Scars of War and Exile

If contemporary Arab-American literature is "a political category, not a cultural or historical given," as Steven Salaita writes in Modern Arab Fiction: A Reader's Guide (2011), then it also is political in the sense that "the personal is political." As Carole Hansich and other 1970s feminists defined this phrase, individual problems must be grappled with in the context of ongoing, collective political action.

Because Thérèse Soukar Chehade's finely rendered first novel, Loom, uses the Lebanese Civil War as the background to her story of a Maronite Christian immigrant family, it can be grouped thematically with novels such as Etel Adnan's groundbreaking Sitt Marie Rose (1977). Unlike Adnan's Phalangist chebabs, however, the members of Chehade's Christian militia, called "the party," are not symbols of a poetic, dangerously addictive hyper-masculinity but are rather examples of the banality of evil. Here is how Eva—the aptly named seductive Lebanese cousin whose impending Christmas visit to the aptly named Scarabee, Massachusetts looms over the novel—recalls her involvement in "the party" from the perspective of twenty years:

She liked some of them, the young ones, barely out of high school, eager to defend the cause and preserve the share of power negotiated in 1943. After dinner they helped her with the dishes and told her about the girls they were dating and those they planned to woo.... When she was in a bad mood, they took over the cooking and shrugged off mocking jeers about doing women's work.... A few women, girlfriends and sisters, sometimes visited, bringing clean clothes and cigarettes.... They rarely mentioned the war and left within an hour of their arrival, chattering nonstop on their way down, their arms full of dirty laundry.

Sectarian violence, the metaphorical dirty laundry, "lingered like a foul smell, threatening to erupt at any minute"—but Eva becomes inured to it, her sensitivity another casualty of war. Even the novel's most brutal incident—the display of the head of a murdered Muslim fighter to an obscenely excited crowd in a Maronite mountain village square—seems in Eva's recollection like a ghastly movie. Walking home, she "stop[s] at the water fountain to wash her hands stained by the green skin of the [unripe] walnuts" she and her cousin Josephine have been eating. It takes the death in a freak bombing of Eva's husband—a militia member who "saw no contradiction in being a Christian Arab" and viewed "the enemy not [as] a lesser people but an adversary who had to be fought and coaxed into sharing power"—to shock her into genuine mourning.

Eva's is one of seven haunted voices that narrate Loom, an overlapping narrative of loss and frustrated desires, of dreams deferred and revisited. Five of the other six voices also belong to members of the isolated Zaydan family—ironically, the name in Arabic means "enlarging"—who have been eking out an existence at a convenience store in Scarabee for eighteen years, their social contacts limited to the world of family and store, painful memories of their own war now merging with images of the U.S. war in Iraq glimpsed on television. The trope of the Arab-American merchant—simultaneously burdened and proud—is incarnated by Eva's cousin George, whose moment of transcendent optimism occurs near the end of the novel:

He...sees before his eyes numbers neatly stacked in his favor, shelves emptied and replenished daily, walls freshly painted the humming of refrigerators like background music, and the cascade of the soda bottles in their chutes snatched by eager hands....

George and his wife, Salma, have settled uneasily into middle age, gaining weight as if to anchor themselves in a harsh environment in which their dark skin and accented English mark them as eternal foreigners—either as Arabs who one day "will finally confess to being named Ali or Ahmed" or as Mexicans—another being named Ali or Ahmed" or as Mexicans—another ethnic group despised despite their Christianity and...