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ABSTRACT
In the early 1970s, Syrian-born author, Ghada al-Samman authored two essays on the supernatural based, in part, on her experiences in Beirut. These essays mark the beginning of what I identify as her sustained literary interest in the supernatural. While al-Samman’s political investments as a feminist and leftist writer have been the primary lenses through which critics have considered her work, this essay recenters her literary contributions. Focusing on her Lebanese civil war trilogy, I explore how she constructs and sustains a supernatural literary sensibility over the course of several decades, amalgamating Arabo-Islamic cosmologies, Euro-American psychoanalytic notions, and Shakespearean aesthetics. The result, I argue, is a supernatural hermeneutic which highlights the irreparable damage of both pre-war and wartime environs to the individual soul and the body politic.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Evyn Kropf, Librarian for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan, for her invaluable assistance locating a key source for this manuscript and to Nancy N. Roberts for our conversations on her translations.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 These volumes, as yet untranslated, consist of collected and previously unpublished essays throughout the author’s career.
2 Al-Samman, “Magic,” 110.
3 Al-Samman, “Magic,” 110–111.
4 Al-Samman, “Magic,” 104.
5 As a master’s student at the American University of Beirut in the 1950s she studied English literature and the theatre of the absurd, a genre associated with interwar European playwrights Samuel Beckett and Marcel Proust, among others. The sixth volume of her previously unpublished essays in the collection al-Amal Ghayr al-Kamila: Muwatina Mutalabbisa bi-l-Qiraʾa (1979; Compatriot Caught Reading Red-Handed) consists largely of literary analyses of Euro-American authors such as Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Anton Chekhov and Samuel Beckett, among others.
6 See cooke, War’s Other Voices; Badran and cooke, Opening the Gates; and, Accad, Sexuality and War.
7 Ashour et al, Arab Women Writers.
8 Khayyat, “Memory Remains.”
9 Kassab, “The Paramount Reality of the Beirutis.”
10 Jensen, “Ghada Samman’s ‘Beirut ‘75’”; Vinson, “Ghada Samman.”
11 Vinson “Ghada Samman”; Suyoufie, “Magical Realism.”.
12 Hanna, Feminism and Avant-Garde Aesthetics in the Levantine Novel. Zeina Halabi’s Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile and the Nation offers a useful primer of the failure and critique of these ideologies in parts of the Middle East in Arabic literature and cultural discourse during the final decades of the twentieth century.
13 See Awwad, Arab Causes in the Fiction of Ghada al-Samman; Roberts, Beirut 75 (Introduction); Manganaro, “Review: Beirut 75”; Sbaiti, “Ghada Samman’s Beirut Nightmares”; Schlote, “Street lives, roof lives.”
14 A review of foundational medieval and early modern non-realist fiction is beyond the scope of this piece, but interested readers might turn to Hanadi al-Samman’s chapter, “Diasporic Haunting,” as a starting point (104–106).
15 By way of example, many of the contributors to Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris’s major edited collection Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community understand magical realism and related speculative genres to be inherently post-colonial. See, for instance, Stephen Slemon’s essay: “Magic Realism as Post-colonial Discourse.”
16 See al-Masri, “An enchanted ring” and Sellman, Arabic Exile Literature. In “Writing the Dismembered Nation,” Haytham Bahoora considers the function of the fantastic through the specific lens of “post-colonial gothic” storytelling modes which convey the “aesthetic of horror” and “unspeakable violence” which form the backdrop to contemporary Iraqi fiction. He even suggests the value of a future comparison of Iraqi and Lebanese post-colonial sectarian strife as a cauldron for this mode of storytelling.
17 Suyoufie, “Magical Realism.” Hanna’s Feminism and Avant-Garde Aesthetics makes a case for understanding this novel as rendering the war trilogy a tetralogy based, in part, on the continuity of a primary character from Laylat al-Milyar; its chronology (set in post-war Beirut); and, its continued investment in what Hanna identifies as a “unique existentialist perspective on the human condition, women’s in particular, during times of national crisis” (39).
18 See also Litvin, Hamlet’s Arab Journey for a discussion of the trope of Hamlet in mid- to late-twentieth century Arab nationalist discourse and literatures.
19 لماذا ينتحبن هكذا؟ تواني ذاهباً إلى موتي وعرافات القدر يشيعنني ويبكينني؟ (Al-Samman, Bayrut 75, 7).
20 مجرد أفواه منفتحة داخل جمجمة لا يكسوها لحم ولا جلد (Al-Samman, Bayrut 75, 7).
21 في قاع الظلمة … مضيئة و بر اقة مثل محبو هرات ساحرة (Al-Samman, Bayrut 75, 15).
22 George Nicholas El-Hage writes of al-Samman’s novel: “Beirut is portrayed as a cruel, heartless, inhospitable and damp place, stripped of all of its positive qualities. […] In this novel, Beirut’s psychological and spiritual climate rather parallels the surrealistic and existential climate that permeates Camus’ The Stranger” (np). Indeed, this dark rendering of Beirut is a common feature of much mid- and late-20th century literature. Evelyne Accad and miriam cooke have also argued that male authors in particular anthropomorphize the city as a cannibalizing (female) siren/temptress/whore to men who seek only a better life. Ghenwa Hayek’s study of the representation and function of the city in modern Lebanese literature reaches past these essentializations to identify a deeper anxiety about Beirut at the heart of these texts. As literary output followed migration patterns from Mount Lebanon and other rural areas once imagined as the heartland of Lebanon, to Beirut and settles in, the rapid “modernization and growing urbanization [as well as] war and then reconstruction,” disorients and alienates the characters who make their homes in the city (Hayek, 4). In her recent monograph, War Remains, Yasmine Khayyat describes Beirut as “a new cipher for Arab tragedy” in the literature from across the Arab world once the wars began (35).
23 Al-Samman appears to have drawn inspiration from the labor strikes of fishermen in southern Lebanon in the early 1970s for the story of one of her characters in the novella: a fisherman who organizes with his peers to write a letter condemning the monopolization of the trade by state-backed elites. Fishermen in the southern city of Sidon went on strike to protest the state’s attempt to monopolize fishing on Lebanon’s coast. Led by President Camille Chamoun with the support of the largely Maronite National Liberal Party, many saw the economic move as another example of sectarian political corruption at the expense of the poor and working classes, and part of a broader power struggle between Lebanon’s politicized ethnoreligious groups. In February 1975, striking fishermen protested with support from PLO leadership and sympathizers. These protests culminated in a violent government repression and acts of violence, including the killing of the mayor of Sidon. The plight of the fishermen—and the working-class more broadly—plays prominently in al-Samman’s Bayrut 75, penned in 1974 as the protests were beginning to ramp up.
24 See Johnson, All Honourable Men for an anthropological example of the rural codes of honor which al-Samman references in her novella.
25 Al-Samman, Beirut 75, 16.
26 Al-Samman, Bayrut 75, 17.
27 Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon; Asad, “Appendix III”; and El-Zein, Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn are excellent sources on this matter. Unfortunately, in the English translation, the connection between a supernatural notion of possession and madness is lost; the English retains only the pathological connotation: “others thought … he was obsessed with delusions” (20).
28 Roberts’ translation of al-rūḥ renders “soul” into “spirit”: Al-Samman, Beirut 75, 101.
29 Pandolfo, Knot of the Soul, 8.
30 See Tsacoyianis, Disturbing Spirits, for more on contemporary practices of folk-magic in the Levant—what Tsacoyianis calls “vernacular healing modalities.”
31 Al-Samman’s fiction has strong pan-Arab leanings and empathy for the Palestinian cause. Her works often feature characters or narrators who are outspoken against those who have turned their back on either cause. Awwad notes that this affinity was not an uncritical ideological embrace so much as her recognition that the cause of any downtrodden and marginalized peoples, including women, is fundamental to any political revolution.
32 Al-Samman, Bayrut 75, 38–39.
33 Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory.
34 Caruth, 4.
35 Al-Samman, The Night of the First Billion, 324. I have quoted Roberts’s translation here.
36 Al-Samman, Laylat al-Milyar, 251. The original Arabic reads: لكنه تنثال مشي غابات من الحرائق و العذابات و الاهوال … ومر بسىع طبقات للجحيم، ولعله ما زال …
37 Al-Samman, The Night of the First Billion, 286. I have quoted Robert’s translation here.
38 See Hartman, “Zahra’s Uncle,” for a discussion of how this nuanced masculinist reading of Zahra gets lost in the English translation, reducing the character of Uncle Hashem to the stereotype of a hyper-sexual, aggressive Arab man.
39 Rebeiz, Gendering Civil War, 163.
40 In the context of al-Samman’s writing, Suyoufie describes al-Qamar al-Murabbaʿ as an act of ventriloquy in which al-Samman, herself a medium of sorts, makes use of a specific form of magical realism “shaped by post-colonial discourse … [which privileges] the marginalized (the dead, ghosts, immigrants, and women)” and textually subverts oppressive discourses and systems (Suyoufie, “Magical Realism,” 184). Al-Samman’s fantastic in this volume is thus a vehicle for critiquing social and political conditions in the Arab world and its diasporas. Citing Brenda Cooper, Hanadi al-Samman draws on Homi Bhabha’s notion of the sociolinguistic “third space” to understand the haunted and hybrid position of the diasporans who return to a dystopic, post-war Beirut in Sahra Tanakkuriyya. Extending the post-colonial interpretative apparatus which Suyoufie and al-Samman identify in specific texts, Bahriya may be seen as holding up, then shattering, a mirror to a diasporic community that has wrongfully imagined itself as divorced from the homeland and its problems.
41 Zamora and Faris, Magical Realism, 171.
42 Asad, “Appendix III: On the term and concept of jinn,” np.