Standing by the Ruins: Elegiac Humanism in Wartime and Postwar Lebanon

Notes

note s introduction 1. Theodor Hanf stresses the vulnerability of a neutral Lebanon in the aftermath of the 1973 October War: “No foreign power was willing to defend the interests of the Lebanese state. They stood by and watched as Lebanon’s barely armed neutrality was eroded, and some purposively contributed” (Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon [London: Centre of Lebanese Studies, 1993], 175). 2. Open war endured sporadically for fifteen years, dwarfing all other armed conflicts in modern Lebanese history. Richly funded from all points of the compass, it left 170,000 dead and injured out of a population of 3.5 million, and forced more than a million to flee their homes and often the country. It ruined the economy, infrastructure, and longterm confidence in the nation (see Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon [London: Pluto Press, 2007], 238). 3. Stressing the secular nature of the conflict in the early 1970s, Hanf writes: “The remarkable feature was the absence of ‘confessional’ undertones . They were not conflicts between communities but between social and economic groups and interests” (Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon, 109). 4. Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon, 231. 5. On the modernity of sectarianism, Eisenstadt writes that these groups appropriate space and time according to their respective utopian visions and that these are often “imbued with very strong eschatological components which place them at the end of history, with a message of messianic redemption often following an imminent catastrophe—an ontology which comes to full fruition in their specific ‘enclave’ culture” Notes 190 (Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 90). See also Juan Cole, Sacred Space and Holy War (London: Tauris, 2002), 189–211; Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3–41; and Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 1–14. 6. Hanf, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon, 193. 7. Eisenstadt argues that the roots of modern fundamentalism may be traced to the nineteenth-century United States (Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution, 82–83). Makdisi affirms that Lebanon’s role as a hothouse of modern sectarianism goes back to the nineteenth century (The Culture of Sectarianism, 174). Sectarianism, as an element of modernity, is clearly as transnational and locally inflected as other elements of modernity. 8. Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon, 233. 9. Hanf, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon, 160. 10. Rashid al-Daif discusses the relationship between these three subgenres and Western antecedents in “al-Nitaj al-Riwaʾi fi Lubnan: Tayyarat wa Ittijahat” (Novelistic Production in Lebanon: Currents and Trends), Fusul 16, no. 4 (Spring 1998): 167–72. See also Stefan G. Meyer ’s The Experimental Arabic Novel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 15–69. For the purposes of this introduction, the literary context may be extended to the realms of film and popular culture, which will receive fuller analyses in the relevant chapters. 11. For compendious introductions in English to commitment literature in Arabic, see Verena Klemm’s “Different Notions of Commitment (Iltizām) and Committed Literature (al-Adab al-Multazim) in the Literary Circles of the Mashriq,” Arabic and Middle Eastern Literatures 3 (2000): 51–62; and M. M. Badawi’s “Commitment in Contemporary Arabic Literature,” in Critical Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature, ed. Issa J. Boullata (Boulder, Colo.: Three Continents Press, 1980), 23–44. 12. See especially Lewis ʿAwwad’s al-Ishtirakiyya wa-l-Adab (Socialism and Literature) (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1963), 8–10. 13. Klemm, “Different Notions,” 57. See also Roger Allen’s The Arabic Novel (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 57–60. 14. Ghassan Kanafani, Fi-al-Adab al-Sihyuni (On Zionist Literature ) (Beirut: Munazzamat al-Tahrir al-Filistiniyya, Markaz al-Abhath, 1967), 146. 15. Ahmad Mohammad Aʿtiya, al-Iltizam wa-l-Thawra fi-al-Adab al- Notes 191 ʿArabiyya al-Haditha (Commitment and Revolution in Modern Arabic Literature) (Beirut: Dar al-ʿAwda, 1974), 9. For the role of literature in Zionist ideology, see Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 83. I offer a condensed history of Zionist commitment literature culled from English-language sources in “A Survival Aesthetic for Ongoing War,” Crisis and Memory, ed. Ken Seigneurie (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2003), 16–21. 16. Aʿtiya, al-Iltizam wa-l-Thawra, 7. 17. Elise Salem, Constructing Lebanon: A Century of Literary Narratives (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 122. 18. Klemm, “Different Notions,” 58...