The Literature of the Lebanese Diaspora by Jumana Bayeh (review)

Mashriq & Mahjar 3, no. 2 (2016), 183–186 ISSN 2169-4435 JUMANA BAYEH, The Literature of the Lebanese Diaspora (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015). Pp. 277. £69.00, cloth. ISBN 9781788315340. REVIEWED BY SAHAR AMER, Arabic Language and Cultures, University of Sydney, Australia; email: sahar.amer@sydney.edu.au Jumana Bayeh’s groundbreaking book offers an elegant and sophisticated analysis of several novels produced in the aftermath of the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990) and explores through them the complex relationships between place, displacement, and belonging. She challenges the limitations of conventional theories of diaspora and highlights the role that literature, when politically and historically contextualized, plays in expanding notions of home, place, and the nation-state. Ultimately, this study proposes an original and incisive exploration of Lebanese cultural and political history as well as of the global Lebanese diaspora. Bayeh demonstrates a thorough mastery of major theories of diaspora developed since the 1990s, notably by Safran, Clifford, Stuart Hall, and Ghassan Hage, as well as of postcolonial theorists such as Said, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Kristeva. Her solid grasp of the secondary literature of the novels she studies combines with a deep sensitivity to the intertextual resonances that permeate Lebanese diasporic writings: T.S. Eliot and Salman Rushdie (Chapter Two); Robert de Niro’s film “The Deer Hunter” (Chapter Three); Albert Camus (Chapter Three); Khalil Gibran, the Rahbani Brothers, and Mahmoud Darwish (Chapter Five); Arabian Nights (Chapter Six). Not least, Bayeh displays a superb grasp of the wider Arabic poetic conventions that are also part and parcel of the Lebanese contemporary diasporic novel (the Adonis myth, the Thousand and One Nights, the feminization of urban spaces, the pastoral idyll, etc.). Bayeh’s attentiveness to these transnational, intertextual, intercultural, and interlinguistic voices allow her to situate the novels she studies within the very specific context of pre- 184 Mashriq & Mahjar 3, no. 2 (2016) and post-war Lebanon particularly with regard to the relations between Maronite/Muslim/Druze, those between Phoenicians and Arabs, or those between Palestinians and Jews. Ultimately, Bayeh’s book underlines the intricate political implications of the Lebanese post-independence situation. Bayeh’s main contribution resides without any doubt in her use of literature to challenge historical and social-scientist approaches to diaspora studies. Her expertise in Arabic and Lebanese aesthetics and her impressive close-reading skills allow her to challenge established theories of diaspora especially as they relate to notions of home, roots, urban space, and nationalism. If the example of the Jewish diaspora has long served as a model in diaspora studies (Safran, Cohen), this model, Bayeh demonstrates, does not account for other diasporic experiences such as that of Lebanon where the return to a homeland became problematic because of the civil war. Her goal is thus to widen the prescriptive typology of diaspora studies and broaden the semantic field of the very category of diaspora. Her other related goal is to show how dispersed novelists, because of the geographical and temporal distance afforded by their state of diaspora, can help us reflect upon central contemporary political questions. Bayeh’s analysis of the urban space in Tony Hanania’s Unreal City and Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game (Part I) highlights the careful effacement of all local customs and traces of the Orient. In these novels, the new architectural developments by the Solidere reconstruction projects, which aim at the commercial revitalization of Beirut represent an erasure of the Lebanese civil war, and they are a prime symbol of the state’s suppression of the flow of migrants from the rural areas to the city. Literature challenges this state-led amnesia and endeavors to uncover the history of Beirut, of its Maronite community, of French colonialism in order to shed light on the contemporary postwar situation. The characters’ sense of alienation in the city is thus interpreted to be not due to the abandonment of nature, of the Lebanese countryside and the mountains as many critics have argued. Rather, alienation, in Bayeh’s reading, is a result of a distorted capitalism (illicit trade of drugs and of looted goods), of the continued exploitation of the peasants, of corruption, of the loss of Palestine, and of...