The fifteen-year war in Lebanon was over in 1990, and the Lebanese are still trying to remember it. They are trying to gather together the shards of that war by patching together days and dates. But in their focus on time they have overlooked the crucial role of space. According to, “The ways in which we are situated in space determine the nature and quality of our existence in the world.” The French professor, the father of geocriticism, reminds us: “For a long period, time seems to have been the main coordinate of human inscription into the world.

Space only a rough container.” Indeed, in the case of the Lebanese war, space was not merely a rough container but a protagonist. The Lebanese conflict, like any civil war, has redefined not only the notions of front line and war space but also the way the population, especially women, deals with intimacy in the patriarchal Lebanese society. When the war broke out in 1975, many women scattered across Beirut started to write about their own experiences. In the late 1980s the American professor gave them a name, the Beirut Decentrists, thus highlighting their physical dispersal in the city. Explained that these women were decentered in a more intellectual way, as they “wrote in the capital but were tangential to its literary tradition.” But we must go beyond the dualistic logic of center-periphery to understand the notion of space in the Beirut Decentrists’ texts. This essay explores the notion of third space as developed by,, and.

Beirut Nightmares by Ghada Samman (1997-08-01) [Ghada Samman] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers.

Using tools of geocriticism, we will examine how the Beirut Decentrists’ texts engage with an urban space torn by war, allowing us to better understand the many layers underlying a topography of violence. [End Page 102]. To Dislocate the Private In her essay Of Cities and Women (Letters to Fawwaz) compares women to architects and doctors: “They describe with an architect’s or a doctor’s precision exactly whatever happened to each house, and balcony, the charred walls, the disfigured facades, the gutted rooms.” The relationship between body and space, as Adnan suggests, is a key theme in the Beirut Decentrists’ literature. In any civil conflict, the front lines are not clearly defined. War nibbles space and eventually devours the body. The collective tragedy conquers intimate territories.

Inside and outside merge in a new space that disarrays the domestic, familiar landmarks (). This dislocated space is reflected in the Beirut Decentrists’ female characters’ intimate behaviors. Many engage in violent, even masochistic, sexuality that may lead to abortion or self-mutilation. Zahra in Hikayat Zahra finds relief in disfiguration and refusal of motherhood until she finally finds pleasure in violent sexual encounters with a sniper. But a unique characteristic of the Beirut Decentrists’ heroines is that they alter the body’s topography, creating hybrid, androgynous beings caught between male and female. Latifa in Leaving Beirut becomes Umm Ali, the fighter, who “had crossed the sacred line that separates the sexes and defines their difference.” For, “it is no longer a question of clarifying the distinction between the feminine and the masculine, but of redefining the human species,” as if the only way to survive in a war-torn space were to embody a borderland territory (. By breaking the stereotypes of the Eastern woman, the Beirut Decentrists allow not only survival but also the possibility of subverting patriarchal society.

They trespass on the public space reserved for men. Their task is not easy.

In her novel Sitt Marie Rose Adnan depicts the execution of Marie Rose by Christian militiamen. Marie Rose is executed not only because she is a Christian woman in love with a Palestinian man but also because she “dared” to take part in politics ().

Blurring the border between private and public, the Beirut. • If you would like to authenticate using a different subscribed institution that supports Shibboleth authentication or have your own login and password to Project MUSE, click 'Authenticate'. • • • You are not currently authenticated. • View freely available titles: OR.

Operations Manual For Rosengrens Safe. Author by: Ghādah Sammān Language: en Publisher by: Quartet Books Limited Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 52 Total Download: 152 File Size: 42,7 Mb Description: Beirut Nightmares is set at the height of the Lebanese Civil War. The narrator, trapped in her flat for two weeks by street battles and sniper fire, writes a series of vignettes peopled by an extraordinary cast of characters, some drawn from the amazing waking world and others living only in the sleeping minds of those suffering in the conflict.

A pet shop next to the house is filled with terrified animals; the narrator visits them every night and finds that their sufferings parallel those of her innocent and defenceless neighbours in the city streets. A display in an abandoned shop window comes to life as the mannequins step out and join life in the cafes before coming to a terrible end.

Author by: Miriam Cooke Language: en Publisher by: Syracuse University Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 89 Total Download: 347 File Size: 47,7 Mb Description: This book challenges the assumption that men write of war, women of the hearth. The Lebanese war has seen the publication of many more works of fiction by women than by men. Miriam Cooke has termed these women the Beirut Decentrists, as they are decentered or excluded from both literary canon and social discourse. Although they may not share religious or political affiliation, they do share a perspective which holds them together. Cooke traces the transformation in consciousness that has taken place among women who observed and recorded the progress towards chaos in Lebanon. During the so-called 'two-year' war of 1975-76, little comment was made about those (usually men in search of economic security) who left the saturnalia of violence, but with time attitudes changed. Women became aware that they had remained out of a sense of responsibility for others and that they had survived.

Consciousness of survival was catalytic: the Beirut Decentrists began to describe a society that had gone beyond the masculinization normal in most wars and achieved an almost unprecedented femininization. Emigration, the expected behavior for men before 1975, was rejected. Staying, the expected behavior for women before 1975, became the sine qua non for Lebanese citizenship. The writings of the Beirut Decentrists offer hope of an escape from the anarchy.

If men and women could espouse the Lebanese women's sense of responsibility, the energy that had fueled the unrelenting savagery could be turned to reconstruction. But that was before the invasion of 1982. Author by: Aseel Sawalha Language: en Publisher by: University of Texas Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 9 Total Download: 632 File Size: 40,6 Mb Description: Once the cosmopolitan center of the Middle East, Beirut was devastated by the civil war that ran from 1975 to 1991, which dislocated many residents, disrupted normal municipal functions, and destroyed the vibrant downtown district. Install Ub Funkeys Without Cd. The aftermath of the war was an unstable situation Sawalha considers 'a postwar state of emergency,' even as the state strove to restore normalcy. This ethnography centers on various groups' responses to Beirut's large, privatized urban-renewal project that unfolded during this turbulent moment.

At the core of the study is the theme of remembering space. The official process of rebuilding the city as a node in the global economy collided with local day-to-day concerns, and all arguments invariably inspired narratives of what happened before and during the war. Sawalha explains how Beirutis invoked their past experiences of specific sites to vie for the power to shape those sites in the future. Rather than focus on a single site, the ethnography crosses multiple urban sites and social groups, to survey varied groups with interests in particular spaces. The book contextualizes these spatial conflicts within the discourses of the city's historical accounts and the much-debated concept of heritage, voiced in academic writing, politics, and journalism.

In the afterword, Sawalha links these conflicts to the social and political crises of early twenty-first-century Beirut. Author by: Hanadi Al-Samman Language: en Publisher by: Syracuse University Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 23 Total Download: 861 File Size: 46,6 Mb Description: Far from offering another study that bemoans Arab women’s repression and veiling, Anxiety of Erasure looks at Arab women writers living in the diaspora who have translated their experiences into a productive and creative force.

In this book, Al-Samman articulates the therapeutic effects of revisiting forgotten histories and of activating two cultural tropes: that of the maw’udah (buried female infant) and that of Shahrazad in the process of revolutionary change. She asks what it means to develop a national, gendered consciousness from diasporic locals while staying committed to the homeland. Al-Samman presents close readings of the fiction of six prominent authors whose works span over half a century and define the current status of Arab diaspora studies—Ghada al-Samman, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamida al-Na‘na‘, Hoda Barakat, Samar Yazbek, and Salwa al-Neimi. Exploring the journeys in time and space undertaken by these women, Anxiety of Erasure shines a light on the ways in which writers remain participants in their homelands’ intellectual lives, asserting both the traumatic and the triumphant aspects of diaspora. The result is a nuanced Arab women’s poetic that celebrates rootlessness and rootedness, autonomy and belonging.

Author by: Ghādah Sammān Language: en Publisher by: University of Arkansas Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 27 Total Download: 192 File Size: 48,5 Mb Description: Ghada Samman's first full-length novel, originally published in Arabic in 1974, is a creative and daring work which prophetically depicts the social and political causes for the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. It addresses the struggles of Arab, and particularly Lebanese, society, but the message is one of the universal human condition.

Author by: Sonallah Ibrahim Language: en Publisher by: Bloomsbury Publishing Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 23 Total Download: 997 File Size: 41,8 Mb Description: A city – known for its light-heartedness, vibrancy and capacity for fun – is ripped apart by war. A young man – full of the vim, vigour and desires of youth – refuses to allow his spirit to be dampened... November, 1980. An Egyptian writer has chosen the wrong time to come to Beirut in search of a publisher for his controversial book.

Men with machine guns are on every street corner. When the writer meets an old friend from his revolutionary student days, he is introduced to two fascinating women: idealistic film-maker Antoinette and Lamia, the seductive wife of his would-be publisher. His attentions inevitably turn towards the two women, but the background rumble of strife and struggle becomes increasingly hard to ignore. Based on the author's real-life experience of the civil war in Lebanon, Beirut, Beirut is an exploration of how, even in the midst of chaos and violence, universals such as love, desire and yearning are still always our guiding forces.