LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the predicament of in-betweennessa place is often still more poignant than exile from a place or exile to a place’(1990: 3).In Koolaids, Samia Marchi – a thirty-year-old Muslim wife and mother, bornon the Christian side of the so-called Green Line between Christian East andMuslim West Beirut – sees herself as ‘a true Beiruti … no matter what otherssay’ (Alameddine 85). But a militiaman at a checkpoint, speaking in French,insists that she is no longer from East Beirut although her French would allowher to fit in under the bizarre standards that applied during the war. Herextramarital affair with Nicola Akra, a handsome Christian thug, is a symboliccrossing from West to East Beirut and a union of two religions, cut short bypolitical division and moral corruption. Other characters – like the GreekCatholic Mr Suleiman, the Palestinian Fatima and the Muslim Amin Baghdadi– are killed randomly or deliberately on their way home or while visiting theirhometowns. The loss of the safety associated with home turns the entire countryinto an exile with no exits. These tragic stories are captured by a roving eye andstrewn, like the bodies of their victims, throughout the text. More significantly,they show the complementary, not the contradictory, nature of exile andnation; the civil war transforms life in one’s homeland into a state of exile, or a‘discontinuous state of being’ (Said 1994: 360).Benedict Anderson argues that modern communications, particularly theinternet and e-mail, create what he terms long-distance nationalism, that is, thetechnological capacity of diasporic national groups to participate in the politicallife of their nations. Thus, a new or post-modern form of nationalism, namelydiasporic nationalism, is born (Tirman). The dates of the sundry letters ande-mails that Alameddine scatters throughout Koolaids range between 19 Marchand 2 August 1996. They encapsulate concurrent, discrepant views on whatconstitutes Lebanese nationalism. Depending on the speaker, anti-Arab, anti-Syrian, anti-Muslim, anti-Hizbullah, anti-Christian or anti-Israeli sentimentsare prerequisites for being a true Lebanese. While electronic correspondencefacilitates discussion, some mailing lists are limited to like-minded recipients.The result is a cacophony in tune with the splintered narration of this mosaicnovel. What Alameddine is showing us, again, are the immense danger anddisastrous consequences of confusing cultural and national identities and mistakingthe former for the latter. Positioning oneself with or against an external,larger national/cultural group (here, Arab, Syrian or Israeli), a religious one(Christian or Muslim) and/or a political one (Hizbullah) in the name of ‘true’Lebanese nationalism is, in fact, the very negation of enlightened and tolerantnationalism.Like Koolaids, Unreal City is ‘a novel about division – cultural, religious,political, and physical’ (Vinten 1999: 22). It has been dubbed ‘a Lebanese Warand Peace, with the personal and national tragedies intertwined’ (Padel 1999).— 199 —www.taq.ir