Writing Beirut: Mappings of the City in the Modern Arabic Novel by Samira Aghacy (review)

Samira Aghacy’s Writing Beirut: Mappings of the City in the Modern Arabic Novel is the latest in a cluster of academic works published since 2014 on the fiction of modern Lebanon. Aghacy reads sixteen Arabic novels written since the 1960s to explore how they critically engage Beirut. Aghacy brings together many different works of modern Arabic literature, broadly defined, with novels by young authors such as Renée Hayek, lesser-known works such as Jordanian Muʾnis al-Razzaz’s Ahyaʾ fi al-Bahr al-Mayyit (1982), or work that has not yet received much critical attention, such as Rabee Jaber’s Biritus (2005) and Sonallah Ibrahim’s Beirut, Beirut (1984). A particular strength of Aghacy’s book is her attention to representations of Beirut by non-Lebanese authors, who situate the city within a pan-Arab context and emphasize its relevance beyond its Lebanese and diasporic borders.

In her introduction, Aghacy pinpoints seven literary tropes through which the city can be understood; the five content chapters then focus on how these tropes are used in a selection of novels about Beirut. Aghacy understands the city of Beirut to be a “multiple construct—urban and rural, sectarian and secular, liberal and conservative, Lebanese and Arab and Eastern and Western” (6), and the novels she investigates serve to highlight the city’s plurality. Although she does not develop it in detail, Aghacy puts forth a compelling secondary argument that literary representations of Beirut complicate Western discourses of modernity since they show that the city has had its own unique path to urbanization and to literary representations of the urban, which differ from Western prescriptions (and descriptions) of urban modernity.

As Writing Beirut explores the constructs of the city, one of the central binaries to emerge is that of male-female, in alignment with the rest of her body of work, which is deeply attuned to issues of gender. In this book, Aghacy foregrounds gender in two significant ways. First, she identifies how Beirut has been gendered in literary writing. In several chapters, Aghacy demonstrates how the city sometimes is rendered in polarized feminized language, as a beguiling seductress or an unforgiving whore. In other sections, Aghacy points out moments when the city is rendered as masculine and violent, particularly during wartime. Second, Aghacy is attentive to the different ways in which the female and male characters of the novels experience the city. For example, in Aghacy’s reading of Balqis Al-Humani’s Hayy al-Lija (1969), she shows how the rural values that villagers from the south brought with them produce gendered spaces that remain even when these villagers move to an urban setting. Discussing Hassan Daoud’s Sanat al-Utumatik (1996), Aghacy demonstrates how the young men derive scopophilic pleasure from being out in the street and on rooftops. In Hanan al-Shaykh’s Hikayati Sharhun Yatul (2005), the female protagonist engages with public spaces in Beirut in the 1930s, and Aghacy argues that by going to the cinema and being visible in the street, the protagonist was able to reclaim the male gaze by turning it outward. Additionally, in her descriptions of Lebanese novels written during the war, Aghacy reveals how city spaces become increasingly masculine, as women and those men who refuse to fight recede from the public sphere into the domestic.

In many chapters, Writing Beirut works to show how, despite these seemingly rigid boundaries, Beirut is a city where dualities are constantly being altered. Just as the male space is ruptured by the female space and vice versa, the private is ruptured by the public, and the urban by the rural. Aghacy argues throughout the book that much of the tension of this literature arises from the fraught disjuncture between expectations about the city and the urban reality these characters face.

Writing Beirut’s strengths—its breadth and scope—can also, at times, prove challenging for the reader, particularly for those...