Reciprocal Transmission: My "Women and War" Journey with miriam cooke

miriam cooke and I have shared so many important events in our lives. It all started in the 1980s in Beirut. I first encountered miriam's sensibility in the apartment I was assigned to at the Lebanese American University (then called Beirut University College) because she had left it to return to the United States. I was the recipient of a Fulbright research award, just as she had been. I was to conduct research for my book about the role of women in the Lebanese war. Amazingly enough, miriam had been conducting research on a similar topic during the previous months in Lebanon. We were both students, teachers, and researchers of literature, Arab studies, and women's studies. People in Lebanon talked to me about miriam's liveliness and commitment to issues in our part of the world. She had made many friends. The communion we shared before meeting was reflected in the charming LAU apartment we lived in consecutively in the midst of the devastating seventeen years of war that ripped Lebanon apart. When we finally met at a Middle East Studies Association annual meeting, we immediately connected and talked for hours on the subject so dear to our hearts. We were indeed sisters and colleagues in a subfield that was coming into the avant-garde of academic research and publishing. My long conversations with miriam over the phone and at conferences were always engaging and interesting. We encouraged and inspired each other.

Women and War

Our books on women and war as analyzed through Lebanese literature were published within three years of each other (cooke 1987; Accad 1990). I connected sexuality to the war that devastated my country of birth and adolescence. I searched for answers by comparing literature written on the war by men and women authors I was studying and teaching. Scholarship on the war did not address how sexuality, physically and symbolically, was intertwined with the violence and destruction. In keeping with the feminist theory that the personal is political, I knew that the tragedy we were living required such analysis. I argued that we needed a sexual revolution to transform the traditional relations of domination and subordination that permeated intimate sexual and family relations. Developing an exchange of love, tenderness, equal sharing, and recognition among people in intimate life would create a more secure and solid basis for change in other spheres—political, economic, social, religious, and national—because these are often characterized by similar relations of domination.

miriam had reached similar conclusions in the book she published earlier, which focused on women-authored Lebanese war novels by individuals she called the Beirut Decentrists. She challenged the notion that only men wrote about war. She traced the transformation of women who observed and recorded the chaos in Lebanon. Although they differed in ideological and religious beliefs, these authors were bound by their exclusion from the literary canon and social discourse. Their vision would rebuild shattered Lebanon. During the so-called Two-Year War of 1975–76, little comment was made about those who left the country, usually men in search of economic security, and the women who remained behind. These women were increasingly aware that they had stayed out of a sense of responsibility for others. They survived in spite of the terrible violence and destruction. The Beirut Decentrists wrote of a society that had gone beyond masculinization, normal in most wars, to achieve an almost unprecedented feminization. Staying became the standard of Lebanese citizenship. The writings of the Beirut Decentrists offered a way out of anarchy. If men and women could espouse this sense of responsibility, the energy that fueled unrelenting savagery could be turned to reconstruction. Women writers, she found in much of her scholarship, presented a worldview that offered alternatives to the traditional binarisms of war versus peace, home versus front, and civilian versus combatant. Such women often sought to transform their own role, even if it was sometimes too late.

Cancer and War

When I was hit with breast cancer in the mid-1990s, a topic of a subsequent publication (Accad 2000, 2001), miriam...