'Hikayat: Short Stories by Lebanese Women' has established authors, promising newcomers and oodles of attitude By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Friday, October 27, 2006
Daily Star staff BEIRUT: A sexual encounter unfolds in the minaret of a mosque. A tube of red lipstick triggers all manner of madness in a convent for "unmarriageable" girls from good families that have fallen on hard times. A mysterious young woman shows up on a doorstep one day, her body bruised and her head roughly shorn. She refuses to speak and is taken in as a maid. The man of the house starts to touch her timidly each night, and tries to coax her into speaking. She still refuses. When the man's slacker son gets booted from a French boarding school and returns home, he watches in horror as the two youngsters tumble into bed together in about five seconds flat. Worse, she talks to the kid, too. These are a few of the many narrative twists and turns at play in "Hikayat: Short Stories by Lebanese Women," edited by Roseanne Saad Khalaf and published by Telegram, an imprint of Saqi Books. "Hikayat" is the seventh in a series of such books, each anthologizing short fiction by women of a particular nationality (or national descent), each taking its title from the word for stories in the local language. From Iran there's "Afsaneh," from Bangladesh "Galpa," from Pakistan "Kahani," from the Czech Republic "Povidky," from Palestine "Qissat" and from Ireland "Scealta." The Lebanese edition clocks in at just over 200 pages with an introduction, a glossary and a chunk of biographies framing 26 stories by as many writers. The reach of "Hikayat" extends in several directions at once. Included are some of Lebanon's most established modern and contemporary novelists and poets (provided you delete the men from that designation), including Hanan al-Shaykh, Etel Adnan, Emily Nasrallah and Hoda Barakat. At the same time, Khalaf has interspersed these mature works with a few shaky, underdeveloped pieces that she workshopped with her young creative writing students at the American University of Beirut. As a whole, the book spans the breach between urban and rural, young and old, provincial and cosmopolitan, rich and poor, anglophone and francophone, rebellious sex bomb and too-chaste-to-be-believed, gay and straight, traditional and modern, home and exile, in Lebanon and long-since relocated to the far-flung diaspora. And sects, yes - they are surely a great many religious sects represented, but it would be impolitic to tally them. "Hikayat" proceeds along a loose, linear, chronological trajectory - laid out by Khalaf in her introduction - hitting the literary "golden age" before 1975, the Civil War years with those writers often classified as the Beirut decentrists and "the post-war phase of reconstruction and reconciliation." (The book was printed before another war broke out in Lebanon this summer, and rather famously copies of "Hikayat" had to be ferreted out of a warehouse for Saqi Books in the Dahiyeh that was damaged during Israel's devastating 34-day bombardment). Nadine R. L. Touma's "Red Car," the piece that climaxes in the aforementioned mosque incident, injects the collection with powerful, subversive, poetically rich language. Mai Ghoussoub's "Red Lips," involving the lipstick affair, makes keen use of structure to operate on several textual levels at once, from intimate anecdote to grand philosophy. Patrician Sarrafian Ward's "Voice," about the mysterious young woman who shows up on the doorstep, exhibits a mastery of the short story form - compact, concise and constructed with a deliberate arch from start to finish. Better yet, it's told from the perspective of a man and credibly so, weighting the balance of "Hikayat" and saving it from too much chick-lit fair. Lina Mounzer, one of the younger writers featured in the book, tells her tale from a similar point of view and with comparable skills (Ward has published numerous short stories and a critically acclaimed novel, "The Bullet Collection"), suggesting much promise for things to come. In terms of attitude, "Hikayat" has it in abundance. Hala Alyan's "Painted Reflections" - about a wine-swilling, jet-setting little train wreck who is nursing a hangover at a cafe in the Phoenicia when an explosion rips through a motorcade passing nearby - has a few of the choice elements of a Bret Easton Ellis novel, though Alyan has yet to achieve the American writer's pickled nastiness. More fully realized and triumphant is Zeina B. Ghandour's masterful, uproarious and sassy "Omega: Definitions," crafted of interlocking and accumulating one-liners that have to be read whole. To single out any segment from Ghandour's text for quotation would deplete the strength of her voice. All that said, the selections from Lebanon's writers of literary heft tend to fall a bit flat. For some quality Hanan al-Shaykh, re-read "The Story of Zahra" instead. For better Hoda Barakat, check out any paragraph in any of her novels. Still, what "Hikayat" has, and what it opens with, is an excerpt by Layla Baalbaki, one of the most explosive figures in Lebanon's literary history whose work is almost impossible to find in English translation. Baalbaki published her first novel, "Ana Ahya" ("I Live"), in 1958, followed by "Al-Aliha al-Mamsukha" ("The Disfigured Gods") in 1960 and the short story collection "A Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon" in 1964. For her bold and brazen treatment of sexual themes - and, it has been argued, the political undercurrent in her work that challenged and threatened to destabilize not only male hegemony but a ruling order based on feudalism and corruption - she was hauled before the courts and charged with "corrupting" public morality. Surprising, then, is the interiority and nuance of her story here - an abstract, fragmented text about a man and a woman who wake up in bed together at dawn in an unnamed city. The turbulent argument that follows cuts to the core of a relationship in which all is under constant negotiation and independence is checked at every word spoken or left unsaid. It's a rare piece in that it captures a woman's complementary seduction and self-loathing without resorting to so-called feminine (read: soft) language. It's also a rare piece in that it leaves readers wanting to find more of her work. "Hikayat: Short Stories by Lebanese Women," edited by Roseanne Saad Khalaf, is available now from Telegram Books
