Exploring Thirdspace in Nada Awar Jarrar's Unsafe Haven

Abstract

Exploring Thirdspace in Nada Awar Jarrar's Unsafe Haven Luma Balaa (bio) Nada Awar Jarrar is a Lebanese Australian author. She writes in English, and her work belongs to the Anglo-Lebanese exile literature. When she was a child, she had to leave Lebanon because of the civil war (1975–90). She lived in Australia, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States before settling in Lebanon in 1995. In 2006, the thirty-three-day war with Israel broke out, and she fled to the mountains of Lebanon. She wrote Unsafe Haven in 2016 while residing in Beirut at the time of the Syrian war. Nearly all the novel's characters are displaced by wars in their homelands, and through their stories, Jarrar explores the different effects of displacement. Her protagonist describes how the whole Middle East region has been in turmoil, and people "find themselves disconnected and dependent on whatever and whomever provides reprieve from this state of drifting" (80). Displaced during the civil war, she flees to Cyprus for part of her life. This novel tells the story of Hannah, a journalist, who refuses to leave Lebanon despite the instability in the region. She is married to Peter, an American doctor who is without a work permit in Lebanon since, by law, a wife cannot give her nationality to her husband. Instead, he toils at a low-level administrative position (Jarrar 25). Only his love for his wife keeps him there. Their friend Maysoun is an Iraqi social worker who helps refugees. Maysoun forces her mother, Nazha, to live with her for a while in Beirut, but her mother eventually decides to go back home. Anas, an artist, came to Lebanon on business and resides in Syria with his wife and two children. When the war breaks out, Anas's wife takes the children and flees to Germany. He later tries to catch up with her but dies on his way to Damascus. Fatima, a Syrian refugee, has two children, one of whom is illegitimate. She eventually reunites with her family in Turkey. Jarrar portrays ambivalence in various ways throughout the novel. Lebanon becomes a city of contradictions, a space journeying in between the imagined home-land and factual homeland, both unsafe and at the same time a haven, a refuge to hide in. The theme of ambivalence is a "common feature of many migrants and migrant cultures" that can be projected toward the past and the present or even the future, "as to whether things were better 'then' or 'now'" (White 3). Edward Soja's [End Page 30] concepts of "Thirdspace" and Homi Bhabha's "in-between space" are occupied by many of the characters, who are mainly immigrants and refugees. Diaspora theorists such as Benedict Anderson, Svetlana Boym, and Leo Spitzer allow one to study other related themes that might trigger this feeling of ambivalence, such as home-land, war, displacement, nostalgia, trauma, personal memory, collective memory, nationalism, and humanitarianism. The Ambivalence of Nostalgia Nostalgia and nostalgic memory can have both negative and positive impacts. It can make people feel depressed because they cannot go back to the past and visit their lost homeland, or it can have positive effects because it gives them hope to rebuild the lost homeland. So on the one hand, Jarrar is pessimistic and questions the viability of her nation. On the other hand, she has hope and is inspired through her nostalgic memory to go beyond the negativity of the civil war and attempt to reconstruct Lebanon and make people reconnect with their sense of belonging and their common national values and beliefs. Jarrar seems to suffer from nostalgia and homesickness, which is "the desire to return to one's native land" (Spitzer 375). Even though she has physically returned home, she is still nostalgic for the old Lebanon before the civil war. She longs for the lost homeland, for "a 'world of yesterday' from whose ideals and values one had become distanced and detached" (Spitzer 376). Raymond Williams sees nostalgia as an "opiate with dysfunctional consequences, enticing people to take refuge in an idealized past while avoiding a critical examination and engagement with their present" (20...