Native Tongue, Stranger Talk: The Arabic and French Literary Landscapes of Lebanon

3. "May You Bury Me"

82 3 “May You Bury Me” Dying for Honor in Sous la baguette du coudrier Also set in a verdant Christian Lebanese mountain village and recounting a dramatic tale of ill-fated love, Eveline Bustros’s Sous la baguette du coudrier [Under the divining rod] echoes many features of Amy Kher’s Salma et son village.1 On the surface, it too is a straightforwardly ethnographic portrayal of the lives of the villagers, this time set in the Mount Lebanon town of Rachmaya, but in an earlier period, just after the time of the safarbarlak—forced conscriptions into the Ottoman army—of the First World War (1916) and the famine that claimed the lives of so many people from this region.2 Reflecting its setting, this novel’s plot is also more dramatic than Salma et son village’s. The lovers are not mismatched simply 1. Bustros’s collected works, Romans et écrits divers (1988, 153–337), were published as the fourth volume in Dar an-Nahar’s “Patrimoine” series, supported by the Nadia Tuéni foundation. These publications have made a number of out-of-print works by Francophone writers available and the series is still active. 2. The cultural production of Lebanese history, particularly the period around the famine, is rich. For well-known examples, see Tawfiq Yusuf ‘Awwad’s best-known novel Al-Raghif (1939); the Rahbani film written by Mansur Rahbani, directed by Henri Barakat , starring Fayruz, Safarbarlak (1967); the first volume of Rabi‘ Jabir’s Bayrut Madinat al-‘alam (2006); and the French-language author Alexandre Najjar’s recent Roman de Beyrouth (2005), though these two latter works take on a wider spread of history. Works written closer to the period and Bustros’s time include Charles Corm’s Les miracles de la Madonne aux sept douleurs (1948) and Georges Corm’s short poetic collection Chez les humbles (1915). For a discussion of Lebanese literature’s engagement with history and politics, see Elise Salem’s Constructing Lebanon: A Century of Literary Narratives (2003); “May You Bury Me” ◆ 83 because of their divergent social status. The tale’s protagonist, Anissa, is a married woman with children who carries on an illicit extramarital affair with a much younger man, her eldest son’s best friend. Such a grave social transgression cannot be tolerated in the conservative mountain village of Rachmaya. The novel thus ends tragically for Anissa: her brother avenges the family honor by murdering her in her sleep. The story unfolds within a narrative that pays close attention to the village customs of the period in which it is set. Historical events are woven into the plot of the narration together with similar kinds of ethnographic details about mountain life that Kher’s work provides, including the preparation of food, attendance at church and local festivals, social relations between villagers, and so on. Like Salma et son village, Sous la baguette du coudrier can be read as an intervention into a number of debates circulating at the time it was written in the 1940s and also the time it was eventually published in the 1950s. Indeed, this novel depicts some of the historical events leading up to the mandate directly and addresses French intervention in the region more explicitly than Kher’s novel does. Anissa’s love affair and eventual murder are the centrepieces of the plot, however, and the work is a psychological portrait of an unhappy and unsatisfied woman. Both the way in which Bustros’s novel recounts the killing of a woman for family honor and how this is connected to the ethnographic details of the plot are very much products of their time. This is true in a literal sense, as we know that Bustros claimed to have written the novel partly in response to a similar killing that took place in Lebanon in 1921 that was vibrantly reported in the local press, capturing the imagination of people in Beirut (Bustros 1988, 153–54). In addition, however, I propose that this novel, written in the 1940s and not published until 1958, also responds to the specificities of those time periods in the way it negotiates issues of class, gender, and identity through its use of the representation of Arabic within its French-language narration. Like Salma et son village, Sous la baguette du coudrier was written in the context of a Lebanon shaping itself and for Fayruz and on Lebanese cultural production, see Christopher Stone’s Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon...