Leaving Beirut: women and the wars within
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mi-Povey doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400400
Leaving Beirut: women and the wars within Mai Ghoussoub; Saqi Books, 2nd edition, 2007, 188p, ISBN 978-0-86356-676-9, US$14.95 (Pbk)
Mai Ghoussoub’s Leaving Beirut is a complex and poignant book. Strewn with references ranging from al-Mutannabi to Farewell My Concubine to Bataille, it is an exploration of the possibilities for coexistence and life after violence. Reissued after the author’s unexpected death in February 2007 with a forward by British writer Maggie Gee, Leaving Beirut is as relevant and powerful today as it was when originally published in 1998. Traversing continents and eras, Ghoussoub’s reflections echo loudly across the disintegrating political situation in Lebanon, the devastations of Iraq and Palestine, and other reverberations of violence around the world. The book opens with a phone call from Beirut. The narrator, a woman living in Paris, hangs up without speaking. The voice on the line is that of her former lover, reviews of books about war
feminist review 88 2008
169
a Palestinian comrade and fighter from the refugee camps in Lebanon where she was once a volunteer. It is a voice that represents the civil war, the ‘amputated memories of a torn city that had once been hers’, and its incommensurability with her life in exile. That night, she dreams of Mme Nomy, her teacher at Lycee in Lebanon, to whom most of the book is addressed. Mme Nomy once scolded our protagonist for the desire to take revenge. This lesson remained with her for years to come, and Leaving Beirut takes up the questions it left in its wake. What are the relationships between retribution and justice, heroism and betrayal, honour and responsibility, tolerance and judgment? Does reconciliation require forgiveness; does forgiveness require the burial of memory? Throughout, Ghoussoub asks her questions through a series of intimate portraits, vignettes, and musings, and allows the answers – or rather, the possibilities – to emerge gradually through the choices of her subjects. We meet Fadwa, a woman consumed by the vengeance she enacted over many years on her unfaithful husband, and Kirsten, a consciously self-sacrificing ‘good-hearted Western liberal’ in love with the ‘Third World’ who enacts her revenge on her late husband’s lover by erasing her from the memory of his life. We meet Noha Samman, the ‘fiance´e of the south’ who chose to die for her country in Lebanon, and ‘Saint Flora, the Virgin-Martyr’, who chose to die for her Christianity in Andalusian Spain. And we meet Latifa and Said, both empowered by their participation in the Lebanese civil war. Latifa joined the fighters to escape a life of abuse as a maid, and Ghoussoub depicts her transformation into legendary fighter Umm Ali as far removed from revenge for that abuse: ‘She looked beyond life, instead of looking back into it. She stepped into another reality and had no desire to remember the ugliness that had suffocated her’ (p. 78). Said was a well-liked delivery boy for his father’s grocery store who became a fighter noto
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