Being a safe haven for Arab intellectuals, with the outbreak of Civil War in Lebanon, Beirut became a recurrent, if not most central motif in the Lebanese War Novel. Therefore, see for more on the city also the category 1975 – 1988 Lebanese Civil War.
- Rabih Alameddin – I, the Divine (2001) and An Unnecessary Woman (2013).
Written in English, I, the Divine narrates the life story of the Lebanese American artist Sarah Nour el-Din. The novel is made up completely of first chapters, as Sarah suffers from writer’s block, and describes her exile to the United States during the Lebanese Civil War, and her relationship with identity, her family, and the city of Beirut. Sarah furthermore has a talent for controlling the football, but her parents and teacher disallowed her to play the game (also in O: Occupations, Professions and Hobbies: Sports) (reference).
Protagonist of An Unnecessary Woman is the 72-year-old Aaliya Saleh, who, from her solitary apartment, has dedicated her life to literature. She reads inexhaustibly and translates novels into Arabic from existing French and English translations (reference). The novel reflects Aaliya’s life story, one in which she couldn’t fulfil her full potential due to a lack of choices and possibilities, and the war ravaging Beirut, which is an essential part of her identity (also in O: Occupations, Professions and Hobbies: Translation).
- Beirut Noir, edited by Iman Humaydan, is a collection of short stories set in different parts of Beirut, each reflecting on a city that was violently reshaped by the civil conflict. Many of its characters are the ‘left behind’, after fellow countrymen have fled for the Lebanese countryside or other countries (reference). Its contributors include but are not limited to, Tarek Abi Samra, Zena el Khalil, Hala Kawtharani, Abbas Beydoun, and Marie Tawk. The collection is part of Akashic Books’ Noir Series that reflects on different cities of the world such as Baghdad (see above in Iraq), Tehran, and Marrakech (see below in Morocco).
- Tawfīq Yūsuf ʿAwwād (1911 – 1989, Lebanon) – Ṭawāḥīn Bayrūt (1972, English trans., Death in Beirut, 1984). When Tamīmah, a southern Lebanese Shiite girl, visits her law-studying brother in Beirut, she ends up meeting Hānī, a Maronite Christian activist. They become lovers, and after she enrols in the university in Beirut she herself becomes an active member of the student political movement (reference). Having both moved from the rural countryside to the city, their story reflects on the different dimensions of the political and social changes in Lebanon, specifically in cosmopolitan Beirut, as well as on how regional developments influenced the student movement in the years just before the start if the Civil War in 1975 (also in L: Love Lust, and Relationships: Inter-religious and ethnic (romantic) relationships: Between Muslims and Christians and 1968 Student Revolution in Lebanon).
- Ḥalīm Barakāt (1952-, Lebanon) – ʿAwdat al-Ṭāʾir ilā al-Baḥr (1969, English trans. Days of Dust, 1990). This novel depicts the speed with which the 1967 defeat overwhelmed the Arab-majority world through the story of Ramzī, a teacher in Beirut, showing the false news accounts of victories, the napalming of civilians on the West Bank as they fled towards Jordan, the resignation of Nasser, and the student riots that demanded he remained (reference). It portrays Beirut “as a complex space that simultaneously liberates its free-spirited intellectuals and reaffirms their despair facing the gravity of political and military defeat” (reference). Barakāt alludes in the opening and closing of his novel to the Genesis story of the six days of the creation of the earth and uses biblical vocabulary such as al-takwīn (Genesis) and al-jalad (the firmament) (also in R: Religion and Sectarianism: Christians and Christianity and 1967 al-Naksah: Lebanon).
- Ḥassan Dāwūd (1950-, Lebanon) – Bināyat Mātīld (1982, English trans. The House of Mathilde, 1999). This novel, functioning as an archive of Beirut, portrays an apartment building named after Mātīld, an Armenian lady living in it, in which Muslims, Christians, French, Russians, and Arabs live together without conflict, while they see the city disintegrate in the Civil War around them. The novel describes their daily life, including births, marriages, and deaths, as the war on the outside at times creeps into its building walls.
- Fawzī Dhubyān (?, Lebanon) – Ūrwīl fī al-Ḍāḥiyah al-Junūbiya (‘Orwell in the southern neighbourhoods’, 2017). After Hezbollah takes control over water in a neighborhood in Southern Beirut, Ḥammūdī is forced out of his door-to-door water selling business. He starts to sell water pipes (shisha’s) for a company instead and through describing his contacts with colleagues and clients the novel describes the political, social, and religious activities in the neighborhood. It also depicts the life of the marginalized workers in the neighborhood while referencing George Orwell’s 1984 (reference) (also in 1975 – 1988: Lebanese Civil War: 1982 Hezbollah).
- Ghādah al-Sammān (1942-, Syria) – Kawābīs Bayrūt (1976, English trans. Beirut Nightmares, 1997), is a daily journal of an unnamed protagonist who finds herself trapped for two weeks in her apartment building behind the burning Holiday Inn hotel during the war (reference). As the bombing escalates, she is forced to move in with her up-scale downstairs neighbors, a mother and her son, with whom she competes for the remaining resources. Another central element is the next-door pet-shop where, abandoned by their owner, the animals start eating each other. The narrator chronicles her nightmarish existence to fight fear and insanity during her time of confinement. Despite her harrowing experiences, she ultimately survives her ordeal and is hopeful about what the future holds for her as a budding author (also in 1975 – 1988 Lebanese Civil War) (reference).
- Hilāl Shūmān (1982-, Lebanon) – Līmbū Bayrūt (2016, English trans. Limbo Beirut, 2016). For the largest part, this novel is set in 2008 when Hezbollah and Sunni fighters clashed in the streets of Beirut. The novel reveals five interlinked stories from different characters: a gay artist, a struggling novelist, a pregnant woman, a disabled engineer student, a former militia member, and a medical intern. Each of them has a unique and complex relationship with the city that has been tormented by the fifteen-year long Civil War. The novel integrates illustrations from different cotemporary Lebanese artists that accompany each one of the stories (also in 2008 clashes in Lebanon).
Refrences:
In order of appearance
- Yousef Awad. 2016. “Football in Arabic literature in diaspora: Global influences and local manifestations.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 51(8): 1005-21, p. 1009
- Natasha Lvovich. 2021. “Translator and Translated Twice Removed: Multilingual Selfhood in Rabih Alameddine’s ‘An Unnecessary Women’.” CounterText 7(2): 251-262, p. 251
- Marcia Lynx-Qualey. 2015. “Book review ‘Beirut Noir’: Chronicling life in the corrupt city.” www.qantara.de 4 December 2015 www.qantara.de/en/article/book-review-%E2%80%B3beirut-noir%E2%80%B3-chronicling-life-corrupt-city (last accessed 7 March 2021)
- EAL, p. 115
- Roger Allen. 1992. “The Mature Arabic Novel Outside Egypt.” In Modern Arabic Literature. eds. Muhammad Mustafa Badawi. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 193-223, p. 201
- Zeina G. Halabi. 2013. “The Unbearable Heaviness of Being: Suicide of the Intellectual in Rabīʿ Jābir’s Rālf Rizqallāh through the Looking Glass.” JAL 44, pp. 53-82
- Maḥmūd Ḥusnī. 2017. “‘Ūrwīl fī al-Ḍāḥiyah al-Junūbiya’… Siyāq Tajrībī li-Ṣakhab Idiyūlūjī.” www.rommanmag.com, 11 May 2017 https://rommanmag.com/view/posts/postDetails?id=3764 (last accessed 30 November 2021)
- Yasmine Khayyat. 2016. “Memory Remains: Haunted by home in Lebanese (Post) war Fiction.” JAL 47: 43-61
- Nadine Sinno. 2015. “Milk and Honey, Tabbūleh, and Coke: Orientalist, Local and Global Discourses in Alexandra Chreiteh’s Dāyman Coca- Cola.” p. 123