Abstract EN:

Out of the conflict that tore their country apart between 1975 and 1991, Lebanese women have written up an astounding record of the Lebanese War. Through the re-appropriation of a hitherto masculine narrative voice, they renew the traditional structures of fiction in order to set down the record of the devastations in their novels. Their stories, fractured words born of the division, are an ode to the deceased and to a destroyed Lebanon. Yet transcending the pain of loss and the anger in the face of ruin, the creative process sublimates the memory of horror and turns it into a design, with the war-tale becoming a novel of apprenticeship in which the experience of violence is a guiding light in the all-encompassing quest for peace. Looking into the past in search of the origin of the social fracture, these novelists sound the Lebanese collective identity in an attempt to find the basis for unity. Through the rewriting of secular myths, they remind us of the fundamental oneness of the human condition while extolling tolerance and brotherhood. Refusing to stay within accepted boundaries, they unveil another struggle, the fight for sexual equality, and preach the emancipation of women within everyday life. By deliberately standing against the traditional image of women in Mediterranean countries, the Lebanese female war novelists erect a new founding couple, built on ideals of equality and sharing, which embodies the hope of a pacified humankind, just as it teaches the acceptance of otherness and the fertile wealth of diversity.