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

2. Jamil and Salma

57 2 Jamil and Salma The “Son of a Family” and a Peasant Girl Kadisha is the holy river: standing on the heights, clinging to the slopes, nothing but chapels and monasteries have been carved into the rocks as refuges for the pious. A miracle of labor and faith performed by a race to which Salma, without fully probing the reasons, feels proud to belong. Kadisha est la rivière sainte: dressés sur les hauteurs, accrochés aux pentes, ce ne sont que chapelles et monastères et les rochers sont creusés de pieuses retraites. Miracle du labeur et de la foi opéré par une race à laquelle Salma, sans en approfondir les raisons, se sent fière d’appartenir. —Kher 1933, 181 Salma et son village [Salma and her village] presents the green slopes of a northern Lebanese mountain village and its quaint peasant inhabitants to a French-reading audience. The work paints an expansive tableau of this setting, weaving together romantic-emotional and sociopolitical novelistic strands into a story about ill-fated lovers. The plot develops with the life story of the heroine, Salma, an attractive young peasant woman who falls helplessly in love with Jamil, the son of a local notable. Much of the narrative space of Salma et son village then treats the story of this mismatched couple, whose union transgresses lines of class, family 1. Though I consistently refer to Salma et son village’s original date of publication (1933), I have cited throughout from the 1972 edition parenthetically in the text by page number only. 58 ◆ Gendered Interference background, and status within the conservative Christian milieu of the fabled Lebanese mountain region of Bécharrée. This love story gone wrong is implicated in Salma’s final illness and her premature demise. She dies ambiguously, of some sort of fever, although a broken heart is indicated as part of her malady. Like so many other literary works of both poetry and prose published during the French mandate in Lebanon, Amy Kher’s Salma et son village is steeped in the mythology of the “sacred” Lebanese mountains (Haddad 2000, 33–61). Also like many contemporary French-language novels from Lebanon, it engages a discourse that might be considered “ethnographic.” The characterization of Kher’s work as ethnographic makes sense—its subtitle, “faces of Lebanon” [Visages du Liban], announces its intention to reveal a certain portrait of Lebanon through the story of its eponymous protagonist. Indeed the narration is explicitly charged with sharing the “customs and traditions” of a northern Lebanese mountain village with Kher’s French-language readership. How to understand novels that are deeply invested in such a project presents the reader with a challenge. Novels deemed “ethnographic” often are dismissed as unimportant or characterized as somehow not quite “novels ” in their own right because of their focus on detailed descriptions of “local customs and traditions” and the presumed lack of literary artistry therein.2 This is particularly true of the “colonial,” or in this case the “mandate,” novel written in a colonial language, like French, presumably intended for an “outsider” audience. A critic like Ramy Zein responds by claiming that what he calls the “documentary aspect” of Kher’s novel does not detract from it because it is well integrated into the text. He defends Salma et son village against such criticism, claiming, “We should not commit the injustice of judging Amy Kher’s fiction using our modern criteria” [Ne commettons pas l’injustice de juger la fiction d’Amy Kher selon nos critères modernes] (Zein 1998, 265). What I show in this chapter is that we can employ “modern criteria” to understand better how Kher’s recasting of the genre of the ethnographic novel is tied to her use of multiple 2. Haddad 2000, 18–19, 38; Jabbour 2002, 12. Jamil and Salma ◆ 59 genres and languages in the text. By reading the text using such criteria, the language, genre, and even ethnography of the text are shown to be part and parcel of its artistry as a literary work. But this means discarding the suspicion of ethnographic texts in order to probe how she uses this genre to produce a novel that is both complex and creative, participating directly in the most crucial discourses of its time. One of the ways in which to address such suspicion is to see such novels as establishing an “ethnographic...