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

5. Arabic as Feminist Punctuation in the Novel of the Lebanese Civil War

129 5 Arabic as Feminist Punctuation in the Novel of the Lebanese Civil War The three novels discussed in part 1 allow the Arabic language to interfere with French, inscribing messages about gender, women’s roles in society , the French mandate, and the shape of newly independent Lebanon. The Arabic language that is the object of representation is a colloquial Arabic that is either “real” or metaphorical and is often tied to spaces defined traditionally to be those of women—the home or “bayt.” This layering of language in the texts draws on multiple genres, including ethnographies , to allow the novels to create their own novelistic discourses. The three novels discussed in part 2 break from these subtler strategies and transparent techniques to encode messages, parallel to the way in which the period in which they are written and published—the Lebanese civil war—makes a break from what came before it. The civil war is usually said to have begun in 1975 and continued for almost twenty years, resulting in upheavals and changes in society. The field of literary production is no exception. Part 2 analyzes how three novels written in the period of the war use words and expressions marked as Arabic in complex ways to punctuate stronger and unequivocal messages—again about women’s roles in society, the deleterious effects of patriarchy, and the future shape of Lebanon—though these are supplemented by commentaries on violence : domestic violence, the rise of militias, ordinary people taking up arms, and the effect on society. In some ways these two groups of literary works from two distinct time periods can be said to witness a sort of “generational shift” in the way in which languages and genres are relayered into them. The later works also 130 ◆ Arabic as Feminist Punctuation build on the kinds of strategies used in the earlier works, unsurprisingly if we look at language as a process rather than a fixed, static entity that is “waiting to be mixed.” I do not argue that this is a chronological progression , however, though it is clear that the kinds of strategies of language use mirror features of the times in which they are written. The three novels discussed in part 2 are Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s Le fils empaillé [The son stuffed with straw], Evelyne Accad’s Coquelicot du massacre [A poppy from the massacre], and Dominique Eddé’s Lettre posthume [A posthumous letter]. Written and published in the heat of the Lebanese civil war during the 1980s, these works all deliberately and explicitly engage with their time and place, like the works of the mandate and early independence periods. This means that the feminist messages inscribed in them are arguably more direct and forceful, as the 1980s saw sustained feminist activism throughout the world, including Lebanon and the larger Arab world. This is one reason that the language of the house, home, and family —or “bayt”—gives way to a language use that could more properly be defined as “billingsgate,” the everyday and even vulgar language of the streets or marketplace. Bakhtin identifies billingsgate as one aspect of polyglossia in the novel, as well as in some parodic forms of verse, that marks it apart from poetry, breaks “high” literary discourse with “lowly” vulgar language, and inscribes alternative messages and viewpoints (1993, 181, 188–89). The Bakhtinian argument about this “language from below” will help to elucidate how the vulgar punctuation employed by these texts operates. The texts make use of vulgar Arabic expressions incorporated right into their “high literary” French. These moments of punctuation function as speech genres that drastically interrupt the novels’ main narration, mirroring the social breakdown of the war, enriching and further complicating novelistic discourse. It is not only vulgar or obscene words that are represented in these texts, however. All three works also use representations of Arabic referring to the everyday, colloquial language, differently experimenting with gentler , subtler breaks in speech genres as well as more direct and confrontational negotiations. The first novel discussed, Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s Le Arabic as Feminist Punctuation ◆ 131 fils empaillé [The son stuffed with straw] (1980), makes a metacommentary on language use, offering an anticolonial critique of French that particularly resonates with the analyses of Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back (1989). Evelyne Accad’s Coquelicot du massacre [A poppy from the massacre] (1988), uses lengthy, direct explanations of transliterated...