Revisiting Lebanon: Testimony, Trauma, and Transition in Patricia Sarrafian Ward's The Bullet Collection

Abstract

Following an overview of post-war Anglophone and Francophone Lebanese novels, the article discusses Patricia Sarrafian Ward's The Bullet Collection, based on her protagonist's experience of the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990), from the age of six to seventeen, and her reflection on this distressing period from the vantage point of exile in the United States. It argues that Marianna's (self-)critical and testimonial narrative is an instance of trauma writing that features characteristics typical of those born in the late 1960s. Driving these cathartic memoirs is a persistent sense of ‘belatedness’, which can only apply to those who lived through the atrocities in their late childhood and adolescence. The facts of having been born too late to enjoy and remember a peaceful Lebanon, of being too young to understand the violence, to experience love, and to have part in travel-related decisions define Marianna's sentiment of belatedness, producing a text that mimics the symptoms of traumatic experience, namely repetition, temporal fragmentation, and indirection. In so doing, she delivers a critique of Lebanon's public policy of denial of the war and its long-lasting effects.