Beirut, Imagining the City: Space and Place in Lebanese Literature by Ghenwa Hayek

Author:Ghenwa Hayek [Hayek, Ghenwa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, Middle Eastern, Middle East, History, General
ISBN: 9780857725325
Google: 5-eKDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 22929422
Publisher: I. B. Tauris
Published: 2014-10-29T06:36:40+00:00

Between Memory and History

In Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch introduces the concept of postmemory to describe a particular sort of memory, ‘distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection’.24 Hirsch elaborates further, saying that ‘postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated’.25 Hirsch herself is particularly interested in the children of Holocaust survivors and their relationship to photographs of that experience, but admits that the term ‘may usefully describe other second-generation memories of cultural or collective traumatic events and experiences’.26 I believe that Hirsch’s notion of postmemory is a useful and productive one for thinking about the position of the young generation of Lebanese writers that emerged in the decade after the civil war’s end. After all, they grew up in the shadow of the collective trauma of war and the narratives of human and urban loss that it engendered. Yet, as I have already pointed out, they are separated from personal memories of the city by ‘generational distance’; still, they are invested in the urban space by more than a sense of history: they are interested in it as a heavily symbolic space in their nation’s collective imaginary.

By far the most interesting thing about how Hirsch’s definition of postmemory relates to these second-generation novels is its relationship to acts of imaginative creation, such as fiction. For Hirsch, postmemory necessitates a creative intervention in history, since ‘its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation’.27 The relationship of Jaber’s and Najjar’s novels to the city of Beirut is constructed through an imaginative act that lies between history and personal memory, which blurs the relationships between fiction and history.

In Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel, Elizabeth Wesseling argues that one of the focal ways in which the modernist and post-modernist historical novel differs from classical historical fiction is in the former’s disruption of traditional narrative patterns through the inclusion of ‘an additional narrative level, situated between the represented past and the primary narrator’.28 This produces what Wesseling describes as a ‘self-reflexive’ attitude towards the writing of history, in which a mediating figure – in this case, a young writer – is placed between the events and their narrator. Moreover, this young writer figure often expresses an anxiety about, and unease with, the practice of history.29 As a result, the transmission of historical memory is placed in a mise-en-abîme that allows the narrative to expose the multiple layers of knowledge that undergird history. Each of the novels in this chapter complicates the relationship between historical narrative and fiction by exposing the tenuous divide between historical and fictional narrative, what Wesseling describes as the ‘borderland between fiction and historiography’.30 To varying degrees, Najjar and Jaber ‘make the production

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