LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

syrine c. houtperiodically. Unlike Mohammad, Samir is painfully aware before and after eachvisit that he ‘had separated [him]self for too long’ (208). Makram is born inBeirut in 1970 and is killed, without ever having left, in 1989, along with hismother.All three men die, whether of AIDS or during the war. Also, Mohammadloses two brothers, and Makram his father in war-related accidents. AlthoughMohammad and Samir avoid possible physical annihilation by departing, theydo not end up ‘in ivory towers’ as some of those who never left Lebanon mightthink (Alameddine 219). For unlike immigrants who start new lives in a newhome, ‘exiles never break the psychological link with their point of origin’(Pavel 1998: 26). Notwithstanding the possibility of returning home, expatriation– that is, voluntary exile – is quite similar to involuntary exit, if whatensues is the ‘pattern of exilic behavior’ (Tucker 1991: xv).Estranged from his disapproving father and submissive mother, who cut offall communication with him, Mohammad adopts and practises the belief that‘[w]e build our own family’ (Alameddine 115) by devoting ten years of his lifeand some of his artwork to his American lover Scott, whose last words are ‘Ilove you, Mohammad’ (13). Despite the love he receives from Scott, his ownsister Nawal, his Guatemalan housekeeper Maria, and a handful of compassionateAmericans and Lebanese, Mohammad never surmounts his obsession with hisoriginal home and country. John Tirman states that the three core constituentsof memory, which serves as the ‘emotional channel to the homeland’, arelanguage, culture and history. In Mohammad’s case, his memory is revealed byhis unconscious in three areas: his dreams, his paintings (culture) and his ‘slips’into Arabic (language).As Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s personal experience in his prologue to StrangePilgrims demonstrates, while in exile some night dreams fulfil the dual purpose ofallowing the expatriate, first, to bridge past (nation) and present (exile) and,second, to conscientiously examine his or her own identity (1994: viii). Similarly,although Mohammad ‘can’t touch home’ (Alameddine 166) physically, his fourdreams transport him to an earlier time in Beirut, once where he meets hisadolescent self, and his family welcomes him without recognising his olderversion, causing him to decide once again to take off. As Chénieux-Gendronexplains, in a state of self-loss, the exile searches for that which, in childhood,foreshadowed the exile to come (1998: 164–5).Arguing that visual language is more transportable than language to a placeof exile, Linda Nochlin maintains that visual artists, using concrete materials,find it easier to translate their familiar worlds than writers, for whom the loss ofnative language is more devastating (1998: 37). In keeping with this theory,Mohammad, while clearly traumatised, succeeds as a painter but fails as a writer.Scott and Samir, individuals with whom Mohammad shares respectively his— 196 —www.taq.ir