The reconstruction of postwar Beirut projects the image of a modern city, oblivious of its past. Yet, the remnants of war are in constant struggle with this new identity of Beirut.

1. Emilie Thomas Mansour
2. Journal Of Middle East Women's Studies

“Beirut Nightmares” begins where “Beirut ‘75” left off. The title and chapter headings, coupled with grotesque comedy, the absurd, and the macabre all recreate the nightmarish aspect of the civil war, stiflingly experienced by the narrator-protagonist in both her waking and sleeping states.

Parallel to this dilemma, Rachid Al Daif’s narrator in Dear Mr. Kawabata witnesses a struggle between tradition and modernity. This article discusses the sources of both dilemmas and their manifestations: the narrator’s dilemma is an allegory of the reconstructed Beirut due to the driving forces that constitute their struggles. Amnesia and the ghost-like presence of memory are the two opposing forces that result in the schizophrenic identity of Beirut and in the narrator’s struggle. Both Beirut and the narrator experience a loss of memory at times and its haunting shadowy presence at others. Hence the inevitable need to explore the remnants of the memory of war to bring about the conscious awareness and acceptance of the past. European Scientific Journal June 2014 /SPECIAL/ edition vol.2 ISSN: 1857 - 7881 (Print) e RACHID AL DAIF'S DEAR MR.

KAWABATA: AN ALLEGORY OF THE RECONSTRUCTION OF POST-WAR BEIRUT 0 Daisy Waked Head of the English Section of the Language Center Holy Spirit University of Kaslik, Lebanon The reconstruction of postwar Beirut projects the image of a modern city, oblivious of its past. Yet, the remnants of war are in constant struggle with this new identity of Beirut. Parallel to this dilemma, Rachid Al Daif's narrator in Dear Mr. Kawabata witnesses a struggle between tradition and modernity. This article discusses the sources of both dilemmas and their manifestations: the narrator's dilemma is an allegory of the reconstructed Beirut due to the driving forces that constitute their struggles.

Amnesia and the ghost-like presence of memory are the two opposing forces that result in the schizophrenic identity of Beirut and in the narrator's struggle. Both Beirut and the narrator experience a loss of memory at times and its haunting shadowy presence at others.

Hence the inevitable need to explore the remnants of the memory of war to bring about the conscious awareness and acceptance of the past. Beirut; Al Daif; dilemma; memory; war; amnesia - Introduction The schizophrenic reality of post- war Beirut is exemplified in Rachid Al Daifs Dear Mr.

Kawabata (1999). Garish Beirut stands today in all majesty, after a long history of wars and destruction. A prisoner in symmetry, a victim of amnesia activists, Beirut is the two-faced city. In one embrace, the re-born city adopts the modernized future and in the other, clings to a past too painful to be forgotten. The reconstructed Beirut is writing itself through its colorful, impersonal facades and wide, lifeless streets. Between these lines, can be read suffocated wails of the wars memory and ever- present shadows of death. Echoing Gibran Kahlil Gibrans words, Beirut utters its dilemma: It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.

A witness of the Lebanese war, Rachid Al Daif was born in 1945 in Northern Lebanon into a Maronite family. He is a lecturer in Arabic language and literature at the Lebanese University in Beirut, as well as a novelist and poet. Kawabata, he attempts to express the dilemma between modernity and tradition; the future and the past, taking Kawabatas The Master of Go (1951) as his model. Al Daif addresses Kawabata who tasted death and rebirth. Beirut too, hasnt fully recovered from war and its ghosts. It has to go through death in order to live again and have a future. Al Daifs Dear Mr.

Kawabata begins with his encounter with an uncannily image of himself. But that person walked in a different direction, with a different gait, wearing different clothes (D, 1). This was the narrators friend who left the party before the war started. He hasnt killed a soul.

He is neat and well- attired, and sleeps easily at night, with a clear conscience. The narrator hates him. He is himself, but a polished, smiling, healthy image of himself. We hear the narrators laments and recollections of war, and we sense his struggle with the mans haunting image. If we examine the binary opposition that engages both the reconstructed Beirut and Al Daifs narrator, we would find a set of driving forces.

On one hand, there is death/ war/ past and on the other, rebirth/ peace/ future. This article discusses this tearing dilemma in all its aspects based on Al Daifs Dear Mr. Kawabata and specific examples of the reconstruction of postwar Beirut.

Not much has been written about this dilemma that is veiled by the modernized image of Beirut-ascommodity. The purpose of this study is to bring to the surface Beiruts consciousness as a city with a past, with recollections, thoughts and desires. Beirut is not a mere stone-city, a festooned, symmetrical work of bricolage waiting to be consumed. In fact, Jade Tabet, architect, author of La cit aux deux places and editor of Beyrouth: La Brlure Des Rves, questions the perfected image of Beirut: Why, then, this feeling of unease that emerges from the rehabilitated faades, the strange impression of strolling in a dcor de thetre? This article refuses the modern passive consuming of Beirut as an objet dart. Instead, it provides a microscopic gaze on Beiruts identity and spies on the hidden corners of the city. Nasser Rabbat in The Interplay of History and Archeology in Beirut admits his concern for the loss of Beiruts identity as a realm of memory: In the not so-distant future, when the new downtown with its tall buildings and wide, tree-lined boulevards is completed and the face of postwar Beirut is totally remade the city as a whole in its new garb will cease to be a milieu de mmoire, or an environment for memory.

Beirut needs to be conscious of the duplicity that modernism forces upon its existence today. Just as Marx admits in his Communist Manifesto (1848) that the way beyond the contradictions would have to lead through modernity, not out of it, this article delineates the importance of the conscious awareness of Beiruts struggle.

In fact, the pathological remnants of the wars memory have to be explored and most importantly, exposed. This is the act of losing the old halo and finding a new one. This article re-writes a modern city in the Barthean way: jouir dune dfiguration. To deflate the pompous image of Beirut and re-weave its fine threads, are the main concerns of this study. Dismissing the Beirutan fallacy of les jeux sont faits, this article announces: quil y ait un jeu! The game of rewriting Beirut begins with Rachids narrator who wonders why his life hasnt flashed before his eyes when he died: No memories of any sort whatever passed in front of my eyes (D, 2).

Neardeath experience, which usually changes the whole existence of the dying, is not effective in the narrators case. He suffers the burden of those memories that lie deep in him but cannot see the light. Pain is the only manifestation of this strange experience: Nothing, not even the world after death, could distract me from the pain I was feeling. My pain was the only thing to occupy my senses when I returned to life from the vastness of death (D, 2).

The absence of memory may be the deliberate subconscious dismissal of the past and its burdens. The narrators attempt to erase the wounds of his past and cancel all its traces results in this expressive pain.

His desire to display his lifes events and his fear to live them again are the two driving forces that constitute his pain. Fear and desire are the two expressions one can see today on the disfigured face of Barakat Building that still stands on the green line. This building was shared by both the western and eastern parts of Beirut as an eternal witness of their atrocities. It shares the pain of Al Daifs narrator: the suffocating pain of a fragmented, almost extinct memory. Barakat building-halfway between Monot, the street of restaurants and nightclubs and the new commercial central district- stands alone on the shattered fragments of memory. Deserted and sad, its empty windows and broken walls echo the distant howls of the war. This monument once baptized by the unholy fires no longer recalls what it once looked like.

A symbol of the still surviving, but quickly fading memory of Beirut, this building is the last monument of war that can be found in Beirut today. In 1997, a decree was issued to demolish it. The International press adopted the situation, especially when a young architect Mona Al Hallak opposed the project: This building is Lebanon. It symbolizes the beauty of pre-war. During the war, it was a spot for shooters.

Now, they want to erase it to become a parking lot. An old scar on the face of Beirut, this building suffers the pain of forgetfulness. It neither belongs to the glorious pre-war Beirut nor to the years of painful war and it definitely cant feel at home in the citys millennium framework. In his article Shadows of a Past Life amidst Beiruts Ruins: How do we deal with a threatened memory? Wael Abdel Fattah argues that Barakat Building: remains a bridge between a hypothetical city, and another present in its noise, fear, mute violence and growing contrastsThe yellow building encompasses all of Beirut and its indefinite future. The fate of this building was left on hold until the Municipality of Beirut prepared an ambitious project to transform the forsaken building into Beit Beirut Museum and Cultural Center which is projected to be a museum, a cultural and artistic meeting place, a facility for archiving research and studies on the city of Beirut throughout history and an urban planning office for the city of Beirut. The only obvious reality is that Barakat Building, due to the weight of its crashed wall, will never restore its past existence, just like Al Daifs narrator will never be able to see his life flashing before his eyes.

The truth that near death experience promises is the awakening that neither of them went through. The narrator failed to grasp the truth that he could only know through revelation in a moment of mixed fear and desire. Beirut too, holds the moment of revelation in suspense. Isnt it after all, Italo Calvinos city par excellence: the city that is drawn by its whims and fears? Caught in a situation that requires reconciliation with the past, Rachid (Al Daifs narrator) and Beirut (exemplified in Barakat building) show the first manifestations of an evident dilemma. The narrator, in an attempt to give voice to his inner-struggle writes his long letter to Kawabata. As for Beirut, it manifests its own dilemma in its post war reconstruction.

At times mute and shy, violent and provocative at others, these two struggles are discussed in this part of the article. Al Daifs narrator appoints Kawabata as king and regards him as The arbitrator obeyed because of his sincerity (D, 8). Kawabata is the king and the arbitrator in the narrators dilemma because he wrote about an intense struggle in The Master of Go.

This struggle takes the form of the Go game in which the old master is challenged to a marathon by a younger player. The opposition is thus clearly between the old and the new generations, between a master and a young player. They only make a few moves a day. The pressure and tension of the game destroy the health of the master.

He dies shortly after the game ends. Kawabata, Al Daifs narrator expresses his great sympathy with the old master. The latter suffers silently with dignity and extreme pain. Rachid sees in this game many similarities with the struggle he wants to write about. I also wanted, like you, to write a story in which I would speak, through an ordinary event, about the clash between the climate of the age (I mean modernity with its threats and challenges) and local people, I mean tradition (D, 9). This clash between the past and the future, tradition and modernity is the result of his inner conflict. The narrator is unable to tame his memory and reconcile it with his present.

This clash is the subject matter of his letter. It is a clearly great opposition between powerful forces. The generation of the past (tradition) wouldnt accept the scientific discoveries and the worlds evolution. In fact, the narrator had to insist to his parents that the world was round, not flat.

In the same sense, Joseph Bourke emphasizes the intensity of the struggle in Tragic Vision in Kawabatas The Master of go. The most fundamental level of that conflict is the confrontation of two completely different ways of understanding the nature of human existence at the moment when one is giving way to the other and while both are still vital enough to sustain the conflicts intensity. The two conflicting forces in the narrators struggle are both powerful, each in its own way.

Each of them has a different conception of human nature: tradition refuses all attempts of change and evolution, while modernity believes only in its own science and its only faith is in itself. The clash between tradition and modernity is mirrored by a parallel struggle: that of Beiruts past and future. In fact, Beirut that embraces both its whims and fears is in constant search for an identity. Barakat building on one hand represents the fragmented past and Fosh Street, on the other, the modernized part of the city. Barakat building, an empty and still nonrecovered monument of the past war is the force that drives the city back while Fosh Street, with all its modern attractions and lively noise, promises Beirut an appealing vision of a modern future. It is quite similar to the opposition between the narrators belief in the roundness of the earth and the disbelief of his parents who dont believe in the continuity of life due to their static, limited existence.

Rachids narrator admits that only Kawabata can understand him: Is it, I wonder, that you have set me free, through the act you undertook in the last moment of your life? (D, 17) In fact, Kawabata committed suicide in 1972. Al Daif may see in Kawabatas act a conscious and brave confrontation with ones fear. Kawabata was the master of his own driving forces and had control over his existence.

This ultimate mastery over the self is a manifestation of power. Self-realization preceded self-destruction in Kawabatas case. Kawabata confronted his fears and realized his existence before he ended his life. Rachid envies this decision and hopes to reach the same ending after writing about his own conflict. Kawabata tasted a conscious death. This conscious death or closure is what Beirut needs.

The open, undecided fate of Beirut has to be determined. Beirut still stands in shame and helplessness.

Unaware of its own reality, past and future, it hangs in the open winds. Is it doomed to have Barakat Buildings fate or participate in the virtual laughs of Foshs exotic nights? Whatever the way the narrator and Beirut chose, one thing is certain: the new life has to pass through a conscious death. The narrator, in order to overcome his inner struggle and reconcile tradition with modernity, has to be consciously aware of those two. And in order to find its belonging between a fragmented past and an unreal future, Beirut has to be conscious of its own reality. Dag Hammarskjold insists upon this conscious realization: Committed to the future / Even if that only means se prparer bien mourir.

Now that the source of the struggle is located, it is time to delve into some of its manifestations. The narrators encounter with the uncannily sharp image of himself (D, 1) is displeasing to him. The friend appears to the narrator as a haunting shadow. He is described as a handsome, well attired man. His bearing was upright his authentic, Semitic nose was raised a little, arrogantly, like his head (D, 3). There was no wrinkle on his face or neck. Smooth-faced as a child, with a neck that filled the collar of his shirt, without bursting out of it.

A face brimming with purity; a virginal smile (D, 105). The narrator describes his friends appearance with minute details.

He is amazed by his perfect looks. Yet, he is irritated by this overwhelmingly neat phantom. He can even see that his friends face was that of a man who sleeps as soon as his head hits the pillow, with an easy conscience, pure white snow (D, 109). The narrator, far from appreciating such a perfect picture, is in fact repulsed by it.

The excessive neatness and grandiose walk are somehow superficial to him. The narrator is annoyed by his friends fake smile. Later on, this white phantom slips back again into the narrative, confirming his influence on the narrator. The smartest thing about him was his suit. A gray suit with a carefully knotted tie, and a white shirt (D, 137). In Unreal City, Tony Hanania displays a character very similar to Al Daifs.

Hananias narrator, a taxi driver, has to pick up a client from the cemetery. The man appears inside the car before the driver even pulls up the lock to let him in. There is no moisture on the glass beside his face. He doesnt seem cold. He is dressed in a caf-crme Safari summer suit although it is wintertime. He suddenly disappears like an unfinished, fragmented dream. The two over-dressed, strange looking characters seem to belong to another place and time.

Till now, I have discussed the physical description of the friend and its effect on the narrator. A likely embellished, almost pathetic image, Nejmeh Square is the item Id like to discuss next. Home of the parliament, Nejmeh Square is busy during the day and noisy by night with its crowded cafs and clubs. Nejmeh Square, a symmetrical, crafted area attracts hundred of tourists as well as Lebanese people every day.

Yet, something peculiar in its over crafted dcor seems to repulse the careful viewer. Neat and spotless, its streets are carefully lined up and its buildings displayed with exaction. Tabet in La cit aux deux places sees Nejmeh square as a place toilett and over cleaned: a hyperspace. Emptied from all their occupants, its imposing buildings are transformed into spaces of representation where the picturesque only serves consuming purposes, as if in this mise en valeur of the place, lies its mise en mort. Projecting ideal impressions and images, Nejmeh Square brings the same feeling of fake appearances that I have already discussed in the friends case. This spectacle, very similar to Guy Debords, demands a passive acceptance and says nothing more than that which appears is good, that which is good appears.

Nejmeh Square stands in majestic firmness. The passersby cannot but be attracted by its magic. No traces of fatigue or decay can be depicted in its provocative faades. A perfect simulation of a modern environment Nejmeh Square is a virtual scene that promises what Berman calls rhapsodies of Utopian yearning.

Just like Nevsky Prospect, Nejmeh Square displays a set of wide and straight streets. It is planned and designed so well that it serves now as a vortex of consumer economy and exchange. Returning to the friend, he walked along the Hamra street pavement as if nothing had happened. It was as if the horrors that had taken place all over Lebanon, and in Beirut in particular, for the last fifteen years were an artificial flood, specially constructed for a short-term purpose an open air play, perhaps, or to shoot a film (D, 2). The narrator finds it strange that his friend walks in complete absence and denial of Beiruts past. He wonders how such recollections of war and destruction can be easily wiped off from his memory.

Beirut today aches too at the sight of Nejmeh Square which was once a stage for many battles and bloodshed. Here lies the schizophrenic nature of Beirut that I alluded to at the outset of this article. Beirut is torn between a past that cannot see the light again and a future that grew pre-maturely.

Nejmeh square among many other places in Beirut saw the light in a hurried, active impulse to overcome its wounds before they were completely healed. The outcome of this rushed reconstruction is a nondescript land. Nejmeh square witnesses the passing of the days fluently, yearning to a promising future. The friend too is seen holding a misbaha (worry beads) in both handsFor us, Arabs, time does not pass without a misbaha (D, 3). Leaving the past behind, Nejmeh square and the friend unconsciously give time a push. Beirut and the narrator wonder at such behavior but they know quite well that they created them.

I had invented him! I had assembled his component parts from similar features common to many other people I know, features that also link them with myself. I had pulled them together to make him! (D, 3) Beirut too, driven by the desire to become a modern city borrowed its material from all over the world in order to create a city that encompasses all the attractions and modern attributes of the world. In one of its summer 2002 TV ads, the Ministry of Tourism displays a set of consequent pictures from famous cities of the world with their names in form of questions: London? The ad concludes with the line: Its all in Lebanon! With all the previous pictures flashing quickly again.

In this sense, Beirut wants to encompass all the worlds hallmark capitals and features as Al Daif calls them. Beirut appears thus as a patchwork and a commodity ready to be consumed. Citing Debords words, Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities, is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal. Beirut sees itself in a bright future that Barakat Building couldnt even visualize. The friend foretells a beautiful future in the distance: What did he see now in the distance, when almost everyone was agreed that the war had probably ended? Was he trying to catch a glimpse of the peace that was coming?

(D, 109) The narrators friend, in his hauteur and impertinent walk has a vision that no one else can see. Nejmeh square as well projects an economic and touristic vision of Beirut. It is absorbed in this vision that it cast away all the past, like the friend walked as if nothing had happened.

Indeed, his face was that: of a man who sleeps as soon as his head hits the pillow and who enjoys a clear conscience (D, 111). The narrator and his friend belonged to the same political party. They planned demonstrations, were trained to use weapons. The narrator cannot believe how his friends conscience is so clear after all they have been through, and all that they did and witnessed. He adds: I was surprised by the fact that his neck had not a single trace of a drop of blood on it.

It was absolutely straight, as if totally innocentwith the confidence of an upright man, and the unself-consciousness of an inanimate being (D, 139). Smooth as the neck of a virgin and unblemished was his neck. It was commonly known, the narrator claims that during his time a murderers neck is always bent.

Emilie Thomas Mansour

But his friends neck was not even slightly bent and had not a drop of blood on it. He seemed totally innocent from all crime, with a clear conscience. Totally innocent from all recollection of the war, Nejmeh square is a newborn city. It seems to be above all possible recollection of a dreadful past. It stands with a free or maybe a whitened conscience. Its memory made blank, it is a memory for forgetfulness as Mahmud Darwish calls it.

The narrator and Beirut are both banalized (to use Debords word). They are both forced to accept and believe in a simulated reality. The narrator is haunted by his friends attractive, angel-like shadow while Beirut is not allowed to unveil the secrets of the perfect crafted stucco of its modern areas. The image has become the final form of commodity reification. (Using Debords famous words again). The narrator and Beirut are obliged to be silent consumers of the images they are in struggle with.

Beirut city and the narrator, as I already argued, are caught in a dilemma in which many changes and currents take them back to the past, while at times, carry them in a leap to the future. Fighting amnesia, the narrator and Beirut confronted the future in its dual manifestation.

Journal Of Middle East Women's Studies

They will take the opposite direction in the following part of this article, asserting thus the twofold dimension of the struggle. As the narrator unfolds a new layer of his inner struggle, the reader goes a step further in the realization of the driving forces that roar in his unsettled mind. We see him now talking about the generation of the past or tradition.

Having dwelled on modernity and the future, he goes back in his narrative to discuss his fathers reliance on weapons. My father would constantly insist that after his death we should put his revolver under the pillow he rested his head on, because that was the only thing he had faith in, even in his final agony. Otherwise, it will be like burying me naked (D, 38). The narrators father believes in weapons and their ends.

He trusts the gun that could protect him and defend him. This same gun can also kill him.

The gun is clothing to him, a protection and a shield from the outside. In fact, the idea of war becomes a shield to protect them. They hide behind it to justify their behavior, way of thinking or even lack of hope. Makdissi argues in Beirut Fragments that: no matter how hard we try, we cannot shut out the war, even at the moments of relative quiet. We are locked into the situation, penetrated by it.

We carry it in us and around with us. Hope of Peace is a monument built in 1995 near the Ministry of Defense in Beirut. Tanks, VTTs, guns and jeeps are cast in tons of concrete, symbolizing the burial of the war instruments. The monument calls to forget past wounds and look towards the future with hope. If we look critically at this monument, we would see the cannons of the tanks still facing the outside. The risk of shooting fire is always there as long as the cannon is still intact and aiming.

In the same sense, the Lebanese people rushed to cover the exposed parts of their memory with patches of forgetfulness in an attempt to counter the psychological effects of ruin and devastation. Such an attempt is unsuccessful. The narrators father believes in war and its ways just as the Lebanese people nowadays leave the cannons of their memory aiming at the future. In The Little Mountain, Elias Khoury, in an attempt to change the destructive nature and use of the tank tells his friends: I want a tank made of all colors.

The guys brought over lots of colors and began to paint the tank. But a tank remains a tank whether it is colored or half buried. The tank becomes useless only when its cannon is broken.

War in fact becomes the nightmare reality of everyday life. The sounds of bombs, cannons and aerial bombardments (manifested in the Hope of Peace monument) are far from being hushed nowadays. The echoes of these sounds still hover around in the Lebanese ears, whenever thunder strikes or lightening lights up the sky.

We are, as Lebanese individuals, at home in this sometimes shocking, painful and peculiar tyranny of war. Emily Nasrallah handles the issue of memory in A House Not Her Own: Stories from Beirut: I was cooped up inside my house, walking through rooms empty save for the holes in the walls made by the flying sharpnels of continuous war. They were like slap marks on the face of memory. Fighting a struggle between war and peace, haunting memory and forgetfulness, the narrator and Beirut are caught in the dilemma. Ghada Samman portrays this clash in Beirut Nightmares: In one of her nightmares, a father brings his son a present on his birthday.

The present is in a colorful box tied with a golden ribbon. The child opens it with joy. He finds inside a rifle. He is silent.

His father asks him: Dont you like the rifle? I wanted a bicycle so I could ride it on the rainbows highway, and discover the multicolored lanes, one color at a time. The roots of Beiruts struggle were discussed in the first part. In the second, Nejmeh Square was used as an allegory for the total absence of memory.

In the third part, the Hope of Peace monument reveals the other side of Beiruts schizophrenic identity. Now, it is time to bring our discussion to the final stage: that of the conscious awareness of the above mentioned forces in Beiruts struggle. The introduction laid great emphasis on the fact that the pathological remnants of the wars memory must be explored and exposed. As already argued in the first part, the old generation wouldnt admit the scientific fact that the earth is round and that it revolves around itself. The narrator tries to persuade them, but in vain: 'But our ancestors were tied to the earths surface, shackled by its gravity, untroubled by any questions, with hearts that took no pleasure in reality (D, 45). The narrator uses later a metaphor in which the struggle reaches its peak.

He says: Take the pearls of the sea- the man that risks all to dive for them, can reach them and bring them back to land; but the man that stays on the surface of the water by the shore, comes back with only a hidden longing (D, 46). The narrators ancestors stayed at the surface of the water and suffered a hidden longing. The narrator here realizes his inner struggle, which reaches its climax with this metaphor.

The old generation has to delve deeper in its beliefs and values. It has to reach the pearls of knowledge to bring them to the shore. The narrator attains the nirvana of his dilemma with this image. He knows now what has to be done and how to do it. On another level, Beirut needs to experience such an awakening in order to be conscious of its struggle. B018 is an underground nightclub known for its unusual music and strange atmosphere.

Near the port of Beirut, it was the quarantine zone for the port. Later on, it became home to war refugees and then, it was all destroyed. The site witnessed atrocious scenes of persecution and massacre. During this time the only architectural element visible from the road was a wall with a long, narrow hole through which militia snipers could shoot the passersby. To respect the memory of the place, especially the void that ruled over the site behind the wall, Bernard Khoury, the B018 architect developed an underground structure in 1998. This underground nightclub has sliding roof panels at ground level.

When opening, the B018 roof releases sounds and light and extends its atmosphere to the outside. The distortion of the reflected images is exaggerated by the fragmentation of the mirror panels. Its closing is a voluntary gesture of disappearance, a strategy of recess. The gothic, sepulchral entry is a vertical murky stair. The seats, specially designed for the B018 nightclub, are made of steel and covered with dark-stained solid mahogany.

They open to reveal velvet upholstery. Near the entrance is a long narrow window, positioned slightly lower than eye level to commemorate the snipers hole that once existed in the wall. Khourys architectural concept and execution of B018 constitute homage to the past.

He admits that: The danger in architecture here (in Lebanon) is that everyone acts as if nothing happened. History is simplified. B018 refuses to participate in the amnesia that governs other Lebanese postwar reconstruction efforts. B018 is an invitation to dive deep into the wounded memory of war and bring about awareness.

A part of Beirut, just like the old generation, acts as if nothing happened. In order to achieve reconciliation with its internal forces, Beirut needs to reach into its unconscious, go beneath the surface in order to be aware of its past and heal the scars it caused. Buried in the memory of forgetfulness, Beirut is still on the surface of its conscience and suffers a hidden longing for survival. B018, the shrine of the past contains holy recollections of history.

The seats and tables are in the shape of coffins. When panels open up late at night the phantoms of the past reach the city along with the requiem tunes and distorted images of the past. The delirious dancers close the seats, which become flat, wooden-like surfaces to dance on. Dancing on the grave of the past; thus begins the demystification of the authority of war memory. Beiruts memory has to emerge from the underground in order to assert its right to be a modern city. Elias Khoury in The Little Mountain emphasizes the importance of consciousness: Consciousness is the opposite of death. We can abolish death only with consciousness.

Then, well be over with dying and start into real death. In our journey through the streets of Beirut and Al Daifs Dear Mr. Kawabata, we met the constituents of their colliding forces. Consciousness was the key term in this study and the target towards which it aims. Being a flneur was essential to achieve this end. Only the flneur can read the citys true contents behind the motley faades. Walter Benjamin defines the flneur as industrious and productive.

His eyes open, his ears ready, searching for something entirely different from what the crowd gathers to see. Escaping what Debord calls the monopoly of appearance we re-discovered Beirut, dismissing thus the colored spots and fixed legend of its definite map. The postwar reading and re-writing of Beirut was only achieved through our stopping, questioning and remembering Beiruts past and possible future.

Beirut becomes thus a writerly, open-ended space. Flneurs in the elegant streets of Beirut, we can see now that the rehabilitated buildings are based on the ruins of decayed columns. The remnants of the war are therefore used as pillars for the future. This article is an attempt to bring this faux pas into light.

Beirut needs to recuperate its emotional power and impose itself in the world as a city rich in its long, varied memory. Gibran, Kahlil. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 4. Al Daif, Rachid. London: Quartet Books,1. All subsequent quotations from Al Daif's novel will have 'D', followed by the page number in-text, not in notes.

La cit aux deux places. Beyrouth: la brlure des rves. Paris: Autrement, 56. All quotations from Beyrouth: la brlre des rves are my own free translation. Rabbat, Nasser. The Interplay of History and Archeology in Beirut.

Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the Construction and Rreconstruction of Beirut City. Rowe, Peter and Hashim Sarkis. London: Prestel, 21.

Barthes, Roland. Le Plaisir du Texte. Paris: Editions du seuil, 61.

Abdel Fattah, Wael. Shadows of a Past Life admist Beirut's Ruins: how do we deal with a threatened memory? All quotations from the newspaper article, originally in Arabic, are my own free translation. Abdel Fattah, 5. Bourke, Joseph.

Tragic Vision in Kawabata's The Master of Go. Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature. Al Daif does not name this person since among us, people do not mention the names of their enemies when speaking about them. (D, 2) To avoid confusion, I will refer to this person by the name 'friend'. Hanania, Tony. London: Bloomsbury.Tabet, 56.

The Society of The Spectacle. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Canada: Zone Books, entry 12 Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air. New York: Verso, 224. The Society of The Spectacle.

Donald Nicholson-Smith. Canada: Zone Books, entry 168. Makdissi, Jean Said. Beirut Fragments: a war memoir. New York: Persea Books, 213 Khoury, Elias. Little Mountain. Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press, 62.

Nasralla, Emily. A House Not Her Own: stories from Beirut. New York: Gynergy Books, 102. Samman, Ghada. Beirut Nightmares. Nancy Roberts. London: Quartet Books.

The Official B018 website available online at: www.b018.comKhoury, 62. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. U.S.A.: Harvard University Press, 453.

Beirut '75 by Ghada al-Samman: An Autobiographical Interpretation “All ye who enter here, abandon all hope!” “Beirut has ruined me, that’s all!” “That’s not true,” he replied, “You women all accuse Beirut of ruining you when the truth of the matter is that the seeds of corruption were already deep inside you. All Beirut did was to give them a place to thrive and become visible. It’s given them a climate where they can grow.” “She wondered to herself– if they had allowed my body to experience wholesome, sound relationships in Damascus – would I have lost my way to this extent?” In Beirut ‘75, Ghada al-Samman shockingly depicts the tragic lives of fictitious characters who find themselves in Beirut, Lebanon prior to the outbreak of the war. Heralded by many critics as being a work that prophesied the Lebanese civil war, Beirut ‘75 is instead a work that expresses the existential and political views of its author and not the complete reality of the socio-political situation at that critical moment in Lebanese history. Even though Ghada al-Samman argues that the work is not autobiographical and that she does not profess any particular political stance, the work is permeated with her political views and her own personal life experience. The city of Beirut, torn between the East and the West, can even be viewed as a metaphor for the author herself. In his book, Ghada al-Samman Without Wings, Ghali Shoukry states that a literary work should not be studied in the context of the author’s life even though the author’s autobiography is one of the vital elements in the creation of the artwork.

Once the work has been created, Shoukry contends, the author’s life should remain distant from an analysis of the work itself. While I agree in theory with Shoukry’s position, I believe that since al-Samman has intentionally revealed so much about herself and about Beirut ‘75 in her personal and carefully documented interviews, an autobiographical approach to this work is justified and, at the very least, enlightening. In the first part of this study, I present a summary of relevant autobiographical details on Ghada al-Samman. In the second part, I show how these details relate specifically to Beirut ‘75.

Ghada al-Samman is a successful Arab novelist, journalist, and publisher. She is considered to be one of the most prolific woman writers in Arabic today. Al-Samman is a fiercely independent thinker who refuses to compromise her beliefs even under the most trying circumstances. Although she is a staunch promoter of women’s rights and focuses on gender issues, nevertheless she refuses to be labeled a “feminist author.” She argues, and rightly so, that writing is a constant pursuit after that “golden bird called creativity” and that “there is only one alphabet which is neither masculine nor feminine.” She firmly believes that creativity has no gender. Nor do the issues that plague the Arab countries whether they be social, political, economic, religious or otherwise. “It is a biological coincidence that I was born a female,” she says, for “I am a mere writer who happens to be a woman. And I cannot write to the tune of a boiling pot.” She demands to be read as an Arab author regardless of her gender: I labor just like any other man, and I am capable of supporting myself and my child just like any other citizen.

I am merely another Arab citizen who has the right and the obligation to do what he does best. It never occurred to me to give up writing after my marriage. Have you seen a man who submitted his resignation from work because he got married? If it were inevitable that you should view my status as an Arab female, all I can say is that my success is a victory for the Arab working woman, a confirmation of her existence. As a revolutionary power.

A force of positive reform. Al-Samman totally dismisses the argument that part of her mystery and appeal is the fact that her stories are mostly about love, sex, marriage, scandalous relationships, honor, war and Arab nationalism. All are hot and intriguing topics to most Arab readers especially when written by a young, independent, adventurous, upper middle class Arab woman with a charming personality and an exquisite style. Her personal interviews reveal an almost mysterious personality who deliberately defies the traditional role of a domesticated, married Arab woman and mother. Instead, she enjoys a successful career, is independently wealthy, and argues that a real writer need not live poor and be deprived of expensive material things. Al-Samman says, “I do not think that it is the duty of the writer to be poor as was customary during the Middle Ages.

Money means freedom, traveling, beautiful books. And I am not ashamed of my love for music, books and traveling.” In addition, al-Samman conspicuously admits her belief in reincarnation and asserts her passion to travel at night, to own more than one luxurious, elegantly furnished home, to live in a palace, to drive fast sport cars, to eat in fancy restaurants and to rent hotel rooms to write without disturbances. She constantly travels alone to European capitals and also declares that she loves the open road, the sea, the sun, and she hates winter and rain.

She enjoys swimming in the ocean, reads constantly in English, loves Lebanon with its majestic nature and mythical weather, and her favorite bird is the owl which she considers a good omen. All these characteristics add charm and heighten interest and curiosity in such an amazing woman. Without a doubt, Ghada al-Samman stands out as one of the most influential, popular, yet controversial, female writers in the Arab world today. Al-Samman was born in Damascus, Syria, in 1942. She has no vivid recollection of her mother who died when the author was a young child. She was raised by her father and grandmother, although it was her father who played the most critical role in her upbringing: My father occupied my childhood.My father and his friends.I did not play a lot in my childhood.

My relationship with the world of adults was always stronger than my relationships with my. I don’t clearly recall my social childhood. We lived in a small house.

My father.worked constantly and wrote.day and night.He tried to train me on asceticism and will power.we would walk at dawnfor four hours sometimes.With my father, I discovered the meaning of autumn in Damascus. I learned to love nature. He was poor but honest.My grandmother was an illiterate seamstress who raised me.

She was a hard working woman who labored for years to educate her orphaned children and support them while they prepared for their doctoral studies in Paris. Al-Samman also describes her father as a self-made, strong willed, and self disciplined man who never got accustomed to the bourgeois life even after he had climbed the social ladder through his education and hard work.

Ahmad al-Samman was an educator, a university professor, Dean of the Faculty of Law at Damascus University, and later, the Minister of Education in Syria. Having been brought up by such a dedicated, but serious man, and in such an intellectual and formal atmosphere, not withstanding the “atmosphere of fear, anxiety. And the horrifying uncertainty.of the world of the consecutive military coups d’etat in Syria.al-Samman became aware of all this long before she discovered her body.” Al-Samaan feels that she missed out on the basic element of being a child. She did not really have a normal childhood, and, she longs to be a child and to relive those lost moments which she tries to capture when playing with her own only son, Hazim.

Although al-Samman was educated in Syria, Beirut, and London, she admits that she owes a lot of her determination, fighting spirit, and rich literary and musical background to her father’s constant tutoring and guidance. He encouraged her to devour volumes of Medieval Arabic literature and criticism and to memorize the Holy Qur’an at an early age. Ghada al-Samman was a wild child and a rebel. She tells us that she heard, for the first time, stories about “sexintercourse.and virginity” from a young, fourteen-year-old peasant girl. Al-Samman was in her teens at the time and professes to have been “a hot adolescent girl.

Fierce, challenging and extremely daring.” She had an unquenchable curiosity. She states that during her early years in Syria, and because of the extremely conservative milieu and the very strict upbringing that she had to endure, the results of her rebellious attitude reached destructive proportions and cost her dearly. But the positive side of all this was that she became a strong willed woman and a survivalist, who learned to “worship” work and endure under any circumstances. I have been a working woman since I was a university student. In addition to my studies, I worked as a library employee, and an English teacher in a high school in Damascus.

I have known economic independence since my adolescent years and I have been working since, no matter what the circumstances. Al-Samman has always been a working woman who preferred to support herself financially. She believes that total social independence and personal freedom primarily stem from financial independence and self-reliance.

In Syria, Ghada al-Samman was thought to be “mad,” and later on, was considered to be a “ fallen woman” because she was different, she dared to think freely and independently, to challenge the status quo and to spread her wings of thought and “fly” beyond the traditional norms of a conservative society. From the beginning, she wanted to emphatically tell her story to the world.

Ghada al-Samman arrived in Lebanon in September of 1964 to study at the American University of Beirut. French was her first language, followed by Arabic, and then English. Ghada elaborates: We have to be true to our ideals and dare to follow our principles to the end. And be logical no matter what the price. This was my motto when I arrived to Beirut that evening in early 1964 to pursue my Master’s degree in English Literature (at the AUB) after I had secured for myself a job in a high school to earn my living.

My employment did not last for more than one month, for I quickly found out that working as a journalist suits my nature more. Between 1966 and 1969, al-Samman was working and traveling in Europe. This was an important experience for her as a writer and helped her shape new ideas as well as come to terms with many of her previous convictions. She soon realized that living away from an Arab homeland was not the answer.

Although she now “possesses her individual freedom,” she also discovered that “true belonging is a reality” and that her destiny was to return to an Arab country, any country, where she could feel home. However, she also realized that she was still in need of a relatively free political climate in order to be creative and productive because “freedom is impossible in a country that is not free.” It is no mere coincidence that Ghada al-Samman, like two other prominent Syrian Arab poets, her cousin, Nizar Qabbani, and Ali Ahmad Said (Adunis), chose Beirut as their residence instead of Damascus. Al-Samman says: I chose the sky of Beirut because the amount of (oxygen) in it was more abundant than in the other Arab skies. Today, I see in Beirut a screen that reflects the extent of the Arab’s honesty and their ability to overcome their dilemma with democracy and freedom. And I repeat that the flourishing of the buds of freedom in Beirut is a positive indicator for the possibility of growth of one Arab region. In addition to the outdated social traditions that classified her as an outcast and a “fallen woman,” another reason for al-Samman’s decision not to return to Syria could have been her problem with the Syrian authorities. She relates that in the summer of 1966, while in London, her father passed away in Damascus.

At the same time, she was sentenced to jail for three months because she held a university degree and had left the country without official permission from the authorities. Ghada al-Samman was dismissed from her job as a journalist with a Lebanese journal, and her entire family back home severed ties with her due to her rebellious spirit against outmoded customs and traditions, her way of life, and her burning desire for complete independence and freedom. This meant that the flow of any financial support from the family stopped since it obviously did not come without strings attached. This was a trying period for al-Samman, the woman and the author.

She suddenly found herself alone, facing, as she tells us, all the ancient and decayed social and political establishments: the family, society and the law that considered her message dangerous. Her call for freedom was viewed as corrupting to the youth, and her writings were a threat and a challenge. The author went through a process of self-evaluation and truly experienced exile, loneliness and poverty. She came to know the meaning of true friendship and self-reliance. It was during this time that she also discovered her ultimate disdain for the worthless and corrupt values of the bourgeois Damascene society that considered her to be a “ fallen woman.” In her mind, the judgment of such a backward and fake system could not have been farther from reality. The years from 1966 to 1969 were absolutely the most critical and formative years for her as both a human being and a writer.

These were the years that made her what she is now: “everything that I learned, I learned during these years of personal strife” She also had the opportunity to live and experience the life of the lower social classes which her previous upper middle class upbringing did not afford. “She even tried drugs (LSD).” As for her prison sentence, she finally, and with the help of a Syrian lawyer friend, was able to obtain a pardon from the Syrian president, in the early seventies. Al-Samman was obsessed with dreams and nightmares, particularly in her two novels, Beirut ‘75 and The Nightmares of Beirut.

Some of the most persistant dreams that al-Samman herself experienced are those of “Flying.the search for shelter, the feeling of being lost amid tens of similar labyrinths and elevators that open their doors onto hollow spaces.” Such dreams constantly haunt the author until today. It is evident that al-Samman’s self-imposed exile from her homeland in order to avoid a prison sentence has left a permanent and damaging scar on her psyche. She tells Ghali Shoukry about “an endless amount of dreams all about returning to my home in Damascus, at Najma Square, where I find my father waiting for me and then suddenly, they push me to the midst of the square in order to execute me, while I go on screaming in agony: “Why did I return?” In fact, al-Samaan never returned to Syria. She remained in exile in Lebanon, married a Lebanese and became a Lebanese citizen. She lived in Beirut in 1975, and unlike thousands of Lebanese people who left Lebanon during the war, she made a conscious effort to remain in Beirut during the early years of the war and endure with those who either chose to stay or who had no option to leave. During the war, al-Samman personally waited in long lines to get fresh water, to fill her car with gas, and to buy a loaf of bread. She witnessed the explosions, the destruction, and the death of tens of innocent people.

She even tells how she trained to use a machine gun for self protection. Al-Samman committed her career to defending the social and political causes of women and the working class. According to al-Samman, sexual liberation must go hand in hand with economic and political liberation. She says: It is not a secret that I have come to believe that the sexual revolution.is an inseparable part of the Arab individual’s revolution to snatch the rest of his freedoms. Economical, political and the freedom of speech, of writing and thinking. There is no other salvation save the struggle against all our various concepts including our sexual concepts and the struggle against the superficial bourgeois concept of freedom. Pornography, in my opinion, is a misleading representation of a just revolution where the individual immerses himself in a sexual act in order to escape the struggle on another front.

Al-Samman’s job as a journalist in Lebanon demanded that she spend time visiting, investigating, and living in poor villages, prison cells, mental asylums and refugee camps. As an investigative reporter, she wrote articles in some of the most widely read magazines that were shocking to the Arab press especially when written by a woman. She combined courage with a captivating style that is simple and expressive.

Even before she wrote her first novel, she was known as a journalist and a short story writer. However, what really put her in the spotlight was a successive combination of factors that included her undeniable talent, her original bourgeois status from a prominent Syrian family, the controversial topics she addressed as a female writer, and her liberal lifestyle and constant travels. In addition, she devoted much time to the media through consecutive interviews (more than two interviews per month) in order to reach every reader throughout the Arab world. Al-Samman’s relationship with the media is not new. From her early beginnings, she understood the critical importance of the press and was able to maximize its impact. Ghada al-Samman depended primarily on the Lebanese press as a medium to launch her articles and books, not just in Lebanon, but throughout the Arab speaking world. Beirut, being the most liberal of all Arab capitals, had a press that was the most independent, tolerant, mildly censored, and technologically advanced.

In addition, the press in Beirut had a wide circulation and distribution across the Arab world. Ilham Ghali has studied the relationship between al-Samman and the media and has shown that while the local press in the Gulf countries and in Syria rarely published interviews with al-Samman, nevertheless their readers had access through the Lebanese press to all such interviews. According to Ghali, fifty percent of al-Samman’s interviews were primarily conducted and published in Lebanon in comparison to only six percent that were published in the author’s native country of Syria. Another important observation that Ghali makes is that the “war regions” (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt) accept and analyze the “war literature of Ghada al-Samman,” while the “oil regions” (the Gulf States) enjoyed reading this literature which is permeated with romance, sexuality, love, and explicit relationships between men and women.

Such topics attracted the Gulf reader who lived in a much more conservative society where such topics were still taboo. Al-Samman remains one of the very few authors, Arab or otherwise, who collected and published her own interviews, letters and reflections on various subjects in a series of fourteen volumes, and interestingly, entitled the series, The Incomplete Works, assigning individual titles to every book depending on its content. The unusual aspect of some of these interviews and confessions is the fact that many of them lack the spontaneity that accompanies an ad hoc oral interview.

In many instances, al-Samman accepted written questions from journalists or critics, and took the time to answer them in a detailed and premeditated way, leading the reader to know what she really wanted to reveal. This approach afforded her the freedom and flexibility to digress into subjects she wanted to expose and comment on, while simultaneously allowing her to avoid details that she preferred to keep unanswered. On the whole, her answers, almost in the form of short essays, expose her driving tendency to be read, and also bespeak of a conscious, smart, and calculated attempt on her part to supply a significant amount of biographical information that could easily be utilized by a critic, historian, or academic researcher. In essence, al-Samman, as a writer, has taken extreme care to draw her own image of herself while she is still alive, not wanting to leave anything for chance. She does not want to be interpreted by critics posthumously.

She cares much about her image, her opinions, and her character and desires to be viewed through her own personal looking glass. She wants to avoid being misrepresented, for she says, “I have discovered that most of my conversations with the press have been subject to omissions or changes necessitated by editorial cuts. Personal views or.other reasons. Even the questions were edited sometimes.” This method of premeditated responses to various questions on her personal life and on her social, political, and literary views should be categorized as selective self-revelation.

Most of the critics who wrote about her derived their biographical information from her self-revealed story and quoted her as the main source. Consequently, an autobiographical interpretation of Beirut ‘75 is not complete without viewing the text in the broader context of The Incomplete Works. In The Incomplete Works, al-Samman reconstructs the story of her childhood and adulthood and presents it to the reader as she recalls it or wants it to be remembered. Although all the interviews contained in The Incomplete Works had previously been published in various journals, al-Samman argues that republishing them in a book dispelled her fear of losing them, especially after a shell had landed on her house in Beirut at the onset of the war in Lebanon and had almost burned her entire library. Another important feature of these interviews is that some of them did not even take place. She classifies them under the subtitle, “Conversations That Did Not Happen,” and she cites as a prime example the published dialogue she never had with the prominent Palestinian author, the late Ghassan Kanafani: He requested an oral interview.

I refused and insisted that it should be written and I asked for the interview to be delayed a few weeks as I was busy then with my novel - Falling to the Summit - the most famous Arabic novel which is yet to be published. So what did Ghassan do? He went on and wrote the questions and wrote the answers and brought the dialogue to me saying: I know your thoughts, and I know your style, and so, this is our dialogue.I read the dialogue, and I was surprised that he wrote the answers for me, and I approved its publication. An obvious, but very admirable, characteristic that underlies her published interviews is her warm, supportive and praising attitude towards her fellow authors, women and men alike.

She always finds something positive to say about them, constantly comes to their defense, and refuses to take credit for her success at their expense. This really highlights al-Samman as an honest human being and writer who is confident of her talent and who remained above petty attacks. As for the critics’ evaluations of her works, she writes: The critics are divided in their views of my works.There are a lot of attacks, and there is a lot of contentment.and there is the I (in the middle) continuing my path without bitterness. No matter how fierce the attacks, I will not feel bitter.when I think of some geniuses who died and no critic had paid any attention to their talent, I feel lucky because my readers and I have been contemporaries.

I feel like a lucky writer because I have found a reader even if he cursed me. When I remember that Mozart went to his grave alone and nobody walked in his funeral, and that his tomb in Vienna is unknown, I feel that the Arab Nation is not as ungrateful as some claim. Beirut ‘75, written between October 9th and November 22, 1974, is Ghada al-Samman’s first attempt at writing a novel. Its setting covers a period of less than four months and is a story of intrigue, suspense and controversy. As I read it for the first time, it aroused in me feelings of joy, anger, sympathy and frustration. It also awakened memories of happy, yet sad days when I was in Beirut in ‘75 and ‘76. Many of the voices in this book are loud and clear save the voice of the main protagonist, Beirut, who casts her shadow over the whole climate of despair and who lends her name to the book and gives the characters a space to move, a reason to hope, and an opportunity to vent.

Beirut, presented in this book, is a temptress of epic proportions, a city of dreams and temptations, an Eldorado, an Eden, a Purgatory, and ultimately, a Hades for those wretched souls who populate the novel. As Samira Aghacy points out, for many women writers of this time, “the setting takes precedence over character and rises to the level of protagonist to become an active component of the action.” Anyone who knew Beirut in 1975 can relate to this book and can smell the sea and embrace the mood of the characters. Beirut was the enchantress, the symbol of forbidden fruit. Beirut was the city that welcomed and embraced all its visitors and newcomers despite their sins and shortcomings. This unconditional warmth of hospitality, al-Samman comments, is one of the characteristics of either the saint or the whore.

Such was Beirut, a mixture of both. Ghada appreciates in Beirut its magnificent sense of democracy and freedom because she could live there free of many social and legal bonds that burden the citizens in the rest of the Arab countries. In spite of her many reservations on Lebanese society, she admits that Lebanon is the “island of liberty” in the Arab world. Above all, Beirut is, perhaps metaphorically the alter ego of the author herself. Like Ghada al-Samman, Beirut is the story of an exotically beautiful young Arab woman who dares to shed her veil, to rebel, be different, wear make up, go to college, converse in English and French, wear provocative clothes, smoke in public, drive a sports car, sit on the beach, share ideas in the company of Arab intellectuals at a cafe on Hamra street, read a foreign novel, recite poetry, travel to European capitals and read Homer, Dante and Sartre in their original languages. However, neither al-Samman nor Beirut have forgotten their Arab roots and glorious heritage. They have both memorized the Holy Qur’an and the Arabian Nights.

Those who did not know Beirut in the seventies will remain unable to grasp the subtle socio-political and cultural hints underlying the flow of events in this unusually daring novel written in 1974. Al-Samman admits that it is indeed Lebanon’s location at the crossroads of civilization that makes it unique and susceptible to various influences and consequently qualifies it to play a special role as the oasis of freedom in the Middle East. In spite of this, al-Samman goes on to conclude in 1976 that “the hope is great that what Beirut has gone through is only the period of setting the stage for adopting an Arab identity which is her true belonging, the only inevitable destiny for the Lebanese Arab homeland.” It appears that al-Samman, like Beirut, has an identity crisis, torn between her Arabic heritage and her Western love of freedom and self-reliance.

Al-Samman is preoccupied with the dilemma of the Arab intellectual in reconciling the frustrating differences between a conservative, religious Arab background and the stream of Western intellectual, liberal, and secular influences invading the Arab world. On the subconscious level, al-Samman seems totally infatuated with Lebanon just as it is, while on the conscious level, she epitomizes the ultimate frustration and lack of understanding and sympathy displayed by many in sincerely coming to terms with Lebanon’s very existence and national, political and intellectual identity. Al-Samman’s personal outlook on Lebanon is also colored to a great degree by her study of existential writers such as Camus, Sartre, Kafka, and Khalil Hawi. Hanan Awwad confirms that al-Samman is “a strong believer in existentialism since, as is well known, this philosophical movement has spawned a variety of feminist movements in the West; not surprisingly, she has to a real extent been influenced by many of the writers who belong to this school.” Writing about al-Samman’s pre-1967 works, Awwad concludes: Al-Samman touches on love, death, cultural alienation, class consciousness, and even explores East-West cultural differences. Reading her books and short stories of this period, one becomes vividly aware of the depth and intensity of al-Samman’s frustration, of her ineradicably pessimistic outlook on life, which must in part be a legacy from her existentialist mentors in Europe. A sense of alienation, pessimism, and ultimate nihilism, which stems from al-Samman’s existential viewpoint, envelops the main characters in Beirut ‘75.

The protagonists (Yasmeena, Farah, Ta’aan, Abu’l-Malla, and Abu Mustafa) feel trapped, alone, and disconnected from each other and from society. Each character’s personal struggle sheds light on some negative aspect of Lebanese society as seen by al-Samaan in 1974. Each character is exploited in some way, either sexually, politically or economically. Although these underlying ills of Lebanese society existed at the time, I submit that al-Samman shows a journalistic view of Beirut skewed by her own personal perception of reality rather than a complete and more accurate multidimensional view of the society at that time. Al-Samman succeeds in provoking the reader, but erroneously omits certain facts, which results in a novel that becomes a sensationalistic piece of journalism.

In addition, al-Samman fails to successfully convey the depth of existential crisis that each of her characters endures, consequently resulting in characters that remain shallow and who do not convince the reader that their tragic demise is warranted. This position appears to be further supported by Awwad who claims that “al-Samman’s personal feelings and emotions interfere with her intellectual grasp of important Arab issues, thus causing her to propound generalizations of dubious value and create a set of fairly nondescript characters.” The first chapter of the novel repeatedly foreshadows the characters’ impending doom. According to al-Samman, her characters were doomed because they were trapped in a “pond of violence,” otherwise known as “Beirut.” Instead of finding hope and redemption there, they each become entangled in the socio-political issues of Beirut in 1975. From al-Samman’s political and existential view, Beirut is viewed as a “fallen city,” and consequently, not only its citizens but anyone who enters it is doomed to fail. For al-Samman, Beirut is Dante’s hell, a place for lost souls with no hope of salvation. Throughout the novel, the characters seem pathetic in their limited grasp of reality and in their inability to alter their catastrophic destiny.

They seek a childlike and immediate fix to their problems. They do not grow, mature or ripen with experience. Rather, they succumb to their unyielding desires and destructive instincts.

Their mad search for an immediate solution to their poverty, coupled with their uncontrollable passion for money and fame, prove to be a sure formula for disaster. Rather than accept personal responsibility for their actions, they choose instead to blame Beirut.