Beirut Personified

Beirut Personified Evelyne Accad. Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East (New York: New York University Press, 1990). Jean Said Makdisi. Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir (New York: Persea Books, 1990). Fedwa Malti-Douglas Beirut is a chUd. Beirut is a mother. Beirut is a whore. Beirut is the dty that, perhaps more than any other twentieth-century capital, can pride itself on having the most blood and the most ink spilled over it. A modernday urban Dracula, imbibing enormous quantities of blood, it is also a modern-day muse, inspiring authors of aU stripes. Novels, short stories, and poems stand alongside literary genres hitherto unimagined to mourn the passing of this once great city.1 Linguistic barriers are crossed—Arabic, English, and French aU serve to express the nostalgia, the frustation, the shame of the Lebanese Civü War survivor. Jean Said Makdisi chooses to relate her saga in English. Evelyne Accad approaches her subjed in English, but her authors write in French (Etel Adnan, Andrée Chedid) and Arabic (Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad, HaUm Barakat, Elias Khoury, Hanan al-Shaykh). Beirut Fragments and Sexuality and War make an interesting pair: on the one hand, memoirs that serve as an eyewitness testimony to Beirut's horrors; on the other, critical readings of fictional works both foreshadowing and portraying the war. For Makdisi, who lived the daily experience of war, Lebanon was the country of adoption. Accad, a Lebanese-born author now living in the United States, has shuttled back and forth between her country of adoption and her land of birth. Beirut Fragments recounts more than the daily experience of Uving in a war-torn Middle Eastern capital. Makdisi portrays a Palestinian saga, recounting the aU-too-famüiar ptight of a dislocated famüy. Her physical journey begins in Palestine, goes through Egypt and America, and returns to the Middle East, but this time to Lebanon. For her, one senses, Lebanon was the hope that never materialized. A nostalgia for the prewar Lebanese society permeates the book. The author of Sexuality and War also in her way yearns for a lost country. Hers, too, is a work of exüe and nostalgia. She walks her reader through six novels, three by men and three by women, aU of which center on the intersection of sexuality and war. Confessional allegiance is not crucial. Male or female in Accad's analytical framework is more important © 1991 Journal of Women's History, Vol 2 No. 3 (Winter) 136 Journal of Women's History Winter than Christian or Muslim. Men, we learn, are more concerned with war as machismo adivity. Women, though more masochistic, are more prone to gentler, more pacifist actions. Issues like reUgion, virginity, and multiculturality transcend gender to unite aU six authors. War is a quasi-generic category: the three women writers (Adnan, Chedid, al-Shaykh) all write of the Lebanese Civü War. Of the men, Barakat writes of the Israeti-Arab 1967 Six-Day War, Khoury the Lebanese Civü War, and Awwad of the poUtical struggles in pre-Civü War Beirut. Accad's agenda is clear. Herself a novelist, she writes as an engagé writer addressing other engagé writers. Her style is personal, powerful, passionate, uncensored. She questions motivations and techniques and forces her coUeagues into a dialogue where the creative ad and the writer's responsibility take center stage. The politics of sexuality are the issue. Accad highlights two views of Beirut: the dty as a whore and the city as an injured, raped being. The images are gender specific: the first is male generated (Khoury), the second of female origin (Adnan). Both are intimately connected to the domain of sexuality. Accad's book functions as an exploration of the implications of these two powerful images. Since it is not a novel, Makdisi's Fragments would have remained outside Accad's analytical purview. Yet, the memoiristic act should not go unnoticed. In the opening pages, the first person narrator regrets not having kept a diary and records what "might" have been written about the first shelling of her home. Undaunted, she recreates this would-have-been narrative, but we should not be fooled. This narrator then explains...