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

Abstract

This article examines post-war anglophone Lebanese fiction produced in the diaspora since 1998. Focusing on Rabih Alameddine’s Koolaids: The Art of War (1998) and I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters (2001), Patricia Sarrafian Ward’s The Bullet Collection (2003), and Rawi Hage’s 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.