LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

syrine c. houtHanania sees himself as ‘an exile’ who writes about ‘doomed youth, … exile,alienation, loss, and the consolations of worldly sensuality’ in relation to ‘thefalse consciousness of politics, religion, and public ethics.’ He states: ‘Throughthe idea of Lebanon, through Lebanon as an idea, I explore exile as alienation.To this extent, the modern everyman is a Lebanese’ (interview). But unlikeAlameddine, Hanania weaves the themes of exile and nationalism into the firstpersonaccount of a nameless protagonist, thereby refraining from making anydiscursive and/or direct statements about either topic. Although Hanania hasbeen known to identify himself as a Palestinian, his main character is a LebaneseShiite; therefore, my discussion of nationalism will be tied to Lebanon.The novel’s three books – Sidon, Dark Star and Homecoming – aresubdivided into sections indicating the place(s) and month(s) and/or year(s) ofaction. The events – stretching from the pre-war years to July 1990 – are presentedin a more or less linear fashion from the vantage point of one full day inthe present – 3 February 1992 – which frames the text and on which thenarrator is expected to assassinate a ‘renegade’ Muslim writer living in Londonin a suicide mission. Thus, all the narrative threads are made to converge on thisanticipated climax. The autobiographical account, written outside of Lebanon,contains metanarrative references to its genesis, evolution and approaching endas a ‘testimony’ (Hanania 1999: 19) to a life wasted but about to be redeemed ina final act of self-sacrifice for a common cause. The narrator’s reliability andtruthfulness are compromised, however, by years of drug use, as he ‘woulddiscover pages [he] did not remember writing, in a hand [he] barely recognizedas [his] own.’ Due to its ‘unbidden’ nature, he keeps it hidden but ‘[t]o [his]dismay the text [finds] its way into the hands of … a Yemeni radical, and [is]copied, and circulated first among dissident student groups, and then among thewider expatriate community’ (197–8). Besides being too high on opium tocontrol his writing, the narrator cannot decide the influence his words will haveon his own life. Initially intended as a cathartic transcription of his personalhistory and a search for some sort of meaning, the text, in an ironic twist ofevents, decides the narrator’s fate by paving his way towards ultimate meaningin death.The only child of a half-Palestinian, half-English mother and a Lebaneseuniversity professor, the narrator splits his time between Lebanon and England.Having lost his mother at a young age, he suffered from ‘a lonely upbringing’(Hanania 194) in a villa within a short radius with the campus of the AmericanUniversity of Beirut as its centre. Between ‘the cold exile of boarding-school’(196) in England and ‘those dreary … afternoons in the years before the war’(221) in Lebanon, the narrator has led a sheltered and repressed childhood.Restrictions on food and drink, movement and behaviour due to his highersocio-economic class make him wish not only to taste sweets he ‘had been— 200 —www.taq.ir