Masculine Identity in the Fiction of the Arab East since 1967 9780815650898, 9780815632375

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MASCULINE IDENTITY in the Fiction of the Arab East since 1967

G e n de r , C u lt u r e , a n d P ol i t ic s i n t h e M i ddl e E a s t Miriam Cooke, Suad Joseph, and Simona Sharoni, Series Editors

O t h e r t i t l e s i n G e n de r , C u lt u r e , a n d P ol i t ic s i n t h e M i ddl e E a s t

Arab Women’s Lives Retold: Exploring Identity Through Writing N awa r A l -H a s s a n G ol l e y, ed.

The Dance of the Rose and the Nightingale N e s ta R a m a z a n i

Intersections: Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women’s Novels L i s a S u h a i r M ajaj, Pau l a W. S u n de r m a n, and T h e r e s e S a l i ba, eds.

Living Palestine: Family Survival, Resistance, and Mobility under Occupation L i s a Ta r a k i, ed.

Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural History Nasrin R ahimieh

No Shame for the Sun: Lives of Professional Pakistani Women Shahla Haeri

“Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo E ly s e S e m e r dj i a n

Pioneers or Pawns? Women Health Workers and the Politics of Development in Yemen M a r i n a de R e g t

Representing the Unpresentable: Historical Images of National Reform from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic of Iran N e g a r Mo t ta h e de h

Resistance, Repression, and Gender Politics in Occupied Palestine and Jordan Fr ances S. Hasso

MASCULINE

IDENTITY Fiction of the Arab East since 1967 in the

Samira Aghacy With a Foreword by Evelyne Accad

Sy r acuse U n i v er si t y Pr e s s

Copyright © 2009 by Syracuse University Press Syracuse, New York 13244-5290 All Rights Reserved First Edition 2009 09 10 11 12 13 14

6 5 4 3 2 1

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit our Web site at SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu. ISBN: 978-0-8156-3237-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aghacy, Samira. Masculine identity in the fiction of the Arab East since 1967 / Samira Aghacy ; with a foreword by Evelyne Accad. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Gender, culture, and politics in the Middle East) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8156-3237-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Arabic fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Masculinity in literature. 3. War in literature. 4. Patriarchy in literature.

I. Title.

PJ7572.M37A34 2009 892.7'3093521—dc22 Manufactured in the United States of America

2009039767

For Mama, who followed the progress of the book with love, excitement, pride, and a great deal of patience, but did not live to see it in print. For her I dedicate this book and tell her that I am eternally grateful for all the precious gifts she has given me.

S a m i r a Agh ac y is professor of English and comparative literature at the Lebanese American University in Beirut. She is the author of several articles and book chapters on contemporary Lebanese fiction.

Contents For e wor d, Evelyne Accad Ac k now l e d gm e n t s

Introduction

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1. Oedipus King: Tortured Masculinity | 19 2. The Politics of Masculinity: Goal-(Dis)Oriented Masculinity 3. Dictator as Patriarch: The State and the (Dys)Functional Male 4. Oedipus Deposed: The Man’s Sex(uality) | 130 Afterword R e f e r e nc e s I n de x

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Foreword Ev ely n e Acca d

Samira Aghacy is a serious and thorough scholar as well as a highly competent academic administrator, a blend one does not often find in our field, especially in the extremely difficult conditions of war that have plagued Lebanon in these last decades. Under harsh conditions, she was able not only to lead the Lebanese American University of Beirut (as chairperson of the Humanities Division and as dean of the School of Arts and Sciences since 2003) with innovative ideas and a profound sense of justice and commitment, but to produce research of extreme importance, such as this latest book on masculinities in the Arab world, as well as creative poetic collections, A Spike Unleashed (Al Kamel, 1994) and Silence Is Her Voice (forthcoming). She is also the author of many illuminating articles on novelists writing in Arabic, thus able to make them better known to the Western public who, without her, would remain unaware of their important contribution to world literature. She has been active in attending and presenting papers at major conferences in the field as well as editing several issues of Al-Raida, the journal published by the Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab world. In addition to all these time-consuming tasks, Aghacy has managed to be an inspiring professor who has taught several of these topics to her students at the Lebanese American University. In this critical analysis of masculine identity in the Arab East, Samira Aghacy has used feminist theories in all of their complexities as well as an approach inspired by the new field of men’s studies. She was able to show that men, in the Arab world, are a product of their geohistorical political context, thus avoiding essentializing their role within Arab societies and more clearly showing that both men and women suffer under patriarchal domination and oppression. ix

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This is a timely and original work that will not go unnoticed. It finally deals with a question not often talked about in both Eastern and Western criticism, most particularly in Arab scholarship, namely the delicate topic of Arab masculinity; it is therefore a much needed approach. The fact that Aghacy is fluent in both Arabic and English has allowed her to produce a work of criticism no one else could have tackled as successfully. She deals with a large number of Arabic novels, many of which have not yet been translated into other languages despite their importance. It is thus an invaluable tool for anyone working in modern Arabic literature, gender studies, postcolonial literature, sexuality and gender in literature, gender and violence in the Middle East, literature and politics, war literatures, and comparative studies and literature. The regions of the Middle East covered, namely Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq, have been plagued by numerous wars and conflicts affecting the populations of these countries. While most gender studies have concentrated on women’s roles in these contexts, Aghacy tackles men’s issues and the disastrous effects of conflicts on them as well, thus demystifying the notion of their superiority and importance, showing their vulnerability and all the anxieties and problems raised by these conflicts and by the expectations placed on them. Some of the most interesting aspects of this work are how many of the novels deal with male hysteria and paranoia when the male characters are deprived of their authority; men tend to turn their frustrations and anger on women, especially their wives, the easy victims of these situations. Masculinity can also be analyzed as defense of war, resistance, men ready to die for their country while despising women for their passivity and exhibiting real misogynistic feelings; they bond with other male characters while seeming to function in heterosexual relationships. The character of the fida’i (the martyr or the one who gives his life so others may live) is one very much valued in many of these novels. For these men, women are seen as mothers symbolizing the land’s fecundity. Masculinity takes on multiple forms and holds many ambiguities. Masculinity can be fragile and vulnerable, while violent forms of masculinity generated by war can produce subordinate masculinities similar to feminine positions in the patriarchal landscape. It is clear that many men are also victims of war and that the concept of masculinity is a highly complex one. This is one among many of Aghacy’s compelling analysis and argument. It raises crucial issues for today’s world and literary criticism.

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This is a pioneering work in a domain that will no doubt be raised again and written about in the future. Aghacy has been well inspired to deal with it at this time as it is very much needed and originally thought out. Her sensitive, creative, at times poetic, and above all brilliant analysis of masculinities in the literature of the Middle East raises crucial questions that need to be addressed at this time when the Arab world is facing such traumas. It is a thought-provoking, awareness-raising book that will no doubt have a great impact on the field of literary criticism, as well as gender and war studies. Evelyne Accad Urbana, Illinois June 2009

Acknowledgments The book is the outcome of a long period of engagement with gender issues in Arabic literature where I received considerable encouragement from colleagues, friends, students, and also from Lebanese writers. Teaching a course titled “Masculine Identity in Modern Arab Literature of the Near East” in the comparative literature program at the Lebanese American University was a rewarding experience. It has helped focus my research through the exciting and challenging discussions that I had with my students. I would particularly like to acknowledge all the help and support of the Lebanese American University in providing the cultural and academic atmosphere, and the facilities for research and personal development. I wish to extend special thanks and appreciation to the staff at the University Library in Beirut and Byblos who provided material for the work. I wish to thank Mrs. Aida Naaman, Aida Hajjar, Sawsan Habre, Kamal Jaroudy, and Saeed Kreidiyeh whose assistance has been unbounded. The book would not have been possible without them. I am deeply indebted to Maya Aghasi for reading the manuscript and for exceptionally astute and insightful comments that have enriched this project in many ways. I would also like to thank Hassan Daoud, Rashid al-Daif, and Rasha Al-Amir for valuable and invigorating discussions of their fictional works and of the Arabic novel in general. Special thanks go to a special friend, Professor Nabeel Matar, for coming to my aid whenever I needed support and good advice. Heartfelt thanks go to Hanan Sbeity, my research assistant, for her meticulous work on the footnotes and bibliography. The book would not have been completed without her thoroughness and perseverance. Special thanks go to Laila Ghorayeb for technical assistance, computer rescues, and above all, moral support. Last but not least, I would like to express deep gratitude to Dr. Abdallah Sfeir, Lebanese American University provost, whose encouragement and support have been boundless at all levels. xiii

MASCULINE IDENTITY in the Fiction of the Arab East since 1967

Introduction

While gender studies in the Middle East have focused primarily on the situation of women, the presentation of men as gendered subjects has fallen behind and has remained an unexplored field of inquiry. Works on masculinity are scarce and limited to a handful of studies: Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature (1997) is an examination of early Abbassid, Mamluk, Persian, Andalusian, and other Islamic male homoerotic relations in literature; Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History and Literature (1997) offers a variety of general historical, anthropological, and literary studies focused on Islamic culture and literature; Imagined Masculinities (2000) is a collection of essays on general and hybrid topics related to male identity and culture in the modern Middle East; and Desiring Arabs (2007) is an intellectual history of the representation of sexual desires in the Arab world where the last two chapters focus on a variety of novels predominantly Egyptian. The rhetoric of masculinity and femininity has long been reified in various Arab cultural and literary productions and seen in binary opposition where biological differences are fi xed, natural, absolute, and unequivocal, based upon congenital ineluctability. Unlike woman who is anchored in biology, man transcends his physiological reality and is defined in terms of a universalist abstraction. Taking my cue from R. W. Connell, I argue that patriarchal masculinity is a form of “male power” (1995, 77) that is circumscribed in institutions and social mores. This power naturalizes hierarchy and domination over women and subordinate men, taking a variety of forms as it intersects with various family, class, religious, and political systems. This study devoted to the fiction of the Arab East (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Iraq) will be read in the context of a specific set of anxieties about masculinity, gender role, and sexuality in Arab societies in the tumultuous years 1

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leading to the 1967 naksa and until the present, making a study of male representation especially topical and compelling. The post–1967 era has been punctuated with wars: the 1970 Black September War in Jordan, the 1973 Arab–Israeli war, the Civil War in Lebanon, the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the first and second Palestinian intifadas, and the first and second Gulf wars. The continuous rebuffs and debacles in the area caused many men a daunting sense of impotence and ineffectiveness, demystifying an essentialized masculinity generally viewed as firm and stable.1 The study will show gender not within strict sex role theory that treats masculinity as a structure within a fi xed biological mold, but rather as a complex phenomenon, a mercurial and overflowing category fraught with ambivalence and equivocation and operating within particular historical settings and discursive formations (Brittan 1989, 36). Nevertheless, this focus on masculinity should not be seen as a regression and an attempt to exclude women and reestablish an antiquated masculine blueprint. Rather the aim is to focus on the volatile nature of masculinity and its inextricability from femininity. To put it another way, femininity and masculinity will be dealt with as relational patterns that shift and change in accordance with the social, economic, and political transformations in the area. In line with feminist theories that reject a monolithic, historical, and mythic patriarch and call for greater complexity in the study of men, I focus on socially constructed gender and on patriarchal masculinity as a destructive and convoluted phenomenon that affects both men and women. I explore Eve Sedgwick’s view that masculinity sometimes has nothing to do with men (1995, 11–20) and that men are both perpetrators of a masculinity that attempts to dominate the world around it and victims of uniform patriarchal oppression. I examine Toril Moi’s notion that rejects the overly simplistic view of man that relies on an immutable patriarch who exists outside the ravages of time, and regards masculinity as a complex phenomenon charged with inconsistencies and incongruities

1. Hala Maksoud asserts that “in the last century the lives of the Arabs have been punctuated by wars. They have lived through different forms of wars and have experienced their traumatic aftermath, the dislocations, the pain, the killings, and the losses. They have learned to distinguish between various forms of war and their effects on society: wars of liberation, as in Algeria and Palestine; civil wars, as in Lebanon, the Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere; high technology wars, such as the Gulf War; guerilla wars; protracted wars; and others” (1996, 90).

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(1995, 64). I argue that there is no archetypal Arab man, but rather men in diverse socioeconomic and cultural configurations, and concur with Arab and third world feminists who maintain that gender studies in the area cannot and must not be isolated from the historical context where both men and women suffer under social and political oppression: The denunciation of men as the main enemy could easily go against the cultural grain in societies where both men and women are tightly enmeshed in familistic networks of mutual rights and obligations, where both sexes may be labouring under much harsher forms of economic and political oppression and where different possibilities exist for cross-gender coalitions” (Kandiyoti 1996, 15).

This work acknowledges its indebtedness to the academic discipline of men’s studies, defined by Michael Kimmel as an attempt “to treat masculinity not as the normative referent against which standards are assessed but as a problematic gender construct” (Kimmel 1987, 10). While acknowledging the historical and generally persistent oppression of women in Arab and Muslim societies, my aim in this study is to deconstruct the terms of essentialist sexual and biological differences between men and women, revealing masculinity as a dynamic process that is constantly shaped and reshaped within particular systems, frameworks, and discursive mechanisms. The argument that runs through the book questions the assumption that male identity is characterized by strong boundaries and reveals these boundaries to be porous and permeable. To use Kimmel’s words, “Manhood does not bubble up to consciousness from our biological makeup; it is created in culture. Manhood means different things at different times to different people” (Kimmel 2004, 182). This study attempts to focus attention on the rhetoric of masculine hegemony and its subversion as manifested in the texts under study, and the consequences of dealing with and flouting socially and culturally sanctioned norms about masculine power itself. Far from being a unified, comprehensive experience, patriarchal masculinity remains a fundamentally paradoxical and nonuniform phenomenon, both commanding and impotent, heroic and cowardly, central and marginal, combining “power and powerlessness, privilege and pain” (Kaufman 1994, 142). While acknowledging the differences among men, it is still appropriate to talk of men, in some instances, as a unitary group by reason of possessing the

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unmitigated privilege of belonging to the male sex. Even though both men and women are oppressed by social and political structures, there remains some difference in the manner and manifestation of the subjugation and suffering. While the book underlines the need to talk of historical masculinities constructed in particular settings and situations, it also speaks of patriarchal masculinity in the singular as an absolutist, essentialist category to accentuate the duplicitous effects, contradictions, and inconsistencies that continue to press on the subjective Arab male individual. In the book, I speak of a fluctuating authority within masculinity where men are dominant in one context but subordinate and powerless in other contexts, to fathers, family, and government. To use Homi Bhabha’s words, masculinity is a “prosthetic reality . . . an appendix or addition” rather than an inherent quality (1995, 57). Since masculinity “is not always ‘about [all] men’” (Sedgwick 1985, 12), the study obfuscates and interrogates the single and unproblematic model of male power in favor of more shifting and evanescent roles for men. I also contend with Judith Butler, who rejects the view that gender differences pertain to biological factors and locates instability at the base of masculine identities, arguing that it is related to social patterns that constitute ideals of femininity and masculinity and render certain performances or modes of behavior relevant and appropriate. In other words, gender differences are the result of effects of social practices and “impersonation” in the form of “bodily gestures, movements, and styles [that] constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self” (Butler 1999, xxviii). Under the aegis of patriarchy, men fashion themselves after masculine ideals sanctioned by a patriarchal society where transhistorical femininity and universal masculinity are replaced by performative masculinities and femininities that are produced through the repetitive staging of normative standards and cultural ideals. To put it in a different way, the gendered performances—how men understand themselves and socially act out manhood—are in accordance with socially constituted norms and patterns of masculinity and femininity making certain actions pertinent and others not. Consequently, masculinity emerges as a masquerade conceived and performed through the deeply entrenched medium of gender ideologies. Building upon men’s conscripted role within patriarchy, I will examine the extent to which patriarchal constructions of masculinity in Arab societies become constrictions, disrupting man’s quest for self-autonomy and creating contradictions

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for individual men. Instead of generating autonomy and self-government, patriarchy exposes the male individual to a strong sense of personal inadequacy, ineffectuality, and failure to measure up to phallocentric masculine ideals. In an article entitled “Women in the Discourse of Crisis,” Nasr Hamid AbuZeid maintains that the June 1967 setback “constitutes the beginning of the unraveling of all that was once believed to be constant and immutable” (2004, 60). War, which proved to be a catalyst for change, unsettled existing gender codes considerably and produced huge tensions and incongruities in the representations of femininity and masculinity. While bringing about a sense of hope and optimism, the Palestinian problem, which became the binding Arab cause, “the Arab problem par excellence” (Laroui 1976, 171), caused uncertainty and ennui but created an overpowering desire to affirm autonomous action through armed struggle, valorous deeds, and dauntless self-sacrifice.2 Nevertheless, the desire to resist, manifested in the rise of the Palestinian resistance movement, called for the unity of all Arab peoples who—disillusioned by their regimes and their reactionary politics—lent support to the people’s liberation movements. The word fida’i, which comes from fida’, meaning “sacrifice” in Arabic, is loaded with religious connotations. Having devoted his life to the sacred cause, the fida’i embraces the blessings of martyrdom. Accordingly, the fida’i is a paragon of idealized masculinity whose valiant and hallowed struggle against the enemy is such that he is regarded by many as a “prophet” (Haydar 1993, 38). In In Search of Walid Masoud (Al-bahth ‘an Walid Mas’oud, 1978) by the Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, the male protagonist’s lament reveals the consuming effect of the Palestinian debacle on the lives of Arabs and Palestinians: “Fift y years, fift y years of struggle, of hate . . . stubborn resistance. What other nation in history has ever known such a long and terrifying period of enmity and fighting? How could any Palestinian manage, in this bitter, arid, painful atmosphere to think, work, build, or write when he’s had to spend all his time resisting tyrants, tin-pot dictators, and oppressors every way he turns?” (2000, 61). This devastating “historical trauma,” conjoining the historical and the psychic in one symbiotic formulation, left indelible traces on the lives of many men who were powerless to resist the sweeping surge of history (Silverman 1992, 55). The protagonist in Jordanian writer Taysir Subul’s From Now Onwards (Anta 2. For the impact of the June defeat on Arabs, see Badawi 1972.

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munthu al-yawm, 1968) maintains that since the 1967 naksa, “no one has ever witnessed a whole people drown in sorrow like my people.” The whole nation was “transformed into one huge and wounded being” (1968, 59).3 The Nasser era (particularly the years leading to 1967) fostered the dream of a homogeneous and harmonious pan-Arab entity in militaristic and jingoistic defiance of a military Israeli state and of Western hegemony.4 After the 1967 setback, this bombastic and militant attitude was shaken but not erased. Since war is generally considered a quintessential male affair, a history of defeats in successive wars in the area destabilized men’s views of themselves and their central role in society. Nevertheless, official discourses continued to enforce an overriding nationalistic and militant rhetoric that naturalized the nation as heterosexual and homosocial, and consigned gender relations by resolutely demarcating and rigidifying them. Sedgwick’s term “homosocial” refers to “social bonds between persons of the same sex” (1985, 1), or male bonding that is defined in opposition to homosexuality, which is often forcibly homophobic (1985, 89), and based on misogynistic enactments and sublimated desires. In other words, homosocial bonding is a space wherein gender constructions are reified in moments where a deeply entrenched masculinity is shaken. Focusing on the importance of essentialist conceptions of gender in the discourse of the nation and legitimizing the secondary position of women within the national collectivity, Arab societies controlled by men collapsed the nation and woman’s body and insisted on the centrality of woman as a trope of the nation and symbol of the fecundity of the land despite the new mobility of women in Arab societies spurred by modernizing agendas of the postcolonial states and women’s role in the Palestinian resistance. To use Deniz Kandiyoti’s words, nationalism is “both a modern project that melts and transforms traditional attachments in favor of new identities and . . . a reaffirmation of authentic cultural values culled from the depths of a presumed communal past” (1991, 431). This amalgamation

3. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. 4. As Amy Zalman puts it, “The era of Arab socialism is often referred to as masculine, dominated by the image of the charismatic Nasser and his muscular rebuttals of Western intervention” (2003, 16). Tawfiq Al-Hakim describes the struggle before 1967 as a display of machismo rather than serious and meaningful action, for “the real intention was to reach the goal by bravado and not by any actual deed” (1985, 34). See also Ouzgane 1997, 1.

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of certainty and uncertainty, a past fi xity and a modern inconstancy, destabilized notions of manhood and brought about changes in gender relations as well as inducements to preserve and safeguard traditional gender differences. The fiction and poetry of the era both question and naturalize the role of woman as symbol. In response to her admirer’s poem, the character Samar in Sahar Khalifah’s The Courtyard Gate (Bab al-sahah, 1990) insists that she is a real woman, not just a symbol: “I am not the mother, I am not the land, and I am not the symbol. I am a human being. I eat, drink, dream, make mistakes, get frustrated, excluded, angry . . . I am not the symbol; I am a woman” (1990, 176). Within national discourse, woman is a trope of the nation, a refuge for men from humiliation, abasement, and emasculation and a sign of man’s castrating defeat and his debarment from the world of male adventurism and brave attainments. In the novel titled In Search of Walid Masoud, woman is a source of fitna possessing an active and insatiable sexuality that if unchecked would release chaos (Mernissi 1987, xxiv), not only within the domestic space but also in the public sphere, thus constituting a threat to the patriarchal social and political order that determines male/ female behavior. Simultaneously, woman is a sign of potential danger, combining pleasure as well as “terror and death between her thighs” (Jabra 2000, 20). Under political pressure, individual males pursue their oedipal quests and their heroic goals and the stance towards death is the ultimate truth, while the search for a false security in the arms of a woman attests to infirmity of purpose and deadly defeat. Contrary to woman’s metaphorical existence, the male relation to the nation is metonymic, and contiguous. This “horizontal comradeship” (Anderson 1983, 7) is the driving force that is going to liberate the land. Men are supposed to possess an unshakable commitment and a clear teleological vision and course of action that will grant them the badge of courage to regain the lost land. The novels under study possess an underlying political awareness revealing the centrality of political life in the fiction of the Arab East and the precedence of collective over private issues.5 Muhammad Siddiq notes the impulse to political commitment in the literature of the period and maintains that any “serious writer can ill afford to remain uninvolved and merely watch history march by

5. As Salma Khadra Jayyusi puts it, “For the writer to contemplate an orientation completely divorced from political life is to belie reality, to deny experience; for to engross oneself for too long in ‘normal’ everyday experiences is to betray one’s own life and one’s own people” (1992, 3).

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from his aesthetic ivory tower” (quoted in Zalman 2003, 53). The Syrian writer Nabil Suleiman views literature in the Arab world as “inseparable” from politics6 where many writers regard themselves as social and cultural guides for the general public (Cachia 1990, 18–19). Halim Barakat maintains that a “writer could not be part of Arab society and yet not concern himself with change. To be oblivious to tyranny, injustice, poverty, deprivation, victimization, repression, is insensitively improper . . . a sort of engagement in irrelevancies” (1975, 126–27). While some novels can be read as uncomplicated and unalloyed instruments of struggle, other novels reveal more subtly and less explicitly the permeating role of politics in the daily lives of individuals and the way gender roles are negotiated.7 The fiction written over the past forty years or so uncovers a strong sense of group identity where both men and women are entangled in political problems and committed to prevalent causes. Arab writers (both male and female) possess a trenchant political consciousness and a deep interest in what is going on around them so much so that one cannot separate the personal and mental processes of men from the social, political, and ideological structures. Accordingly, the majority of these texts are written in a realistic mode where the authorial narrator is the source of all knowledge, the “sperm” that fertilizes society. While nonliterary writings focus on similar political and social issues, literature is unique in the sense that it reflects the specificity of quotidian experience, subjective life, and personal and exclusively singular and atypical forms of living.8 Furthermore, in a context of general oppression and the absence of freedoms, literature can resist censorship through its metaphorical orientation and allegorical gestures where the authoritative discourse is challenged, confronted and deconstructed through allusion, lacuna, irony, wit, slapstick, pun, equivocation, and other strategies.9 It is through the novel’s open-ended texts and general flexibility that the relentless inexorability of authoritative discourse can be dismantled. While women’s random and sudden procurement of freedom and power is attributed by many to a purely Western imposition, “like serpents in the Garden of

6. Suleiman quoted in Meyer 2001, 98. See also al-Baridi 1997, 22. 7. See Abu-Matar 1980, 206. 8. Raymond Williams maintains that literature is concerned with “structures of feeling,” a concern with “meanings and values as they are actually lived and felt” (1977, 132–34). 9. For the function of literature in the Arab world, see Massad 2007, 272.

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Eden” (Malti-Douglas 1991, 6), these changes can also be attributed to the painful social, political, and military transformations in the area. Kumari Jayawardena maintains that “feminism was not imposed on the Third World by the West, but rather that historical circumstances produced important material and ideological changes that affected women” (1986, 2). This was a time when bodies, sexualities, and gender identities were not insusceptible to the influences of the complex and sporadic configurations of modernity, the abortive wars in the area, and the baneful effects of dictatorial regimes. The Arab individual had to contend with the postcolonial experience of political oppression and autocratic regimes with highly centralized power and modern weaponry that monopolized all political activity, condemned pluralism and independent opinion, sanctioned absolutist ideologies, relied heavily on mechanisms of state coercion, and affirmed compulsory heterosexuality and fraternity as inseparable from national identity. The “male state” referred to by Mary Daly as the “sado/state” (1990, 190–91) represents male aggression and destructiveness. This aggressive patrilineal state flourishes under the shadow of oppressive measures, reactionary politics, and unjust rule, simultaneously paralyzing the country and turning the people into compliant instruments of oppression and exploitation. This reductionist view of the state is challenged by Connell, who views it as “patriarchal” rather than “male” since the power of the state apparatus is premised not only on the exclusion of the “other,” females, but particularly males, on whose erasure the construction of its institutional patriarchal power depended (1990, 516). In his long short story “A Journey into an Unexplored Transient Death” (“Rihlah fi Majahel Mawten ‘Aber”), Syrian writer Saadalla Wannus sums up life under a dictatorial regime with a billboard on the Syrian/Lebanese border with the following message: “No flies will enter the closed mouth” (1997, 136). In many of these texts, there is a clear correlation between authoritarianism, censorship, repression, and patriarchal sexuality that privilege state agents and deny masculinity to the subaltern by using brute force against him, turning him into a submissive and servile subject. Paradoxically, this is the same authoritarian state that accorded women the right to education, work, and political rights. Under the pressure of the patriarchal state, man’s oedipal quest is disrupted and the male psyche is impaired, producing marginal men devoid of heroic traits and unable to impress their stamp upon a baffling and incomprehensible world. The authoritarian state is marked by an exaggerated and amplified power

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represented by the ruthless state apparatus, merciless tyranny, callous oppression, pervasive corruption, and military violence against an Arab individual who is subdued and pacified. All in all, one could say that men found themselves in a liminal position, a state of being caught between two worlds: a world of contestation and defiance and of imposed idleness and torpor. In addition to the representation of masculinity and individualism through themes that link the novels together, the study also aims to underscore differences related to geopolitical events in the area. In an interesting article entitled “The Arabic Novel: A Single Tradition?” Hilary Kilpatrick maintains that the Arabic novel is “written in one language, and [has] a shared cultural heritage and recent historical experience common to the whole area [that] provide[s] novelists in different countries with similar material. In this respect the Arabic novel is distinct in its subject matter from the African or German novel, for instance” (1974, 93). Despite the common language and the unifying call of the Palestinian problem, my study also takes into account regional differences, local specificities (Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, Iraqi), and geopolitical events, distinguished from but not separate from a wider Arab identity.10 Despite the emphasis on a homogeneous region with common problems, literary works cannot be considered identical and unitary. After 1967, there was a gradual shift to local issues and the specificities of each country in the area. According to Roger Allen, the concept of Arab unity after 1967 was an actuality only in moments of crisis, while “regionalism and localism were now to an increasing extent the preferred models” (2001, 209). The tendency to lump the region together can lead to sweeping generalizations and overlooks the subtleties and nuances that distinguish one country from another and the heterogeneous and ideologically diverse nature of these societies. One pertinent example is an article by Nedal M. Al-Mousa, who bases her argument on a handful of novels (five, to be specific) out of a wide range of fiction published in the Arab world, to come to the conclusion that the “distinct nature of the Arabic Novel . . . is best exemplified in what might be called the Arabic bildungsroman” (1993, 223). While the literature of the Arab East (particularly Palestinian and Jordanian literature) focuses predominantly 10. See Mohja Kahf’s distinction between Syrian literature and other literatures in the Middle East (Palestinian, Lebanese, Egyptian) (2001, 226).

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on the common Arab cause represented by the Palestinian problem, Syrian and Iraqi literature includes a large number of novels that reveal the disastrous effect of authoritarian regimes on individuals and groups, while Lebanese literature focuses on the impact of the civil war that lasted for fifteen years. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s view of the need to address the specific experiences of individual Arab and Muslim women in over twenty countries in the area clearly applies to men.11 In writing about the area, one has to keep in mind homogeneity and uniformity, diversity and multiformity, plurality and differentiation, and the ineluctability of living in an explosive region in a state of continuous instability and unrest. In this study, I focus on male-centered novels by both men and women writers to avoid a separatist scholarship that falls into the trap of essentialism and to show how representations of men and maleness in the fiction of the Near East are arbitrated and circulated, produced and reinvented. The incorporation of women writers aims at affirming men’s and women’s common oppression and their collective entanglement in social, national, and political issues. In this context, I challenge essentialist views of Arab women’s writing as radically different from Arab men. Miriam Cooke claims that only Lebanese “feminine literature documents details that seem too trivial and personal to note” (1996, 27). Cooke regards the subjects tackled by women as separate and differentiated and views men and women in oppositional terms: “Men wrote of strategy, ideology and violence. The Beirut Decentrists, regardless of confession and political persuasion, wrote of the dailiness of war. The men wrote of existential Angst; these women of abandoned loneliness. The men wrote defiantly of revolution; these women angrily against emigration” (1996, 3). Lebanese war fiction written by men is loaded with examples of male writers writing about the dailiness of war and the small details of the domestic space.12 Simultaneously, Cooke overlooks many works by women writers who emphasize ideology and public issues and who do not see the individual as separate from his environment. These novels tend to deemphasize the personal

11. It is “problematical to speak of a vision of women shared by Arab and Muslim societies (i.e., over twenty different countries) without addressing the particular historical, material, and ideological power structures that construct such images” (Mohanty 1991, 61). 12. See, for instance, Daoud 1983 and Al-Da‘if 1989.

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and highlight more explicitly women’s immersion in social and political issues, revealing that women are no less patriotic than men and no less committed to public issues. Many novels written by Lebanese women since the 1960s are set predominantly outdoors where women free themselves of the restrictions and dull repetitiveness of the isolating private sphere (Aghacy 2001, 505). In her autobiography Colored Ribbons (Shara’et Mulawwanah, 1994), the Lebanese writer Layla ‘Usayran describes herself as a representative of a whole generation, and she insinuates that if readers are looking for any information regarding her personal life, they will discover that her greatest passion is her struggle in the national movement and the Palestinian resistance.13 In Improvisations on a Lost String (Taqassim ala wataren da’i‘, 1992) by Lebanese/Palestinian writer Nazek Yared, the female narrator shuttles between Palestine, Egypt, and Beirut; while in The Story of Zahra (Hikayat Zahrah, 1980) by the Lebanese writer Hanan Al-Shaykh, Zahra, the protagonist, is seen wandering in the streets of war-torn Beirut, which is normally the habitat of men. These texts written by women have a strong political and social orientation, emphasizing ideas and moral values and taking stands on issues such as war, freedom, independence, immigration, nationalism, political struggle, and the Palestinian problem. In an atmosphere charged with political and ideological changes, the tendency of women to write about public issues is applauded by a diverse array of Arab male critics (and some female critics) who regard women who deal with personal issues as lacking the experience and “political” awareness needed at these critical times. In his book Ghada al-Samman Bila Ajniha, which came out in 1977, Ghali Shukri expresses dissatisfaction with women writers who focus on personal problems and calls for a form of writing that shuns the solipsistic delving into the private self as it constitutes a threat to traditional prerogatives sanctioned by a Arab/Islamic culture. He insists on commitment to public political issues that should take precedence over personal issues. He privileges alSamman over other women writers whom he regards as interchangeable, each one being a “copy of several copies” (Shukri 1977, 79). He notes women’s general lack of experience (meaning political involvement) and maintains that women’s personal problems are not “the whole world” (1977, 80) but a small portion of a painful political and social reality that implicates both men and women, leaving 13. See Aghacy 1998b, 218.

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ineradicable traces. Viewing male writing as the norm, he applauds al-Samman’s work for its “masculine” qualities manifested in her political commitment and revolutionary stance. Accordingly, women writers must follow in her steps and shun the “literature of the harem” or “the literature of the jawari (female slave)” (1977, 185). Twenty years later, Syrian critic Iman al-Qadi confirmed the same preference for literature that is committed, applauding the shift to public issues in ‘Usayran’s works. Al-Qadi maintains that Arab women’s novels after the naksa started breaking the contemptible tendency towards self-absorption. Woman came to the realization that her personal problems are not the whole world but part and parcel of the general problem (37). Al-Qadi applauds ‘Usayran’s ‘Asafir al-fajr (1968), Qala‘at al-’Ustah (1979), and Jisr al-hajar (1982) that, unlike her earlier work, focus on the Palestinian resistance and the Lebanese war (1992, 37). Likewise, in an interview with Buthaina Shaaban, the Palestinian writer Liana Badr sees her personal problems as insignificant compared to the general collective suffering of her own people: “When I joined the PLO in 1969 I felt that all the personal battles I had fought were now endowed with a social significance, because I was firmly convinced then that personal efforts to emancipate oneself are like hitting one’s head against a brick wall. . . . As everyone is suffering similar destiny, how can I confine myself to women’s position and ignore the rest of my people? . . . My struggle for emancipation as a Palestinian is inseparable from my struggle for genuine liberation as a woman; neither of them is valid without the other” (2002, 157, 160, 164). For Badr, women’s subjective problems must be contained and subordinated to the prevalent national cause where personal and sexual issues are secondary. In Resistance Literature, Barbara Harlow affirms the separateness and irreconcilability of the personal and political, and the segregation of the private and public spheres. Accordingly, she regards resistance literature as purely political with a strong edifying role “to change the world” (1987, 30). Aijaz Ahmad is less categorical. While acknowledging the importance of the personal and erotic, he gives more weight to political issues: “Erotic need has been, for women as for men, often important, but only in rare cases is it the lone desire, outside loves and solidarities of other kinds; work . . . has been for the great majority far more central; women are not, any more than men are, mere eroticized bodies” (1987, 150–51). My study contends that national and historical identity cannot be separated from sexual orientation. Kate Millet’s observation that “the personal is political”

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developed out of the realization that experiences that were thought to be purely personal, such as sexual and personal relationships, were actually molded by social and political forces (Millet 1972). My work will show that bodies, sexualities, and gender identities are not sacrosanct from the complex configurations of the modern state, autocratic regimes, and the wars in the area and that Arab subjectivity is fully immersed in history and ideology. Accordingly, the rigid poles between public and private are no longer that polarized, revealing that the borderlines between society and the psyche are difficult to locate or pin down. Authoritative regimes have always dictated sociosexual roles further marginalizing the inner sphere. Accordingly, resistance and change in these novels occur at the social and sexual levels as well as at the textual level through the use of experimental techniques and allegorical intimations. In some works, men are not perpetrators of violence but victims of the patriarchal state. They inhabit the margins and harbor strong aversion to wars and national commitments. Indeed, the novels reveal that in many cases the wars in the area have confi ned men to the inner spaces (to avoid an external world that has killed, tortured, and kidnapped them) in the same way women are confined, marking the emergence of a new and more domesticated maleness (Aghacy 2003, 186). Other narratives underline the politicization of women who are more involved in the public sphere of struggle, war, and ideological commitment, which entails the renunciation of privacy and the undervaluing of the domestic sphere. The contradictory nature of contemporary masculinities in the Arab East challenges naturalized differences and random biology revealing sexuality as a cultural production where the body’s erogenous zones are appropriated by political ideologies, social norms, and conventions so much so that there is a close connection between bed and battlefield.14 In the fiction under study, the private sexual sphere spills over into the public sphere of war and action and tinctures the public with the hue of potent sexuality. For instance, in Sahar Khlifah’s Wild Thorns (Al-sabbar, 1978), Saadiyya’s sexual allure is akin to her husband’s attraction to Haifa harbor: “Saadiyya’s thighs shine in my memory [her

14. Referring to Jordanian literature, Nabil Haddad sees no difference between the public and private in the Jordanian novel and asserts that there is “no difference between what happens in the world of politics and what happens inside the homes” (2003, 16).

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husband Zuhdi] like the sands of Haifa harbour” (1989, 140). What was taken to be private and individual is in fact public and general; what was thought to be a personal problem has a social and political dimension, revealing the inextricability of the personal and the social. In many of these works, the boundaries between the public and intimate spheres are constantly shift ing, where a man might divorce his wife on account of the 1967 setback, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, or Desert Storm. While the majority of texts are committed to a realistic mode marking the intersection of the political, sexual, and personal (Jameson 1986, 69),15 there is a general tendency by novelists and critics in the Arab world to view all narrative as allegorical in the traditional sense that makes use of didactic commentaries and personification where characters are embodiments of abstract notions. Nevertheless, only a handful of novels adhere to this definition of allegory.16 Since, as Frederic Jameson rightly puts it, “the allegorical spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities” (1986, 73), the majority of novels can be construed as partially allegorical in the sense that the story is used to allude to another story hidden outside the text, which is usually political. Jameson argues that third world texts “which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic . . . necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (1986, 69, 73). Jameson posits that no matter how much the text reflects reality, “libidinal investment is to be read primarily in political and social terms” (1986, 72).17 Th is is in line with Millet’s argument that the subjective story is charged with social and political overtones. By aligning sexuality with authority and control, and by allegorically intertwining domestic power relations with historical events and situations, one could say that the texts are marked by allegorical traits without abandoning the realistic mode. Allegory is employed to articulate what has been censored and marginalized by the public, patriarchal discourse.

15. See also the response of Ahmad 1987, 3–25; Siddiq 1984, xi. 16. See, for instance, Subul 1968 and Daoud 1983. 17. For a response to Jameson’s totalizing hypothesis about third world literature and the exclusive association of this literature with nationalist ideology, see Ahmad 1987, 3–25.

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While adopting a method strongly influenced by close reading, I have had to make choices that would emphasize some texts at the expense of others in an attempt to reveal the diversity of male experience in the region. Since the vast majority of these texts deal with political problems, the writers are generally committed to realism, to modes of testimony, and to a linear trajectory focused upon a unitary, goal-oriented self that portrays existence as meaningful and etiological. Other writers experiment with new modes and styles and often turn inwards to represent themselves in personal and confessional modes that reveal a shift from the stable and balanced to the random and shift ing. If engagement (by men and women) with the language of men makes possible subversive feminine subtexts, it is feasible that in writing by men or women, there is space for masculine subtexts that are not complicit or acquiescent with institutionalized male power. My selection from among the emanating narrative corpus is not arbitrary. The fictional works cover a variety of masculinities including traditional— indeed, deeply reactionary—and nontraditional roles of men in the public arena and in personal relationships. While some of these novels can be considered male-focused, the list of men in the fiction of the Arab East who clearly and self-consciously transgress codes of masculinity is substantial. Despite the fact that masculinism is an ideology homologous with men as a dominant group, masculine identity in the novels uncovers a variety of roles assigned to men ranging from domineering types, to precarious, unsure, and less typical, nearly feminine styles of manhood, struggling in a hyper-aggressive world of tyranny and wars.18 Nevertheless, because the writings examined in this book come from a particular culture and time, resemblances among notions of masculinity and the experiences of men are to be expected. These texts underline manifold exaltations of masculinity, the ambiguities it involves, and the subversion it has undergone revealing differences between men in relation to class, age, sexuality, politics, and religion. I have also selected a range of novels that focus on the emergence of softer, more sensitive, and less typical masculinities, creating a mosaic of masculinities that reflect a contested and fractured vision of manliness. In examining these works, I look for gaps and silences in each work and draw attention 18. See Pease, 2000, 12–13.

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to contradictions and inconsistencies to the point where, in certain cases, the discourse becomes riddled with holes. I have also included masculinist narratives that inflate male actions to the level of exaggeration to highlight a culture’s apotheosis of traditional, militant, and heroic masculinity, “the world of the male tribe” as George Tarabishi refers to it (1983, 203). Masculinity in the fiction of the Arab East comes in a variety of forms: the virile macho, the romantic idealist, the tyrannical father, the domineering husband, the daring freedom fighter, the committed intellectual, the ruthless militiaman, the persecuted prisoner, and the soft and effeminate subaltern, to name but a few. The first chapter of this book, “Oedipus King: Tortured Masculinity,” focuses on the male as a central figure who possesses commanding ascendancy and omnipresence and controls the outer and inner spheres. Within this framework, male heterosexuality is polarized through mechanisms designed to enforce male dominance and the subjection of women and subordinate males (sons, old men, sick men, disabled men, and so forth). Frustrated with the political situation, men compensate by venting their anger on women using violence against them. The second chapter, “The Politics of Masculinity: Goal-(Dis)Oriented Masculinity,” deals with a variety of intellectuals who are committed to a revolutionary ideology, others who represent the state’s ideology, and a few others who abdicate their position of responsibility for purely subjective experiences away from the mayhem of political commitment. In addition, it examines the role of the freedom fighter in contexts where masculinity is under threat. The third chapter, “Dictator as Patriarch: The State and the (Dys)Functional Male,” deals with the autocratic state’s strategy of violence, control, torture, surveillance, and physical confinement. The novels dramatize the emasculation of men under autocratic regimes with various attempts at resistance and interrogation. The fourth chapter, “Oedipus Deposed: The Man’s Sex(uality),” deals with fiction that is explicitly conscious of masculinity as fragile and vulnerable, keeping in mind that these texts were written under the shadow and in the aftermath of the Lebanese civil war (1976–1991). All in all, these works reflect a culture’s contested and equivocal vision of manliness, and the contradiction between hegemonic masculinity and the daily experiences of men. Despite the wide range of male experiences, the book contests the assumption that a vibrant plurality of masculinities, in the sociopolitical sense of the word, is already in existence in the fiction of the Arab East. While

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tracing the emergence of multiple masculinities, the study remains predominantly concerned with heterosexual masculinity that is either in control or under pressure, with a few subversive homoerotic masculinities that lurk in male texts but more explicitly and defiantly in female texts. While definitive masculine ideals are firmly entrenched, the fiction reveals that they waver in the face of a harsh social and political reality.

1 Oedipus King Tortured Masculinity

In the introduction to his novel The Sail and the Tempest (Al-Shira‘ wa-al‘assifah, 1994), Syrian writer Hanna Mina asserts, “I do not understand poetry that much, but I like Elias Abi Shabaka. He is a volcano of fl int and fire. He writes with dignity, and when a writer loses his personal masculinity, his literature is castrated . . . yes, castrated” (6). According to Tabaqat Al-shu‘ara’ by Ibn Salam Al-Jumahi, fuhula (which means potency, virility, and fertility) was considered a major trait of great poetry in the Jahiliyya.1 “Al-sha‘er al-fahl” (the virile poet) refers to the poet who possesses the skill to penetrate the depths of words and reproduce superior utterances and poetic molds. His dignity, forcefulness, assured vigor, and control of meanings, coupled with a sharp and intrusive wit and incisive intelligence, underline the inextricability between male sexuality and potent heroes on the battlefield who burst through the battle without fear or hesitation. The fiction under study in this chapter will be read in the context of a monolithic Arab/Islamic masculinity that transcends the specificities of each individual country and that gravitates towards traditional social and religious values, gender dichotomy, and separate spheres where men are convinced of their supremacy even when they feel incapacitated and, therefore, react with violence, revealing an iron determination to remain in control and ensure a fi xed stable male identity. The male is portrayed as a central figure that possesses commanding ascendancy and omnipresence and controls the outer as well as the inner spheres. The patriarch (father, brother, husband) operates beyond the bounds 1. See Ibrahim 2001.

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of time and place and represents vigorous action, misogynistic authority, sexual control, and an isomorphic relation to truth. The father who controls the inner and outer spheres is a sturdy oak that represents fi xity, dominance, and a penetrating supremacy. As head of the household, he has power and status and demands differential behavior from every member of the family. He is severe, resolute, self-centered, emotionally impotent, tyrannical, unyielding, and abusive to women—his wife, daughters, and sisters—as well as to younger men, sons, and men considered inferior. His association with a static and indelible past guarantees an abiding supremacy and predominance within the family sanctum as well as outside it. This traditional brand of hegemonic masculinity is incompatible with modernity and is premised upon a naturalized and inherently polarized relation between men and women. The father is the main agent of patriarchal structure that reifies and fi xes the role of women, family structures, and sexual relations by bifurcating the world into dichotomous spheres, the public world of men and the private world of women. Many of the works in this chapter enforce a primal form of masculinity where the father figure is a mythic model of primitive, rugged, physical masculinity representing misogyny, control, and discipline in the private sphere and intractability, recalcitrance, and undisciplined male camaraderie in the public sphere, a stronghold of unadulterated masculine integrality entirely free of women. This rigid demarcation of gender roles where any nonmasculine feeling is lethal ensures the supremacy, integrity, and homosocial solidarity of men and the subordination of women. In these novels, men take up a physical presence in the public sphere, the arena of male heterosexuality that is anchored securely in historical time and alienated from the body, while women are sexual beings tethered to the body and unable to transcend their biological materiality or enter the male world of history. As a result, women as well as subordinate men are perceived as an alterity, the relegated others who occupy the margins. In the midst of the political and military turmoil, male characters cling to static values in a desperate attempt to stay on firm ground. Despite men’s supposedly undisputed power inside and outside, there is a lurking fear of change that threatens the apparent stability of the family, where male power is diminished and traditional manhood is threatened. As a result, the stability of male power becomes dependent on man’s ability to control his wife; sexual intercourse is transformed into a kind of conquest conflated with rape where the penis is

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a symbol of power, an instrument of appropriation, and a weapon expressing simultaneously male misogyny and fear of female power. It underlines what bell hooks calls the “phallocentric model” for masculinity in which “what the male does with his penis” represents the primary and most “accessible way to assert masculine status” (1992, 94). To ward off the fear of female power and to ensure the remasculinization of the domestic space, many male characters resort to domestic violence to reaffirm male prerogatives, to confirm potency and eminence, and to restore and reenact a reactionary and stable manhood. Many of these novels deal with male hysteria and paranoia on being denied absolute authority. Frustrated with the political situation and changing social values, men compensate for their sense of insecurity, paranoid dread of inferiority, and frustrated attempt at mastery by venting their anger on their wives to prove that they epitomize the normative standards. For many men, the exemplary expression of masculinity is the virile male body, while the castrated male body signals a compromised self that harbors a primitive fear of the empowered woman, which finds outlet in violent measures aimed against women. In many of these works, men’s honor rests on the sexual purity of women, virginity before marriage, and their role as wives and mothers. The real man is one who is able to control the sexual behavior of his wife, to limit her mobility, and to impregnate her and mark the offspring with his name (Gallop 1997, 499). The fiction under study reveals the authoritarian relations dominant in the domestic sphere where woman possesses power only if she accepts the role conferred upon her as mother and wife. This can be seen in Hassan Daoud’s The Mathilde Building (Binayat Matild, 1983) where women control the inner sphere and much of the action while the male characters remain shadowy and marginal. Nevertheless, any seditious action or recalcitrance by women results in ruthless reaction where the bed becomes an arena of sexual conquest, aggression, and destructiveness. All subject positions are appropriated by men, while woman, who is expunged by the male, loses not only her personal integrity and wholeness but also her own children who belong legally to men. Many of these works are androcentric fictions disclosing nostalgia for older forms of patriarchy coupled with anxiety about the loss of old certainties. The narratives try to consolidate the power that men exercise over women and other men viewed inferior for their sexual orientation, or their economic and social status. These novels can be labeled as oedipal narratives where the main male

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character is supposed to be the guiding force and dominant point of view and where female characters are fi ltered entirely through male perspective. This is a concept of masculinity defined in terms of defense of war, resistance, and male friendship while endorsing heterosexual love. In these works, the political activist is a compelling representative of idealized masculinity, a “real” man who is ready to die for his country. These are masculine forms in the sense that they fetishize masculinity and sanction binary roles for men and women, revealing a deep-seated misogyny. Despite their being anchored in the traditional realist novel, some of them are written with a variety of points of view that generally reinforce the male perspective while the female remains marginal and voiceless. The male character’s linguistic domination is manifested in his ability to generalize about women and view them as biological producers whose existence centers around the inevitability of marriage and the need to obey the father or husband who controls their lives and whose monologic discourse appropriates women and entrenches the power that men exercise over women. In a hypermasculine world, male characters use an exclusively male language rife with obscenities and derogatory words against women in order to elevate a drooping masculinity. In some works, the authorial narrator uses female narrators as decoys to avoid naming names and to give himself the freedom of saying “I don’t know” since, unlike women, men are supposed to be all-knowing when it comes to political and military issues. While heterosexual masculinity is established as virile, forceful, and assertive, the underlying fissures that threaten male stability such as feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness in relation to the social and political situation reveal the fluidity of gender and power relations (Kaufman 1994, 142) and the male character’s strong sense that he cannot live up to prescribed roles for men within society. Despite inconsistencies in the construction of masculinity, the patriarchal society remains branded in male consciousness where the majority of men desire to regain their prodigal masculinity and selfpossession, or cling to stereotypes that reinforce the myth of masculine ascendancy and control. T h e Fat h e r’s Wor d a s L aw Shadows on the Window (Zilal ‘ala al-nafidha, 1979) by the Iraqi writer Gha’ib To‘mi Faraman is a novel with multiple points of view reflecting the father’s loss

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of power and his desperate attempt to reestablish and reinforce his control. The narrative is set in Baghdad in the late 1960s where the text makes jumbled references to earlier periods of time. The narrative dominated by the father’s vision focuses on family life, amatory involvements, and relations among family members. The father, Abdil Wahid Najjar Marmuq, has three sons and one daughter and is a carpenter who used to make coffins but now sells furniture. Far from celebrating family values and romantic love, the novel exposes both areas as sites of male power and women’s oppression and relegation to subordinate positions. The novel is firmly entrenched within the law of the father who is convinced of his firmness, control, and ability to secure the subservience of all members of the family. It takes place around the event of the disappearance of Hassiba, his son’s wife. This novel is inspired by William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (which was translated into Arabic in 1963) in its use of three male narrators who tell the story of one woman. Hassiba is seen through the perspective of the father and three sons (Majid, Fadil, and Shamel) who usurp her voice and individuality, tautologically reinforcing her otherness and achieving mastery through narration. This recursive structure serves to explore issues of narrative authority, reliability, and each narrator’s claims to what he assumes is the truth about Hassiba. The young wife is fi ltered entirely through the male perspective and remains voiceless while her world is limited to the inner space where she is lonesome and ostracized. She is seen by the family as the “other,” a figure of arcane alterity who remains mysterious and unfathomable. Even though the sons are generally oppressed, they are patriarchs too at some level, but the woman is exclusively represented by the men who view her from their own egocentric perspectives, where the plethora of voices is not aimed at exposing the reader to a variety of points of view but rather to install the social reality represented by men. While there are differences among the men, it is still relevant to talk of them as a unitary group and to view polyphony in the novel as a means of exposing patriarchal stratagems of oppression and control. The novel begins with the father’s muted anger with his daughter-in-law who has disappeared suddenly and unexpectedly, without anyone having any idea where she spent the night. Since her ignominious behavior reveals that the men in the family are unable to control their women, he tries to hide the scandal from his acquaintances and friends. Such behavior is unheard of in the vicinity for it brings shame upon the family and puts pressure particularly on the father’s

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flawless and impeccable reputation. While Abdil Wahid is proud of his stable masculinity, his son’s wife is seen as capricious and unpredictable. The father— who is a steady supporter of the ideology of separate spheres where women occupy the inner, private space and remain submerged under male authority—wonders if her deed is an act of rebellion and recalcitrance or just a naïve and frivolous act that betrays the woman’s fickleness and inconstancy. Abdil Wahid understands that it is natural for a wife to disagree with her husband and seek refuge with her own family, but this particular woman has no family to go to, and he is plagued by all sorts of harrowing thoughts. Perhaps she was kidnapped by a man after losing her way, and instead of showing her the way back, the “accursed devil” (15) lures her to his own house. Despite such fears, Abdil Wahid keeps hoping that this is all a charade, and that Hassiba, his daughter-in-law, has not abandoned the house at all. He recalls how he himself had walked out of his father’s shop, but Hassiba is a woman who needs protection and a roof over her head. He wonders how she could have rejected the family refuge to wander in the streets with the cats and the stray dogs. As head of the household, the father expects deferential behavior and respect from every member of the family, particularly his daughter-in-law. He imagines the “ungrateful refugee” (21) wandering in this alley or that, hesitating, feeling scared, disgraced, and defeated, and deduces that she will return to beg him for forgiveness and kiss his head and feet. Since she has defiled the family honor, he feels it is his duty to curb the woman’s transgressive behavior. It suddenly dawns upon Abdil Wahid that his family is not the well-knit whole he had imagined it to be, and that he is left alone to reclaim his patriarchal heritage and live up to his role as head of the family by finding his daughter-in-law.2 Fadil, Abdil Wahid’s son, met Hassiba at a wedding party, fell in love with her at first sight without thinking about her family, and rushed into marriage without weighing the consequences. When his father interferes, the son asserts defiantly, “‘Are you the one who is going to marry?’” (16). Fadil reminds Abdil Wahid of himself—he wanted to quit his father’s shop and marry the woman he

2. Peteet writes, “Several anthropologists have referred to the concept of honour as a defi ning frame for masculinity. Abu-Lughod’s work on the Egyptian Bedouin emphasizes the notion of control as crucial.” For Abu-Lughod, “‘Real men’ are able to exact respect and command obedience from others while they themselves resist submitting to others’ control” (Abu-Lughod [1986], quoted in Peteet 2000, 107). See also Badran 1988, 19.

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loved—but he thanks God that he decided to stay with his father and did not do what his son has done. Despite the attraction of the other woman, Abdil Wahid kept within the traditional mold and remained faithful to his wife, who bore him many children. The father clearly wants to solidify his position of power and maintain the sanctity of the family in the face of lurking changes. Unlike his wife, Hassiba is unable to fulfi ll her marital role and give his son a child, although her role within the hierarchy of the family institution is supposed to be one of fecundity. Therefore, she is viewed as undeserving the title of wife, and the whole family turns against her. Maternity rather than sexuality seems to determine Hassiba’s femininity and her role within the family sanctum. What they demand of her is to become an incubator, to bring forth children in accordance with her reproductive powers that give her identity. Since her husband’s fertility is taken for granted, she is reduced into a disabling presence that deprives her husband from progeny and lineage (Peteet 2000, 107). The point of view shifts from the father to his elder son Majid whose opinion is that Hassiba’s disappearance was due to the pressure of the entire family, which she couldn’t bear. The space in which she moved was shrinking, and she was criticized for any action that she took, whether she stayed in her room or left it to join the family. Consequently, the family house becomes a space of enclosure and suffocation rather than comfort and support. Majid tries to understand and justify her behavior and believes the family should have treated her well—a poor girl who has no family to protect her or look after her. Aware that the family defines woman exclusively by her reproductive capacities, he tells his father indignantly that “a woman is not a chicken; if she does not lay eggs, you slaughter her and eat the meat” (187). Majid maintains that having internalized male values, the women in his family (his mother and sister) uphold the father’s view of marriage and procreation and blame Hassiba for not having children. Majid has just returned from abroad after completing his studies and is looking for a job, but without success. He spends the days following up on his application to a government office and is told that he is on the waiting list, but he soon discovers that his application is lost and that there is no hope of finding it. He feels distressed by the state of education in a country controlled by autocratic powers that are plagued with bureaucracy and red tape, and he realizes discouragingly that his only hope is a “hole in the official service where I can nibble away the days of my life” (54). Whenever he sees

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Hassiba washing the clothes under the stairs, he trembles with desire. Nevertheless, he remains detached for fear of being submerged into her subaltern position. At the same time, he discovers that he is in love with her though he pretends to occupy a traditionally fraternal position vis-à-vis his brother’s wife. While he can use language with considerable facility, it does not grant him power, for within the political and social structure he is unable to realize himself as a man (with a job). Indeed, the struggle against oppressive family values mirrors his own struggle against an oppressive regime. He tells us that his earlier love for Zahra is not for the person of the woman but rather as a good distraction at a time in his life when he was hiding from state persecution in his struggle for political freedom. His attraction to his brother’s wife, who reminds him of Zahra, can be seen within the same framework where Majid’s frustration with the state is reaching a peak and where woman again functions as an outlet. Since he has no power over the world around him, he is determined to focus on words, an attempt to control experience through language. Instead of acting on his desire, he compensates by verbalizing this desire. Majid’s failure to find a job appears to be a general problem in the country. Outside, he meets other men who are unemployed and who feel disheartened about the future. He tells us that his companions feel oppressed by the regime and spend their time talking about “nothing in particular” (117), and their allusions to the regime and the country—that is never free of a jail or prison camp—are oblique and evasive. Just as the country has turned into a big prison where everyone is under surveillance, the home is transformed into a suffocating enclosure under the vigilant eyes of his own mother, father, and sister. As a result, he feels estranged inside the house and in the public spaces that he usually frequents. The text reveals that his political frustration is deep, and when he attempts to write his autobiography, he maintains that the focus of his life is not his first love but “the first demonstration he participated in against the PakistaniTurkish alliance, the Baghdad alliance, and when he marched in solidarity with Egypt, the nationalization of the Suez Canal and Abdel Nasser” (267). One of his companions is Jalil, referred to ironically as the “robust” (fahl; 193) member of the gang because of the torture he underwent in prison three years before, which affected his potency. To cover up, he approaches the other sex with the appetite of “a hungry hunter and moves from one love to another like a bee” (194). The narrative captures the frustration and general sense of impotence among men

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who are disillusioned because of their inability to express their political views in a world where, in Jalil’s opinion, suicide is the latest brand of heroism. Nevertheless, despite the oppressive atmosphere, the existence of prisons reveals a revolutionary spirit that has not been completely subdued. After the young wife’s disappearance, Majid decides to visit his brother Fadil, who prefers the lowliest job in a shop making wooden boxes to working with his own father. From the start, Fadil appears to have a mind of his own and to insist on his distinct individuality and subjective choices. He moves outside an oedipal framework with the father as law and insists on displacing his father’s traditional and deeply entrenched values and beliefs by refusing to complete his studies or to work in his father’s shop. When Majid visits him at work, he is stunned to come face to face with Fadil’s wretched situation. Dressed in rags and with disheveled hair, he looks like a “mouse that has just emerged from the garbage” (48), with hollow cheeks mirroring an inner sense of exhaustion, emaciation, and depression. Fadil rejects the idea of his mother choosing a bride he cannot see before the marriage night, and he marries Hassiba whom he meets at a wedding party. Sensing her fear on the wedding night, he rejects a masculinity contracted through such notions as virginity, honor, and shame and does not force himself on his terrified bride. Convinced that his bride should not be treated like a sheep, he gives her time to absorb the situation. In the meantime, he takes a knife and bleeds himself to show a blood-stained sheet to the family waiting outside. Unlike his father, who assumes Hassiba is falling short of her duty, Fadil takes their failure to conceive as a personal failure: he decides to go through fertility tests himself even though it is humiliating for a man to do so. Deep down, he feels humiliated before his family for not being able to impregnate his wife. The novel explores the suffocating effects on both men and women of an outdated nuclear family structure preserved through the manipulation of women and men alike, and intolerable political conditions. Because Fadil marries Hassiba without the approval of his family, he feels uncomfortable and tries to avoid his father, never exchanging any serious conversation with him. Sensing that his father and his younger brother Shamil are gloating over his situation, he avoids looking his father in the eye for fear of reading silent reproach. While his family wants him to divorce his wife for not bearing children, he is not certain that it is her fault. He suspects that he is the culprit, the seed that does not grow, and that the doctors have lied to him, reassured him, and pronounced him “normal” in exchange for some money

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he has given them, reducing manhood to a mere bribe. Even though his sexual relations with his wife reassure him of his masculinity, the fact that he is unable to impregnate her fills him with anxiety. He admits that he was extremely happy with his wife whom he views as his only refuge from a depraved existence, but his family’s harassment of her has complicated his life, and now he fears that she may have drowned herself in the river. The younger son Shamil is studying drama and writes a play based upon his family. By so doing, he tries to figure out why the bride has escaped. This playwithin-the-novel interrupts the primary diegesis, and the novel’s ontological horizon is disrupted in favor of a hybrid genre. In so doing, Faraman is perhaps protecting a supposedly publicly performed play from the pressures of censorship that far exceed those on a written narrative. In discussing the play with his fellow actors, Shamil describes the love between the wife and her husband as “a sluggish and vulgar kind of love which is content with a room and a bed” (131), the kind of love that is based upon ignorance and pure physical attraction. When they reach the part where the elder brother falls in love with the young wife, one actor complains that according to the shari‘a, this is unacceptable, and thus unrealistic in a play that claims to mirror reality. Shamil wonders why other acts such as drinking, prostitution, and usury are practiced, but only adultery is regarded as a sin. Shamil believes that the wife has actually been disloyal to her husband because of “her weakness, her loose, spineless, and sluggish surrender” (134). He maintains that she looks like a “goat” without a shepherd (134), probably dreaming of a love that would shake her being, so when she catches sight of her husband’s educated brother looking shaven and perfumed, she surrenders to him. Shamil attributes his elder brother’s degeneracy to the several years he spent in the West, “where psychological complexes and disintegration are rife and where disgrace and dishonor” (71) are seen as the norm. As a result, the elder son—as portrayed in the play—has no scruples about desiring his sister-in-law and forgets all about the shari‘a and their customs and traditions. Her husband goes to work all day and comes back exhausted in the evening looking like a “rat” that has just emerged “out of the maize” (134). Shamil tries to put the pieces of his sister-in-law’s story together and understand why she ran away. While Shamil is unable to put up with his family’s morbid attachment to a bygone past, his dramatization of the young wife’s escape reflects a strong desire to come to terms with a traumatic and unprecedented situation

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within the family, uncovering Shamil’s own fi xation on the past. He describes the father to his fellow actors as “coarse, sure of himself, and determined to mold his children according to his imbecilic mind” (65). As for the mother, she is as ignorant as “a book of incantation” (65) and is in the habit of going to the fortuneteller who scores the largest numbers of “miracles” (65). Referring to his sister-inlaw, he tells his friends that she was a girl of ambiguous origins, like a “neglected plant” (70), and that he believes she took flight because she was sterile and could not give the family a child. Shamil’s views of his enigmatic sister-in-law reveal anxiety about genealogy, social status, and female sexuality. The actors who do not know that this story is taken from Shamil’s own family wonder how an educated man with experience could fall in love with an illiterate woman who has virtually nothing to offer, and suspect that her husband is the one who is sterile. Feeling disempowered and disgruntled with the oppressive political and social institutions that deprive him of freedom, Shamil constructs a fictional world through which he is able to release his frustrations and achieve a sense of power and control through art. Shamil’s tale is the scourge that he uses against his parents and against his own frustrations. Shamil achieves power not through what he does but through the manner in which he tells the story. Similarly, his brothers Majid and Fadil discover that their experience of telling is one way to compensate for the drab and restrictive experience of living.3 The three brothers write stories to make sense of an inscrutable reality, to come to terms with a faltering masculinity, and to impress upon the reader the wider social reality that remains predominant. The text is a hybrid of heterogeneous entities which includes two genres, fiction and drama, as well as multiple male voices and a semi-omniscient narrator who has sympathies with the father’s traditional view. The narrator whose views almost coincide with the father’s has the privilege of entering the father’s mind and scanning his thoughts and reminiscences; however, since the narrator does

3. For instance, the narrator of Haydar’s Al-Zaman al-muwhesh asserts, “The Arab is lying in a well-locked coffi n, and from inside he dreams of the sun, women, and the removal of the dust and the spiders’ webs that were woven around him. I imagine him knocking at the walls violently in order to emerge out of darkness. His fist bleeds as he knocks, but he remains bound by subjugation, prayers, and rules that were made to keep him in his place and stop him from breaking any taboo” (1993, 57).

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not understand how the minds of the sons work, he allows them the freedom to speak for themselves and to address the reader directly. In the old Rassafa area where they first lived, Abdil Wahid felt at home. He joked, raised his voice, felt at ease, and listened to every word the people uttered, but in this new district, Hayy al-Washwash, he appears lost, isolated, and disoriented. While the centrality of the father seems consistent throughout the novel, it is clear that Abdil Wahid contends with the changing times and perpetuates his authority by ensuring that his son Fadil remains in control. The father is worried because his son is unable to take the disappearance of his wife like a man, but drinks every night and acts in a reckless manner. Observing that his son is pale and knocked out, he is all the more determined to find his son’s lost woman. Convinced that he must live up to his role as head of the family, he resorts to a woman, his former lover Na‘ima Saab, who is said to possess magical powers, to learn whether his son is bewitched and to find his bride. Deep down, though, he doubts her abilities, for if she really has this power “she would have caught him [Abdil Wahid] like a hook, then, in the prime of her love and vigor” (87). What’s more, he believes that seeking help from a woman is a major defect particularly for one, like himself, “in the peak of manhood” (83). The father admits that he resorted to his former lover in a moment of desperation, but when he discovers the whereabouts of his son’s wife without the help of Na‘ima, he drives her off as he does a disturbing fly. Being the man he is, he will not allow any woman to expose his vulnerability and put him at her mercy. After all, he is proud of his ability to determine and control the destiny of all women under his control, and is optimistic that his house will return to its former state where his wife and children gather around the TV with himself at the head of the family. Abdil Wahid does not want his son to go along with his daughter’s wishes and find another wife, fearing that it is his son who cannot have children, and a second wife will doubtlessly expose him. Th is is why he finds it necessary for the wife to return to cover up his son’s infertility and, therefore, emasculation. Even though Abdil Wahid is traditional, he is aware that the times have changed, and in order to maintain values and traditions, he tries to protect what he assumes are static values despite the lurking suspicion that they are gradually undergoing change. Managing to find the lost bride, the father talks to her, orders her to return home, and threatens to find her wherever she goes, but the woman remains silent

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and does not respond. Her silence as far as he is concerned is a sign of acquiescence though there is no confirmation in the text that the wife will give in. The narrator wants to work the text towards closure and a singular interpretation that would anchor it securely in the right location; nevertheless, the story is riddled with gaps and absences that engender its plurality and its indeterminacy. The narrator wants to complete the story with a happy ending that is concocted by the father who insists on holding the strings to the end and who congratulates himself on a successful manly endeavor where his law is inculcated; however, this supposed achievement is thwarted by the story’s ambiguous ending that leaves the reader with more questions than answers. The woman remains the silent center of the novel to the very end, creating uncertainty and inconclusiveness despite the father’s optimism about his ability to ensure the traditional happy ending. M ac h i s mo t o C ou n t e r P ol i t ic a l M a rgi na l i z at ion Journey at Dusk (Al-Rahil ‘inda al-ghuroub, 1992) by Syrian writer Hanna Mina focuses on the figure of the primitive man who lives on the peripheries of society and who represents an archetypal, defiant, and intransigent masculinity. We are told by the narrator that the protagonist Fater is a sailor who lives in a forsaken area on the Syrian coast. He leads an apolitical life outside the events of history, only to become more involved in political events towards the end of the novel. In a world where manhood is constantly under threat, Fater embodies fuhula, an erotico-heroic masculinity both erogenous and bellicose. This is a man who projects a powerful, aggressive, chauvinistic, uncontrolled masculinity to counter political marginalization. Fater represents a robust, seemingly uncomplicated version of masculinity where adventure, sexual encounters, and heroic deeds dominate the scene. Barred from any serious endeavor or political commitment, Fater is weary and bored, spending his time drinking and fornicating in a sort of Edenic world outside history. Fater’s relationship with his mistress Sulafa develops counter to the historical reality, outside the problems of the contemporary world. Fater lives in an unchanging fantasy world where machismo, virility, excess, and robust aggression are the desired qualities for male behavior. He is a caricature of an archaic, primordial masculinity that is manifested in a naïve and exaggerated display of sinew and muscle, where exclusive male bonding, active and heroic

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male bravado, and coarse and obscene language are the norm. As Tarabishi puts it, “Prison is nothing but half a school of men. The other half is the school of women” (86). Fater compensates for being placed outside history by concentrating on an exaggerated sexual relationship with Sulafa, a sort of prelapsarian Eve desperately trying to cope with Fater’s form of archetypal masculinity. At the same time, this personal affair bears traces of the other public story Fater was deprived of. Fater, a sailor and smuggler who “knew the sea like the back of his hand” (5), lives a sort of death in life owing to an unspecified general tyranny that remains in the realm of the abstract and indefinite. At forty, Fater finds no other way to deal with a diminishing masculinity but a persistent adolescent defiance of the powers intent on domesticating him. On shore, he feels like a fish out of water and tells his friend Jassim such a fish has “become putrid. We, myself, yourself and the others are rotting slowly, day after day. We do nothing, because we don’t have the courage to do anything. They have domesticated us. We are domesticated wolves, meaning, in a few words, dogs. And what do dogs do? They guard the home and the fields, and this is our honorable mission!” (61). It is not clear who the “they” are, but it is supposed to be an indirect reference to the regime. Fater’s exaggerated masculinity at sea can be attributed to his fear of the onset of old age and his realization that his feats of physical and sexual prowess have not given him the sense of balance and satisfaction that he has been looking for. In a context of general powerlessness and political ineffectuality, Fater’s display of sexual vigor is compensation for being deprived of political action since it is in the conflict outside, in the battle for social and political justice, where the true masculine self is realized. Furthermore, Fater spends his time in the company of men where male bonding is solidified through bragging and boasting. Fater’s valorous exploits are such that he is “prepared to stake everything on one throw of the dice” (quoted in Discovering Men, 64); as David Morgan puts it, this brand of masculinity often revolves “around the control, or lack of control, over women” (1992, 64) and a desire for political power. When Fater insists on swimming in the sea on a cold, rainy winter day, his friend Jassim is threatened by such reckless courage, especially when an old man watching the scene accuses the former of having “no balls” (68). Jassim feels even more humiliated when he does not kill the old man for fear of getting into trouble with the authorities. Fear of punishment gets in the way of his masculinity, and he has

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no choice but to “swallow his moustache” (72), a symbol of manhood, and admit failure and emasculation. The name Fater comes from fitra (meaning natural disposition), which associates him with the primitive and the instinctual. In line with his primitive masculinity, he is unfeeling and purely physical in his relationship with women. Being the macho man he is, he congratulates himself on not forcing himself on any woman, as women come to him of their own accord. When Sulafa argues with him about his superior attitude, he brags about having her “heart in my pocket” (130). After several casual affairs with women, Fater thinks that he understands women and is in a position to generalize about them. He affirms that woman is emotional and is “unable to control herself, even in the most manageable situations that require no agitation or excitability” (130), and he regards his relations with women as a matter of loss and gain since every encounter with a woman is a battle for control. In order to ensure Sulafa’s submission, he affects indifference to humiliate her and force her to placate and mollify him. The narrative discourse mostly uses a third-person voice typical of traditional authorial narration, often claiming exclusive insight into the interiority of the protagonist, a mode of telling rather than showing, diegesis rather than mimesis. The narrator frames and judges the actions of Fater. Even when the narrator is critical, it is a tolerant indulgence and hidden admiration of Fater’s exaggerated masculinity. At the same time, this is a dream world where the omniscient authorial narrator compensates for strong feelings of inadequacy and political marginalization by creating a male protagonist who possesses sexual potency and physical valor, and who manages to tame the possessive acquisitive devouring female by forcing her to grovel before him. This is a segregated world composed of pure masculinity and femininity where the penis is the instrument of power and of female degradation, and where sexuality and aggression are interchangeable. Sulafa, who represents all women, is seen as a lecherous and raging animal who calms down only after having a smack of Fater’s virile potency: “The addicted woman took a dose to extinguish the addiction” (208). Mina presents Sulafa as a monstrous beast who is on the rampage until pacified by Fater’s lusty masculinity. In the novel, all relations and hierarchies boil down to sexual control irrespective of social and educational status. Even though Sulafa holds a university degree, Fater is unaffected by this and feels superior to her because he has succeeded in

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possessing her. The novel is written in a realistic mode with chronological plotting and explicit moralizing, and the text is punctuated with generalizations in order to cement the boundaries between men and women. For Fater, woman is a conniving Eve who resorts to deceit as a weapon to fight man. In the novel, gender roles are rigidly defined to privilege man and denigrate woman. Fater’s tendency to generalize springs from a strong desire to ensure that masculinity is innate and that “woman is woman and man is man” (157). For instance, he tells us that when “a woman falls deeply in love, she remains deeply emotional and excitable . . . and in order to calm down she starts beating, breaking and crying” (143). Fater’s fi xation on virility underscores his hunger for power, mastery, and control. Since, according to Fater, man is associated with physical prowess and woman with cunning and deception, a real man tames his woman but does not use force against her. A stony unresponsiveness has become second nature to him where he remains calm when she loses her temper (132). While he humbles himself before a tempestuous sea, he refuses to abase himself before any woman since softness in a man turns him into an object of derision and disdain and puts him at the mercy of woman. The novel is a celebration of manliness and an amplification of masculine virtues where man is the perpetual victor, while woman is the incessant loser. Fater represents a simple and uncomplicated masculinity that stresses competition between men, sexual control of women, boastful bragging, and displays of machismo.4 When Sulafa asks him to stop bragging about his “rare heroic feats” (140), she manages to ruffle his feathers by uncovering his inner fragility and making him feel exposed in her presence; he can no longer cover up an exaggerated virility coupled with sadomasochistic tendencies. Feeling internally insecure, he reacts with noisy braggadocio in cafés and other male gatherings. The novel projects an atavistic, robust, misogynistic, and intractable masculinity with Fater, a “cock in a spectacle” (98–99). Fater displays an unflinching toughness as well as a virility that is always heterosexual. The novel marginalizes women, concentrating instead on myriad variations of homosocial male order. Fater is fully conscious of his performance (Butler 1999, xxviii) and always monitors his behavior and assesses it to determine whether it is in line with the norms propounded by patriarchal society. Even when he feels like crying, he tries to justify the feminine 4. For a discussion of machismo, see Bolton 1979.

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act by going back to his ancestors who were tough and chivalrous but were not ashamed of crying: “Why should I be ashamed of it even in private” (239). Mina’s novels are predominantly set during the French mandate, in the past rather than in the present, most probably for fear of state reprisals. Initially, Fater does not feel fit to serve in a political party because he was a smuggler in his youth, but when he does become involved in politics, his whole outlook changes. Fater is asked to contribute old clothes for members of the party who are in prison. Having a cause and having allowed members of the group to hide in his house, he ends up in prison and is subjected to torture. Now that he is committed to a cause, prison becomes a healing space where he recovers from his depression. Prison is transformed into a school to acculturate Fater and all those who are fighting for freedom (Samaha 1999, 79). Salhi Al-Shakuri (a new comrade) tells him about his experience of torture in prison and how, despite electric shocks and cigarette burns all over his body, he remains impervious and recalcitrant. AlShakuri wonders whether Fater has heard of “pulling nails, puffing the stomach to the extent that the intestines are about to explode, electric shocks, extinguishing cigarettes on the body” (222), but Fater is determined to fight such oppression by supporting the people who are in the throes of the authorities. To avoid getting into trouble with the authorities himself, Mina is purposely ambiguous about the time the events take place, but when he describes the forms of torture used against Fater, the narrator finds it necessary to assert explicitly that it is 1952 rather than the earlier, vague second half of the twentieth century. Elsewhere, the text points to a much later period than 1952: Sulafa’s university degree, the “cassettes in town” (49), references to women who work “in a boutique, a restaurant, a café . . . and in hotels and excel in it” (46), and allusions to women sailors in the Arab world (46). Furthermore, the narrator tells us that today (surely not 1952), woman goes abroad to study all by herself, excels, and returns to practice in her field of specialization. The existence of women, like Sulafa, who have the courage to spend the night with men who are not their husbands, is treated very lightly in the novel, as if it were a daily occurrence. This world he is referring to is clearly not the world of the early 1950s, and this confusion in time can be construed as a strategy by the authorial narrator to confront the political authority but to avoid political retaliation at the same time. Fater comes to the realization that to focus on the intimate world of erotic bliss and emotional expression is to lose one’s social identity and to live on the

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margins of society. The novel shifts from third person to first when Fater meets Al-Shakuri, who, according to Fater, “transformed me to the other bank” (215), where Fater speaks in his own assured voice, being now more at peace with himself. Contrary to Fater, who lives in a solipsistic ahistorical and marginal world of his own, Salhi is an educated political activist who works for the collective good and for society and belongs to a political party that is fighting for “freedom, progress, and social justice” (218). Towards the end of the novel, the narrator and protagonist merge into one, integrating the two personalities. Fater is now what the authorial narrator wants him to be, a real man committed to a noble cause. Fater cannot forget a past of smuggling and fornication, but he begins to understand the value of self-denial, of struggle, and of possessing a noble cause. While the narrator celebrates the intensity of feeling between Fater and Sulafa, he also sees the limitations of locking oneself up in a regressive relationship outside history. While Fater engages in telling tales of personal valor and muscular feats, the authorial narrator, who identifies with the protagonist, tells a fantasy tale that would compensate for his equally marginal position in the public sphere. F rom Pro gr e s si v e Ac t i v ism t o R e gr e s si v e T r a di t iona l ism Like Mina’s Journey at Dusk, Jordanian writer Mu‘nes Al-Razzaz’s The Gang of the Bloody Rose (‘Isabat al-wardah al-damiyah’, 1997) is a narrative where man’s political frustration and humiliation leave him no alternative but to project this anger on his wife. This is a novel about men in a period in which gender definitions are acutely threatened by social, political, and cultural changes. This is a polyphonic narrative told from the points of view of the characters Mu‘tassem, Assi, and Siham. Mu‘tassem (which means to stand firm or to persevere) describes Assi (which means the defiant) as his only “legitimate friend” (7) and the one who controls his life and makes all the decisions for him. In addition to having analogous names, they are described as identical twins. Mu‘tassem is Assi’s shadowy, primitive, and uncanny double, more closely attached to him than Assi’s wife Siham. They are two men in one, together a whole character that is divided against itself. Since the world Assi and Mu‘tassem live in is depicted as one of frustration, defeat, fragmentation, and entrapment, the yearning for fathers, for past authority

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and sure knowledge, dominates the text. Mu‘tassem internalizes patriarchal values and is unable to sever relations with the archaic father. He maintains that when “my father hit me the last time, . . . I caught his wrist . . . I was like a madman, rebellious, scared, angry, terrified . . . I squeezed his wrist, he screamed and I was stunned . . . I released his hand instantly, and kissed it and asked him if he had too much pain. I was bitten by feelings of guilt; guilt is a wolf” (32–33). As a result of his attachment to his father, Mu‘tassem wants to grow a mustache like his grandfather’s in order to “look like a spitting image of him” (100–101) and restore a fi xed and stable sense of atavistic masculinity in the present. The law of the father is inextricable from the family over which he rules with unconditional and unlimited power, and Mu‘tassem maintains that “family is government; the family is an authority whose commander is the head of the family, my father, the Prime Minister of our family” (32). For Mu‘tassem, the family is a diminutive authoritarian state where the borders between them become porous, and the public sphere infi ltrates the private realm, challenging the official discourse that separates inner and outer spheres. The main event in the novel is the killing of Siham, Assi’s wife, but it is difficult to determine who actually killed her and for what reason, since numerous scenarios of her death are on the table. We are told that Assi killed his wife after hearing a rumor that she was unfaithful to him when he was behind bars. Mu‘tassem catches sight of her sitting with Abdel-Karim, the musician, alone in a room and wonders why Abdel-Karim’s mother is not there to keep them company and put people’s minds at rest: “Abdel-Karim is a man, and Siham is a woman, alone in a room. This means that the devil . . . is the third” (36). Another story Mu‘tassem relates is that Siham has caught a fatal disease and begged her husband to end her life: “Have you not heard of the Gulf War, Desert Storm? The cloud was black after the bombarding of the warehouse of microbic and chemical weapons that covered the sun” (18), and Siham catches the plague emanating from Iraq that has infected the atmosphere, displaced all fi xed values, and turned people mad. In such a defiled atmosphere, Mu‘tassem regards Siham’s murder as insignificant and blames people for being interested in slander and defamation rather than the serious political and economic issues such as “high prices, the high cost of living, the Palestinian problem, and the problem of traffic jams” (13). A third version of the story is that Mu‘tassem himself kills Assi’s wife because he assumes she has betrayed her husband when he was in prison.

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Assi is an intellectual and political activist who ends up in prison for his principles and political views and gets out a defeated human being. Earlier, he had thought his wife an exceptional woman and admired her political courage and defiance, referring to her as “my exciting rebel” (130). When Siham married him, she knew that he was a freedom fighter and that such a life is fraught with danger; the rule is incarceration and detention, and the exception is freedom. Failing to achieve any of his political goals, Assi returns to the cocoon of archaic traditions and antiquated lifestyles. Since he cannot transform power relations within society, he becomes intent on gaining power over his wife by proving to her that he holds the reins. For instance, after being released from prison, the intellectual and judicious man ironically seeks information from the grocer and the psychologically disturbed Mu‘tassem to get to the truth about his wife’s behavior. Siham wonders how her husband could possibly believe a retarded man (Mu‘tassem) who thinks that imperialism is the cause of her relationship with Abdel-Karim. But Assi goes along with Mu‘tassem and uses physical force against his wife for the first time in his life, accusing her of preferring Abdel-Karim, a cowardly man who is unable to fight or struggle like a real man. When she reminds him that she married him for his “coarse masculinity” (108) and that she does not like the “soft” type represented by Abdil-Karim, Assi accuses her of fantasizing about the musician even when she is in bed with her husband. Assi’s attitude to Siham is unsympathetic, myopic, and occasionally violently boorish. When his wife asks him for proof of her adultery, the only evidence he can provide is that he dreamt of her sleeping with Abdel-Karim and Mu‘tassem’s letters that dealt with what the latter thought he saw rather than what he actually saw. For Assi, this is intended to be a statement of authority that convinces no one, even the retarded Hiyam (Mu‘tassem’s beloved), who wonders how Assi could have killed his wife just “because he heard a rumor, just a rumor that she betrayed him at a time when he was behind prison bars” (17). Despite the lack of concrete evidence that would incriminate his wife, Assi decides to get out of prison at any cost in order to save his honor and punish his transgressive wife. He signs a blank sheet of paper and asks the prison warden to write any confession he wants. Assi writes a letter full of apologies and platitudes, begging the minister of interior to release him. Determined to get out of the hellish prison to settle scores with his wife, his political struggle and noble aims fade away. This willingness to give up his political struggle to pursue a defiant wife

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reveals a desperate need to ensure a stable identity and solid gender boundaries. Having been humiliated at the public, political level, he decides to control, colonize, and appropriate his wife. When his wife admits that she is horrified at his psychological disfigurement and radical change, he has a hysterical fit and cries like a baby, asking her to forgive a man who was in hell and whose brain has been affected by the scorching sun. Assi spent seven years in prison contending with torture and humiliation, but when he surrenders to the authorities he is despised and shunned by his party and friends. After his release, Assi becomes moody, withdrawn, vengeful, egotistical, forbidding, and violent. He gets out of prison a time bomb full of anger and rage with his own party, the government, and the world around him. All solid boundaries dissolve, and Assi feels castrated and unmanned by a wife who prefers a softer form of masculinity. Since the world around him began collapsing in the face of ominous forces like the 1967 war and the Lebanese war, reaching a crescendo after the Gulf War, Assi sees himself as “resigned or retired from life” (96) and envies the dead who do not have to worry about what people say and do not have to prove their “masculinity or nationalistic feelings” (118). Feeling disillusioned with past ideologies of struggle and the dreams they had fostered, he envies Mu‘tassem, who “eats, drinks, sleeps, and does not dream romantic dreams” (119), and admits that when he hears intellectuals discussing politics, national problems, and the ideals of the past, he has diarrhea and shits in his pants. Assi’s manhood was compromised early in life when his mother married a young man one year after his father’s death. Now his own wife prefers someone who, in his opinion, is not even a man. He learns that “her relationship with Abdel-Karim has become the talk of town and that his dignity has become a joke” (73). Siham tells Assi that she is grateful to him for introducing her to the world of philosophy, poetry, and politics and recalls that he wanted to change human beings before changing the world, reminding him of his strong belief in a perfect human being who has severed all relations with the animal, the monster, and has been transformed into a sort of demi-angel. Wishing that Assi were a musician rather than a politician, Siham writes to him and urges him to join her and her neighbor Abdel-Karim in the perfect world of music. Assi is infuriated that Abdel-Karim, the sissy, who is afraid of people and who doesn’t know how to cross the street without his mother, should be his guide to the world of perfection: “Do you call a person who knows nothing of life but classical music that

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the Eastern ear detests . . . a man. . . . My God . . . what is happening over there in the capital, in my absence? Has Siham lost her mind? This is the game of the bourgeoisie, the pretentious and the phony” (82). Assi feels that the old world has finally collapsed with the Gulf War and the new world order, and the only honorable and heroic act left for him is to kill his “adulterous” wife. After the death of his wife, Assi begins to shun people and to view himself as a coward who has the guts to kill his wife but not himself. He feels castrated and in no mood for love, friendship or sex. Sitting on the beach, he is approached by a beggar who thinks he is a garbage container. Assi begins to bark, “not the barking of a wounded man, but like an earthquake stretching from the Mediterranean to the red sea, ending in the Dead sea inactive, withered breathing his last” (161). Mu‘tassem, Assi’s alter ego, sentences Siham to death, taking his cue from the rule of the father: “Father says that the law does not protect the foolish, and Siham is foolish because she married a freedom fighter and could not give up sex. Therefore, Siham broke the law, the law of nature, people, and religion. Therefore she must be given the right punishment for adultery . . . Murder” (115). When interrogated about the death of Siham, Mu‘tassem asserts that he killed her because she admitted adultery in her letters to her husband: “The bitch. She brags about being in love with Abdel-Karim, while Assi is in the detention center like a lion in a cage” (22). The yearning for paternal control, past authority, and certain knowledge permeates the novel, where Siham can only prevail within the rules and under oedipal territorial control. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Assi discovers that political activism has become impossible and suddenly finds himself face to face with his wife: “My uncle said that we were defeated after the defeat of the Socialist block in the Cold War. He said that the Arabs bet on Moscow, while the Israelis bet on Washington. And Washington is winning the war. The cold war has ended” (193). Assi wonders whether the war between Mu‘tassem and himself over Siham has just begun. Mu‘tassem represents the atavistic past that has swept away Assi’s modern ideology of resistance, and left the latter with the sole cause of punishing his wife in order to save his honor.5 The political spills over into the core of the private sphere where Assi releases his anger on the only “culprit” he can actually punish. The inextricable relation between private and public is further reinforced through the use of political language to describe a 5. See Ehrenreich 1995, 284.

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domestic situation. When the parents of Mu‘tassem and Hiyam meet to discuss their children’s insane decision to marry, Mu‘tassem is enraged that the two people directly involved are not present: “You are looking for a settlement, a solution, to conclude a treaty in the absence of the two concerned parties?” (33). He tells us that when he hit the table with his steely grip, he recalled how Khrushchev hit the table with his shoe in protest at the United Nations (33). The sexual relations between Mu‘tassem and Hiyam are described in military terms: he tells us that when the “strange explosion” occurs, he thinks it is Hiyam’s heart bursting, but when the earth lifts them up and throws them down again, Hiyam is transformed into a tribe of women thirsty for love and into an atomic bomb. He admits that he did not know then that “American planes [in Iraq] had shelled the poisoned warehouse” (26). The confusion of the personal and political in Mu‘tassem’s mind affirms the intrusion of the public realm into the private, making them inextricably connected.6 Mu‘tassem tells us that he is not sure whether it was a dream or a real incident, but he saw through the open window Abdel-Karim playing the piano with Siham behind him, “her greedy looks falling upon his half naked back, touching his uncontrollable fingers dancing on the piano keys” (24–25). Mu‘tassem affirms that someone had told him that the smell of men’s sweat intensifies women’s lust, and he envisages Siham standing behind Abdel-Karim, “her eyes piercing the light transparent summer shirt, damp with sweat” (38). Abdel-Karim is the object of Siham’s gaze, and in his relationship with Siham, it is she who plays the active role in their relationship.7 According to Assi, Abdel-Karim is a womanizer who never imposes himself on women but is willing whenever a woman approaches him. Assi’s mad jealousy can also be attributed to Abdel-Karim’s social class and his popularity with women of a certain class, since in addition to his musical talents, he is well-versed in the English, French, and Italian languages. Assi resents Abdel-Karim’s pacifist refinement and delicacy, which even surpasses the tenderness and sensitivity of women, and regards him as phony and conformist, associating him with the American poison emanating from Iraq. On her part, Siham’s relationship with the musician can be attributed to her disillusionment with all political ideologies and her desire for a world with “no 6. See Millet 1972. 7. See Mulvey 1975.

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wars, no violence, no subjugation, no repression” (39). She befriends the musician, the weaker of the two men, and is aware that her husband’s brand of violent masculinity is of the atavistic past. But for Assi, music is a trifling and trivial occupation, unbecoming to men. Siham’s words “I wish you were a musician and not a politician” drive Assi crazy (81). The prevailing of the “soft” musician over the “masculine” activist shakes Assi, who begins to feel that the values he believes in are becoming marginalized and that there are no great causes left for him to fight for. Under the cover of educational, social, and ideological demands, Assi manages to suppress perverse inclinations, but when his political career proves futile and his wife betrays him with a man he views as spineless, Assi’s sense of injured manhood finds refuge in the monster within himself that he unleashes in the form of Mu‘tassem. The narrative underscores the fragmenting of the self and the bringing of the pieces together into a character who speaks with a single voice when Assi loses his identity to Mu‘tassem. The absence of a coherent self here is reflected in the absence of a coherent plot, and the novel’s end is unresolved. Assi’s “I” becomes overwhelmed by what lies beneath it, by its inner fissures and depths, which surface in the form of bestial and aggressive drives represented by Mu‘tassem (the primitive man). Mu‘tassem is a being so inherently violent and degenerate that Assi sometimes stands aghast at what he is capable of enacting. Mu‘tassem is emotionally unstable, ignorant, primitive, vengeful, and violent, a visible manifestation of Assi’s nightmare. His ruthless contempt for women impels him to dismiss the act of killing one’s wife as a minor issue compared to the death of hundreds of thousands of millions in Hiroshima. His exoneration of physical brutality and ruthless manipulation of women seems to be the very fact of his maleness. The Assi/Mu‘tassem bond is emblematic of unrecognized male homosexual desire, rebellious homoerotic ties constituting a love triangle (Girard 1965, 2) with Siham at the apex, and an acrimonious response to Siham’s forceful and demonstrative sexuality. Feeling terrified at Siham’s subversive behavior, Assi and Mu‘tassem recapture and cling to the old order instead of looking forward. If they rebel against the political and social problems within Arab societies, they remain strict adherents of the traditional moral values sustained by these societies. The Assi/Mu‘tassem relation reveals a fracturing of the self, a condition of living alternately with opposing tendencies and estrangement from the central

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self, a sign of self-dissolution rather than self-possession. The Assi/Mu‘tassem relation stands as a damning commentary on the self-alienation and schizophrenia that comes with Assi’s accelerating dissension and political rebellion and his strong partiality to personal codes of honor. Mu‘tassem’s actions are monstrous exaggerations of Assi’s desires and increasing sense of persecution at the hands of the state; his wife’s preference for “the world of music to the world of violent revolution and bloody coups d’états” (81) thrust him into primitive acts of violence against her. The novel enforces a polyphonic discourse where Assi and Mu‘tassem present their viewpoints as separate individuals, but the smoke coming from Iraq must be resisted, and the murder of Siham is one manifestation. By killing his wife and solidifying ideologies of honor, Assi ensures that Siham is prevented from acting as an independent subject. At the same time, by becoming one with Mu‘tassem and erasing individual and idiosyncratic differences, Assi/Mu‘tassem end up as one collective body that would more effectively confront the foreign threat lurking in nearby Iraq. The musician represents a subordinate masculinity tinged with effeminacy, and disempowerment constituting a threat to Assi’s brand of manhood that is inextricable from his bellicose revolutionary struggle. Assi is shocked by his wife’s desire for a feminized man who is anathema to the virile, militaristic, and group-oriented masculinity represented by Assi. Not only does Assi disintegrate over the course of this text, but the whole notion of character is undermined in a narrative that promotes ideals of collectivity that are violently opposed to the cult of individuality and personhood. Assi’s integration with Mu‘tassem underscores his regression to a primitive masculinity, a rueful commentary on the damage to the psyche by the oppressive political situation in the country and in the area as a whole. W h e n Wom a n T r av e r se s t h e Ph a l l ic Ci t y While Hassiba confronts patriarchy within the home space, Zahra in Hanan AlShaykh’s The Story of Zahra (Hikayat Zahrah, 1980) contends with male violence both in the domestic sphere and the outer spaces of the city. The narrative begins with the protagonist Zahra reflecting on the roots of her mental impairment in her childhood and adolescence. She was forced to share her mother’s adulterous bed with her mother’s lover, who offered her sweets to secure her silence. Her

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childhood was haunted by images of aggressive, appropriating, villainous masculinity with Zahra struggling in a hostile environment that robbed her of her mother and transformed her into a frightened and defensive child. Zahra’s first glimpse of adult sexuality consisted of a deadly dread of her father’s Hitler-like mustache and leather belt aimed at her mother and at herself for hiding information about her mother’s sexual behavior. She refers to her father as “this god in his khaki suit” and expresses her “dread of his tram-car, dread of his strong body” (14). On one occasion, she describes the violence he inflicts on her mother: “My mother was sprawled on the kitchen floor as my father, in his khaki suit, his leather belt in one hand, was beating her. . . . Seeing the blood covering her face, I tore at my hair and beat my chest, exactly as she would herself” (15). She recalls her mother and herself screaming and shaking behind the door, and Zahra recounts how her face and, more important, her inner psyche have become scarred. Her father taunts her about her acne and tells her that she will end up an old maid with no marriage prospects if she continues to squeeze her pimples; no man would want to marry her with her “drawn cheeks and pimpled, pock-marked face” (29). Her feelings of inferiority are accentuated by socially constructed notions of beauty for women, where Zahra considers herself plain and unattractive. In order to protect herself, she refuses to mingle with people or communicate with them: “I couldn’t talk to them [people], not even to say, ‘How are you?’ They showed their sarcasm, because of my fat, because of my acne. They never tried to get to know me and see me for the person I really was. They cared only about appearance, and mine had gone to the dogs” (127). The novel creates a mosaic of masculinities mirroring a contested and fractured vision of manliness in a country at war. At home, her brother Ahmad and father are privileged with chicken and meat: “Meat continued to be for Ahmad. Eggs were for Ahmad. Fresh tomatoes were for Ahmad. So were the fattest olives” (25). If Ahmad was late arriving home, her mother would “rumple his bed and push a pillow down under the bedclothes” (25) in order to conceal his absence from his father. Even when he tries to steal her mother’s gold bracelet, she pretends that it did not happen. Similarly, her father overlooks Ahmad’s defects; even though he barely reads and writes, their father thinks of educational plans for him to study electrical engineering in America. Ahmad is privileged by the mere fact that he is a boy, and his sister who is studious and clever is brushed aside. When the war breaks out, Ahmad joins the militia, wears a military suit, and carries a

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Kalashnikov rifle. At the start, we are told that Ahmad and his comrades join the war because they want to draw attention to the “demands of the repressed Shiite minority, they want to destroy imperialism along with the isolationist forces and the decaying, tattered regime,” and to fight oppression (142). But Ahmad soon forgets all such goals and is transformed into a coarse militiaman who takes pleasure in looting, desecrating, and destroying. The quintessential masculine activity of war transforms Ahmad into a symbol of power and a loathsome perpetrator of horror, savagery, and destruction. The apotheosis of war by Ahmad and many other young men reveals how their obsession with masculine identity is in part a response to diminished male autonomy in private, economic, and political life. Ahmad joins the war and becomes part of an all-male bonding that consists of tough, economically and socially depraved men who steal and brag about their deeds. Ahmad stores the goods he has stolen at home: “a motley collection: chandeliers, ovens, shoes, medicines, and some hair dryers” (167). In order to bear the gruesome scenes they encounter such as a friend’s “guts spilled out beside his new watch” (168), Ahmad, like his companions, takes drugs to deal with a contradictory and unstable state of maleness where he is both aggressor and victim. His exaggerated masculinity fostered by the chaos allows him to feel free to masturbate in the presence of Zahra. Ahmad tells his sister that the militias control the city and he is ecstatic since no “day passes in which I do not perform an act once prohibited by government or law or mere public opinion” (163). He admits that he dreads the end of the war because “he would then amount to nothing? Overnight, he would become a ghost stalking the streets” (165). Since the war erases his earlier sense of disempowerment and social inferiority, Ahmad is determined to escape from his submerged feelings of ineptness and defeat and immerse himself in the war inferno that provides him with the unlimited power of a robust masculinity. When the war began he was, like Zahra, “so nervous and afraid,” but now he is “like the cock of the roost, spreading [his] rampant feathers” (168). He wants the war to persist, for he does not want “to worry about what to do next” (144) and does not want to be sidelined once again: “The war has structured my days and nights, my financial status, my very self. It has given me a task that suits me” (168). Zahra tells us that she had no willpower to resist Malek, a married man and friend of her brother. She admits that she did not love Malek, indeed, she could not stand him, but she cannot tell why she had sex with him and had to have

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two abortions as a result. She attributes her vulnerability to her plainness and lack of sex appeal and to her feelings of inferiority. In her view, a person who “has a face and body like mine is easily persuaded” (30), and she goes along with Malek like someone mesmerized. Furthermore, since Zahra is accustomed to submissiveness within the home, she is unable to flout the authority of men and submits without resistance. She asserts ironically that Malek begins his seduction by talking about friendship and showing concern by offering her a job and talking of love, “of Khalil Gibran and platonic affection” (32). In a devastating war context, the romantic ideals propounded by the Lebanese writer Gibran Khalil Gibran are no longer relevant. Zahra and Malek’s meeting in a café comes to an end when he tells her that because he is concerned about her reputation, it is not advisable for her to be seen with a married man. Nevertheless, when he actually has sex with her in the garage, she tells us that “it seemed he had swallowed his tongue and, along with it, the eulogies on platonic love and Khalil Gibran’s famous quotations” (33). As his name conveys in Arabic, Malek is the one who possesses, the one who wants to hold her in his grip and use her as a sexual convenience. Far from a monolithic masculinity that embodies aggression and violence, the novel presents a mosaic of masculinities where al-Shaykh enables us to hear the voices of two men in addition to Zahra. Aligning gender with the land, Hashem (the second narrator), views his niece Zahra as a symbol of the homeland. When he first meets her, he brushes off present-day decadence and conjures up the days of his youth when strength was infinite and a steadfast body enabled him to devote his life to the political party he belonged to and to his country. As a young man and member of the Popular Syrian party that struggles for a “greater Syria,” Hashem is described as a tough, terribly excitable man who believes in action rather than words. He tells us that after joining the party, he “felt like a grenade ready to explode at any moment” (49). Hashem holds extreme views, and since he believes that his party possesses the truth, he advocates the extermination of all other parties that have a different ideology. As a result, many members of his own party accuse him of “political hooliganism” (50), and of possessing “a whole bundle of inferiority complexes” (50–51). They attribute his inability “to engage in any discussion that demands more than an instinctive intelligence” to his limited education (52). As a result, instead of pondering and observing, he opts for risk-taking action and adventure, believing, as one party member puts

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it, that the party is “a boxing match” (54). Eventually, Hashem, like many others, is forced to leave the country after a failed coup, but the past remains very much part of his consciousness. At first, he keeps his ties with the homeland through Zahra’s letters and admits that the sheer fact that he writes long letters “at least ten pages long” reveal that he is perhaps as disturbed as his own niece (67). Zahra and her uncle exchange letters not to communicate but rather to overcome their personal neuroses. Their letters reveal a desire to come to terms with their own problems. For instance, her uncle notes that Zahra “wrote about the same subjects, and only once did she answer a question which I had put to her a year earlier” (67). When Zahra meets her uncle in Africa, she notes “how very idealistic he was about his country” (19). At the same time she tells us how he begins to harass her sexually, forcing her to hide in the bathroom. One evening in the movies, he goes as far as putting “an arm round my shoulders and . . . hugging me. I was left breathless, incredulous, motionless as his hand squeezed my shoulder” (21). While staying in her uncle’s house in Africa, she tells us that he had the audacity to read her diary without permission, thinking that he is entitled to this since he is her uncle and the man of the house. Even when she stops him, he does not give up and resumes “his frenzied search of the room, thrashing about as if he were an eagle which had mistakenly blundered in and was looking for a way out, or as if he were a hungry rat, scavenging for food” (27). On another occasion, he lies by her side and starts “to lick my fingers . . . saying how sharply he longed for his family” (35), but Zahra says “even through his trousers and my nightgown, I felt his penis throbbing against my thigh” (35). Zahra hates herself because she does not have the courage to protest, and her only reaction is a deadly silence. She feels “like a rat in a trap” (101) where the bathroom is the only refuge from her uncle’s harassment. Even when Hashem attributes his attraction to Zahra to his yearning for the homeland, the words he employs are charged with sexual innuendoes aimed at Zahra the woman rather than the homeland. He describes Zahra as the only one who could respond to “the intensity of my glances, the beating of my heart, the trembling of my hands against the huge tree trunks that resembled giants and elephants. This tired, sad butterfly had alighted on me. She didn’t realize how I was like a new-hatched bird, opening its tiny beak almost to tearing point for one drop of water, one grain of seed” (70). He even voices his intentions plainly and undisguisedly: “If you were to turn into someone other

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than my niece, I would marry you. Don’t whisper it to anyone. Your eyes have a sadness I like. In your silence there is a sadness I love” (71). Indeed, the vast majority of the men Zahra has contact with turn out to be sexual abusers. Sleeping next to her grandfather, “it seemed as if a cold hand furtively moved in my panties” (122), and she suspects that it is her cousin Kassem whom she had met the day before at her grandfather’s house. Even though her uncle harasses and badgers his niece, he is a different man when Zahra breaks down. He takes her to the hospital, pays the bill, waits by her side, and helps her to “walk to the bathroom, where he waited until I was done, then brought me back to bed” (117). When Majed (the man Zahra marries in Africa) tells her uncle that his niece is not a virgin, the uncle defends Zahra and assures Majed that it is “beside the point and not worth mentioning. . . . This is not something to make a fuss about in the twentieth century” (112). Majed (the third narrator), another man Zahra encounters in Africa, proposes to her the first day he meets her: “Just like that, simple . . . no preambles” (28). But Majed’s true reason for asking to marry her on the spot is that she is Hashem’s niece, who comes from a better family background than his own, and more importantly, she is a “ready-made bride” (73). By marrying her, “I’ll be saved from having to go to Lebanon to look for a wife. I’ll save the costs of travel and trousseau, for I’ve heard that brides here do not expect a trousseau as they do back home” (73). He admits that he was a nonentity in Lebanon because he had no money, but here, in Africa, he wants to make money in order to win the respect of the world. His earliest recollections are of a poverty-stricken family, with his father “carrying his anvil, his hammer, and a box of nails” (74) around the streets to make ends meet. Majid wants to get over his sense of inferiority and emasculation and to make money to stop his mother from working as a servant in Beirut. He recalls how she used to take him to work with her and make him sit in “the kitchen surrounded by pairs of shoes” (77) that he was supposed to shine in order to make some extra pennies for the family. His marriage to Zahra gives him contentment at many levels—the social, the economic, and the sexual, where he is now “the owner of a woman’s body that I could make love to whenever I wished”—and as a result, he is certain that his “feelings of deprivation must dwindle” (83). But soon he discovers that his wife is not a virgin: “I did not ask for a sea of blood, I would have settled for one drop, but could only cry out, as if in a trance, ‘Cursed woman! Daughter of a cursed

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woman’” (84). Despite his anger and a strong sense that he has been fooled, he thanks God “that my mother was far away, far from this mess, and could not ask to see the stained sheets so that she might display them to Zahra’s mother, to the neighbors and relatives” (86). After he learns that Zahra has had two abortions, he decides to forget about it since such issues are “insignificant here in Africa, where there is no culture, no environment, no family to blow them up out of all proportion; for here every man stands on his own like a lone tree, like someone without a past who only has himself” (88). Tradition appears to weigh down on Majed, but since he is miles away from oppressive customs, traditions, and expectations of men back home, he is ready to “start from scratch with Zahra, so long as she, too, can forget her past and grow happier, speak to me, help me with my work, bear my children” (88). In the face of an unforeseen situation, Majid decides to modify his traditional views, to adjust to the new situation, and to accommodate old definitions of morality to new conditions. While Zahra is portrayed as an archetypal victim of men, Majid himself is not a “typical abuser” (Zeidan 1995, 209) but rather a dupe of his wife’s tricks and deceptions. Zahra herself admits that Majid is blameless, for, as the “wife of his dreams, all I had brought him was deception and disappointment” (106). When Zahra has a nervous breakdown, Majid does not have the faintest idea what Zahra is suffering from for he has never heard of mental illness: “I had never before heard that hospitals could be for those who wept and those who quieted them down. My understanding was that hospitals existed to treat people who suffered from terrible diseases or needed operations” (90). But as long as her illness does not turn into a scandal, he is ready to put up with it. In Africa, he is freed from the binding chains of tradition and can afford to modify antiquated customs and habits.8 When Zahra returns from Africa after divorcing her husband, she notes that her father’s fascistic rule over the family has waned in the glare of the new militarism and primitive violence precipitated by the war. Zahra observes that he has aged and pined away and that he is “no longer a fat monster on whose chest and shoulders black hairs curled like cockroaches” (138). The novel reflects the

8. In an interview with Paula Sunderman, Al-Shaykh underlines her sympathy with women as well as men: “I feel that [women] are victims of society more than victims of men because men are sometimes victims of society as well” (Al-Shaykh 1992, 629).

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shifting power relations and patterns of domination and subordination within the particular historical setting of the war. Zahra notes that her father has changed and has emerged as a being who deplores sectarian divisions and is critical of Ahmad, who has immersed himself in this inferno of violence and hatred. When his son gives him money, the father honorably rejects it and blames his wife for accepting the money, disclosing a strong sense of integrity that his wife appears to be deficient in: “I wouldn’t touch such cursed money. It belongs to martyrs and orphans. You did wrong in accepting it” (132). Back home in a war-torn city, Zahra feels better when she becomes involved in the collectivity. She volunteers to work at a casualty ward but finds herself face to face with the gruesome reality of the war: “I was no use to anyone, with my constant trembling and my soul permeated with the groans of the wounded” (134–35). Despite her inability to cope with human suffering, she is able to voice her opinion and express outrage and disbelief at the atrocities of the war. Her trip to Africa has been therapeutic despite her suffering and depression and has given her back her voice and her self. Zahra discovers that having managed to dump the “threadbare secret” (126) of not being a virgin and of having had two abortions, her old feelings of inferiority have disappeared, and she finds herself returning to normal. The first time Zahra hears of a sniper on the roof next to her aunt’s apartment block, she panics and decides to contact a radio station or newspaper about a sniper who kills people indiscriminately on both sides of the green line. But her neighbor warns her against it for fear of retaliation by the sniper. After this incident, she becomes obsessed with the sniper and with counting the “numbers of those killed by him” (156). Eventually, she decides to meet him face to face, claiming that the reason is “humanitarian”: to put an end to his indiscriminate killings. The first time she sets eye on the sniper, she describes him as “leaning against the water cistern, his feet spread out and a clay pitcher at his side. Binoculars dangled around his neck and his hands rested on the rifle, dormant on his hip. He looked as if he slept” (157). Her description of the sniper is clearly tinged with sexual overtones. The binocular, the pitcher, and the rifle are phallic symbols that associate the sniper with a virile masculinity and reinforce Zahra’s sexual attraction to him. Miriam Cooke and Joseph Zeidan maintain that Zahra sees this “monster” as a benign being. Cooke asserts that Zahra sees the sniper as approachable and

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accommodating: “The sniper is described as a brother, a lover, a child. He is a human that can be approached and touched. There is hope, after all, if the symbol of the war’s anonymous savagery can be personalized and then reasoned with as sister, lover or mother” (1996, 29). Similarly, Zeidan affirms that “his relaxed state and the rifle’s ‘dormancy’ preclude the one image one might expect from a sniper in this situation—that of sexual potency. Aggression, or even danger” (1995, 216). Looking at the sniper, Zahra is not sure whether he is asleep or not, but prefers to see him as a harmless being despite the fact that he carries his rifle and is in a position of readiness and preparedness. Her attitude to the sniper is confused and contradictory, and her story is replete with attempts to justify her puzzling attraction to this violent man. She maintains that “his reflexes, seeming so human, put him for me in the category of human being” (174). At the same time, she wonders if he is insane or whether it is necessary for him to kill, but then she dismisses the idea by maintaining she has “never seen him grow emotional” and that “he always seems well-balanced and normally behaved” (174). When she first sees him on the roof, she takes off her clothes and wraps a towel around her waist and head to give the impression that she has just had a bath. Rather than attack her, he talks to her and allows her to go in peace. His apathetic attitude annoys her and intensifies her feelings of inferiority and anger: “I found myself hating the sniper for having seen me half-naked and heard me humming a song. Knowing I was alone on the roof, he had brushed me aside, as if I had no importance” (159). She feels that she has lost the opportunity of making him “look at me as a man would look at a woman in peacetime” (159). When she begins to have sex with him every afternoon, her “humanitarian” mission is brushed aside. Her idea of engaging him with sex to distract his attention and save innocent lives proves sentimental and unrealistic, and she soon discovers that her “visits only replaced his siestas” (160). Her “feminine sense of responsibility, connection, caring and loving,” as Cooke puts it (104), has waned in the glare of the pleasure she experiences with the sniper for the first time in her life. Zahra’s claim that she has a moral agenda and that she was “reaching out to others” (Cooke 1996, 104) was a pretext to hide her romantic fascination with powerful masculinity and a man who is virile, forceful, risk-taking, and violent. She finds the sniper a good catch since his “lack of contact with life or women . . . made me the center of his world” (161). She no longer feels that she has to compete

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with other women—such as Malek’s wife—and she feels “grateful” to the sniper “for accepting me despite my plainness” since she assumes that the sniper knows that “beauty is not everything” (161). Now when she looks at the dazzling beauty of the Persian woman in the print hanging next to her wardrobe, she no longer feels different but is glad that she has “joined that species of woman and am able to bear a comparison with her” (184). Zahra does not possess her mother’s beauty, her blue eyes, dimpled chin, round face, fair hair, and the ability to have a lover who loves her. All the men she has had contact with have treated her as a sexual convenience, but she insists that now it is different. The war has changed all that and has “made beauty, money, terror and convention all equally irrelevant” (161). Zahra discovers that the environment surrounding war and violence can provide her with erotic autonomy. The war releases her sexual desires and incites her to make the first sexual choice in her life. For instance, she is the one who breaks the sociosexual taboos and takes the initiative with the sniper and even contemplates proposing marriage to him. While she engages in a struggle against male power, she is also engaged in a struggle for power, for becoming the subject of the narrative by taking meaning into her own hands and assuming a subjectivity and sexuality of her own. Zahra’s carnivalesque war world suspends values, traditions, hierarchies, and prohibitions in favor of heteroglot exuberance, chaos, excess, and permissiveness.9 This defiance can be seen in her ostentatious display of sexual pleasure: “Oh, sniper, let me cry out in pleasure so that my father hears me and comes to find me sprawled out so. I am one with the dust in this building of death. Let my father see my legs spread wide in submission. Let every part of me submit, from the dark sex between my thighs, to my breasts with their still dormant nipples, my hands able only to tremble” (161). This avowal reveals that she has orgasm not with Sami the man but with the sniper, the embodiment of hyper-masculinity and aggression. Through masochism and submission to cruelty and violence, she submits to the phallic domination of male power that controls the city (Aghacy 2001, 507).

9. “As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and complete” (Bakhtin 1984, 10).

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Even though she defies tradition, she succumbs to it when she begins to have hopes of marrying the sniper, her god of war, and of serving him like any obedient wife: “I want to live alone with a man [the sniper], to tend to his needs each night and morning” (173). It is clear that Zahra has internalized the “ideology of supremacy” (Connell 1995, 83) that limits women’s freedom, denying them the individuality and subjectivity it grants to men. Even though she has the courage to approach the sniper and invite him to have sex with her, she is afraid to open her mouth in his presence, particularly about his vocation: “The few times I have dared to open my mouth have only been to reply to questions about the things he must have heard in Abu Jamil’s restaurant” (173). Their conversation centers exclusively around the past, while his present and recent past are “enshrouded in obscurity” (176). Like her brother, Zahra does not want the war to end for fear her sniper “would slip from my view as soon as the bullets ceased and the rockets stopped, and that I would be left with only my shell to retreat into” (184). If Zahra is the hysterical voice of alterity, a disruptive voice that breaks the silence, it is soon stifled by the brute instinct of a repressive male ideology that continues to haunt her to the end. While it is true, as Cooke maintains, that “Zahra hated men” (her father, her mother’s lover, brother, Majid; 52), it is strange that she should be attracted to a man like the sniper. While she cannot stand her own brother who participates in fighting and looting, she loves the murderous sniper who has killed a large number of innocent civilians. Referring to her brother, she tells us that his “voice irritated me. The brutality in his laugh irritated me. Everything about him irritated me” (187). Nevertheless, under the cover of sentimental ideals about his humanity, approachability, and benevolence, Zahra forgets the sniper’s ruthless brutality. When she learns that she is pregnant, she automatically assumes they will be “married in a speedily held wedding,” for the sniper is a bachelor, unlike her earlier lover (203). While Zahra appears to challenge stable definitions of masculinity, she remains strongly within predominantly traditional masculine ideals that sanction polarization and differentiation. It is Zahra’s gullibility and flawed impression of the sniper and her relationship with him that bring about her tragic end. As Cooke puts it, “War had given Zahra the illusion that she could live in peace as a normal person. But at the point when she began to look beyond the war, to eschew the logic that had given her the strength to live in the present, she fell into the trap. Yes, war had opened up vistas, but within its own logic. It could

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not yet be used to transcend itself” (Cooke 1996, 58). Despite her defiance and her attunement to and reconciliation with the war, she discovers too late that war is the quintessential terrain of men and that her sniper remains as hard as nails. Zahra’s temporary suspension of moral values remains, like her brother’s, a frustrating outburst against marginalization, a failing attempt at ego boosting, self-realization, and self-empowerment. Despite her carnivalesque exuberance and subversive actions, Zahra’s ultimate aim is to be a servile wife and mother; she yearns for the submissive position of commonplace normalcy.

2 The Politics of Masculinity Goal-(Dis)Oriented Masculinity

While the previous chapter focused on a traditional masculinity that aims to remain in control, this chapter deals with a paradoxically progressive and retrograde brand of masculinity that aims at social change and political resistance through armed struggle. Many works of fiction since the second half of the 1960s focus on the intellectual who uses his writing (novel, literature, drama) as an instrument of political mobilization and means of raising consciousness, what Jameson refers to as “the cultural intellectual who is also a political militant, the intellectual who produces both poetry and praxis” (Jameson 1986, 75). These intellectuals have a leadership role in society where they insist on commitment to principles and ideologies and view themselves as individuals with a specific public role, representing the people, confronting the authorities, and engaging in public and political struggle. These works can be construed as oedipal narratives that are generally goal-oriented, linear, and conclusive, focusing on the unitary and univocal self of the intellectual who is committed to a radical revolutionary ideology and who uses words to spread ideology and prepare the ground for political and military struggle.1 Intellectuals can be divided into three categories: those who commit to a revolutionary ideology, view themselves as tough witnesses of the shortcomings of their societies, and believe they have the right to speak on behalf of the people and to lead them to the “right” path; others who have turned into mouthpieces, defending the oppressive state’s ideology and political choices and producing propagandist literature;2 while others feel disillusioned with the political situation, resort to 1. See Said 1996, 10. 2. See, for instance, Al-‘Ujaily 1977.

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purely personal and subjective experiences, adopt elitist and seclusionist stands by seeking refuge in the ivory tower of their inward states of consciousness, and direct their path towards the self rather than the people’s destiny. Such retreat from the public sphere and the focus on personal issues is generally viewed as an unpatriotic indulgence and unmanly escape into words, what Mu’nes Al-Razzaz refers to as “language masturbation” (quoted in Meyer 2001, 195). Since 1967, Arab intellectuals have felt that their attempts to change society have been ineffectual. In Haydar Haydar’s Dreary Times (Al-Zaman Al-Muwhesh, 1993) the male narrator describes Syrian intellectuals as a “gossipy bunch who engage in [purely] theoretical talk” (27), what Elias Khoury refers to as “Kalamologia,” which literally means “talkologia” in English (Khoury 1974, 77). In other words, many Arab intellectuals have become aware of the futility of political commitment under oppressive circumstances and the fear of political retaliation.3 The narratives under study in this chapter also focus on the figure of the fida’i as an epitome of idealized masculinity and on a gendered national identity where the sexual and political are intertwined.4 Even though women are allowed to take part in the resistance, they remain generally outside the arena of war and are viewed as intruders into the routine existence of men who have bonded together in a brotherhood of blood. Nationalistic discourse assigns oppositional roles for men and women based upon biological determinism. The freedom fighter is a mythic figure who is supposed to rescue a sagging masculinity represented by the Arab regimes and resurrect the unproblematic male subject who is fully committed to the cause and to a public world of activity and valorous deeds, a “real man,” both virile and aggressive, who views the “rape” of the nation as an aff ront to manhood itself and an urgent call for action. Resolved to imprint his mark upon the world, the fida’i forges ahead resolutely through exemplary deeds and performances that

3. Ibrahim Abu-Rabi‘ sums up the meaning of crisis for Arab intellectuals: “It is in the juxtaposition between these formulations of tradition versus modernity, ummah versus nation, secularism versus divine sovereignty, democracy versus dictatorship, criticism versus quietism, that the story of contemporary Arab thought lies” (2004, 10). For the gap between the intellectual and society, see Madi 1978, 44. See also Harb 1996, 80. 4. For an early in-depth treatment of nation and sexuality as discreet autonomous constructs, see George L. Mosse’s pioneering work Nationalism and Sexuality (1985).

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testify to an unassailable and unwavering masculinity.5 Nationalist discourse is male-centered, where acts of heroism, revolutionary valor, and self-sacrifice for a higher purpose are major attributes of masculinity. Benedict Anderson cites memorials to the “unknown (national) warrior” as exemplifying the sacred qualities of nationalism, which places sacrifice for the nation above all other attachments including family, class, and religion (Anderson 1983, 17).6 The fascination of Arab writers with the fida’i reflects the centrality of this figure in Arab culture. Many fictional works pay tribute to the fida’i, his sacrifices, and his total commitment to the cause. In Liana Badr’s “A Land of Rock and Thyme,” the female protagonist accidentally comes upon her martyred fida’i husband’s diary: “On another page I saw curving lines that he’d clearly drawn himself. It was a miniature map of Palestine. I read what he’d written by it: ‘Remember. This must be turned into a reality’” (2002, 21). Ahmad the fida’i is revered by his wife and associated “with the shimmering light of a glimmering sunrise. Ahmad came from a town of olives and almonds, and he radiated joy; that’s why when I see pictures of him, he’s always laughing” (27–28). In his wife’s eyes, he is transfigured and idolized for fighting for a sacred cause. He represents a martial brand of masculinity propounded by nationalist discourse that venerates the fida’i, whose defiant valor and firmness of purpose will liberate the vanquished land. In times of crisis, confusion, and contradiction, the fida’i looks to the past and yearns for fi xity and rootedness. Fearing dissolution and uncertainty, he remains fixated on an atavistic past that has the power to grant him identity7 and a sense of control that he does not possess in the present. This fi xation is manifested in the construction of the homeland as a maternal terrain of desire that is constantly deferred. Within national discourse, motherhood is a fundamental form of national service for its reproductive and nurturing role in providing offspring for the revolution, serving male fighters, and running various less-demanding errands. In this role, women are sanctified and revered as mothers and mothers

5. As Michael Herzfeld puts it, “There is less focus on ‘being a good man’ than on ‘being good at being a man’—a stance that stresses performative excellence, the ability to foreground manhood by means of deeds that strikingly ‘speak for themselves’” (1985, 16). 6. See also Klemm 2004. 7. See Anderson 1983, 19.

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of martyrs, and as tropes of the nation, reifying the abstractions of nationhood and history. As a metaphor of the nation, woman is both a source of power, an object of veneration and fetishism, and a victim assaulted and despoiled by the occupier (Yuval-Davis 1997, 1–3), while unmarried and infertile women are marginalized and have no place in the discourse of the nation. Within this framework, woman is viewed as existing in anterior time, while men are historical, engaged in armed struggle, and thrusting forward with modern weapons to liberate the land that symbolizes a lost but unchangeable past. Woman represents life and fertility, the earth that bears fruit despite the surrounding sterility and torpor. She is a mnemonic image that ensures the male’s nostalgia for rootedness in a stable and unchangeable past that has the function of hoisting his collapsing masculinity and giving the past an unquestioned authority. Accordingly, national norms are inextricable from gender norms where men and women are assigned polarized roles and function within a collectivity with an essentialized national identity. These novels operate within a paradigm that privileges collective concerns over individual issues, underscoring an ideological commitment to the public and collective cause of the undaunted fraternity, leaving no room for idiosyncratic selfhood. Accordingly, the land is invested with an aura of nostalgic longing and hankering prurience, for it is the heterosexual male who is supposed to restore and possess the female land, while the homosexual is a subject of contempt and incompetence, considered incapable of true patriotism. Framed as unheroic and effeminate, he is suppressed and marginalized. In addition to those women who fit in with their designated roles as mothers and symbols of the land’s fecundity, there are others who transcend their roles by becoming national actors in various ways, particularly in the intifada. This participation in the struggle helps break down the segregation of spheres and allows women more freedom of movement, more political commitment, and more engagement in the actual fighting and the resistance. Despite the active role many women play, they have to work within the boundaries laid down by men, the initiators and molders of the revolution.8 Nevertheless, many texts reveal that despite sacrifice, the bitter truth is that the nation has not been liberated and that a life of struggle and adventure is turning out to be no more than an anachronistic delusion, an index to a sense of national castration. Indeed, many of these 8. For men as “the main movers of history,” see Jayawardena 1992, 260.

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texts destabilize the supposedly solid image of the fida’i and underline the strong sense of lack and incapacitation felt by many fidayeen. In the narratives under discussion, male subjects are constantly threatened with emasculation, underscoring the feeling among men that they are no longer capable of fully controlling the world, having lost their collective nerve, self-assurance, and the ability to rescue the motherland from the chains of the occupier. These texts are about the multifarious exultations of masculinity, the ambiguities it entails, and the subversion of the autonomous masculine subject whose castration is linked to the land’s inaccessibility and possession by the enemy. I n t e l l e c t ua l a n d F r e e d om F igh t e r In Search of Walid Masoud (Al-Bahth ‘an Walid Mas‘oud, 2000) by Jabra focuses on a fida’i endowed with courage and initiative—a real man—but also stricken with frustrations and feelings of lack and inadequacy. The protagonist, Walid Masoud, a Palestinian intellectual and activist, had fought for twenty-five years against political oppression and had struggled against the Israelis both within and outside the occupied lands. He is devastated by the military setbacks and the loss of the land, but insists all the more forcibly on political and armed struggle. If Walid possesses heroic qualities such as bodily valor, toughness, determination, courage, self-sacrifice, endurance, and obduracy in the face of catastrophe, he suffers at the same time from feelings of defeat, persecution, confi nement, and a lurking anxiety about an underlying soft ness and fragility. Viewing the violation of the land as a form of castration, Walid reacts to this strong feeling of emasculation with a noisy insistence on gender polarities and on ensuring that women remain restricted to the roles assigned to them by the patriarchy. Despite a lifelong resistance to Israeli occupation, he remains traditional, affirming patriarchy and a compulsory heterosexuality as inseparable from national identity. In addition to Walid’s attempts to control women and view them exclusively as metaphors of the land, his relationship with men is contiguous, blending rivalry, jealousy, admiration, and seduction. Having lived in Baghdad for many years, Walid disappears one dark night in the early 1970s, and the novel begins with his friends gathering to hear Walid’s voice on a tape that was left behind in his abandoned car. His friends talk about their relations with Walid and end up uncovering their own ambivalent feelings

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towards him. In the absence of a traditionally authoritative narrator, his friends, who represent conflicting ideological positions, make efforts to uncover the facts, to put the pieces of his autobiography together, to judge and evaluate, and to mirror the truth about him, but the facts remain slippery and equivocal and the plot remains riddled with holes. Abandoning linear time and sequential plotting, the novel tells the story through a series of monologues in an attempt to decipher the enigma of Masoud, where a plurality of registers provides a sense of deferred meaning in that each attempt to speak of him is not seen as the ultimate truth but, rather, of yet another in a series of multifarious discourses. His friends focus on his public actions, particularly his relations with women, which reveal him to be a “Don Juan,” as his mistress Mariam refers to it (129). Unlike Western intellectuals described as “dead from the waist down” (Nuttall 2003), Walid is intellectually and sexually potent. Having internalized social standards set by men, women are attracted to Walid, who is a symbol of physical prowess and sexual virility. Walid proves his potency through numerous sexual encounters and brags about the number of women he has slept with—the quantity rather than quality of his sexual encounters. His promiscuity, phallic energies, and a purely dominative and animalistic approach to women reveal a vaunting and overweening masculinity, where desire is uncompromisingly heterosexual and where feelings and emotions are ruthlessly checked to give free reign to sexual desire. Since he does not want to lose his personal autonomy to a woman, he insists on a purely erotic intimacy where the only happy moments are “abrupt pleasures” that “seem like a rare wine that we drink only in small amounts because there’s so little of it to be had” (194). His friend Ibrahim al-Hajj Nawfal attributes this raw promiscuity to Walid’s refusal to be at the mercy of any woman: “I felt there was something deep down inside of him that he refused to submit to any woman. As soon as his emotions reached the point of bursting, and he began to worry something deep inside him might take fire, he gives his beloved the cold shoulder as a means of prevention, of protection” (259). The narrative is marked by the articulation of desire as nonchalant and perfunctory. Fearing for his sister who is in love with Walid, psychiatrist Tareq Raouf, Walid’s friend, tells her that every “woman he’s had an affair with has been driven to madness or hysteria. You may not be aware of it, but I treated his wife some years back, in 1957, if I remember. You know she went mad, don’t you?” (221). Furthermore, he tells her, Walid’s wife was committed to a mental

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hospital in Bethlehem and his mistress Mariam was on the “brink of madness” (221). Commenting on the sudden disappearance of Walid, Raouf suggests that he may have committed suicide. According to him, those “born with Capricorn in the ascendant” are devoured by the fires of lust and often “fall prey to their own evil desires” (102). Walid’s unbridled masculinity is linked with intellectual potency: in the sections where he is the speaker, he is projected as the one who possesses the word and the drive. His didacticism is a way of confirming his own identity as master of his own fate and of the women who circulate around him. He maintains that his beloved Shahd will have pity on him only when he pays her “a thousand words which he’ll put inside her blouse between her breasts” (15). Shahd is projected as a passive recipient, a “bearer rather than a generator of meaning” (Mulvey 1975, 7). Using bombastic rhetoric, Walid maintains that “Shahd comes across the Euphrates and across the desert to meet her lover as he hurls words into the womb of darkness which gets pregnant with possibilities and keeps the owls and the crows and the nightingales between her thighs up to the moment of orgasm and death” (20). Although his language strikes an intimate note, he remains detached and fundamentally unknown to Shahd and to the rest of his friends. His attachment to her is related to what she provokes and inspires in him, her ability to understand him rather than any attempt on his part to understand her, while he remains entrapped in smug complacency and narcissistic self-absorption. In his relationship with Shahd, he insists on identifying himself with a wild, primitive, and virile masculinity despite the fact that her intellectual capabilities rivaled Walid’s own and many of his male friends. In the novel, women are seen in terms of physical appearance, as objects of the gaze,9 while men are occluded as corporal beings, solidifying the boundaries between man as subject and woman as object. While Shahd possesses “the most beautiful thighs on the banks of the Tigris since Ishtar failed to seduce Gilgamesh” (19), Mariam’s physical endowments, “beauty of face and body,” and “that lust every man loves to imagine in his love,” belonged to Walid, who was “equal to the task” (109). Despite his overwhelming masculinity, he “wasn’t able to put an end to her insomnia and headaches” (109). The text draws attention to gaps and inconsistencies in the smooth 9. See Mulvey 1975, 6–18.

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surface of the discourse, where Walid’s effect on women is not as all-consuming as his friends and he would like to project. Walid remains the center of attraction in Baghdadi society since he is an outsider, a “migrating bird” whose rebellious social and political acts are tolerated, indeed, condoned as he never stays “long enough to be held accountable” (129). Furthermore, Walid remains the center of attraction simply because he is Palestinian and, as his friend Ibrahim puts it, “Palestinians have a particular corner of the Arab conscience these days” (267). He is a figure of idolization and fetishism, and his body signifies masculinity, virility, and the absence of any feminine traits. In fact, like Fater in Mina’s Journey at Dusk, he is an essentialized figure of masculinity in his possession of a world to himself and his active immersion in the resistance. As political activist and resistance fighter, he leads a frugal life where he is always on the move, “his suitcase full of books and papers, with just three or four pieces of clothing” (80). After a visit to Walid, Ibrahim tells us that Walid “looked as though he’d been on a pilgrimage to a saint’s shrine, or met some legendary hero” (49). Being a Christian and a religious nationalist, Walid sees himself as a Christ figure sacrificing himself for the purity of his nation. Greatly influenced by Christ’s words “the poor should inherit the earth” (138), he is convinced that the fidayeen are the ones who will eventually possess the land. All in all, Walid is a bundle of contradictions who is projected as “a wizard with money” (26), combining spirituality, commitment, and sexual energy. Contrary to his mistresses who remain fair game for Walid, his own wife and the mother of his son is protected and remains in the background. Her name is Rima but he always refers to her as “Umm Marwan” (29), reducing her to reproductive functions and confining her to a purely maternal role, where she is barred from the public sphere, deprived of any agency, and later confined to an asylum. Walid is intent on sanctifying motherhood and on seeing his wife as a pure being “far removed from the human dung heap” (252) where she tends the home sphere and upholds an idyllic retreat that bespeaks a nostalgic idealization of the atavistic homeland. In contrast to Walid’s activism, responsibility, sexual promiscuity, and authority, his wife is projected as passive, marginal, and hysterical. As a staunch revolutionary, Walid insists on erecting boundaries between the private and the personal on one side and the public and collective on the other, as his political and military commitment should remain pure and free of any contamination.

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Unable to deal with the irregularities and fluctuations of life with Walid who leads an irascible and hectic existence, his wife ends up in an asylum. Ibrahim attributes Rima’s madness to Walid’s way of life and her constant worries about him: “She used to cling to him. Argue with him, worry every time he went out. . . . She used to go out of the house and pace up and down in the street waiting for him” (237–38). His arrest and banishment traumatized her and gave her a “cruel jolt and disturbed her mind” (238). With “the roaming eyes, the disheveled hair cascading down like splinters of wood” (238), she suddenly “withdrew into herself and closed up like a cocoon” (238), a text silenced by Walid and his friends. But her madness gave him freedom and enabled him to travel extensively around the world, struggle for the cause, and make money. The psychological breakdown of his wife marks the symbolic death of the feminine within him and his release from all feminine forces that threaten to “possess” him. Walid insists on an unproblematic image of himself as potent, self-controlled, and in possession of the higher mental and spiritual faculties that allow him to pursue his goal without any impediment. The novel projects an essentialized national and sexual identity where masculinity and femininity are polarized entities with the male heterosexual in the position of power and at the center of the social, moral, and symbolic order. For twenty-five years, Walid remained a staunch advocate of armed struggle against Israel, and the 1967 debacle proved him right. From the start, Walid is described by his friends as firm “like a razor blade” possessing the “resolve of molten iron in a crucible” (80). He is a model Palestinian man in his determination, self-sacrifice, obduracy in the face of catastrophe, and conviction that Arab regimes are incapable of liberating the land. Walid views the violation of the land as a personal assault and is determined to overcome feelings of shame and emasculation through brave resistance and valorous deeds, affirming the inextricability of heterosexual masculinity and nationalist discourse. Ibrahim refers to him as an activist “prepared to throw bombs, write secret posters, set booby traps for the enemy, all this without worrying whether the world knows about it. . . . It was just a spontaneous part of his being” (267). Likened to Alexander the Great (who ironically was gay), Walid is associated with the fires of passion and with repressed forces that drive him to “fly off the handle at the first touch, just like a match” (34). Being the paradigm of a true revolutionary, he has the courage to face death on a daily basis.

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Following the occupation of the West Bank by the Israelis, he is captured and tortured. When in prison he is threatened in an effort to make him capitulate and confess that he is no Tarzan. He is able to endure and defy the enemy by refusing to confess even when he is threatened with castration. Proud of his firmness, tenacity, and steadfastness of purpose, he is able to take risks and to win the badge of courage. In prison, Walid thinks of his mother, father, son, and homeland. Calling the name of his son, Walid appeals to Marwan to “remember your father; keep his name pure and unsullied, even if they kill him here like a dog” (185). Neither his wife nor his mistresses come to mind in prison, reinforcing the marginal position women occupy in his life.10 As an intellectual and freedom fighter, he is resolute, restrained, inscrutable, resourceful, vain, knowledgeable, authoritative, and secure in his position in the patriarchy. Indeed, his idea of true manhood lies in intellectual vigor, active sexuality, rigid duty, proud nationality, and fearless resistance.11 In the discourse of Arab nationalist thinkers, notably Costantine Zureik, it is impossible to become an intellectual without first being revolutionary at heart, and Walid’s idea of manhood centers on the concretization and actualization of ideology. As Jabra himself puts it, the intellectuals “are the real transformers of society, and the real revolutionaries whether they carried arms for change or not” (quoted in Wadi 1981, 164). Walid tries to reconcile an alienating, shaky present with a cohesive, secure past by achieving epistemological certainty through memories of the homeland and through sexual affairs, without which, according to Kazim’s sister, “he can’t think, write, or achieve anything” (49). Sex is a refuge from “the abyss of his own reality, which is his never-ending nightmare” (20), of defeat, persecution, and siege. Like Fater, his anxieties about an underlying soft ness push him to flaunt his virility in bed, revealing the strong alliance between sexual performance and masculinity in Walid’s mind. Mariam sees Walid’s excessive libido as a form of compensation, “a deep-rooted fear of losing his masculinity” (129). She regards him as a “lost man” who has the illusion of being in control, of possessing a

10. Abu al-Shabab maintains that the “freedom fighter is supposed to be brave, undaunted, arrogant, sacrificing himself for the cause, a lover of women but they come second” (1977, 51). 11. According to Stevi Jackson, “Heterosexual sex has been culturally constructed around the eroticization of power” (1996, 176).

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homeland, of belonging, but whose harsh reality drives him to despair and into bed with women (129). His struggle can be read as a masquerade of power, and the novel evokes with heavy irony the resolute path through life of Walid, the solid man of purpose. This contradiction between outer machismo and inner insecurity, vigorous struggle and emotional deprivation, affirms Walid’s unflagging attempt to prove his masculinity amid the devastation of the present. Unlike Walid, his son Marwan lives in the Sabra refugee camp in Lebanon away from women and from passion, and is totally immersed in the public arena of risk-taking deeds and brave accomplishments. Marwan belongs to a new generation undefi led by the earlier rebuffs, that views resistance as the singular route to liberation and “can’t wait to cross the border” (216). When Wissal, another of Walid’s lovers, first meets him in Lebanon, she records that his “gorgeous eyes were exactly like his father’s, but they had a brighter gleam to them and a cruelty totally missing from Walid’s” (211). Even though he is surrounded by women, Marwan’s mind is somewhere else. When Walid, who is approaching fift y, learns from Wissal that his son wants him to limit his operations to “organizing, financing, and making the necessary connections as a background to the fighting” (214), he reacts in a violent way, banging his head against the wall and “sobbing and moaning horribly” (217). The decline of his youthful prowess makes him feel unworthy and incomplete and drives him to cry like a woman in the presence of Wissal. Walid’s romantic illusions about war and the resistance and his erotic fixation on the past force him to disavow the present whenever he feels that the umbilical cord with the past and the homeland is severed. The homeland, which is compared with Wissal, is perceived by Walid as a feminine site of desire. He tells Wissal, “If I have the right to make love to you and fight the whole world for your sake, and all this when I’m pushing fift y, don’t I have the right to love my country, too, and fight the rest of the world for its sake, even if I were ninety?” (217). His desire to possess the land incites him to infuse it with feminine qualities, interweaving nationalism with sexuality. While his association with women is purely sexual, his relations with men are intellectual, distant, and competitive, which reinforces his own sense of potent manliness. When Kazim critiques one of Walid’s books, the latter is infuriated. Extremely sensitive to criticism, particularly when it comes from a friend who should have understood his situation, Walid reacts by accusing Kazim of lacking the guts to act like a man. He denounces Kazim for lacking a

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practical side and asks him bluntly, “How many demonstrations have you taken part in?” (42). Living in a world of abstractions, Kazim lacks the much needed practical side, and Walid wonders what he knows “about struggle, about yelling and standing naked among wolves?” (44). Contrary to Walid’s risk-taking manliness, Kazim’s masculinity is deficient and parasitic as it depends on a sister for daily sustenance. Kazim represents a milder form of masculinity that is less virile and less potent. In Walid’s eyes, Kazim’s masculinity is anemic, lacking the capacity to impose its natural and obvious authority conferred upon him by the patriarchal culture. In the barren present, Walid escapes into the lush fecundity of the past represented by the homeland that provides him with “constant secret sustenance” (27). Walid’s discourse resonates with poignant longing and nostalgia for the past, which remains a galvanizing metaphor: “I can’t forget the olive trees and the red soil and the cold shady waves where we could eat figs and grapes hanging down in huge clusters from the vines and lying like pregnant women on the red soil and the buzzing of bees and hornets” (93). The images charged with sexual overtones are directly associated with an eroticized homeland,12 and Walid’s desire to possess the land drives him to imbue it with feminine qualities, infusing a public national problem with an erotic and private streak, and interweaving the national with the sexual. The homeland is green and immutable, always in a perpetual static state, and this permanently “remembered plenitude” (Bardenstein 1998, 21) sustains him in the barren present without erasing a fear that a whole way of life is being eradicated: “the swings, the earthen jar vendors, the people squabbling and laughing around the water well, the sellers of Kebab, livers, and spleens, the smell of grilling as it wafted among the olive trees? Where were the bottles of Arak, the beautiful girls and the singers of the traditional folk ballads?” (183). While Walid is cold and detached with women, he is tender, impassioned, and unrestrained when it comes to his country. For Walid, the violation of Palestine is a violation of masculinity to which he reacts with excessive feeling, bravado, and jingoism. Mariam tells us that when he shows her around Jerusalem, he speaks of a land “raped by the enemy. . . . He spoke of this land he knew, inch by inch, as he’d never known any other land, or any woman’s body” (174). When pressed to prove his love, he appeals to his tears and his misery as witnesses and 12. See Parker 1992, 6.

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swears eternal devotion, mourning, “My poor hills, are you weeping? Should I jump out of the jeep into your orchards, bury myself in your mud, and become part of your soil, your thorns, and your anemones?” (183). His active involvement in the revolution coexists with a primitive mythologizing of the feminine land where his love for the homeland is for a female body both “chaste” and “maternal,” a damsel in distress, vanquished by the stranger and occupier yet awaiting her knight’s rescue. While Walid’s male friends view him as an essentialized figure of masculinity and idolize a physically potent, courageous man of action in control of his masculinity, the narrative uncovers more complex dimensions in Walid’s relationship with men, particularly with Tareq Raouf, the psychiatrist. According to Raouf, Walid’s primary problem is “that lust that overwhelmed his mind, that dark satanic power that clouded his thinking, and brought him so low his mind became finally blinded to everything and death became the sole inescapable end” (127). Mattityahu Peled maintains that the doctor envies Walid his success with women and collects information about Walid’s exploits that convince him that Walid is indeed a Don Juan.13 Raouf’s jealousy and desire of Walid is articulated through Mariam whom he has sex with in order to deny, distort, and censor a passionate love for Walid, a love that strikes him with horror. The sexual act with Mariam is an attempt to define his masculinity in a manner acceptable to the ideologies of a patriarchal and heterosexist culture. Raouf articulates Walid’s masculinity in bodily rather than universal and transcendent terms where the latter’s body is objectified, eroticized, and feminized. He describes Walid as strong and muscular and tells us that they “used to swim at the club together and I was always impressed by his compact body” even at the age of fift y (102). In the eyes of Raouf, Walid’s body is a spectacle of desire, an object of the doctor’s erotic gaze and scopophilic desire. His relationship with Walid can be read as homosexual in nature yet heavily repressed. The doctor tells his own subversive story, creating holes in the text where meaning is ruptured. The novel unravels a curious dialectic between what is posed as the need for Raouf to preserve his male integrity and the narrative drive to uncover, to explain the tension between his attraction to women and his repressed passion for Walid. The doctor finally admits unequivocally that “I wasn’t interested in Mariam’s and Jinan’s secrets . . . 13. See Peled 1995.

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My sole preoccupation was with Walid himself. . . . he’d occupied a part of my very being, even though he himself had been totally bound up in his continuous love affairs” (126). Rene Girard’s crucial insight “that the impulse toward the object is ultimately an impulse toward the mediator” (1965, 10) laid important groundwork in its idea of mediated desire, in which the (usually male) subject’s desire for the object (typically female) is prompted by imitation of the desire of another (also usually a male) and termed “the mediator” (Girard 1965, 2). This idea offers potential for understanding the bonds of rivalry between men based on a shared female object of desire and competition. Mariam is desirable not because of her qualities but the bonds that link the two rivals—they are more intense than the ones that link either rival with the beloved. From this viewpoint, Mariam is exchangeable property to solidify the bond between the two men. Paradoxically, this identification with Walid imbues Tariq symbolically with his power since Tariq’s jealousy of Walid is related to a strong desire to emulate him and possess the women he sleeps with. Tareq wonders about the number of women Walid has had affairs with (sometimes more than one woman at the same time), and perhaps imagines himself as one of them. Referring to Walid’s potency, he asserts, “I discovered later it was a strength of a different sort, and it was he himself who alerted me to it. It was a strength I wish I’d never discovered—his sexual strength” (103). When he goes to Mariam’s house in the middle of the night, he tells us that he thought he saw Walid in the mirror even though Mariam categorically denies it. Walid is the object of desire and derision, and the narrative dramatizes the precarious nature of dominant masculinity and the fact that Raouf has a lack that Walid fi lls. When he hears the tape, he feels that his old enemy has finally withdrawn from the battle and can no longer tempt him to cross boundaries of behavior or cast his masculinity in doubt. Approaching fift y and feeling pressured to give up his military struggle to younger and more able-bodied men, Walid opts for a heroic retreat, leaving behind his self-recorded memoirs that transform him in the eyes of his friends into a mythical figure. The novel evokes with heavy irony the resolute path through life of Walid, the man of action, whose struggle can be read as a masquerade of power through excessive libido, intellectual rigidity, and a tireless but frustrating military struggle. Despite all the “practical” attributes of Walid, he still remains an ungraspable abstraction. How else can Walid remain a “hero” in the eye of posterity?

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A De f e at e d F i da’i C on j u r e s U p a H e roic Pa st Unlike Walid, who continues to resist despite the hurdles that face him, the fida’i in The Inheritance (Al-Mirath, 1997) by the Palestinian writer Sahar Khalifah admits defeat but is unable to cope with a new sedentary life. In addition to the fida’i, Khalifah presents various brands of masculinities all focused on resistance and the challenge of being a man in an occupied land. This is a narrative focalized through a woman who is looking for her roots and who discovers that women suffer twice: first at the hands of men and second at the hand of the occupation. The narrator, Zeinab Hamdan, nicknamed Zeina, is a Palestinian born in the United States whose father marries her American mother in order to secure an American green card and divorces her to marry other women and have a “large army of children” (11). Zeina’s father started off as a peddler who sold “goods from Hong Kong claiming them to be sacred gadgets from the Holy Lands” (13). Like his Arab neighbors, her father, who lives in New York, continues to enforce customs and traditions, insisting primarily on the purity and virginity of his daughters. When the neighbor’s daughter gets pregnant outside wedlock, the latter’s father runs after her “like a wild bull” (15) carrying the biggest knife he finds in the kitchen, but he is prevented from slaughtering her by the neighbors. Any alteration to their traditional lifestyles is threatening to their masculinity, sanity, honor, and to their “cultural perseverance and continuity,” to use Mary Layoun’s words (14). This incident frightens Zeina’s father who says that his friend “should have slaughtered” a daughter who had “dirtied his name and marred his honor and made him bow his head before people. If I were in his place, I would have hounded her to hell’s extremities” (15). When his own daughter Zeina gets pregnant, he pursues her to her grandmother’s house and beats her on her stomach, face, and head screaming, “Who is the son of a bitch”? (24). Her American grandmother saves her by shooting him in the arm, and he accuses the old woman of breaking his back in allowing Zeina to escape. Despite everything, Zeina bears no grudge against her father, for she fully understands the tangled codes of honor and masculinity and the desire to protect one’s identity, self-esteem, and the family honor; since he can no longer control her behavior and preserve her ‘ird (honor), he loses his credibility as a man.14 She tells us that 14. For the interplay between ’ard (land) and ‘ird (honor), see Peteet 1993, 51.

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she will never forget the sight of her father with his “bent back under a shame that has accumulated for thousands of years” (25). Zeina does not claim that she has had an unhappy childhood and tells us that except for his wives, and her mother’s lack of love and care, her childhood was a “breeze” (19). Her father was basically a good man “full of memories, jokes and stories he used to tell his children as they gathered around the fire” (19). Even though he was a man of the world, he “would start crying at the mention of the name of an old friend in Damascus or Beirut” (19). Unlike America that is infected with materialism and individualism, the homeland is pure and uncontaminated: “If you need money, you can take it from any friend. No banks, no bills . . . the people there are true Muslims” (16). The text reveals a strong cohesion between the personal and the political, avowing the permeability of boundaries between the public and private, the sexual and political. When Zeina’s father tells his Arab friend that the Americans are “fucking us just like that, blatantly, openly,” his friend responds to this metaphorical expression: “Fucking us? I am the one who fucks and fucks leaving no white or black woman. I fuck the whole lot of them” (17). But when his friend is reminded that his own daughter was “fucked” by an American, Zeina’s father responds that he wants his daughters “to be Arabs [and] to marry Muslim Arabs the way God and his Prophet prescribed” (‘Ala Sunnat Allah wa Rasulihi) (17), and the only way to ensure that is to return home. Back home, her father is no longer the grocer he was in America but a wealthy immigrant who marries the young woman Fitna, who assumes that he has the means to open up a shop for her younger brother. Owing to his age, he is unable to produce an heir, and so in order to ensure the inheritance, his young wife has artificial insemination in the Israeli hospital of Hadassa, a metaphor pointing to the castration of the Palestinian man, the virility of the Israeli, and the inheritance of the land by the Israelis. Having fed upon her father’s stories where the homeland is always a lost paradise, Zeina returns with emotional trepidation but soon discovers that the paradise her father used to talk about is a squalid place filled with rubbish, a place rife with prisons, with “beatings, hunger, unemployment and paucity” (110), a world where men must be tough and ruthless in order to survive. Zeina’s cousin, Mazen, represents the frustration and bitter realization that the optimism of the 1970s (the heyday of the PLO) has settled down into paralysis and disenchantment. Mazen, who now lives on the West Bank, suffers from strong feelings of

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regret and disillusionment in the wake of the evacuation of the Palestinian resistance from Beirut in 1982 and spends his time reminiscing and telling the story of a lost revolution. Despite a foot injury that he sustained in Beirut, Mazen is still tall and handsome, and his attractiveness to Violet and other women is not just because he was a hero and a fida’i, but because of the heroic stories he tells about the revolution and his affairs with women that endorse his sexual potency. Like Walid Masoud who emerges as a hero from the stories told about him by his friends, Mazen tells his own story of past fortitude and heroic deeds. Mazen’s reputation as a man is clearly bound up with feats of courage, valor, and sexual virility (Gilmore 1990, 41) where his experience in Beirut was the overriding test for manliness. Feeling a profound sense of lack and inadequacy in the present, he becomes all the more obsessed with the masculine feats that he had left behind in Beirut. His ideals of the fighter who confronts death and struggles for personal aggrandizement, fame, and honor are shattered. Since manliness and heroic feats are inextricably connected in his mind, he views the resistance as the ultimate test of manliness, but the Beirut debacle brought about a fear about the loss of virile strength, leaving an endless nostalgic longing for the past. His soul is still in Beirut and he wonders how he ended up in such a disheartening place as Wadi Al-Rihan, where he is hit by depression and becomes addicted to drink and to old romantic songs by the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, particularly Al-Atlal (“The Ruins”). In this wretched, backward place, he feels vulnerable and regrets the loss of his earlier charm when he could tell women, “‘Be’ and they came into being” (261). In the sixties, Mazen was nicknamed Guevara, reinforcing the hypermasculine image he projects. But now, all he is left with are decrepit, antiquated, and irrelevant words. Wadi al-Rihan has become a prison where he is forced to lead a lethargic, monotonous, and restrictive life. He laments the loss of his Lebanese girlfriend Salma Gibran: “Salma Beirut, Salma Gibran, Salma Lebanon and the seventies. Beirut is gone. Salma is gone, and we are now in the nineties . . . dreams are lost” (65). In a world of darkness that stretches “from Mauritania to Iran and from Cairo to Dhahran” (275), he loses his bearings and views himself as “a kite blown away by the wind” (275). Outside Lebanon and in the traditional rural atmosphere of Wadi al-Rihan, he is the remains of a man who survives on crumbs of memory and his daily visits to Violet’s home, a refuge that “fills a blank in his life” (107) though only a bad copy of the Beirut experience.

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When he sees the broker putting his hands around his sister, Mazen loses control and knocks him down, causing a scandal. He regrets it afterwards and realizes that the shock made him lose his mind and act impulsively, humiliating his sister and the whole family. He wonders whether he has lost the ability to control himself now that he is far away from the Palestinian organization, or whether personal relations are more complex and unfathomable than public relations. While Mazen cannot accept his sister having affairs with other men, he finds no harm in his own relations. Even though he has affairs with many women, which he believes he is entitled to, such relations remain ephemeral like those with the girls in the organization and the party, which are exclusively for sex and pleasure “but the morning is another day” (158). Zeina is surprised to hear the brothers talk about Nahla, their sister, as though she were retarded when she elopes with a married man and disgraces the family. Nahla’s brother Saeed believes he has a transgressive promiscuous sister whose dangerous sexuality and fitna need to be controlled: she has failed to manage her behavior according to normative standards of respectability. Under the baneful influence of her American cousin, Saeed believes, her behavior has become Western and alien. Sensing that he is losing control over the situation, he insists on drawing boundaries to ensure his authority. He accuses his father and brothers of not being man enough and vows to punish his unruly sister: “What does Miss Nahla think? That the world is loose with no men to put things right?” (159). The ideology of chastity safeguards Saeed’s masculine authority at the expense of his sister who, despite the fact that she spent all her money on her brothers, is in the subordinate position by virtue of their privileged positions within the patriarchy. The brothers’ attitude to their sister is a test of resolve to reaffirm customs and traditions and to protect their values and themselves. By insistently imposing their will and firmness of purpose, Nahla’s brothers manage to brush away fears of the erosion of masculinity under Israeli rule where they occupy subordinate positions. In the novel, masculinity is constantly being put to the test and men are under pressure to perform. One brand of masculinity is seen in Saeed, Nahla’s eldest brother, who is determined to maintain the morality and integrity of the family. When he finally finds his lost sister, he picks up a big knife, but Zeina, the narrator, discovers an unexpected soft ness sensing “from the way he looked that he is not really angry and that he is pretending to be angry . . . to prove to others

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that he is capable of doing it” (164). Saeed wants to frighten his sister; he is clearly under compulsion to perform according to the normative standard. As a result he puts on a show and pretends to be determined to massacre his sister.15 Khalifah presents a variety of masculinities within the same social setting to show that masculinity is not natural, stable, and timeless, but rather historical, volatile, and shifting (Brittan 1989, 36), revealing that there is no archetypal Arab man. Nahla’s third brother Kamal was educated in the West and appears to have different ideas about his sister and the future of the homeland. Living in a diasporic Western setting, Kamal’s liberalism is manifested in his strong belief in reason and science. Based upon such Western liberal values, he believes that the only way to serve his country is through technology and the establishment of a factory on his father’s land, which now only produces tomatoes, cucumbers, and cabbages. He trivializes the land that is held sacred by his father and ascribes high value to technology and practical problem solving, dismissing his father’s views as romantic and outdated. But his father refuses to sell the land or build a factory on it, for he believes that the land is inextricable from traditional values, and he insists on adhering to it in the face of disorienting changes that uproot them. In the face of a dismantled reality, Kamal sees the “need to breathe; we want to live; we want roads like the rest of the world” (125), and he repudiates “theory and empty talk” (238) propounded by the revolution. His aim is to clean up the place and turn it into something civilized and acceptable and to ensure that the people enter the arena of science, constructive systemization, and functional utility. He wonders how his sister Nahla, who had “fasted” so long, could elope with a man as old as her father, who is illiterate and ignorant and who dyes his hair. He believes that she should go to Germany and live her life away from the chains of outdated customs and traditions. If a man like their cousin Abdel Hadi opts for a life of love, politics, travel, and adventures (81), Nahla has no access to any of these luxuries. Her only outlet is marriage. She has reached the age of fift y and is on the verge of menopause, and she panics and is afraid that her menstrual period is going to stop without having “tried it [sex], once in her life time, once” (99). As a result, she decides to marry any man that comes her way regardless of social and cultural background. The prospective groom turns out to be an illiterate broker in his seventies, a pigmy 15. For masculinity as masquerade, see Butler 1999, xxviii, 6.

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with a bloated paunch and puff y eyes, with a wife and hawkish sons to match. Kamal is unable to understand why his sister insists on adhering to the norms of a society that exclude unmarried women from “true womanhood” and force her to marry a man like that. But Nahla finds no alternative in a society that reinforces an essentialist view of gender relations where she is reduced to her sexual and biological functions. As for her vital role in educating and giving financial help to her brothers, it is all but forgotten. Breadwinning, which is a measure of manhood, becomes Nahla’s occupation, revealing a reversal in gender roles, but her brothers have learned to use this supposedly emasculating fact for their own masculine purposes. Despite all the financial help that she has given them, an unmarried woman like Nahla remains at the mercy of her brothers and their wives who want to pocket her money. For instance, her sister-in-law complains that Nahla is “stingy and greedy. All this money? What for? For whom? No child, nothing. Why is she keeping all this money?” (118). Nahla must understand that her brother is struggling to support his family, as a man should. Mazen, who gives his blood and soul for the cause, must be assisted financially by Nahla if she possesses any nationalistic feelings. The novel subverts the view that masculinity is associated with the ability of men to provide financial support to the family where the woman appears to be the major source of income. Nahla’s brothers resort to culturally defined ideals of manhood and nationhood to ensure the subjugation of their sister. In addition to doing the work that is supposed to belong to men, she contributes money and her gold bracelets to the struggle. She even feels that she needs to do more, and believes that had she been born a man like Mazen, she would have stormed the borders and fought as Mazen did (115). Despite the money she spends on Mazen, he insists on stubbornly hanging about, lamenting the past, and doing nothing with the present. Nahla feels hurt that despite all her personal and financial sacrifices, her brothers continue to live parasitically off her until she discovers that life has passed her by and left her a spinster living in a “tomb” (118). Nahla tells her cousin Zeina that she is grieved, for her brothers do not take the trouble to ask about her save when they need money. She sees herself as a forgotten cow with her milk drying up. Her brothers have lived their lives while life has passed her by, and now she is an old maid without a house, a husband, or child. Now that her period has become irregular, she is ready to marry a married man as old as her father rather than die a barren old

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maid at the mercy of her brothers and their wives. When her brothers insist on her divorcing the old man, her reaction is, “Is he not my husband? Even if he ran away, still he is my husband and the wife must be patient” (201). She goes as far as rejecting divorce completely: “What are people going to say about me. Do you want them to say this is a scandal?” (201). The narrator notes the immense difference in priorities between Nahla and her brother Mazen Gifara, who remains immersed in revolutionary ideals while she tries to survive in the real world: “He told the story of Beirut and the revolution, and she talked of home and the family. . . . He told his love story, and she told the story of hunger for one loving touch. He told of the leader and the rock. She told the story of the small worries of a teacher who started off in the bloom of youth and ended up an old maid . . . a flat and sickly word” (66). Her brother Kamal wants her to go to Frankfurt and live her life, but Mazen is strongly opposed to the idea of an Arab woman betraying her culture and acting like a Western woman. For Mazen, Kamal is just “a bookworm,” and as pitiable and laborious “as a donkey” (156). Similarly, the broker dismisses Kamal as naïve and gullible. Kamal’s brand of masculinity, which regards heroism and deeds of valor as things of the past, is not taken seriously in a society that values the fida’i and marginalizes any brand of education that extricates itself from the political and its concomitant ideals and focuses on practical matters. When Kamal expresses his intent to secure a license to establish a factory through the legal procedures, the broker with his “penetrating eyes like a hawk” (127) sees a man who does not realize that it is impossible to get a license this way. This incident makes him all the more convinced that maps and education are not enough for a man to ensure success in business. The broker’s sons represent a masculinity that is certain, assured, and unshakable, a working-class masculinity that is defi ned in terms of excess and public demonstrations of machismo. The masculinity that they represent is in line with sex role theory that underlines “sexual differentiation” and sees male roles as natural and self-evident (Carrigan 1985, 578). The sons enact an exaggerated vitality and aggression to compensate for the sense of castration that they experience under Israeli rule. One of them admits that they “have lived in disgrace and shame for twenty-eight years under the shoe and were beaten until we could no longer take it” (217). As a result they will not compromise when it comes to their rights and are ready to kill their own father to ensure their rightful inheritance:

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in such a world, “if you have a penny, you are worth that penny” (217). When their father Abu Salem elopes with Nahla, the sons vow to separate them for fear that the new wife will take possession of their inheritance. Fearing for his life in a place devoid of law and order, the old man makes off to Jordan leaving his bride at the mercy of his sons, who end up abducting her and hiding her in a garage. The issue is not so much their father’s marriage—since in their view, “it is his right” (215) to marry another woman—but the inheritance. Once the money is securely within their grasp, there is no harm in their father enjoying himself. This ruthlessness enables many men under occupation to survive in a hostile world where traditional moral and social codes do not always have the significance they are supposed to have, and where men remain generally at the mercy of the occupier. At the same time, their mother, even though humiliated by her husband’s marriage, is proud that she has tough sons who are able to protect her rights. Despite everything she is convinced that Abu Salem is a victim lured by a shameless woman. Similarly, Nahla’s brothers are under pressure to take action and defend their honor in a place devoid of law and order, revealing that to be a man in such a framework is to be bound up with action, no matter how callous and brutal. Zeina discovers that what her father had said about people back home giving freely and helping others who are needy is just a myth, and in this lawless place men have to fend for themselves in order to survive. The narrator tells us cynically that the politician Bey Abdel Hadi, Fitna’s rich unmarried cousin, tries to compensate for political frustration and his inability to control history by bragging about his adventures and feats with women. Living under a corrupt leadership consisting of “scoundrels and rogues” (82) in an occupied land inhabited by coarse people, he, like Fater, compensates for political and military ineffectuality by asserting his masculinity through machismo and showing off. He relates how when he was in America, Arab women ran after him because “he is a catch” (85). When he tries to understand this phenomenon from a “scientific perspective” (85), he comes to the conclusion that an Arab man like himself would be “too virile” (85) for an Arab woman. Accordingly, he decides to have affairs with American woman who are more equipped to cope with this robust masculinity, while the Arab woman is a mother, a symbol of nurturance and fertility. He relates to masculinity by flaunting his sexual potency and the ability to bring about female orgasm and tells us about the delights of the flesh and a purely erotic attachment to non-Muslim women.

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Abdel Hadi’s advances to the Palestinian Christian woman Violet (Mazen’s lover) make her feel humiliated for being viewed as a sexual convenience by men. She recalls the 1970s when political leaders, poets, or intellectuals managed to lure women into bed, treating them like prostitutes without paying them for their services, which went “to the revolution and to liberation” (226). She realizes that women in this society occupy subordinate positions and that “real” women are those who “have hatched six children, or those who cover their heads and break their spirit and become colorless and odorless, like bags stuffed with strange material without shape or touch, that is, sacks, a sack of lentils, a sack of rice potato and barley” (224). Liberal women do not benefit from their freedom but rather end up providing free sex for men. As a result, Violet sees no place for her at home and starts thinking seriously of emigration. Nahla and her mother are critical of Mazen’s escapades and his romantic ideals that have become out of date. His mother’s voice of common sense urges her son who has turned forty to wake up from a world of empty dreams and start thinking of the future rather than the past: “My son, what is the end of all this? Beirut is finished. Amman is gone. Tunis is gone, and you are now here . . . what are you going to do with your life. . . . We are fed up with Nasser and Guevara. My son, wake up and look at yourself and see what you’re going to do the rest of your life” (93). From her position of marginality, his mother has insight and resilience to go on with her life despite obstructions. The women in the family believe that Mazen should realize he is Mazen Hamdan, not Gefara, but he insists on feeding on the past. His sister wonders why he who has no source of income insists on bearing the burden of his people when he can hardly cope with his own personal problems. Khalifah’s novel is narrated by a woman and outsider whose detached perspective uncovers the emasculation of men rather than their heroism under occupation. The narrative blurs and subverts gender boundaries and presents a variety of masculinities (reactionary, progressive, military, subaltern, and so forth) that develop in accordance with the social and cultural context and the changes that have occurred in society. This is seen in the differences among Nahla’s brothers, Zeina’s father, Abdil Hadi the broker, and his sons, where these differences disrupt a fi xed and ahistorical definition of masculinity.16 Unlike men 16. See Kandiyoti 1994, 198.

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who are generally idealistic, the women viewed as symbols are, in fact, more sensible, mundane, and less sentimental than the men. T h e Su ba lt e r n T e l l s t h e F i da’i’s R e volu t iona ry S t ory While Mazen spends his days yearning for a lost past, the fida’i in Door to the Sun (Bab al-shams, 1998) by the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury is already in a state of comatose paralysis. The novel is an amalgamation of anecdotes and stories related by Palestinian refugees in Lebanon to the author who was himself a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization. These are eyewitness reports by ordinary people and their version of the Palestinian debacle since 1948. The stories circle around the Palestinian camps of ‘Ayn al-Hilwi, Miyyi wa Miyyi, Sabra, Shatila, the border villages on the Lebanese-Palestinian borders, and the Galilee villages inside Israel. Door to the Sun is a chronicle of the past told through oral history that challenges official history and attempts to subvert it. The narrative consists of a variety of stories told by Khalil (the frame narrator), as well as by his grandfather, his mistress Shams, and his father, mother, and other subaltern and marginalized people who tell stories from a minority perspective.17 Khoury pieces together the scattered stories that intertwine and intersect in an attempt to understand the tragic history of the Palestinians at the time in 1982 when the Palestinian resistance was forced to leave Lebanon.18 Khalil, the frame narrator, refers to himself as a Palestinian man who, being deemed unfit for tough military training, ends up as a practicing medical doctor after three months’ training in China. The narrator identifies with Yunis the “hero” to compensate for his own lack of physical prowess and heroic achievement. Faced with a shattering defeat, he retreats into the past by way of selective autobiographical and oral memories. Though impotent and psychologically debilitated, he finds succor in memory. The stories emerge out of a strong sense of defeat and loss after the Palestinian guerilla fighters are forced to evacuate Beirut, and the whole concept of resistance is now, like Yunis, in a coma. In his early

17. Th is “minority discourse,” as Homi Bhabha refers to it, plays a subversive role in challenging official versions of national history: “Minority discourse . . . contests genealogies of ‘origin’ that lead to claims for cultural supremacy and historical priority” (1994, 157). 18. See Saleh 2001, 139.

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forties, Khalil spends his time tending the ailing Palestinian freedom fighter Yunis whose name changes according to place and military operation (Abu Salem in the camp, Abu Saleh in distant operations, Yunis in Door to the Sun, “the man” in Deir Al-Assad, and Izzeddine in the West strip) who represents a glorious past. If Yunis is in a coma, the narrator too is in a trance or stupor as he is paralyzed, benumbed, and unable to take action. By trying to awaken Yunis from his coma, Khalil is trying to resurrect the past through stories that crisscross and interlace to “reproduce the geographical, historical and psychological map of the tragedy” (Jarrar 1999, 121). Like Walid Massoud, whose friends undertake to tell his story, Yunis exists through stories of his past feats. The stories come to life when Khalil takes refuge inside Yunis’s room after the murder of his girlfriend. Khalil sits by his side to tell stories about himself, Yunis, and other Palestinian stories since the nakba of 1948. While relating these stories, Khalil reflects upon the values of a patriarchal society where men hold sway. For instance, when Yunis’s wife dies, Yunis tells Khalil that “the death of Nahila [his wife] does not matter. A woman does not die except when her man stops loving her” (15). For Khalil, Nahila’s existence is directly linked to her husband’s where their emotional and sexual relationship is inextricable from revolutionary struggle and is fundamental to the construction of national identity where revolution, resistance, and sexuality are interlocked. Khalil wonders if the story of Yunis is one of a freedom fighter or a lover who, although he loves his wife, does not understand how any man could be faithful to one woman when Adam himself “peace be on him, was not faithful to his only woman” (45). While Yunis seeks to fulfill heroic acts of self-assertion and bravery, Nahila’s domestic and private contribution to the struggle is as vital as her husband’s. Nahila represents fertility, voluptuousness, and the corporal body that produces children for the revolution (Hadidi 1999, 7). Yunis manages to reduce Nahila to reproductive and sexual functions, and, as a result, her children fi ll the house. Her job is to look after them and after Yunis’s parents, too. The money Yunis gives her is not enough, but she cannot ask him for more knowing that he is embroiled in an all-consuming mission, fighting for the land, struggling for his own people, and risking his life for them. By participating in the national struggle, Yunis and Nahila represent a brand of nationalism that is directly linked with heterosexuality and reproduction. Like the land, Nahila is feminine, solid, physical, and tangible. In addition to her .

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reproductive functions, she maintains the family and awaits the return of her husband whose masculine potency is such that when she sleeps with him it is as if “I am sleeping with all the men I have known and have not known” (74).19 Nahila’s respect for her heroic, brave, and virile husband who is her man and “all men” (74) at the same time predetermines her inferior position and makes it a foregone conclusion. In his exile, Yunis views Nahila as a trope of the past, a representative of an authentic national identity that erases all contradiction and instability, fi xing men as active and tangential and women as passive and emblematic. Nahila insists on resisting and staying in her village knowing that the Israelis will kill her husband if he returns. The fact that Nahila remains behind in the homeland underlines the narrative of the nation as motherland that is defended through the homosocial resistance. As a fida’i, Yunis becomes immersed in models of masculinity that are divested of the feminine, and his relationship with his wife can be described as sexual but also distant, oblique, and secondary. Nahila looks forward to the future, while her husband remains firmly rooted in an atavistic past. After having sex with her, Yunis always talks of politics, of Jamal Abdel Nasser whom he refers to as the new Salaheddine, but these were issues she could not understand, having ten mouths to feed all by herself. She spends her life trying to please him, but in the end, she gets tired of him and his “journey into the unknown” (399). As Khalil puts it, Yunis saw his life “as scattered fragments. From Palestine to Lebanon, and from Lebanon to Syria, and from prison to prison to another prison,” and ended up living nowhere in particular (391). His wife admits that she hates her mother for marrying her off to “a man who was not a man” (394) and who knows no other job but military struggle. But Khalil believes that Yunis did not really want to return to her and wonders if he was afraid of her. Khalil suggests that deep down, Yunis may have known that Nahila’s masculine qualities of strength and endurance overshadowed him, and that is why he could not bear to expose his weaknesses in her presence. The novel uncovers gaps in the integrity and authority of the patriarch, Yunis, in the face of a powerful female who eclipses his achievements through her tenacity and indefatigable resistance. The text interrogates essentialist assumptions of gender roles and portrays Nahila as the actual breadwinner and supporter of the family, including Yunis’s old parents. While it is supposed to be a masculine story of 19. See Zalman 2003, 203.

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male struggle and female nurturance, the narrative disrupts such rigid gender roles and draws attention to the fluidity of these boundaries. Khalil cannot envisage life without Yunis and views him as a father figure: “You told me that I look like your first son Ibrahim who died. Consider me your son who did not die. Why don’t you open one eye and look at me? I am tired, father” (22). For Khalil, Yunis represents the idealized and stable world of the past as opposed to the anarchy, confusion, and vulnerability of the present. In addressing Yunis, he tries to put the disconnected story together and to make it whole. He admits that he cannot envisage life without Yunis: “Please don’t, death no. What am I going to do after your death?” (21). For Khalil, Yunis is the heroic “wolf of Galilee” (409) who must die in the battlefield, not “in bed” (37), for he is the one who trained George Habash, Wadi‘ Haddad, Hani Al-Hindi, and the entire generation of old activists, and it is through him that Khalil enters the male world of time and action. Yunis is a man of steadfastness and resolution whose struggle is directed towards the goal of liberation through acts of valiance and bellicosity. Khalil wants to know all the details, and how he did what he did. In his encounter with his dying friend, Khalil blames him initially for not defending his village against the Israelis in 1948 even though he was armed and had a British rifle. But then he discovers that Yunis did not shoot for fear that the Jews would take it out on the innocent people in the village, including his own family. Far from being a rash and hot-blooded fighter who uses his gun for any reason, Yunis remains a responsible man who loves his people and wants to spare them any unnecessary suffering and pain despite the fact that he remains part of the revolution machinery whose ultimate aim is to defeat and crush the enemy. Khalil devotes all his time to Yunis: he feeds him, washes him, talks to him at length, and insists on staying by his bedside, for “it is a shame to leave a hero like you to rot in bed” (68). He insists that it does not befit a hero to be put in an old people’s home, and insists that he will kill anyone who tries to touch Yunis or take him anywhere else. Shams, Khalil’s unfaithful girlfriend, tells Khalil how she married her husband, who was supposed to be an engineering student in Beirut but ended up a fida’i at the start of the Lebanese war. She tells him that “her husband used to scare her more than the war itself” (479). He used to “come from nowhere filled with dust” (479), smelling of earth and sweat and penetrate her without bothering to take off his clothes. He was a roving vagabond and fida’i navigating between Ayn

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al-Hilwi refugee camp in the south and the Shatila and Burj al-Barajina camps in Beirut. Unable to accept a fida’i wife who wears trousers and carries a rifle, he decides to return to Jordan. In war-free Jordan, he uses his phallic weapon in the bedroom, which is transformed into a battleground. Shams tells Khalil that her husband used to “crucify me, and point his forefinger like a gun” (502) in an attempt to threaten her. Shams deserts him but decides to reclaim her daughter. In order to have her daughter back, she needs a tough and ferocious fida’i who can contend with her husband, kidnap her daughter, and return her safely to her mother. Accordingly, she goes to bed with any ruthless man who could do the job. Khalil attributes her lack of trust in him to the fact that he had naïvely confessed to her that he was too fragile and cowardly to help her rescue her daughter from her husband. When she is murdered, he is apprehended and interrogated but then released because he is “pathetic, may God help him” (75). Khalil discovers later that Shams murdered her unfaithful lover and was in turn murdered by his family. Shams has the male courage to kill and get killed, while Khalil, fearing for his life, hides inside the hospital. When he is imprisoned in Ansar prison for a month, he loses twenty kilos. His fear of physical torture and sexual castration, which is akin to death, is disclosed in a dream one male prisoner has: “I dreamt yesterday that . . . I was standing on the sidewalk stretching my human (he used to call his organ this odd name) and it was, I don’t know, excuse the word, long, long, meaning longer than the road’s length, when an Israeli tank walked on it” (77). He is terrified because he believes that if a man dreams of his sexual organ being cut, it means he is going to die. Khalil’s obsession with male virility is revealed in the numerous stories he tells the comatose Yunis of men who were afraid to lose their virility in war. One man, he tells us, was wounded in battle, but his single worry was his sexual organ: “Blood was gushing out of him, and he put his hand between his thighs. And when he was sure that the injury was not there, he started jumping with joy before he passed out because of the pain” (179). Yunis’s illness is an outlet for the narrator to run away from his own death by telling the Palestinian story. By talking to the “hero,” Khalil finds a way to better understand himself. Yunis is the model of what a Palestinian man should be like, a mirror that exposes Khalil as inadequate. Khalil relates the Palestinian odyssey to Yunis as he might have related it to himself in the inner recesses of his mind. In his addresses to Yunis, Khalil gives voice to his frustrations, anger,

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and disillusionment with the struggle, viewing himself squarely within the collectivity and evaluating himself in relation to his position within the group. As Jameson puts it, the act of telling “the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious feeling of the collectivity itself” (Jameson 1986, 69). As the novel proceeds, the narrator becomes more critical of his “hero” and the way he conducts his life. Khalil reminds Yunis that when the fidayeen left Lebanon, Yunis was against withdrawal, preferring death to moving out “under the guardianship of the Americans and the Israelis. No, and a thousand times no” (95). Yet Yunis was the first to run away and find refuge in a Christian village, pretending to be a Christian. Khalil’s view is that the Palestinian fighters must withdraw in the manner defeated armies withdraw, and imagines himself part of a Greek epic, going on a new Palestinian odyssey (96). When Khalil finally makes up his mind to stay with Yunis, he goes home to collect his belongings, but there are many objects that he does not care about. While determined to keep the painting with God in kufi handwriting that will shelter and protect him, he does not want “posters of the martyrs” (127) over his head because they no longer mean anything. He tells Yunis, “We used to tremble before the posters of the martyrs, and feel that the martyr will tear the colored picture and return back to us. The poster was a fundamental part of our lives . . . and we all dreamt of seeing our own pictures surrounded by the striking red and the halo of martyrs” (127–28). He reminds Yunis of his friend Adnan, who was diagnosed with depression after being released from an Israeli prison. In order to spare him humiliation, Yunis shoots him in the head, crying, “I have declared you a martyr” (139). Despite all misfortunes, Yunis remains optimistic, however. After the long siege of the Shatila camp in 1985, he tells Khalil that no matter how bad the situation might be, they have no option but to cling to life and avoid death. After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the evacuation of Palestinian fighters from Lebanon, the whole meaning of heroism has changed. Unlike Yunis, Khalil can no longer stand living in a world of deceptions, and he starts looking for other stories than the heroic ones he has been dwelling upon for so long. For Khalil, the hero has become a fossilized relic, and therefore there is no need for Yunis to come back to life. The world has changed and revolutions have faded away: “What a pity how revolutions end! The worst thing is the end of revolutions.

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Revolution is like a human being. It ages, goes senile, and wets in its pants” (142). Yunis represents the old days of heroic feats in Jordan and Lebanon when a man’s heart did not tremble, where words were easy and blood was easy, too. Similarly, the war transforms Khalil into a “doctor” after only three months of training, but now that the war is over, he is reduced to a servant at the hospital and he feels diminished, marginalized, belittled, and exploited. He stops listening to the news and regards himself a corpse. He tells us that the only fruitful action left for him is to reinvent the nation by editing the stories he has heard and those related to Yunis: “otherwise all is lost, and we enter an eternal sleep?” (372). Different stories by different people are fi ltered through Khalil’s consciousness and the odd pieces of Khalil’s Palestinian odyssey are put together in an attempt to rewrite and, accordingly, subvert the official story. He constructs the nation from disconnected tales and fragments and asks “why of all the earth’s peoples [we] have to invent our nation every day” (372). Like a male Scheherazade, he tells the stories to ward off the shadow of death that lurks behind each tale. As Maher Jarrar puts it, “talking is the only way to beat death as Scheherazade has taught us” (121).20 Khalil tells stories of valorous acts committed by Yunis, but since the latter cannot validate them, the line between reality and fiction becomes blurred. Yunis likes razor-sharp words, but the narrator, who is less incisive, cannot reproduce his exact words. Referring to Nuha’s story, he asserts, “Nuha did not describe her grandmother as looking like a tree with broken branches. I have added this in order to try to describe to you the shape of the old woman and her psychological situation and her bleeding wounds” (204–5). In the course of the narrative, he is transformed from a failing doctor into a sort of patient who seeks therapy by telling stories to Yunis. Sitting by Yunis’s sickbed, Khalil manages to build a house and a homeland with words. By talking to Yunis he is actually talking to himself, interrogating himself, coming to terms with himself, but also aware of the fact that words have become hollow and self-defeating: “If talking is a therapy we would have liberated Palestine a long time ago” (163). The only hope left for the narrator is to nurse a dying symbol of the struggle and to take refuge in memories and recollections in order to avoid a desolate present. 20. See Todorov 1977, 73–76; and also Faris 1982.

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A n I n t e l l e c t ua l i n H is I vory T ow e r Unlike the earlier novels that focus on the importance of resistance and armed struggle, The Shadow and the Echo (Al-Zil wa-al-sada, 1989) by the Lebanese writer Youssef Habshi Al-Ashqar, focuses on an intellectual who is totally opposed to war. Iskandar, the protagonist, is the stable center of the novel. Around him rotates the action, and the characters derive their existence from his. Iskandar is a Maronite/Christian from Beitmellat, a village in Mount Lebanon, who lives in West Beirut having inherited a large sum of money. Comfortably off, he builds a mansion with a garden by the sea and dwells in this Edenic setting until the breakout of the war, which leaves house and garden in disarray. The valuable marble statues that adorn the mansion are now covered with linen sheets and the whole place looks like a “mortuary” (14). Mart, his French mistress, deserts him, and his religious sect abandons him when he refuses to donate money to the Christian militias. As a result, Iskandar can no longer go up to his village, for he is considered a traitor to the Christian cause; in wartime, the only effective language is the language of slogans labeling people in oppositional terms: Christian, Muslim, patriotic, traitor, rich, poor, and so forth. For his fellow villagers, Iskandar has violated communal standards, family laws, sectarian affi liation, and kinship ties. At the same time, his own sense of belonging is shaken. As a Christian in a Muslim area, he is viewed by the Muslims as having stayed behind for the selfish desire to stand guard over his property and possessions. Iskandar is isolated physically, emotionally, and intellectually, and as a result, his seclusion seems so complete that he appears to be living in a timeless world without “calendar memory” (101). He extricates himself socially and psychologically from the collectivity with which he had previously identified and opts for individual freedom and agency, focusing on personal judgment rather than on kinship and communal affinity. Iskandar’s way of dealing with the exigencies of change is to adopt a rigid and narcissistic desire to resist. Since he has not killed anyone, he contents himself with the idea that, unlike the ignorant masses, he has remained uncontaminated. Youssef (the second narrator and son of Iskandar’s friend Khalil) hates the “statue” in him and believes that such a man is incapable of love. Ounsi (a former journalist and his lifelong friend) refers to him as “abstract thought” without any impact upon anyone (15). For Ounsi, no one is intimidated by

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Iskandar or afraid of him since he is “neutral and colorless” (15), an intellectual whose brand of “castrated” pure thought festers and decays in the mortuary of his mansion. He is associated with verbal rather than physical skills, and his philosophical frame of mind clearly repels people, indeed, causes them to shun him like the plague. According to his friend Ounsi, the war has no need of emasculated intellectuals like Iskandar who are both cowardly and pusillanimous. Ounsi believes that the war cannot accommodate people who remain on the fence, someone like Iskandar who is anemic, colorless, and noncommittal. The marble statues that bedeck his house attest to his rigidity and inflexibility and to the fact that he is effaced and irrelevant. Like his statue of Buddha, he remains cold, impassive, and impervious to the explosive and fiery world around him. The hard exterior he has put in place alienates and antagonizes the men who know him. Unlike Ounsi, who is engaged and committed to a cause, Iskandar assumes the role of an “amateur” intellectual21 who repudiates a war that caters to opportunists and profiteers. All the same, the values he upholds remain abstract and fade under the pressure of the war, represented by the militias and the local and regional powers. As a result, he finds himself ostracized, an “exiled intellectual” (Harb 1996, 28) whose elitist stand isolates him from the group and banishes him to his forsaken house. Despite his exile and banishment, he congratulates himself on the firm stand he has taken to uphold his convictions and maintain his integrity. Despite his seclusion and retreat, Iskandar remains a focal point and center of attraction for the men in his hometown who appear to view his brand of masculinity as attractive, though intimidating and threatening to their own sense of identity. Their relationship to Iskandar remains one of rivalry and competition: Asmar, whose money comes from Africa, is personally jealous of Iskandar because of his superior and higher social status; Youssef’s hatred seems to spring from jealousy, social inferiority, and resentment against his own father who could not make ends meet; while Assad views Iskandar as a traitor and debauchee

21. Said sees “the importance to the intellectual of passionate engagement, risk, exposure, commitment to principles, vulnerability in debating and being involved in worldly causes. . . . The professional [intellectual] claims detachment on the basis of a profession and pretends to objectivity, whereas the amateur is moved neither by rewards nor by the fulfi llment of an immediate career plan but by committed engagement with ideas and values in the public sphere” (1996, 109).

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“living with a degenerate woman” (167) outside marriage. Resentment against what Iskandar represents at all levels (social, economic, intellectual, religious, and political) makes him a signifier and a correlative to their frustrations, desires, and aspirations. Since the men in Iskandar’s hometown, including Youssef and Asmar, can be viewed as heroic types of proletarian masculinity, they are intimidated by Iskandar’s idiosyncrasies that are anathema to their brand of kinship and tribal affi liations. As a result, Iskandar finds his masculinity susceptible to attacks from those embodying alternate masculinities. For them, Iskandar is the object of admiration as well as revulsion. He is envied for possessing an intransigent male intellectuality that is able to confront and challenge them, but he is also despised for not possessing the bellicose masculinity normally exalted and revered in times of war. Iskandar’s voice and ideology dominate the novel, and his model of masculinity is the subject of the envy of all the other men. Iskandar’s language infi ltrates into the discourse of the other characters whose language, no matter what walks of life they come from, mirrors Iskandar’s phallocentrically rational, balanced, and abstract style. From the very beginning, Iskandar attributes the violence in the country to self-serving and mercenary motives: people do not fight for a public cause but rather for selfish, acquisitive reasons. Convinced of the validity of his opinions, Iskandar stands certain of his rightness, views himself as a man of principles, and insists that his version of the truth needs to be imposed on an ignorant, erroneous, and perverted world around him. He maintains that all Lebanon is his country and not just East or West Beirut, and insists on a self-imposed exile in his mansion in West Beirut. He sees himself as above the triviality, opportunism, and hooliganism of the war and turns his back to what he assumes is a destructive and atavistic masculinity. He insists on extricating himself from the backwardness of the fighters, particularly the men in his village. As an intellectual, he believes it is his mission to speak the truth even at the risk of marginalization and exclusion. His sharp honesty and belief in rational facts are derivatives of his religious upbringing, which prohibits lying and stealing, and conditions him to see the world through logical reason rather than unreasonable sentiment. Brought up in a protective cocoon, he was forbidden from climbing trees, playing with other kids, and acting spontaneously. However, no matter how opposed he might be to such strict upbringing, Iskandar is proud of his uniqueness that has set him apart from the “herd,” as Al-Ashqar refers

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to them in an interview with the newspaper Al-Diyar (April 14, 1988). Proud of his intellectual superiority, Iskandar sees himself in a position of advantage and privilege. Nevertheless, the qualities that make him unique condemn him and narrow his vision. Using classical rather than colloquial Arabic, his language can be described as phallocentrically rational, cerebral, abstract, educated, and enmeshed with ideology. A garrulous critic of the world, he insists on remaining marginal and peripheral, shunning the common and ignorant men filling the warring streets of Beirut. When he retreats from the public realm into seclusion and searches for a false security in the face of death, his behavior is challenged by the men in his village. But his inflexibility and stubbornness and his certainty about the validity of his stand are yet another form of hegemony embodying a masculinity based upon the renunciation of brute force, which favors a point of view and a trajectory of action that allows the elitist perspective to dominate all other frames of reference. His obstinacy, intransigence, and self-discipline determine his character, which seeks control in the intellectual rather than the military realm. Iskandar represents a relentlessly monolithic intellectualism that aims at controlling the world and imposing its own hegemonic views. The novel foregrounds debates, arguments, ideas, viewpoints, as well as a masculinist tendency for abstractions, which is another brutal form of behavior analogous to physical violence. Iskandar’s view of the war is rigidly judgmental, and his appraisals are reductive, making no allowance for the manifold complexities of the Lebanese war experience. The narrative foregrounds Iskandar’s prejudices and limitations and offers a variety of masculine roles that appear mostly negative: the corrupt politician, the ruthless militiaman, the calculating opportunist, the idealist, and so on. Iskandar opposes the militiamen and regards them as quintessentially bellicose, pugilistic, and brutal. Despite his apparently pacifist stand against the public world of war and violence and his strong belief in human dignity, the text reveals his tunnel vision, which simplifies human beings and sees them as representatives and archetypes. For instance, his understanding of people involved in the civil war is restricted to a few individuals like Assad and Asmar who are viewed as retrograde and atavistic and whose brand of nationalism is a veneer that covers up selfish motives. Unlike Youssef, who attributes the Christian involvement in the war to a history of fear and slaughter that has entangled them, Iskandar sees

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war waged by a bunch of bloodthirsty opportunists. He concentrates on immediate violations of moral standards and insists on remaining, as Youssef sees him, “lukewarm . . . neutral, clean, cold like marble” (307). His self-absorption drives him to regard himself as “the man-god” (42). Iskandar believes that having replaced the dead God, he has the right answers by way of a logocentric view of the world that seeks control by appealing to discursive reason. Unlike Christ, who loved the sick, Iskandar only looks for healthy individuals who are scarce in the diseased world that surrounds him. In a newspaper interview, Al-Ashqar said that in The Shadow and the Echo, he “wanted to uncover what the war has exposed in the hope that this nation improve and repair after what it has committed” (1990). In another interview, Al-Ashqar speaks of himself and the protagonist Iskandar interchangeably and views himself, like Iskandar, as a tough witness of the failings of the war (1988a). This contiguity between hero and author, where Iskandar’s views articulate the author’s own likes and dislikes, produces a novel of ideas. The narrator’s discourse dominates the novel through Iskandar whose ideology and viewpoint control the novel, leaving no room for the reader to speculate. Iskandar’s repudiation of the war and those who participate in it remains a fixed conviction endorsed by the narrator who is incontestably the author’s mouthpiece. This is an oedipal narrative that favors a singularly dominant point of view and a pattern of structural development that allows the elitist perspective of Iskandar at the center of the text to retain its ascendancy over other perspectives. Believing himself to be the possessor of the truth and the law, Iskandar condemns and passes judgments and sees himself in sharp opposition to the other men in the village who became involved in the war. His Manichean view of the world reveals a simplistic perspective that is unable to grasp the complexity of the Lebanese situation. His approach is linear in the sense that it is rigid, unswerving, and directed towards a fi xed goal (Flannigan-Saint-Aubin, 240), an outright rejection and condemnation of a war of expediency and exploitation. While he condemns Lebanese immigrants, like Assad, and views them as greedy for money and power, Iskandar himself has never worked or earned a single penny, and has done nothing with his money apart from building a mansion and having a mistress. He deludes himself into thinking that he could lead Asmar to a better path than the worship of money (125), an attitude that reveals his self-righteousness and complacency and his belief that he possesses the truth and, therefore, can

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play the role of God. Having inherited all the money he possesses, his masculine honor is bound to his ability to control rather than his capacity for efficacious work and productivity. He advises Ounsi against emigration when he himself remains an alien in his own country. He lives in the hollowness of shadows and the anonymity of masks, and his rigidity and lack of spontaneity hamper any emotive disposition or tendency to express personal feelings. His mind is set on ideas rather than things, on thinking about living rather than on actually living, on remaining a disembodied being rather than a tangible body. In his insistence on impartial abstract thought, he assumes an authoritative stand and believes in the veracity of the course he has taken. His epistemological approach is reinforced through the power to see connections, to explicate and interpret: “The mother is an echo the father an echo, love, friends, as well as the village, the party, the nation and religion, God too is an echo, all that is an echo to the voice of fear” (161). Iskandar’s oppressive tendencies are reflected in his language, which is basically monological, used to limit and restrict meaning. The narrative abounds with general, abstract statements, rigid definitions where a personal matter always has a universal value. In his discourse, the abstract dominates the concrete, and human beings are viewed not as individuals but as representatives of a particular concept or notion. Referring to his mistress Mart, he writes, “The presence of Mart in the house deprives me of my freedom. The presence of the other no matter how shadowy gives the impression of commitment, and total commitment spoils freedom” (44). Being cut off from the world of male action, he compensates by occupying and fi lling the domestic space, thus remasculating it and displacing Mart. In the novel, women are excluded from the conflict and are seen as appendages, passive mothers, sluts, and objects of exchange between men. Mart, Iskandar’s mistress, was originally a singer whom he met in a bar in Paris. He never marries her (perhaps because of his traditional rural mentality that persists despite his attempt to sever relations with the past), and his relationship with her remains purely physical and noncommittal. Despite his disavowal, Mart still believes that Iskandar cares for her, but he hides behind his armor, keeping his feelings under a padlock, and staying impervious to any debilitating feeling in order to retain his autonomy and brace up his masculinity against the dangers of being under a woman’s thumb. Mart believes that his narcissism and self-absorption block his vision and stop him from realizing that there is “no salvation without the other”

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(243). Indeed, Iskandar sees his relationship with Mart as a form of confinement, monotony, and aloneness rather than enthrallment, sharing, and deference. Like his mansion and his statues, Mart is another possession, an article he has acquired in addition to the statues, colored glasses, paintings, Persian rugs, and variegated chinaware. His nationalistic vision is constructed on competition and struggle between men and the erasure of women, who are seen either as mothers or as sexual conveniences. However, the text reveals that Iskandar’s sense of superiority, rationality, and undemonstrative frigidity is a delusion. When his mother dies, he goes up to the village to attend her funeral. Now Iskandar comes to a better understanding of the village community. He becomes aware of his own rigidity, idealism, impracticality, and separation from the people in his village and discovers to his chagrin that he is presumptuous, haughty, and antisocial: “I only know how to be the small god who refuses to go to others and expects the others to come to him” (114). Even though he knows that he will be in danger in the village, he decides to risk his life to attend his mother’s funeral, referring to this action as the only “meaningful deed I have ever done” (50) and the only way to salvation. He begins to feel compassion and empathy with the people of his village and admits that he truly yearns for Ounsi, Mart, and his parents. He revaluates his life and dismisses his earlier actions as futile. Only when he begins to manifest his feminine side does he begin to achieve some happiness. He abandons the cold and undemonstrative world of ideas, reaching out for the tangible, and discovers the importance of “things” in his life. The process of concretization is one of externalization, the going out of the self and the reaching out for the “echo.” When Iskandar arrives in Beitmellat, he sits on the bed and looks at the bedroom: “The old wool blanket, the pillow case, and the quilt” (433). The final chapters are short, for Iskandar has surrendered to the world of “dirt and blood,” has plunged into reality, leaving the world of abstractions and idle talk behind. Youssef’s narrative is a sort of a mise en abyme of Iskandar’s story, which ends in the form of memoirs jotted down in prison. His attitude to Iskandar remains a mixture of attraction and repulsion. Youssef seems confused as to why he became involved in war atrocities (killing, kidnapping, and shelling) and blames it on his desire to show off (before the war he was a nonentity and a failure), to assert his masculinity, to demolish social differences, to achieve material success, to have fun, and to revolt against Iskandar, who represents the father’s authority over the

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son. His involvement in war marks the passage from childhood into the culturally sanctioned form of active and aggressive manhood. But Youssef’s major concern in the novel is his ambivalent feelings for Iskandar, a commingling of love, hate, admiration, and contempt. At one instant, Youssef admits that he is unable to sleep because of Iskandar: “I did not sleep. I was thinking of Iskandar, and I realized how attracted I am to him. And that I did not start hating him today, or a few days ago. I must have hated him from the first day I saw him. You know perhaps I felt with the boy’s sixth sense that he is the man I would have liked to be but will not be able to” (203–4). Discovering that his natural father is not what he thought he was, Youssef feels the need for a substitute. Aware of his parents’ shortcomings (his father’s economic failure and antipathy for war; his mother’s affair with Assad and her partiality for war), he feels the need for a father substitute and compensates by seeing Iskandar as a model to be emulated as well as the paternal figure he always dreamt of. His father’s effeminacy can be compared with Iskandar’s masculinity augmented by his notable social status. Similarly, his mother’s aggressiveness and masculinity, urging her son to join the fighters as opposed to his father’s objection to the war, reveal that his parents constitute a serious threat to Youssef’s sense of gender stability. Accordingly, his attraction to Mart and Iskandar is one way of substituting his real parents with Mart and Iskandar as mother and father figures. At the same time, Youssef, Iskandar, and Mart form an erotic triangle, one that fuses desire and sexuality as well as class and ideology. As Kimmel puts it, “Homoerotic desire is cast as feminine desire, desire for other men. Homophobia is the effort to suppress that desire, to purify all relationships with other men . . . and to ensure that no one could possibly ever mistake one for a homosexual” (Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia,” 188). Indeed, Mart is attractive to Youssef only because she belongs to Iskandar. For Youssef, Iskandar is the real object of sexual and romantic love, but this desire is not expressed sexually because of the taboo on homosexual desire. Youssef’s repressed sexual desire for Iskandar is manifested in a displaced desire for his mistress Mart, who eventually deserts Iskandar to live with Youssef. This apparent displacement is meaningful in a culture where heterosexual desire is the norm, and where Youssef’s inability to dislodge this homoerotic desire drives him to look for a substitute. Youssef’s attraction to Iskandar is interspersed not only with sexual but with emotional and romantic overtones. Youssef recalls an image of Iskandar with

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his bulky figure and brushed hair, walking with sure steps, smiling an enigmatic smile that fascinates him in the same manner that he is delighted with the Milky Way on clear summer nights. When Youssef is no longer able to cope with this disturbing attraction to Iskandar, he adopts a belligerent masculinity that culminates in the violent murder of Iskandar, whom he kills perhaps to exterminate the feminine within him.

3 Dictator as Patriarch The State and the (Dys)Functional Male

In a story titled “The One Who Burnt the Ships” (“Al-Ladhi ’Ahraq alSofon,” 1970), Syrian writer Zakaria Tamir speaks of “eight days” of the Creation where on the eighth day, God “created interrogators who came down to the cities with the police, the prisons, and their chains” (24). With vitriolic irony, the story sums up the plight of the Arab individual under dictatorship, where men pulverized by their regimes wind up facing imprisonment and torture for their political views. The fiction analyzed in this chapter draws attention to the tyranny and oppression to which men are subjected, and to detention as a political statement made by the detainee on behalf of the nation.1 The theme of the intellectual extends to novels under study in this chapter. Here the impact of the military state on the educated elite is crippling in an attempt to turn them into passive citizens and obedient pawns. Rather than focusing on the Zionist enemy or the colonial West, these writers critique their own postcolonial governments and regimes. The state in the Arab world, referred to by Hisham Sharabi as the “neopatriarchal state,”2 is a product of arbitrary power, violence, control, surveillance, and physical confinement. The strategy of coercion, intimidation, and torture is part of the state-controlled

1. See Tierney-Tello 1996, 195. 2. Hisham Sharabi asserts that “the most advanced and functional aspect of the neopatriarchal state . . . is its internal security apparatus, the mukhabarat. . . . [I]n social practice ordinary citizens not only are arbitrarily deprived of some of their basic rights but are the virtual prisoners of the state, the objects of its capricious and ever-present violence. . . . [It] is in many ways no more than a modernized version of the traditional patriarchal sultanate” (1988, 7).

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machinery and security apparatus represented by the mukhabarat or secret service (Moghadam 2003, 11), which aims at producing submissive individuals, what a Syrian intellectual refers to as “the mind quarantine” (Kilo 2002, 90). Men themselves are targets occupying a feminine position in relation to the regime apparatus, which is clearly identified as masculine. In some of these works, detention is presented within the romantic perspective of liberation, where the deprivation of physical liberty opens the way to spiritual freedom and restoration and where the prison, an instrument of punishment, becomes paradoxically a source of empowerment and inner liberation.3 While the prison is generally associated with atrocities and torture, it is simultaneously a zone of homoerotic desire favoring homosocial bonding as a strategy of resistance. At the same time, it is a place where men prove their virility or their castration. The works under study uncover a special affinity between body pain and endurance, which is gendered masculine. The badge of courage that men win through resistance to torture attests to the prisoner’s ability to exercise control over the body and overcome paralysis and political impotence normally associated with the castrated and compromised male body. In these texts, the male body is supposed to be a model of endurance, showing no frailty or susceptibility. To be a man, the prisoner should be able to bear pain and transcend the limitations of his body. In some novels, the prison experience is another male rite of passage and a learning experience where educated men teach less-educated and illiterate men and where the prison becomes a source of learning and consciousness raising. The character Usama in Khalifah’s Wild Thorns maintains that “those who don’t go to prison, even for a day, will never become real men, even if they grow two moustaches rather than one” (149). Having withstood the test of interrogation by not disclosing information or becoming collaborators, these men reveal an iron resolve and intractable determination. Since detention is not a personal affair but rather a collective social and political phenomenon, it ensures a man’s belonging to the collectivity, to those who resist the oppressors, his sacrifice on behalf of the people and return home wiser, more confident, and more assured of his manhood, virility, and integrity (Peteet 2000, 111).

3. Other forms of prison writing can be seen in documentary eye-witness accounts of imprisonment where the atrocities committed do not break the prisoner but rather make him all the more determined to resist. See, for instance, Bshara 2000.

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The texts under study do not represent a singular response to authority— each novel addresses different aspects of the effects of dictatorship—but they all manage to break the silence imposed by the patriarchal political authorities and suggest other alternatives. Some of them are downright defiant of official history and view resistance as the only way to challenge this authority. Resistance to the univocal discourse occurs on the personal/sexual as well as the social level as seen in novels like Nihad Sirees’s The Silence and the Noise (2004) and Mu’nes al-Razzaz’s Confessions of a Silencer (1986). In many of these works, sexuality, the body, and gender differences are underlined in order to denounce the power relations at work under authoritarianism. Some texts simply describe the baneful effect of censorship as in Hayat Sharara’s If the Days Turn to Dusk (Idha al-ayyam aghsaqat, 2002), and expose coercive measures that the state attempts to hide. Other texts make use of experimentation as a way of challenging the authoritarian story and disrupting literary conventions as seen in Al-Da‘if’s This Side of Innocence (Nahiyat al-bara’a, 1997), which actively attempts symbolic transformation by challenging rigid constructions imposed by the powers that be and revealing them to be discursive constructions. Indeed, the act of writing itself is a form of resistance to the status quo. Although men are supposed to exemplify culturally elevated forms of masculinity, a large number of men do not embody normative configurations of masculinity. The novels dramatize the emasculation of men under autocratic regimes and their inability to resist inhuman torture and affliction. The punitive measures and surveillance used by the regimes to break resistance represent the grotesqueness of the state apparatus. The “bureaucratic archivalization of political opposition” (Harlow 1992, 210), despotic tactics, and modern torture appliances reveal the pernicious and malignant power of the modern phallic state and the feminine position the male occupies in relation to the dominant power structure. My aim in this chapter is to examine the emasculation of men under autocratic regimes, especially those men who oppose the despotic system or try to demonstrate individuality in the face of dictatorial power that aims at neutralizing and erasing any sign of insurrection through the violent appropriation of the body. The military-style authoritarian apparatus employs modern technology to ban political parties, censor the press, and crush opposition. The yoking of modernity and dictatorship in the name of national autonomy mutates the state modality, combining archaic mechanisms with modern tools to impose absolute authority

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and reaffirm patriarchal values through the construction of a national subject that is outmaneuvered, overwhelmed, and vanquished.4 Many Arab authors have personally gone through detention or imprisonment for their political views, and many of them share experiences of suffering, alienation, and political frustration. Their works reflect this personal experience and awareness of the meaning of political incarceration (Peters 2001, 404) and defeats by Israel, what Ibrahim Abu-Rabi‘ refers to as “the twice-defeated person or phenomenon” (2004, 109), once by the state of Israel and secondly by the oppressive Arab state. In many cases, the sustenance of many writers depends upon the state, and as a result any wrong step jeopardizes their livelihood. For instance, Mina worked at the Syrian ministry of culture and Colette Khoury served at the ministry of defense (Kahf 2001, 229). Accordingly, in order to avoid retaliation, they use allusions and other devices to break out of imposed silence and challenge the univocal discourse of the state. Despite heavy-handed attempts by the state to silence any dissenting voice and naturalize their own, many of these writers challenge the state through the subversive act of writing, marking a shift from silence to articulate utterance and political agency. In order to avoid sensitive issues, many of these writers set their narratives in the past and retreat from the conditions of history by focusing on personal rather than political subjects. When something cannot be said directly, these writers break established norms through narrative structure, character, and language, using allegorical traits to avoid political persecution. The real story is told in the margins and between the lines through allusions, euphemisms, circumlocution, and camouflage techniques, with the dictatorial regime remaining persistently in the background. These texts provide a rich ground for what Said refers to as “contrapuntal reading,” which exposes simultaneously what goes on in the actual text and what its author has deliberately kept in the dark (Said, Culture and Imperialism, 66–67). Writing under dictatorship is a form of political resistance where the writer refuses to allow the forces of terror to have their way or appropriate a self that is resistant to oppression. Arab subjectivity was and still is deeply conditioned by modern history, a history full of political and ideological conflicts and a sense of deep crisis and petrifying feelings of inadequacy and ineffectiveness pertaining 4. See Connell 1990.

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to institutional and ideological discourses that the male appropriates and internalizes. Under despotic regimes, individuality is a grievous crime that invokes the most severe punishment. These works pose evidence of the effect of political oppression on masculine identity, the emasculation of men under the authoritarian state, where men have no choice but to define themselves—not only against women—but also against other men who represent the dominant order. These texts underline the instability of the male as a sign, propose different narratives of masculine liminality, and question the view that men are archetypal victimizers regardless of local and historical specificities. Some of these novels deal with detention by portraying surveillance operations, intimidations, and threats aimed at breaking men’s resistance to show the effect of political oppression on masculine identity. As a result, the physical prowess and chauvinistic heroism that seem to empower men only make them the passive victims of larger structures of political power and state ideology, where the only hope of survival is self-erasure or defiant assertiveness. Under the iron hand of the macho state, men emerge paradoxically as perpetrators and defenseless victims of patriarchal oppression. At the same time, the sheer act of writing and the use of irony and other oblique strategies as defense weapons show resistance to the totalizing discourse of the state and a strong desire for change. T ort u r e a s a Ba d ge of C ou r age Commenting upon Iraqi writer Mu’nis Al-Razzaz’s semiautobiographical novel Confessions of a Silencer (I‘tirafat katem sawt, 1986), Muhsin Jassim Al-Musawi calls it a “narrative of dissent that questions the ideology of the modern secular state, its idealistic discourse, which generates totalitarianism and repression” (255). Barbara Harlow maintains that the novel “exposes the coercive machinery of political containment” (1992, 8) through various strategies of resistance. This is a novel of ideas related through a variety of voices including the father’s, the mother’s, the young sister’s, Yusuf’s, and that of an omniscient narrator. The use of a plurality of voices and multiple nonlinear narratives are themselves an attempt by the author to prevent the imposition of a single worldview and thus critique the repressive measures of the authoritarian state. Although the novel employs a polyphonic discourse, the characters appear to speak the same language irrespective of age, class, social status, or education. The novel does not provide

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significant differences in tone, vernacular, sentence structure, and registers and, therefore, falls prey to the dominance of one discourse, that of the male narrator who sees the father as the perfect model of masculinity. Even the little girl uses the same language the others use, irrespective of her age and innocence. It is not specified where in the Arab world the events take place, implying it could have taken place anywhere in the area. The timeline is jumbled and uncertain: a supposed confrontation (historically inaccurate) occurs between generals and intellectuals in an unidentified place, at a time when the camp wars in Lebanon were raging between the Shiite Amal militia and the Palestinians. The events are extrapolated from scattered hints and are loosely based on Al-Razzaz’s father’s house arrest in Iraq.5 The father in the novel, Dr. Murad, who holds a prominent position in the Iraqi ruling party, is suddenly and unexpectedly placed under house arrest and under surveillance where his house and telephone are bugged. The professor does not know why he is being punished and tries to explain to his wife and daughter (who are held with him) the reasons behind his incarceration by the state, a callous agent of oppression, terror, and physical and psychological coercion. The state, representing the public terrain, invades the inner space, a site of resistance against the state, which is both apart from and implicated in the public sphere. The novel commences with the voice of the young daughter who is barred from leaving the house and who blames her father for their plight, hoping that he will shoot himself (with the gun left behind by the authorities) to save them from this affl iction. However, since her father is the controlling force in the family, she feels guilty and fears that God will punish her irreverence. A Marxist political thinker and writer, the father is determined to write a book, his only weapon against the authorities, knowing full well that it will be confiscated as soon as it is fi nished. Dr. Murad’s wife sees the futility of persisting in a fight against those who are putting them under house arrest, though she describes her husband’s actions as heroic: “This is the tragedy . . . for the hero to know his tragic destiny, but despite

5. Muhsin Jassim Al-Musawi argues that the novel “manipulates the real situation, the house in Baghdad where his [Al-Razzaz’s] family was held under arrest, supervised by guards, surveillance cameras, and an officer who communicates with the father to check further on his intentions and thoughts” providing “a record of his own father’s house arrest and death in Baghdad” (2003, 118).

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this knowledge to pursue his course towards an inescapable lot” (10). In order to contend with an unbearable present, she seeks refuge in the past. She recalls that as a young girl, she was an adventurous tomboy: “I used to roam the streets wearing a man’s suit. I wear a kuffieh and roam the streets. I am overwhelmed by an abundantly delicious feeling of freedom . . . and I feel that I am about to fly” (22). To free herself from the “cocoon of the suffocating world of the harem” (43), she decides to transgress gender boundaries and enter the public space disguised in her brother’s clothes. It was on one of her trips in disguise that she met Dr. Murad and was struck by his liberal ideas, his rearticulation of gender as socially rather than ontologically determined. Her elder brother was enthusiastic about his sister’s courage and her ability to take risks and would often indulgently refer to her as “Boy Hasan” (Hassan saby in Arabic) or “tomboy.” Nevertheless, when she surpasses the limits by expressing desire to ride her brother’s bicycle, he reports it to his mother, who slaps her and pulls her ears, warning her daughter that she will lose her virginity if she rides a bicycle: “What are the people, relatives, your future husband, and the neighbors going to say?” (46). On the wedding night, the bridegroom will not be convinced that the bicycle took her virginity and will think that the story is a cover-up for a family scandal. This incident teaches the mother that the world of women is one of impediments and prohibitions imposed not only by natural law but also by man-made laws. But past problems appear insignificant compared to an oppressive and nightmarish present. Detained in their own house, watching the television with the volume turned off, the father and mother learn how to read the state’s images, to decipher censored political information, in order to understand the situation. On television, they watch the ruling party celebrating the occasion of the Revolution, but the minister of information is absent, which means that he is out of favor. The doctor and his wife have learned to read between the lines, to decipher the visual images in order to understand what is happening. When the wife asks her husband about the reason for his purge from the ruling party, Dr. Murad maintains that he was told that the “state is a pair of shoes size 45 and your [Murad’s] foot size is 35 . . . With you . . . we were a fly turned on its back. Without you, we will be a fly lying on its belly and ready to take off and break forth” (33). The doctor’s opposition to the execution of leftists may have been the reason for his removal from office. Besides, he tells his wife, the party is

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indignant about his interview with a Gulf paper where he admitted that he used to run away from the university to hear a song by the famous Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. The authoritative, patriarchal state cannot tolerate any form of vulnerability when it comes to a statesman. Exposure of one’s weaknesses is seen as detrimental to the party and to “the dignity” of its rule (33). For a despotic and dictatorial regime, any flexibility or softness on the part of a member of the state is considered anathema. By ostracizing the doctor, the state ensures a final separation between the intellectual and the people and a terminal disappearance of the former from the public world of active life.6 The mother worries about her son Ahmad, who is alive and free in Lebanon, and wishes he would give up politics, which is like a “mill without any piety or fear of God, grinding everything without mercy” (25). Her son calls them every Thursday and is the only voice that links her to the outside world and the only reason for life. Even though she is consciously aware of the subordinate position of women in society, her son (rather than daughter) is the center of her life. In the second part, Yusuf (the second narrator) addresses an unknown audience (perhaps the reader) to unburden himself. Even though Yusuf is a hired assassin, he assures us that he is no monster but rather a human being who was a committed party member, a lover, and a man with sensitive feelings: “I assure you that I am human like you. I have even loved an American woman at one time. I assure you that I knew in my rebellious youth the taste of tears. Imagine, I cried once for a woman, and another time for fear of hell. And a third time when I heard a song by Farid Al-Atrash” (51). Yusuf projects himself as an educated man who studied philosophy at the Beirut Arab University and dropped out after two years. He regards himself as a sort of intellectual, though he admits that he loathes all intellectuals, fears them, and wishes them dead. Yet Yusuf feels insecure in the presence of a man like Dr. Murad or anyone who holds a high position. Yusuf envies the professor’s nationalism (which is inflected with a revolutionary flavor), his tightly disciplined, steadfast image of manhood, and his legendary strength. He sees the old man as a rare specimen, both self-disciplined and immune to any disturbances and “earthquakes” (169). Irrespective of the pressures he is exposed to, he is determined to resist in order to witness the advent of the twenty-first century, which will be the age of the liberation of all persecuted 6. See Madi 1978, 44.

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people. Dr. Murad is a model of honorable, heroic, enduring masculinity and the unflinching ability to face death, but his dignity, moral strength, and unswerving resistance turn him into an object of envy for Yusuf. This manly purity perceived as a symbol of true masculinity intimidates Yusuf, who is nostalgic for a heightened manly ideal that the professor represents as opposed to his own prosaic and unsteady masculinity. To cover up his feelings of inferiority, Yusuf invents excuses for disliking him and tells us that the professor is too casual for a man in his position. Yusuf believes in hierarchy, hates Murad’s egalitarianism and familiar approach, and believes he should be formal, aloof, and neutral. Yusuf feels antagonized by Murad’s avuncular attitude and is convinced that his relation to the old man should be based upon the naturalization of hierarchy and differentiation. The real cause for Yusef’s hatred is that Dr. Murad, unlike himself, was able to endure torture and interrogation in prison. The old man’s obduracy and endurance expose Yusuf’s weakness and lack: “How do I defeat the old man? How do I break him . . . at least once in his life. I had a nervous breakdown in prison, but he remained like an unyielding oak. I detest him. Even putting him under house arrest did not destroy him” (61). What torments Yusuf is that his collapse was witnessed by Dr. Murad, who remained stiff and unyielding. Like Assi in The Gang of the Bloody Rose, Yusuf’s capitulation and confession have left indelible scars. These marks are painful reminders of Murad’s stoic power and resistance. Yusuf’s fragile masculinity can be construed as the outcome of a psychological and political crisis that afflicted Arab men especially after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. His relationship with the doctor is an odd mixture of love/hate, and because he reveres power, he tries to invent excuses to find fault with Murad, such as his casualness, his haggard clothing, and his modesty. Feeling humiliated in prison and madly jealous of Dr. Murad, he starts thinking of ways to break the apparently unbreakable man. In the presence of Murad, Yusuf is dumb and cowardly, expecting the old man to behave in a manner that befits his superior position rather than treat him in an amicable and paternal manner. In prison, he describes himself as an “insect” (62), crying and wailing in the presence of Dr. Murad after failing the test of manhood. In addition to his political humiliation, Yusuf suffers from feelings of inferiority and shame owing to his mother’s disgraceful profession as a prostitute and his stepfather’s continuous battery and humiliation. He goes to prison feeling

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proud of his political commitment, but is accused only of sexual deviance. His fragile sense of masculinity is destroyed in prison when, rather than asking him about the political party he belongs to, the interrogators assure him that they know that he has been raped: “Who deflowered you? No, no, Mr. Yusuf we did not reprimand you for political reasons. No, not because you are a danger to the social security, we reprimanded you for moral reasons. You are a danger to the morals of society and its values” (85). When he wanted to urinate, they wondered if he had an organ to pee with, and when they led him to the women’s toilet, he became the laughingstock of the interrogators after urinating in his pants. Yusuf suffers from a nervous breakdown, realizing that his political involvement was compensation for an impaired manhood, great shame for his mother’s lascivious behavior: “I want to hide in my mother’s breast. But her breast is occupied. And my mother says after the visitors leave that without their gifts I would have walked barefoot in the streets with my bum visible to the eye” (64). To cover up his sense of diminished masculinity and his inability to fulfill codes of manhood that he finds insufferable, he affirms his masculinity by confessing the names of his comrades to prove to the torturers that he is in prison for political, not moral/sexual reasons. Unable to face his vulnerability, he goes to the other extreme and uses brute force to cover up his anxiety, discomposure, and bitterness. But now Yusuf is at once perpetrator and victim of patriarchal and state oppression. He tries to reclaim an imperiled manhood by projecting an image of machismo, hardiness, and unrestraint, an infallible hyper-masculinity that is itself the result of a strong sense of deficiency and vulnerability. In the novel, manhood is defined through differences between men, which displaces the idea of a one-dimensional masculinity embodied in Dr. Murad and reveals a diversity of male roles. Yusuf opens up to Sulafa because she is half French and half deaf and, therefore, from a different world that accepts the weaknesses he tries to conceal from his own people. He tells his story in her presence, feeling free to speak his mind and shout at her, not like those educated woman journalists back home who are recalcitrant and “who deserve death” (153). Yusuf admits to Sulafa that he suffers from “insomnia, nightmares, fever attacks, sexual impotence, and psychological disorder” (129), and yearns for death in order “to follow his father Hajj Mahmud who misses him and is the only one who understands him” (138). Sulafa does not know that Hajj Mahmud is his stepfather, not his father, and that “his tongue

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was his shoe and his words were kicks” (138). Feeling deprived of the patriarchal power accorded to Dr. Murad, Yusuf tries to resurrect the dead father (his stepfather) to give his life some equilibrium and fi xed meaning and to revive a frail and etiolated masculinity. He finally chooses the hypermasculine job of a hired assassin in order to compensate for his sense of emasculation. Being unable to confront strong men, he selects his victims carefully: “My victim ought to be weak and fragile lest my hands would shiver while shooting” (154). Yusuf glorifies masculinity while he himself is deficient and is unable to stand any of its tests. He likes to be in control and, as a result, he dislikes chaos in his apartment. At one point, he maintains, “I was about to kill my servant once because she did not put things in their proper places. Order means control over a place” (69). But how can he clear up his apartment when, in addition to the problems of an oppressive regime, men have to contend with the Middle East problem, which, if not solved, “will push people to mad desperation?” (141). To use Daly’s words, Yusuf’s life as a male can be described as “a state of joylessness” characterized by “oppression, repression, depression” (1999, ix). Ahmad, Murad’s son, joins the military struggle in Beirut, but when the Palestinian resistance is driven out, he is devastated. He tells Yusuf that he “now lives a surplus life” (145). Having submitted his resignation from the party, “meaning from life” (145), he feels psychologically shaken. In order to wreak vengeance on the unshakeable old man who made him feel deficient, Yusuf kills his son Ahmad. Nevertheless, the old man remains steadfast to the end and has no need of anyone, wife, daughter, or son. His intransigent masculinity, ruthless self-sufficiency, and trenchant political commitment spur him on regardless of any impeding family hurdles, so much so that the reader tends to feel more sympathy for the fragile Yusuf than for the old man who appears to be empty of any human feeling. T ort u r e a s E m a s c u l at ion Lebanese writer Rashid Al-Da‘if’s fictional work entitled This Side of Innocence (Nahiyat al-Bara’a, 1997) can be described as the Lebanese version of the nightmare of oppression and incarceration.7 The unnamed narrator (representing the 7. In an interview with critic Sabry Hafez in Al-Safir, Hafez asserts that the “good examples in the war novel have constituted a real addition to the development of the Arabic novel. . . . the

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ordinary Arab individual) is accused of tearing up the picture of a war lord or politician. He tells us that the picture had been glued securely to the wall, but in “broad daylight” (40) the perpetrator has scraped it with a knife or some sharp object, “making the eyes look gauged-out and scary, and over the upper lip he etched a contemptuous line” (39). The narrator is seen as the culprit of this provocative and defiant offense, or at least the one who possesses information on the person who actually committed the act. In a confessional tone, the narrator tells of his traumatic experience of incarceration in a room that looks like an office and then in his own house in the presence of his wife and child. Using free indirect speech, the narrator breaks up the linear line of the story by entering the timeless world of incarceration where the historical and the personal intersect and commingle. Harlow states that imprisonment and political detention are endemic apparatuses of the state authority in much of the third world (1992, 227). However, the Lebanese experience differs since it is not the state that incarcerates and tortures but political parties and military groups that mushroomed in the fifteen-year war. These are male groups who sought political and military ascendancy through surveillance, mass terror, incarceration, and murder. From the start, the narrator is aware that he is living in a closed country resembling a big prison. Sensing that the area where he lives is under watch, he is determined to regulate his behavior and to exercise self-discipline. He maintains sarcastically that “I have gotten very good at apologizing . . . I’m the master of apology, and I’ve gotten so skillful at being peaceable that I’ve become famous for it” (43). Since any innocent act could be interpreted as a crime, the narrator assumes that he was spotted greeting the man who tore the picture: “Maybe what I would call saying hello, they would call passing secret information, or conspiring” (62). The narrator projects himself as a “carefree innocent” (30) who has tried to avoid getting into trouble or meddling in politics, never having “claimed to be courageous” (28). Accordingly, he is shocked to find himself abducted and treated like a criminal. He tries to reassure himself that whatever crime he may

young generation of writers in Egypt today (like Muntasser Al-Qaffash, Noura Amin, Said Nuh, and others) used to tell me that they were more influenced by Rashid Al-Da‘if than they were by Naguib Mahfouz or even the Egyptian writers of the 1960s” (Hafez 2004).

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have committed cannot be serious “since a person under arrest, or a dangerous criminal, is not put into a room that receives sunlight from a window unprotected by metal bars” (42). His watch having stopped working, time is no longer perceived in terms of clocks and calendars, and the narrator enters an inner world of fantasies and hallucinations where the diachronic narrative is disrupted and replaced by synchronic time that dominates the novel through a spatial perspective on reality. The narrator endures a wearisome repetition of time in the office he is detained in, and the narrative takes on a synchronic structure, breaking norms with regard to narrative structure, character, or sequential plot to convey an experience of incongruity, discontinuity, and incomprehensibility. Such a technique contests the univocal discourse of the groups who hold power. Realizing that he has no means to prove his innocence, the narrator starts digging up excuses for the torturers in order to cope with the gross injustice committed against him and a punishment that is unbearable. In line with Foucault’s views of surveillance, isolation becomes the means of bringing the victim to a state where he will carry on the reform work of his torturers. For Foucault, one “who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power. He inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (202–3). Locked into his guilty consciousness, he tries to blame himself for what has befallen, and the place is transformed into a psychological prison. The narrator admits that the “picture irritated me every time I passed by it, and I was always afraid my self might surprise me by going up to it and tearing it in anger. I used to avoid looking at it in order not to be attracted to it like a moth that is unavoidably attracted to the light and dies” (132). The fact that he did not like the picture meant that he was in fact guilty and deserved to be punished. He tells us that “I never imagined for a second that my inner disgust for that picture would at some time show on my face or show in my behavior and become obvious to other people” (79–80). He knows that even though he did not tear the picture, the “truth is that picture always . . . made me upset. . . . It pissed me off ” (77). The narrator admits that he is infuriated by similar pictures that cover the walls of the city: “What does it mean for me to be forced to see the picture of a martyr, for example, or of a bridegroom who spent his wedding night in some tragic accident . . . Does it mean . . . you are like his parents and should receive condolences, affection, appreciation and tribute . . . ?” (132).

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The narrator realizes that his interrogators, these “disciples of truth” (74) as he refers to them, are not going to “allow any ambiguity or confusion to get in their way” (1). Accordingly, he feels the need to defend himself. Fearing that his address book may contain names that his interrogators will find dubious, he tells us “I had to eat it down to the last scrap. . . . And so I began with the first page; I chewed it slowly and swallowed it. (Actually, I mean I shoved it down my throat)” (65). Sensing that his abductors are still suspicious that “I still held my old Arab nationalist sentiments, that I hadn’t yet refi ned these sentiments, or developed them as I should in accordance with the current international, regional and local situation” (74), he decides to alleviate their misgivings. Believing that his inner mind is easily accessible to their piercing gaze, he starts viewing them as omnipotent gods (111) and overhears them saying, “Don’t you think we know everything, especially about you?” (111). He maintains that he was subjected to interrogation and torture in order to confess or submit the name of the person who actually tore the picture.8 The narrator tells his story in fragments, steering clear, however, of what actually happened in the dark chamber. If we do not see him tortured, we sense the violation imprinted on his body and mind. In prison, he is reduced to a “colossal body”9 that is exposed, tortured, and raped. This traumatic experience devastates a man who admits he was very shy about exposing his body to strangers (men as well as women); even on intimate occasions he makes sure that the lights are off to keep his body concealed from the gaze of his wife. The fact that his body has become a spectacle causes him humiliation and strong feelings of emasculation. The experience of torture creates for the narrator the sensation of a coerced and vulnerable body that limits him to his immediate corporal existence and feminizes him.10 Accordingly, masculinity is articulated in bodily rather than universal and transcendent terms. The narrator’s tangible presence, which according to Elaine Scarry “is almost always the condition of those without power” (207),

8. As Elaine Scarry puts it, “Torture consists of a primary physical act, the infl iction of pain, and a primary verbal act, the interrogation” (1985, 28). 9. Ibid., 57. 10. Examining the ritual of torture, Millet writes that in “torture one is fi rst reduced to a woman, then to a child, and as the torture creates a woman out of any human material being tortured, he also creates a child, frightened before the great, all-powerful . . . state” (1994, 190).

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can be contrasted with the torturers who remain disembodied voices. In addition to the assault on his body, the narrator is only allowed to speak in response to the interrogators’ questions: violence functions as a means of claiming not only the body but the narrator as speaking subject. As the narrator is no longer able to transcend the limitations of his physical existence, he feels objectified and emasculated, and finds himself incapable of articulating this castrating experience except in general terms. Under pressure, he feels lost in this labyrinth of what happened and what did not, of who tore the picture, of whose picture it is, and of the identity of the torturers. His body becomes directly involved in a political field where the prison regime of interrogation, punishment, and manipulation leaves its marks upon him, destroys the human and political constitution that continues to resist, and undermines the narrator’s personal identity and integrity. Without the benefit of collective resistance (as occurs with Palestinians inside Israel), the narrator is completely isolated and his personal integrity is undermined. Once his wife and son become implicated, the picture of marital and family happiness is irrevocably destroyed. The men invade his private home in an attempt to control the private realm (in addition to the public) by demolishing his private life. In order to protect himself and his family, the narrator, like the father in Faraman’s Shadows on the Window, clings desperately to traditional paradigms of family and honor at a point when the boundaries between private and public and the personal and political erode. His family is used to humiliate and unman him when he is exposed in the presence of his wife and child. For instance, one of the torturers interrupts him before his wife and child to remind him that someone like him cannot swear by his honor when he has “been getting fucked all day long” (123). Under such cruel circumstances, he has nothing but his pants to hold fast to since there is not a single iota of human dignity left for him to adhere to. The narrator says that “the ugliest possible moments in the world are when a father is humiliated in front of his son” (85), and he refuses to look his son in the eye: “Never in my life had I experienced such a mixture of strong, contradictory, varied, and unsteady emotions, which were primarily feelings of shame and embarrassment, probably the most difficult for me to bear. Shame and embarrassment before my son!” (87). The narrator witnesses the image of the all-powerful, forceful, and commanding father crumble before his son’s eyes, and the dynamics of cruelty and marriage become increasingly complicated as the narrator loses

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his hold on reality and on his domestic situation: “Was it really something I said that led them to my house, to the very heart of my personal life and into its very innards” (116). In order to alter the unequal balance of power, he counts on his wife’s performance in the presence of the interrogators and desperately needs her secret assistance to rescue a tottering masculinity. Knowing that his torturers are set on humiliating him before his wife, her collusion to maintain the social pretense is badly needed. He expects her not to give them the chance to demean “her husband, her crown of glory, the father of her son and all future children” (98). He waits for her to say “‘As you wish,’ and show them how much she respected me; to . . . show them how obedient she was; to show them how dear I was to her, to her heart—so dear she couldn’t possibly deny me any request” (97). The narrator and the interrogators manipulate the concept of woman’s honor (sharaf) in order to achieve their goals. The torturers exploit the particular vulnerabilities of the wife through threats and acts of sexual abuse against her and violence against her son, while the husband remains obsessed with his manhood and the feelings of castration that he expects his wife to salvage by showing complete adherence to and support of social norms and traditions. At first, the narrator tries to reassure himself that his wife will act in the way he expects her to. After all, she is “her parent’s daughter, the daughter of a family fortified by hundreds of years of uprightness, true faith, and piety. . . . No one has ever heard of one girl or one woman in that family to have gone astray—God forbid! Or that she disobeyed her husband in any way” (109–10). Indeed, she is totally submissive to the male members of her family: “‘I’ll tell my father!’ she’d say whenever she had any difficulties or anyone bothered her” (114). He wanted her to come to his rescue and grant him his manhood in the presence of the torturers: “In so many words I had said to her, ‘Save me! I’m drowning!’” (97). He wants his wife to rescue him from humiliation and emasculation and to show them that “no power on earth was capable of lowering her high esteem for me even one iota” (98). If physical torture shakes the narrator, the demolition of his house—a reflection and source of identity and an essential part of self-making—destroys him completely. If the home represented by his wife is a stable and nurturing refuge that upholds sanctified patterns of behavior, the “man of the house” (103) is stunned when his wife does not even bother to cast a fleeting glance at the

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wounds all over his body “as if I were the plague” (102). He comes to the shocking realization that domestic comforts are suddenly turned against him and that the home as a semblance of stability is a mere charade. He discovers that the “lethal blow [came] . . . from my last available refuge—my wife, the pillow upon which I rest my head of all its trouble” (98). The narrator is shocked to discover that his wife does not comprehend the seriousness of the situation or respond to it in the way he expects. Since his wife exists outside history, outside the law of the father, she is incapable of subverting the dominant ideology of power. To use Harlow’s words, the cultural traditions that see woman as a token of stability and her honor as a symbol belonging to her male guardians are submitted to the systematic manipulations and brutality of torture and interrogation (1992, 45–46). His wife is unable to cope with the political and sexual complications of the situation and fails to read the language of the oppressors. The narrator says that “not only was she completely disregarding the particular situation we were in there in our house, but in the entire country . . . she was completely unaware of it, which was more likely because she never followed the news at all—not in the papers, or magazines, or on the radio or television, not even in conversations with people. There was nothing she hated more than talking about politics” (95–96). His wife remains in line with the patriarchal view that political commitment is the domain of men and that the woman’s role is restricted to the domestic sphere. When the boundaries between private and public begin to erode, revealing the intertwining of the sexual and the political, the private and the public, the narrator clings more desperately to the traditional paradigms of family and honor to protect himself and his family. Finding out that the narrator has no information to pass on to them, the torturers lose interest, and he is released as arbitrarily as he is kidnapped: “They heard what I had to say and didn’t want to listen. Not because it irritated them, but because they considered it insignificant and not worth listening to” (133). At that moment, he tells us, he was prepared “to explode, like a bomb packed tightly with highly explosive materials, like one of those incredible bombs that used to go off in the middle of the street during traffic hour in Beirut and mow down people and places” (119). The invasion of his home destroys the narrator’s sanity and his sense of self and integrity. He experiences frustration, discomfiture, and political impotence leading to a highly problematic sense of masculinity as fractured and insecure, where the solid boundaries between private and public were

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dismantled. He decides to strike back and begins to think of ways and means to take revenge. Transformed into a subhuman level, the only way to restore his human integrity is to let out his anger upon his wife who has destroyed his world by her innocence. He enters an inner world of nightmare where fiction and reality intermingle and become indistinguishable. Holding “the big knife and the barbecue skewer,” he describes his wife’s body as cold: “As if her body and the bed she was lying on were one, not two separate things. As if the skewer in my hand secured her to the bed, never to be separated again” (145). The only way to deal with his predicament is to wreak vengeance upon his wife for exposing him and breaking his masculinity. This Side of Innocence reveals the cruel precariousness of politics and the psychological and physical trauma of political victimization. The novel ends in a moral and psychological vacuum, where innocence is seen as an obstacle to survival in a world with codes that must be deciphered, understood, and accommodated. The torturers deal their final blow by tearing the narrator’s own life apart and appropriating his political (personal) identity. Far from elevating the narrator’s moral awareness of men, of his country, or of himself, his incarceration has revealed life’s horror and absurdity. I n t e l l e c t ua l s u n de r Stat e Su rv e i l l a nc e If the Days Turn to Dusk (Idha al-ayyam aghsaqat, 2002) by the Iraqi writer Hayat Sharara, is a semiautobiographical novel based upon the female author’s experience as a university professor during the sanctions on Iraq.11 By taking up an active position of author, Sharara reveals her sympathies not only with women but with men, who are the focus of inspection and surveillance and the major victims of dictatorship and war. Sharara uses a male narrator in a subversive attempt to interrogate male views about their masculinity and their subordinate positions in relation to men with influence in the ruling party. Sharara finds the traditional autobiographical novel an appropriate genre for representing the calamitous life of men and women under dictatorship. The first-person male narrator is Naaman Mahmoud, a university professor, who relates his daily experience during a time 11. Sharara committed suicide with her daughter, and the novel was published posthumously by her sister.

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when many intellectuals felt sidelined. Through the protagonist, Sharara gives voice to what is muted by the authoritarian discourse, to what is censored and obscured by the belligerent, hostile, and warlike state. The novel depicts the plight of an academic intellectual in the claustrophobic atmosphere of state oppression, which infiltrates into all institutions including the university. If the university professor is normally someone who possesses status, affluence, and social standing, the war has changed all that. Dr. Naaman has been transformed into a being who is nervous, defensive, and close-lipped in the presence of the regime’s spies, who are scattered all over the university. Fallen from a position of eminence and social status, Naaman feels insecure and depleted, and his sense of loss is emblematic of the whole narrative. Befuddled by the changes beleaguering him, he struggles to affirm his value as a man in the midst of the conditions that expose his fragility and vulnerability, casting him out of the paradise of fi xed identity and sure things into the position of other. Living at the mercy of a state that persecutes anyone who is perceived as a threat to its security and authority, Naaman makes sure to abide by the rules of the alienating patriarchal power, the only force that has the power to grant him the dignity and self-respect that he wants desperately to retain. The narrative is focalized through a male character and read through the lens of marginality where Naaman is forced to comply with standards of performance sanctioned by the state. The story records Naaman’s daily attempts to survive and maintain his integrity and existence despite the bleak atmosphere that surrounds him. The female author presents a man who is trapped in a situation where his sense of manhood is threatened and where self-erasure offers the only hope of survival in an absurdly vicious and inimical world. In this oppressive atmosphere, Naaman challenges an imposed silence by insisting on speaking in whispers to the reader to remind him that he has to draw his ear close to his lips to ensure that no one else hears him and takes what he says as incriminating evidence against him. He is haunted with fear not only in his conscious mind but in all his senses. His hands tremble when his voice sounds too high, his knees give way, his mouth becomes dry, and the blood freezes in his veins. In order to protect himself, he has learned to speak in whispers and to look around him so much so that his neck has acquired an amazing elasticity. Written in a realistic documentary mode, this subversive narrative works to resist authority by interrogating the univocal discourse of the autocratic regime

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and rejecting a passive acceptance of war and the ideology that sanctions self-sacrifice and dying for a cause. From the margins of official discourse, the narrative rejects all heroic endeavors propagated by the state. The protagonist’s transformation from censored silence to writerly subjectivity reveals a defiant challenge of official history, the law of the father, and the political order, which is marked by a pronounced absence of debate. Terrified of informers, the narrator is constantly worried that his thoughts might be read by others and would, therefore, expose him to the heavy hand of the regime. He tells us that this sort of fear “freezes the soul, paralyzes the joints, kills words on the lips, and causes dread in the eyes, where the person remains nailed in his place, in that narrow corner where he has been confined and does not move save by the will of others” (180). The dictator is a source of terror, throwing people into the darkness of torture rooms, prisons, and detention centers. As a result, the narrator decides to regulate his behavior by making himself virtually invisible. This oppressive atmosphere is mirrored at the university, where the dean and Baathist professors run the show and determine who is doing his job and who is not. The school dean is a figure of tyranny who exaggerates the slightest mistake in order to insure total compliance. If a professor is late owing to an unforeseen accident on the road, the dean threatens to write reports to the authorities. The university is full of spies who await the slightest slip of the tongue in order to hold it against the speaker. The professors are constantly under watch. For instance, we are told that a professor has to maintain his dignified position and refrain from looking at his watch in class no matter how bored the students might be. Trying to cope with tyranny and oppression, Naaman realizes that he has to forget that he is a human being and compares himself to a machine that moves mechanically. Being a citizen under the regime, he is required to participate in demonstrations and to do exactly what is required of him. He is obliged to stand in line with other professors to be weighed to make sure that he has not put on weight, as body fitness is an indication of civilization and progress. Standing in line, he regards his behavior as a humiliating surrender: “I endured silently, like a statue devoid of feeling” (90). Naaman’s shaken identity leads to a problematic sense of masculinity as fractured, insecure, and failing to fathom a volatile world. Sharara portrays the degrading effect of poverty that many Iraqis began to contend with; everything has become expensive and Naaman is at the level of abject poverty. To moisten his piece of dry bread and provide the body with some

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vitamins, he tells us that he can only afford to buy some leeks. He feels humiliated that he cannot even buy one egg for 50 dinars, and his senses of empowerment and potency are replaced by impotence and enervation. The narrator’s insecurity is intensified when he learns that a professor’s retirement indemnity is so meager that he needs to look for another job to make ends meet. In order to survive, he must learn how to be practical and pragmatic. When his wife decides to take up dressmaking in order to help him financially, he feels insulted and disoriented since this will not only disrupt the privacy he has been accustomed to but, more importantly, it will affect his morale and injure his masculinity since it is the man who should provide for the family, not the wife. He has frequent nightmares about people demanding the key to his house, and when he responds that he has no home, they stab him with a butcher’s knife and dump him in a forest inhabited by wild beasts that smell the blood and attack him. This recurring nightmare reveals his strong sense of displacement. He escapes from scrutiny into the relatively safer privacy of the home, an opaque structure that keeps him out of the sight of the state’s surveillance apparatus. The lack of academic integrity and ethics at the university is reflected in widespread sexual harassment of female professors and female students, and the willingness of some women to use their bodies to pass an exam or to secure academic promotion and other privileges. He tells us that the dean himself once stopped a female student whom he assumes is breaking the rules by wearing trousers, but the student defies him by turning round to reassure him that it is a skirt. Having lost the battle, he is not able to hide his anger, especially when his eyes fall on her beautiful white legs. The narrator tells us that it was her youth and femininity that enabled her to defy him and poke fun at his lust and lasciviousness, and his attempts to exploit the incident in order to intimidate the girl fail drastically. Naaman is also shocked by the unrestrained behavior of a colleague, Adawiyya Hammoud. He describes her as someone who “swings in her walk, her yellow hair shines and curls harmoniously with the movement of her body, and her dress ruffles with colors, shiny gray, yellow and orange” (120). Another colleague describes her as a “sex bomb” (200) who goes to bed only with the “right” people. The narrator thinks she is defi led and “her presence with us reminds us of the level of decline we have reached” (121). By seducing the professors or “customers” who happen to be in high positions as well as others in the secret service, she is allowed to travel and represent the university abroad.

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Corruption infi ltrates all aspects of the educational system at the university where some professors pass students in exchange for gifts. Furthermore, students who belong to the secret service or mukhabarat are accepted at the university regardless of their academic standing and are allowed to be absent whenever they want, for these are the people who end up writing reports to the government about students, employees, and professors. To avoid confrontation with the regime, the instructors end up giving them grades they do not deserve, yet it is a serious blunder to show mercy for other students, who must obey the rules to the letter. The narrator feels the earth shaking under his feet as he finds himself submitting to the powers that be and playing the role assigned to him with bowed head and feelings of humiliation. Despite the disorienting changes that have occurred, the narrator continues to view men and women in binary opposition. He asserts that “women are different from men in the way they face problems. A woman has nothing but religion as a refuge from the problems of life and its catastrophes. Men, on the other hand, resort to drinking, nightclubs, and women” (271). In his view, women by nature are opposed to drink. Similarly, his colleague Anwar complains that his wife has gone too far by wearing the veil, which means that he will have to find other women to entertain him and he anticipates that this will be easy. After all, the number of women who dream of spending a night with a man is high since in a war, men have become a “rare currency” (272), the dream of spinsters, divorcees, widows, and loose women, while the price of women has gone down. The narrator is conscious of the damaging effects of dictatorship and marginalization but seems completely unaware that he might be employing the same coercive approach in his attitude to women. Naaman notes that men like himself spend their time in their gloomy offices working and taking refuge in drinking and watching pornographic fi lms. At first, he is reluctant to join in, but he is told that morality will not do him any good, and that these films are reservoirs for future gossip and material to avoid talking about politics or the political situation in the country. He tells us that drinking alcohol boosts the morale of his friends and colleagues and allows them to lose their inhibitions and compensate for their feeling of deficiency; like Fater, they brag about their masculinity and fuhula, particularly when they are drunk. The narrator is a disillusioned middle-aged man who has lost all hope for the future. He remembers a time in his youth when he joined secret organizations,

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attended meetings, and participated in demonstrations and other political activities. In those days, he was full of enthusiasm and hope about a future of individual freedom away from exploitation, fear, and violence. But now he is left with nothing but bitter irony and derision, and the shocking realization that history does not move forward. When a colleague, Dr. Akram, was suddenly and unexpectedly dismissed from the university, no one wanted to be associated with him since the eye of the regime is everywhere to ensure submissiveness and compliance. This is a place where people are expected to prove their loyalty every day by filling out forms about their families, their political affi liations and views past and present, and their participation in the second war against Iran: through money donations or human souls. The narrator tells us of one of his colleagues, Badri, who was imprisoned a few years earlier for joining a political group. This black spot in his career cannot be erased and remains in his record to be used against him: he is forced to work as an informer for the regime. In the pressure to please the state, he starts drinking to help him maintain scholarly dignity. When he begins to have liver and heart problems, he stops drinking and takes refuge in religion; he becomes a practicing Muslim who stays up all night chanting Quranic verses. With time, he forgets his past, and whenever he is reminded of it he says, “That was before the flood” (144). Naaman views masculinity and social appearances as interchangeable. He tells us that he remembers the good old days when he really felt like a professor as he drove his own car to the university and got out “carrying his black suitcase, wearing his eyeglasses, and walking in a self-confident manner” (162). Today, these symbols of success and status are a thing of the past. He sells his car to buy clothes, and he takes the bus where he is crammed with students in the rush hour. He feels that his students no longer respect him or view him as a real man. Feeling humiliated by their pity and derision (166), he comes face to face with the gloomy realization that he has exchanged a strong male identity for a passive manhood that has lost all agency and initiative. After receiving his termination letter, Dr. Akram has no choice but to find a job to sustain him. He ends up working in a warehouse where he feels embarrassed when his former students address him as doctor and ask for a kilo of sugar or rice. To avoid suffering a similar fate, the narrator trains himself to avoid colleagues who insult him and force him to react. He becomes extremely careful

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in the grades he gives to lazy students who might report him to a colleague who belongs to the secret service. He tells us that he was not afraid of people but of the bugged walls of rooms: “Sometimes my tongue got the better of me when I uttered a statement revealing displeasure with the behavior of a student, a professor, or a piece of news in the newspaper. Afterwards, I felt anxious and blamed myself for recklessness and for not being alert and awake” (181). He keeps the Arab proverb “Your tongue is your horse; if you protect it, it will protect you” (182) in mind and trains himself to speak only when it is absolutely necessary in order not to place any suspicion on himself. In a world of sweeping surveillance, he feels the dire need to pretend, role-play, and wear a mask. Naaman feels so humiliated at work that he thinks that retirement is the only outlet. He decides to stop his usual contributions to the newspaper since the paper will cost him more than the money that he will get from the articles. Simultaneously, he is distracted and unable to concentrate because he knows that it is the duty of every university professor to write about the “mother of all battles” and feels all the more anxious when he is given two days to complete an article. The pinch of poverty forces him to sell his books, but he discovers that his most precious possessions “have no value, and that those, who are almost illiterate, have more power and control over our fate than we have ever imagined” (118). Naaman discovers that all the values he upholds are falling apart and fading before his very eyes. When young men at the university are conscripted, they surrender quietly to their fate. All men under forty-five are dragged into military training sessions: no one is exempted, even crippled men or men with heart disease and asthma. For these men, war is no heroic endeavor; it is forced upon them and will not lead to victory and honor but to a humiliating destruction, disfigurement, or death. The narrator’s aversion to war springs from his realization of the senselessness of death at the front and the worthlessness of human life. The dark green military suits remind him of death and destruction, and those men who go to war either get killed or return with their hair grown white and with wrinkles on their foreheads. Those men who are glad to escape death the first time do not make it the second time. These are subaltern male bodies that march under the two huge intersecting swords, a symbol under which the men march to their inevitable doom. For many, this war appears to be going on forever just like the Bassous wars between the jahilliyya Arabs, which lasted for decades. Accordingly, “the

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need for permanent human fuel to keep the war raging” (187) incites the government to promote procreation by granting maternity allowances. Men like the narrator walk with their eyes on the ground and sometimes look to heaven with silent beseeching and supplication. Naaman uses the refuge of his personal/political story to find his way out of silence and subvert the authority that has turned him into a state-controlled automaton. T h e Dic tat or O c c u pi e s t h e D om e s t ic Sph e r e If in The Days Turn to Dusk, refuge from the state can be found within the opaque walls of home, Scattered Crumbs (Al-Futayt al-muba‘thar, 2000) by the Iraqi writer Muhsin Al-Ramli reveals how the military state infiltrates into the supposed safety of the inner sphere. This is the story of an unnamed Iraqi who, like the author himself, is currently living in Spain, and who tells us that he is looking for his lost cousin Mahmoud who fled the country at the end of the Iraq-Iran war. The narrator describes Mahmoud as an ordinary, run-of-the-mill, inconspicuous fellow, who has “no distinctive characteristics.” (51). Nevertheless, it is vital to the narrator to find his cousin, for it is one way of reassuring himself that he is doing something “worthy of respect” (7). His cousin reminds him of the man he himself has become after being forced to flee the country by a ruthless regime. Living as a refugee in Granada, he feels a profound sense of debility and admits dejectedly: “We cry like women over homelands that we did not know how to preserve like men” (124). Iraqi men like himself who have fled the country wound up spitting at their “mustaches before the mirrors of the West” and eventually “shaving them off ” (124). Thinking of the people back home, he asserts despondently, “‘Safe is he who has entered his grave’” (124). The only outlet from this humiliating situation is to blacken “pages with sorrowful cries” as the only deliverance from the man like Mahmoud he has become (124). This discomposure over lack of power and ineffectuality drive him to channel his frustrations into self-expression and self-articulation in order to resuscitate a dilapidated masculinity. The narrative is a mode of articulating his views and restoring a lost phallic power by breaking out of the silence imposed upon him both inside and outside his country. Feeling a sort of a death in life, he tries to resurrect himself by holding the phallic pen that would challenge and subvert a deadly regime that has castrated the men in his country. Since his life at home and in exile has been one of marginalization

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and alienation, he tries to achieve power through the experience of telling rather than living. The focus of the narrative is not so much the search for Mahmoud but his immediate family, which consists of father, mother, and eight children (one sister, Mahmoud, and his six brothers) who live in a provincial Iraqi village under the autocratic rule of Saddam Hussein. In such a place, the nuclear family, the community, and the party control the life of the individual who is expected to conform and remain submerged within the collectivity. The narrator tells the story in a humorous and indulging manner without being judgmental or critical, demonstrating how a totalitarian regime infi ltrates into the everyday life of a peasant society through its power machinery and the secret service. This style allows for the release of aggression through the protective armor of humor. The narrator captures the simplicity of a family that is destroyed by a ruthless regime. Ijayel, the father, who watches official ceremonies and cowboy fi lms on television, loves the leader, who is the perfect model of a desired bellicose and martial masculinity. Within a kinship structure that privileges male superiors (Joseph 1993, 453), the father is the undisputed center around which the family rotates, the teleological self that is authoritative, fi xed and stable. Ijayel is the embodiment of authority, force, and control, a despot who wants his children to worship the leader in the same manner that he himself defers to him. Through the state apparatus, the regime succeeds in producing “docile bodies,” that is, bodies that are subdued and controlled without the need for explicit coercion or violence (Foucault 1979, 136). The public sphere is controlled by the state’s monolithic discourse, which infi ltrates the inner sphere through the state apparatus and capillary machinery represented by television, radio, the district police chief, the village party head, and other means to politicize the private terrain and ensure that the people absorb and internalize the norms of behavior inculcated by the state. Since the regime attempts to impress its own ideology upon the people and, therefore, control their thoughts, the word “national” has come to have affirmative connotations that elevate any action or object described as national. If Uncle Ijayel wished to describe a man or a thing that he liked, he uses the English word “national,” which he pronounces “nationan” (32). Ijayel’s brand of nationalism is naïve, gullible, and mournfully comical, bordering on the farcical. Ijayel is proud of his nationalism that goes back to his grandfather who killed a British officer

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“sonofabitch” (32). The word “nationan” represents everything he approves of, including his wife’s beans and the kerosene heater that “fi lled his lungs and blackened his face with carbon when its fire flared up while he was asleep” (34). The father’s form of nationalism is manifested in an unshakable allegiance to the leader and, consequently, to the homeland itself, which is idolized and revered. While his sons Ahmad, who is a judge, and Abdel-Wahid, who was “martyred fighting for the homeland, dignity . . . honor” (35), are considered “nationan,” his two other sons Qassim and Saadi, who “deserted the army just when the war heated up” (34), are not “nationan.” Since they fail to measure up to the masculine ideal of the warrior, they are not capable of true patriotism. As a result, they are barred from the political world and occupy the nooks and corners of the village. Qassim paints and makes love to his wife Hasiba, while Saadi chases the young men of the village. They occupy a marginal, feminine position vis-àvis the patriarchal mode of government and its concomitant cult of masculine aggression and encounters on the battlefield. The feminine traits that Qassim possesses and his aversion to war and violence have no place in a country that worships the leader’s form of martial masculinity. Qassim, the eldest son, marries Hasiba, who has seven brothers described as timid, bashful, and pusillanimous, affirming the subjugation of men under the regime and within the patriarchal family. Hasiba, the only daughter, takes after her father, who is daring, ferocious, and unabashed. When she screams at her brothers, “They could, they swore, see fire blazing from her eyes. Then they would wet their underpants” (28). The only one in the world she feared was her father, who would use violence against her: “One time he turned her face to Mecca and twisted her arms down behind her, and he stomped on them with his boot. Then he put a knife to her neck and would have slaughtered her like a chicken had not the mediators begged him and fallen on his hand, kissing it and refusing to leave until he promised not to kill her” (27–28). Hasiba challenges male perceptions of femininity and resists undifferentiated typicality. The narrator’s disgust with Saadi’s sexuality reveals his loathing of homosexuality. When Saadi tried to rape him, he was repelled by his “fetid breath,” his “thick, wanton, nauseating” voice (64), and his profanity: he tells the young narrator, “I want us to play the chicken and cock game, the bride and groom, the goat and the ram, the dog and the bitch, the donkey and the she-ass” (63–64). Even Saadi’s language is described by the narrator as “womanish” or “haremish,”

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for he uses noncommittal words and phrases like “‘Nice’ or ‘Not nice,’ ‘I like it’ or ‘I don’t like it’” (35). Saadi justifies his desertion by using the supposedly childish and credulous language of women, which is devoid of mature argumentation, asserting, “I don’t like the army and the war is not nice” (35). Saadi’s brand of manhood is opposed to the undifferentiated masculinity propagated by the state, yet as long as it constitutes no threat to the regime, his sexual proclivities are overlooked. Consequently, he insists on going out “to ‘play’ with the boys in the valleys, woods, and mountain folds, and in the nooks of ruined houses” (62). Ijayel is a simple man who is swayed by the regime’s overwhelming propaganda to the extent that he deifies the leader and ranks him next to God. When he tells other worshippers in the mosque, “I worship my homeland!” (30) we are told that the majority of men would have agreed with him. Only Mullah Salih scorns him: “Have you become senile, man? You blaspheme!” (31). The father’s jingoism drives the sheikh to warn against a new form of dangerous “heathenism” (31). Despite the sheik’s angry repudiation of Ijayel, the leader is deified and even put ahead of Allah himself in the eyes of Ijayel and the people in general. His omnipotent and all-encompassing masculinity is the model propagated by the patriarchal regime, and the narrator asserts sarcastically that “the poets swore by the life of the Leader, and then by Allah . . . The singers’ throats crooned tunes that praised the muscles of the Leader and the greatness of his mustache, symbolic of the scales of justice, as well as his blood, inherited from the Prophet, and his unique genius” (75). The leader is projected as omniscient and all-knowing, infi ltrating into the tiny details of people’s lives, from the need for a toothbrush to the liberation of the land. In a society that authorizes a coherent and uncontradictory masculinity, with the soldier as a key symbol, the individual male is summoned to uphold the normative standard and identify with a combative, militaristic form of masculinity. Under such rule, everything is subordinated to the whims of the leader, who represents the legitimized hegemonic masculine state. When the leader casually declares war, a rural deputy who objects to it is executed, and war is declared “in the name of the people and its representatives” (73). Rather than celebrating victory, the narrator interrogates the concept of militarism and the heroic soldier by asserting dolefully, “We heard of victories and the raising of flags over liberated lands that expanded the way our village cemetery did, with the aid of the corpses of our village sons. They were wrapped

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up in the flags of the homeland, and other flags fluttered above the graves until our old cemetery was transformed into a forest of flags of homeland under which mothers still weep every Thursday” (73). The narrator is disgusted with war and is aware of the senselessness and absurdity of dying, not for a noble cause but to empower a leader who cares very little for his people. Living in a country at war, people’s daily lives are reflections of a warring society that demands the use of weapons on all occasions, including wedding ceremonies. At Warda’s wedding, “Qassim hurried out, passing under the bullets fired in celebration” (70), noting the “warlike and armed” (70–71) nature of their celebrations and his aversion to war and violence, which runs against his artistic disposition and makes him all the more convinced that “it was better to get killed than to kill” (61). The world of the novel is dominated by the image of the militaristic leader that is omnipresent through photographs, statues, and portraits on every street, and on radio, television, and in Friday sermons as a model to be emulated. In order to inflame feelings, the government methodically continues to run the Khansa show “about the poetess of old who took great pride in the warrior martyrdom of her father, two husbands, two brothers, and four sons—six times a day, before and after meals” (73). Television “started raining thousands of cowboy movies on us, for manliness and killing came easier than slipping on banana peels” (73–74). The ruling party succeeds in ensuring that the public invades the private and tries to shape it in its own image. Even though Ijayel dislikes his son Qassim’s paintings and refers to them as “cat’s scribbles” (55), he asks him to paint the leader. Qassim is stunned and wonders if he could paint a man he loathes so much. When he tells his father that he cannot do it, Ijayel’s reaction is unequivocal: “You’re not your father’s son! You’re not nationan . . . You’re not a man, and that’s why you left your brothers at the battlefront and ran to Hasiba’s lap” (57–58). He calls him a “sonofabitch” who does not want the leader to be “a son of the people” (58) and starts beating him with his head cord and calling him traitor, but his wife intervenes and begs him to stop: “Calm down, Hajj, I beg you! Take refuge with Allah from the devil. Do you want to beat him now that he’s a man with four children?” (59). After this argument, Warda realizes that “that distant being whose pictures she saw everywhere without paying attention to them had the power to stir up strife between her father and her brother” (59–60). When Warda asks her husband for his opinion of the leader, she is disappointed with his answer: “Whoever

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marries our mother becomes our father, so leave us in peace” (90). She divorces him for his expediency and opportunism and is determined to marry a man who possesses dignity and self-respect. She is attracted to Ismael, who shares her antipathy to the leader who caused the death of Qassim, Abdel-Wahid, and Fawzi, her former husband, and turned them into “scattered crumbs” (121–22). Even as they make love, Warda and her new husband dream about retaliation and revenge against the leader; their bedroom is in the grip of the same power structures that dominate the public sphere. Despite their conflicting views regarding the leader, Qassim does not want to disappoint his father and decides to draw the homeland rather than the leader. He paints a map of the land in red surrounded by a large green heart. When his father sets eye on it, he does not understand his son’s hint and wonders why he reversed the colors: “You should have made the homeland green and the heart red, as they are in truth and reality” (79). When the battle intensifies and the losses multiply, the state starts clamping down on all war deserters they can lay their hands on, and Qassim is arrested and executed as a traitor. In order to make an example of him, they leave his body lying in the square for three days and try to enlist his mentally retarded brother Abood. They flog him and refuse to listen to Ijayil’s entreaties to spare the mentally retarded boy. When they finally realize his condition, they return Abood agitated, distraught, and unhinged by the system Ijayel idolizes. Only then does it dawn upon Ijayel what his son’s painting actually signified. A childhood wound begins to bleed again, to deplete and emaciate him, and the scar is permanent: three sons are lost and his depraved son Saadi winds up working for a regime that is, like Saadi himself, corrupt, wanton, and perverted. Ijayel, who assumes that his power within the house is uncontestable, discovers his subordinate position in relation to a stiff and unyielding regime that has succeeded in dismantling his home and family. T h e I n t e l l e c t ua l Su bv e rt s t h e Au t hor i ta r i a n Dis c ou r se Syrian writer Nihad Sirees’s The Silence and the Noise (Al-Samt wa-al-sakhab, 2004) was written under dictatorship as a form of contestation and political resistance against the forces of terror represented by the ruling party. The novel is narrated by a male writer, Fathi Shin, living under a dictatorial regime in an

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unspecified Arab country where the days are dull, empty, and fruitless. In a biting tone, the narrator pokes fun at the dictatorial regime. Watching a demonstration from his balcony, he sees pictures of the leader fluttering like the waves of the sea above the heads of the demonstrators. As he watches the leader’s twentiethanniversary celebrations, he congratulates himself for picking up another catch phrase, thanking God for being born under the leader’s rule. On this occasion, each city in the country has to demonstrate on a specific date to ensure that the one television station can cover all the demonstrations. The demonstrations are to arouse excitement and electrify the people in order to instill the love of the leader in their hearts, erase individuality, and ensure that the people are “fluent in the rhetorical formulas” (Wedeen 1999, 46) propagated by the state, though the defiant voice of the narrator is ample proof that the leader is not the unquestioned object of adulation. When Fathi is questioned by one of the organizers as to why he is not in the demonstration, he responds that he is not a government employee, does not belong to any union, and he is the well-known writer Fathi Shin. Since the regime has paranoiac fears of writers and intellectuals, the organizer becomes more aggressive, demanding his identity card.12 When he looks at the card, his response is, “Traitor, contemptible.” The narrator responds, “Thank you” (14), but the man looks at him with contempt and disgust as if he were looking at garbage (13–14). From the start of the novel, we note that the narrator is defiant. While everybody is in the street celebrating the leader’s greatness, we find Fathi moving in the opposite direction, away from the masses: “I was really walking opposite to the drift . . . clashing with the demonstrators. The more I walked, the more overcrowded the streets became, and the more effort I needed to force my way through” (118–19). The narrator’s tone is sardonic in an attempt to poke fun at the regime and, like Scattered Crumbs, to achieve agency through humor. But he offers no clear-cut solution to the problem. The narrator watches a fat man with flushed face and protruding veins who is carried on the shoulders of young men chanting slogans forcefully. Fathi mocks their official discourse, asserting that

12. According to Mohja Kahf, “Syrian culture has become the one most associated with the posture of paranoia stemming from a realistic fear of a police state with a vast surveillance apparatus and great demands of public shows of allegiance” (2001, 233).

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people in his country prefer rhymed slogans as it is easier to repeat meaningless words when they are rhythmic and musical. He maintains that poetry is a public genre, while the prose he writes addresses the subjective individual. Poetry capitalizes on the emotions of people and stops them from thinking, while prose addresses the mind and attaches importance to individual judgment and personal appraisal. The narrator tells us that his parents were easygoing people who loved humor; they were a happy couple who liked to tell jokes and cherished genial company. In the meantime, the leader, an officer in the army, engineered a coup d’état and became the absolute ruler. The first thing he did was close the newspapers, keeping running only two that echoed the government’s point of view. Fathi’s father, a lawyer who was not yet aware of the change in government, wrote a naïve caricature about the president that ended up in the hands of the mukhabarat (the secret service). His interrogation and detention lasted for six months, and after his release, he was no longer the carefree individual he had been. He was barred from practicing law for two years. Despite her husband’s ordeal, his wife persists in her optimistic, light-hearted view of life even after his death. Like the narrator’s wife in This Side of Innocence, she finds refuge in her feminine world outside the world of politics despite her husband’s incarceration and her son’s banishment from writing and from publishing his books. When she announces that she is going to marry Hael Ali Hassan, Fathi assumes that it is a plot by the regime to use his mother’s licentiousness to get back at him and force him to work for the government. Using sarcasm to subvert the regime’s modalities, the narrator ridicules a slapstick encounter between Hael (which means “great” in Arabic) and the leader. Hael’s friendship with the leader is the result of an act of “heroism” that Hael accidentally performed. Greeting the people, the leader tripped and was about to fall when a man standing behind him puts his arms under the leader’s armpits and prevents him from collapsing on the ground. The description of the leader’s rescue is charged with homoerotic overtones and the suggestion is that the leader must suppress his emasculating desires: “When the two bodies [Hael’s and the leader’s] reached a certain level, the person’s [Hael’s] body stopped falling, then the two bodies were banded together and together they began pushing upwards with the strength of one person, and when the leader stood up again in his normal manner, the body of the person remained stuck to

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him for three seconds, then he released himself, but his hands remained under the leader’s armpits” (57). After the incident, the leader asks his men to look for the “brave” man who saved his honor and self-respect before millions of people. They find him “feeding his calves on a farm. They capture him, drag him to the house, and ask him to wash immediately and wear a dark suit and a yellow tie. Then they drag him along, having lost his energy and about to wet his pants with fear, followed by a weeping wife and five young children” (54). Hael spends three days with the leader where they “eat large amounts of food, play backgammon, and swim in the private swimming pool” (59). Soon afterwards he is appointed head of one of the branches in charge of the leader’s personal security. Hael feels exhilarated as he has never even dreamed of as much as a smile from the leader. The narrator trivializes the way a dictatorial regime conducts itself: the man with an ordinary provincial face finds himself suddenly part of the leader’s security entourage. Since Hael’s wife is too common for his new position, he decides to divorce her and find a woman that would be more befitting to his new prestige, and his eye falls upon the narrator’s mother. Hael insists on marrying the narrator’s mother on the twentieth anniversary of the leader’s assumption of power, reflecting Hael’s own appropriation of power within the home. In line with this political event, the narrator asserts sarcastically that they are going to “occupy my mother’s chamber” (62), but he is unwilling to attend the “circus” of her marriage (61). Hael’s crassness and imbecility turn him into a farcical target of the protagonist’s mockery. His delight in hilarity, disharmony, and incompatibility allows the narrator, at least momentarily, to relish an unpleasant situation through the use of humor that alleviates acute feelings of defeat. The novel is a parody of authoritarianism and the absurdity of living under a dictatorial regime. The narrator tells us that whenever there is a demonstration, housewives are expected to watch them on TV. Since the state’s power is omnipresent and omniscient, people turn up the volume and leave the windows open to avoid being accused of lacking nationalism and patriotism, and to confirm their loyalty and allegiance. The “favorite” music is martial music that enhances political fervor and underscores the militancy of the regime. As for the muwashahhat—a musical form that originated in Andalos and continues to be sung and enjoyed in the Arab world—that soothe the soul and put the listener in a mood of delicate feelings, they are seen as defeatist and reactionary and

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therefore suppressed (64). The flute is trivial and unpatriotic because it consigns the listener to a mood of sad contemplation and defeatism, but the trumpet makes people more alert, zealous, and willing to sacrifice themselves for the leader (65). The regime’s favorite music is that designed for males who are always ready to fight and sacrifice. Even love songs have to be addressed to the leader since all passion, infatuation, ecstasy, fondness, and adoration must belong solely to him. In order to impose the state’s ideology, “unpatriotic” words such as “desertion, separation, crying over the remains of the beloved, and pining to death, are completely forbidden and banned” from songs, or from being aired on radio and television since they may insinuate that “the people have deserted the leader, God forbid it” (66–67). This is a high-handed political system that suppresses individual opinions. The narrator’s literary program broadcast on television is abruptly discontinued because it contains no reference to the leader. Abu Ahmad, who was in charge of the copy machine, was asked to make 10,000 copies of the leader’s photograph to be fi xed on the walls of the city at night. The next day Abu Ahmad discovers that the machine was not functioning properly and he produced a picture stained with black ink, with the unlucky smear over the leader’s eye, making him look like a pirate. The disfigured poster reflects the narrator’s view of the regime as banditry and pillage, but the poor man is accused of not being a devoted nationalist. He is imprisoned for six months and is tortured severely: the skin of his back cracks open, his testicles shrink, and the skin of his feet all but wears off. According to the narrator, the dictator cannot live without the cheers of multitudes and becomes despondent when the crowds fi lling the streets and shouting his name are out of sight for too long. As an intellectual, the narrator fights the autocratic regime, refuses to cooperate, but also feels deeply responsible for the education and enlightenment of his people. He clearly fits in with Said’s definition of the intellectual as one “whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug” (Said 1996, 11). In his context, the narrator is an intellectual who possesses the true marks of manhood in his ability to hold his head high in the face of government oppression and to be politically active by writing about it, addressing the reader directly,

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and reporting the stories of others who have suffered under the regime. In other words, the text contests the univocal official narrative and exposes it as a purely discursive construction. While the people are supposed to be either in a demonstration or participating by watching on television, the narrator and his mistress Lamis retire to the bathroom in order not to be disturbed by the noise outside. Th rough carnivalesque acts, the narrator celebrates a transgressive sexual ritual inside the bathroom, which is seen as a refuge, a defense weapon against the clamorous rhetoric of the regime’s political discourse, and a repudiation of the power relations at work under authoritarianism. If humor can no longer be used for a moral purpose, the carnivalesque endorses humor as a transgressive discourse. The narrator resorts to a personal sexual relation to denounce a regime that promotes and reinforces traditional notions of manhood and womanhood and to compensate for being banned from writing. Earlier, it was writing that kept him going, but now the only outlet is sex with his mistress away from the noise pollution precipitated by the regime. By insisting on making comic sense out of nonsense, the novel celebrates the individual capacity for resistance—through recalcitrance, insubordination, and humor—that challenges and interrogates the woeful historical reality. The narrator tells us that sex is impossible with the noise that comes from the neighbors’ radios and apologizes for an erotic chapter he writes, where his defiance of and resistance to authoritarianism is articulated in particularly sexual terms. The silence that has been imposed on him for many years is strangling him, and the only way to resist is through escape into sexual love and through writing, where the act of telling becomes in itself an act of agency and instrumentality that allows the assertion of individuality and release of aggression when outright protest is prohibited. Unlike the protagonist of Journey at Dusk, who is convinced of his superiority to Sulafa, Fathi’s relationship with his mistress Lamis is one of mutual respect and equality. The personal sexual relation is a protest against the regime, which promotes traditional notions of sexuality, and an attempt at transformation by interrogating gender roles through an egalitarian relationship. The narrator’s insistence on feeling and love is a substitute for the ruthlessness and hostility of the state. Lamis’s personality is a carnivalesque disparagement of all values propounded by the state. She is a woman who is not ashamed of her body and

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feels free to remain undressed when Fathi is in her apartment. Her transgressive sexuality is a means of violating the norms of the state. Her intelligence and sharp intuition enable her to guess the intentions of the authorities before Fathi. An Arab man under pressure, he begins to see things from a different perspective and appreciate the integrity of a woman’s body and her ability to give without any inhibitions. The equality in their relationship gives him strength and selfconfidence and compensates for a regime that is cruelly hierarchical. Indeed, the lovers’ sexual and political transgressions sanction woman’s reappropriation of her body and serve as emblems of resistance to authority. The narrator finds it better to be possessed by a woman than by the regime, and in this manner, he interrogates the authority of the dictatorial and paternalistic regime. Contrary to his mistress, his mother becomes a tool that would force her son to acquiesce and return to the fold. Through his mother, the state wages a battle on the private sexual realm by clamping down on any resistance by Fathi to its authoritarian policies. Hael threatens that he will either marry his mother or use her as a sexual convenience. Fathi seeks help from his sister, who advises him to be realistic and to feign stupidity and do what idiots like her husband does. His sister’s skill in telling jokes and wearing the mask of stupidity are resourceful weapons to survive under the regime. She urges him to join the demonstrations, and if he cannot stand the noise to put cotton in his ears. The ending is a dream the narrator has of Hael raping his mother and tearing her clothes, but his mother turns the table on him by begging him to do it again. The mother, who is presented as a figure of low comedy, challenges the stereotypical image of woman that the regime wants to propagate by enjoying the role of prostitute and preferring it to the role of submissive and undefi led wife. The dream enables Fathi to cope with an otherwise nightmarish reality. The open ending reveals mistrust of denouements and closure. In a world of absurdity, the only outlet is laughter, which provides a way of coping with oppression. Comedy is an end in itself rather than a means to edification or change. The closing pages end in banality and farce where traumatic events are denied traditional serious treatment, in itself a form of protest. Through the medium of humor, the narrative uncovers the absurdity and cataclysmic imbecility of the regime.

4 Oedipus Deposed The Man’s Sex(uality)

This chapter focuses on texts that are explicitly conscious of masculinity as fragile and vulnerable. These texts were written under the shadow and in the aftermath of the Lebanese civil war, which left ineradicable scars on male as well as female writers, forcing them to come face to face with a new, more complex gender identity. The primitive and violent form of masculinity generated by the war produced subordinate masculinities incompatible with the norm that the warring parties and militias represented. War produced male identities that can be described as physically vulnerable, struggling in the hyperaggressive world of war and occupying a position of the feminine in relation to the mobile and complex power structures reproduced by a protracted war. The ideological norms and prevalent version of manhood as virile, savage, autonomous, and anachronistic clashed with one erupting out of a new set of historical circumstances, one that is fragile, insecure, anxious, and repeatedly found lacking in agency and initiative. While war is a masculine endeavor, it is clear that many men are victims of war and that masculinity is ambivalent and prevaricating, dependent on the exigencies of patriarchal power and shift ing power relations among men. Indeed, the rankling awareness among many men of the discordance between the ideal model of masculinity and the historical facts causes them a strong sense of anxiety, particularly since the wars in the area endorsed not so much the control of women by men but the control of men by other men (Donaldson 1993, 655). Through the sustained use of the metaphor of a protagonist who is injured by stray bullets, rockets, or car bombs, these novels challenge any traditional equation of masculinity with confidence, self-assurance, and determination. The 130

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fiction under study reveals that men’s experience of marginalization, vulnerability, and political impotence generated pervasive anxiety about masculinity and about men who cannot live up to the grandiose standard of accomplishment and self-actualization. Through this gap flow resentment, anger, and powerlessness over men’s failure to align themselves with prevalent gender roles. Since—within the context of the Lebanese war—men were the major targets of violence (kidnappings, killings, interrogation, and torture), the novels portray male characters who yearn for a state of powerlessness and the safety of the inner sphere away from an annihilating external reality. In the context of war, the ideal of manhood loses its universal wholeness and slips into inconsistency, where masculinity segments into nonuniform variants and the male inhabitation of masculinity becomes precarious. The uncertainty of the male characters’ sense of manhood is a marker of a deep concern about masculine identity and its relation to the feminine “other” in a situation where gender roles are in transition and where traditional versions of masculinity are under threat. In some of these works, the established version of male adulthood as virile, autonomous, and expansive clashes with another version emerging out of a new set of circumstances. Indeed, some works present men who are more consciously aware of their gender. For instance, in Al-Da‘if’s A Passage to Dusk (Fushah mustahdafah bayna al-nu‘as wa al-nawm, 1986), the male protagonist defies the boundaries of gendered identity when he looks at himself in the mirror and sees a woman. The fantasy of being a woman in wartime springs from the protagonist’s disgust with the exaggerated violence perpetrated by men against other men in war, where women were relatively untargeted and in many cases were less inconvenienced in their movements than many men who were not directly involved in the actual fighting. If some war novels celebrate masculine codes, other works express a masculine longing for other types of experience where men harbor a masochistic desire for temporary loss of control. War provided a temporary and carnivalesque liberation from established norms and values. It is only in the context of war, where chaos reigns, that a man like Khalil in Hoda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter (Hajar al-dahek, 1990) plucks up the courage to admit his sexual preference for men. Befuddled by the changes beleaguering men like himself, Khalil tries to break out of the entrapment of rigid gender roles by opting to be himself, and by giving in to effeminate tendencies and articulating his desire for men rather than women. Within the relative freedom afforded by the general chaos and the

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loosening of social and moral values, Khalil feels free to explore the softer man within, but soon discovers that this freedom is short-lived, as the pressure surrounding him forces him to finally shed a debilitating feminine self. While reformulating sexual norms, war also disrupted earlier restraining norms giving women more independence and sexual freedoms. In addition to the power acquired by women through education, employment, and other rights earned over the years, war was another factor that empowered many of them and gave them more autonomy. The postwar era in Lebanon witnessed a sudden but steady emergence of women who became more visible and more instrumental in the public sphere. Some of these novels focus on the disruptive power of female sexuality, which becomes more pronounced at the expense of men whose supposedly secure masculine identity is displaced and decentered. What these works underscore is men’s tragicomic or fruitless attempts to measure up to the masculine ideal. Sabotaged by a latent horror of feminine alterity, men feel inadequate and castrated. These works of fiction underscore the impact of political instability in the area on men’s views of themselves and their relations to women. While it is true that women writers appear to be more concerned with gender issues than men, men are becoming more consciously aware of their gender and of the instability of masculinity, which is constantly being renegotiated according to historical circumstances. The postwar era witnessed the emergence of a new consciousness that challenged an inflated brand of masculinity and produced peripheral masculinities, indeed, feminine types of men who challenged an ahistorical and reductionist ideology of masculinity and expressed their inability to measure up to the dominant norm. One pertinent example is Daoud’s Ghina’ al-batriq (1998), which focuses on the effect of physical disability on men. The fiction dealt with in this chapter uncovers a crisis in masculinity in a world where what it means to be male or female is increasingly blurred, varied, and problematic and where the old values of militant masculinity are overlooked by many men whose general preference for a soft and sensitive form of masculinity undermines the antiquated, belligerent model. E f f e m i nat e M e n A r e Ou t si de H is t ory The Stone of Laughter (Hajar al-dahek, 1990) by the Lebanese woman writer Hoda Barakat focuses on a male protagonist who is trying to survive in wartime.

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Through free indirect speech, the omniscient female narrator relates the narrative tinged by the thoughts and feelings of Khalil, the protagonist. Barakat presents a male character that breaks out of the confines of primal masculinity generated by the war and hides within the safety of the domestic sphere. Contrary to those involved in the war, Khalil rejects the manly qualities of daring, bravery, and power, the system that has legitimized domination, and all available male prerogatives such as accumulating wealth and exercising power through violence and aggression. Realizing that he cannot live up to an amplified wartime masculinity, he turns his back to the public male world of militancy and takes refuge in a private domestic sphere. Khalil’s attitude reveals that if the Lebanese civil war has produced an inflated form of masculinity, it has also precipitated the emergence of less aggressive, indeed effeminate types of men. Barakat presents a male protagonist whose subversive inclinations reveal that gender identities are not stable and immutable, but shifting and changeable. By embracing a softer version of masculinity, Khalil’s life becomes further complicated within the volatile war atmosphere, and his sense of his own masculine identity becomes equivocal. The wartime definition of manliness was of little use in meeting the human needs of many men, like Khalil, who were not directly involved in the war. Whenever a battle draws to an end, Khalil engages himself by obsessively cleaning and tidying up his flat: “After every battle, his room is clean and fresh again like new . . . The tiles shine and the room gives out a smell of soap, of polish, of disinfectant” (11). As a way of resisting the disorder, contamination, and chaos of war, he takes pleasure in his own room’s “matchless order” (12), thus disclosing a male experience inconsistent with the norm: Khalil has the luxury of harboring masochistic desires for a temporary loss of control and effeminate immersion in the domestic inner sphere. Surrounded by war, Khalil finds himself unable to conform to traditional norms and decides to abdicate the power afforded him by the public sphere. He feels “deeply ashamed of his friends who were rowdy at demonstrations and speeches” (38) and of the brutality and ferocity of men within the war context. He is critical of his friends who have “entered manhood by the wide door of history” (14), men who “have got a grip on the important things in life” (14). Weary of the empty rhetoric propounded by them, and feeling “an aversion to those who do talk” (107), Khalil idealizes feminine values and admires women who do not

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talk but “warble” (109). For him, women “do not form sentences with thoughts, therefore they do not attempt to form histories when they talk. . . . They say useful things, their talk is that with which to buy bread and fry eggs and do the laundry and fi x the tap” (109). Khalil maintains that women are fortunate for being outside history: “All that they say about politics is that they do not understand what troubles the soul . . . they come to stories about sex, whispering, and boast of nothing but the prowess of their husbands, of how much their husbands love them . . . they complain in a pampered way about their declining health and they like to appear younger than their age” (109–10). Unlike Walid Masoud who sees women as national symbols, Khalil is clearly envious of their resilience and practicality, their ability to tread on the ground: “Women, thought Khalil, moaning in envy alone in his room. . . . They’re in touch with the world, they have a secret communication with it which makes anything that doesn’t belong to them nothing but a flurry of dust” (144). Simultaneously, Khalil views women as fi xed in a mythical, eternal, and unchangeable world.1 Khalil feels estranged from his friends because of “the light way they spoke about girls and the amount they used his room for the purpose of love” (113), which made him feel disgusted, confused, and deeply embarrassed. But it is clear that his view of a woman like Zahra is not very different from his male compeers. He loves women in the abstract and hates real women: “Generally, women only arouse a dull curiosity in me which turns into a sort of fear when I get close to their bodies . . . their bodies are more complex than I can bear or rather than I can imagine” (68). This disgust with women is strongly aligned with the physical stench of war. Referring to Zahra, he confesses that he is “extremely sensitive to and disgusted by the dreadful smell which her armpits exhale,” and is certain that “two legs of that size, hands as red as that with such thick, animal skin cannot belong to a creature with a soul” (93). For him, Zahra and her new boyfriend represent a nauseating heterosexual love. He describes them as “two pigs who walk, with the revolting secret smells which their vile bodies secrete, amid piles of rubbish in the loathsome vapours and dust and dirt” (129).

1. “His description of women’s discourse is altogether contemptuous. It is trivial, irrational, incoherent and inarticulate, hardly speech at all. It maintains women in the realm of silence and babble” (Aghacy 1998a, 190).

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His inner contempt for women can be seen when Khalil maintains that his brothers and comrades die while the mothers “sit cross-legged like Sultanas while their children work, take arms, kill. They are quick to forget, they collect the salaries of the dead as they earn the takings of the ones who are still alive” (220). Rather than viewing the mothers as nurturing creatures or symbols of the land, they are seen as idle beings who await their sons’ deaths to cash their paychecks. Khalil’s liminality is reflected in his physical positioning by the window where he partakes of the external as well as internal spaces. At the same time, Khalil remains defensive about the world of public action and blames his mother for lacking the proper national sense. According to Fayad, his mother is “willing to sacrifice Khalil’s masculinity rather than allow him to participate in the nationalist struggle” (2002, 172). Khalil represents a new mode of masculinity that became prevalent during the war: the weak male who is insecure, humiliated, incarcerated, and tortured. Despite the fact that the war is engineered by men, this was a time when many men were made most vulnerable. Khalil submerges himself in a feminine sanctuary as a defense against the extreme anxiety produced by masculine identification and to hide from an intimidating masculine world that has marginalized him. At home, he immerses himself in housework: “He used to take the little metal tray and sit next to the radio for hours, picking over lentils or rice for the soup he had at dawn, his only meal. Or he would sit next to the radio unraveling old woolen jumpers then wrapping crinkled threads around a thick book to smooth them out, in the hope that he would knit them up again as soon as he went shopping and bought the right needles” (73). In a world where destruction reigns, Khalil indulges in numerous handicrafts and other productive work inside the home. After a round of fighting outside, he fetches “the broom from the kitchen” and begins “gathering up the broken glass” (22) and “watering the plants” (23). Inside the timeless world of the home, Khalil sees himself as a “plump divorcee” (26), a housewife, an old hen, and a widow. He does the housework and weeps “a flood of tears” (82) like a woman whenever he feels low or frustrated. Khalil’s masquerade as a housewife, his bag that looks like “a housewife’s shopping bag” (37) reveal a manifold, fluctuating male identity and a yearning for an alternative identity that the war uncovers and makes possible. The female narrator intervenes from within the narrative and undermines the stability of the male by making a point of objectifying the male body. She

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describes Khalil’s shoulders as “no wider than the little pillow where he lays his head” (13) and his body like a “moulted broom which sits, ignored, in a corner gathering dust and sticky dirt and getting shorter” (68). Th is defect in Khalil’s figure is a rupture in his masculine perfection, signaling an incompletely armored masculinity. It is only in the context of the war that Khalil feels comfortable with the smallness of his frame and manages to break out of the entrapment of the male body into a feminine breathing space. Contrary to his friend Said, who likes to be the “center of the circle,” Khalil is shy and self-effacing, knowing that he has nothing in common with those men “who have got a grip on the important things in life, and who . . . have laid down plans to fasten their hold on the upper echelons . . . in politics, in leadership, in the press” (14). Compared to them, Khalil is in a “stagnant feminine state of submission to a purely vegetable life” (14), basking in a marginal state that many women enjoyed during the war. In the highly “reflexive” world of the war, a variety of identities emerge through daily interactions.2 Living in a lawless and anarchic situation, Khalil submits to feelings and desires he would not have dared to express in a normal situation. For instance, he admits that he is sexually attracted to his friend Naji, and his eyes follow “the smooth line of Naji’s leg . . . a bit of his leg is showing between his trousers and his long socks” (5). He admires the hair on Naji’s legs, which is “jet black, gleaming, chaotic, like his eyes,” and admits that whenever he “wants to buy something new,” he chooses it “with Naji’s eyes” (6). He tells us that whenever they walk together, Naji is always slightly ahead of him, which “allows him to secretly enjoy looking at Naji’s shoulders and back from behind” (7). He fantasizes about having sex with Naji and with Raafat, whose voice he hears on the radio talking about the wiles of women. Khalil dreams of Raafat’s hand on his “neck, where the hair grows thick and, panting loudly, brought his eyes and lips close to Khalil” (77), but he remembers Naji, who must be feeling jealous and, with red eyes and angry face, would have taken “hold of Khalil’s collar and tugged at it, pulling the buttons off his shirt as he tore it open down to the navel” and “slowly came close again, stretching out his strong hand to pull Khalil’s leather belt undone” (77). In this passage, the male body as the object of provocative allure and seduction takes center stage in a manner not generally encountered in modern Arabic literature where “one seldom fi nds any sensuality 2. See Giddens 1990.

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in the portrayal of a male character” (Lagrange 2000, 171). Despite such wet dreams, Khalil’s relationship with Naji remains a passionate one that stops short of sex, an adoration uncontaminated by the physical stench and gore that are part of the war experience. His necrophilic attraction to corpses can be construed as a way of making amends for his sexual frustration and his fear of having sex with men: “He feels that excitement which goes directly from his lungs to his loins whenever he sees a corpse with its chest and waist and hip and throat and arms laid bare in the newspaper, for those firm, naked bodies” (158). Khalil expresses sexual desire for Naji when he looks at a photograph of Naji and a woman right after he hears of Naji’s death. Khalil feels a strange attachment to this woman, who is probably Naji’s paramour. Contrary to his disgust with Zahra, Khalil admits that he desires the girl in the photograph he saw in Naji’s room; since he assumes Naji was attracted to her, he reveals that the real object of this triangular desire is Naji himself. Similarly, Khalil is fascinated by his cousin Youssef’s beauty and constantly dreams of a homoerotic intimacy. Youssef is tall and “thin, thin in a particular way which suggested hardness and concealed strength, not weakness or saplessness. His skin was a subdued brown, the brown of earthenware coming out of the kiln, an ancient, burnished brown like the skin of a pharaoh’s slave. . . . Youssef was so beautiful he made the Renaissance sculptors seem like fools” (90). The reference to “pharaoh’s slave” aligns Yusuf with the biblical Yusuf who is associated with beauty and homoerotic desires. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych maintains that when “the figure of Yusuf is seen outside of the Qur’anic text, the homoerotic element inherent in the archetype emerges. The beauty of Yusuf becomes a byword for the homoerotic allure of the graceful ephebe” (211). Khalil views himself as Zalikha, the pharaoh’s wife who falls in love with Youssef (alluding to the story of Youssef in the Quran). Khalil glorifies the male body even though his feelings for Youssef do not go beyond a remote impassioned adoration: “Youssef’s eyes . . . kept coming to him like flying pollen from trees, like those microscopic thorns that the Indian fig sends out with every puff of wind” (92). Khalil’s insistence on a feminized positionality draws attention to identity as performance or masquerade (Butler 1999, xxviii), which is further reinforced by the fact that the text’s author and narrator are women. If war is seen as a biological necessity for men just as reproduction is a biological necessity for women, Khalil wrestles with the question of an alternate maleness. While society holds up the

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conventional image of masculinity, Khalil the marginal hero yearns for atypicality and the chance to act in accordance with his own singular homoerotic desires. Khalil defies male tyranny and advocates a worldview that accommodates difference and insists on a private, subjective existence for himself. The novel constructs a softened masculine image that has domestic concerns and is antithetical to the cult of machismo and militancy. As a result, men like Khalil are victims of the violence perpetrated by other men, and his failure can be attributed to his inability to play the role assigned to him as a man living in a war culture. Khalil is clearly isolated from this committed male world and sees himself outside the collectivity, a “boring man, with a hole in my brain” (96). This sense of alienation is a direct outcome of a war that has marginalized him and separated him from normative masculinity, where he has “lost the warmth of the group” (113) and the privileges of male bonding and solidarity. Khalil clearly has difficulty living up to the standards of what it means to be masculine—the war’s construction of male national identity as virile and belligerent, and his antipathy to the war is manifested in a “strong inclination to peace, to safety, his lack of desire to go out . . . his inability to stand the sight of blood” (14). Rather than representing the univocal discourse of patriarchy, Khalil’s resistance to the heterosexual matrix in a social and political context reveals that masculinity is not natural and homogeneous but diverse and heterogeneous. Since masculinity is not a natural attribute bestowed on men, Khalil’s actions are not determined by biology but by a desire to free himself from the shackles of essentialism through a performance that aligns him with femininity. While Khalil rests in his room and rarely leaves the apartment except to do the shopping, his male friends avoid the constraints of the home for the unrestricted freedom of the public space. Even the shy young man Youssef came to feel “restless in his narrow space” (92) and started “to go out a lot” (117). Unlike Khalil, Youssef knows what it means to be a man in the context of war; he assumes his role as head to support his family and “make sure that the needs of the house are met and to take a salary at the end of the month” (114). In contrast to Khalil, Youssef manages to find space for himself in the external world. When he joins a militia group and gets killed soon after, Khalil mourns his death and views him as a victim of masculine codes that oppress and exploit not only women but men. Looking at the “firm, naked bodies” of men in the newspaper, Khalil is certain “that the sharp flame of their masculinity is what led

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them to kill,” while Khalil’s “pale, pale, still body” (158) fades away in the glare of their bodies. Contrary to these luminous bodies, Khalil’s body is aligned with the kitchen sink, underscoring his marginalization and erosion.3 Khalil’s fragile body reminds him of kitchen tools and appliances and functions as an emblem of a psyche in crisis and of his inability to satisfy the requirements of manhood: “He does not like his body, his weak, stiff legs, his chest, hollow as a frying pan without a handle, his arms, hanging down the sides of the chair like a pair of moulted brooms,” his body “which dangles like a mildewed and broken clock pendulum” (159). Since Khalil begins to realize that his transgressive behavior bespeaks a heretical deflection from straight masculinity, he starts viewing his gay inclinations as pathological and reassures himself that what he suffers from is just a passing anxiety precipitated by the war: “Khalil knew that a fear of blood to the point of faintness, having short legs, a slight build, straight chestnut hair and large eyes, all these do not make a man a hermaphrodite, or effeminate, or make him any more masculine . . . he knew that the temporary breakdown that he was suffering was only a psychological crisis that the mad world outside had imposed on him” (83). The novel discloses the alterity of homosexual tendencies within the context of a heightened code of masculinity and the inconstancy of masculine identities despite the rigid polarization of gender identities in wartime. Since he has swerved from the path of “straight” masculinity, Khalil finds himself in the throes of an identity crisis that he can only resolve by reestablishing a coherent masculine identity. He observes that other men do not take him seriously and make fun of his effeminate behavior. He despises himself for seeking a false security that has emasculated and incapacitated him, and recognizes that it is time for action and achievement. Accordingly, he repudiates all feminine signifiers, wears a garb of belligerence, and finds succor in male homosocial comradeship. He embraces the ideal masculine qualities of dominance, activity, violence, autonomy, impersonality, and self-mastery. Since the rules set by traditional heterosexual society enforce a set of acts and behavior upon men, Khalil’s body gestures and general behavior become problematic. As Butler puts it, gender must be understood as a “doing” (33), a performance that constitutes the identity that it purports to be. Accordingly, Khalil begins to set up bridges with 3. See Aghacy 1998a.

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the past, with the paternal principle, in order to obliterate his feminine impulses. He renounces his short-lived feminine refuge and is transformed from a nurturing, sacrificing, emotionally sensitive man to a narcissistic, arrogant, and greedy militiaman. The tender, sensitive, “feminized” hero who is seen as anathema to virile war masculinity is vanquished and overpowered. Khalil is victimized by a society that does not tolerate difference and alterity, and has no choice but to submit to a rigidly entrenched patriarchal society.4 Since part of his performance of masculinity is showing disgust with and rejection of women, he rapes his next-door neighbor. This display of machismo is the only way out of the groove of effeminacy and marginalization. He sees the same woman he had offered assistance to in a different light. He suspects that whenever she greets him it is a “politeness excessive to the point of scorn” (200), and begins to sense something masculine about her that intimidates his own renewed sense of masculinity. His awareness of her strength angers him and he is all the more convinced of the repulsiveness of women: “How disgusting their bodies are, which are always secreting something. Always secreting blood, fi lth, rancid milk, urine, sweat, pungent white juices, tears” (215). Since he is unsure of his sexual identity, he needs to prove his masculinity by taking action. To use Butler’s words, gender is produced through “the repeated stylization of the body” (Butler 1999, 43), that is, the repetition of culturally intelligible acts and gestures that create the impression of an inherent biological essence. Accordingly, Khalil drops the shopping bag, wears a leather jacket and black glasses, and marches on with brazen confidence. Nearly dying during an ulcer operation, Khalil begins to see the world differently: “He looked upon his body as if it were a beautiful and beloved prodigal son. I love my beautiful body” (189). His effeminate body was something he hated and never really felt at ease with, and his love for other male bodies is a form of compensation for his own feelings of inferiority. He discovers that only the grave is clean, and views his earlier self as dead, and decides to wallow in the carnival of life. The curses, the robbery, and the killing outside shows that all these “games,

4. For types of allusions to homosexuality in modern Arabic literature, see Lagrange 2000. He describes homosexuals in Arabic literature as “undergoing severe malaise and loss of self-worth, possibly leading to death or suicide or articulated in the traumatic relationship with the other, usually the Western foreigner” (175).

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operas, scenarios, jokes, swearing” (190) are ways of celebrating life, and he is “fi lled with childlike delight with his new body, his strong body” (195). Khalil wants to learn “a new alphabet with which to love himself” and his body (195). Now he relishes the “uproar of the children,” the “car horns,” and the “sound of the electricity generators” (195), even “the cockroach which rushes down the plughole in the sink” (195). Khalil becomes involved with “the Brother,” the embodiment of hypermasculinity, who takes the bold step of confessing his feelings for Khalil, assuming that the latter is soft and effeminate. Rejecting this overture, Khalil becomes intent on entering the male arena where he meets his male counterparts in competition and war and refuses to be emotionally attached to any woman. Recoiling to an atavistic masculinity and embracing the mythical norm of ascendancy, mastery, and dominance, he is transformed into a rapist and extortionist. The celebration of toughness and national and military commitment is a necessary step in the discovery of his real sexual identity, which is heterosexual and homosocial. Accordingly, he makes a nostalgic return to a reactionary and retrograde patriarchal masculinity as a defense against a debilitating femininity, and as the only possible way to survive in the world of wartime Lebanon. By obliterating his feminine impulses, he embraces the masculine models set by the war, exhibiting a shocking machismo and obduracy, and his metamorphosis is complete. M a n ho od a n d C onge n i ta l De for m at ion If Khalil embraces a brand of masculinity that is disabled emotionally, the penguin man in Lebanese writer Hassan Daoud’s The Penguin’s Song (Ghina’ albatriq, 1998) is physically handicapped. This narrative is told by a man in his mid-twenties. His congenital malformation isolates him, but he achieves agency through a transgressive narrative that finds its way into a public sphere that rejects all forms of human oddity. When he walks, he tells us that he “jumps and pushes his chest upwards” like shorebirds that are unable to fly because of their small wings (44). He tells the story without sentimentality and with detachment as if he were moving slowly to his fate. His overprotective father does not allow his disabled son to do anything. In his shop in the old city, his father would leave his son in a chair and go out to attend to various errands. The young man says that this enforced inertia drains him, turning him into a spectacle to curious

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and inquisitive eyes that are taken in by this hybrid creature, and his abjection, marginalization, and social apartness become complete. After undergoing an unspecified catastrophe, the city is no longer livable, and the narrator’s family packs up and moves to a neutral area in a building that overlooks the city. Even though the city is nameless, there are allusions that suggest that it is Beirut. The novel is replete with references to places and sites that existed in the old city such as Al-Ma‘rad, Tal‘at Al-Bukhari, Hayy al-Sarayat, Al-Nuriyya, the Al-Amine Mosque, etc. Furthermore, the narrator’s mother confirms that “the old city was destroyed” (21). While many citizens have managed to find alternatives for their lost shops in the old city, the narrator’s father ignores his wife’s suggestions to open a new shop, viewing it as a humiliating alternative. He refuses to work even temporarily in a shabby shop under the stairs of a building with the bare minimum of merchandise. Retiring to the relative safety of the domestic sphere, he watches his wife cook, sits on the balcony looking at the devastated city from a distance, and locks the doors and closes the windows when he decides it is time to go to bed. Although the father does not refer to the war directly, he is clearly traumatized by it and tells his wife that he wonders how people can go on with their lives as if nothing had happened. Driven by an impulse to escape fostered by the devastating war, he retires into his domestic cocoon and severs himself from the trauma of history even as he watches the city being leveled by bulldozers. The war appears to have sapped his masculine stamina, self-mastery, and autonomy. Despite the crippling historical circumstances, the father remains attached to the city even after thirteen years and awaits impatiently the reconstruction of the old city that will give him back his shop and his masculine identity as the economic supporter of the family; nevertheless, he dies before anything concrete takes place. Watching history unfold from a distance, the narrator tells his tale through a series of synchronic scenes outside time and diachronic temporality. For instance, rather than telling us that his father has aged, he notes the white dilation that has invaded his eyes.5 With his unsightly figure and arrested development, the narrator embodies a grotesque monstrosity. Looking like a penguin (an amalgam of man and bird) with short hands, bulging belly and chest, and head sunken between his 5. See Dorilian 1998.

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shoulders, he is constructed as freakish and outlandish. On a bus trip organized by the school, the narrator is attracted to a girl whom he watches through the mirror. He remains aloof, sitting in the front of the bus instead of mingling with the students or joining in their songs. While the girl notices his look, he remains in his seat waiting for her to take the initiative and sit in the empty seat next to him. But she soon forgets all about him when she starts talking to another boy, and the narrator notes the intimacy that develops between them and becomes aware of his inability to perform in the game of heterosexual conquest and male rivalry. The innocent girl he was attracted to now is, in his view, both corrupted and defiled. Furthermore, since the students mimic his walk, and his deformed, asymmetrical body, he decides to give up school altogether; he feels that he no longer belongs to the school community. When he tells his father of his desire to stop going to school, his father wonders whether his school bag is too heavy or whether sitting down for a long time makes him too tired. When his mother tells her husband that if her son wants to quit, she finds no reason why he should go to school, her husband asks her not to interfere in matters she knows nothing about and warns his son that by sitting at home he will end up just like a woman, feminized and domesticated. However, his son reassures him that he will be working daily and reading all the books that his father had bought him thirteen years before. Accordingly, he dresses up every day as if to go to school and spends his time reading. This ineffectual preoccupation with reading keeps him hidden away from a ruthless external world, while the old books keep him well-installed in the past; school is a trope of the present and future. This cloistered, eccentric, and atavistic being associates his body with “ancient people” (157) who perished long ago, evoking affinities with primordial people, mythic races, and extinct animals. Spending his time exclusively within the space of the home, he admits that he felt ancient when he sat in his father’s old shop among the other objects. He also feels ancient when he carries his empty plate and the old pot to the kitchen and when he is “piled up, lurking, and gathering up by the window” (157), dangling out to catch sight of the girl downstairs. When the girl discovers him at the window, he tells us that she probably assumes that he “must have been there forever, placed at the corner of the window like a mummified bird” (157–58). The narrator represents a version of manhood precariously poised between masculine hardness and feminine retirement and enclosure. He is a pathologically

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passionless man whose reclusive aloofness and dread of being the focus of public spectacle ensure his absence from the public eye to the point of self-erasure. If the narrator leads a sedentary existence, however, he remains an active onlooker within an autoerotic field of vision, and the narrative explores social taboos and perverse sexualities through the lustful eye of the penguin man. The girl who lives in the apartment underneath becomes the center of his gaze. From his bedroom window, he watches her walking on the sandy road and imagines the sand infi ltrating her white shoes and her tender toes that he envisages as “soft and pliant” (38), not yet coarsened by age. For her to have a sexual appeal for the penguin man, she must remain liminally arrested on the frontier between the innocence of a child and full-blown womanhood. Glimpsed from his window, the distance she traverses between the flat and the sand road constitutes a symbolic geography of desire that gives the narrator’s pedophilic fantasies a needed validity. He admits that he would like to be the only one who is able to detect something not childish in her sweaty and tired body that he sees struggling on the road visible from his window. Using the girl’s virginity to inspire his masturbation, he attributes to her body a virile sexuality that is exclusively preserved for him. Concealing his physical anomaly and feminine passivity, he compensates by remaining in a continual state of arousal in an attempt to pounce at the child before she turns woman, and before she begins to constitute a sexual threat. Like a crouching wolf in his perverse sanctuary, he monitors the girl’s every move and strips her naked in his fantasy. His gaze is loaded with carnality as he watches her “white hand” (26) closing the window where the girl is transformed into a fetishized visual object set against his monstrous oddity. Even though he possesses the authoritative gaze, his desiring look is related to loss of patriarchal control and his knowledge that the moment she begins to mature biologically, his chance for a physical affair with her will be over. As a result, his gaze can be viewed as a chiasmatic combination of erotic desire and hurtfulness, appetite and an equal awareness of lack and fear of castration.6 His compulsive fi xation on the girl is such that he can hear the click of the light switch in her apartment and can from the sound of her steps determine her exact location. He fantasizes about her naked and about her body, not as a whole 6. Mary Russo defi nes fetishism as “the attempted representation of lack in the service of male disavowal . . . hiding the feared no-thing, castration” (1994, 140).

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but as anatomized and dismembered (Apter 1991, xi). His scopophilic spectatorship and erotic phantasm are such that her feet become the predominant erogenous zones of her dislocated body, a spot of intense visual cathexis. He dreams of putting his hands on her breasts, but he does not like her to expose herself to the empty apartment, as if defying someone who is there watching her. Simultaneously, he feels threatened when he observes that she is growing and becoming more conscious of her body and of her sexuality. Feeling threatened by the girl’s developing sexuality and fear of her sexual maturation, he has fantasies about having sex with her, and the language he employs betrays him. For instance, he refers to her in her apartment as “underneath” him, and alludes to “the body on top of her,” meaning himself on the floor above (58). He desires the body that has not felt any sexual desire before and worships an angelic beauty that should only belong to the beastly penguin man. Her golden blond hair turns her into an unattainable celestial being that can only be possessed in his phantasms, a sort of beauty-and-the-beast situation. Accordingly, his active gaze encompasses desire mixed with misgivings about his masculinity. As E. Ann Kaplan refers to it, “The subject bearing the gaze is not interested in the subject per se, but [is] consumed with his own anxieties, which are inevitably mixed with desire” (1997, xviii). The penguin man tells us that he manages to communicate his feelings to her one night when he tells her from the window where he is standing: “I knew you were going to get up. I have waited for you so you would not be alone” (173). Apparently, this is no more than a desire on his part since nothing happens and we learn nothing about the girl’s reaction. He fantasizes about having sex with her on the roof where his fetishistic desire for her toes takes hold of him: he imagines himself wallowing in her sweaty feet and in the “erect toes” (197) which he holds in his hands until he reaches a climax. The penguin man represents a masculinity characterized by silence, marginalization, confinement, voyeurism, and implosion. This is a novel about a man whose transgressive, anomalous physiognomy isolates him from male homosocial collectivity and deprives him of the challenge of male competitive assertiveness, a central mark of the Lebanese war. The abject state of the lonely penguin man is a telling commentary on the Lebanese war’s compulsory fraternity. The penguin’s extreme individuation and pathological traits are the result of insecurity about a deformed body that brings about a ruthless social exclusion depriving him of intimacy with any man or woman.

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His ostracism and solipsistic pursuits can be read as a ferocious defense against the threat of castration and an escape from the male world of public action into the ahistorical domestic space normally controlled by women. This is a miasmic ordeal of masculine paralysis and monastic isolation for failing to be a “normal” being in a society that spurns difference. Despite his marginalization, however, he does not question the tenets of the patriarchal male world and resents his inability to make use of his privileges as a man in a patriarchal society. The novel is a first-person confession written in a lyrical style with occasional references to the material details of everyday life or the specificities of contemporary political events. Despite the staggering isolation, writing empowers the isolated male self giving it a distinct voice of its own and a form of compensation for its alienating congenital malformation. Th is is a male narrator who despite his marginality speaks within the mode of the phallogocentric voice of masculine domination, and continues to function within the patriarchal discourse. The narrative constitutes a prosthetic link to an exterior world that is generally barricaded and inaccessible to the narrator. The process of writing provides him with the illusion of connecting with the outer world. As a result, writing becomes a seat of masculine empowerment and a paradigmatic form of manly action in a world where the female is an anatomized body while the male attempts to be an abstract and bodiless voice despite his conspicuous malformed body. This is a masculine narrative that defines the arena of domesticity as an enclosed and claustrophobic space identified with women and fantasizes escape routes to the much coveted patriarchal domain that he augments as much as he confronts and defies. In his liminal position, he eschews the threat of female sexuality and the challenge of male control, thus creating an alternative masculinity that is both defiant and acquiescent, standing on the frontier between two oppositional worlds. The penguin and his father remain imprisoned in a feminine inner space while the mother manages to escape the domestic space for a desired sisterhood and female complicity that empowers her and enables her to exchange roles with the men in the family. When his mother starts spending more time with the girl’s mother downstairs, it looks as though the house belongs solely to the father and his son. The two women take walks on the sandy road and have picnics in a spot where they can be seen by the husband and son. His

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mother’s relationship with the woman downstairs alienates her from her son, who believes that she does not care for him and is indifferent to the effort he exerts when he walks the claustrophobic noisy and crowded streets. When the son fi nally decides to fi nd a job, his father insists on accompanying him, but his mother wants her husband to leave him alone as she is sure that her son will find his way. Her son’s resentment is obvious when he tells us that “her enthusiasm for visits and trips made her more inclined to take risks and to go out” (86). When he gets a job proofreading, his father respects the work he is doing, but his mother is not impressed as this meager job will not put him in the male position of breadwinner. While the son values his father’s appreciation, he is angry with his mother who has taken a fancy to her daily excursions. Possessing a precarious masculine identity, he is critical of his mother’s untraditional behavior. He grudges his mother’s playful mood, which gives her an intelligence that she does not normally possess. Both men feel threatened by the mother who, despite her illiteracy, manages to slip out of their control and achieve agency through her ability to traverse the public sphere and establish new bonds, not only with the woman downstairs but also with the general external world, and abandon the atavistic world the two men inhabit. Left alone at home with his disabled son, the father tries to engage him in conversation, but his son remains silent, living in a world of his own. Owing to his impaired vision, the father can no longer see the old city from the balcony. Eventually, he forgets about his shop, stops asking about it, and spends his time counting the little money left in the coffer, which he thinks is better than standing in front of the mirror as his wife does. The son’s misogynistic reading of women makes him all the more irritated by her frivolous, playful smile that gives him the impression that his mother is a rash and reckless coquette. Because his sexual identity remains elusive to his mother, she tries to discover his sexual orientation by pushing him into bed with her friend. His mother rather than father plays the masculine role of introducing him to the male world of sexuality. Assuming that her friend is the center of her son’s interest, she gives him a knowing smile every time she spots him taking his position by the window. By trying to arrange an encounter between her friend and her son, the mother accomplishes a prosthetic link to ensure that her son is “normal” despite his difference. When he finally accompanies his mother to his neighbor’s home, he sits

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face to face with the woman whose legs attract him so much that he can hardly take his eyes off them. Nevertheless, the main reason for his acquiescence to his mother’s invitation is to take a look at the apartment in which the little girl moves so that he can monitor more closely the girl’s movements. He assumes that if he goes into the bathroom, he will be in a place where the mother and daughter are often naked, and he fantasizes that he will find the girl’s panties on the floor. When he enters the bedroom with the woman, he wishes that his mother were there for he feels awkward and unprepared, but he also has a strong sense that she is spying on them and that he is having sex under her eye. Under the prying eyes of his mother, he feels that he needs to perform, which reveals detachment and lack of affect and verbal communication. He has difficulty dissociating the woman from his mother and the mother from the daughter so much so that the women collapse into one, revealing how fantasy feeds a castrated reality. The penguin’s sexual encounter with the woman is achieved only if he fantasizes about the daughter, whose traces on her mother’s body keep him erect and whose emergence from her mother’s womb enables him to penetrate the mother. He clearly prefers his father to his mother, who constitutes a threat to him. He recalls how his father bought every book his son demanded, and how he used to stand sweating by his son’s side to make sure that he bought the right books. Whenever he goes out to the balcony where his father normally sits, his father stands up to give him his seat and manifests a strong nurturing spirit that his mother does not. His resentment against his mother appears exaggerated, for she is, after all, a simple woman who accepts the bare minimum and tries to cope with her situation. She economizes when it comes to cooking, adding an eggplant or some oil and onions to the leftovers of the earlier day to give the new meal some taste and variety. She does not go anywhere and receives no visitors. His mother is an ordinary woman who manages to survive on the little money they have. Nevertheless, she is presented as a perplexing combination of good and bad, strength and weakness. She gets dressed every day as if she were preparing for visitors who never show up. Yet her husband and son grudge her this and view her as a paragon of feeble-mindedness and female inferiority. Her son tells us that when she sits knitting, it looks as though the needles are sporting with the stitches, revealing a wantonness that is morally revolting to both father and son.

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The father and son grudge her outings and feel threatened by female bonding that could castrate men. But his mother defends herself and tells her son that while women wear makeup, she uses only soap; it does not cost him anything if she stands before the mirror and goes downstairs wearing her old clothes. In the son’s view, she is a middle-aged woman who must respect herself and not act like a young woman. The fact that she withholds her nurturance and protection transforms her into a monstrous being in her son’s eyes, and her assertiveness is measured against the two men’s self-effacement. The son assumes that his father hates her and that gives him extra energy, but he projects his own anger with his mother when he maintains that his mother has become “a hot cavity like a red iron” (191) in his father’s mind. Having experienced a prolonged period of infantile dependence, the son cannot cope with his mother’s abandonment and is unable to cut the umbilical cord. The narrator ends up feeding his ailing father, whose movement around the flat becomes restricted to the balcony. The buildings rising sluggishly before his father’s eyes are phallic tropes whose laborious attempts to stand erect represent the father’s final defeat and castration. His father awaits the “erection” of the buildings, but he dies before any building is completed, and as a result, he fails to regain his masculinity. After his death, his son spots two buildings that look bowed and arched, reflecting the son’s own sense of impotence. When his father dies, the son sells his books and some of the furniture to bury him, while his mother and her friend move to the city where the penguin man suspects that the woman is doing what she did with him, sleeping with men. The women embrace the new life that awaits them in the city, while the men remain mummified in the past and outside the flow of time. The narrator’s fantasies of the girl are his way of hewing his way out of the suffocating maternal presence and moving women from positions of authority and power to one of utter powerlessness. But he has started to see a different look on the girl’s face, what he refers to as the lurking wily and deceitful look, and feels that she too is preparing herself to move to the city. His own pull towards death is reinforced through his frequent visits to his father’s grave to calm the latter’s “restless soul” (206). The narrator ends up paying homage to the dead and repudiating the living. His mother’s sexuality and grossness of flesh obliterates her son, whose recalcitrant corporeal difference feminize and turn him into a pariah, who, having thrust out his head, recoils into his shell. In the empty

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house, he seeks that state of utter void that would drive him inevitably to his impending doom. A n E x-M i l i t i a m a n ’s Fa n ta si e s of P ow e r Unlike the fida’i, who is revered by his people, the militiaman is viewed as a thug and murderer, as seen in How Wonderful (Ya Salam, 1999) by the Lebanese woman writer Najwa Barakat. The time is postwar Lebanon, yet the ghost of war pervades the narrative. Characters measure themselves in relation to the war and are unable to emancipate themselves from it. The novel underscores the diverse, changeable gender identities within particular contexts, and how men try to cope with an emasculating present where the relation between male sexual potency and the war is evident. The novel portrays the wrenching effect of war on men’s understanding of themselves and their sex roles and the sense that traditional notions of masculinity and male autonomy are eroding under the pressure of peace. This narrative focuses on lower-class and subaltern characters in the wake of the Lebanese civil war. When the novel begins, Luqman, the protagonist and exmilitia man, is vanquished, demoralized, subservient, and emasculated. He feels disoriented and paralyzed after the Lebanese civil war ends abruptly, leaving him without any power: “One day, just like that, suddenly, they cut his war like it was a rope, and Luqman’s life fell flat on its back, lifeless . . . a heap . . . paralysis in the brain” (6). At this point, Luqman begins touching his penis—which he refers to as “my companion” (7)—urging “him” to rise; he finds out that, like himself, his companion has no desire either. The identification of sexual performance with masculinity causes Luqman a great deal of trepidation, but he does not panic for he hopes to meet Marina, his Russian mistress, in the evening and prove that he is still the same potent man he has always been. He is clearly attracted to Marina, whom he describes as dazzling in the summer and as “cool, and refreshing like a bottle of soda water with a sugary and minty flavor” in the winter (7). However, Luqman knows that he is left with only fift y dollars and that he will not be able to maintain his relationship with her the way he did in the war when he had loads of money. Being financially incapacitated, he senses that his masculinity is in jeopardy, particularly when people no longer fear or respect him. One morning as he is

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washing in the bathroom, he spots a “creature” on the window staring at him without batting an eye. Luqman realizes that he is no longer able to affect the world around him: Had his automatic rifle been available, he would have pulled it up slowly, looked through the aperture, aimed directly between the eyebrows, pulled the trigger slowly and carefully, and hit the target. He would have enjoyed the sight of this villain’s skull exploding, his brain gushing out and his blood scattering like drizzle in all directions. Then he would have gone to him, grabbed him and thrown him on the ground and started kicking his body with his feet until his entrails came out from the belly, the mouth and ears. (9–10)

Luqman copes with feelings of castration and effeminacy through compensatory fantasies of savagery and brutality. Living on the fringes of postwar Lebanon, he feels nostalgic for a heightened manly ideal that he has lost, one where misogyny and heroism are interchangeable terms. When he goes down the stairs of his building, he has a strong desire to bang ferociously at the concierge’s door and scream: “You dog, open or else I’ll open fire on you” (15). Life has changed from the old days when “the earth shook and trembled at the sound of his steps, but the balance of power no longer tips to his side” (15). He has fantasies of violence whenever he feels intimidated by anyone. For instance, he dreams of his old Range Rover that would run over the beggar who pesters him for money. Luqman emerges defective and unstable out of a war that witnessed exaggerated acts of machismo and brutality, bringing him face to face with his primordial instincts. His sense of frustration drives him to watch a hanging that he refers to as a “festival.” When he gets there he discovers that thousands of people have come from all over the country to watch the execution as “people have died of boredom” and miss such celebrations (18). The place is full of all sorts of people: mothers suckling their babies, elderly people in their wheelchairs, as well as sellers of coffee, juices, sandwiches, and sweets. When a woman screams insisting on seeing the men to be hanged, Luqman is filled with anger: “If the matter were in his hands, he would have assailed her with slaps and strikes, trampled on her protruding stomach, pulled her hair and spit in her dirty mouth that is full of food. . . . A mob. In God’s name, they are even less than a mob! A herd. Animals who deserve the guillotine, and who deserve slaughter!” (21).

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On the scaffold where two men are to be executed, a female correspondent with long painted nails reads the death sentence. After the execution, she has sex with Luqman in her car, and as soon as she satiates her desire, she kicks him out. Luqman represents a stereotypical masculinity that is defined in terms of aggression, chauvinism, and butchery, but in peacetime he experiences an emasculating reversal of gender roles where a woman, who is clearly not equal to man in war, treats him like an object and dumps him when she is through with him. The scene figures the woman as decidedly not passive and Luqman as the object of her desires; the traditional image of dominant macho male and submissive female is shaken. The aggressive Luqman, who is used to penetrating and appropriating virgin territories, is metaphorically penetrated by the woman with painted nails. The “festival” he attends is a Bakhtinian carnival site that overruns gender boundaries and destabilizes masculine and feminine categories (Martin 1990, 138). The novel questions the “natural” differences between men and women betraying a strong sense of insecurity about masculinity in peacetime, which remains a disturbingly complex and shifting category (Peterson 1998, 20). In the novel, war is not a magnanimous act of self-sacrifice the way it is in Palestinian literature but a sadistic act practiced with pride and inventiveness. As a result, peacetime becomes an entrapping environment where Luqman knows that he has lost his dominating masculine identity and has been brushed to a corner. The old days are gone and the balance of power has shifted. When the war ends, Luqman faces the problem of reintegrating into a postwar society: finding a job and maintaining the integrity of his masculinity. To compensate for a lost sense of masculine power, he attempts to revive his authority by hiding behind a feminine guise of compassion in order to regain a lost sense of agency and achievement. He realizes that values shunned in war such as sensitivity, delicacy, and tenderness are desperately needed in peacetime. The grotesque environment around him, whose images of darkness, entrapment, and squalor place him in a vulnerable situation, reveals that he is unequipped to survive in a world of peace. Luqman feels nostalgic for the good old days when he had absolute power, when the city, under the phallic control of masculine power, seethed with tumultuous violence and destruction. This was a time when the world was at his command and where death was meaningless and human beings were insignificant. He recalls how he and his friend Najib raped a virgin who

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committed suicide the following morning. This tough camaraderie seems to be the fact of their maleness, which is bound up with offensive, hostile aggression (Gilmore 1990, 41). An infallible, armored masculinity pervades the war city and infi ltrates into all areas including the inner spaces dominated by women. For instance, when a shell kills Salam’s parents and a militiaman, Al-Abrass, comes to console her, Salam tells him not to worry about two old people when “young people are dying by the tens and hundreds” (29). In a world of peace, Luqman can no longer go out with the prostitute he desires, and he finds refuge with Salam (whose name ironically means peace), who is plain and older than he. He wonders how his friend Al-Abrass, who died in the war, could have loved her and attributes this to the fact that he never trusted women and accordingly chose an ugly woman whose chances of deceiving him are minimal. Salam is Al-Abrass’s bequest, and Luqman is upset to be saddled with an ugly old maid in a new world where traditional attributes of masculinity such as wealth and material success are appropriated by women; men feel inadequate, at the mercy of women. Luqman is perturbed about a feminine offensive in postwar Lebanon and is bent on using his masculine prerogatives to neutralize this onslaught. When the war is over, Salam asks him to stay at her house, and he accepts because he thinks he can lay hands on her money. When he discovers that it is not that easy to steal it, he decides not to fall into the trap and go to bed with her, fearing that if he does, Salam will suck his blood until he dries up and withers. Salam is an archetypal figure of female menace, which is able to castrate him and turn him into a eunuch. He is repelled by her foul breath, the smell of her sweat, and her mice-infested home, suggesting a squalid life that he cannot escape from. In order to avoid being too involved with her, he tells her that he remains loyal to his friend Al-Abrass who loved her; he will not make any advances for she is a woman he respects and venerates, while he is a man with no past or future and does not deserve a woman like her. Living with her, he has no choice but to drive her to the sanatorium to see her sick brother, although deep down, he desires to drive her car at high speed, open the door, and “throw her into the abyss” (37). His frustration springs from a growing realization that she is in control. Despite his anger, he convinces himself that he is doing a lonely woman a good turn that will be rewarded with some extra dollars. Besides, if he does not

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take her to the sanatorium, her brother Salim (which ironically means healthy) will have to return home and have a nurse look after him, paid for with the puny amount of money Luqman hopes to get for himself. The title of the novel is itself an ironic comment upon his relationship with Salam. Salam’s name in Arabic means “peace,” while Ya salam means “How wonderful”. The title is the author’s ironic comment on a peaceful postwar Lebanon that is controlled by women like Salam. In a peace context, Luqman feels cornered by women, whom he views as fatal to his equilibrium and well-being: “All women are whores without exception. His own mother was a whore. She beat him for the most insignificant reasons. Or even for no reason at all. She beat him until the blood trickled down his mouth, and when his father came home, he beat him again and tied him to a tree for hours” (40). He does not understand why he was beaten as he had only killed a scabby cat, or thrown a stone at a hen, or hanged a rabbit. Was it possible that his parents preferred these fi lthy animals to him? When he starts giving them money, they treat him with respect, but when he is no longer able to provide, they dismiss him and affirm that he has always been a “son of a bitch” (41). Now his lot is with spinsters and “half women” like Salam when during the war he was able to make the richest and most famous whores in the world bow to him. He feels nostalgic for a past that continues to colonize the present through fantasies of violence that strike him every time he is unable to cope with the present situation. Now he lives the life of dogs, and his resentment is manifested in sadistic acts of violence. For instance, he tramples upon a rat until it is completely unrecognizable. By releasing his frustrations on dumb creatures, he compensates for being forced to return to a peripheral position after the war. The novel uncovers masculinities other than the primitive and destructive that surface in a war context. Salam’s brother Salim is unable to deal with the brutality and ferocity of the war and, as a result, breaks down completely. AlAbrass used to take Salim on his rounds, but one day Salim has had enough (it is not clear where he takes him, but perhaps Salim had witnessed torture), and he tells Salam that he does not want to see Al-Abrass anymore. Salam slaps him and screams at him, “Shut up, you coward. You are not a man, you’re a hen. And I am clear of you and your despicable shame” (44). Salim regresses to a state of infantilism and whenever he sees Salam, he wants to suckle at her breast. His infantile desire for a mother that gratifies his needs and removes all frustrations explain his craving to regress to the safety of a primordial womb.

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By contrast, Al-Abrass is a tough, callous, and mysterious man, ingenious in the techniques of torture. He needs no one and goes to extremes in his activities and his torturing techniques. Similarly, Luqman’s second comrade Jamil, a professional sniper, is described as a “loner who hated humans, and did not like to mingle. A wolf that trusts no one but himself and his brothers the wolves” (49). For Luqman, such types are like gods and prophets who determine fates, and work by themselves far away from the “scum” of humans although they are becoming extinct. Salam too is disillusioned with the men around her, including Luqman, whom she views as an opportunist, and her boss, who wants her to cheat and spy on other employees: “Animals! Men are all animals! Idiots, arrogant and disgusting strutting around like cocks without brains. The moment they see buttocks, or a leg or naked flesh, they open their mouths, their breathing accelerates and their tongues dangle like hungry and wild dogs ready to pounce on anything” (83). Despite Salam’s attack on men, she remains basically a product of her society. When Al-Abrass, the feared hyper-masculine militia man, gets engaged to her, she feels proud and relieved: her relatives cannot despise her as an old maid now that she has a man. Salam’s inner strength is used not to empower herself as a woman but rather to ensure that she remains under a man’s wing. Finding out that Luqman is having an affair with another, she attaches herself to his friend Najib, who is basically a sadist. Her masochism enables her to submit to his violence and congratulate herself on the ability to catch a man. She dumps her brother in the cellar and kills him with morphine injections in order to keep her new lover without the nuisance of a sick brother. Feeling more secure in her relationship with Najib, she starts a small business with Luqman and Najib to exterminate rats from houses and public places. On a visit to a woman who contacts them about the mice in her apartment, Luqman discovers a new lifestyle that will give him a chance to get out of the groove of poverty and squalor. Shirine, a young Lebanese woman who lived in France during the war, returns to Lebanon with the French delegation of a joint program of UNESCO and the Lebanese government to excavate archeological sites in the country. In order to deal with a world where women begin to occupy not only the private but public space, Luqman uses guile to cope with and benefit from this resurgence of women in the public arena and in positions of control. He starts

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dreaming of moving to a more civilized country like France where he would start anew. Realizing that his ruthlessness has become counterproductive in times of peace, he decides to set a trap for Shirine so she will fall in love with him and take him with her to France. He tries to brush aside a primal masculinity and insinuates a kinder, gentler, feminized version of masculinity. Locating his victim’s vulnerabilities, he tells her that he participated in the war by joining a political party but that he quit when he discovered that the war was perpetrated by mercenaries and villains. His talk about degeneracy succeeds in hooking his fish. Even though he places his sense of masculine identity in sexual potency and material wealth, he decides to go along with Shirine’s views of love in order to attain his goal. Realizing that Shirine is a romantic woman, he decides to give her love and affection to make sure that she has fallen for him. Under a soft, gentle, and feminine guise, he plays the role of the infatuated lover who expresses his love through sympathy and tenderness. Behind the veneer of delicacy and sensitivity there lurk raging appetites and desires rooted in a primitive fear of a disorienting peace epitomized by the empowered woman. Shirine’s work at the archeological site mirrors the excavation of the psyche that produces, ironically, a primitive man in the image of Luqman in her bedroom. What keeps him from being torn asunder is his dogged strength, his emotional impairment, his calculating frame of mind, his low opinion of women, and his repressed aggressiveness that is given free rein in riotous fantasies. Afraid of losing control, he warns his “companion” not to “rush it for the situation is sensitive where any incorrect move is sure to lose Miss Shirine and the Parisian future along with her. You must get used to this type of women. With her, speed does not work, one needs all the time” (125). He plays the role of the smitten lover in order to seize her money and her French nationality. Feeling disappointed with the way archeological sites are handled by the Lebanese government, however, Shirine decides to return to France. She doesn’t consult Luqman, who is outraged at the war for coming to an end, leaving men like himself at the mercy of women: “And I? And us? How do we survive in this dog age, the age of peace, decadence, disgust, cheating, looting, cheating, lies, deception and appearances?” (169). Despite his disappointment, Shirine proposes to him, “We will marry and you will bear children for me” (170), suggesting that she is in control and intends to play the active role in the marriage. The novel is

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profoundly subversive with a relentless lack of sentimentality. At the same time, it is imbued with deliberate ambivalence emanating from a narrator who destabilizes traditional gender roles uncovering the internal ambiguity of maleness and femaleness. On the day of Luqman’s departure, he visits Salam and is shocked to discover that her lover Najib has died and that Siham has had a breakdown. When Najib dies of the plague that he contracted from his obsessive experimentation with mice, Siham denies it and keeps the body rotting in the bedroom. After Luqman visits Salam, he decides to stop in on Al-Abrass’s senile mother in the hope of stealing some of her money, which he considers wasted on her, but she locks him in, thinking that he is her deceased son who has tortured many people. Terrified of him, she ties him up and turns the gas on to make sure he never harms her or anyone else again. Luqman has been ambushed by yet another woman who in peacetime turns against him and makes him pay the price of war. The feminine comes back in a distorted form to exact revenge on him and on what he stands for. His masculinity, which shuns any gentle and nurturing qualities, cannot sustain him in peacetime, heralding the demise of a phallic masculinity by a pervasive and overpowering female principle. W h e n Wom a n H a s t h e U ppe r H a n d Meryl Streep Can Suit Herself (Tistifil Meryl Stryp, 2000) by the Lebanese writer Rashid Al-Da‘if is an unprecedented probing into private relationships hitherto considered taboo in Arab writing. This is a novel where masculine identity, which is characterized by strong boundaries and viewed as self-evident and unproblematic, is in a state of crisis in postwar Lebanon. The novel brings private sexual experience into the realm of the public and interrogates the view that male language is directed towards the public and political rather than the private and personal. The narrative favors a male narrator, Rachud, whose perspective, viewing women and men in binary terms, dominates the world of the novel. The work underlines the rise of a softer form of masculinity that challenges essentialist views of sexual identity and the “stereotype of the traditional sheltered woman who contributed little to . . . life outside the home” (Tucker 1993, xi), and marks the rise of feminine autonomy and the derailment of masculine control. The novel focuses on an intransigently powerful woman who challenges her

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husband’s views of women’s inferiority and sheltered existence, which collapses male control and heralds the rise of feminine autonomy. Al-Da‘if presents a man living in postwar Lebanon who discovers that being a man has become problematic and that he needs to make major adjustments in his life to deal with a woman that he cannot understand. The unexpected acquisition of rights, the sudden empowerment of women, indeed the feminization of Lebanese culture, takes him by surprise and causes frustration and anxiety, particularly when he discovers that his version of traditional masculinity is incompatible with the modern world that his wife has embraced. The novel is shaped by a female principle represented by the narrator’s wife, who challenges her husband’s masculine self and threatens to dismantle his authority. The narrator’s sense of what constitutes maleness and femaleness is displaced, causing confusion particularly that his ideals of male behavior are based on women as either paragons of purity or sexual conveniences. In reaction, he sets out to prove his masculine control over his wife through an intimate address to the reader. This is a novel of double-talk and multiple discourses—patriarchal, misogynous, and feminist—existing in antagonistic incongruity and generating equivocality and indeterminacy despite the single narrative voice. The discourse of traditional submission is infi ltrated by another discourse of subversive defiance and insubordination that undermines the masculinist ideology that appears to control the narrative. The narrative is dialogic: contradictory registers are embedded in the actual narrative. The diminutive nickname of the narrator Rashid, who is referred to as “Rachud,” underlines the trivialization of his situation and the victory of his wife over him. He is presented as the butt of mockery, as an anachronism that his wife has surpassed and left behind. Al-Da‘if’s novel is self-consciously ironic throughout, revealing Rachud to be the frequent target of his own jests and mockery. Looking at the relationship between himself and his wife, the narrator begins to discover the discrepancy between public attitudes and private practices. He longs for a stable and harmonious world and views himself as a staunch supporter of the social order that fi xes him in a position of dominance and control. Accordingly, he attempts to define his masculinity in concurrence with ideologies fostered by a patriarchal, heterosexist culture. For instance, virginity of women before marriage is valued by the narrator, indeed rigorously demanded, to ensure the integrity of the family and Rachud’s superiority and control. His

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strong belief in virginity is related to his narcissistic feelings and his conviction that he deserves “to open” a woman (79). This is a precious gift that will continue to affect him positively all the days of his life. This acquisitive masculine desire implies that the narrator feels the need to possess the object woman totally and disrupt any attempt by her to challenge him. In order to prove his point, the narrator relies on religious discourse that professes man as “the head of woman” (90) and woman as naturally inferior to man: “God created man as a being stronger than woman . . . and God surely did not create anything in vain” (141). Religion is given a role as a marker of identity, and his wife’s conformity to the religious text is a vital matter for Rachud. In resorting to religious text, Rachud is intent on empowering himself in relation to his wife. His essentialist view that, regardless of time or place, “the man remains a man and the woman a woman” (143) reinforces a general mistrust of women and uncertainty about his masculinity. In line with a religiously and socially sanctioned ideology of gender differentiation, he sets out to preserve the status quo by insisting on marginalizing his wife and ensuring that she remains absent and voiceless. The narrator is intent on committing his wife to a monological discourse that maintains and solidifies rigid gender boundaries so that she, like Hassiba in Shadows on the Window, has no existence outside the narrator’s representation of her. Like Mina’s protagonist Fater, Rachud’s tendency to view women as abstractions is a strategy to treat them as a monolithic group, erasing any idiosyncrasies that they might exhibit. He is convinced that without her husband, a woman is at loose ends and will only have real peace when “her husband returns to her or she returns to him” (22); her capitulation means that the “angels of heaven” are satisfied with her (70). He maintains that a woman should only feel at ease within the stability of her family; otherwise, Lebanon will be like the West where “as soon as a woman loses her temper with her husband, she bangs the door behind her without even saying goodbye” (22). As far as he is concerned, the marriage and family institutions define women as vulnerable and in need of men’s guidance and protection. This view in itself is a self-protective strategy to reassure him of male agency and power over women, who should be compliant and live up to male fantasies of passivity and ward off fitna that creeps in and defi les a woman’s purity. Idealizing women and protecting them are the essence of true manhood, and women must comply.

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Sensing that men and women are becoming too much alike, and conscious of his wife’s challenge to his masculinity, he reacts with a rowdy affirmation of gender opposition and separate spheres for men and women, who must be seen within the traditional configuration of domesticity. His response to her power is to reassert his power over her by appropriating her voice and speaking on her behalf. Feeling threatened and marginalized by his wife’s uncharacteristic behavior (her decision to leave the house), he wants to limit her to reproductive functions and biological ineluctability. In attempting to retain control over his wife, he goes as far as appropriating his wife’s procreative role, taking exclusive credit for her pregnancy and her ability to bear children. He congratulates himself on making her pregnant and transforming her into “a mother, the most beautiful thing in this world, into a symbol of affection, giving and sacrifice” (86). Having bestowed all these graces upon his wife, he wonders why she is ungrateful: “She did not thank me when she knew she was pregnant” (102). Now that his wife is pregnant, his desire for paternal control becomes allencompassing; he is certain that he will have a male rather than a female child. Simultaneously, he insists that motherhood is the primary element that defines a woman, and even when a woman is suffering within a marriage, she must put up with her husband because she is a mother and nothing is more “precious to her than the happiness of her son [not daughter], the fruit of her womb” (69). Aware of the precariousness of the once-sacred image of the father/husband, the narrator tries to stabilize the role through a narrative where verbal potency stands as a compensation for sexual insecurity. The narrator’s view of masculinity is bound up with a strongly homosocial interaction where he needs to secure the approval of male counterparts who are in a position to corroborate his masculinity and grant or deny the manhood he desires. Deeply suspicious that his wife has had other relations before marriage, Rachud dreads the idea that a former lover of hers would “laugh at me in secret, and mock me and boast in my presence because he simply refused to marry the girl I am proud to be married to . . . because he slept with her . . . and she was easy” (134). Rachud cannot bear to be espoused to this man’s “leftovers” (137) and says he will not marry a woman who has had sex with more than one man: “I will only marry a sane woman. I mean ordinary. That is someone who has no history charged with moral dissipation. And if I have to marry one who has had an affair (I do not say affairs) and within the limits of the possible, she will not be

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within the circles that I move in, so I do not have to meet this person (a former lover) every day” (138). Strongly aware of the fragility of his position with his wife, who has already left the house, he makes a point of hiding from his male friends his marital problems as they will reveal that his household is not under control. After all, his wife would never leave the house without permission if she was certain of her husband’s masculinity. His friends are a source of anxiety in the sense that they have the ability to expose him for not proving his manliness and controlling his wife’s behavior. Like Fater in Journey at Dusk, his relationship with his male friends is characterized by obscene language, intense homophobia, and contempt for women. One of his friends tells them that when he gets upset with his wife he “gives it to her” (60) to ensure that the penis remains an instrument of control. Convinced that female sexuality threatens his control, the narrator needs to check his wife’s unbridled sexuality. Resenting the fact that his wife calls him a “hairy monkey” and prefers the machos of Hollywood who have soft bodies without any hair, he maintains ironically that “we, the inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean are too old-fashioned” (83). He feels threatened by the westernization of Lebanese society and goes as far as to say that Lebanese women have surpassed Western women in their liberal attitudes and behavior. Watching the film “Kramer versus Kramer” on television, he compares the Meryl Streep character with his own wife and wonders whether his wife has not surpassed the American. After all, Streep is just an actress in a film, but his wife plays this role in real life: “They act in movies and we imitate in reality” (84). The narrator fears that traditional versions of masculinity are under threat and what he thought were fixed gender categories are in fact fluid and unstable. Rachud is unable to extricate himself from the past or to deal with the exigencies of change, particularly in the private sphere. The narrative is infused with incongruities and conflicts accentuating the ineluctability of living in the feminized world of postwar Lebanon, where women’s increased access to sexuality have blurred traditional gender demarcations and jeopardized the meanings attached to masculinity. In order to repel the demon of effeminacy, Rachud insists on upholding manly traits that include hardness, intractability, and emphasis on erotic rather than emotional intimacy, where sexual potency is the primary marker of masculinity. This emotionally sterile, hardened version of masculinity, reminiscent of Najwa Barakat’s protagonist Luqman, remains deeply rooted in his consciousness where he repudiates

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anything feminine and insists on withholding any emotions. Rachud’s androcentric narrative dismisses all female signifiers like care, tenderness, malleability, and sensitivity as ruinous—indeed fatal—to a man’s well-being, affirming a strong nostalgia for stable forms of masculinity. In his story, Rachud asserts that he does not trust women who are wily and conniving; he wonders “what a woman hides” (69). He realizes that he is no match for his ominously powerful and treacherous wife, and is painfully conscious of a truncated and displaced identity. He is clearly threatened by his wife’s past and fastens on every word and action to prove to himself that his wife was a virgin when he married her. Paying her a visit one evening before their wedding, he makes a point of telling her that this is the first time he has ever stayed up with a woman so late at night, with her parents asleep in their beds. He expects her to reassure him that it is the first time for her too, but “she did not respond, as if she did not pay attention to what I said” (46). The narrator is threatened by his wife’s sexuality and concludes that he needs a strategy to contain her. His sense of foreboding about his wife’s untraditional behavior goes back to the time he first met her. Sitting together in a café, he orders a Pepsi while she orders a beer. He is stunned since it is the man’s prerogative to order an intoxicating drink, not the woman’s, who must be religious, modest, and sensitive and not treat him like “a shadow in the desert,” (91) as if he does not exist. Since his wife is a dangerous and disruptive presence, he tries to maintain order by strict physical and psychological control. When she admits that she was deflowered at the age of nine, he insists on taking her to the gynecologist to check if she lost her virginity then or years later, affirming his insistence on controlling her sexuality and on assigning a subjugated role for her in society. This intimidating behavior on his part is the by-product of his attempt to consolidate the fragile boundaries of his masculinity. But when the doctor is unable to alleviate his fears, he feels like a plaything in the hands of destiny and in the hands of the devils who insist on provoking him. Having read A Thousand and One Nights, and how a king is betrayed by his wife, he becomes assured that “woman, this beautiful, pleasant, pure, ethereal creature is capable of bending the will of the afareet” (120); if a king is betrayed by his wife then there is “no man who is not deceived by his wife” (121). Rachud’s reading of his wife is dependent upon patriarchal notions of womanhood. His wife’s reserve is initially construed by Rachud as a welcome female

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modesty and bashfulness. Nonetheless, when he promises to tell her all about his past affairs with women, her response is that he does not have to tell her anything. Her discretion and respect for personal freedoms is viewed by Rachud as a way of covering up her own past. From his privileged, disembodied position, the narrator focuses on his wife’s reified body. Feeling insecure and unable to satisfy his curiosity about her past sexual relations, he sees her body as the key not only to pleasure but to power and knowledge. His wife’s body is transformed into a text that he attempts to read in order to get to the truth about her past. He turns his wife’s body into a subject of investigation and insists on inscribing his own meanings by treating her as an object to be possessed and appropriated. He goes as far as using a flashlight to investigate his wife’s anus while she is asleep to try to figure out whether she has had anal sex to protect her virginity. If he insists on presenting his wife’s body as readable, decipherable, and penetrable, the narrative reveals that his wife is illegible and undecipherable. His wife remains a gap that he fills with his own panic, her body representing the feminine that crouches inside him and threatens to emasculate him. Since he views stability as the preeminently masculine virtue, he tries to control the unstable feminine by attempting to read his wife’s body. Such manipulation of her body is the key to his sense of male stability and agency. As Catherine MacKinnon puts it, gender is “the congealed form of the sexualization of inequality between men and women” (6). Failing to read the secrets of her body, he resorts to psychological manipulation in order to reestablish the sexual boundaries that would free him from anxiety over his identity, his fear of female sexuality, and his own sense of inadequacy in relation to his wife. Indeed, his fear of castration, of the “vagina dentata, the female genital with teeth that threatens emasculation” (Hoch 2004, 103), forces him to cling all the more stubbornly to an atavistic masculinity. The novel charts the fluctuations of his struggle with masculinity and his efforts to ward off an effeminacy that is aligned with anarchy and misrule. The novel’s discourse infiltrates the narrator’s misogynic discourse through irony, trivializing his claims to superiority and commitment to clichés and hackneyed phrases. The narrator’s discourse deconstructs the patriarchal discourse by exposing the mechanisms and processes that make up such a disquisition. He writes in a voice of masculine assurance but with slippery ambiguity. Even though his verbal potency compensates for his sexual insecurity, he discovers that his wife insists on competing with him even in the realm of language, a direct threat to

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the narrator’s stability in his erstwhile undisputed male identity. The narrator is surprised at his wife’s ability to comment upon pornographic films: she tells him that “porno fi lms are like chemical fertilizers that accelerate the growth of the fruit and increase its size to the maximum” (49). He is stunned to discover that the word “contraception” is among the words she employs openly, without inhibition: “My wife asks me about male contraception as if she were asking about a bottle of water” (88, 86). When she tells him that she cannot take the pill for health reasons, his suspicions about her purity are intensified. Watching the sunset, Rachud tells his wife, “Look! What a beautiful sight! It is as though the sun is a ball of fire plunging into the sea” (47). His wife bursts out laughing and tells him that she had heard someone compare the setting sun to an “erect penis” (47). His wife can verbally control the situation by challenging his romantic rhetoric of love for a different kind of language that shocks him, causing an emasculating reversal of gender roles. She defeats him both by appropriating his language and undermining his superiority through her self-assertiveness and knowledge that surpasses the narrator’s. Her verbal advantage reveals the limits of Rachud’s attempt to remain in control, and his loss of certitude and self-possession. His wife challenges platitudes and stock images, and her obscene masculine language and acquaintance with pornographic fi lms intensify Rachud’s anxiety. He admits that her insinuations about his sexual performance make him feel insecure, particularly when she employs unfamiliar metaphors and disorienting analogies. For instance, she refers to him as a “diesel motor” that warms up fast but does not last (84). Making use of the terminology employed by his wife, he tells us that things are getting out of control and that he is “like a car whose brakes give way in a steep decline” (23). Clearly, the indiscreet and disorienting language she employs shakes the narrator and puts him on his guard against an unbridled female power. Her vitriolic analogies and language void of clichés confuse and unsettle him, revealing the gap between classical and spoken forms of language where the latter clearly holds sway over the former. His wife shows no signs of happiness at the prospect of being a mother; her only reaction is to tell her husband that he is “evil” (85). At first, he thinks that the word evil points to his effectiveness and potency. He discovers that what she actually means is that he has injured her and the disfiguring effects of her pregnancy will not be erased even after the delivery, as if he has thrown “a burning substance, an acid and deformed her forever” (93). This

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repudiation of her nurturing role causes him further befuddlement, transforming the safe refuge of the house into a place of discord. Whenever his wife senses that he is becoming suspicious of something that she utters, she tells him that she has read it in an “English magazine” (49). His wife’s knowledge of English threatens his sense of identity and makes him feel vulnerable in her presence. Her use of the English language is an advantage she has over him that gives her access to information he cannot control. He also feels threatened by television, that “infernal box” (50) that absorbs his wife so intensely that she forgets that she has a husband and that “I was ever born” or ever “crept on the surface of this earth” (53). For his wife, a house without television is like a tomb, which drives her to spend her time at her mother’s place, where she watches television. Being superstitious and religious, he is shocked that his wife uses the word “tomb” in reference to their home and maintains that this is a bad omen (13). Instead of being at her husband’s beck and call, the roles are reversed and it is the husband who has to wait upon his wife. He complains that his wife does not take him seriously, “does not obey him or listen to anything he says, sleeps whenever she wants at her mother’s place and does not take any desire of mine into consideration” (141). Rachud is exasperated by his wife’s behavior, which is hysterical and unstable. By challenging his ingrained beliefs, she remains fluid and enigmatic rather than static and recognizable. It is undoubtedly this slipperiness and refusal to stay within a singular definitive position that accounts for Rachud’s anxiety and inability to understand his wife. Indeed, his masculinity is destabilized whenever he tries to define himself in relation to her. He fears that he has failed to prove his manhood when he failed to please her sexually and that means that, in her eyes, he is not man enough. He feels that his virility is at stake and fears the idea of being unmanned and reduced to the level of the feminine. He becomes obsessed with the idea of someone touching his wife, “the mother of my children, the bearer of my name,” saying if a man “penetrates her, it is like he is entering me (Oh my God!)” (109–10). This brings back recollections of effeminate behavior in the presence of his male friends. He recalls how his sissy behavior as an adolescent infuriated his mother: “I always played the role of the actress when I and my friends used to act a fi lm we had seen in the cinema or on television. Once she beat me with such unforgettable cruelty when she saw ‘my husband’ or ‘fiancé’ or a man kissing me

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on the mouth, and I surrendering to him in the same manner prostitutes surrendered to men in these fi lms” (66). When he played football, he preferred to be the goalkeeper, which causes him anxiety since, in his mind, woman and goalkeeper are interconnected in the sense that both are penetrated. This slippage of the purity and integrity of the masculine self betrays a general dread of homosexuality in a society that precludes any alternative masculine identity. His awareness of vulnerability intensifies his fear of being viewed as emasculated and plays a crucial role in intensifying his homophobia and his insistence on unequivocal gender dichotomization. As a result, he adopts a rigidly heterosexual, blatantly homophobic attitude to ward off the feeling that manhood has become a more complicated business, causing immense anxiety for men. The narrator is clearly intimidated by his wife’s actual power over him and the erosion of his male prerogatives. He tells us that even when they disagree over trivial matters, his wife magnifies the problem and does not back out until she feels she has won “new ground” (44). His affair with the dressmaker creates further complications, and he fears that this incident will give his wife further power over him: “She is stubborn by nature and will no doubt try to impose new conditions as it is the case each time” (44). His wife makes the final decision to leave. She accuses him of being jealous and suspicious and tells him, “Let it be clear from now on, I will not return to you and this is a decision I was going to make even if the rape incident had not occurred. Do you understand? You on your way and I on mine” (82). The narrator abides by idealized notions of gender relations in an attempt to overlook the messy details of his life with his wife. For instance, he tells us that he understands the desperate need for a country like Lebanon that preserves public as well as private freedoms, the freedom of the press, and women’s freedom, freedoms that are rare in the region (30). But he is unable to apply these abstract notions to his own life. While he insists on projecting himself as a civilized man, he reveals sadistic tendencies toward his wife. Initially, when his wife carves out some private space for herself, he appears broad-minded, patient, and understanding. He professes his belief in sexual equality, marital independence, and female professionalism and conceals his fear of female autonomy and his resistance to change. When his wife leaves the house, he fantasizes about her return “belittled and humiliated” where she finds refuge “in a corner” (45). He is convinced that it is a woman’s duty to make up with her husband and not

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the other way round, but when his wife sticks to her guns, he justifies forgiving her: “sympathy, mercy, and forgiveness are the duties of all human beings” (25). Caught in a zone of gender ambiguity and anxious about his powerlessness, he fears that this subversive woman will strip him of his professed authority. While he feels sorry for the dressmaker whom, he assumes, is dying with a desire she cannot satisfy, he insists, at the same time, that sex should be practiced exclusively within the framework of marriage. Al-Da‘if’s narrator displays the male and female sides of his personality, but he is portrayed as not having integrated the two. He is torn between East and West, tradition and modernity, past and present. The narrator defends his point of view by recourse to a traditional, patriarchal discourse. Historian Sharabi maintains that neopatriarchal Arab society is essentially schizophrenic, for beneath the modern appearance there is another hidden reality, an odd mixture of authentic traditionalism and progressive modernity (1988, 8). Al-Da‘if’s narrator cannot understand the contradiction of a society that advertises everywhere the need to use contraceptives to protect oneself against AIDS and yet believes in virginity and the sanctity of marriage. He finds it incomprehensible that such commercials should be on television, within the sanctity of the home, and outside on billboards on the streets and highways. His personal life becomes tumultuous as his relationship with his wife is complicated by new ideas and challenges to masculine ideals. He feels not only baffled but invaded by an independent woman, and realizes that his notions of masculinity are eroding, and that his supposedly natural prerogatives are no longer secure. While his wife is out, Rachud attempts to seduce the seamstress by pretending that he needs her to fi x a curtain. But when he touches her, she faints, leaving Rachud totally flabbergasted. Unable to wake her up, he has to call her parents who come to the house and accuse him of raping their daughter. His physical prowess is further challenged when the seamstress’s brother attacks him after learning that Rachud has attempted to rape his sister. Like a wild beast the brother grabs hold of Rachud and hurls him to the ground, swearing and cursing. Trying to justify his failure to defend himself, Rachud asserts that the seamstress’s relative “surprised me for I was not expecting him from the East and was surprised to find him coming from the West” (38). Th is is an allusion to Abdel Nasser’s famous statement after the 1967 Arab debacle against Israel, revealing “the intersection of political activity and personal life” and

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the analogous implication of the failing power of the Arab man (Harlow 1992, 211). The brother’s unexpected assault, like “a military attack” (38), astounded him, betraying the absurdities of the masculinity he tries to uphold. The brother turns to Rachud’s wife standing by and gropes her, screaming insults and calling her “whore”. Rachud tries to rescue his wife but the brother is faster, and Rachud ends up on the floor once again. The slapstick reinforces the comedy revealing the narrator’s belittled and diminished status, and his attempt to control his wife is seen as comic, childish, and even fatuous. Rachud is a quixotic figure whose masculinity is losing ground. Rachud tells us that the scandal keeps him indoors particularly since there are no political or military events that could distract attention from his affair with the dressmaker: “the Gulf war has come to an end; the bombing of Iraq and the pictures of bodies of Iraqi soldiers in the desert are lost. The Lebanese war has ended, and even in the world there is nothing to occupy people’s minds like the Bosnia massacres, Usama Bin Laden being pursued in Afghanistan, or the famous handshake between Arafat and Rabin in Washington” (40–41). Despite his unease with predominant constructions of masculinity, his obsession with his wife’s sexuality leaves Rachud firmly anchored in a private world that has sucked him into its vortex and made him oblivious to the world around him. When American president George Bush appears on television to talk about the first Gulf War and the “new world order” (11), Rachud is thinking of something else: his wife’s refusal to sleep in their apartment and insistence on staying with her mother. He tells us that he did not pay attention to the words of the American president that night and it did not occur to him that it was going to have this historic value. He discovers that he has “witnessed a historic moment without realizing it” (11). The world is moving on, but Rachud is busy monitoring his wife’s actions and trying to find out how many men she has slept with. At the end, his wife slams the door behind her, aborts the baby without consulting with him, and fi les for divorce while Rashud is left waiting at home, passive, indecisive, and empty-handed. T h e Sh e i k h ’s M e n t or Is a Wom a n The Day of Judgment (Yawm al-din, 2002) by the Lebanese woman writer Rasha Al-Amir is an address by a “devout sheikh” (13) to his mistress in the form of

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disconnected memoirs and digressions that he decides to turn into a book of twenty-five chapters. In writing his book, he takes his mistress’s comments into consideration for she is also his mentor when it comes to writing this book about their life together. Her suggestions that he should clarify certain references for the reader are portrayed as explanatory notes that he adds to the text, revealing his appreciation of the editing role she plays and approval of her guidance. In his book, he unburdens himself to her and prefers stoic silence in her company to prominence and repute in the public sphere. The novel is subversive in the sense that it breaks “the taboo of the distance surrounding all religious personae” (Zaki 2004, 147) and presents a supposedly unassailable religious personality who, instead of dwelling in the well-protected realm of the spiritual,7 turns to the secular realm and projects himself as an ordinary individual with strengths and vulnerabilities, appetites and desires. Rather than the traditional man of God who defends established norms and values and warns of the dangers of unrestricted freedom and love outside marriage, this religious personality gives us an account of sexual intimacy, love, and personal familiarity and understanding. In his address to his mistress, he interrogates the worldview represented by the religious institution and exposes the limitations of his own religious undertaking through the use of irony. The novel records the daily functions of the cleric in his duties to his constituency and the private home of a woman that, according to Mona Zaki, turns into a “haven from which he would take the first steps of his hijrah” (2004, 144), alluding to the Prophet’s movement from Mecca to Medina, from the public world of religion and politics into the private world of self-discovery and self-possession. In his personal erotic relation, the cleric/lover enters a new world that privileges individual over social and communal relations. By answering the needs of the self, he is no longer able to survive as a public personality and comes into the open with a love affair, frank, passionate, and undisguised. He speaks comfortably in a confessional mode and grants validity and significance to private, personal experience. Addressed to his mistress whom he, like Fathi in The Silence and the Noise, views as an equal, he blurs gender roles in favor of a balanced relation with his mistress. In relating disconnected, nonlinear events and impressions, 7. In a review of the novel in the newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Inaam Kajaji wonders, “Do religious personalities fall in love?” (Kajaji 2002).

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he uncovers the events that lead up to his departure from the country and his reunion with his beloved. The cleric tells us that he is in charge of the “Migrants’ Mosque” (33) at the outskirts of the city (most probably North African), and his job is to urge the constituents to adhere to Islam, its supporters, and its codes and laws. The mosque is frequented by a large community of migrants from rural backgrounds who have come to this country to earn a living in a richer, more stable, and more liberal place. The “Migrant’s Mosque” is attended by the poor and the alien, who live on the peripheries of the unnamed city (his mistress’s city), a place rife with radicalism, ideological rigidity, and spiraling violence. Since these men belong to the least privileged sectors of society, they are easy prey to extremist groups, and the sheikh wonders if these “armed young men with the hard village features” would regain their masculinity if they were allowed to join the security forces in their country (163). The cleric views Islamic militancy in the context of socioeconomic problems that need to be addressed in order to fight radical Islam.8 As a boy in the village, the cleric tells us that he insisted on accompanying his father to the village mosque every day. Having a delicate physique, he could not beat his brothers in their violent games. So instead of working in the open air on the farm, he ends up in damp and mildewed rooms, reading books and studying jurisprudence. After graduating from the university, he is employed in the ministry of religious affairs, which sanctions the state’s brand of Islam against resurgents and extremists. As Abu-Rabi‘ puts it, many Arab states depend “more and more on the official ulama establishment as a means of protection against the challenges of resurgence” (123). The cleric views himself as a peasant who comes from a village whose people “breathe religion” (188), and as a result, ends up with an exclusively religious education. He learned how to pray before learning how to read and even now his job is to urge people to adhere to religious values and rituals. He started off as an employee in the ministry of religious affairs whose overseer was an advocate of the “Reform Movement” (41) supported by the state “to enhance the legitimacy of the ruling elite and the status quo” (Abu Rabi‘ 2004, 135) and protect against insurgency and insubordination. The imam tells us that he was chosen by his boss to serve his country by attending to the moral and 8. See Fatima Mernissi’s “Anatomy of a Fundamentalist” (1987, xviii–xxii).

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religious well-being of his people in a neighboring country. From the start, he tells us that he is a moderate whose looks, dress, and short beard do not distinctly reveal that he is a religious personality. The upsurge in religious activities around the imam’s mosque and the rise of intolerance reveal the radicalization of religion, and the imam is troubled by the threat of eschatological extremism and militarism and the violent means by which religious goals are achieved, worries that are heightened by disturbances in his own mosque. The sheikh/narrator, who is approaching forty, is an introvert and a recluse who attends to his work in the mosque and then retires to a sequestered, studious life. He deplores the extremists and refers to them as the “spider’s web” that has nestled in the house of God: Friday prayers have turned into a nightmare owing to the squabbles and clashes (237). Among such actions is the distribution of leaflets that justify bloodshed, the gathering of contributions for mujahideen in distant countries, and the persistent harassment of certain individuals in the congregation, accusing them of attending the mosque not to remember God but to spy on them. Hearing about explosions in the city and the large number of casualties in a crowded shopping center, the sheikh admits that he fully supports the “necessary violence” (148) practiced by the authorities to confront this brand of “Iron Islam” (415) practiced by “evil doers and their wickedness” (148). These extremists find it permissible to rape and impregnate a mentally retarded girl so long as they are doing their duty in the arena of jihad. And if someone dares ask whether jihad sanctions sexual abuse, the prescribed answer is a reference to one of the siyar (Ahmad Ali Al-Imam’s Nazarat Mu‘assira fi fuqh al-Jadid, 71–72) that God grants victory to his religion through the virtuous and the dissolute alike (451). The sheik’s conflict with the radicals escalates in a weekly television program where he takes a stand against extremism and attempts to spread his moderate brand of Islam. In his confrontation with them, he resorts to sacred text. Referring to the Quran, he maintains that anyone who finds fault with his prince must be patient since he who abandons the group will die “a jahiliyya death” (122) in a pre-Islamic blindness and ignorance. Furthermore, the notion of ummah, the Muslim world, is challenged by the sheikh who is very much aware of cultural differences among the many countries where Islam is practiced (Abu-Rabi‘ 2004, 159). As a result, he incurs the anger of a party that sanctions a monolithic Islam that transcends geographical boundaries and harbors a fetishistic fascination with death that is exalted to “the level of worship” (417).

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The extremists turn against him, claiming that he was appointed as the imam of the mosque under dubious circumstances; during Ramadan he refused to allow them to gather inside the mosque to revive the devotional evening gatherings. They call him names such as “barking dog” (469), clown, and meddler in jurisprudence, who, in addition to being a hypocrite, is a proponent of the infidel and an agent of the tyrannical creed of the state and its apparatus. As a result of this confrontation with them in the media, he is sentenced to death, through a fatwa, for being an enemy of Islam. Despite such attacks, the imam is content since the assault reveals that they have seen his television program, and this in itself is a sign of victory over them. Rather than “evolving in nonhistorical time” (Lazreg 1988, 87), the sheikh’s mistress, who is educated and liberal, does not fall into the category of the stereotypical veiled, oppressed, and powerless Arab woman, and she challenges the stereotype of women in Islamic countries.9 Furthermore, she is not seen in opposition to man but rather is defined in her individual relationship with the sheikh, not prior to it. The sheikh’s world is an exclusively male world whose identity depends explicitly upon the exclusion of women. In such a world, service to God is the ultimate criterion of manliness. In opposition to the sheikh’s moderate form of Islam, a new kind of Islam emerges that sanctions extreme violence, where moderation is seen as effeminate. Within an atmosphere of conflict and turmoil, the cleric weaves his tale to ward off the patriarchal power that caters to violence and death, and embraces life represented by woman. His affair with the woman makes him responsive to a more flexible and softer side that he was unconscious of. Indeed, his discourse is predominantly dialogic, addressed to a woman whose secular ideology, he maintains, has changed his life, a woman who teaches him the “alphabet of life” as Al-Amir herself refers to it (2003b, 4). Writing in the first person is something he has not been used to; he turns from an impersonal public utterance to a private confessional mode of writing and embraces a moderate, feminine Islam. Since his brand of Islam has no place in the public sphere,

9. Chandra Talpade Mohanty criticizes Western feminists who construct “monolithic images of ‘third world women’ by ignoring the complex and mobile relationships between their historical materiality on the level of specific oppressions and political choices, on the one hand, and their general discursive representations, on the other” (1991, 69).

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he castigates the public in favor of a private and domestic space and finds more affinity in a woman’s world than in the violent world of men. He decides to write about his history, his transformation in a few months from the imam of a humble mosque frequented by the poor and the alien on the outskirts of the city into a celebrity, and finally into a nonentity protected by the authorities from the “justice” of those who were once his brothers in God and religion. In his address, one notes a compelling blend of the man of God and the man of the world, the poetry of al-Mutanabbi and religious revelation. His consciously staged address to his absent beloved is a hybrid of Quranic turathi language with references to the fuqaha’, the siyar, and the ahadith of the prophet coupled with the poetic language of modern poet Abu al-Tayyeb al-Mutanabbi. All these discourses constitute the various experiences of the imam, making him more self-confident and articulate. Ironically, he describes the beginning of his letter to his mistress as the “ fatiha” to their relationship. When he writes to her he has become familiar with the poetry of al-Mutanabbi and her modern style. He meets with his mistress daily at seven in the evening, while the rest of the day is spent in dealing with problems related to “my mosque,” as he refers to it. At first he is apologetic about writing in the first person—this is new to him both as a mullah and man of God—but he eventually discovers that writing has given him authority over his own life. Living through tumultuous times of randomness and irrationality, he discovers that maintaining faith in the old models has become impossible. Feeling disillusioned with the literal world of politics and history, he seeks the alternative reality of the pleasures of the body and the pleasure of writing. The sheikh regards his mistress as an inspiring agent, a feminine muse that has given him the inspiration to lead a new life and write about it. Writing brings him face to face with his own real self away from a wretched and tattered manhood that he sheds under her eye. He rejects his earlier yearning for authority and sure knowledge and embraces an unstable but exciting and challenging present in her company. He transgresses vocational and gender boundaries and acknowledges sexuality as a prime mover in life and art. His pen races from the traditional to the modern, the hackneyed to the original, the spontaneous to the contrived, the frigid to the passionate, and from the pleasures of the body to the pleasures of the text. The power of his letter comes from the heart, from affect and emotion, where he discovers that to be an author is to free himself from the shackles of restrictive

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molds. This is an illicit union of a public man and a woman who transforms him into a private artist who discovers that he is a writer on al-Mutanabbi’s side rather than on the sheikh’s side, where he privileges literature over religion and the erotics of private writing over the spirituality of public speaking. Using feminine signifiers, he writes subjectively to challenge the domineering public voices of the religious male establishment, revealing the intimate link between sexuality and writing. He discovers the linguistic resourcefulness of his mistress and admires her ability to use language liberally: her power over words, her use of authentic speech, and her perceived ability to control and personalize discourse. Fascinated by her independence and spontaneity, he starts avoiding clichés by making use of a variety of discourses and using words in new configurations. In other words, he borrows words from sources other than the religious realm and moves beyond the narrow circle of his existence. He admires his mistress’s ability to live in the real world rather than in the realm of abstraction and fixed ideologies and appreciates her subversive individuality, her freedom from dogma, and her ability to combine sexual autonomy and linguistic power. In their daily encounters, he notes that she raises tricky questions related to religion without any inhibitions, and he realizes that to express impelling desire requires courage to defy literary and social conventions. He discovers, to his surprise, “that on happy occasions I do not use classical Arabic . . . as if cheerfulness is not a significant momentous occurrence” (317). At the same time, he resorts to religious discourse to understand his new self and his emotional and sexual needs. For instance, he draws his mistress’s attention to God’s word in Imam Ghazali’s book Ihya’ ‘Ulum Al-Din in the chapter entitled “Adab Al-Nikah”: “Do thou not burden us beyond what we have strength to bear” (“Al-Baqara,” 286:99). The country he moves to becomes a place of adventure, renewal, and tremendous potentialities. In this foreign city, a variety of lifestyles exist, the rural represented by his mosque located on the outskirts of the city and the modern represented by the woman. On her side of the city, he enjoys the experience of anonymity far away from the small cohesive community in the vicinity of the mosque. He finds himself shuttling between strongly defined neighborhoods inhabited by rural communities and the indeterminate public spaces of the actual city, which fire his imagination, offering him a new sense of independence and freedom. His undaunted avowal of vulnerability and self-depreciation drives him to abandon the violent male world of extremists for the peaceful feminine world

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of his mistress. Under her influence, he breaks out of silence, becomes visible through his television program, and discovers his newly realized powers of speech, which turn him into a “celebrity” (461). While he approves of a woman with a masculine intellect and acknowledges female agency and initiative, he too feels empowered and invigorated under the influence of love. In her company, he begins to appreciate the value of the little things between them and to gradually recoil into the self in search of self-realization in a fundamentally private form of experience. From the start, the sheikh is aware that the woman he has fallen in love with lives in a completely different world from his own. This is a woman who has as much access to the public space as any man, lives alone (a phenomenon unheard of in his country), and is not the passive object of love but rather an active and articulate pursuer. Cutting the umbilical cord with past structures and breaking the psychological shackles, both moral and religious, he fi nds refuge in the woman’s world and begins to see his life through her eyes. Even though the sheikh controls the narrative, the woman he addresses assumes an absent presence. The novel indeed is shaped by a powerful, encroaching female principle that controls the narrative. In the midst of his preoccupations and the disputes in his mosque, he awaits their meeting with trepidation and buoyancy. Looking back at a “wretched ‘manliness’” that forced him to hide his feelings (23) and to live a life tied to the group and divorced from the more authentic inner self, he becomes all the more attached to this newly found love that drags him away from the world of the spirit to that of the flesh, from “darkness into light” (276). Living in a restricted world where people’s behavior is closely monitored, he decides to keep his daily visits to his mistress under cover. Initially, he claims that he is working on a project on the poet Abu al-Tayyeb al-Mutanabbi, but when he begins to stay late, he spreads the news that he has meetings outside the city. In such fraught political circumstances, he finds refuge in private life and celebrates the feminine sphere with feelings of renewal, increased energy, and euphoria. Under her influence, he turns his back to an atavistic masculinity and enters her private feminine sanctuary where love is transformed into a religion of the body. Abandoning the realm of ungendered masculinity, he absorbs himself in a realm where the idea of manhood loses its universal dimension under the glare of his mistress’s agency and instrumentality. In her presence, he becomes aware of the fact that, unlike her, he does not think independently; he is in the habit of

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reproducing the religious text whenever she asks him a question on any topic. Accordingly, he decides to shun the automated religious discourse such as “God guides whom He wills to the Right Path, and may He guide you” (161). On the other hand, her power springs from al-Mutanabbi who she quotes at will. Assuming that her sheikh is on the opposite side, she reads verses from her favorite poet to comment on the plight of the nation and the pathetic situation of men. She tells him that al-Mutanabbi’s problems are our own and quotes one verse to prove her point: “Nothing is uglier than a virile man [fahl] with a penis who is controlled by an umma without a womb” (159). When she invites him to her home, he views her invitation in Sufi terms, as God’s call to the virtuous to enter paradise (aljannah) (193).10 This deflationary wit borrows from holy text and applies it to purposes that are antithetical to this discourse. To keep the past from destroying the vitality of the present, he insists that their meeting space remains unaffected by the profane activities of the public world. Assuming that his vocation is of no interest to her, he decides not to tell her about what goes on at the mosque and is content to express general feelings of distress about the violence in her country and his own; nevertheless, he discovers that she is interested in a wide range of subjects. He rejects a premodern masculinity that insists on keeping the poles of masculine and feminine strictly separate and becomes involved in a relationship that acknowledges equality between men and women. He goes as far as telling us that after meeting her he has become slack about prayers though he is still a believer. Before meeting her, he admits he was but a “shadow” (40) undifferentiated from thousands of his countrymen. He tells us that he was “veiled with a thousand veils” (108), but after meeting her, he begins to listen to the needs of his body, and her house offers him an enriched consciousness leading to freedom, genuine selfhood, and uninhibited love. When he makes his first visit, he feels uncomfortable about being alone with a woman, for he always believed in the sanctity of separate spheres. He feels awkward and bewildered but is surprised to find out that she is easygoing and carefree about it. For forty years, he tells her, he has taken his body for granted, until she came into his life and “encouraged me and taught me to be enchanted with my body the way I am captivated by your [her] body” (29). Initially, he was a 10. As Mona Zaki puts it, “the most reserved of Mullahs describes the beginning of an intimacy in Sufi terms: of sex as an inviolable station (maqam); of lust as complete devotion” (2004, 146).

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spiritual function, a disembodied entity, but after meeting her he becomes pointedly aware of his body and finds pleasure in submitting to her gaze. A vibrantly passionate, sensuous woman, she is not afraid to ask him to look at her body in the same manner she looks at his. She challenges the passive role conventionally accorded to woman and views herself as the subject of her sexuality. She is a strong woman with an independent mind who transgresses her role as guardian of traditional values and defines herself in terms of personal agency and instrumentality. Under her spell, he admits that he has lived a double life, but he suffers no guilt about it. He admits that he is “mawlana” (our lord) during the day and a “mawla” (supporter or manservant) to “mawlati” (my lady) (25) after seven. From the start, he gives her a prominent position and reveals his indebtedness to a woman who holds the reins and expresses her desires forcefully and directly; he feels “illiterate” (201) in her learned presence and sees his mosque as a source of subjugation and ignorance. Because female desire, what women want, is repressed or misrepresented in a phallocentric society, the expression of female desire becomes a key location for deconstructing male control. The imam is grateful to the woman who was instrumental in his growth and self-realization. He tells us that the bond between them is in her hands and that she has the power to draw him near or send him away according to her fancy. He spends long hours in the company of Diwan al-Mutanabbi waiting for her to remember to “summon him” (91) since he acts at her command; he is the young woman’s paramour. Her nonconformity and her potential to be the active agent lead to a deliberate confounding of traditional roles and expose the narrator’s sense of masculine instability. While he is eloquent in public, he loses all his eloquence in private and even feels inferior in her presence. He admires her spontaneity that is set against his rigidity and inability to free himself from the shackles of religious discourse. The imam learns to rehearse a new masculinity different from the earlier abstract masculinity for a more tangible, productive, and fleshy masculinity. In her company, he acquires a female sensitivity. For instance, when he comes to her house at a late hour, he opens the door, walks on tiptoe, and takes off his shoes in order not to wake her up or disturb her. The narrator notes that his mistress refers to poet al-Mutanabbi by his first name, Ahmad, and is amazed at how she personalizes and takes liberties with a vast amount of poetry. He is jealous of Diwan al-Mutanabbi who, though dead, continues to have influence. Like Eve, his mistress strips the sheikh of his Edenic

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spirituality and makes him taste the fruit, the delights and raptures of the erotic. By daring to speak freely about his affair, he calls into question the traditional logic of patriarchy represented by the religious institution. The act of telling his story is an assertion of individuality where he projects a feminized version of male subjectivity and emerges increasingly more willing to articulate his personal feelings and ready to tune in to his own desires and sexual well-being. The burst of energy and eloquence matches the vigor he feels with her and his realization that the religious institution seems detrimental to his actual human needs. As a result, he chooses love and God, and breaks away from the institution. The woman’s subversive political views largely originate in a modern, feminine, individualistic consciousness that is antagonistic to the antiquated, aggressive masculine sensibility. She launches an attack on religious extremists and is surprised that they are not ashamed of their “failure and limitations, backwardness and addiction to lying, and pleasure in killing. I am sorry if I confess to you that cleanliness for me is water, soap, and a toothbrush, not one aspect of faith” (160). Lacking the courage to reconcile private and public, he has no remedy but her “domestic cure” (31) that sustains him in this situation and resurrects the feminine within him, making him aware of the instabilities of masculinity. The woman here represents culture rather than nature, modernity expressed in everyday material things like dress and lifestyle. Noting that he lives a frugal life and his clothes are old and tattered and his lifestyle is sparse, pious, and joyless, she teaches him that it is not a shame to be stylish and to wear light clothing, which is more comfortable than his traditional attire. When he is about to appear on television, he thinks about his appearance and notes that the man in charge looked disappointed by his looks. He tells us that he appeared before the television man without a turban or a beard “like a nose bag,” wearing a coat that she gave him and carrying an old suitcase (305). When he offers to wash the dishes, she tells him that she has the “electric slave” (144) that can do the job. She points to the dishwasher, the “white cube which is standing deaf-mute near the oven” (144), revealing that domestic ideology and the role of women within it is already laden with cracks, where technology performs the woman’s often devalued work inside the house, allowing her breathing space outside the confines of the inner space. Her immersion in history enables her to transcend the monolithic and ahistorical role assigned to her. She gives him the first sunglasses he has ever worn and teaches him how to use electric equipment (462). As Mona Zaki puts it, “All

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modern appliances such as computers, washing machines, a television’s remote control . . . are unfamiliar marvels for him” (146). Her association with modernity is further reinforced when he describes her as a skillful driver. He learns from her the “virtues of humor and jesting” (332), and notes her appreciation of irony when she reads to him from a journal: “disagreement between groups of people on theological issues, and their killing one another under the heading of this disagreement reveals a high level of civilization!” (150). He also discovers that when a man and woman come together physically the devil is not necessarily between them and what he has learned in the fuqh books is nothing compared to what a man and woman learn together. He tells us that he did not marry a village girl as his aim was not to satiate his lust for women. He discovers that what he is looking for is love that accommodates the needs of each partner who is allowed to assume an active role and maintain autonomy as an individual. He is content because he is of the party of life rather than death and grateful to her because she has revived him from the coma and stupor of masculinity. As for himself, he has given her virtually nothing, a few insignificant rules of grammar that will hardly make any difference anywhere. With her he learns how to be a man, not in the institutional sense, but in the private and personal sense. The novel is a celebration of love and a rejoicing in the physical world and the intimacy of union. Far from being an ethereal being, his woman conveys a sense of a concrete presence and gratified rather than repressed desire. Al-Mutanabbi is known for his poetry in praise of rulers who were his patrons and his criticism of other rulers. Here the text suggests a parallel with the position of the narrator as a critic of the Islamists as well as rulers and regimes. Simultaneously, the text uncovers a parallel where the sheikh is committed to his mistress, patron, and teacher whom he focuses on in his discourse. After his abduction by the authorities who blame it on the extremists and take pride in foiling the kidnapping attempt, the narrator realizes that he needs to extricate himself from both sides. Al-Mutanabbi gives up his da‘wa (call) for poetry just as the sheikh gives up his own da‘wa after discovering the corruption on both sides, the government and the extremists. The narrator opts for stoic silence in his mistress’s company and individual freedom away from a world where the individual is shaped by ideology and has meaning only as part of a community, or group.

Afterword

Despite the defeat of Arab nationalist projects and the resurgence of political Islam, this resurgence remains the least dominant theme in literature since 1967. In an article entitled “The Faith of Islam in Modern Arabic Fiction,” Trevor Le Gassick notes that there is “a striking absence of advocacy of Islamic values” in the works of Arab intellectuals and writers who “have been out of touch with the current mood of their co-religionists” (1988, 97). The marginalization of the religious dimension can be attributed to the fact that the majority of writers and intellectuals continue to retain their nationalist, secularist, progressive views that regard religion as belonging to the past and, therefore, unequipped to solve the complex social and political problems in the area. These writers see a strong complicity between Islamist groups and Arab regimes in the suppression of freedoms and the use of intellectuals as scapegoats to mend an unstable and unpredictable relation between Arab states and Islamic groups. Over the past three decades, smear campaigns have targeted many Arab intellectuals. Writers, academics, and journalists have been intimidated, attacked, incarcerated, and murdered for their opinions. For instance, in 1992, the Egyptian columnist Faraj Fouda was murdered by extremists, and in 1989 Nobel Prize–winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed in an attack by Islamists, not to mention the systematic killings of intellectuals in Lebanon following the withdrawal of the Syrian army in 2005. Other measures aimed at intellectuals, writers, and artists include accusations of blasphemy, lawsuits condemning their literary and artistic works, and confiscation of their books in an attempt to silence them, alienate them from average Arabs, and force them to submit to the dominant ideology. Many Arab intellectuals view Islamists with suspicion and regard them as agents of tyranny and violence. When Nasr Hamid Abu-Zeid, the Egyptian 180

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university professor and scholar, was accused of apostasy and forced to separate from his wife, a statement of support by a group of Arab intellectuals appeared in the Lebanese journal Al-Adab, attacking extremists and referring to them as “forces of darkness” and “imams of ignorance” who, with the support of “illegitimate and defeated regimes,” battle against freedom, thought, learning, and progress (1993, 95). While such collective support is prevalent in Lebanon, other Arab writers live in fear of state persecution. Fearing retaliation, they exercise self-discipline when it comes to political and religious issues, which they refrain from writing about or use tropes, allusions, and double meaning to avoid getting into trouble. On the whole, writers have steered clear of dealing with men as Muslim individuals since any attempt to historicize and socialize Islam is faced with hostility by Islamists whose approach is “textual [rather] than historical or social” (Abu-Rabi‘ 2004, 9). Al-Amir’s The Day of Judgment is one of the few books from this era that focuses on a religious personality, a moderate sheikh, who is in direct confrontation with militant Islamic groups who want to occupy his mosque in an attempt to liberate it (2003a, 162) and impose their brand of Islam. However, while the novel details the sheikh’s personal ideas and inner feelings and desires, the Islamists remain abstract, enigmatic figures. Nevertheless, many reviews of The Day of Judgment applauded Al-Amir’s courage “to walk this minefield” (Al-‘Umayr 2002, 31), her explicit attacks on militant Islam, and her partiality for a secular form of life. Other novels either overlook the religious dimension altogether or, like Sharara’s If the Days Turn to Dusk, refer to Islam peripherally or as a last resort for Arab men after a life of disappointment with the modern, secularist, autocratic Arab state. In reaction to a concept of ummah that encompasses the entire Muslim world without taking into consideration “the major historical, political, and cultural differences between the many countries that in fact make up the Muslim world” (Abu-Rabi‘ 2004, 159), many writers recoil from a monolithic Islamic agenda (although they had embraced a united Arab nation) to dwell upon their private experiences within their local settings. In addition to the Palestinian problem that promotes a pan-Arab ideology and continues to feature in the fiction (particularly in Palestinian and Jordanian literature), indigenous local experiences have taken precedence in literature to ward off a unitary and timeless Muslim agenda. Among the topics these writers deal with are the Lebanese war, modernization

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and the challenge of globalization, and women and their challenging emergence from their subaltern status, particularly in postwar Lebanon. Intellectuals who believed themselves to have a leadership role in society have started to view themselves as marginal spectators, devoid of any role in the making of events. In Jordanian novelist Ghaleb Halassa’s The Novelists (1988), one character maintains that communist intellectuals are out of touch and living in a world of their own, while Islamists have a more credible mass support: “Look at the Muslim Brothers. They communicate directly with the people in the mosque, in night school,” and so forth (239). The revolutionary theories propagated by communists in their leaflets are seen as pointless since the masses cannot read, while the government finds in these publications a good pretext to arrest and detain them (317). In a society where the rate of illiteracy is high, Islam has been the source of all knowledge and of identity at the expense of the “foreign” ideologies propounded by Arab intellectuals. Yahyia Zoubir maintains that it would be “erroneous to attribute the emergence of Islamism to socioeconomic factors” (as Al-Amir does in Day of Judgment). For Zoubir, economic factors are partially responsible, but militant Islam is the outcome of “the latest reawakening against Western domination and the Western-inspired modernity following the failure of post-independence authorities in creating prosperous Muslim societies.” As a result, people cling all the more to traditional culture to resist the dominant Western-oriented culture represented by Arab/Islamic regimes (Zoubir 2002, 82, 85). Although once writers were concerned with ideological, political, and military issues, their feelings of alienation drove them to seek refuge in the private sphere. Today sexuality is a topic that many writers both male and female are dealing with in new ways, where heterosexual and homosexual relations feature either directly or indirectly. Intellectuals feel that writing about sexuality is more tolerated by governments than politics and religion, though sex can get entangled in political and religious issues as well. As Egyptian writer Edward Al-Kharrat succinctly puts it, censorship in the Arab world is a “beast” (2002, 77) that lurks and attacks its victim at the right moment: “If there is a bit more freedom available now than there was fift y years ago when it comes to erotic literature, or what is referred to as ‘pornographic’ literature, which is not pornographic or dissolute, this margin is too narrow and fragile and subject to erasure according to the

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whims of politicians and under pressure from any authority, be it religious or military” (78). Ironically, political and religious oppression have relegated men to a “feminine” position where they have no choice but to end up writing, like women, about their private sexual affairs. In these works, the general trend is to name names and shock the reader by breaking taboos. These qualities of transgression and slippage have subjected the novels to accusations of obscenity, sedition, and imitating the Western way of life, creating a world that is alien to Arab culture and values. Arab critics generally view such works negatively not because of moral or religious reasons but because they lack political commitment and praxis; they uncover a Western rather than Arab or Islamic orientation. Referring to Al-Da‘if’s Forget the Car (Insi al-sayyarah, 2002), critic Aql Al-‘Awit maintains that the “pornographic light burns” cruelly (2002, 10) and compares the protagonist’s sexual promiscuity to an act of murder. He maintains that the ruthless objectification of the human body described by the author with self-possession and detachment “reminds us of the deeds of professional killers who commit their murders, and then wipe their mouths with the sleeves of their shirts and move on as if nothing has happened” (11). For Al-‘Awit, such crude sexual encounters are deadly and totally alien to Arab culture. While these works may have shocked Arab critics, it is clear that these writers tell such stories to challenge the groups and institutions that have forged the manacles that chain the individual and deprive him of personal, religious, and political freedoms. In other words, private promiscuity is a way to move outside again, to problematize the central/marginal dichotomy, and question the public through the prism of private life. The subversive potential of these novels is in their challenge to the public sphere with a personal aesthetic that is capable of dragging the private into the public by politicizing it. In these texts, sexual transgressions serve a political purpose of deploying sexuality to oppose the prevalent order, entwining the inner and the outer, the sensual and the scandalous in order to disturb, defamiliarize, discompose, and ensure a public voice for men. These male writers declare war against the publicly entrenched moral order and violate rules regarding publicly acceptable sexual mores. Nevertheless, this does not mean that their aim is to propagate freer relations between men and women. Their desire is to empower men (not women) and

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reinstall their traditional position in the public sphere.1 This excessive virility, combining obscenity with aggression and brutality, is another way of regaining a lost masculinity and attaining power and control since, for the majority of writers, the “intellectual” is fundamentally a “political intellectual” (Jameson 1986, 74) whose focus is on collective issues. Through the intersection of politics and sexuality, men are supposed to retrieve a long-lost coherent and undifferentiated masculinity. Notwithstanding, these novels bear witness to the precarious position of men, the shift in gender boundaries, and the rise of new masculinities in the dynamics of political and ideological transformations. While sexuality has been the domain of women writers since the 1960s, many male writers are now dealing with sexual and homoerotic themes in a more sensitive manner despite the fact that homosexuality is still seen as a direct attack on manhood and a sign of femininity. Besides, the imposed marginalization of intellectuals from the public sphere and a general focus on sexuality has made some writers more conscious of the unstable and precarious position of men, the plurality of male experience, and the gendered nature of masculinity.

1. For Stephen Guth’s discussion of gender equality as the domain of women writers, see Guth 1995.

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Index Note: Fictional characters are indicated by (fict.) following the uninverted name. Abdel Hadi (fict.), 73, 76, 77

ahadith, 173

Abdel-Karim (fict.), 37, 38, 39, 41, 43

Ahmad (fict., freedom fighter), 57

Abdel-Nasser, Gamal, 167

Ahmad (fict., son of Ijayel), 120

Abdel-Wahid (fict.), 120, 123

Ahmad (fict., Zahra’s brother), 44, 45, 50, 53

Abdil Wahid Najjar Marmuq (fict.): anger

Ahmad, Aijaz, 13

with Hassiba’s disappearance, 23–24;

Ahmad Murad (fict.), 101, 104

attempt to reestablish control, 30–31,

alcohol, 115, 116

108; discomfort in new surroundings, 30;

allegory, 8, 14, 15, 97

interference in Fadil’s marriage, 24; mar-

Allen, Roger, 10

riage of, 24–25; Shamil’s view of, 28

alterity: Hassiba as, 23–24; of homoerotic

Abi Shabaka, Elias, 19

tendencies, 139; of penguin man, 142–43;

Abood (fict.), 123

society’s intolerance of, 140; women/

Al-Abrass (fict.), 153, 154–55

subordinate men as, 20–21, 22

Al-Abrass’s mother (fict.), 157

Amin, Noura, 104–5n7

absolutist ideologies, 9

Al-Amir, Rasha: The Day of Judgment,

Abu Ahmad (fict.), 127

168–79, 181; focus on religious personal-

Abu al-Shabab, Wassef, 64n10

ity in confl ict with extremism, 171–72,

Abu-Lughod, Leila, 24n2

181; interrogation of religious worldview,

Abu-Rabi‘, Ibrahim, 56n3, 97, 170

169; on love/personal life vs. institutional

Abu Salem (fict.), 72–73, 74–75, 76

religious life, 173–76; sheikh’s parallel

Abu Salem’s sons (fict.), 75–76

to al-Mutanabbi’s poetry, 179; on source

Abu Salem’s wife (fict.), 76

of Islamism, 182; taboo of distance sur-

Abu-Zeid, Nasr Hamid, 5, 180–81

rounding religious persons broken by, 169

Al-Adab, 181

Anderson, Benedict, 57

Adawiyya Hammoud (fict.), 114, 115

Anta munthu al-yawm (Subul), 5–6

Adnan (fict.), 83

Anwar (fict.), 115

aggression, 9, 31, 33, 75–76, 152–53. See also

Arab critics, 183

violence

Arab-Israeli War (1973), 2

199

200

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i n de x

Arab-Israeli War (1967): effect on Assi, 39;

use of experimental techniques, 14; use of

effect on pan-Arab entity, 6–7; effect on

humor, 8, 119, 124, 126, 128, 129; use of

private lives, 15; effect on Walid Masoud,

tropes/illusions/irony, 8, 98, 181. See also

5, 59, 63; effects on gender roles, 5–9;

specific writer

Nasser’s comment on, 167; shift to local

armed struggle, 55. See also war

issues in literature following, 10

‘Asafir al-fajr (‘Usayran), 13

Arab literature: allusions to homosexuality

Al-Ashqar, Youssef Habshi: desire to uncover

in, 140n4 (see also effeminacy; homosexu-

effects of, 89; on homoerotic desires,

ality/homoerotic tendencies); centrality

92–93; on intellectual masculinity, 85–87;

of political life in, 7–8; characteristics

on intellectual opposition to, 85–93; on

of, 16; choices of in this work, 16–17;

Iskandar, 87–88; The Shadow and the

common language of, 10; conflation of

Echo, 85–93

private/public spheres, 13–15; critics of,

Asmar (fict.), 86, 87, 88, 89

183; humor in, 8, 119, 124, 126, 128, 129;

Assad (fict.), 86–87, 88, 89, 92

lack of advocacy of Islamic values in, 180,

Assi (fict.): emasculation of, 38–40, 42;

181–82; of Oedipus King, 19–22; political

imprisonment of, 37–38; murder of

commitment of, 7–8, 11–16; precedence

Siham, 40, 43; as narrator of The Gang

of collective over private issues in, 7;

of the Bloody Rose, 36; relationship with

regional/geopolitical influences on,

Mu‘tassem, 36, 42–43; remarriage of his

10–12 (see also Iraqi literature; Lebanese

mother, 39; results of imprisonment,

literature; Palestinian literature; Syrian

38–39, 102; view of Abdel-Karim, 39–40,

literature); resistance to censorship, 8,

41, 42

14, 15, 97, 181 (see also irony); on role of

atavistic masculinity, 37, 40, 141

women in postwar 1967 era, 7; subversive-

authorial narration, 8, 33, 35, 36

ness of, 97, 98, 118; themes linking novels,

authoritarian state: absurdity of living under,

10; themes of women writers, 11–12. See

125–27; banning of unpatriotic words/

also Arab writers; specific novel by title

phrases, 127; challenges to univocal

“Arab Novel, The” (Kilpatrick), 10

discourse of, 96, 97, 106, 112–16, 138;

Arab socialist era, 6n4

choice of music, 126–27; coercive tactics

Arab society, 167

of, 9–10, 96, 99–102 (see also coercion;

Arab subjectivity, 14, 97

incarceration; intimidation; prison;

Arab writers: effects of Lebanese civil war

torture); complicity of Islamic groups

on, 130; fascination with fida’i, 57; fear

with, 180; control of individuals, 119;

of state persecution, 181; involvement

dictation of sociosexual roles, 9, 14; effect

in politics, 7–8; prison experiences of,

on masculinity, 9–10; emasculation of

97; provision of voice to censored, 112;

men under, 17, 96, 98; futility of political

resistance to univocal discourse of state,

commitment under, 56; imprisonment

96, 97, 106, 112–13, 138; subversiveness

in, 102–3, 105–11; individualism in, 98,

of writings, 97, 98, 118; topics of, 11–16,

119, 124, 127; intellectual subversion of

181–84; use of allegory, 8, 14, 15, 97, 181;

through writing, 123–29; intolerance of

i n de x

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201

vulnerability of statesmen, 101; literary

131–41; use of irony, 153, 154; on war’s

techniques for evasion of punishment/

effect on gender norms, 131–41, 150–51,

censorship by, 8, 14, 15, 35–36, 97, 98,

152, 161

119, 124, 126, 128, 129, 181; literature’s

beauty, 44, 45–46

revelation of effects of, 11; masculine

Beirut: evacuation of Palestinian resistance

aggression of, 120; men as major victims

from, 71, 78, 83, 104; Iskandar’s home

of, 111; occupation of domestic space,

in, 85, 87; Iskandar’s view of war in, 88;

118–23; penetration into university life,

Majed’s childhood in, 48; male responses

112; penetration of private sphere, 99–101,

to evacuation of Palestinian resistance

108–11; Al-Razzaz’s use of literary

from, 70–71, 77, 78, 104; as setting of The

techniques to critique, 98; regression to

Penguin’s Song, 142; topics of writers of,

primitive masculinity in, 43; resistance to

11; Zahra’s wanderings in, 12; Zeina’s

univocal discourse of, 96, 97, 106, 112–13,

father’s nostalgia for, 70

138; as source of dignity/self-respect,

Bey Abdel Hadi (fict.), 76–77

112; surveillance by, 111–18, 126; Tamir’s

Bhabha, Homi, 4, 78n17

story of plight of people under, 94; use of

Binayat Matild (Daoud), 21

technology to crush opposition, 96–97,

biological determinism, 56

119; writing under, 15, 97, 180–84. See

Black September War, 2

also patriarchal state

body: effect of wars on, 14; exposure of as

autocratic regimes. See authoritarian state

torture, 107, 108; as expression of mas-

Al-‘Awit, ‘Aql, 183

culinity, 21; Lamis’s reappropriation of, 128–29; sheikh’s awareness of awakened, 176–77; Tareq Raouf’s desire for Walid,

Baathist professors (fict.), 113 Bab al-sahah (Khalifah), 7 Bab Al-shams (Khoury). See Door to the Sun (Khoury)

67; underlined to denounce power relations, 96 bragging/boasting, 32, 33, 34, 76 brutality, 151, 154

Badr, Liana, 13, 57

Bush, George, 168

Badri (fict.), 116

Butler, Judith, 4, 139, 140

Al-bahth ‘an Walid Masoud (Jabra). See In Search of Walid Masoud (Jabra) Barakat, Halim, 8

camp wars, 99

Barakat, Hoda: on alterity of homosexual-

carnival: as celebration of humor as

ity, 139; focus on lower-class/subaltern

transgressive discourse, 128; Khalil’s

characters, 150; focus on survival of

wallowing in, 140–41; Luqman’s sexual

protagonist in time, 132; How Wonder-

experience with woman at hanging as,

ful, 150–57, 161; on pressures of peace,

152; as temporary liberation from prevail-

150–51, 152–54, 156; questioning of natu-

ing truth, 52n9, 128–29; war’s liberation

ral differences between genders, 151–52,

from norms as, 131; Zahra’s subversive

153, 155, 156–57; The Stone of Laughter,

actions as, 53–54; Zahra’s war world as, 52

202

|

i n de x

castration: female rejection as, 144, 146;

precedence of in Arab literature, 7;

Fitna’s artificial insemination point-

prison as means of membership in, 95;

ing to, 70; Khalil’s fear of, 82; linked to

self-isolation of Iskandar from, 85–86, 87;

land’s inaccessibility, 59, 75; of males

self-isolation of Khalil from, 138; Zahra’s

in authoritarian states, 118; Palestinian

involvement in, 50

sense of under Israeli occupation, 70, 75;

Colored Ribbons (‘Usayran), 12

of penguin man’s father, 149; proved in

communists, 182

prison experiences, 95; Rachud’s fear of,

community, 91, 119

163; as symbol of compromised self, 21;

Confessions of a Silencer (Al-Razzaz): con-

threat of female bonding, 149; torture as

sistent language of, 98–99; defi nition of

form of, 108–9; violated land as, 59. See

manhood, 103–4; Dr. Murad’s response

also emasculation

to son’s death, 104; exposure of coercive

celebrations, 122, 124

machinery of political containment, 98;

censorship: as beast that lurks, 182–83;

house arrest of Murad family, 98–101;

under dictatorship, 125, 127; effects of,

model of masculinity presented by, 99;

96; of Fathi Shin’s writing, 125; literary

as narrative of dissent, 98; narrator of,

devises used to circumvent, 8, 14, 15, 97,

98–99, 101; personal/social resistance to

181; Naaman’s transformation to writerly

authority, 96; plurality of voices/non-

subjectivity and, 113; play within novel as

linear narratives in, 98–99; uncertain

protection from, 28; use of protagonist’s

setting of, 99; Yusuf’s compensation for

voice to counter, 112

loss of masculinity, 103–4; Yusuf’s view

children: as male possession, 21; patriarchal

of Dr. Murad, 101–2

preference for males, 44, 50, 101, 160;

confi nement of women, 20, 62

sexual abuse of, 43–44, 46, 47–48; use of

Connell, R. W., 1, 9

for intimidation, 108

contrapuntal reading, 97

Civil War (Lebanon): compulsive fraternity

control: through art, 29; as crucial element of

during, 145; effect on Assi, 39; effect on

masculinity, 24n2, 32, 33, 34, 69, 72, 90,

male/female writers, 2, 130; effect on

158, 161, 162, 168; discourse on women

men’s self-understanding, 150; as literary

within male-controlled societies, 6;

theme, 11; masculinities produced by,

fada’i’s fi xation on, 57; Fater’s hunger for,

130–31, 132, 133, 135, 138, 154–55; politi-

34; female sexuality as threat to, 161, 162;

cal detention/torture during, 105

Ijayel as embodiment of, 119; of individu-

coercion, 9, 94–95, 96. See also incarceration; intimidation; surveillance; torture collectivity: individuals’ submergence in

als under Hussein, 119; through intellect, 88–89; through language, 26, 29, 158, 164, 165; longing for loss of, 131–32, 133–34;

under autocratic regimes, 43, 119; isola-

loss of self-control, 72; male attempt

tion of penguin man from, 141–42, 143,

to regain, 23–24, 30–31, 45, 158–61,

145–46; Khalil’s view of self within,

162, 163; male loss of, 59, 76, 144, 147;

82–83; polarization of gender roles

male need for control of women, 22–23,

within, 58; position of women in, 6;

30–31; male response to female control,

i n de x

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203

153–54, 155–58, 160–61, 164; of males

Mathilde Building, 21; The Penguin’s Song,

deconstructed by expression of female

132, 141–50; style of, 146

desires, 177; male sense of during, 152–53;

daughter of Dr. Murad (fict.), 99

means of under autocratic regimes, 17,

Day of Judgment, The (Al-Amir): confronta-

94–95, 108; of men by men, 95–96, 130; of

tion between moderate/extremist Islam,

neopatriarchal state, 94–95; order as, 104;

171–72, 181; as interrogation of religious

paternalistic determination to remain in,

worldview, 169; memoirs of devout sheikh

19–22, 158–59, 160–64; penis as instru-

to mistress, 168–70, 172–74; parallel to

ment of, 20–21, 76, 161; polarization of

al-Mutanabbi’s poetry, 179; setting of,

male sexuality in male-controlled societ-

170; on source of Islamism, 182; taboo of

ies, 17; resistance to torture as, 95; rise of

distance surrounding religious persons,

female autonomy and, 157–58; of women

169; transformation of sheikh, 173–76

as compensation for political frustration,

dean of university (fict.), 113, 114

38–39, 40, 59, 64–65; writing as form of,

defiant assertiveness, 98

99, 184; Zahra’s submission to, 52–53

demonstrations, 124, 126, 128

Cooke, Miriam, 11–12, 50–51, 53

Desert Storm, 2, 15

Courtyard Gate, The (Khalifah), 7

Desiring Arabs (Massad), 1

culture, 3, 6, 17, 92, 115, 183

despotic regimes. See authoritarian state detention, 94, 95, 97, 98, 105 dictatorship. See authoritarian state

Al-Da‘if, Rashid: articulation of masculinity in bodily terms, 107; challenge to

district police chief, 119 domestic sphere: penguin man’s defi nition

essentialist views of sexual identity, 131,

of, 146; penguin man’s mother’s escape

157–68; exposure of private relationships,

from, 146–47; as refuge for men, 133–34,

157; Forget the Car, 183; influence on

135, 136, 139; as refuge for penguin man,

Egyptian literature, 104n7; Meryl Streep

142, 146; as refuge for women, 110–11,

Can Suit Herself, 157–68; on nightmare of

125; sheikh’s preference for, 171–72;

torture/incarceration, 104–11; presen-

state occupation of, 118–23. See also

tation of multiple discourses, 158; on state penetration/destruction of private

private sphere domestic violence: as affi rmation of male pre-

sphere, 108–10; This Side of Innocence,

rogatives, 17, 19, 20–21; as compensation

96, 104–11; use of dialogic narrative, 158;

for political frustration, 36, 38–39, 40, 43;

use of experimentation to challenge con-

as means of control, 120, 161; as reaction

structions of state, 96, 106; use of humor,

to incapacitation, 17, 19, 20–21, 111, 154;

167–68; use of irony, 110–11, 158, 163, 164

as response to loss of honor, 37, 38, 40, 43,

Daly, Mary, 9, 104 Daoud, Hassan: exploration of sexuality, 143,

72–73; Zahra’s contention with, 43–54 Door to the Sun (Khoury): on fluidity of

144–45; focus on isolation of physically

gender boundaries, 79–81, 82–84; gaps/

disabled, 132, 141–42, 143, 145–46; on

absences in, 80–81; Khalil’s identification

loss of patriarchal control, 146–47; The

with Yunis, 78; Khalil’s imprisonment, 82;

204

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i n de x

Door to the Sun (Khoury) (cont.) Khalil’s reflections on patriarchal state,

exaggeration, 75 existence, 16

79; Khalil’s relationship with Shams, 82; linking of nationalism to heterosexuality/reproduction, 79; narrator of, 78,

Fadil (fict.), 23, 24, 27–28, 30

83–84; representation of fida’i in, 78, 79,

“Faith of Islam in Modern Arabic Fiction,

80, 81–82, 83–84; setting of, 78; subversion of national history, 78, 84; on values

The” (Le Gassick), 180 family: control of individuals in authoritar-

of patriarchal society, 79; on women

ian states, 119; incarceration of, 99–101;

as symbols of homeland, 80; Yunis’s

state’s use of for intimidation, 108–11,

responses to evacuation of Palestinian resistance, 78

125, 129 Faraman, Gha’ib To‘mi: on frustration of

Dr. Akram (fict.), 116

unemployment, 26; on men’s attempts

Dreary Times (Haydar), 29n3, 56

to reestablish control, 22–23, 30–31; on

Dr. Murad (fict.): house arrest/surveil-

patriarchal view of woman’s role, 23–24,

lance of, 99; reading of state’s images,

25, 27; portrayal of patriarchal masculin-

100; removal from office, 99, 100–101;

ity, 22–31; protection of play from censor-

response to death of Ahmad, 104; torture

ship, 30; Shadows on the Window, 22–31,

of, 102; writing as weapon against state,

108; on unacceptable love relationships,

99; Yusuf’s opinion of, 101–2

24–26, 27–29; use of multiple narrators, 23 Fater (fict.): compensation for political

effeminacy: of Abdel-Karim, 43; align-

marginalization, 31–32, 34, 64, 115; as

ment with anarchy/misrule, 163; of

embodiment of fuhula, 31; as essential-

Khalil, 133–39; Khalil’s way out of, 140;

ized figure of masculinity, 62; hunger for

of Rachud, 165–66; religious modera-

power/control, 34; imprisonment of, 35;

tion viewed as, 172. See also femininity/

involvement in politics, 35; justification

feminine characteristics; homosexuality/

of crying, 34–35; relationship with Al-

homoerotic tendencies

Sakuri, 35, 36; relationship with women,

emasculation: of Assi, 38–40, 42; by authoritarian state, 17, 96, 98, 102, 103; under

31–32, 33, 34, 159; source of name, 33; swim in cold sea, 33

autocratic regimes, 96; of ex-militia man,

father of penguin man (fict.): death of, 142,

150; by patriarchal traditions, 17, 19; pov-

149; protection of son, 141–42, 143, 147;

erty and, 114; of refugees, 118; through

relationship with son, 148; response to

surveillance, 113; through torture, 96,

devastation of city, 142

102, 103, 107–11; of Walid Masoud, 65, 68;

father of Zahra (fict.), 44, 49–50

of Yusuf, 102–3; Yusuf’s compensation

father of Zeina (fict.), 69–70

for, 103, 104. See also castration

fathers: attempt to regain lost control, 22–23;

erotico-heroic masculinity, 31

brutality of, 44, 120; changes in old age,

essentialist gender concepts, 6–7

49–50; discomfort in new surroundings,

i n de x

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205

30; Ijayel as despot/worshipper of

autonomy of in postwar Lebanon, 157–58;

Hussein, 119–20, 121; interference in

aversion to war as, 120; destabilization

children’s marriage, 24; patriarchal

of category in postwar Lebanon, 152;

control by, 19–21, 29, 69–70; protection

effect of 1967 war on representations of,

of disabled children, 141–42, 143, 147;

5; emergence from gender ideologies,

response to lack of control, 23–25, 30–31,

4; Fater’s justification of, 34–35; female

69–70; in Shadows on the Window, 30–31;

autonomy and, 152, 157–58; Hassiba’s

as undisputed center of family, 119;

challenge to male perceptions of, 120,

Zeina’s, 69–70

130–31; homeland as site of, 65, 66–67;

Fathi Shin (fict.): banishment from writing,

homoerotic desires as, 92, 93, 120–21,

125; defiance of, 124–25, 127, 128; demon-

131–32, 184; as inspiration to new life,

stration organizer’s questioning of, 124;

173; Iskandar’s happiness and, 91;

discontinuation of radio broadcast, 127;

Khalil’s, 133–39; Khalil’s repudiation of,

dream about mother’s rape, 129; man-

139–41; masculine identity in relation

hood of, 127; mockery of Hael, 125–26;

to, 2, 131; of masculinities produced by

as narrator, 123–24; relationship with

Lebanese civil war, 132, 135–36, 138;

Lamis, 128–29, 169; sexual act as denun-

of moderate Islam, 172–73; of Nahila,

ciation of regime, 128–29; writings of, 125

79–80; patriarchal values of, 1, 4, 25;

Fathi Shin’s father (fict.), 125

of penguin man’s father, 141–42, 143,

Fathi Shin’s mother (fict.), 125, 126, 129

146, 147, 148; as opposite of masculinity

Fathi Shin’s sister (fict.), 129

in national discourse, 63; of Rachud’s

fatwa, 172

actions, 163, 165–66; Rachud’s repudia-

Faulkner, William, 23

tion of, 162, 163, 165; as refuge for men in

Fawzi (fict.), 122–23

times of war, 131–32, 134, 135–36, 138; as

Fayad, Mona, 135

refuge for women, 125, 134; of sheikh’s

fear of punishment, 32–33, 56

actions, 177; sheikh’s choice of, 174, 175,

fecundity, 6, 25, 66. See also motherhood

178; of sheikh’s mistress, 178; styles of

female desire, 177

masculinity and, 16; Walid’s release from,

feminine literature, 11–13 feminine masculinity: of Khalil, 78, 81,

63; Zahra’s waning sense of, 51 feminism/feminists, 2–3, 9, 158

82–84; of penguin man’s father, 141–42,

fetishism, 144n6, 145

143, 147, 148; used as ruse by Luqman, 156

fida’i: Ahmad as, 104; Arab writers’ fascina-

feminine position: of men under autocratic

tion with, 57; characteristics of, 64n10;

regimes, 95, 96, 111, 130; of narrator in

as epitome of idealized masculinity,

This Side of Innocence, 107–8; of penguin

56–57; fi xation on atavistic past, 57, 58,

man, 143, 144; of Qassim’s/Saadi’s, 120;

66–67, 71; inability to cope with defeat,

relegation of men to through oppression,

69; Iskandar’s view of, 87, 88; Mazen

182–83

as, 70–71, 74, 75, 77, 78; as paragon of

femininity/feminine characteristics: of Abdel-Karim, 43; ability to defy lust, 114;

idealized masculinity, 5; role of, 17; sense of lack/incapacitation of, 58–59, 66–67,

206

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i n de x

fida’i (cont.) 68, 70–71, 78; Sham’s husband as, 81–82; Walid Masoud as, 59, 62, 63–64, 68; Yunis as, 78, 79, 80, 81–82, 83–84

163; in Search for Walid Masoud, 61–62; in Shadows on the Window, 31 gender: alignment with land, 46; as “doing,” 139, 140; MacKinnon’s defi nition of, 163;

fi lms, 161

Naaman’s binary view of, 115; preference

fitna, 7, 159

for male children, 44

Fitna (fict.), 70

gender boundaries, 77, 84, 100

fitra, 33

gender differences, 4, 96

Forget the Car (Al-Da‘if), 183

gendered national identity, 56

Foucault, Michel, 106

gender identity: effects of war on, 130–31;

Fouda, Faraj, 180 freedom fighters. See fida’i

influence of history/ideology on, 14; as masquerade, 4, 65, 68, 135, 137

From Now Onwards (Subul), 5–6

gender norms, 58

fuhula, 19, 31. See also virility

gender relations: effect of 1967 war on, 6–7;

fuqaha’, 173

essentialist concepts of, 6–7; female

Fushah mustahdafah bayna al-nu’as wa al-

autonomy and, 152, 157–58, 170, 172,

nawm (Al-Da’if), 131 Al-Futayt al-muba‘thar (Al-Ramli). See Scattered Crumbs (Al-Ramli)

173, 174–78, 177; fluidity of, 22; Mina’s portrayal of, 33–34; traditional view of, 72–74. See also specific character or novel gender roles: in Arab cultural/literary productions, 1; blurring of in The Day of

Gang of the Bloody Rose, The (Al-Razzaz):

Judgment, 169; blurring of under auto-

Assi’s capitulation, 102; Assi’s childhood,

cratic regimes, 114; defiance of gendered

39; Assi’s view of Abdel-Karim, 41; chal-

identity in Passage to Dusk, 131; disrup-

lenge to discourse of separate spheres,

tion of in Door to the Sun, 80–81; effect of

37, 40–41; focus of, 36–37, 40; murder of

pressures of peace on, 150, 152–54; effect

Siham, 37–38, 40, 43; Mu‘tassem’s rela-

of Western fi lms on, 161; female auton-

tionship with Hiyam, 41; narrators of, 36;

omy and, 152, 157–58; fluidity of, 161;

release of Assi from prison, 38–39; setting

interrogated through egalitarian relation-

of, 36–37; Siham’s desire for peaceful life,

ship, 128–29; patriarchal discourse on, 1,

39–40, 41–42; unity of Mu‘tassem/Assi,

4, 20, 59; reversal of in Door to the Sun,

36, 42–43; unresolved ending of, 42; on

79–81, 82; reversal of in How Wonderful,

violence as compensation for political

152; reversal of in Meryl Streep Can Suit

frustrations, 36, 42; on yearning for past

Herself, 155–57, 164, 165–66; reversal of

authority in time of uncertainty, 36–37,

in The Inheritance, 74; reversal of in The

38, 40, 42

Penguin’s Song, 142, 146–48, 149; under

gaps/absences: in integrity/authority of

threat following civil war in Lebanon,

patriarch in Door to the Sun, 80–81; in

130, 131, 157–58; war’s provision of libera-

literature, 16–17; in Rachud’s masculinity,

tion from norms, 131–32

i n de x Ghada al-Samman Bila Ajniha (Shukri), 12–13 Ghina’ al-batriq (Daoud). See Penguin’s Song, The (Daoud) Gibran, Khalil, 46 Girard, Rene, 67–68

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relationship to national identity, 9, 59, 79; resistance to national discourse of, 138. See also heroic masculinity; primordial masculinity; revolutionary masculinity Hikayat Zahrah (Al-Shaykh). See Story of Zahra, The (Al-Shaykh)

girl (fict. in The Penguin’s Song), 143, 144–45

historical identity, 13–14

Gulf wars, 2, 15, 37, 38, 39, 40

Hiyam (fict.), 38, 41 home: as feminine sphere, 62, 75; Hassiba’s confrontation with patriarchy in, 25, 27,

Haddad, Nabil, 14n14

43; lack of distinction between politics

Hael Ali Hassan (fict.), 125–26, 129

and, 14n14; Majid’s estrangement in,

Hafez, Sabry, 104n7

26; as place of incarceration, 99–101; as

Hajar al-Dahek (Barakat). See Stone of Laugh-

refuge from state, 118; state’s penetra-

ter, The (Barakat)

tion/destruction of, 108–11; as token of

Hajj Mahmud (fict.), 102, 103–4

stability, 110; Zahra’s experience of male

al-Hakim, Tawfiq, 6n4

violence in, 43–44. See also domestic

Halassa, Ghaleb, 182

sphere; private sphere

hanging, 151

homeland: Ijayel’s idolization of, 120; Qas-

Harlow, Barbara, 13, 98, 105, 110

sim’s painting of, 123; Walid Masoud’s

Hashem (fict.), 46–48

longing for, 65, 66; women as metaphor

Hasiba (fict.), 120

for, 6–7, 57–58, 59, 65, 66–67, 80, 134;

Hassiba (fict.): barrenness of, 25, 27; confron-

worship of, 121; Zeina’s father’s nostalgia

tation of patriarchy, 43; disappearance of, 23–24, 159; marriage of, 27; silence of, 30–31

for, 70 Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature (Rowson/Wright), 1

Haydar, Haydar, 29n3, 56

homophobia, 92, 166

hegemonic masculinity, 19–21

homosexuality/homoerotic tendencies: allu-

heroic masculinity: of Shams’s husband,

sions to in Arabic literature, 140n4; Assi/

81–82; view of intellectuals, 87; of Yunis,

Mu‘tassem’s bond as emblematic of, 42;

78, 79, 80–81, 83–84. See also fida’i

as compensation for feelings of inferi-

heroism, 75, 83, 121, 151

ority, 140; Khalil’s freedom to express

Herzfeld, Michael, 57n5

during time, 131–32, 136–38; overtones

heterosexuality: arena of, 20; compelled by

of in rescue of leader by Hael, 125–26;

oppressive political regimes, 9; eroticiza-

Rachud’s dread of, 165–66; of Saadi,

tion of power and, 64n11; Khalil’s repul-

120; suppression/marginalization of, 58;

sion of, 134; linked to resistance, 123;

Tareq Raouf’s repression of, 67; view of

nationalist discourse of, 6; oedipal nar-

in Scattered Crumbs, 120–21; Youssef’s

ratives’ stress on, 22; polarization of, 17;

repression of, 92–93

208

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i n de x

homosocial bonding: defi nition of, 6; Khalil’s

reference to Islam, 181; portrayal of

venture into, 139; in military, 45; penguin

degradation of poverty in Iraq, 113–14,

man’s isolation from, 145–46; in prison,

116, 117; rejection of passive acceptance

95; Rachud’s need for, 160; in resistance

of/ideology of self-sacrifice, 112, 117–18;

movements, 56; solidification of through

as resistance to univocal discourse of

bragging, 32, 34; as strategy of resistance,

regime, 112–13; setting of, 111

95 honor: as defi ning frame of masculinity,

Ihya’ ‘Ulum Al-Din (Ghazali), 174 Ijayel (fict.): deification of Hussein, 119, 121;

24n2, 69–70, 72–73, 109–10; dependence

entreaties on Abood’s behalf, 123; nation-

upon women’s sexual purity, 21, 40, 43,

alism of, 119–20; as patriarch of family,

69–70, 72–73

119, 123; response to Qassim’s refusal

hooks, bell, 21 How Wonderful (Barakat): focus on lower-

to paint Hussein, 122; view of Qassim’s painting of homeland, 123

class/subaltern characters, 150; irony of

illiteracy, 182

names/title, 153, 154; Luqman’s disorien-

Imagined Masculinities (Ghoussoub/Sinclair-

tation, 150–51; Luqman’s form of mascu-

Webb), 1

linity, 150–51, 152, 161; on pressures of

Imam Ghazali, 174

peace, 150–51, 152–54, 156; questioning

impotence, 26–27

of natural differences between genders,

imprisonment. See incarceration; prison;

151–52, 153, 155, 156–57; setting, 150 humor: for alleviating feelings of defeat, 126; as means of achieving agency, 124; as

torture Improvisations on a Lost String (Yared), 12 incarceration: of Abu Ahmad for bad copies

means of coping with oppression, 119, 129;

of leader’s picture, 127; as apparatus of

as means of resisting censorship, 8; revela-

state authority, 105; of Arab writers, 97;

tion of absurdity of despotic regimes, 129;

of Assi, 37–39, 102; of Dr. Murad, 102–3;

as transgressive discourse, 128

of Fater, 35; of Fathi’s father, 125; of

Hussein, Saddam, 119, 121, 122 hypermasculinity, 22, 104, 141

intellectuals, 180; of Khalil, 82; of Murad family, 99–101; of narrator of This Side of Innocence, 105–11; for participation in political groups, 116; in patriarchal states,

Ibrahim al-Hajj Nawfal (fict.), 60, 62, 63

94–95; as source of empowerment, 95; of

identity, 109–11, 112. See also male identity

Walid Masoud, 64; of Yusuf, 102–3. See

Idha al-ayyam aghsaqat (Sharara). See If the Days Turn to Dusk (Sharara) If the Days Turn to Dusk (Sharara): changes

also prison; torture independent opinion, 9 individuality/individualism: in despotic

in university life, 113; on effects of censor-

states, 98, 119, 124, 127; of Fadil, 27; inser-

ship/surveillance, 96, 111–18; Naaman’s

tion of through writing, 128; as theme

response to surveillance, 112, 113, 115–17;

linking Arab novels, 10

Naaman’s view of masculinity, 116; narrator of, 111–12, 113, 115; peripheral

Inheritance, The (Khalifah): on cohesion between personal/political, 70; confl ict

i n de x between modernity/tradition in, 73,

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internal security apparatus: endemic nature

75; father’s nostalgia for homeland, 70;

of, 105; incarceration of families, 99–101;

on limited options for women, 73–75;

incarceration of Fathi’s father, 125; instal-

Mazen’s political frustration, 70–71;

lation of spies in university, 113, 115;

mosaic of masculinity presented in,

modalities/function of, 94–95, 180; subju-

69–73, 74, 75–76, 77; narrator of, 69, 76,

gation of individuals, 119; surveillance of

77; on Palestinian frustration/incapacita-

intellectuals, 111–18; of Syria, 124n12. See

tion, 70; on relationship between female

also coercion; incarceration; interrogators

purity/honor/masculinity, 69–70, 72–73,

(fict.); intimidation; torture

75; responses to Nahla’s marriage, 72–73;

interrogators (fict.), 103, 106–7, 108–11

reversal of gender roles in, 74, 77; setting

intifada, 58

of, 69, 70; on women’s suffering under

intimidation, 94–95, 180. See also coercion;

occupation, 69, 72–76

incarceration

innocence, 110–11, 125

Iraq, 111, 119, 123

In Search of Walid Masoud (Jabra): abandon-

Iraqi literature: If the Days Turn to Dusk,

ment of linear time/sequential plot, 60;

111–18; provision of voice to censored,

on effect of Palestinian debacle on men,

112; revelation of effect of authoritarian

5; emasculation of Walid Masoud, 68;

regimes, 11; Scattered Crumbs, 118–23;

gaps/absences in, 61–62; narrator of, 60; portrayal of freedom fighter, 59–61, 62,

Shadows on the Window, 22–31 irony: Al-Amir’s use of, 169, 179; Barakat’s

63–64; portrayal of women, 7, 61, 62–63;

use of, 153, 154; Al-Da‘if’s use of, 110–11,

view of women as symbols of nation,

158, 163, 164; Jabra’s use of, 65, 68; as

57–58, 59, 65, 66–67, 134; Walid Masoud’s

means of resisting censorship, 8, 181; of

idea of manhood, 64; Walid Masoud’s

Naaman’s life, 116; as resistance to state

relationship with women, 59, 60–62 Insi Al-sayyarah (Al-Da‘if), 183

discourse, 98; al-Sofon’s use of, 94 ‘Isabat al-wardah al-damiyah (Al-Razzaz).

intellectual masculinity, 85–87, 88

See Gang of the Bloody Rose, The

intellectuals: authoritarian state’s fear of,

(Al-Razzaz)

124; categories of, 55–56; effectiveness of,

Iskandar (fict.): Al-Ashqar’s identification

56; functions of, 127; impact of military

with, 89; as center of The Shadow and the

state on, 94; importance of passionate

Echo, 85, 89; childhood of, 87–88; friend’s

engagement, 86n21; leadership role of, 55;

views of, 85–87; isolation from collectiv-

male responses to, 86–87; opposition to,

ity, 85–86, 87, 90; masculinity of, 86, 87,

85–93; oppression of, 180; subversion of

90; murder of, 93; oppressive tendencies

authoritarian discourse, 123–29; surveil-

of, 90; reevaluation of his life, 91; relation-

lance of, 99–101, 111–18; view of selves as

ship with Mart, 90–91; self-absorption of,

spectators, 182; writings of, 58. See also

89; self-righteousness of, 89–90; tunnel

Dr. Murad (fict.); Iskandar (fict.); Kamal

vision of, 88; view of war/violence, 87,

(fict.); Khalil (fict., in Door to the Sun);

88–89; Youssef’s attitude toward, 85,

Walid Masoud (fict.)

91–93

210

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i n de x

Islamic extremists, 171–72, 180, 181

Jordanian literature: focus of, 10–11; From

Islamic groups, 180–81

Now Onwards, 5–6; The Gang of the

Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History and

Bloody Rose, 36–43; link of public/private

Literature (Murray/Roscoe), 1 Islamic militancy, 170

spheres in, 14n14 Journey at Dusk (Mina): Fater’s compensa-

Islamists, 180–81, 182

tion for political marginalization, 31–32,

Ismael (fict.), 123

34, 64; Fater’s imprisonment, 35; Fater’s

isolation: because of physical deformity,

involvement in politics, 35; Fater’s

141–42, 145–46; effect on prisoners, 106,

justification of crying, 34–35; Fater’s

108; as form of self-erasure, 98; of Iskan-

masculinity, 62; Fater’s reckless behavior,

dar from collectivity, 85–86, 87; of Khalil

33; Fater’s relationship with women,

from male world, 138

31–32, 33, 34, 159; on gender relations,

Israel: Arab-Israeli War (1967), 5, 6, 15, 39, 59, 63, 167; Arab-Israeli War (1973), 2; inheritance of Palestine, 70; invasion of Lebanon, 2, 15, 102; occupation of land, 75–76

33–34; narrator of, 33; setting of, 35, 36; Al-Shakuri’s effect on Fater, 35, 36 “Journey into an Unexpected Transient Day, A” (Wannus), 9 Al-Jumahi, Ibn Salam, 19

I‘tirafat katem sawt (Al-Razzaz). See Confessions of a Silencer (Al-Razzaz) Kahf, Mohja, 10n10, 124n12 Kajaji, Inaam, 169n7 Jabra, Jabra Ibrahim: abandonment of linear

Kamal (fict.), 73–74, 75

time/sequential plot, 60; on concept of

Kandiyoti, Deniz, 6

masculinity, 59, 60–62, 64; on effect of

Kaplan, E. Ann, 145

Palestinian debacle on men, 5; In Search of

Kassem (fict.), 48

Walid Masoud, 5, 7, 59–68, 134; portrayal

Kazim (fict.), 65–66

of freedom fighter, 59–61, 62, 63–64;

Kazim’s sister (fict.), 64

portrayal of women, 7, 61, 62–63; on role

Khalifah, Sahar: blurring of gender boundar-

of intellectuals, 64; on women as symbols

ies, 74, 77; on cohesion between personal/

of nation, 57–58, 59, 65, 66–67, 134

political, 70; on confl ict between

Jackson, Stevi, 64n11

modernity/tradition, 73, 75; The Court-

Jalil (fict.), 26–27

yard Gate, 7; The Inheritance, 69–78; on

Jameson, Frederic, 15, 55, 83

limited options for women, 73–75; on link

Jamil (fict.), 155

between private/public spheres, 14–15;

Jarrar, Maher, 84

on manhood gained in prison, 95; mosaic

Jassim (fict.), 32–33

of masculinity presented by, 69–70, 74,

Jayawardena, Kumari, 9

75–76, 77; on political frustration of

Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, 7n5

Palestinians, 70–71, 75, 77; on relation-

Jisr al-hajar (‘Usayran), 13

ship between female purity/honor/

Jordan, 2

masculinity, 69–70, 75; Wild Thorns, 14,

i n de x

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211

95; on women’s suffering under occupa-

Lamis (fict.), 128–29

tion, 69–70, 72–77

land: inextricability from traditional values,

Khalil (fict., in Door to the Sun): care of Yunis, 79; on end of revolutions, 83–84; fear of castration, 82; imprisonment of,

73; Israeli inheritance of, 70; women as metaphor for, 6–7, 57–58, 59, 65, 66–67. See also homeland

82; reflections on patriarchal state, 79;

“Land of Rock and Thyme, A” (Badr), 57

relationship with Shams, 82; retreat into

language: banning of unpatriotic, 127; of

memories, 78–79; rewriting of Palestinian

characters of Confessions of a Silencer,

story, 82–84; view of martyrs, 83; view of

98–99; control through, 26, 29, 158, 165;

Yunis, 81, 83; view of Yunis’s marriage, 80

direction of male language, 157; of Iskan-

Khalil (fict., in The Stone of Laughter): alienation of, 138; entrance into male arena, 140–41; freedom to express homosexual-

dar, 88; as means of rebuilding homeland, 84; wife’s competition with Rachud in realm of, 163–64, 165, 166

ity in time, 131–32, 133, 136–38; identity

leader (fict.), 125–26, 127

crisis of, 139; masculinity of, 135; narra-

Lebanese literature: The Day of Judgment,

tor’s objectification of body of, 135–36;

168–79; Door to the Sun, 78–84; on effects

necrophilic attraction, 137; refuge in

of civil, 11; How Wonderful, 150–57;

domestic sphere, 133–34, 135, 136, 139;

Meryl Streep Can Suit Herself, 157–68;

submission to patriarchal society, 139–40;

The Penguin’s Song, 132, 141–50; The

view of his body, 139, 140–41; view of

Shadow and the Echo, 85–93; The Stone

women, 133–35, 140

of Laughter, 132–41; The Story of Zahra,

Khalil’s grandfather (fict.), 78 Khansa show, 122 Khoury, Colette, 97 Khoury, Elias: Door to the Sun, 78–84; on

43–54; themes of women writers, 12; This Side of Innocence, 104–11 Lebanon: civil war in, 2, 11, 39, 105, 130, 131–32, 133, 138, 150; collective support

fluidity of gender boundaries, 79–81,

of intellectuals in, 181; effects of pres-

82–84; gaps/absences in works of, 80–81;

sures of peace on masculinity, 150–51,

masculinity presented by, 78; reflections

152, 157–58, 161; empowerment of

on patriarchal society, 79–80; representa-

women in, 146–47, 149, 151–52, 155, 158;

tion of fida’i, 78, 79, 80, 81–82, 83–84;

feminization of culture of, 158; Israeli

representation of women, 79–80, 81–82;

invasion of, 2, 15, 102; killing of intellec-

on responses to Palestinian evacuation of

tuals in, 180; political detention/torture

Lebanon, 78–79; subversion of national

in, 105; removal of Palestinian resistance

history, 78, 84; on theoretical talk, 56

from, 78, 83, 104; stories of refugees in,

Kilpatrick, Hilary, 10 Kimmel, Michael, 3, 92

78–84 Le Gassick, Trevor, 180 literature. See Arab literature; Iraqi literature; Jordanian literature; Lebanese literature;

“Al-Ladhi ’Ahrak al-Sofon” (Tamir), 94 Lagrange, Frederic, 140n4

Palestinian literature; Syrian literature localism, 10, 181

212

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i n de x

love: Fadil’s marriage for, 24–25, 29; Fater’s

creation of, 3; defi nition of in Confes-

view of women in, 34; fear of homosexual

sion of a Silencer, 103; of disabled man,

feelings of, 67–68, 92; Khalil’s disgust

143–44; effects of war on, 130–31; of

with heterosexual, 134; Khalil’s homo-

Fathi Shin, 127–28; initiation into, 91–92;

sexual desires, 137–38; Khalil’s love of his

machismo as means of reclaiming, 103;

body, 140–41; Majid’s for Hassiba, 25–26,

nationalist destabilization of notions

28; Malek’s talk of, 46; Shamil’s view of,

of, 6–7; protection of women as essence

28; sheikh’s choice of over religion, 169,

of, 159; Rachud’s view of, 166; reduced

175–76, 178, 179; as substitute for state’s

to bribe, 27–28; response to threats to,

ruthlessness, 128–29; as trap for Shirine,

20–22; of Saadi, 121; Walid Masoud’s idea

156; Walid’s love of country, 65, 66–67; Zahra’s love for sniper, 53 Luqman (fict.): affair of, 155; childhood of, 154; compensation for lost masculinity, 152; death of, 157; disorientation at war’s

of, 64. See also masculinity; men Mariam (fict.): relationship with Walid, 61; sex with Tareq Raouf, 67, 68; view of Walid, 60, 64–65; on Walid’s view of Palestine, 66

end, 150–51; experiences in, 152–53;

Marina (fict.), 150

fantasies of savagery, 151; masculinity of,

Mart (fict.), 85, 90–91, 92

150, 161; nostalgia for, 152–53, 154; rela-

martial masculinity: of Saddam Hussein, 119,

tionship with Salam, 153–54; seduction of

120, 121; of Mazen, 71, 74, 77; Palestin-

Shirine, 156; view of brutal men, 155

ian problem precipitating, 5; required by authoritarian regime, 121; Siham’s rejection of, 43

machismo: as counter to political margin-

martyrs, 5, 58, 83, 122

alization, 31–36, 64–65, 76; exaggerated

Marwan (fict.), 64, 65

acts of daring, 151; Khalil’s display of, 140,

masculine literature, 11–12

141; Khalil’s masculinity as antithetical

masculinity: appeal to religious discourse

to, 138; as means of reclaiming manhood,

in defense of, 159; articulation in bodily

103; of working-class masculinity, 75

terms, 107; association with ability to sup-

Mahfouz, Naguib, 104–5n7, 180

port family, 74; bragging as compensation

Mahmoud (fict.), 118

for marginalization, 115; compensation

Majed (fict.), 48–49

for loss of, 103, 104; as complex phenom-

Majid (fict.), 23, 25–26

enon, 2; crisis of in postwar Lebanon,

Maksoud, Hala, 2n1

150–51, 152, 157–58, 161; disorientation

male identity, 3, 130–31. See also manhood;

of, 17; Dr. Murad as model of, 99–100,

masculinity

101–2; as dynamic process, 3; effect of

Malek (fict.), 45–46

Palestinian debacle on, 5–9; effect of

male state, 9. See also authoritarian state;

wars on, 2, 45, 130–31, 132; effects of

patriarchal state manhood: authoritarian state’s threat to, 112; confi nement as means to, 95; cultural

surveillance/censorship on, 112, 113; equated with social appearances, 116; fear of punishment and, 32–33; feminine

i n de x

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213

attraction to, 50–52; focus of this work

violation of, 66; violence as compensation

on, 2–3, 11, 16–18; fragility/vulnerability

for loss of, 150; Western concept of, 73; of

of, 17, 71, 73, 102, 130, 138; generation of,

working-class, 75–76; Yusuf’s glorifica-

2, 20–22, 130–31, 132, 133, 135, 138, 142,

tion of, 104. See also emasculation; mar-

154–55; hegemonic form of, 19–21; honor

tial masculinity; patriarchal masculinity;

as defi ning frame of, 24n2, 69–70, 72–73,

primordial masculinity; traditional mas-

109–10; of Saddam Hussein, 119, 120, 121;

culinity; specific male character

identification with sexual performance/

Mathilde Building, The (Daoud), 21

potency, 64, 71, 76, 150, 156, 161, 165;

Mazen (fict.): affairs with women, 71, 72;

involvement in war as assertion of, 91; of

longing for past, 71, 74, 75, 77, 78; Nahla’s

Iskandar, 86; in Journey at Dusk, 31–36;

support of, 74; representation of revo-

Khalil’s form of, 133–39; linked to aggres-

lutionary paralysis, 70–71; response to

sion, 152–53; linked to heroic feats, 71;

sister’s sexual relationships, 72; stories of

linked to homosocial interaction, 160–61;

heroism, 71; view of Nahla’s marriage, 75

linked to intellectual potency, 61; linked

McKinnon, Catherine, 163

to man’s ability to provide fi nancially,

memorials to unknown warriors, 57

114, 150, 156; linked to sexual purity of

men: adjustments to postwar Lebanon,

women, 158–59, 160–61, 162–63; linked

150–51, 152, 153–54, 156, 158; boundaries

to verbal potency, 160; of Luqman, 152,

set for female revolutionaries, 58; com-

161; machismo as means of reclaim-

pensation for political marginalization,

ing, 76; as masquerade, 4, 65, 68, 135,

31–32, 34, 36–43, 64, 115; confi nement

137; mosaic of in Story of Zahra, 44–50;

in inner spaces during, 14; as corporal

nationalist discourse on, 56–57; neopatri-

beings, 61; diversity among, 2–3; effect

archal challenge to, 167; of Oedipus King,

of Palestinian debacle on, 5; effect of

17, 19–22; pan-Arab version of, 19–21; in

pressure of patriarchal state, 9–10, 14,

patriarchal states, 1, 17, 95, 96; of penguin

95; effects of war on, 130–31; female

man, 143–44, 146; phallocentric model

autonomy and, 157–58; and forced mili-

for, 21; in postwar Lebanon, 157–58;

tary service under dictatorships, 117–18;

primal form of, 20–21; proven through

honor of, 21; of oedipal narratives, 17,

endurance of torture, 95, 102; of Rachud,

19–22; oppression of in authoritarian

158–59, 161–62, 165; relationship to femi-

states, 94, 98–104; patriarchal control by,

ninity, 2; in religious world of sheikh, 172;

19–21; as perpetrators of masculinity, 2;

represented by Kazim, 66; represented by

prison as rite of passage, 95; relationship

political activists, 22; self-expression/self-

to nation, 7; response to problems, 115;

articulation as reviver of, 118–19, 184; in

subjugation of, 3, 4, 9–10, 14, 19–20, 120,

Shadows on the Window, 22–31; sheikh’s

123; transgression of codes of masculin-

more feminine form of, 177, 179; studies

ity in literature of, 16; as unitary group,

of in Middle East, 1; as theme linking

3–4; as victims of authoritarian regimes,

Arab novels, 10, 16–17; transformation of

17, 96, 98, 102, 103, 118–19, 123 (see also

in Fater, 35–36; violation of homeland as

Confessions of a Silencer [Al-Razzaz];

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i n de x

men (cont.) If the Days Turn to Dusk [Sharara]; This

the Tempest, 19; setting of novels, 35, 36; work at Syrian ministry of culture, 97

Side of Innocence [Al-Da‘if]); as victims of

mind quarantine, 94–95

dictatorships/war, 111; as victims of other

minority discourse, 78n17

men’s violence, 138; as victims of patri-

Al-Mirath (Khalifah). See Inheritance, The

archal oppression, 2, 4, 19–20, 48–49,

(Khalifah)

120–22; as victims of society, 49n8; writ-

misogyny: of Fater, 34; of homosocial bond-

ings of vs. women’s writings, 11–12. See

ing, 6; Khalil’s expression of, 140, 141;

also specific male character

Luqman and, 151; of patriarchy, 19–21,

men’s studies, 3

158, 163; of penguin man, 147; of Rachud,

Meryl Streep Can Suit Herself (Al-Da‘if):

162, 163; revealed in oedipal narratives,

challenge to essentialist views of sexual identity, 157–68; exposure of private

21–22. See also domestic violence modernity: effect on bodies/gender identities/

relationships, 157; multiple discourses

sexuality, 9; incompatibility of traditional

in, 158; narrator’s perspective, 157, 158;

masculinity with, 20–21, 158; Islamism

Rachud’s affair with dressmaker, 166,

as counter to, 182; sheikh’s mistress

167–68; Rachud’s attempt to preserve

associated with, 174, 178–79; yoking of

patriarchal control, 158, 159–60, 162,

dictatorship with, 96–97

163, 166–67; Rachud’s reading of his wife,

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 11, 172n9

162–63; setting of, 157; wife’s competition

Moi, Toril, 2

with Rachud in language, 163–65; wife’s

Morgan, David, 32

decision to leave house, 160, 161, 165, 166,

mother of penguin man (fict.): concern for

168; wife’s masculine actions, 162; wife’s

son’s sexuality, 147–48; escape from

response to pregnancy, 160, 164; wife’s

domestic sphere, 146–47; move to city,

sexual relationships, 160–61, 162; wife’s

149; son’s view of, 148–49; suggestion to

view of Rachud, 161

rebuild shop, 142

metaphor: as resistance to censorship, 8;

motherhood: as defi ning element of women,

women as land/nation, 6–7, 57–58, 59, 65,

160; nationalist discourse on, 57–58, 74,

66–67

76–77, 79; Walid Masoud’s sanctification

Migrants’ Mosque, 170, 171

of, 62

militarism, 49, 121–22, 171

Al-Mousa, Nedal M., 10

military duty, 45, 117

mukhabarat. See internal security apparatus

military groups, 41, 105

Mullah Salih (fict.), 121

military state, 94

Al-Musawi, Muhsin Jassim, 98, 99n5

military-style authoritarian apparatus,

music, 126–27

96–97. See also authoritarian state Millet, Kate, 13–14, 15, 107n10 Mina, Hanna: on Elias Abi Shabaka, 19; Journey at Dusk, 31–36, 62, 64; portrayal of gender roles, 32–35, 159; The Sail and

Muslim Brothers, 182 al-Mutanabbi, Abu al-Tayyeb, 173, 175, 176, 177, 179 Mu‘tassem (fict.): Assi’s envy of, 39; internalization of patriarchal values, 37; as

i n de x

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215

narrator of The Gang of the Bloody Rose,

detention/torture of, 105–10; offense of,

36; relationship with Assi, 36, 42–43;

104–5

as representative of atavistic past, 40; response to parents’ meeting over mar-

narrator(s): of Confessions of a Silencer, 98–99, 101; of The Day of Judgment, 171

riage of, 41; view of Siham’s murder, 37,

(see also sheikh [fict.]); of Door to the Sun,

40, 42; view of Siham’s relationship with

78; of Dreary Times, 56; of The Gang of

Abdel-Karim, 37, 41; violent/degenerate

the Bloody Rose, 36; of If the Days Turn to

nature of, 42

Dusk, 111–12, 113, 115 (see also Naaman

muwashahhat, 126–27

Mahmoud [fict.]); of The Inheritance, 69, 76, 77; of In Search of Walid Masoud, 60; of Journey at Dusk, 33, 35; of Meryl

Naaman Mahmoud (fict.): articles for news-

Streep Can Suit Herself, 157, 158; of The

paper, 117; aversion to war, 117–18; binary

Penguin’s Song, 141, 142–43, 146 (see also

view of genders, 115; compensation for

penguin man [fict.]); of Scattered Crumbs,

feelings of deficiency, 115; degradation of

118, 119, 120, 121; of The Shadow and the

poverty of, 113–14, 116, 117; as narra-

Echo, 89; of Shadows on the Window, 23,

tor, 111–12, 113, 115; nightmares of, 114;

29; of The Silence and the Noise, 123, 127

political activities of, 115–16; response

(see also Fathi Shin [fict.]); of The Stone

to surveillance, 112, 113, 115–16, 177;

of Laughter, 133, 135; of Story of Zahra,

self-erasure of, 112, 113, 116–17; shock at

46–47, 48; of This Side of Innocence,

behavior of colleagues, 114; submission to

104–11; of Al-Zaman al-muwhesh, 29n3

authorities, 113, 116–17; transformation

Nasser era, 6

from censored silence to writerly subjec-

nation (women as metaphor for), 6–7, 57–58,

tivity, 113, 118; view of genders, 115; view of masculinity, 116

59, 65, 66–67, 80, 134 national history, 78, 113

Nahila (fict.), 79–80

national identity, 59, 79, 138

Nahiyat al-bara’a (Al-Da‘if). See This Side of

nationalism: defi nition of, 6; effect of 1967

Innocence (Al-Da‘if) Nahla (fict.): abduction of, 76; criticism of Mazen’s escapades, 77; fi nancial support of brothers, 74; marriage of, 72, 73–74, 75

war on, 6; Ijayel’s brand of, 119–20; of Iskandar, 91; linked to heterosexuality/ reproduction, 13–14, 65–66, 74, 79–80 nationalist discourse: assignment of opposi-

Nahla’s mother (fict.), 77

tional roles to men/women, 56–57; effect

Na‘ima Saab (fict.), 30

of Palestinian debacle on, 6; on intellectu-

Naji (fict.), 136–37

als as revolutionaries, 64; male-centered

Najib (fict.), 152, 155, 157

nature of, 57; on motherhood/women,

naksa, 5, 13, 15. See also Arab-Israeli war (1967)

57–58, 76–77, 79; view of men, 58 national norms, 58

narrative authority, 23

necrophilia, 137

narrator (fict., in This Side of Innocence):

neopatriarchal state, 94, 167

break with reality/violence of, 110–11;

Novelists, The (Halassa), 182

216

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i n de x

Nuh, Said, 104–5n7 Nuha (fict.), 84

patriarchal discourse, 158, 163. See also univocal discourse patriarchal masculinity: as absolutist, essentialist category, 4; challenge to in postwar

oedipal narratives: of dominant males fi lter-

Lebanon, 157–58; creation of contradic-

ing female perspective, 21–22 (see also

tions, 4–5; definition of, 1; dependence on

Gang of the Bloody Rose, The [Al-Razzaz];

women’s sexual purity, 21, 40, 43, 69–70,

Journey at Dusk [Mina]; Shadows on the

72–73; as destructive/convoluted phe-

Window [Faraman]; Story of Zahra, The

nomenon, 2–3; disruption of man’s quest

[Al-Shaykh]); favoring singularly domi-

for self-autonomy, 4; emergence from

nant viewpoint, 89; of freedom fighters,

gender ideologies, 4; longing for in Gang

55–59. See also Door to the Sun (Khoury);

of the Bloody Rose, 40; Mu‘tassem’s inter-

Inheritance, The (Khalifah); In Search of

nalization of, 37; as paradoxical/nonuni-

Walid Masoud (Jabra); Shadow and the

form phenomenon, 4; penguin man and,

Echo, The (Al-Ashqar)

146, 147, 148–49; portrayal of in Shadows

oedipal quest, 9–10

on the Window, 22–31; as represented in

Oedipus King, 19–22

oedipal narratives, 19–22; as show, 72–73;

“One Who Burnt the Ships, The” (Tamir), 94

Zahra’s submission to, 52–54

open-ended texts, 8, 31, 42, 129

patriarchal society, 4

Ounsi (fict.), 85–86, 90

patriarchal state: characteristics of, 9–10, 94–95; complicity of Islamic groups with, 180; emasculated males’ insistence

Palestinian intifadas, 2

upon, 59; emasculation of men under, 17,

Palestinian literature: focus of, 10–11; The

19, 96, 98; individuality in, 98; Khalil’s

Inheritance, 69–78; In Search of Walid

reflections on, 79; Majed’s freedom from,

Masoud, 5, 7, 59–68; themes of women

48–49; masculine aggression of, 120;

writers, 12; Walid Masoud as model of, 63

as source of dignity/self-respect, 112;

Palestinian problem, 5, 10–11, 66, 181 Palestinian resistance movement, 5, 71, 78, 83, 104

subjugation of men, 9–10, 14. See also authoritarian state peace, 150, 152

Palestinians, 62, 70, 75, 77

pedophilia, 144

pan-Arabism: effect of 1967 war on, 6–7;

Peled, Mattityahu, 67

emphasis on in Arab literature, 7–8, 10,

penguin man (fict.): homage paid to dead,

19; Palestinian problem as unifying force,

149; isolation of, 141–42, 143, 145–46;

5, 181

job of, 147; masculinity of, 143–44, 145;

paranoia, 21, 124

physical deformity of, 142–43; relation-

party head, 119

ship with father, 148; relationship with

Passage to Dusk, A (Al-Da’if), 131

mother, 147–49; sexual fantasies of, 143,

patriarch, 19–22, 80–81

144–45, 148, 149; writings of, 146

i n de x Penguin’s Song, The (Daoud), 141–50; focus

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217

political power, 32

on isolation of physically disabled man,

political turmoil, 20–22

132, 141–42, 143, 145–46; on loss of patri-

politicians, 99–101

archal control, 146–47; narrator of, 141,

post-1967 era, 2

146; penguin man’s deformity, 142–43;

poverty, 113–14, 116, 117

penguin man’s sexual fantasies, 143,

power relations, 22, 64n11

144–45; style of, 146; writings of penguin

primordial masculinity: characteristics of,

man, 146 personal issues: in Arab literature, 8, 11–16, 97, 118, 128, 167, 169, 172, 178–79, 181, 183–84 (see also specific novel); complex-

133; extremes of in war, 130, 152–53; Fater as caricature of, 31–32; politically frustrated men reverting to, 42–43; transformation of in Fater, 35–36

ity of, 72; as inseparable from political,

prison: Arab authors’ experiences in, 97; as

8, 14, 41, 51, 63, 70, 90, 105, 108–9, 111,

collective social/political phenomenon,

167; as resistance to univocal discourse,

95; effect on Yusuf, 104; effects on Assi,

96; traces of public story in, 32; Walid’s

37–39, 102; Fater’s experience in, 35;

separation of from collective issues, 62

Khalil in, 82; Lebanon as, 105; under

Peteet, Julie M., 24n2

oppressive regimes, 26–27, 94–95; as

phallocentric model for masculinity, 21

source of maturity, 95; Walid Masoud’s

physical disability, 132, 141–42, 143, 145–46

experience in, 64; Yusuf’s degradation vs.

pluralism, 9

Dr. Murad’s victory in, 102–3. See also

poetry, 124–25

incarceration; intimidation; torture

political activism/activists, 22, 40

prison writings, 95n3

political detention, 99–102, 105

private promiscuity, 182–84

political issues: in Arab literature, 7–8, 11–16;

private sphere: conflation with public sphere,

personal issues inseparable from, 8,

13–15, 70; dictators’ occupation of,

11–16, 41, 51, 63, 70, 90, 105, 108–9, 111,

118–23; escape from surveillance in, 114;

167; women’s literature on, 11–12

infi ltration of public sphere in Gang of the

political marginalization: anger against

Bloody Rose, 37, 40–41; in The Mathilde

wives as compensation for, 36; control

Building, 21; patriarchal separation of

of women as compensation for, 38–39,

from public sphere, 20, 21, 24, 62; state’s

40, 59, 64–65; Fater’s compensation

penetration of, 99, 108–11; women’s con-

for, 31–32, 34, 64, 115; flaunting virility

tention with male violence in, 43. See also

as compensation for, 76; machismo as

domestic sphere; home

counter to, 31–36, 64–65, 76; of Mazen,

progressive activism, 36–43

70–71; of Palestinians, 75, 77; violence as

progressive/retrograde masculinity, 55, 73, 75

compensation for, 36, 38–39, 40, 42, 43,

proletarian masculinity, 87

75–76

prose, 125

political mobilization, 55 political parties, 105, 116

public sphere: blurring of boundaries of in Gang of the Bloody Rose, 37, 40–41;

218

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i n de x

public sphere (cont.) boundaries for women in, 58; conflation of private sphere with, 13–15, 70; Dr.

response to pregnancy, 160, 164; sexual relationships of, 162; struggle with seamstress’s brother, 168; view of Rachud, 161

Murad’s wife’s excursions in, 100; intel-

radio, 119, 127

lectuals’ retreat from, 55–56; patriarchal

Al-Ramli, Muhsin: challenge to univocal

separation of from private sphere, 20, 21,

state discourse, 120–21; on emascula-

24, 62; state as representative of, 99; state’s

tion of refugees by military regime,

monolithic discourse controlling, 119;

118; on homosexuality, 120–21; on Iraqi

women’s contention with male violence

war, 121–22, 123; mosaic of masculinity

in, 43; women’s entrance into, 155–57;

presented by, 119–20; representation of

Zahra’s traversing of, 12

women, 120; Scattered Crumbs, 118–23; on state’s complete control of public/ private spheres, 119–20, 121, 123; use of

al-Qadi, Iman, 13

humor as protective armor, 119, 124

Al-Qaffash, Muntasser, 104–5n7

rape, 20–21, 140, 141

Qala‘at al-’Ustah (‘Usayran), 13

Al-Razzaz, Mu’nes: challenge to discourse

Qassim (fict.), 120, 122, 123

on separate spheres, 37, 40–41, 100; on

Quranic turathi, 173

compensation for emasculation, 103–4; Confessions of a Silencer, 96, 98–104; on desire for peaceful life vs. war, 39–40,

Raafat (fict.), 136

41–42; on emasculation of torture, 102;

Rachud (fict.): affair with dressmaker, 166,

exposure of coercive machinery of politi-

167–68; attempt to prove authority, 158,

cal containment, 98, 99n5; focus of works

160; concept of masculinity, 158–59,

of, 36–37, 40; The Gang of the Bloody Rose,

161–62; concern about wife’s sexual rela-

36–43, 102; on intellectuals’ escape into

tions, 160–61, 162–63, 168; confusion in

words, 56; on invasion of private sphere

neopatriarchal society, 167; effect of wife’s

by state, 99–101; models of masculinity

response to pregnancy on, 160, 164–65;

presented by, 99–100, 101–4; on personal/

effeminate behavior of, 165–66; isolation

social resistance to authority, 96; ques-

of, 168; patriarchal, binary view of gen-

tioning of modern secular state ideology,

ders, 157, 158–59; as target of own jests/

98; use of plurality of voices/nonlinear

mockery, 158; unintegrated male/female

narrative, 98–99; use of unresolved end-

aspects of, 166–67; wife’s verbal competi-

ings, 42; on violence as compensation for

tion with, 163–64, 165, 166

political frustrations, 36–43; on yearning

Rachud’s wife (fict.): absence from home, 160, 161, 162, 165; competition with Rachud

for past authority in time of uncertainty, 36–37, 38, 40, 42

in realm of language, 163–64, 165, 166;

reactionary masculinity, 75–76

decision to leave Rachud, 166, 168; love of

realism, 16

television, 165; masculine actions of, 162;

Reform Movement, 170

Rachud’s attempt to read her body, 163;

refugees, 118

i n de x regionalism, 10, 181

Salhi Al-Shakuri (fict.), 35, 36

regressive traditionalism, 36–43

Salim (fict.), 154–55

religion: fida’i and, 5; marginalization of

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219

Salma Gibran (fict.), 71

in Arab literature, 180; as means to

Samar (fict.), 7

maintain dignity, 116, 159; as protection

Sami (fict.), 50–52

against resurgence of radicalism, 170;

al-Samman, Ghada, 12–13

radicalization of, 171; sheikh’s shunning

Al-Samt wa-al-sakhab (Siree). See Silence and

of, 175–76

the Noise, The (Siree)

religious personalities, 169–79

Scarry, Elaine, 107

reproduction: as biological necessity for

Scattered Crumbs (Al-Ramli): on emas-

women, 137; as defi ning element of

culation of refugees from military

women, 79–80, 160; nationalist discourse

regime, 118; Ijayel as despot/worship-

on, 57–58, 74, 76–77, 79; as role of woman

per of Hussein, 119, 121; Ijayel’s brand

in patriarchal societies, 79; as source of

of nationalism, 119–20; on Iraqi war,

revolutionaries, 118; Walid Masoud’s

121–22; militaristic wedding celebration,

sanctification of, 62

122; mosaic of masculinity presented in,

resistance: as aim of progressive masculinity,

119–20, 121; narrator of, 118, 119; paint-

55; homosocial bonding in prison as, 95;

ing of Iraq, 123; representation of women,

linked to heterosexuality/reproduction,

120; search for Mahmoud’s family, 118,

123; relationship to sexuality, 79; writing

119; setting of, 118–19; on state’s control

as form of, 8, 13, 96, 97, 98, 118, 123–24

of public/private spheres, 119–20, 121,

Resistance Literature (Harlow), 13

123; use of humor as protective armor,

revolution, 79, 83–84

119, 124; view of homosexuality in,

revolutionary ideology, 55, 79 revolutionary masculinity, 38, 80. See also fida’i

120–21 Scheherazade, 84 seamstress’s family (fict.), 167–68

“Rihla fi Majahel Yawm Aber” (Wannus), 9

secret service. See internal security apparatus

Rima (fict.), 62–63

Sedgwick, Eve, 2, 6

Russo, Mary, 144

self (fragmentation of), 42–43 self-erasure: by narrator of This Side of Innocence, 106–7; seclusion as form of, 144; as

Saadi (fict.), 120–21, 123 Saadiyya (fict.), 14 Al-Sabbar (Khlifah), 14–15, 95

source of survival in authoritarian states, 98, 112, 113, 116–17 setting: of Confessions of a Silencer, 99; of

sado/state, 9

The Day of Judgment, 170; of Door to the

Saeed (fict.), 72–73

Sun, 78; of The Gang of the Bloody Rose,

Said (fict.), 127, 136

36–37; of How Wonderful, 150; of If the

Said, Edward W., 86n21, 97

Days Turn to Dusk, 111; of The Inheri-

Sail and the Tempest, The (Mina), 19

tance, 69, 70; of Journey at Dusk, 35, 36;

Salam (fict.), 153–54, 155, 157

of Meryl Streep Can Suit Herself, 157;

220

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i n de x

setting (cont.) of Scattered Crumbs, 118–19; of The Silence and the Noise, 123–24; of The Stone of Laughter, 133

of women, 90–91; Youssef’s attitude/feelings toward Iskandar, 91–93 Shadows on the Window (Faraman): Fadil’s response to disappearance of Hassiba,

sex role theory, 2, 75

23–24, 30; father’s attempt to reestablish

sexual harassment, 47–48, 114

control, 22–23, 30–31, 108; on frustra-

sexual intercourse: as compensation for loss,

tion of unemployment, 26; Hassiba’s

128; as form of conquest, 20–21, 70, 82;

lack of presence in, 159; hybridity of, 29;

as means of control, 76, 161; as means

inconclusive ending of, 31, 129; Majid’s

of denouncing despotic regime, 128; as

narration of, 25–26; on male submission

means of proving manhood, 59, 60–62, 76

to woman, 30; narrators of, 23, 29, 31,

sexuality: as cultural production, 14–15; as

85; patriarchal masculinity portrayed in,

domain of women writers, 184; effect of

23–24; on patriarchal view of woman’s

male insecurities on, 20–21; females’ use

role, 25, 27; Shamil’s play, 28–29; on

of under dictatorships, 114; interchange-

unacceptable love relationships, 23,

ability with aggression, 33; interchange-

25–26, 27–29; on writing as escape from

ability with revolution/resistance, 79;

reality, 28

link to writing, 174; of Luqman, 150;

Al-sha‘er al-fahl, 19

masculinity and, 64; as means of violat-

Shahd (fict.), 61

ing norms of state, 128–29; necrophilia,

Shamil (fict.), 23, 28–29

137; of penguin man, 143, 144–45,

Shams (fict.), 78, 81–82

147–48, 149; as prime mover in life/art,

Shams’ husband (fict.), 81–82

173; relationship to national/historical

Sharabi, Hisham, 94, 167

identity, 13–14, 65–66, 79; as topic of

Shara’et Mulawwanah (‘Usayran), 12

Arab literature, 182–84; underlined to

Sharara, Hayat: challenge to national history,

denounce power relations, 96; of women

113; on degradation of poverty, 113–14,

as threat to masculinity, 161; Zahra’s

116, 117; on effects of censorship/surveil-

relationship with sniper and, 52. See

lance, 96, 112, 114–15, 116–17; If the Days

also heterosexuality; homosexuality/

Turn to Dusk, 96, 111–18; interrogation

homoerotic tendencies

of discourse of autocratic regime, 112–13;

Shaaban, Buthaina, 13

reference to Islam, 181; sympathies with

Shadow and the Echo, The (Al-Ashqar): fore-

men/women under surveillance, 111; view

grounding of verbal warfare/masculinist abstraction, 88; Iskandar’s childhood, 87;

of war, 117–18 Al-Shaykh, Hanan: mosaic of masculinity

Iskandar’s isolation, 85–86, 87, 88; Iskan-

presented by, 44–50; on release from

dar’s transformation, 91; Iskandar’s view

traditional values, 48–49; on shift ing

of self, 89–90; Iskandar’s view of war, 86,

power relations in war, 49–50; The Story

87, 88–89; on male responses to intellec-

of Zahra, 43–54; sympathy with women/

tual masculinity, 86–87; masculine roles

men, 49n8; use of multiple narrators,

in, 85, 88; narrator of, 89; representation

46–47, 48; on women in public space,

i n de x

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221

12; on women’s contention with male

regime, 124, 126; Fathi’s contempt for

violence, 43–54

regime, 124; Fathi Shin’s father’s arrest,

sheikh (fict.): abduction of, 179; appearance

125; Fathi’s mother used as tool of state,

of, 171, 178; background of, 170–71; bal-

129; Hael’s heroic act, 125–26; interroga-

anced relationship with woman, 169–70;

tion of gender roles through egalitarian

castigation of public in favor of domestic

relationship, 128–29; music preferred by

space, 171–72, 174–75; choice of love/God

regime, 126–27; narrator of, 123; open

over religion, 178–79; confrontation with

ending of, 129; as parody of authori-

extremists, 171–72, 181; death sentence of,

tarianism, 126; personal/sexual/social

172; job at “Migrants’ Mosque,” 170, 174;

resistance to authority, 96, 128, 169; por-

lessons on technology, 178–79; memoirs

trayal of women, 125, 128–29; setting of,

to mistress, 168–70, 172–74; relation-

123–24; use of humor to achieve agency,

ship with mistress, 170, 172; shunning of religious life/discourse, 175–76; television

124, 125–28, 129 Siree, Nihad: contestation/resistance of forces

program, 175; transformation of, 173–74;

of terror, 123–28; on demonstrations

view of mistress, 173, 174, 177; yielding of

in dictatorial regime, 124, 126; Hael’s

control to woman, 177

marriage, 126; on individual capacity for

sheikh’s mistress (fict.): association with

resistance, 128; interrogation of gender

modernity, 174, 178–79; attack on

roles through egalitarian relationship,

extremists, 178; as challenge to stereo-

128–29; parody of authoritarianism,

type of Arab women, 172, 177; linguistic

126; personal/sexual/social resistance to

resourcefulness of, 174; relationship with

authority, 96; portrayal of women, 125,

sheikh, 170, 172; sheikh’s view of, 173,

128–29; on regime’s use of music, 126–27;

174; transformation of sheikh wrought

The Silence and the Noise, 96, 123–29; on

by, 174–78

state’s intimidation tactics, 129; use of

Al-Shira‘ wa-al-‘assifah (Mina), 19

humor to achieve agency, 124, 125–28,

Shirine (fict.), 156–57

129; use of open ending, 129; writing as

Shukri, Ghali, 12–13

form of resistance, 123

Siddiq, Muhammad, 7–8

siyar, 173

Siham (fict. in Gang of the Bloody Rose):

sniper (fict.), 50–52

desire for ideal world, 42; letter to Assi,

social change, 55

39; marriage of, 38; murder of, 40, 43; as

society, 49n8

narrator, 36; relationship with Abdel-Ka-

socioeconomic status, 3

rim, 37–39, 41–42; versions of her death,

soft masculinity, 157–58. See also feminine

37; as wife of Assi, 36

masculinity

Siham (fict. in How Wonderful), 157

Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 23

Silence and the Noise, The (Siree): cancel-

Soviet Union’s dissolution, 40

lation of Fathi’s radio program, 127; as

Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney, 137

contestation/resistance to forces of terror,

Stone of Laughter, The (Barakat): disclosure

123; on demonstrations in dictatorial

of alterity of homosexuality, 139; Khalil’s

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Stone of Laughter, The (Barakat) (cont.)

31–36; revelation of effect of authoritar-

entrance into male arena, 140–41; Khalil’s

ian regimes, 11; The Silence and the Noise,

homosexuality, 131–32, 136–38; Khalil’s

123–29

identity crisis, 139–40; Khalil’s necrophilic attraction, 137; Khalil’s retreat into domestic sphere, 133–34, 135, 136, 139;

Tabaqat Al-Shu‘ra’ (Al-Jumahi), 19

Khalil’s view of his body, 139, 140–41;

Tamir, Zakaria, 94

Khalil’s view of women, 133–35; narrator

Taqassim ala wataren da’e‘ (Yared), 12

of, 133, 135; setting of, 133; Youssef’s

Tarabishi, George, 17, 32

masculinity, 138–39

Tareq Raouf (fict.), 60–61, 67–68

Story of Zahra, The (Al-Shaykh): Ahmad’s military service, 44–45; Hashem’s relationship with Zahra, 46–48; Majed’s

technology: to crush opposition, 96–97, 119; Kamal’s reliance on, 73; as replacement for women’s work, 178–79

marriage to Zahra, 48–49; Malek’s

television, 119, 126, 165, 171, 175

relationship with Zahra, 45–46; mosaic

testimony, 16

of masculinity in, 44–50; narrators of,

This Side of Innocence (Al-Da‘if): incar-

46–47, 48; political/social orientation

ceration of narrator, 105–10; narrator

of, 12; on shift ing power relations in

of, 104–6; narrator’s break with reality,

war, 49–50; Zahra’s childhood traumas,

110–11; narrator’s offense, 104–6; syn-

43–44; Zahra’s relationship with sniper,

chronic structure and spacial perspective

50–54; Zahra’s work with collectivity, 50

on reality, 106; use of experimentation to

Streep, Meryl, 161 subaltern masculinity, 75–76, 105–10 subordinate masculinity, 43 Subul, Taysir, 5–6

challenge constructions of state, 96; wife’s innocence, 110 Thousand and One Nights, A (anonymous), 162

Sulafa (fict. in Confessions of a Silencer), 103

Tistifil Meryl Stryp (Al-Da‘if), 157–68

Sulafa (fict. in Journey at Dusk), 31, 32, 33,

torture: of Abu Ahmad for bad copies of

34, 35

leader’s picture, 127; as badge of courage,

Suleiman, Nabil, 8

95, 101–2; Dr. Murad’s endurance vs.

Sunderman, Paula, 49n8

Yusuf’s breakdown under, 102; emascula-

surveillance: as detention, 98; effect on

tion of men through, 96, 102, 103, 107–9;

masculinity, 113; effect on university life,

of narrator in This Side of Innocence,

113, 114; as means to break resistance,

106–11; under patriarchal state, 94–95;

96; Naaman’s response to, 112, 113, 114,

physical/verbal aspects of, 107n8; reduc-

115, 116–17; of narrator in This Side of

tion of human material through, 107n10;

Innocence, 105; paranoia from in Syria,

use of family against victims, 108–11

124n12; under patriarchal state, 94–95

tradition: control over women and, 20, 31–32;

Syria, 124n12

justification of violence against women,

Syrian literature: as distinct from other

17, 20–21, 36, 38, 72–73; land as inextri-

Arab literatures, 10n10; Journey at Dusk,

cable from, 73; objectification of women,

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61; reduction of women to biological

95; Rachud’s fear of loss of, 165; Walid as

functions, 61, 72–73; subjugation of

symbol of, 60, 62, 64. See also manhood;

women, 3, 4, 9–10, 17, 23, 59, 73

masculinity

traditional masculinity: incompatible with modernity, 158; Majed’s freedom from, 48–49; Zahra’s submission to, 52–54 twice-defeated person/phenomenon, 97

Walid Masoud (fict.): as center of attraction in Baghdadi society, 62; Christian beliefs, 62; disappearance of, 59–60, 68; as freedom fighter, 59, 62, 63–64, 71;

ulama, 170

friend’s stories of, 79; idea of manhood,

ummah, 171, 181

64; imprisonment of, 64; intellectual

unemployment, 25–26

potency of, 61; nostalgia for past/home-

university life, 112, 113, 114–15, 117

land, 66–67; relationships with men,

univocal discourse: challenges to, 138; of

65–66, 67–68; relationships with women,

Iraqi state, 119; Khalil as contradiction to, 138; personal/sexual/social resistance to, 96, 97, 106, 112–13 ‘Usayran, Layla: ‘Asafir al-fajr, 13; Colored

59, 60–63, 64; response to Marwan’s desires, 65 Wannus, Saadalla, 9 war: Assi’s wife’s desire for peace vs., 39–40,

Ribbons, 12; focus of works of, 13; on her

41–42; aversion to as femininity, 120; as

struggle in national movement, 12; Jisr

biological necessity for men, 137; Chris-

al-hajar, 13; Qala‘at al-’Ustah, 13

tian involvement in, 88; confi nement of men in inner spaces during, 14; critique of in Scattered Crumbs, 121–22; domestic

violence: against children, 44, 102, 104; as

sphere as refuge from, 133–34, 135, 136,

compensation for loss of masculinity,

139; effect of 1967 defeat on pan-Arabism/

103–4, 111, 151; as compensation for

nationalism, 6–7; effect of Lebanese civil

political frustration, 36, 38–39, 43, 75–76;

war on women, 131, 132; effect on bodies/

Islamic extremists sanctioning of, 172; of

sexuality/gender identities, 9, 14; effect on

Luqman’s parents, 154; as means of exter-

daily lives, 122; effect on gender relations,

minating feminine in males, 93; of neopa-

6–9; effect on Lebanese literature, 11;

triarchal state, 94–95; patriarchal use of,

effects on masculinity/male identity, 2,

44, 120, 122; as reaction to incapacitation,

20–22, 45, 130–31, 132, 142; exaggerated

17, 19, 20–21, 111, 154; of war, 151

acts of machismo during, 151; freedom to

Violet (fict.), 71, 77

express alternate masculinities during,

virility: as desired male quality, 31; Fater’s fi x-

131–32, 133, 136–38; as initiation into

ation on, 34; flaunting of as compensation

manhood, 91–92; Iskandar’s view of, 87,

for political frustration, 76; of Israelis, 70;

88, 88–89; labeling people in oppositional

Khalil’s obsession with, 82; as major trait

terms during, 85; Luqman’s nostalgia for,

of great poetry, 19; Mazen’s male image

152–53, 154; male sense of control during,

bound in, 71; prison as proving ground of,

152–53; masculinities generated by, 2,

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war (cont.)

narratives, 22; patriarchal control of,

20–22, 130–31, 132, 133, 135, 138, 142,

30–31, 43, 44, 120, 159–60; in phallic city,

152–53, 154–55; men as major victims of,

43–54; politicalization of, 13–15; por-

14, 111; Naaman’s aversion to, 117–18; in

trayal of in In Search of Walid Masoud,

postwar 1967 era, 2; reasons for involve-

7; primordial masculinity’s control over,

ment in, 91, 91–92; rejection of passive

31–32; procurement of freedom in Arab

acceptance of, 112, 117–18; as sadistic act,

countries, 8–9, 157–58; representation of

152–53; shift ing power relations/patterns

in The Shadow and the Echo, 90–91; as

of domination in, 49–50; Zahra’s view of

representative of modernity, 174, 178–79;

effects of, 52, 53–54. See also Arab-Israeli

response to problems, 115; reversal of

war (1967); Civil War (Lebanon)

gender roles of Palestinians, 74; reversal

Warda (fict.), 122–23

of roles in postwar Lebanon, 153, 155;

war novels, 131. See also Scattered Crumbs

rights of under authoritarian state, 9; role

(Al-Ramli); Story of Zahra, The

in resistance movements, 56, 79; sexual

(Al-Shaykh)

harassment of, 47–48, 114; sexuality as

Western influence, 8–9, 161, 165

domain of female writers, 184; sexuality

wife of Dr. Murad (fict.), 99–100, 101

of as threat to masculinity, 161; in Shad-

wife of Naaman (fict.), 114

ows on the Window, 23; as source of revo-

wife of narrator of This Side of Innocence

lutionaries, 79; subjugation of, 3, 4, 9–10,

(fict.), 108, 109–10

17, 23, 59, 74; suffering under occupation,

Wild Thorns (Khlifah), 14–15, 95

69–70, 72–77, 75; as symbol of nation/

Williams, Raymond, 8n8

homeland, 6–7, 57–58, 59, 65, 66–67, 80,

Wissal (fict.), 64

134; as symbol of nurturance/stability,

woman (women): ability to move on, 77,

76, 109–10; taking refuge in domestic

78; attraction to Walid Masoud, 60; as

sphere, 110–11, 125; traditional view of,

author of war novel, 111; confinement to

158; use of sexuality for professional gain,

private sphere, 20, 62; effect of dictator-

114; viewed as equal to man, 128–29, 169;

ships on, 115; effect of Lebanese civil

violence against, 17, 20–21, 36, 38, 72–73,

war on, 131, 132; effects of manipula-

111, 120; writings of vs. men’s writings,

tion/torture on, 110; empowerment of

11–12. See also motherhood; specific

in postwar Lebanon, 8–9, 152, 157–58,

female character

163–65; entrance into public space, 160,

women at hanging (fict.), 151–52

161; fi nancial provision by, 74, 79, 80–81,

“Women in the Discourse of Crisis” (Abu-

114; impediments/prohibitions to, 100;

Zeid), 5

Khalil’s view of, 133–35; lack of options

working-class masculinity, 75–76

for, 72–73; as mentor to sheikh, 169; as

writing: as act of agency, 128; censorship and,

narrators of oedipal narratives, 22, 69,

182–83; as compensation for reality, 29;

72, 77; as national actors, 58, 79–80;

empowerment of disabled, isolated man,

nationalist discourse on, 57–58, 74, 76–77,

146; as form of resistance, 13, 97, 98, 118,

79–80; objectification of, 61; in oedipal

123–24; as means to reenter public life,

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183–84; as restorer of masculinity/power,

Zahra (fict., in Shadows on the Window), 26

118–19; as source of authority of one’s life,

Zahra (fict., in The Stone of Laughter), 134,

169, 173–74

137 Zahra (fict., in The Story of Zahra): childhood traumas of, 43–44; Hashem’s view of,

Yared, Nazek, 12

47; internalization of patriarchal values,

Ya Salam (Barakat). See How Wonderful

52–54; in male habitat, 12; marriage of,

(Barakat) Youssef (fict., in The Shadow and the Echo): attitude toward Iskandar, 85, 91–93; as heroic type of proletarian masculin-

48–49; nervous breakdown of, 48, 49; obsession with sniper, 50–53; relationship with Hashem, 47; relationship with Malek, 45–46; return from Africa, 49–50

ity, 87; reasons for involvement in war,

Zaki, Mona, 169, 176n10, 178–79

91–92; repression of homosexual desires,

Zalikha (pharaoh’s wife in Quran), 137

92–93; view of Christian involvement in

Zalman, Amy, 6n4

war, 88

Al-Zaman al-muwhesh (Haydar), 29n3, 56

Youssef (fict. in The Stone of Laughter), 137, 138 Yunis (fict.): in coma, 78; existence through

Zeidan, Joseph, 50, 51 Zeinab Hamdan “Zeina” (fict.): childhood of, 70; father’s response to pregnancy

stories of past feats, 79; Khalil’s identifica-

of, 69–70; Nahla’s pain revealed to, 74;

tion with, 78; Khalil’s veneration of, 81;

surprise at talk about Nahla, 72; view of

masculinity of, 80; as representative of

homeland, 70, 76; view of Saeed’s soft-

past heroism, 83–84; shooting of Adnan,

ness, 72–73

83; taking refuge in Christian village, 83; view of Nahila, 79, 80 Yusuf (fict.): compensation for emasculation, 103, 104; imprisonment/torture of, 102–3; murder of Ahmad, 104; resurrection of

Zilal ‘ala al-nafidha (Faraman). See Shadows on the Window (Faraman) Al-Zil wa-al-sada (Al-Ashqar). See Shadow and the Echo, The (Al-Ashqar) Zoubir, Yahyia, 182

step-father, 103–4; view of Dr. Murad,

Zuhdi (fict.), 14–15

101–2; view of self, 101, 102–3; voice of, 98

Zureik, Costantine, 64