Feminism and Avant-Garde Aesthetics in the Levantine Novel by Kifah Hanna (review)

Kifah Hanna's Feminism and Avant-Garde Aesthetics in the Levantine Novel offers serialized readings of Arabic novels by Ghada al-Samman, Sahar Khalifeh, and Huda Barakat, whose fiction portrays war's destruction of oppositional gender relations and constructs in the Arab world. Hanna locates the birth of an "interstitial Levantine feminism" in these works (5). She situates them at the very moment in which Arabic literary works were reconsidering the "gender politics" of Lebanese and Palestinian nationalisms (126). The result, she argues, is a political feminism informed by an ethos of relationality.

In her first chapter, "The Vicious Cycle: Contemporary Literary Feminisms in the Mashriq," Hanna argues that the political upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s produced a second, more political wave of Arab literary feminism (the first wave came in the 1930s) that interwove concerns with gender and nationalism. These mid-twentieth-century movements destabilized traditional conceptions of nation and homeland and notions of virile Palestinian and Lebanese masculinities. Hanna argues that the works of Samman, Khalifeh, and Barakat spoke into the vacuums created by these disruptions and, in so doing, challenged orthodox nationalist representations. She contends that these authors employed and modified specific literary aesthetics to ensure that previously marginalized figures—such as women and ethnic minorities—were read as paradigmatic of the changes unfolding in their societies.

In her second chapter Hanna appends Samman's novel, Sahra Tanakuriyya li-l Mawta (Masquerade for the Dead, 2003), to the three novels widely considered her Lebanese civil-war trilogy, creating a "tetralogy." While acknowledging the influence of the French school of existentialism in Samman's novels, Hanna argues that her theoretical approach also interrogates the "core ontological questions faced by the Arab individual in the second half of the twentieth century" (39). In addition to her distinctive blend of absurdism and magical realism, Samman firmly roots the need for an existentialist literary aesthetic within the sociopolitical realm, differing from the more personal Arab existentialism of her male contemporaries. Hanna acclaims Samman's uses of existentialism in the context of war to speak to the uniform dissolution of the human while avoiding "standard feminist plotlines" (60).

Hanna then explores critical realism in novels Sahar Khalifeh published between 1976 and 2004 in relation to life in the occupied Palestinian territories. Khalifeh's female protagonists find hypocrisy in the language of the Palestinian male's liberation struggle, which remains uninterested in the liberation of women. Hanna notes that Khalifeh's protagonists destabilize the patriarchal binary of the national/political against the domestic/social so that men are considered part of rather than the sole vanguards of a new Palestinian identity. Khalifeh uses critical realism and vernacular Arabic to parallel this destabilization, shirking the conservative Modern Standard Arabic used in male-dominated Arabic literature.

In the last section of the book Hanna argues that Huda Barakat renders impossible the continuation of a "traditional" Lebanese masculinity during the civil war in her novels published between 1990 and 2004. For Hanna, Barakat illustrates the nonheroic and humanizing impact of war on men, allowing insanity and trauma to undo gender paradigms. The liminal positions of the characters become emblematic of their moment of enunciation: androgynous individuals represent the confusion and transgressions of the civil war. Hanna is careful to distinguish Barakat's surrealist aesthetic from male and European iterations. Barakat, Hanna contends, rejects the psychoanalytically influenced surrealist metaphor of the feminine as the hysterical. Instead, she favors reconfiguring a static Lebanese masculinity with the potential for liberation and permanent transcendence. However, "as if sensing the impossibility of [these] subjectivities in the [then] current sociopolitical order," Barakat ends her narratives with the "literal and figurative disappearance" of androgynous protagonists. Such figures are too avant-garde for their time (114).

By considering a Levantine feminism where nationalist and feminist sentiments coexist, Hanna builds on the work of acclaimed scholars of feminist and critical gender theory. At the same time, Hanna's critique of the works...