LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

10 11The Predicament of In-Betweenness inthe Contemporary Lebanese Exilic Novelin EnglishSyrine C. HoutThe last few years of the twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of Anglophoneand Francophone novels by Lebanese-born, and in many cases first-time,authors whose childhood and adolescence were fully or partially spent in wartornLebanon between 1975 and 1991. Rabih Alameddine, Tony Hanania,Hani Hammoud and Alexandre Najjar 1 top the growing list of post-1995literature produced in and about exile, 2 thus dealing not only with the civil strifebut with one of its most crucial and long-lasting by-products: expatriation. 3 Thepost-war novels characterise a new literary and cultural phenomenon, and havefounded what one may predict to become a full-fledged branch of Lebaneseexilic (mahjar) literature.Elise Salem Manganaro opines that ‘it is necessary to examine the everbroadeningdefinition of what constitutes a Lebanese literature’ and argues for a‘literary pluralism’, as many authors with no Lebanese identification papers havenonetheless ‘consciously sought to identify themselves with some aspect of thisamorphous Lebanon’ (1994: 374–5). 4 A new group of mahjar writers, she states,emerged during the war between 1975 and 1991 in the US, Canada, WesternEurope and Latin America. In addition to the geographical distance enjoyed byimmigrant authors, the post-war exilic narratives are written with the hindsightnecessary to create a critical distance from the immediacy of violence and chaos.Emerging a few years after peace had been achieved in Lebanon, these textsexhibit a more recent consciousness, one replete with irony, parody and scathingcritiques of self and nation.Notwithstanding their exilic condition, the relatively young authors of thepost-1995 mahjar literature share with their immediate literary predecessors, inLebanon and abroad, what Marianne Hirsch calls the survivor memory. Despitetheir differences in age and experience, their collective work does and willcontinue to embody, for a while at least, the memories of the first generation ofwar survivors. Second-generation writers who grow up dominated not by thetraumatic event itself but by narratives that preceded their birth display whatHirsch terms ‘postmemory’. Qualitatively, this literature is different because it is— 190 —www.taq.ir