ABSTRACT
In her article ‘Mapping Peace’, Miriam Cooke claims that ‘women have a stake
in interpreting their war experiences’ and that she, as literary critic, ‘ha[s] a
stake in making sense of these interpretations . . . in a world grown tolerant of violence, we must understand how its assumptions shape our lives’.2 Mindful of
the difficulty in maintaining traditional social norms, Cooke argues that ‘dif-
ferences of perspective and in socio-political roles that are acceptable in
normal times become intolerable in war time’.3 Writing during war time is, to
Cooke, an experience that is part of war itself, an experience that informs
the socio-political roles that precede it. Here I want to look at Hanan Al-
Shaykh’s novels The Story of Zahra and Beirut Blues and Mai Ghoussoub’s Leaving
Beirut: Women and the Wars Within as instances of Lebanese women’s war lit-
erature where the ‘intolerable’ is written. I would also like to briefly intro-
duce the broad concerns of Arab women’s war literature and the critical
context that has come to surround these works. How women experience their
political and gendered roles as they understand, negotiate and represent war is
of particular interest to me. I also ask whether it is possible to determine the
extent to which writers participate in the construction of a new history and
how they articulate ambivalence towards their role in it. I argue that although
much existing criticism of this war literature views writing as the authoritative
tool against the violence of war, in other words, as passive resistance, and
though I do not want to discount this view, it is also crucial to attempt to
understand the stories that are being told as ones that reveal monstrosity, hatred
and the unexpected – in other words, stories that attempt to write the transfor-
mation that war brings. Events are fictionalised and documented in such a way
that they acquire an active role in this negotiation of the consequences of war,
and are not just observations, but emerge as critical manifestations of intolerable
situations. The texts examined incorporate both writing as resistance and writing
of methods of resistance that themselves end up questioning hitherto acknowl-
edged (though not necessarily accepted) gender-specific rules. In other words,
though writing about the condition of war may be viewed as an act of resistance
in itself by many critics, and indeed many authors, the events we encounter are
more intricate and momentous than this, revealing frustration, loathing, violence
and even exhilaration. When I read certain novels by Lebanese women authors,
it does not occur to me that the writers are participating in an identifiable
resistance to the war (which is not to say that they cannot be recuperated as
doing so by critics). Rather, I see a fictionalisation, and in many ways an
embodiment of a struggle with the norms of gender uncovered through the cir-
cumstances of war.
