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

Conclusion

311 Conclusion Like a Garlic Dish without the Garlic? When Abou Ali and Alia challenge the narrator of Dominique Eddé’s Pourquoi il fait si sombre? for writing her novel about the Lebanese civil war in French, they wonder aloud, “why the hell write Arabic in French?” (à quoi ça rime, écrire l’arabe en français?). To underline this point more forcefully, they emphasize that it is both a matter of not making sense and leaving behind a bad taste: “[it’s] like you made a garlic dish without the garlic” ([c’est] comme si tu faisais un plat à l’ail sans l’ail) (Eddé 1999, 105). Abou Ali and Alia’s voices work with others to create the polyphony that permeates Pourquoi il fait si sombre? They interrupt the narrator’s stream of consciousness and call both the narrative and authorial voices into question. The garlic dish without the garlic, like so many other metaphors that Eddé invokes in her works, demonstrates her doubt that French is an adequate language of expression for certain of her characters’ realities in Lebanon—it tightens its corset, it leaks into the text, it’s bland and cannot convey the sharp taste of life in the war. Reflections on, insecurities about, and challenges to French language use in Lebanon comingle in Eddé’s works with harsh critiques of it. Informed by anticolonial politics, characters of different social classes and milieus point out again and again how writing French is “writing bourgeois,” as Nadia Tuéni so aptly phrased it (Tuéni 1986, 63). But Eddé’s toppling of the metaphor of writing Arabic into the French language as “local spice and flavor” contrasts with how Nadia Tuéni reclaimed the notion of writing Arabic in French as a compliment rather than a critique. I opened the preface to Native Tongue, Stranger Talk 312 ◆ Native Tongue, Stranger Talk with Tuéni’s claim that in her French sentences you can recognize “the rhythm and musicality of Arabic.” In this pronouncement, she makes a statement about language, literature, identity, and belonging that is both poetic and political. Tuéni is proud to do what Abou Ali says is impossible. Vénus Khoury-Ghata echoes Tuéni’s sense of pride and affiliation with the Arabic language when she directly announces her use of franbanais in French-language texts. Ideologically explicitly anticolonial, KhouryGhata redresses some of the violence the French language has wrought on Lebanon through her creative novelistic language. Eddé holds a similar political stance but her narrations accomplish this differently. These and all of the writers whose works are discussed in Native Tongue, Stranger Talk in one way or another articulate political and ideological stances toward and relationships with the Arabic and French languages . This means that French-language fiction by Lebanese women writers is not just an expression of elite society, disconnected from Arab and/or Lebanese realities. It means that these novels are not merely exotic ethnographic exposés that train a European-influenced gaze on the Orient . These are outmoded ways of approaching a vibrant literary tradition that questions and challenges the colonial language imposed on Lebanon through experimentation with textual languages. All of the novels mount some form of resistance to the colonial language, French, through the crafting of creatively layered languages. They deal with political and ideological questions through language explicitly and implicitly, with less and more sympathy toward the French-language, but all of the writers create textual languages and worldviews that negotiate the borders and overlaps between the Arabic and French languages. They do this in their texts ostensibly written in French as insiders and outsiders to two languages identified as different and separate—Arabic and French. Because French is always a colonial language, despite the different ways in which the authors discussed in this study navigate their relationships to it, there is always a tension in how Arabic rubs up against French in their works. What I have tried to draw out in Native Tongue, Stranger Talk is not only what Arabic and French represent within texts but also how they operate more concretely in relation to each other on the textual level. How languages that are identifiable as Arabic and French interanimate each Conclusion ◆ 313 other in producing creative novelistic discourse is crucial to the readings. Conventional wisdom about languages and language “mixing” is thus questioned. The language/s created in all of...