LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the predicament of in-betweennessforbidden as a boy’ (126) but to savour freedom by rebelling against familialauthority and going ‘beyond the boundaries prescribed’ (53).Rebellion manifests itself in many forms: the addiction to opium and sleepaids (Nembutal), the ‘unveiling’ of emotions via writing, the contradiction ofparental wishes, and taking refuge in political extremism by joining the Shiiteparty Jihad al-Binaa. What leads to defiance is primarily guilt deepened by regret.The narrator is the victim not of the civil war but of ‘the remote [my emphasis]insouciance that comes to those who have survived a war in which they havenot participated’ (Hanania 194–5). He feels inferior to ‘the names of formerstudents of [his] father … who had died defending the strongholds in Tyre andBeaufort Castle’ (168). But cowardice underpins his passivity. He writes: ‘I wouldnever have the courage to go out into the [Palestinian refugee] camps’ (142) and‘would lose my nerve beyond the Commodore [Hotel]’ (179). To assuage hisguilt, however, he gives money and cigarettes to his friends and poor villagers,and powdered milk, chocolate, old clothes, toys and even his Nembutal tabletsto needy and injured children.Guilt is instigated by several facts: the narrator’s privileged status as a memberof two cultures – resulting from his mixed parentage, ‘mobile’ (extended) familyand Western schooling – on the one hand, and his belonging to an oppressivefeudal family from southern Lebanon, on the other. As a boy, he wished toknow from his Lebanese friend Ali, whose ancestors had served his own, about‘the crimes of the old beys [chiefs]’ (Hanania 56), a fact of which he is laterreminded when his room in the Ealing Husseinya in London is ransacked byboys whose ‘families had suffered under the beys’ (259). After joining the Shiitemilitary organisation, he is he told by Ali’s father, Musa-al-Tango, how thelatter ‘had always known … that the last of the beys [that is, the narrator] wouldredeem the crimes of all his forefathers’ (253). The narrative re-ordering of hispast from his point of view in the present makes the reader anticipate a teleologicaldevelopment of events despite the aimless and precarious existence ledby the narrator. As he puts it, his ‘conversion has been the only child of fate’ (30).The road to redemption is not smooth but ‘wrinkled’ by spatial and temporalgaps, as the narrator spends the war years shuttling between Madrid, Londonand Beirut. Three characters – his two British companions, Leighton and Verger,and later Ali – help connect the narrator’s disjointed experiences by appearingin both Beirut and London at various points. The narrator’s psychologicalmobility, vouchsafed by his cultural and national in-betweenness, makes him atdifferent times spurn requests by his father, his Palestinian girlfriend Layla, andAli for him to stay in any one place, whether that be Europe or Lebanon. Afterhis mother’s death and his father’s remarriage to an American, the idea of afixed home has been replaced for him by what James Clifford calls ‘dwelling-intraveling’(1997: 36). His self-indulgent travelling is contrasted with the— 201 —www.taq.ir