Disciples of Passion (review)

Hoda Barakat delves inside the psyche, describing a realm of memories, obscurity, fragility, and forgetfulness. Marking the Arabic literary scene since 1993, Disciples of Passion is a work of art and renders Barakat a remarkable novelist. Her other novels, Stone of Laughter (1990) and The Tiller of Waters (1998), are burdened by a conceptual exploration of war and conflict and a persistent desire to look into how the human mind experiences, reacts, and suffers during disastrous events. Disciples of Passion goes even further in exposing the pathology of violence.

The text runs from its thematic concern, the war, much like its narrator, who rushes to seek shelter from the blast and shelling. Barakat's war is a different one. No scenes of wreckage, no waste or ruins, as in most novels about war. She is not interested in portraying the external scenes of destruction; she goes inside the narrator's psyche during its most fragile and traumatized state while trembling in insanity. Indeed, the narrative inhabits a psyche ravaged by war, represented instantly at the beginning of the novel. How violent is her opening sentence and how riveting: "After killing her, I sat down on a high boulder" (1). The novel so emphatically stages its narrative mystery in this assertive short sentence that continues to arrest and intrigue the reader. But in another killing, the narrator feels that he inhales and devours her: "At the moment I killed her, when I saw and realized that I had killed her, I knew that I had breathed in her soul. I swallowed the angel of her, and it was within me" (2). What is the crime? Who is she? Why did the narrator murder her? Is he mad?

All these questions linger while the narrator unfolds bits and pieces of stories pouring from a devastated memory wounded by terror, forgetfulness, and an impenetrable past. His narration does not offer a complete account, since he suffers from spells of amnesia and always leaves us guessing. Then we begin assembling our own understanding of these enchanting, lyrical, and tormenting recollections. The narrator remains unnamed like his lover, the woman he claims he murdered. Sometimes he sounds self-conscious, insightful, and wiser than the sane, but at other times we wonder about his reliability and may very well assume that this story is part of his hallucinations. Nevertheless, we find ourselves attached to this fragile and injured narrator and almost forget he is a murderer. He relates that his "body still carried the traces of torture, although there were no longer so many marks, and those that were left were superficial" (13). He perceives himself as a misfit with a large and awkward body. He is a dysfunctional male in a city in war. However, he tells us that "[m]y body was very strong, very large and audacious. In moments of anger it would fly up into the air and circle above them like a hawk" (8). In the eyes of other men, he is a coward; he did not carry a gun and fight like real men according to the prevalent view. It turns out that his is an inner conflict as he tries to figure out the woman who stayed with him after an attack on the town, unable to cross the border to her own, where her family and husband live. His nightmarish memories about the woman are spectacular in both their beauty and dread.

Barakat constructs an isolated world in a war-torn city to generate evocative scenes that could not occur in a realist representation of Beirut and its peripheries. Dayre al-Salib, "a hospital for nervous disorders and mental diseases," is a Lebanon where everyone is insane or locked in because of a mental disturbance (4). The psychiatric hospital becomes one of the novel's main settings, but memory laden with its past is the provocative site that puts the reader in an anguishing space. The narrator declares that "[t]hey did not even seem aware of my presence as they...