LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the predicament of in-betweennessThe abnormal circumstances and daily deprivations of the war strengthenthe desire for that which is not readily available. The narrator confesses thatwhat he missed the most while in war-torn Lebanon was not ‘the England [he]had known, [that is] the mildewed country houses [and] his schoolfriends’drinking and smoking in pubs’ but the ‘the electricity and looking out at thesnow from a hot bath and the spiteful tidiness of the pavements in that littlehouse off the Brompton Road where the bey owned the house he never used.’ Atnight in Beirut he dreams ‘of a country [he] had never left behind, a bey’sEngland of summer hats and swizzle-sticks and concinnous buttonholes andgarden parties where Layla strolls’ (Hanania 135). When in England, as theopening and ending of the novel show, he dreams of Layla in the ‘land she hasnever left’ (5 and 267). Ten years later, he still hears ‘the old ringing in [his] earsfrom the summer of the siege’ (14) when alone in Leighton’s house. Wheneverhe leaves his country, whether that is England or Lebanon, he never leaves itbehind but carries it with(in) him in his ‘contrapuntal consciousness’, to quoteSaid again.The atrocities of the war compound the narrator’s guilt towards his Lebaneseand Palestinian friends who, due to poverty, political commitment and/ornational status, do not have the option of going into exile. To assuage hisculpability, he lapses into drug-induced numbness. Protected by the snow inYorkshire (his mother’s birthplace) while attending university in 1982, he ‘nolonger took the papers [or] watched the news’ (Hanania 159) despite hisattempts to communicate via letters with his friends. After learning about theIsraeli invasion, he returns to Beirut for the summer before starting to work atan auction-house in Madrid. For the following five years he lives in Madrid andin London, where as a junior curator at the Tate Gallery he leads a ‘solitary …immured life’, immersed in ‘a discipline of forgetting’ (193). With no news fromthe Red Crescent offices about his friends after the massacres in the Sabra andShatila Palestinian refugee camps, he ‘saw the newspapers in the kiosks, andlooked away’ as all ‘the names that had played as refrains in the long song of[his] childhood return[ed] like strange blooms to these foreign walls’ (191).In his attempt to overcome his guilt towards Layla – whom he had ‘strung …along for three summers with gifts and visions and promises’ (Hanania 118) andwho is now rumoured to have turned to prostitution – the narrator pursues ‘briefand barren affairs’ with fashionable women and succumbs to ‘the rigours of thepipe’. Sex and substance abuse prove insufficient, however, in guarding himagainst his mounting ‘self-disgust’ (195). Despairing of finding Layla, and thuslosing a sense of direction, he starts looking for an alternative atonement.Before joining the brotherhood, however, he shows hesitation by avoidingcontact with the ‘bearded men’ (198) – who loiter around the bey’s house inLondon – and paradoxically ‘escaping’ through the back window to Lebanon in— 203 —www.taq.ir