LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the predicament of in-betweennesssensibility and nationality, see in his work his ‘dreams … fears … mother …father [and] the war which tore [his] life apart’ (Alameddine 13). In whatAmerican art critics interpret as Mohammad’s abstract art, Samir sees Druze,Christian and Muslim village houses and admires his compatriot for havingrealistically ‘captured Lebanon’ and told ‘the tale of [his] home’ (101). Later, tothe mythological, psychoanalytical, philosophical and metanarrative interpretationsof American critics, Samir adds a nativist one when he sees a jackass oncanvas as a symbol of an outmoded means of Lebanese transportation, and thepainting as a whole as ‘mourn[ing] the death of a country’ (190). As may beseen, nostalgic memory, to borrow Spitzer’s concept, permits Mohammadthrough the cultural medium of his paintings to bypass the war years andreconnect himself to the untarnished image, if not the reality, of a simpler andreligiously harmonious nation.As Svetlana Boym demonstrates, bilingual exiles can rarely shed an accent,and their ‘[e]rrors betray the syntax of the mother tongue’ (1998: 244). English,spoken with an accent, slips away in Mohammad’s moments of delirium,drunkenness and anger. Here, Arabic as a whole takes over, re-attaching him tohis linguistic roots. Mohammad, nicknamed Mo, often refers to this linguisticcondition as a predicament. Fitting in America without belonging there, andbelonging in Lebanon without fitting there epitomises his linguistic, emotionaland mental state of cultural in-betweenness.Interestingly, Mohammad’s location of home keeps shifting. Critical memory,the opposite of the nostalgic kind, is exhibited when he declares that he hateshis sister’s cooking because it ‘reminds [him] of home’ (Alameddine 17). Later,however, when she ‘talks to [him] of home’, he insists that he is ‘home’ (212).Here, the distinction between original and adopted home discussed earliercomes to mind. Although Mohammad insists that his happiest day was when hebecame an American citizen and tore up his Lebanese passport, in his lastmoments he curses Lebanese and Americans alike. Further, he expresses hisexilic mood as follows:I tried so hard to rid myself of anything Lebanese. I hate everything Lebanese. But Inever could. It seeps though my entire being. The harder I tried, the more it showedup in the unlikeliest of places. But I never gave up. I do not want to be consideredLebanese. But that is not up to me … Nothing in my life is up to me. (243–4)Clearly, while it may be easy to extricate oneself from one’s home-country, it isa lot harder to expunge one’s national traits from one’s appearance or psyche.Boym argues that there are two types of nostalgia, depending on whether thestress is laid on the nostos – which implies the desire to return to a mythicalhome – or algia – which is enthralled by the distance, and not by the referentitself. This ironic nostalgia is fragmentary in that it ‘accepts (if it does notenjoy) the paradoxes of exile and displacement’ (1998: 241). Mohammad’s— 197 —www.taq.ir