Native Tongue, Stranger Talk: The Arabic and French Literary Landscapes of Lebanon by Michelle Hartman (review)

For anyone interested in Lebanese fiction and sociopolitical history, Francophone studies, feminist writings, postcolonialism, world literature debates, and/or literary multilingualism, Michelle Hartman's Native Tongue, Stranger Talk: The Arabic and French Literary Landscapes of Lebanon is a very useful resource. The first English-language critical work on Francophone Lebanese literature, the book marks out its parameters with nine novels by women writers, produced from 1933 to 2003, a period that straddles all of modern Lebanon's main historical phases: the French Mandate, Lebanese independence, the 1975–1990 civil war, and the postwar period of economic reconstruction and attempts at nation-building. Much of Hartman's own career, featuring both academic and professional translation work on Middle Eastern writings, is exemplified in this study devoted to matters of language. In this new tome, Hartman hones in on code- switching— defined as the practice of alternating between two or more languages or varieties of language in conversation—specifically, on the role and impact of Arabic insertions in French-language Lebanese narratives. Based on close readings aimed at examining this practice, she argues that it has a political import that goes far beyond simply exoticizing Lebanese culture for non-Arab readers. In line with recent studies—for example, Felix Lang's The Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel (2016), Jumana Bayeh's The Literature of the Lebanese Diaspora (2015), and Syrine Hout's Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction (2012)—that insist on the Lebanese identity of an ever-growing corpus of foreign-language fictional works by authors continuously engaged with Lebanon as either nation or notion, Hartman's integrates these often marginalized French-language texts into the predominantly Arabophone Lebanese canon. Underlying this laudable exercise is her challenge to the erroneous perception of these writings as peripheral because of their putative collusion with French as a major European language and, in the case of the earlier ones, with France as a colonial power.

In the preface, Hartman poses three questions underpinning her "anti-colonial framework" (x): "Can a work written in a colonial language like French express the everyday realities lived in Arabic in Lebanon? Can this be done in a way that does not simply 'spice up' the text and make a French novel seem more exotic? How can a French text speak Arabic?" (ix–x). These queries are especially fascinating when one considers that examining Arabic code-switching in English-language Arab literatures—by authors originally from Egypt, Palestine, and Sudan, like Ahdaf Soueif, Susan Abulhawa, and Leila Aboulela—has increased dramatically in the last decade. Hartman's study is therefore a timely contribution to this trendy topic. However, while the book's subtitle—The Arabic and French Literary Landscapes of Lebanon— implies a canvass featuring a similar number of literary contributions in both languages, including perhaps some significant points of intersection, no such even-handedness is forthcoming. Hartman's reading of a select number of novels—diachronically against a detailed historico-political backdrop, and discursively in connection with evolving political, religious, gender, and class-based issues—reveals noteworthy insights about the 'place,' both literally and figuratively, of this particular group of French-educated, middle-class, and mostly Christian women authors. It does not, however, do so in comparison with contemporaneous Arabophone Lebanese writers. Such a study has been recently undertaken (by Felix Lang) with respect to post–civil war homegrown Lebanese literature regardless of language and/or gender. To live up to its subtitle and delineate a bilingual "literary landscape," Hartman's book would have had to reflect more distant readings of a larger number of texts in both French and Arabic.

This disappointment notwithstanding, Hartman excels at teasing out the creative tactics employed to incorporate Arabic in the selected Francophone novels, which are studied in chronological order. The common denominators in these narratives, she argues, are that all seek to destabilize the so-called worldliness of French...