acted as stimuli for writers. The Lebanese Civil War, which erupted on 13 April 1975, lasted for 15 years. Like many cataclysmic events of similar scope and duration, it inspired a generation of writers to respond artistically to the destruction of lives, families, institutions, and infrastructure in a variety of genres. Novelist and critic Elias Khoury believes that, paradoxically, it facilitated the birth of the modern Lebanese novel, because the protracted violence broke many social, sexual, religious, and moral taboos and thus paved the way towards narrative innovation in form and content (qtd in Kacimi 15). Furthermore, a group of women emerged by penning their own views and concerns. Miriam Cooke and Evelyne Accad, who have written widely on Lebanese war literature, argue that the chaos acted as an incentive for female authors to define themselves vis--vis the war by narrativizing it. Lebanese literature has undergone changes in the post-war period, the most significant of which is the rise of the diasporic anglophone Lebanese narrative since 1998. It is not at all surprising that a wave of English- but also French-language Lebanese literature has emerged,1 considering that 1.2 million Lebanese, i.e. over one-fourth of the population, left their country between 1975 and 2007 to settle abroad (Center 3). Saree Makdisi states that
*Email: sh06@aub.edu.lb
ISSN 1744-9855 print/ISSN 1744-9863 online 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2011.569376 http://www.informaworld.com

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in post-war Lebanese writing, history and pain are inextricably tied (209). Roseanne Khalaf agrees by observing that post-war fictions are concerned with sorting out the past (15). The artistic and necessarily belated articulation of emotional and/or physical pain can allow the author to attempt to re-enact, however subjectively, the traumatic experience of war. Traumatic stress is caused by life-threatening or self-threatening events that are accompanied by fear, helplessness, or horror (Resick 28). Trauma theorists argue that the impact of catastrophic incidents, be they personal or collective, impedes free association, the creative process through which experience, memory, and fantasy are woven into the texture of a life or a culture (Radstone 457). In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth argues that traumatic narratives should be situated within particular historical-cultural contexts. In novels, traumatic events stem from collective experiences, such as the Holocaust, war,2 or slavery, or from personal ones, such as rape or bereavement (Whitehead 161). The task of remembering and narrativizing the Lebanese Civil War is monumental in a nation whose public discourse has been characterized, as many critics have correctly argued, by a collective amnesia deemed necessary by some, particularly by its political leaders, given the volatility fuelled by Lebanons sectarianism and its susceptibility to foreign meddling. Since there can be no agreement on a consistent war narrative, statesponsored forgetfulness becomes a strategy to suppress political/public memory. Until today, Lebanese public policy has been successful in omitting the civil war from history textbooks. Sune Haugbolle argues that while legal, political, and socio-psychological factors made memories of the civil war both taboo and predicament (193), and thus impeded a muchneeded national debate about the conflict and its consequences, the desire to discuss the methods and types of remembering materialized with increasing momentum after the turn of the 21st century. He argues further that this amnesia covers a generational divide between those who lived the war and have memories of guilt coupled with memories of suffering, and those who were too young to remember or who emigrated and came back only after the war (194). Whereas for the older survivors amnesia is adopted to bury/ exorcise traumatic memories, for the younger ones it serves as a reaction to an amnesiac society, which resists informing them about the past and provides no clear plan for the future. In both cases, he argues, the Lebanese are victims of gaps between personal memory and collective denial, since collective memory requires a process of interaction between public and private memory (191). Since the late 1990s, and at an accelerating pace, some of these writers who lived through the war, which made a lasting impression on them despite their having been too young at the time to translate their thoughts and emotions into writing, as the older generation of authors had done, have been emerging. The war and its consequences the emotional suffering experienced both during the events and later when trying to remember and/or face them following expatriation are the overriding themes in these works. As with any long-term war trauma, many of these authors search for a meaning, if any, of what happened. This endeavor is strongest among those whose memories are painful but whose understanding of the terrifying events at the time of their occurrence was limited by age. Possessing neither a mature adults mind capable of collecting memories during the mayhem nor what Marianne Hirsch calls postmemory typical of second-generation writers who grow up dominated not by the traumatic event itself but by narratives that preceded their birth authors of this body of literature are different because they can rely, respectively, neither on undiluted recollections of direct experiences nor on purely imaginative reconstructions of the earlier survivors testimonies.3 In fact, some characters in these

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novels comment on how imagination fills in gaps in their porous memories of childhood and early adolescence in war-torn Lebanon. These younger anglophone and francophone Lebanese authors have therefore, as Elise Salem puts it, broadened and complicated the notion of Lebanon (771). Most notable among these are Rabih Alameddine, Tony Hanania, Rawi Hage, Nada Awar Jarrar, Patricia Sarrafian Ward, Abbas el-Zein, and Nathalie Abi-Ezzi, who write in English, and Hani Hammoud, Alexandre Najjar, Bernard Antoun, and Wajdi Mouawad, who do so in French. They left for Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, or France. Most now still live abroad; some visit Lebanon frequently, like Alameddine, el-Zein, and Najjar; others much less so, like Ward and Hanania; while still others, like Jarrar and Hammoud, have repatriated. These writers share five key biographical facts: they were all born between the late 1950s and early 1970s in Lebanon and/or spent stretches of their childhoods and adolescence there;4 they all experienced the war, whether for a short or a long period; they all left at some point during or after the war; they all adopted a foreign language, already familiar to them thanks to education and/or a bi-national identity, in which to write; and finally, they all focus on the experiences of war and exile from the vantage point of another country; i.e. they display a state of cultural in-betweenness, thus producing a transnational body of diasporic literature, characterized by their affiliation with Lebanon as a continuous source of artistic inspiration. The psychological internalization of armed conflict continues to prevail in post-war Lebanese literature, as it did during the war period regardless of language mostly Arabic and partly French at the time and the workings of individual memory in relation to the traumatizing collective past are also central in recent novels by arabophone Lebanese authors, like Elias Khoury, Rashid al-Daif, Hoda Barakat, Hanan al-Shaykh, and others. However, and this is a significant point of distinction, in addition to the choice of Arabic and the older age of the authors, most Arabic-language Lebanese writers, whether or not they emigrated, still deal largely with internal exile as a psychosocial or a political phenomenon without addressing lives in the diaspora as such. By contrast, and despite displaying an uneven focus on war vs post-war issues, and on survival at home vs life abroad, Lebanese diasporic narratives in English and in French share what I see as a generation-specific awareness of a dichotomous existence, a life split and defined in terms of the here and now (the host country or second home) vs the there and then (Lebanon). Notwithstanding occasional descriptions of wartime events, none of the anglophone Lebanese novels claim to be historical or realist fictions. They focus not on narrating the war, i.e. on the what, when, and where of historical events, but rather on when, how, and why selected war-related facts and experiences are remembered and by whom. In the opinion of Rabih Alameddine, who left for the United States at 17 and whose Koolaids launched the wave of post-war anglophone Lebanese literature in 1998, departing is not necessarily an attempt to escape the past, but to escape oneself because by leaving one gains a distance of both space and time, which is essential for writing about family or home [or war].5 Redefining home, whether in connection with or separately from the family and the nation, is a hallmark of these Lebanese, as it is of many other diasporic fictions. Patricia Sarrafian Ward, the author of The Bullet Collection (2003)6 who left for the United States at 18, explains:
Its hard to say [ ] where the truth ends and the fiction begins [yet ] the novel speaks truthfully about growing up in war, suffering from depression, and what it is like to leave ones homeland [ in this sense it is] as true as nonfiction. (E-mail interview)

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Speaking of his own De Niros Game (2006),7 Rawi Hage, who left for the United States at the age of 20 and later relocated to Canada, states: Some things I lived through, some I heard about, some are purely imagined [ ]. Id like to keep the ambiguity (qtd in Stoffman par. 3). So it is not the truth of what actually happened that these novelists are interested in conveying, as some writers of the older generation had been, but rather acute observations about childhoods ravaged by war. Several of these novels have joined the flourishing corpus of international narratives about children growing up and/or fighting in politically turbulent settings. Such texts include Anglo-Libyan Hisham Matars In the Country of Men (2007), Nigerian-American Uzodinma Iwealas Beasts of No Nation (2005), and Afghani-American Khaled Hosseinis The Kite Runner (2004). For example, Alameddines The Hakawati (2008), Nathalie Abi-Ezzis A Girl Made of Dust (2008), Hages De Niros Game, and Tony Hananias Unreal City (1999) portray the dangers of political indoctrination and military mobilization of the youth by showcasing protagonists who end up half mad, impoverished, alienated, drug addicted, and/or dead as a result of having joined various rightist and leftist militias. Viewing the accelerating mobility of people, goods, capital, and ideas as the hallmark of globalization, Ottmar Ette contends that 21st-century literature is international and will therefore have increasingly to be conceived and appreciated as literature without a fixed abode (35). Instead of territorializing literary production, he argues that we should vectorize it in order to understand the reality of cultures as being in motion (42). This vectorization has comprised not only the themes and content of literature, their various presentations and representations of movement, but also their adoption by a wide spectrum of readerships on a global scale (42). Indeed, Arab literature produced in English with a western audience in mind reaches this readership more effectively than translated Arab literatures might (Salhi 110). As Ette states, since in the postmodern era the temporal bases of thought and writing have become weaker while spatial ones have become stronger, transculturality in many contemporary texts has necessarily increased. Therefore, one should focus on migration and movement as salient traits of world literatures in order to appraise the vectorial imagination from which they emanate (42). Despite the upsurge of transculturality, he believes that a full-fledged Poetics of Movement has yet to emerge (42). I argue that contemporary anglophone Lebanese novels embody a distinctive transculturality manifest in the portrayals of their characters recurrent movements from and back to Lebanon, in mind and/or in body, and of their processes of remembering war-related traumatic events. In emphasizing these narrative dynamics, I show how they contribute a particular slant to Ettes concept of poetics of movement in transnational literature and, in the process, also provide a diasporic, anti-amnesiac, and generation-specific testimony to the long-term effects of the Lebanese Civil War. By focusing on four novels, Alameddines Koolaids and I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters (2001), Wards The Bullet Collection, and Hages Cockroach (2008), I underscore the connections between three common features cultural hybridity or in-betweenness, trauma, and memory which characterize, with variable emphases, these stylistically diverse post-war fictions as a transnational brand of Lebanese literature. Specifically, I illustrate how personal traumas suffered during the civil war help shape not only the protagonists hybridized identities but also their narratives, which become part of the cultural history of the war and the post-war period. In my reading, I use Homi Bhabhas idea of the hybrid, in which liminality opens up a Third Space where new selfhoods are formed and articulated as alternatives to unitary conceptualizations of national identity (39). Teetering on both literal (geographical) and

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figurative (emotional) boundaries between Lebanon and their new places, the protagonists remain ambivalent, pushed and pulled as they are towards both poles, in-between the claims of the past and the needs of the present and future (Bhabha 219). Depending on their self-identifications as primarily diasporic or exilic in the dialectic of belonging and not belonging, their renovated identities are nuanced, displaying various degrees and modes of hybridity, from the celebratory to the confrontational. Their experiences of unhomeliness Bhabhas term to describe the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world (9) are defined by intersections of age, gender, and class, as well as by reasons for departure and traumatic war memories. First, however, a discussion of the question of language is necessary. As Edward Said showed in 1992, English never developed roots in the colonized Arab Middle East and writings in English from these parts were minimal compared to the output, for example, from India or Africa (Reflections on Exile 40507). Geoffrey Nash explains that anglophone writers of Arab background may demonstrate an awareness of the migrant predicament, depending on their (re)locations, but their adoption of English is made freely and not forced upon them as a result of colonialism and/or migration. In fact, it results in most cases from an upper-class western education and is therefore the product of late 20th-century globalization (20, 191). Yasir Suleiman states that a nationally committed Arab writer can write in English or French without detracting from his identity (13), adding that while all Arabic literature is Arab, not all Arab literature is Arabic (16). For none of the Lebanese authors does writing in English (or French) diminish their ties to Lebanon. Hage declares: Language is not an ideology for me, its just a tool like photography to express (myself) (qtd in Stoffman par. 20). Norman Nikro argues that, alongside the predominant native Arabic, English has been significant in recent years in informing the cultural landscape of Lebanon. Therefore, not only has English become one of Lebanons diasporic languages but it also has come to participate in how Lebanese culture develops the capacity to structure and redefine itself. Elias Khoury states that:
one must change the direction of investigation and open a new chapter related to literature by Arab emigrants written in Spanish, Portuguese, English and French, [because this] can help us redefine the concept of World literature as an atmosphere where all the strangers, those who are outside their countries, and those who are strangers in their own countries, can meet and create from the diversities of their languages a human unity. (10809)

In the case of Lebanon, Yasir Suleiman affirms that Arabic literature is but one of the literatures within the Lebanese literary scene (18). In fact, a few Lebanese authors write in two languages simultaneously, for example Etel Adnan (English and French) and Jad el Hage (Arabic and English). It is important to distinguish between these authors and their narrators/protagonists. While many of the characters are torn between cultures, showcasing what Edward Said called contrapuntal consciousness, i.e. the inevitable double or plural visions due to awareness of two or more cultures (Reflections on Exile 366), the writers themselves illustrate how cultural divides are engineered and may be overcome. Speaking of Montreal, where he has lived since 1992, Hage says: This is home. Finally (qtd in Salvador par. 26), explaining his view thus: If I went back to Lebanon or moved to some other place, Id have to go through another immigration (qtd in Wagner par. 13). Alameddine refuses the hyphenated identity label of Arab-American, stating: I am American and I am Lebanese and I am Arab (E-mail interview). Ward says: I dont know what I am other than being a writer [ ]. I have come to realize [that] my past of war and loss is a thread I pull through every tale; maybe that is a kind of identity.8

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Andreas Pflitsch has celebrated a new tone of young anglophone (and francophone) writers from Lebanon characterized by their debunking of two myths: the return to a golden age of a romanticized Lebanon, and the slavish imitation of a supposedly superior western lifestyle. As he aptly puts it: Nothing is holy to them (Britisch-libanesische 25152). Indeed, displaced Lebanese characters neither idealize their country of origin nor shed their past to embrace unquestioningly a western mode of living. Instead, cultural hybridity typifies this literature, albeit in different degrees, and manifests itself not only on the levels of languages, settings, and themes, but most prominently in what I have called elsewhere a predicament of in-betweenness.9 As Steven Salaita rightfully argues, Alameddines portrayal of the civil war in Koolaids has internationalized it as one in which many nations, including the United States, had high stakes, both militarily and politically. Furthermore, his polyphonic narrative populated by diasporic Lebanese characters unveils old-fashioned definitions of both unitary personal and national identities, be they American or Lebanese. I also agree with his view of Koolaids as a narrative which privileges neither the Arab World nor the United States but rather locks them into a dialectic in which both can be defined only in relation to one another but disagree with his designating it an ArabAmerican text with a particular Eastward gaze (Gazing 141), as this would mistakenly posit the United States as the geographical reference point or the main narrative consciousness from which the East, here Lebanon, is being viewed. Alameddines catchy line, uttered by his main character Mohammad in Koolaids In America, I fit, but I do not belong. In Lebanon, I belong, but I do not fit (40) illustrates best, I believe, what Layla Al Maleh calls a spiritual diaspora in describing the main characters in Alameddines four works of fiction (36). It also applies, with varying degrees of severity, including extreme alienation, to other characters in post-war anglophone fiction who, after being caught in the cross-fire, left Lebanon to find themselves caught between opposite ends. The United States offers freedom as well as anonymity but at the same time it threatens to sever or weaken their emotional ties to their birthplace. As Mohammad says:
The happiest day in my life was when I got my American citizenship and was able to tear up my Lebanese passport [ ]. Then I got to hate Americans [ ]. I tried so hard to rid myself of anything Lebanese. I hate everything Lebanese. But I never could [ ]. The harder I tried, the more it showed up in the unlikeliest of places. But I never gave up. I do not want to be considered a Lebanese. But that is not up to me [ ]. Nothing in my life is up to me. (24344)

Following his escape from war-torn Lebanon in 1975 at the age of 15, Mohammad became a successful painter in the United States. He never returned and enjoyed his freedom as a gay man away from family pressures, specifically his fathers authoritarianism, and Lebanese moral taboos. His mother tongue, however, resurfaces in specific situations. Now in his mid-30s and dying of AIDS in a hospital, a scene with which this fragmentary novel begins and ends, he resorts to Arabic when angry to curse Americans and Lebanese alike. He also dreams in Arabic, thus clearly showing it to be the language of his unconscious. In Writing Outside the Nation, Azade Seyhan clarifies that transnational writings cultivate an appreciation for the translatability of languages and cultures as well as for the untranslatability of certain forms of cultural specificity (157). One vignette shows Mohammad at his own exhibition switching to Arabic in his conversation with Samir, a fellow gay Lebanese, to exclude American art critics standing nearby who fail to see, unlike his friend, the pre-war Lebanese village lurking in his paintings but insist instead on admiring it, grosso modo, as great abstract art. This scene acts as a meta-narrative moment in which Alameddine insinuates that his oeuvre, like Mohammads painting, displays markers which invite multiple, if not contradictory, interpretations. Here, what to most Lebanese eyes

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suggests a familiar traditional village would (most likely) remain an untranslatable visual form of cultural specificity. Alameddine tackles the predicament of cultural in-betweenness from a different angle in his second novel I, the Divine, presented as a memoir by 40-year-old half-American halfLebanese Sarah Nour el-Din. Delivered in 50 fragments in an attempt to make sense of her war-scarred life, and displaying obsessive repetition of images and scenes, temporal fragmentation, and narrative indirection, which constitute the hallmarks of trauma writing (Whitehead 3), it qualifies as war-engendered trauma literature. After getting raped at 16, and at 18 losing her half-sister to a snipers bullet, she leaves at 20 with her husband Omar for New York, where she has her only child, finishes her bachelors degree, and then decides to remain in the United States, opting for divorce and exploring lifes opportunities for the next 20 years in her American mothers country. Speaking of New York and comparing her attitude to Omars, she writes: I loved the city, he hated it. I felt at home while he felt like a foreigner [ ]. I was having a ball, while he was counting the days until we could go back (53). Her enthusiasm notwithstanding, Sarah realizes later that her American patina covers an Arab soul, stating: Throughout my life, these contradictory parts battled endlessly, clashed, never coming to a satisfactory conclusion (229). Her itch to rub herself raw, get out of her skin, and thus emerge as a different person (82) is a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, since splitting off from ones body or awareness can reduce the victims immediate sense of violation (Vickroy 13).10 In addition, she suffers from chronic anxiety-depression disorder which she treats by medication. After a second failed marriage and a third dead-end relationship with an American man, and moving from New York to San Francisco and becoming a reputable visual artist, she starts writing her memoir, forever starting with first chapters, an arduous process which will nonetheless facilitate her emotional healing. Setting my memory in time is easy, Sarah writes. The first day of the war in Beirut, April 1975. I was fifteen (38). Much more challenging, however, is verbalizing the personal trauma she suffered in 1976: abduction, gang rape, loss of virginity, and resulting pregnancy and abortion. She revisits this scene three times and from different perspectives, the first of which, one-third into her text, begins to describe in the first-person voice that harrowing evening but then stops. If trauma can result from a prolonged exposure to danger [such as war] as well as from a sudden flash of terror [such as rape] (Kai Erikson qtd in Vickroy 12), and is not wholly recognized at the time it occurs but only becomes an event at some later point of intense emotional crisis (Whitehead 6), then what triggers Sarahs traumatic memory is her abandonment by her American lover 20 years later. The second and third attempts at narrating her rape come two-thirds into her memoir: both are from a fictionalized third-person perspective, but whereas the second is in French and abandoned, the third, in English, finally completes the story of how in only one hour, her life had come to an end (199). Sarahs rape, which takes place in an unnamed locale whose description matches the war-ravaged downtown area along the Green Line then separating Muslim West from Christian East Beirut, i.e. in the symbolic focal point of the entire war (Makdisi 204), is not only a personal tragedy but also allegorically represents the fates of many innocent civilians along that bloody stretch. In Lebanon to celebrate the new millennium with her family, Sarah recalls her rape when asked if she would relocate to Beirut, thereby experiencing literally what Maruja Torres calls the wound of return (qtd in Grinberg and Grinberg 185). Her sentiment that [w]henever she is in Beirut, home is New York [and] [w]henever she is in New York, home is Beirut, i.e. that [h]ome is never where she is, but where she is not (99), shows her to be in the throes of de-exile (Torres qtd in Grinberg and Grinberg 18485) wherever

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she happens to be. Until the end, Sarah shuffle[s] ad nauseam between the need to assert [her] individuality and the need to belong to [her] clan (229). Home, far from denoting a fixed geographical location, is understood in relational terms. It is not the place to be, but the one for which to long. Pflitsch differentiates among three types of identity: the multicultural, the intercultural, and the transcultural. The multicultural and the intercultural describe a mosaic-like identity of multiple components. By contrast, transcultural identity is mobile, flexible, [and has] no fixed borders (Pflitsch, To Fit 281). Mohammad and Sarah forge new relationships of sexual love, friendship, and business with Americans whilst maintaining ties to a few likeminded fellow Lebanese in the diaspora. Neither one, however, maintains ties with active members of Lebanese-American communities. Like Mohammad, Sarah is rebellious, freedom loving, and largely anti-nostalgic. Unlike Mohammad, however, she survives and surmounts her war-related trauma by narrativizing it. Her transcontinental mobility and more flexible mindset make her what Carol Fadda-Conrey calls the epitome of [ ] the transnational diasporic subject that cuts across the Lebanese and American cultures, but is nevertheless displaced in both and belongs completely in neither (165). As Ette explains, transnational literature is both local and global, or glocal (glokal), because it is ortspolygamisch, or place-polygamous, using two terms coined by the German globalization theorist Ulrich Beck (qtd in Pflitsch, Einleitung 19193). Koolaids, but also I, the Divine, is a novel completely globalized even while remaining vigorously local (Salaita, Arab American 74). Whereas Mohammad and Sarah find some form of salvation and enjoy financial ease in the United States, becoming at times celebratory diasporics, other characters who witness the war and relocate to North America remain confrontational and exiled, whether from/in the new location or from Lebanon and the new place equally, as in the cases of The Bullet Collection and Cockroach, respectively. In The Writer as Migrant Ha Jin states that many exiles, emigrants, expatriates, and even some immigrants are possessed with the desire to someday return to their native lands. It is this nostalgia which deprives them of a sense of direction and prevents them from putting down roots anywhere. Their physical displacements, he adds, can be so painful as to impair their views of their present and future in the new habitat (63). This view applies to writers as well as to fictional characters, particularly to Marianna in The Bullet Collection and the unnamed protagonist in Cockroach, who do not become transnational individuals. Like I, the Divine, The Bullet Collection is an example of first-person trauma writing, characterized by ruptures in chronology, narrative indirection, and the repetition of scenes and images, attempting to translate traumatic memory into writing.11 Forced by her parents to relocate to the United States after having experienced almost the entire war, Marianna lives now only to yearn for a childhood that never was, a home that could never hold, and an exile that could not fulfill (Al Maleh 43). Installed in a quiet New England town, 18year-old half-American half-Lebanese Marianna realizes that, after being in America for eight months and exist[ing] in a state of euphoria brought on by the allure of a new life (59), the idea of [j]ust a little while and then well go home began to evaporate (7). Her realization of the loss of Lebanon-as-home constitutes an emotional crisis which causes Marianna to fall into a depression and attempt suicide before being literally dragged to see a psychotherapist. Exile becomes synonymous here with the fear of losing her cultural identity, generating a pain aggravated by her remorse for not having cherished earlier moments in Lebanon. Traumatic signposts are abundant, not only in the many aborted starts, as in I, the Divine, to illustrate something significant, but also in the obsessive return to past scenes.

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What underlies Mariannas trauma is her sense of belatedness. She labels herself a latecomer, i.e. having been born too close to the onset of bloodshed in 1975, being only six years old then, to have had sufficient time to enjoy and remember a peaceful Lebanon. As if to counteract this sad fact, she places her few but precious memories of her early childhood in italics to emphasize their qualitative difference from what followed them, namely war. The why and how and when the war began are details that held no interest for me, she writes, because [t]here is so little from before, but I invent how it must have been (12, 16). Jealous of older peoples pre-war memories, she angrily tells her mother: If there hadnt been a war, my life would have been like yours. Her mothers reply that [o]ne life is like any other infuriates Marianna, who insists that her parents generation belonged to another world, one that she longed for [her] whole childhood (67). The most telling instance of how she comes to terms with a traumatizing event involves the sudden disappearance of Ziad, with whom she falls in love at 12 and loses at 16. One reason he becomes obsessively present in her memoir is also related to her sense of belatedness. The war snatches her first love away from her in her teens (219), as it had stolen her childhood. The traces of uncertain past incidents, Whitehead clarifies, or the ghosts of those who died too suddenly and violently to be properly mourned, possess those who are seeking to get on with the task of living (6). Being forced to live away from the theater of her crushed desires prompts Marianna to record her memories and fantasies lest these too be lost. Once these are on paper, the need to remember will be lessened and moving on made easier. In the last section, titled Winter, Marianna continues to defy her older sister Alaine and parents philosophy of deliberate forgetfulness. In the United States, Alaine, who had tried to kill herself repeatedly during the war, erases all reminders of her earlier suffering. She does this by hiding her scarred wrists and burning her sketches and war memorabilia, blurting out: I dont remember []. And I dont want to (182). Marianna sees this radical attempt at self-cleansing as gutless and futile. To counter her familys amnesia, Mariannas relentless memory (234) reaches what Andreas Huyssen calls mnemonic fever, which recreates links with a past that threatens to disappear (qtd in Whitehead 82). Her estrangement from family members who refuse to acknowledge Lebanons dark past, let alone their own troubled psyches, is lessened by re-animating the voices and images of the dead in her memoir. Having done so, she is ready psychologically to return to Lebanon, but the country is still at war. The United States, therefore, serves only as a temporary alternative country. Unlike Sarah, who is also half-American, Marianna considers herself fully Lebanese, unable and unwilling to embrace a new life in the United States. Cockroach is a first-person oral narrative by an unidentified save for being sometimes called a dirty Arab (15) impoverished, hash-addicted, and suicidal young immigrant in Montreal, forced by law to attend psychotherapy sessions to straighten himself out or risk being returned to a mental asylum. He is taken through a talking cure in order to reduce the lingering effect of his violent teenage years as a thief and an extortionist during the war and to assuage his guilt about having indirectly caused the death of his older sister Souad by failing to pull the trigger on her thuggish husband Tony. The word Lebanon is never mentioned, although it is clearly implied four times.12 The protagonist, now in Canada for seven years, refers to Lebanon as my homeland (5) and my country (135). The war has been abstracted, rendered a metaphor for absurdity and violence. For example, the protagonist confesses that he is split between two planes and aware of two existences (119). This duality, however, does not result from his binational, bi-lingual, or bi-cultural identity but rather from his self-perception as being half human, i.e. trapped, and half cockroach, i.e. free to roam the earth and able to withstand

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the burning rays of the sun (7). The existential overtones make this novel, in a literal sense, come closest to what Ette calls a literature without a fixed abode, if only by refusing to clearly name a homeland-as-origin. Having no one to return to, yet unwilling to be part of the Lebanese diasporic community, the protagonists emotional ties are not to Lebanon per se but to the dead sister who called him cockroach when as a child he crawled under the sheets with her to be safe from the adversities of the world, the only place where he ever felt at home. His memories of his pre-war childhood and of his turbulent adolescence are elicited by his psychotherapist Genevieve and delivered in a somewhat systematic fashion, but not without some manipulation on his part. However, more spontaneous memories are transmitted in a freeassociative manner as confessions to his Iranian girlfriend Shohreh, to her compatriot Farhoud, and to the reader. Bharati Mukherjee states that the price which the typical immigrant willingly pays but the exile avoids is the trauma of self-transformation (par. 16). This immigrant was badly traumatized by his failure to save his sisters life long before he set foot on Canadian soil. Although not a trauma narrative on the textual level like The Bullet Collection and I, the Divine, Cockroach showcases this characters troubled past, marked by moral delinquency resulting from poverty and facilitated by the wars chaos and parental neglect, and how his formative experiences continue to pervade his existence and dictate his behavior in his new place. He is aware of the catalytic effect of his psychotherapist on his inner transformation, initiated by her insistence that he harbors a lot of hidden anger. Seeing her has brought on a feeling of violence within [him] that [he] hadnt experienced since [he] left [his] homeland (45). His existence as an immigrant with an unresolved trauma complex is symbolized by the scar on his forehead. It looks fragile, like his own life, as if it was about to burst wide open and spray a fountain of blood (85). He fabricates stories about this scar to preppie [Canadian] men, whom he robs, in order to bolster their image of him as a noble savage (183). As he was taught by his mentor Abou-Roro back home, stealing from the rich is justified by the hunger of the poor. Asked to release his latent anger by remembering it, he witnesses Genevieve recording his forcibly excavated memories in her notebook. Contrary to her wishes, yet in tune with his own way of working through his trauma, this weekly routine of going to her clinic which structures the novel by starting each chapter re-ignites his aggressive tendencies towards a long-awaited catharsis. Age limitations on what one can and cannot do in wartime are a major theme in the post-war anglophone Lebanese novel. This protagonist vents frustration to his therapist about his failure to kill his militia-linked brother-in-law: I wanted to kill him, but I was young and he was older and stronger (62). The cold weather, symbolic of the bitter feeling of exile, begins to subside with the increasing warmth of [necessary] violence in the early spring (279). He stops seeing Genevieve as Shohreh becomes his emotional anchor. His longing for her transforms into a sense of belonging to her. Her request that he help her kill the Iranian who tortured and raped her offers him the chance to overcome his guilt complex. This he does, by shooting the man and then imagining himself escaping like a cockroach through a drain. This vision constitutes a symbolic return to an equilibrium he had lost, to a self cleansed from a burden, and thus to his dead sister, whose presence had once provided his only sense of home. As I have shown, diasporic anglophone Lebanese novels represent spaces in which characters inhabit the rim of an in-between reality (Bhabha 13) shaped largely by the traumatic memories of this nation. Produced in the West, yet read around the world thanks to translation, it is best to qualify this literature as transnational, whether with an

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exilic or a diasporic flavor with regard to its characters outlooks and behaviors. Azade Seyhan writes that the emergent literatures of deterritorialized peoples beyond the parameters of national literature paradigms do not have, as yet, a particular name. Remembering resists omission, and literature becomes a necessary channel for subjective and historical agency in a time of emotional loss. So long as Lebanon deliberately fails to address its past, it is the conscientious and gifted members of this nation who will commemorate its recent history of war, even if their primary by-product has been and continues to be expatriation. By insisting on expressing what has remained silenced, repressed, and even erased, the anglophone literary constructions of their generationbased experiences amount to testimonies that will be required even to outline this nations possible futures. Notes
1. Contemporary anglophone Lebanese literature is a more recent phenomenon than its francophone 2. In the last three decades, anxiety about the eventual loss of direct memories of the Holocaust has

counterpart.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

driven a flourishing of memory studies in both theory and fiction. Much work in relation to the formal and psychosocial features of Holocaust literature, by Geoffrey H. Hartman, Lawrence L. Langer, and others, has been done, including comparative studies, like Edkinss Trauma and the Memory of Politics, which examines how some memories of the Holocaust and the Vietnam War are politically constructed. In Family Frames and her article The Generation of Postmemory, Hirsch discusses postmemory by demonstrating the discursive power of photographs in fixing Jewish historical consciousness and remembrance for the descendants of Holocaust survivors. Jarrar was born in 1958, Alameddine in 1959, Antoun in 1961, Hammoud and el-Zein in 1963, Hanania and Hage in 1964, Najjar in 1967, Mouawad in 1968, Ward in 1969, and Abi-Ezzi in 1972. Quoted in <www.wwnorton.com/rgguides/ithedivinergg.htm>. It received the Hala Maksoud Award at the RAWI (Radius of Arab-American Writers, Inc.) conference in 2005. It received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2008. Quoted in <www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200502/stories/bio22.html>. See Hout, The Predicament of In-Betweenness. PTSD, depression, and anxiety disorders may result from traumatic stressors (Resick 28). Sarah exhibits the Macbeth effect, which describes cases when a threat to ones moral purity induces an obsessive need to cleanse ones body. See Zhong and Liljenquist. As a trauma narrative, The Bullet Collection has been compared to Ruth Klugers 1992 Germanlanguage memoir, translated into English as Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001). See Wolters. These markers include the lira (Lebanons currency), the Phoenicians (its ancient inhabitants), Almaza (a local beer brand), and a high rock (Beiruts iconic Pigeon Rocks).

Notes on contributor
Syrine Hout is Associate Professor of English at the American University of Beirut and is completing a book-length study titled Postwar Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora. 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 Politics, Culture and the Lebanese Diaspora (2010), Arab Voices in Diaspora: Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab Literature (2009), Literature and Nation in the Middle East (2006), Nadia Tuni: Lebanon: Poems of Love and War (2006), and Christian Encounters with the Other (1998). Her articles have appeared in Utopian Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Studies in the Humanities, CEA Critic, World Literature Today, Studies in Travel Writing, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Middle Eastern Literatures and Al-Abhath: Journal of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences (AUB).

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