MODERNITY AS A CULTURAL THREAT

In some novels written by Lebanese writers, modernity is generally associated with change and betrayal of one's culture. In such works, women figure as bearers of traditional values and home is the sphere in which identity is protected and continuity with the past is reassured. In Layla Baalbaki's Ana ahya,¹⁹

the character Bahaa accuses Lena, a young woman who is attracted to him, of making a point of trapping men and of deforming “our Eastern woman to look like a distorted Western woman.”²⁰ Convinced that he possesses the truth, he insists that Lena should subscribe to it without any question. As far as he is concerned, Lena, like any other woman, is no more than a mnemonic image in which modern man preserves the past to be able to cope with the disorienting problems generated by modernity. Lena sees herself as fluctuating between two cultures: “I am not French…and my countenance in the mirror is witness of my descent from the early man that lived along our coasts thousands of years ago…even though I am neither fair nor dark, I am from here. I am not French. Not French.”²¹ Lena voices her protest and indignation and feels angry and frustrated that her desire for freedom and independence should associate her with Western values. She resents the way Arab men accept a Western woman's behavior but do not tolerate it when it comes to Arab women. Referring to a foreign woman whom she spots in a café, Lena notes that the “woman lit her cigarette, and not a sign of surprise or defiance appeared on the face of any man. She is a foreigner and not one of our Eastern women who are imprisoned within the man's fold.”²²

The West is seen as menacing and threatening to one's identity, history, and traditions. For instance, the protagonist of Suhail Idriss's al-Hayy al-latini²³

travels to France to pursue his education. The novel traces his life in Paris, his interaction with French women, his acculturation and assimilation of Western ideas, and his return to his country with the “right” tools to deal with the world around him and to effect social and political change. When the protagonist tells his mother, in the early 1950s, of his decision to marry a French woman, the latter sees it as a scandal and disgrace because this is a girl that he “picked up in the street, a girl who works in a store. A Christian not of his religion…what a scandal and disgrace has fallen upon our house, our family that has lived long in sheltered restraint, virtue, integrity and piety.”²⁴ The French woman is seen as a threat to the Arab man's values; she is a source of corruption, evil, and immorality. If her son needs to study in a more technologically advanced country, he must retain his moral and religious purity and avoid contamination and defilement.²⁵ Referring to the protagonist's mother, Issa Boullata asserts that she “used all the force of cultural pressures on him by invoking the honor and reputation of the family and referring to the gossip that would arise if he married a non-virgin who had been the fiancée of another, a Christian woman… She referred to the scandal that would tarnish his father's memory.”²⁶ She persuades him to marry a woman from his own country and religion, someone who cannot be seen in the streets and who protects her honor by remaining within the private sphere, the domain where timeless emotions and traditions hold sway. His mother makes concessions to Western education and technology as long as it is “stripped of all cultural implications.”²⁷ As Louay Safi puts it, “Europe presented, at once, a source of inspiration and a model to be emulated and followed, on the one hand, and a source of threat and a foe to be feared and confronted on the other.”²⁸

Modernity in this well-made novel is clearly identified with masculinity, where the male protagonist has access to public spaces and foreign countries, while the woman's space remains limited. The protagonist and his friend Fouad remain optimistic, despite national and political problems looming on the horizon, because they believe they understand the world they live in and have the right solutions for them. Accordingly, the protagonist abandons his French girlfriend, and Fouad insists that he wants his “wife to be a real life companion,”²⁹

an Arab who understands the situation deeply enough to be able to assist her husband in his nationalistic and political struggle.³⁰ The novel is intimately concerned with epistemological questions, and the characters have confidence in their ability to draw moral judgments and to find solutions to complex and manifestly irresolvable problems. Referring to the pre-war Lebanese novel, Yumna al-עId asserts that it is a “reflector and advocate of social change,”³¹ where the “hero” possesses “a clear perspective and is on the side of good against evil, truth against non-truth…. [he] is a model, and he represents the conscience of the people he addresses.”³² The Latin Quarter is a work that reveals man's ability to understand the world and presents characters that possess a fixed core of identity and a stable center.

If the West is a model to be emulated, it is also a menace that threatens to eradicate one's culture and reduce one to a state of submission and dependence. Elias Khoury's war novel entitled Rihlat Gandhi al-saghir³³

reveals the apocalyptic effect of the Lebanese civil war on people who belong generally to the lower classes. In the novel, the Lebanese Christian Right Wing Phalange party, Israel, the Western churches, and the Americans are major targets of attack because they are seen by the narrator as strongly associated with the Western cultural assault. In the chaos generated by the civil war, several characters develop hostile attitudes toward Americans and insist on seeing them or anyone associated with them in a suspicious light. For instance, the narrator is critical of the Protestant minister who “believed that America was the heart of civilization and progress and freedom.”³⁴ Similarly, another character, Nuha, refers to a young man from America as “a spy… They're all spies.”³⁵ Indeed, as Abu-Deeb puts it, the ḥadāthi project, represented by the educated narrator, consisted of “resistance to imperialism and Western hegemony.”³⁶ Although converted to Protestantism, the reverend, in the narrator's view, remains a Greek Orthodox at heart. Similarly, his wife, who went along with him, kept “a box of Byzantine icons,” and “insisted on christening her children in the baptismal font at the monastery of Saint Elias Btina in Beirut.”³⁷ The narrator sees Protestant sects as intruders and asserts that those, like the minister, who converted to Protestantism did that for purely economic rather than ideological reasons. As a matter of fact, the pastor tells his wife that if his father “hadn't become a Protestant he'd have died of starvation during World War I” and if it “hadn't been for my job at the American school I'd never have been able to send my kids to school. And if it hadn't been for this new Christian denomination, we'd have died of hunger, like dogs.”³⁸ Toward the end of his life, the reverend “started wetting his pants and speaking nonsense.” He would go to the Greek Orthodox Church, “stand in front of an icon of the Virgin, make the sign of the cross, and bow down so low his forehead touched the ground.”³⁹ The narrator reduces the pastor and the American professor to one or two traits and sees them as representatives of a hegemonic power that will erase his own culture and reduce him to slavery and imitation.⁴⁰

Similarly, the West is seen as a cultural and political threat in Khoury's al-Jabal al- saghir.⁴¹

The novel reflects a confused and muddled war reality that can be seen in the language and the techniques that are used. Khoury favors a narrative that does not follow a logical sequential pattern but rather progresses by digression or circular repetition. As Evelyne Accad puts it, the narrative is “disconnected and absurd, expressing a hopelessness and meaninglessness spreading to the rest of the world through phrases, sentences, descriptions that recur with the monotony of despair.”⁴² In the midst of chaos and violence, the French priest tells the Lebanese militia man that he came to rescue “the land of Lamartine” from “serfdom.”⁴³ To do that, it was necessary to capture people's hearts and minds “not by the sword but through culture. If they studied in our schools, they'd learn our language, would strengthen their economic ties with us and learn about civilization.”⁴⁴ In the narrator's opinion, the priest has covered up his real imperialistic project under the philanthropic guise of a “pedagogic mission,”⁴⁵ which consists of spreading Western culture and “civilization” through education and the French language. The narrator responds to the French Catholic priest's assertion by telling him: “But father, you didn't introduce civilization to our countries. You're just colonizers, coming in with the Ten Commandments. Giving us the Commandments and taking the land.”⁴⁶ Because formal education is an important site of identity construction and validation of cultural norms, the narrator feels threatened by the cultural assault—which has penetrated a wide range of institutions and sociocultural realms such as schools and other institutions.

In the novel, the narrator perceives modernity as an extension of foreign domination and alien cultural hegemony, and as a major cause of the ensuing sectarian feuds and divisions culminating in a vicious civil war. The text suggests that this is a form of education provided by the West that eventually benefited a small elite (those who studied in French and other foreign schools), to the detriment of the majority of the population, which retained its indigenous values. As a result, rifts and divisions were created within Lebanese society revealing the baneful effect of such civilizing missions. As Said puts it, “Elias Khoury's lone, rather pathetic French priest symbolizes a larger absence, and the degradation of what has been a powerful engagement with the West.”⁴⁷

In the inferno of a violent war, partially caused by cultural and economic rifts precipitated by a Western pedagogic project, the French priest loses his influence and is relegated to a corner.

If Lebanese writers regard a foreign language as a means of interaction and communication, they also perceive it as a threat to one's identity and the authentic way of living. The protagonist of Idriss' The Latin Quarter who studies in Paris sees the need to learn the French language because French writers can be sources of inspiration to Arab writers who still lag behind. In his opinion, Arab writers should learn from French writers who have the courage to tackle any issue no matter how provocative: “Are not our writers lacking in this area? Don't they avoid raising in their writings problems that affect our lives for fear of the reaction of the supporters of tradition.”⁴⁸

Contrary to this confidence in Western culture, the protagonist of Khoury's The Little Mountain sees the French language as a medium through which Western values and lifestyles can infiltrate and undermine one's own culture. In the novel, the French Catholic priest sees the need to teach the French language as the best way of imposing Western hegemony.

The pernicious effect of Western education on the Arab individual is revealed distinctly in Rabi Jaber's Youssef al-ءInglizi.⁴⁹

The narrator, who is relating the life experience of his great grandfather, presents the effect of a purely English education on the protagonist Youssef, who ends up a dummy void of any feelings or the ability to communicate. In the second month of school (established by British missionaries in the late 19th century), Youssef learns a hundred English words and stops playing with other children, preferring to spend his time studying the English/Arabic dictionary by Ali Smith and Boutros al-Boustani. Consequently, he begins to feel more at home with the English rather than the Arabic language and tells his teacher Vandyke that “English words look more like things than Arabic words.”⁵⁰ When he visits his sister after a long absence, “Nassab embraces her brother Youssef and cries. On his part, he kisses her without any feeling, as if he is embracing a stranger.”⁵¹ When he reads Jane Austen's Emma, it is as if he has entered into the world of the book “and started living a new life there, a life that begins right away without a past and without memory.”⁵²

If Youssef appears European in manner and lifestyle, he feels internally alienated, and his “loneliness…hurt[s] him.”⁵³

He feels a split between Arabic and English, Orient and Occident, and is unable to identify with either. As a result, he is transformed into a passive almost effeminate being who remains neutral and who extricates himself from social and political life. In the wars between the Maronites and the Druze in the mountains, he remained detached and refused to fight in the same manner that other male members of the family did. The novel is concerned with pure reporting of the protagonist's actions and deeds, and the characters appear and disappear leaving no traces of an inner life. Indeed, Youssef's subjective life is sunken nearly to a zero to show the injurious effect of capitulation to the West and to living without roots or a past on Youssef, who is no more than an artificial copy of the English “gentleman.” By changing his name from Youssef Ibrahim Khater Jaber to Joseph Abraham Mender, he sheds his Lebanese self without adopting another, and ends up a hollow man emptied of substance and life.

MODERNITY AS A SOURCE OF EMPOWERMENT

For other writers, it is precisely this modern Western world that is sought after, which can be seen in works predominantly by women who regard women as a fundamental constituent of modernity, rather than an anachronism in a modern world. The protagonist of al-Shaykh's title story Uknisu al-shamsa עan al-sutuh⁵⁴

tries to extricate herself from all familial and communal ties and seeks the freedom and independence afforded her by a Western mode of life. In London, she finds refuge from the poverty and drudgery of a backward society where individuals (particularly women) have no control over their own lives. She asserts: “I was happy in London, free, mistress of myself and my pocket.”⁵⁵ She sees her life in London as a happy escape from poverty, the “drudgery of cleaning our house, where there were only torn rags, a broom, and a pail of water, and you had to go down on your knees to scrub the floor and do the endless piles of washing by hand.”⁵⁶ When her English boyfriend wonders how she could have left the sun of her country “for the sake of these gray clouds” in London, she tells him about the emptiness and limitations of her life in her country: “What can I do with the sun? I answered. Sweep it off the rooftops?”⁵⁷ She regards her homeland as backward, poor, and oppressive, and remembers the “monotony of the days in my country, the poverty and nothingness…the threatening looks of the men in the family, the attentive stares from the ones in the street.”⁵⁸ She recalls a society dominated by men who view women either as possessions or as prey. Having lost her virginity in London, she wonders why she does not feel guilty: “Instead of striking my face and grieving aloud because my hymen was no longer intact, I wondered, is it because he's an Englishman that he doesn't feel proud he's taken my virginity?”⁵⁹ Unlike men back home, the English man does not see a relationship with a woman as a form of victory or loss. The narrator insists on seeing herself as an individual, as other than a compliant product of her society and manages to find herself in the anonymity of London. Unlike many male characters who manifest a great deal of anxiety and ambivalence in the face of the modern, al-Shaykh's female protagonist sees Western modernity as the embodiment of exhilarating possibilities and the potential for new and previously unimaginable social and sexual freedoms.

Other works reveal that the war generated a form of modernity that emerged out of the warring streets of Beirut, providing women with freedom and liberation. For instance, in Khoury's The Journey of Little Gandhi, the prostitute Alice is content because her work as a prostitute has empowered her at various levels. In the novel, the male narrator asserts that, unlike other women in her situation, the prostitute “never claimed she didn't like the profession… Alice said she enjoyed her life a lot, she loved and lived.”⁶⁰

This new profession frees her from the restrictions of her earlier job as “maid” and gives her a sense of independence that she has not had before. Indeed, Alice's free access to the public sphere reveals the loosening of sexuality from the bonds of traditions and the family, particularly in the chaos and confusion of the Lebanese civil war. The prostitute generally representing a “dangerous sexuality”⁶¹ assumes a certain control over her life and her lovers and begins “to see the world as a totally different place.”⁶² Again, this is a form of modernity that emerges out of the war situation.

Similarly, in al-Shaykh's Hikayat Zahra,⁶³

the war city is not the exclusive domain of men and prostitutes who colonize the public space but also of respectable women like Zahra. In a war setup and in the absence of her family, the protagonist Zahra transgresses all spatial boundaries and traditional structures to empower and free herself from familial authority and other social and religious restrictions.⁶⁴ By having sex with the sniper on the outer stairs, Zahra unleashes what is considered a menacing female sexuality that challenges and interrogates the norms of society, in a chaotic and anarchic present.⁶⁵

Likewise, in Hoda Barakat's Hajar al-dahik,⁶⁶

the war city is responsible for the emergence of different sexualities that have so far remained under cover. For instance, the protagonist Khalil is a feminized man who opts to live in a protected female inner space doing the chores of a housewife, in a subversive attempt to dissolve gender boundaries. In such a hostile atmosphere, the protagonist wrestles with the question of an alternative maleness and finds himself attracted to men rather than women. For Khalil, the external male world of war and violence is disorienting, antagonistic, and deeply infused with a dark sense of modern isolation, “not the result of the machine, but of the tyranny of war,”⁶⁷ revealing that Khalil's sense of alienation is the outcome of the war rather than a Western existential angst.

Other works present characters who make use of modern tools to reinforce xenophobic traditionalism and the rigid premodernity of family, clan, and tribe.⁶⁸

The educated narrator of al-Daif's Lernin Inglish⁶⁹ is aware of the fact that, even though the world is fast moving toward the 21st century, the habits of revenge in his hometown remain “stronger than days and times.”⁷⁰ If in the past his countrymen used “to kill with swords, now they do it with guns. They used to move around on the backs of animals, now they use cars.”⁷¹

DEAR MR. KAWABATA: MODERNITY AND THE LOCAL EXPERIENCE

From the start, the narrator of al-Daif's semiautobiographical novel, Dear Mr. Kawabata, tells us that he adopted the Marxist ideology believing that he could adapt it to the political, military, and cultural specificities of Lebanon. Because he, together with other Arab intellectuals, shares anxiety about Western culture, the Marxist socialist ideology appeals to him because it enables him to embrace modernity through another path than that of the West. As Laroui puts it, “Marxism furnished an ideology capable of denying tradition without seeming to surrender to Europe; it allowed one to evade a particular form of European society but did not compel one to return to tradition.”⁷²

As far as Rashid is concerned, a leftist paradigm of modernity has a revolutionary appeal particularly in his struggle in the Palestinian resistance and in his search for national self-determination. He maintains that there was “an intimate connection between the rotation of the earth (i.e., scientific fact), the struggle for political demands, and the Palestinian resistance which was aiming to crush the illegal occupiers—the Zionist enemy—and destroy the state they had set up by force on Palestinian soil.”⁷³ To ensure the success of his national struggle, he believes that he should uphold a rational stance through the repudiation of the past and a total commitment to change, progress, and political and military struggle organized along a cult of hardness represented by an exclusively masculine endeavor, which is forceful, militaristic, risk taking as well as confident, and commanding. The narrator sees modernity as the backbone of his political struggle and as a totalizing ideology where reason holds sway and provides the tools that would enable him to change and control the world around him. To be modern is to adopt reason and progress and to uphold the belief that epistemological certainty is attainable. Because his own native culture represents a mode of life that impedes successful development and leads to archaic superstition and self-delusion, he becomes intent on rejecting it and on embracing modernity.

While the narrator is strongly enthusiastic about and deeply affected by modernity, the vast majority of his countrymen remain untouched by these changes and continue to retain their values and traditions. Rashid discovers that his ideas grate on the ears of the people in his village, who fail to understand him or to speak the same language. He tells us that his father saw him “drifting from the rotation of the earth to atheism, from there to socialism, and from there to the Palestinian resistance—all of which he believed were opposed to the Lebanese state that the Christians had been able to establish with the help of France…thus safeguarding themselves against a return to the previous situation under which they'd been a protected minority under Muslim domination for a period of more than 300 years.”⁷⁴

The son's “heretical ideas”⁷⁵ drive the father to view him as a corrupter of tradition and traditional values and as a threat to the father's sense of self-identity and belonging.⁷⁶ As a result, Rashid's modern project to break with the ancient world creates tensions and confrontations. Convinced that his vision of the world is normal and comprehensive, Rashid's father views his son's new ideology as an evil that threatens annihilation and disintegration. The image of the “viper” that the father uses to describe his son reveals the father's fear of being dragged out of the protective cocoon of his traditional, peasant world, and his desire to cling to his culture and retain his sense of identity. On the other hand, the narrator's conviction that his father's political stand is based on sect and collective memory induces him to see him as archaic and antiquated. To use Dipesh Chakrabarty's words, Rashid's father is a peasant who represents “all the seemingly nonmodern, rural, nonsecular relationships and life practices.”⁷⁷ Likewise, the narrator's friend's father was also furious with his son for adopting this atheistic ideology. Hassan's father used to “rip up his French schoolbooks in case they corrupted his pure Muslim mind with the filth and immorality and unbelief that they contained.”⁷⁸ For Rashid's and Hassan's fathers, atheism is not simply the absence of religion but a foreign presence and imposition.

Despite his father's disapproval and fundamental hostility to secular modernity, the narrator's oedipal revolt against authority is manifested in his rejection of fixity and stabilized forms and his insistence on the establishment of a truly modern state where a person's sect is a minor issue. The narrator supports a new modern sense of the national as opposed to the local, and an urban identity rather than a closed, self-sufficient rural identity. What he aims at is a complete rejection of difference and the achievement of unity at the political, ideological, and national levels. He is convinced that, with the aid of science and reason, his countrymen will abandon religious superstition, ossified customs and beliefs, and tribal feuds that have divided the country into warring sectors causing enmity and bloodshed, and will eventually adopt the “universal” ideals of modernity.

In an attempt to convince his mother of the validity of his modern views, he makes claims to scientific legitimacy by telling her: “It's science that has made it possible for you…to have six children so far, and for all of them to stay alive…. It's the same science that can see with its own eyes, as you see with your own eyes, that the earth is a sphere and that it rotates.”⁷⁹

Convinced of his viewpoint, he makes the attempt to convince Sadiq, an illiterate village man who could not distinguish “an alif from a telegraph pole”⁸⁰ of the validity of the science that he has learnt at school and the fact that the earth is not the center of the universe. He is determined to impose his form of modernity, but Sadiq reacts to such an imposition by asserting: “‘God curse your schools and your teachers.’… ‘You want me to change my beliefs when I've already come to the end of my life!’…‘I've no son to comfort me, and I've left not a single thing for people to remember me by. I have one hope left, the hope of heaven, and you want me to lose that?’”⁸¹ Decidedly, Rashid intends to replace a specifically religious consciousness infused with superstition, with an empirical, rational orientation. Nevertheless, by attempting to challenge all norms and preexisting beliefs, he develops a tyrannical and immature lust for domination and a shallow attitude to progress. Writing about his father's funeral, he tells us that he felt aloof and unconcerned: “When I stood beside his corpse, laid out in the middle of the house, surrounded by women all in black, I stood there without shedding a single tear. Meanwhile the others—my brothers and other relatives—were weeping and wailing over him. I stayed standing there watching the ancient rituals that no longer had any meaning.”⁸²

As an Arab intellectual, he insists on seeing traditionalism and modernization as binary formations divided along dichotomous lines. His either/or approach leads to an irreconcilable rift between his form of modernity and the local culture that he is intent on modernizing and transforming. Believing that these theories and concepts are universal, objective, and culturally neutral,⁸³

he insists on imposing his monological discourse on the subaltern without heeding specificity, actuality, and the details of Sadiq's own life. This hegemonous attitude reveals that he can deal with the local only as an absence of modernity. Indeed, Rashid confronts the authority of tradition and adopts a monologic and totalizing discourse that validates modernity. His intellectual rigidity and cultural arrogance suggest that, because the people in his hometown lack his capacity for reflective reasoning, his brand of modernity should be enforced no matter how disorienting, and regardless of the gap and rupture that it can generate. This modernity rooted in scientific legitimacy acts as a substitute for dialogue and communication. Nevertheless, in subjecting his supposedly backward countrymen to the normalizing action of Western cultural technology, he succeeds only in creating more rifts and divisions.

In a similar attempt to assure his mother of the validity of his modern ideas, he makes claims to scientific legitimacy by trying to convince her that the earth is spherical, but his mother sees it in a different light: “Whether the earth revolves or does not revolve, my son,…is all the same to you. Either way, you have to study to get your diploma to be able to get a job.”⁸⁴

His mother is convinced that education will secure her son a respectable job: “The certificate itself was simply a passport to a steady job that would enable him to keep his fingernails clean.”⁸⁵ As far as his mother is concerned, a steady job guarantees her son a better future away from his father's manual work, the kind of job that has given her nothing but the worries and insecurities of poverty. Nevertheless, when she tells her husband that “I won't let my children live as you've made us live in disgrace,” her reward is a slap on the face: “She spat blood, her nose started to bleed, and her eye was swollen for a whole month. If it hadn't been for the grace of God, she would have gone blind.”⁸⁶

In an attempt to liberate herself from oppressive material conditions, Rashid's mother appropriates modernity into a local context revealing, to use Jeffrey Herf's words, that “there is no such thing as modernity in general. There are only national societies each of which becomes modern in its own fashion.”⁸⁷

His mother accommodates modernity within the specificities of her own life and the facticity of her lived local experience. Rashid tells us that, for his mother, a “steady job was a thousand times better than the earth. If the earth gave, it was after a thousand labours, and if it did not give, the worry lasted for days and days. But a steady job gave, pure and simple. If my mother had been given a choice before marrying, she would have chosen a husband with a steady job who received a salary at the end of each month—not a peasant or a barber (a village barber!) or a carpenter, or all three together as was the case with my father.”⁸⁸ Undeniably, the man she would have liked to marry “was like someone who lived in the city. He was as pale as they were, his flesh was soft, and he was clean—clean under the fingernails.”⁸⁹ He had all the qualities that Rashid's own father did not possess, and he pronounced some words “like a city dweller.”⁹⁰ His mother loathes her husband's primitive aggressive masculinity and yearns for a softer masculinity represented by the urbanized neighbor who does not beat his son or wife and who is well-versed in the secrets of the universe and the ways of the world. Despite the employee's apparent modernity that aligns him with Rashid himself, the latter prefers his own father, who treats him harshly and burns his thumb in a moment of anger. Rashid is always ready to justify his father's behavior: “I can almost see his face as he put the red-hot rod on my finger. He felt pain, I am certain of that.” His father reminds him of Abraham who also “felt pain as he almost plunged the knife into his son's neck, before hearing the voice of God calling him at the decisive moment.”⁹¹ Although Rashid envies the employee's son, he never wished his mother “had married anyone else besides my father.”⁹² In fact, he tells us that he “didn't exactly feel loathing towards him [the employee], but I wouldn't have chosen him as my husband if I'd been a woman,”⁹³ revealing a confused attitude toward any mode of life that is antagonistic to the law of the father. His mother's disdain of a rural way of life and her desire to free herself from it spring from the local situation, an “alternative modernity” grounded in reality, no matter how much the narrator tries to essentialize it.⁹⁴ This “reflexive” experience of modernity,⁹⁵ which is meaningful within the context of his mother's daily experience, leaves room, unequivocally, for a modernity that emerges out of a quotidian context and possesses “its own inner capacity for flexibility and creativity.”⁹⁶

The romanticization of his mother and the local that she represents is a regression, a strong desire by Rashid to retain his cultural identity in the face of an inimical and alienating modernity. Despite his awareness of his mother's strong desire for change, he insists on brushing it aside and on seeing her as existing outside of history and as aligned with nature: “My mother was a tree. The tree gives of its fruit at the due time. Didn't I tell you, Mr. Kawabata, how she answered anyone who commented on how many children she had? She replied that she couldn't keep her children in her stomach at will, even if she had wanted to.”⁹⁷

Rashid insists on binding his mother to nature through her reproductive capacities and to see her as a guardian of a timeless authenticity. A pervasive and insidious traditional culture continues to haunt him no matter how he tries to extricate himself from it. As Safi puts it, it is “not the technological and scientific aspects of Western modernity which are the object of fierce resistance…but rather the normative and cultural.”⁹⁸ For Rashid, woman continues to stand for a more natural and, to use Rita Felski's words, “edenic condition of organic wholeness untouched by the ruptures and contradictions of modern life,”⁹⁹ for a site of nostalgic longing for authenticity, social harmony, and security. Accordingly, Rashid insists on excluding his mother from modernity—which despite some feeble efforts on his part at drawing her attention to certain scientific achievements—remains primarily a masculine endeavor.

Despite his attempts to exclude his mother from history, her modernity haunts him and incites him to stifle any signs of individuality, subjectivity, or desire on her part. His mother is modern in the sense that she expresses feelings and desires that threaten his sense of moral and cultural identity and interrogate his insistence on a universal condition of modernity, revealing that modernity is an “unfinished project”¹⁰⁰

that reappears in diverse forms in accordance with the culture, environment, and locale. The narrator is strongly aware that his mother had her own individualistic views on certain matters: “If she didn't want something, nobody in the world would force it on her.”¹⁰¹ As a result, he sees her as a threat and becomes intent on regulating and controlling her sexuality. Because he knows that his mother would have preferred a more urbanized and, therefore, a more “modern” man, Rashid needs constant reassurance. The text is full of references to his need of concrete evidence that his mother loves his father. On seeing his parents embracing, the narrator feels reassured and asserts: “My mother loved my father, then.”¹⁰² He feels at ease when his mother “showed her love for my father,” because his mother was generally undemonstrative and, like men, “not good at expressing herself.”¹⁰³ The binaries of masculine and feminine are negotiated in the novel revealing that they are not stable categories. When his father died, his mother was forty years old: “She was beautiful, and still in good health, despite having borne ten children.”¹⁰⁴ His mother's sexuality is a clear threat to the narrator's autonomy, stability, and to the cultural order, betraying a primitive desire on his part to dominate and control his mother. Therefore, he feels relieved when he notes that there were “several dozen grey hairs…on my mother's head, and I saw the colour of her hair losing its sheen. Among us, grey hairs are attributed to anxiety, and anxiety implies the death of the desire for new adventures.”¹⁰⁵ If the narrator idolizes his mother and sees her as closely linked with nature, he is clearly threatened by her sexuality. Unlike his father, who is knowable and predictable, the unpredictability of his mother causes him anxiety and agitation. He loses his balance and almost passes out when he hears her using obscene language in public and referring to another woman in the village as a whore. Rashid always liked to refer to her as “My gentle mother, my mother the tree,”¹⁰⁶ but her other disorienting qualities put him on his guard and make him all the more determined to ensure continuity with the past by essentializing tradition,¹⁰⁷ and relegating her to a fixed, and unchangeable zone. Rashid is torn between a desire to achieve progress and political stability, and agitation over losing his moral and cultural identity. He tries to recover a shaky masculinity—precipitated by the defeat his party suffered in the war—by ensuring that his mother remain in a stable framework of atemporal authenticity, revealing that the passage to modernity is fraught with irresolvable contradictions and incongruities.

In his insistence on duplicating the Western project, Rashid comes to the realization that modernity is associated with things that upset his habits and constrain him in inescapable ways. For him, modernity turns out to be a tricky ideal, which associates change with the potential betrayal of one's culture. When his French teacher advises him to have a breakfast of coffee with milk and slices of bread with a little butter and jam, it is clear that this kind of breakfast is not to Rashid's liking: “I hid my sorrow and embarrassment. In the morning I liked to eat the leftovers from my mother's cooking the previous day. I liked to eat a loaf of bread with a little zaatar on it, with some olives and olive oil. That is how I usually greeted the day. But progress has its price, and the task is a difficult one—the task of adapting to an advanced society. With self-discipline, however, we can overcome all difficulties.”¹⁰⁸

Furthermore, his sense that “discipline” is a masculine quality as opposed to the chaos associated with women drives him to describe the earth as racing “like a madwoman,”¹⁰⁹ rather than a madman.

Initially, what the narrator sought was a rapid modernization and the eradication of traditional modes of life; nevertheless, he discovers the physical difficulty of living in a world totally shaped after the new style. When his father is killed, Rashid, in line with his secularist stance and his belief in a nation state with a centralized political power, wanted to bring a court case against his father's killers, but his uncles are not satisfied with this measure. They tell Rashid that they will “open proceedings against them in the same way they did against us,” but “we won't be satisfied with a court case any more than they were.”¹¹⁰

Despite the presence of a judicial institution, they insist on taking revenge in accordance with the prevalent customs. Rashid's uncles continue to follow their traditions unequivocally, despite the existence of modern institutions. The modern and the traditional continue to coexist, but only in contradictory union. Accordingly, if modernity breaks down the protective framework of the small community and of tradition, replacing it by modern institutions, traditional structures continue to haunt, undermine, and incapacitate the present. Indeed, if change in Western societies is generated from within the local cultures of these societies, such change is experienced within Rashid's culture as an imposition and a threat. It is clear that, although he embraces modernity, he is unable to apply his version of modernity to the local situation around him.

In the highly charged atmosphere of the civil war, the novel reveals the irrelevance of civilizing projects to a world where sectarian division, violence, destruction, and bloodshed dominate the scene. The past aspirations and the earlier ideals of commitment, progress, and modernity prove irrelevant and out of place. As al-עId puts it, “the war killed the dream, the dream of commitment, the dream of the hero…. the dream of the prophetic vision.”¹¹¹

Feeling diminished, marginalized, and pushed to the periphery by the failure of his ideological and military project, Rashid feels perplexed in the maze of conflicting ideologies, both local and borrowed from the West, and realizes that to be modern is to lead a life of paradox and uncertainty.

Gripped with anxiety and ontological insecurity, Rashid begins to see his brand of modernity as a distortion and deformation. He discovers that he is no more than a submissive subject of a discourse that uses Communist jargon to guide others to what is supposed to be the right path. His brand of modernity represented by his revolutionary valor is constituted by men “trained together in the use of weapons, combat methods and the principles of popular wars of liberation”¹¹²

and of women who are seen as objects of loathing and disparagement. He tells us that when he told a comrade of his attraction to a woman “who was close to us politically. He immediately told me with a smile how only a week ago, after he had ejaculated inside her and got up off her, she in turn had got up and he'd started to urinate over her.”¹¹³ Rashid discovers that he as well as his comrades in the party did not, indeed, cannot practice what they preach, that their ideas remain amorphous and inchoate, and that, far from being viewed on equal footing with men, women remain objects of desire. Rashid discovers the irreconcilable gap between theory and practice. For instance, he draws Kawabata's attention to an article on martyrdom that he has written in the newspaper where he makes fun of a bourgeois mentality that cannot stand the sight of blood. Nevertheless, he eventually finds out that he himself has the same problem. He admits that his “stomach also used to really churn at the sight of blood.”¹¹⁴

In the novel, modernity is conceived as the emergence of new kinds of spaces, and Beirut is the place where a modern form of life is supposed to materialize. Modernity is identified as the modern urban way of life, where reason and science triumph over religion, custom, and tradition: “Beirut must turn into a city of individuals, free from the ties of family, countryside, sect, and tribal affiliation. This was what a city was! Beirut must become like the cities described in books we used to read so that our principles could become effective there. We had fashioned our ideas, all we have to do now was fashion Beirut in accordance with those ideas.”¹¹⁵

Nevertheless, he discovers that, even though he has great hopes for Beirut, he is unable to cut the umbilical cord that still binds him to his village and his traditions.

Like others who belong to this “book-learned intelligentsia,”¹¹⁶

Rashid—supervised by Lenin and under his “immediate authority”¹¹⁷—clings tenaciously to abstract theory and a dogmatic style of political thought, to the detriment of practical politics and a clear-cut position on advancement and change. Rashid discovers that his form of modernity is damaging to his culture and to what I. R. Sinai refers to as an “archaic agrarian” society with its “ingrained habits” and “irrational tribal religions.”¹¹⁸ The text reveals the decentering of Rashid's supposedly rational and autonomous self and the defeat of systematic thought, and totalized laws and institutions, whether Lebanese or Western, decentering Rashid as the knowing and rational subject. By abandoning plot and dislocating narrative organization, the text deviates from chronology to underline Rashid's own fluctuating position. The novel disrupts linear time and plot as one way of decentering Rashid as a rational and knowing subject.

Realizing the insidious nature of modernity and its alienating structures and mechanics, the narrator sees the devastating effect of his brand of modernity on his country and on himself. Referring to his comrade in the Communist party, he tells us that this man whose job it was to brainwash young men and incite them to their death washes his hands of their blood. This friend congratulates himself on never having “fired a shot at anyone in a war that had killed thousands, and had disfigured, paralyzed, orphaned, widowed or destroyed scores of times as many.”¹¹⁹

Unlike his friend who tries to shirk responsibility, the narrator is aware of the crushing, indeed, deadly effect of their role in the war under the banner of development and change, and feels great guilt and anxiety. He tells Kawabata, “I lie awake with this nightmare: What if they were to return? Once again I feel the ants moving in my mouth, while my lips sewn together like a deep wound. What should I say to them?”¹²⁰ As a result, a state of doubt and bewilderment begins to replace the earlier optimistic tone of certainty that dominated Rashid's earlier approach to modernity.

Rashid begins to discover that this form of “Mutilated Modernity”¹²¹

has only scratched the surface, and that mental projections still function according to the old modes, and he finds himself in a marginal and invisible position. When one of Rashid's comrades is injured and realizes he is going to die, he asks Rashid to recite al-fātiḥa: “The request stunned me. Deep in my heart I wished that I could recite the fātiḥa for him, but I didn't know it. At the same time, I didn't want to refuse him a request at such a decisive moment as the one he was passing through. So I quickly muttered some phrases that I improvised on the spot, including the name of God, then left him and went to tell our comrades that he'd been injured.”¹²² He discovers that far from being atavistic aberrations, religious ideologies remain secure within the self, despite all attempts to erase and marginalize them. The text interrogates the view that religion is a peripheral element in society; Rashid sees the futility of using Western standards to judge his own society. To use R. Radhakrishnan's words, Rashid “straddles two regions or spaces, internalizing Western epistemological modes at the outer or purely pragmatic level, and at the inner level maintaining a traditional identity.”¹²³

Rashid discovers that his form of modernity has no place in a country where familial and tribal affiliations determine identity. He tells us that, in “our country, your name defines you, and your father, and your grandfather's grandfather, and the place where you live. If your own name doesn't help, then your father's name will help.”¹²⁴

He finds out that he himself cannot escape ideological contamination and is bound up in a tangled web of family, community, tribe, and sect that remains ingrained in his psyche. Indeed, the letter to Kawabata underscores his repudiation of the West as well as of his fellow Arabs in favor of a Japanese writer who occupies a position between East and West and who deals with modernity and tradition in his own fiction. Accordingly, Kawabata can truly share and have a more sensitive and nuanced response to and understanding of the narrator's problems.

Feeling alienated from family, tribe, and party, Rashid begins to see his brand of modernity as a distortion and deformation and decides to free the language he uses from all shackles, whether they are “expressions of eternal beauty we have in Arabic,”¹²⁵

or Communistic terminology. Adopting Marxist ideology, Rashid sees himself as a language-using social and historical entity and tells Kawabata, “We grasped the reins of history and raced it toward the goal it had defined for itself: Communism by way of socialism. Our role was to steer events in the right direction, to remove the obstacles from the path of history's wheel—notice this expression—so that it should not be held up or get stuck.”¹²⁶ Rashid discovers that he has become an instrument of language, a medium of clashing discourses that have led to violence and bloodshed. He wonders, “Which of us did not kill with his own hand, which of us did not kill with his tongue?”¹²⁷ He admits that he smells “the scent of blood in the eloquent style of these phrases!”¹²⁸ He realizes that, under the conditions of modernity represented by his nationalistic struggle, is a hypermasculine endeavor that smells of blood. The modern organized around a masculine norm brought with it an ideal grounded in male bonding that effectively excluded women from political life and sanctioned a primitive and aggressive masculine norm.¹²⁹

Realizing the cataclysmic effects of his nationalistic and modernist projects, Rashid comes to the realization that he is no longer able to use the cliché-laden language that he used earlier. He complains to Kawabata that “either language is not helping me, or else I can no longer master it, but my consolation is that you understand me.”¹³⁰

Freed of the fixity and dogmatism of a cliché-ridden language, he decides to extricate himself from all ideological contamination, whether from the “image of the West within” or from the “melancholic attachment to a vanished Arab past”¹³¹ to be himself, a subjective individual free of a consuming ideology. Nevertheless, and as a result, he finds himself in a marginal, invisible, and muddled situation. Rashid rejects the two dominating discourses—the Western Marxist ideology and the sectarian, religious, premodern national narrative—to find himself abandoned and displaced, groping frantically in an empty void.