LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

syrine c. houtinvoluntary exit of many villagers who have fled from blood feuds and faminesto West Africa and South America and sometimes returned with fortunes madeabroad.The narrator’s memories of Lebanon, resurfacing during the ‘seven yearssince [he] had been home [here, Lebanon]’ (Hanania 197) and given narrativeshape between 1985 and 1992, are nostalgic, not critical. He fondly rememberslistening to martyr plays and old Abu Musa’s tales, and touching the fountain’scarved lions. Familiar sights, sounds, tastes and smells encountered during hischildhood spell ‘home’ for him. He frequents the Lebanese restaurant Al-Bustanin Ravenscourt Park so that he can savour the ‘Shish’Taouk in the old villageway’ (15). The ‘sweet juices running over the gums and tongue’ evoke the‘heraldic blue of the sky and the terraced hills and the distant margin of the sea,all that could never change there’ (16). According to Ghassan Hage, nostalgiacan be active and always functions metonymically. Furthermore, it is not so mucha yearning for a place as it is for an intensely personal experience associatedtherewith. Not only does this alimentary experience trigger the recollection ofthat which is naturally and consistently beautiful due to its indestructibility bywar but also that of eating forbidden foods offered to him by Ali’s mother butnever served in his uncle Samir’s house in Sidon. The memory is so precious andprecarious that dessert at Al-Bustan is shunned lest it threaten ‘to take away thetaste of what [he] had just eaten’ (17). Specific tastes and smells are alsoattached to certain childhood friends who remind him of home. For thenarrator, Lebanon is never just a symbol or an ideal – as is sometimes the case inKoolaids – but a lived reality or, to reiterate George’s term, a home-country inwhich the personal and the public overlap and contribute equally to ‘imagininga space as home’ (11).As Morse explains, ‘home’ here is a repertoire of familiar sensory experiences.Later the war, partly spent in his Beirut residence overlooking the sea, becomesassociated in the narrator’s mind with a set of peculiar and unpleasant sights,smells and sounds: the ever-higher heaps of rubbish – alternatively rotting andburning – the humming of generators and the din of explosions. Hage explainsthat although the object triggering the memory may itself be disagreeable, theresulting recollection is always sweet. In the days of heavy shelling and restrictedmovement, rationing becomes necessary and hunger makes the narrator crave‘foods [he] had always hated, some [he] did not know [he] had ever eaten’ (144).But life outside of Lebanon, too, is associated with certain alimentary habits. Atthe supermarket in Beirut, the narrator buys ‘the last supplies of those staples[he] had developed a taste for at [his English] boarding-school [and] which likethe apples of [Layla’s brother] Harun seemed mysteriously to augment in flavourthe further from England they travelled. Marmite, digestive biscuits, Cadbury’sDrinking Chocolate’ (126).— 202 —www.taq.ir