Michelle Hartman's Native Tongue, Stranger Talk is, as she writes, “[t]he first full-length study of French-language writing from Lebanon in English” (p. xi). For historical reasons, Lebanon has never fit easily within Francophone paradigms. The French colonial presence in the Levant was short lived by comparison to North Africa and the Caribbean, and the literature written in French by Lebanese authors was predominantly the work of Maronites, a community with long historical ties to the metropole. For most French readers, this literature is at best an exotic oddity; for many Arab critics, it is politically suspect. Hartman's ambitious counterargument is that French-language writing from Lebanon is, in fact, “[a] vibrant literary tradition that questions and challenges the colonial language imposed on Lebanon through experimentation” (p. 312).

Native Tongue, Stranger Talk is not a synoptic account of this literary tradition, nor does it pretend to be. Hartman focuses on the work of female novelists, and further narrows her interest to representations of Arabic words within these fictions—a curious restriction, given the lack of previous work on this corpus in English. By studying such matters, Hartman wants to show how the texts “create new literary languages within and through multiple layerings of Arabics and Frenches” (p. 7), as well as how they mount a “challenge to colonial knowledge production” (p. 60)—a pair of aims that yokes anticolonial politics to the methodologies of world literature. The book consists of historical surveys and literary case studies drawn from three periods of modern Lebanese history: the Mandate and early independence era, the civil conflict (1975–1990), and the post-war period. (The 1960s is a somewhat puzzling lacuna.)

Hartman's study is valuable for many reasons. It introduces several little-known but intriguing novelists to English-language readers, and it supplies helpful historical contexts for their work. The analyses of each writer, which pay close attention to rhetorical form, gender politics, and audience, are thoroughly informed by secondary literature in French and Arabic. In each of her historical précises, Hartman reviews the history and institutions of Francophone education in Lebanon, as well as French-language publishing in Beirut—a milieu that has not been so well studied as its Arabic counterpart. Hartman's seminal work on the writings of midcentury Maronite intellectuals, particularly those of Michel Chiha, helps her to elucidate the political nuances of the texts she examines. This is especially true of her chapter on Evelyn Accad's Coquelicot du massacre (A Poppy from the Massacre [Paris: L’harmattan, 1988]), a rather pedantic fiction published during the last years of the civil war, which denounces Lebanese factionalism and patriarchy. Hartman shows that despite Accad's explicitly antisectarian and feminist agenda, her work relies on a rhetoric of nostalgia, “tolerance,” and Phoenician imagery that echo powerfully exclusivist strands of Lebanese Christian mythography.

Hartman's anticolonial framework is put under a certain stress by her opening chapters, which take up the work of novelists writing under the French mandate. Amy Kher's Salma et son village (Salma and Her Village [Beirut: Mondiale, 1933]) is a tale of star-crossed lovers—a poor girl and a notable's son—set in a mountain village of northern Lebanon. The following chapter examines Eveline Bustros's Sous la baguette du coudrier (Under the Diving Rod [Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1958]), a story of marital infidelity and honor killing, also set in a Christian village (the novel was written in the 1940s, but not published until 1958). Hartman reads both novels, persuasively, as what she terms “ethnographic” fictions. The authors offer to French-language readers, inside and outside Lebanon, an intimate view of “Oriental” Christian communities, including their colorful and backward customs. Each novel is, in its own way, a critique of how patriarchy and religious orthodoxy conspire to keep coreligionists in a state of benightedness—a central trope of Maronite intellectual discourse since the 19th century. Indeed, the novels of Kher and Bustros are late additions to the genre of what we might call Enlightenment melodrama, a kind of fiction that flatters the sensibilities of metropolitan readers and confirms the outlook of local elites.

But Hartman argues that matters are not so clear-cut. She suggests that Kher and Bustros, like the other authors in her study, are engaged in “the production of alternative knowledge” and “the disruption of colonial ethnographies,” (p. 60) aims that can be discerned by examining how each novelist handles representations of the Arabic language. Hartman shows how Kher and Bustros use translated proverbs, footnotes, altered typefaces, and relexification (“the use of unidiomatic language to render an idea from one language to another”) to generate what she calls “gendered interference”: a hiccup in the French that underlines the political—in particular, the feminist—messages of the authors. But it is not clear that paying attention to such matters tells us any more about these ideological aims than a less specialized reading would, nor it is clear that the novels finally repay the close attention Hartman gives them. When approaching genre fiction, a strategy of distant reading is often more illuminating than philology.

One also feels that Hartman may be exaggerating the disruptions and production of alternatives that happen in these texts. There is no evidence to suggest that Kher or Bustros was interested in the project of writing back to colonial power that Hartman ascribes to them (p. 54). She spends several pages analyzing Bustros’ repeated use of the Arabic idiom “taqburni” (“may you bury me”; Hartman transliterates the village pronunciation) an affectionate expression used by parents to their children that acquires an ironic cast in this story, in which a son is pressured to murder his mother to avenge the family honor. Hartman argues that the idiom, which Bustros translates into unidiomatic French (“puisse-tu m’ensevelir”), is meant to draw our attention to archaic customs that harm women. This may be true, but it also seems important to note that these brutal customs are coded—via relexification—as specifically “Arab.” This is hardly surprising given the intellectual climate of these fictions, but it makes it hard to read them as anticolonial novels in the way Hartman proposes.

A larger problem is that none of the novels really show the sort of linguistic experimentation that Hartman claims for them. While she promises to study how Arabic and French “interanimate” each other in these texts, it is questionable whether any of the authors truly engage with Arabic as a literary resource (and in any case, for these novels, the animation is all in one direction). In the second section of her book, Hartman analyzes Vénus Khoury-Ghata's Le fils empaillé (The Son Stuffed with Straw [Paris: Belfond, 1980]), another story of abusive patriarchy, which proposes the existence of “Frabanais,” a hybrid dialect of French and the Lebanese vernacular used by the children of the novel (and outlawed by the father). But this dialect is more notional than actual. It consists mostly of commonplaces and does not have much impact on Khoury-Ghata's own prose, which, as Hartman notes, is “standard, literary French” (p. 158). In other novels, such as Dominique Eddé's Cerf-Volant (Kite [Paris: Arpenteur/Gallimard, 2003]), Arabic is figured as a medium for political solidarity—Eddé's novel is the most politically adventurous of all the fictions—but here again, Arabic exists mostly in the abstract and hardly abrades the surface of the French. Indeed, what is more remarkable about these fictions than their experimentation is their stylistic conservatism. And rather than “interanimation,” one is struck by the relative isolation of this Francophone literary community from the wider Arabic one. All this might have been more obvious if Hartman had compared her chosen works to other French-language authors—in the Maghrib or French Caribbean—who have wrestled more intensively with similar political and linguistic issues (in a work that aspires to read texts through the lens of world literature, is it surprising how reluctant Hartman is to stray from a national framework).

In an interview published in 1993, the (Arabic-language) novelist Elias Khoury claimed, “The Francophone phenomenon in Lebanon is finished … There is no longer the colonial influence to sustain it. Lebanon as a producer of Francophone culture is no more.” This is not literally true, of course, and Hartman mounts a spirited defense of the tradition and its contemporary practitioners. Her efforts to link them up with the wider republic of letters should better their chances of survival.