LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the predicament of in-betweennesswell-defined and easy-to-reach targets such as ‘irreverent’ writers. Killing ascapegoat is a highly distorted example of active nationalism, not only becauseof its aggressive nature but also because of its religious motivation.The novel has for its title a line from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922).The narrator is the modern ‘hollow’ man, to use Eliot’s metaphor, whose emptylife in the ‘unreal city’ of his inner landscape finds eventual fulfilment, howeverbrief, in a party ideology which allows him to prove his love for his country byproving himself loyal to one of his few surviving childhood friends: Ali. Whileassassinating a writer for religious reasons thousands of miles away from Lebanonmay hardly qualify as evidence of patriotism, it is certainly an act of allegianceto Ali, whose charisma turns him into a quasi supernatural figure and a pseudoprophet, especially when he vows to the young narrator that ‘on the appointedday [they] would go together to the cave’ (Hanania 56). This cave, we are told,had protected Fakr-al-Din, the Lebanese dwarf emir (prince), who hid insidefrom the Turks.As foretold, the narrator’s curiosity to visit this hollow is satisfied inadvertentlyyears later when, as a Jihad al-Binaa ‘soldier,’ he finds refuge from theShiite Amal militiamen in the same cavern. Like the isolated emir, for years he‘had hidden in his cave, and peopled the walls with his imaginings, and thoughhe remembered the world he had no longer trusted his memories’ (Hanania266). In States of Fantasy, Jacqueline Rose discusses the enormous importance ofcollective fantasy in nation building. ‘Fantasy is a way of re-elaborating andtherefore of partly recognizing the memory which is struggling, against all odds,to be heard’ (quoted in Tirman 2001: par. 21). Reduced to a personal level,fantasy may be seen here as helping the narrator fill in his memory gaps abouthis home-country. Again like the emir, he is now ready to step out of hisproverbial cave into the sunlight by assuming his ‘national’ responsibility andaccepting his fate in the form of imminent yet dignified death. Earlier, thenarrator had stated that people must exist a little less if they cannot be certainthat others have remembered them. If living on in people’s memories is atestimony to one’s existence, then dying with a bang cannot but serve as areminder of a man whose fall was a fitting end to a purposeful life.Like Koolaids, Unreal City is post-modern in that it refuses to convey a singleobjective truth about the Lebanese experience of coping with the war. Uncertaintyand ambiguity equally pervade the narrator’s account in the latter. Heconfesses: ‘I remember little of those times now, and what I remember is not fitmatter to record’ (Hanania 195). The discrepancy between experiences and theirtextual (re)construction is attributed here not to AIDS but to drug abuse.Ironically, however, in both texts foggy and fragmentary memories portray acutelyas well as broadly the inner complex reality of various Lebanese characters tornbetween two homes, two identities and ultimately two life choices.— 205 —www.taq.ir