LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

syrine c. hout1987. After returning to London in 1990, he ‘avoid[s] all [his] old acquaintances… [from] the old days’ (30–1). But his radicalisation is sealed when news ofAsad’s gruesome death reaches him. In addition, with his father’s death, ‘the lastweight had been lifted’ (261).The narrator’s love for his wounded country, so far manifested in his devotionto a few friends and attachment to certain locales, habits and objects – like hismother’s painting which symbolises the pre-war years – is transformed into apartisan ideology whose idea(l) of national loyalty is based on that of Islamicjihad. And so the secular, drug-addicted and womanising art connoisseur burnshis books and begins ‘a new regime of washing’ (Hanania 260), praying andfasting and adopts the idea of martyrdom as the only means for his spiritualpurification. Having done little besides ‘dream[ing] through the years of the war’(266) and fruitlessly searching for ‘the faces war and time [that is, exile] hadstolen’ (260) from him, he responds to what he now perceives to be his call ofduty towards his suffering nation by assuming his newly discovered religiousidentity.As in Koolaids, the difference between cultural/religious and national identitycomes to the fore, albeit in novelistic garb. For the narrator, joining thissectarian but also political and military brotherhood allows him to accomplishtwo goals simultaneously: to re-affirm his (misunderstood) ‘Lebaneseness’ and torebel against his upper socio-economic class, which had partly protected himagainst direct danger and involvement by offering him, in hard times, an alternativenation (England). If, as George argues, home and class are two factors,among several others, which shape the individual’s ideological constitution,then what we see the narrator doing is undermining the latter in order todeepen, however fallaciously, his nationalistic roots.Looking back on his life, the narrator had perceived himself as ‘a comicalimposture’ (Hanania 27), devoid of substance and value. In a dream shortlybefore his suicide mission, he had seen his self – as the writer of a play about thecivil war – split between a ‘garish marionette’ – with ‘features not entirelydissimilar to those of [his] own person’ blaspheming on the stage – and the‘actual’ playwright who congratulates him on his convincing performance oftrying to control the disorder caused by the puppet. Like some of Mohammad’sdreams in Koolaids, this one reveals his unconscious to contain contradictoryselves. Thinking/wishing himself to be the author of a theatrical production, he‘discovers’ that he is but the unwitting star in someone else’s drama, like the‘clown’ whom he destroys in front of the audience. One may interpret the dreamas expressing his desire to be in charge of his life (and art) but failing to be sodue to the war and his chemical dependency. As one reviewer put it, the‘narrator is mostly out of the action, and nearly always out of his head’ (Vinten1999: 22). So, his antidote to drifting through life is politicised action against— 204 —www.taq.ir