LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the predicament of in-betweennesssignifying respectively the private and the public spheres, is much more obviousthan in English. For George, ‘home-country’ is the ‘intersection of … individualand communal that is manifest in imagining a space as home’ (11).It is this intersection of the personal and the collective that constitutes thefocus of my reading and, more specifically, how it largely determines theprotagonists’ attitudes towards both their original (nation) and adopted (exile)homes. As Eva Hoffman explains, ‘within the framework of postmodern theory,we have come to value exactly those qualities of experience that exile demands– uncertainty, displacement, the fragmented identity’ (quoted in Tirman 2001:par. 6). Koolaids and, to a lesser degree, Unreal City cannot but be read inrelation to literary post-modernism. In both novels, exile neither dampens norstrengthens nationalistic feeling. Instead of pitting exile against ‘original home’or nation as two diametrically opposed realities – as Said and Brennan do – andsinging the praises of the one or the other, Alameddine and Hanania show exileto be independent of geography by locating it within the individual, the nationand the host country, as theorised by the second group of critics mentionedearlier. Feeling at home is associated with freedom, a sense of belonging andpersonal dignity, wherever and whenever these may be found and enjoyed.Exile, by contrast, is a state of cognitive and emotional dissonance, whethergenerated by war and political/sectarian division in one’s own nation or inducedby physical uprootedness abroad. Both novels portray a complex relationshipbetween self-love and love for a bleeding nation. Staying in Lebanon does notprove love for one’s country of birth anymore than leaving it affirms indifferencetowards it.As a novel which draws parallels between the Lebanese civil war and theAIDS epidemic in the US, Koolaids has attracted the attention of readers andreviewers in the East and West. 7 As Michael Denneny states, fiction respondingto AIDS has become more ambitious in the last few years by ‘seeing this epidemicin the wider context of humanity and history’. He equates Alameddine with‘the great Latin American masters of fiction … who confront the concretehistorical dilemmas of their own people with a soaring, almost metaphysicalimagination that irradiates the ultimately particular with universal meaning’(1999: 21). Sarah Schulman’s comment that Koolaids’ ‘content reflects the needfor justice’ 8 is compatible with Adnan Haydar’s reading of the novel as oneengaged in an endless critical process aimed at a grammar of truth but whosecontent, in a true post-modernist fashion, is rendered absurd through irony andparody. Thus, the text is not about the Lebanese civil war but rather aboutconditions of war, furnishing a view of global history and common destiny.Leo Spitzer argues that in the twentieth century nostalgia – which had beenused earlier to describe the emotion of ‘homesickness’ 9 – came to signify ‘anincurable state of mind’ in which the feelings of absence and loss could no— 193 —www.taq.ir