LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

syrine c. houtformer acquires the attributes of stability and centrality, while the latterbecomes synonymous with anxiety and marginality. For both critics, the exile isalways ‘out of place’ (Said 362) or ‘ec-centric’, someone who feels his differenceas ‘a kind of orphanhood’ (Said 1984: 53).Other critics depoliticise the concept of exile by emphasising its philosophicaland psychological, specifically its existential, dimensions. Hamid Naficyexplains that after having been associated in the past either implicitly orexplicitly with a present or absent home, or a homeland, as referent, the idea ofexile is ‘now in ruins or in perpetual manipulation’, free ‘from the chains of itsreferent’ (1999: 9). Martin Tucker equates ‘exilism’ as a universal state of being,with a ‘plurality of referents’ (1991: xi). In its post-modern guise, ‘exile’ itselfseems to have been exiled from its original home or meaning. As a ‘discontinuousstate of being’, to quote Said again, it fulfils one’s desire for displacements,dislocations and detours in post-modern culture. In Strangers to Ourselves (1994),Julia Kristeva contends that everyone is becoming a foreigner to himself orherself in a world that is becoming increasingly heterogeneous and fragmentedbeneath its ostensible technological and media-inspired oneness. In this context,humanity as a whole is orphaned.This chapter focuses on two Anglophone novels, Rabih Alameddine’sKoolaids: The Art of War (1998) and Tony Hanania’s Unreal City (1999), 6 withthe aim of analysing the post-war exilic sensibility conveyed by these twounique yet comparable contemporary works. The questions to be raised are thefollowing: how is nationalism (re)defined in the context of a civil war caused,among other factors, by the very absence of collective national identity andcivic-mindedness? In such a fragmented nation, what constitutes home? Andhow is one’s original home viewed from a geographical and temporal distance?Evidently, both narratives betray a certain degree of nostalgia evinced in thevery fact of having been published. Nationalism, defined in psycho-social termsas the devotion and loyalty to one’s own nation – that is, patriotism – assumesthe sense of personal as well as communal belonging to derive from some kind ofconformity or continuity. If so, how does nationalist sentiment suffer or changewhen such conformity and/or continuity are neither possible nor perhaps evendesirable?Borrowing Rosemary George’s terms in The Politics of Home, I show bothKoolaids and Unreal City to be neither nationalist nor immigrant texts, asneither one deals with the nation exclusively as ‘object and subject’ (1996: 12)or entirely ‘unwrites nation and national projects’ (186). Instead, both novelsdisplay the predicament of cultural and national in-betweenness. The samecritic argues that there are several factors – such as home, gender/sexuality, raceand class – which act as ideological determinants of the human subject (2). InGerman, the etymological link between Heim (home) and Heimat (nation),— 192 —www.taq.ir