LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the predicament of in-betweennessconnected to its object of study ‘not through recollection but through animaginative investment and creation’ (1998: 420). In light of this definition,Lebanese war literature based solely on postmemory, if there is to be one,cannot be expected to come into full force before the middle decades of thetwenty-first century.Elie Chalala claims that ‘writing from exile and in different languagesmarginalizes and limits the effectiveness’ of the work of intellectuals living abroad.Further, he argues that ‘segments of the literary and artistic communities have… failed to match the commitment of their pre-1975 predecessors’, as ‘somehave chosen a post-modernist, post-structuralist, and post-colonial approach,producing works accessible only to Western elitist audiences’ (2000: 24). Whileworks written in languages other than Arabic may be inaccessible to a strictlyArabic-speaking readership, it is erroneous to suggest that the aforementionedapproaches to literature, especially the third, are peculiar to Western intellectualismand, therefore, are fake and/or pretentious when adopted by writers ofArab origin. Chalala’s term commitment betrays his penchant for realism as theonly serious method for analysing the Lebanese war. What he fails to appreciateare the subjectivity, selectivity and self-referentiality of literature, irrespectiveof the language and the region in which it is produced. Although French is theex-colonial language of Lebanon, many Lebanese have perfected English astheir second language. 5 André Chedid writes that there is ‘in each Lebanese adouble inclination for both Europeanization [and Americanization] and Arabization;a complex situation, sometimes contradictory, often harmonized’ (quotedin Accad 1990: 28).What is the relationship between exile and nationalism? Almost all postcolonialThird World fiction raises questions about the nation. Timothy Brennanargues that as a result of insurgent nationalism, international capitalism, andcultural globalism, postcolonial novels are unique in portraying the topics ofnationalism and exile as two realities ‘unavoidably aware of one another’ (1991:62). In one particular type of this literature, he contends, ‘the contradictorytopoi of exile and nation are fused in a lament for the necessary and regrettableinsistence of nation-forming, in which the writer proclaims his identity with acountry whose artificiality and exclusiveness have driven him into a kind ofexile – a simultaneous recognition of nationhood and an alienation from it’(63). Edward Said states that nationalism is ‘an assertion of belonging in and toa place, a people, a heritage. It affirms the home created by a community oflanguage, culture, and customs; and, by so doing, it fends off exile, fights toprevent its ravages’ (1994: 359). Unlike the national, he argues, exile is‘fundamentally a discontinuous state of being’ (360). Both Brennan and Saidthink of the nation and exile as opposite realities. Further, while the nation isviewed as an entity and exile as a particle ejected or self-expelled therefrom, the— 191 —www.taq.ir