What is Lebanese literature?
Lebanon is, just like other countries in the region, an abyss of history. The land's historical origins as a country lie in its unique position at the crossroads of the Mediterranean and the Arab world. In antiquity, the coastal cities of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos were centres of Phoenician civilisation, known for trade, navigation, and cultural exchange across the Mediterranean. Later, the region was incorporated into successive empires—Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman—each leaving traces in its religious and cultural fabric. The mountainous heartland, especially Mount Lebanon, developed a distinctive identity as a refuge for Maronite Christians and Druze, whose autonomy within the Ottoman Empire laid the groundwork for Lebanon’s later political particularism. The modern state took shape after World War I, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the French Mandate was established over Syria and Lebanon. In 1920, France proclaimed the creation of “Greater Lebanon,” enlarging the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate by annexing surrounding Muslim-majority areas such as the Bekaa Valley, Tripoli, and the South, thus producing a multi-confessional polity. This construction served French strategic interests but also embedded sectarian complexity into the state’s foundations.
Lebanon gained formal independence in 1943 with the National Pact, an unwritten agreement that institutionalised power-sharing among its religious communities: the presidency reserved for a Maronite Christian, the prime ministership for a Sunni Muslim, and the parliamentary speakership for a Shi‘i Muslim. This arrangement symbolised Lebanon’s dual orientation—Mediterranean and Arab, Christian and Muslim—but also foreshadowed the sectarian tensions that would periodically erupt, most dramatically in the Civil War (1975–1990). Thus, Lebanon’s historical origins combine an ancient cosmopolitan legacy with a modern statehood born of colonial borders and difficult confessional compromise.
What we call Lebanese literature in the modern sense reflects the country’s layered history of cosmopolitanism, sectarian conflict, and diaspora. It often weaves together themes of memory, exile, war, and cultural hybridity, marked by a tension between Beirut’s role as an Arab intellectual hub and the scars of the civil war. Writers like Khalil Gibran gave it a mystical, universal voice with works such as The Prophet (1923), which became globally influential. Later authors turned more directly to Lebanon’s political and social realities: Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun (1998) is a landmark novel of Palestinian exile told through a Lebanese lens, while his earlier Little Mountain (1977) captured the brutal fragmentation of the Lebanese Civil War. Hanan al-Shaykh, in novels like The Story of Zahra (1980), explored gender, sexuality, and violence with striking candour, while Amin Maalouf, writing in French, has produced internationally celebrated novels such as Leo Africanus (1986) and Samarkand (1988), which reimagine Middle Eastern history for a global audience. Together, these works form a diverse canon where personal stories intertwine with collective memory, offering both intimate portraits of Lebanese society and contributions to world literature.
Arguably, among most popular recent Lebanese novelists there is Rabih Alameddine. In 2008, his novel The Hakawati intertwined the stories of a Lebanese-American man returning to Beirut with the rich tapestry of Lebanese folklore and family history. Through the lens of traditional storytelling (hakawati means "storyteller" in Arabic), Alameddine explores themes of war, identity, and the power of narrative. The novel's structure mirrors the fragmented nature of Lebanese history, offering readers a multifaceted view of the country's past and present. More recentry, in The Angel of History (2016), Alameddine delves into the life of a Lebanese-American writer reflecting on his experiences during the AIDS epidemic in the United States. The novel addresses themes of grief, identity, and the intersection of personal and political histories. Through its introspective narrative, it provides insight into the complexities of the Lebanese diaspora and the lingering effects of trauma.
Among recent acquisitions, one might cite Hala Alyan's The Arsonists' City (2021), a multigenerational family saga that spans Lebanon, Syria, and the United States. Alyan examines the impact of war, displacement, and the search for belonging on a family torn apart by secrets and history. The novel's intricate character development and exploration of identity make it a poignant reflection on the Lebanese experience across borders.
I have readHanan al-Shaykh, The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story (2009)
Elias Khoury, يالو | Yalo (2002) Amin Maalouf, Léon l'Africain (1986), Samarcande (1988), Les Jardins de Lumière (1991), Le Rocher de Tanios (1993), Le Premier siècle après Béatrice (1992), Les Échelles du Levant (1996), Le Périple de Baldassare (2000), Les Croisades vues par les Arabes (1983), Les Identités meurtrières (1998), Le Dérèglement du monde (2009) |
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I have writtenRestytucja Śródziemnomorza. Poszukiwanie transkulturowej ciągłości w pisarstwie Amina Maaloufa
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prozac
(a mother's story)
It is a story that runs smooth and sentimental, at least in my Polish translation (Polish versions always tend to smoothen the edges of any text, coming from any country, as if in constant fear of scandalising the ill-disposed reader). In The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story (2009), Hanan al-Shaykh does just this, telling the life of her own mother, as a part of the larger project of addressing the changing gender roles and women's status in Arab society. But overall, it is a love story, mainly. There is the usual set in the background: the forced marriage of a girl in her teens, misery and economic injustice, domestic violence of husband against wife and brother against sister, abuse of the illiterate that are natural victims in the universe of written contracts, etc. It is almost a specific sub-genre in Arab literature, the novel of the writer's mother.
Yet as I read it, the recollections run smoothly in the riverbed of great love, a story with a relatively happy ending, since the heroine finally gets divorced from the man who forced her and marries the man whom she loves. And she bears him many children till his tragic death in a car accident. The love of the man, also the love of her children almost covers the reality of a donkey bearing a burden of stones - this is how she sees herself. It appears almost a strident detail that comes out of nothing that she is on Prozac late in her old age. Why, if overall her life seems so beautiful, under the sun of great love?
This is why the book is marked by an internal contradiction. It sounds like a sentimental love story, conjugated with a sentimental journey into the world of old Beirut's cinemas and Arab cinematography of the thirties, while it should have been written in bold curses from the first to the last page. The woman it portrays doesn't seem frustrated or angry. On the contrary, she seems so well integrated into her society, as she organizes her endless coffee meetings with her friends and distributes the presents she brought from America among her kin and neighbours. Except that she is on Prozac.
Apparently, she forgave everyone, even his father who refused to feed his abandoned family when she was a child. Even the brother who had beaten her because of her love affair. Why Prozac, then? Forgiveness, and the sense of being utterly victorious in her life, should have cured her. But apparently, it did not. Those wounds never heal.
There is a curse connected to the very act of writing (or dictating, like in the case of this illiterate mother) as if the recollection were a punishable transgression: the author gets cancer and dies shortly after. This is what Hanan al-Shaykh says, at the end of her book. Curiously, I also got cancer sometime after writing my own autobiography, The Four Riders. It was filled with curses from the first to the last page; I forgave or spared no one. I just run away from my domestic aggressors as far as I could, and I removed them from my life as thoroughly as I could. I sent them all to the devil, unforgiven, together with the very earth that bore them. The sweetness of the Arab woman who reintegrates her kin and returns to die among her people makes much more pleasant reading. But is it more efficient as a life strategy?
Hanan al-Shaykh, The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story (2009). Read in a Polish translation: Szarańcza i ptak, trans. Joanna Bogunia, Dawid Juraszek, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Nasza Księgarnia, 2011.
Kraków, 15.08.2022.
Yet as I read it, the recollections run smoothly in the riverbed of great love, a story with a relatively happy ending, since the heroine finally gets divorced from the man who forced her and marries the man whom she loves. And she bears him many children till his tragic death in a car accident. The love of the man, also the love of her children almost covers the reality of a donkey bearing a burden of stones - this is how she sees herself. It appears almost a strident detail that comes out of nothing that she is on Prozac late in her old age. Why, if overall her life seems so beautiful, under the sun of great love?
This is why the book is marked by an internal contradiction. It sounds like a sentimental love story, conjugated with a sentimental journey into the world of old Beirut's cinemas and Arab cinematography of the thirties, while it should have been written in bold curses from the first to the last page. The woman it portrays doesn't seem frustrated or angry. On the contrary, she seems so well integrated into her society, as she organizes her endless coffee meetings with her friends and distributes the presents she brought from America among her kin and neighbours. Except that she is on Prozac.
Apparently, she forgave everyone, even his father who refused to feed his abandoned family when she was a child. Even the brother who had beaten her because of her love affair. Why Prozac, then? Forgiveness, and the sense of being utterly victorious in her life, should have cured her. But apparently, it did not. Those wounds never heal.
There is a curse connected to the very act of writing (or dictating, like in the case of this illiterate mother) as if the recollection were a punishable transgression: the author gets cancer and dies shortly after. This is what Hanan al-Shaykh says, at the end of her book. Curiously, I also got cancer sometime after writing my own autobiography, The Four Riders. It was filled with curses from the first to the last page; I forgave or spared no one. I just run away from my domestic aggressors as far as I could, and I removed them from my life as thoroughly as I could. I sent them all to the devil, unforgiven, together with the very earth that bore them. The sweetness of the Arab woman who reintegrates her kin and returns to die among her people makes much more pleasant reading. But is it more efficient as a life strategy?
Hanan al-Shaykh, The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story (2009). Read in a Polish translation: Szarańcza i ptak, trans. Joanna Bogunia, Dawid Juraszek, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Nasza Księgarnia, 2011.
Kraków, 15.08.2022.
the ugly word that starts with an "i"
When I was a professor at the University of Warsaw, some time around 2010, I used to make my students read Maalouf's Identités meurtrières. Usually to no avail. Most of them preferred to believe older, male professors, chanting their siren song of simple and strong, national identity, that contributed, in 2015, to the victory of the ultra-conservative, Catholic-nationalistic party "Law and Justice". And that was when the time of Maalouf definitely ended (just as my professorship at the University of Warsaw).
Nonetheless, the anecdote proves how much Maalouf was right and important. His essays - as well as some of his novels, such as Le Périple de Baldassare, a cross-cultural search for a lost manuscript -, give the impression of simplicity as if they were destined for young adults. Or just less sophisticated readers. They were written as popular literature, probably deliberately, to make a real impact. At other times, Maalouf was popular even in Poland; many of his novels were translated, and I supervised various graduate dissertations concerning them; it seemed an ideal material for my students of "Cultural Studies - Mediterranean Civilisation". Maalouf was making a politically correct, easy reading for years. Till the times changed.
Les Identités meurtrières speak of the danger of identity taken as something clear, unique, uncompromising, requiring unconditional fidelity. And looking suspiciously to all those who do not share the same clarity. How important this book might be in Poland, today if anyone read it! But no one does. The book was translated into Polish because someone took it for a publication concerning terrorism and the danger of those fanatical Arabs. Just the same way as La Maladie de l'islam, de Abdelwahab Meddeb, that was also translated later on. Just because the title seemed to go straight to the core of Polish anxieties, at the time the country refused to participate in the European policy in response to the Syrian refugee crisis.
What I tried to explain to my Varsovian students, the only identity we possess is strictly individual and performative; it is something actualised in a context, in an encounter, facing another human being. My anti-essentialism was paddling laboriously against the current. Maalouf says that identity is a drawing on living skin, something warm and elastic, not an artificial structure. Something personal, made out of unrepeatable biography, like a fingerprint that distinguishes each of us, instead of connecting us into a tribe. He speaks of double, triple, and multiple identities, of the importance of those bridge-building individuals that the tribes take for traitors.
Amin Maalouf, Les Identités meurtrières, Paris, Grasset, 1998. My Polish edition: Zabójcze tożsamości, trans. Halina Lisowska-Chehab, Warszawa, PIW, 2002.
Kraków, 4.08.2021.
Nonetheless, the anecdote proves how much Maalouf was right and important. His essays - as well as some of his novels, such as Le Périple de Baldassare, a cross-cultural search for a lost manuscript -, give the impression of simplicity as if they were destined for young adults. Or just less sophisticated readers. They were written as popular literature, probably deliberately, to make a real impact. At other times, Maalouf was popular even in Poland; many of his novels were translated, and I supervised various graduate dissertations concerning them; it seemed an ideal material for my students of "Cultural Studies - Mediterranean Civilisation". Maalouf was making a politically correct, easy reading for years. Till the times changed.
Les Identités meurtrières speak of the danger of identity taken as something clear, unique, uncompromising, requiring unconditional fidelity. And looking suspiciously to all those who do not share the same clarity. How important this book might be in Poland, today if anyone read it! But no one does. The book was translated into Polish because someone took it for a publication concerning terrorism and the danger of those fanatical Arabs. Just the same way as La Maladie de l'islam, de Abdelwahab Meddeb, that was also translated later on. Just because the title seemed to go straight to the core of Polish anxieties, at the time the country refused to participate in the European policy in response to the Syrian refugee crisis.
What I tried to explain to my Varsovian students, the only identity we possess is strictly individual and performative; it is something actualised in a context, in an encounter, facing another human being. My anti-essentialism was paddling laboriously against the current. Maalouf says that identity is a drawing on living skin, something warm and elastic, not an artificial structure. Something personal, made out of unrepeatable biography, like a fingerprint that distinguishes each of us, instead of connecting us into a tribe. He speaks of double, triple, and multiple identities, of the importance of those bridge-building individuals that the tribes take for traitors.
Amin Maalouf, Les Identités meurtrières, Paris, Grasset, 1998. My Polish edition: Zabójcze tożsamości, trans. Halina Lisowska-Chehab, Warszawa, PIW, 2002.
Kraków, 4.08.2021.
