The Impact of the Lebanese Civil War on Weaving the Texture of the Narrative of Ghada Al-Samman’s Beirut Nightmares

Abstract

The paper is concerned with examining the impact of the Lebanese civil war on weaving the fabric of the narrative of Ghada al-Samman’s novel Beirut Nightmares (1975). The enormous atrocities and people’s great sufferings brought about by the civil war are filtered through the consciousness of a femrale narrator. The narrator’s self-imposed mission to bear witness to the devastating effect of the civil war on a people and their country is presented in part in diary-like accounts of events. For al-Samman, factual representation of the events of the civil war deemed to be inadequate to portray their tremendous traumatic effect expressed in peoples’ overwhelming sense of dislocation, painful recognition of the superficiality of human ties, and the unmasking of the dark side of human soul. The civil war, I argue, serves as a remarkable fertile ground for invigorating al-Samman’s literary imagination as is well reflected in her employment of a wide range of modes of representation and discourses, including diary-like account of events, fantasy, nightmares, dreams, surrealistic elements, anthropomorphism, and anthropocentrism.That is to the end of portraying the impact of the civil war on the private lives of the individuals in the most effective dramatic manner. This polyphonic strategy, in the terminology of Michail Bachtin, enables al-Samman to rigorously probe the social, political, moral, and psychological effects of the civil war on the micro and the macro levels.