Makdisi's War Memoir: Fragments of Self and Place

Abstract

This article aims at analyzing the fissures of female discontinuity in Beirut Fragments (1990) through examining three aspects: the position of the female 'I' in relation to the narrative, which includes the form of the narrative, and thus, the author calls it 'narrative and its discontents'; the centrality of the place (Beirut in this case) that works as a substitute for the fragmented 'I' and turns the book into a topography rather than autobiography; then the language as a vehicle of conveying the gaps and seals of the self. ********** Wars have often paradoxical results: they both destroy and allow for the appearance of new modes of relations. As the social fabric in Lebanon was getting ripped by the horrors of the civil war (1975-1990), gender responsibilities were changing. In volume II of Bahithat, issued by the Lebanese Association of Women Researchers, Mona Takieddine Amyuni states in the 'Preface' that it is significant that al-Bahithat was born in 1986 during the Lebanese war. The war was a cruel mother for all the Lebanese. But it was particularly a turning point for the Lebanese woman. The Lebanese woman safeguarded her nation's humanity in the midst of savagery. She was propelled to the foreground at home and outside. She took upon herself domestic, economic and social responsibilities when men fought, went away, or simply died. So many testimonies of displaced families speak of the stamina of women, in a country where one-sixth of the population was displaced. (19) To hear that women are most affected by the Lebanese war, by any war, is not new information. Wars usually throw women into the trauma of trying to find the 'human' in the utterly 'inhuman'. It is a trauma that fuels different forms of resistance ranging from what Suha Bishara, the Lebanese militant, actually presented as an expression of her position in a recent book, Resistante. (1) Youmna el-Id argues it was resistance when the Lebanese woman carried on with her work ... It was resistance when she wrote secretively the mottoes of perseverance on the walls of the city. And when she wrote the stories of men and women who joined the movement of resistance. (6 My translation) The notion of writing as a form of resistance sounds like an abstract piece of privileged philosophy, yet it was a lived experience. The fiction written by women during, and in the aftermath of, the Lebanese war is broadly considered a form of resistance, a means of survival, and a consolidation of the memory. Hanan al-Shaykh's The Story of Zahra is a narrative example of what war can do to women, and Hoda Barakat's The Tiller of Waters is another example of war's devastation rendered fictionally. Still, in fiction there is a protagonist who does this and then that, that is to say, the power of imagination lavishes some order on the lives of the characters even when these lives are already dismembered by the war. The difficulty arises when the writer decides to record the events of the war in a linear, chronological sequence with the knowing 'I' in the center. In her book Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir, Jean Said Makdisi makes one of these attempts. To write a memoir of the civil war in Lebanon is not an easy task since it lasted almost fifteen years. Reality became more harsh and cruel with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The civil strife started with a battle between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Kata'ib party (Phalangists). Battles spread to the different parts of Beirut, and eventually the city center was destroyed. The extreme sign of deterioration was the division of Beirut into two warring parts. It is perhaps the complexity of the situation which inspired Makdisi to add a historical chronology at the beginning of her war memoir. The chronology also serves another purpose. …