Memory Remains: Haunted by Home in Lebanese (Post)war Fiction

Abstract

This article examines the dialectics of memory and oblivion in two Arabic novels deeply imbricated in the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) and its aftermath: Ghādah al-Sammān’s (b. 1942) wartime novel Kawābīs Bayrūt (Beirut Nightmares), first published in 1976; and Ilyās Khūrī’s (b. 1948) postwar novel Yālū (Yalo), first published in 2002. Characters in both novels sift through fragments of their wartime memories, selectively forgetting some and remembering others in order to craft particular textual narratives for themselves that impede, enable, critique, and/or complicate the possibility of their belonging to the postwar Lebanese nation. Ruins are strewn throughout the novels. Instead of embracing ruins as nostalgic markers as did the classical bards of Pre-Islamic Arabia, the narrator of Kawābīs Bayrūt conjures up their innovators, such as al-Mutanabbī and Abū Tammām, to whose introspective meditations on ruins al-Sammān adds her own textured rereading of ruination atop their visceral rejection of all things nostalgia-infused. As the protagonists are continually entangled in (and are produced by) the violence of the war machine, they persistently struggle to integrate into their respective realities, revealing the contradiction at the heart of so-called ‘national belonging.’