Native Tongue, Stranger Talk: The Arabic and French Literary Landscapes of Lebanon

by Michelle Hartman

Overview

Can a reality lived in Arabic be expressed in French? Can a French-language
literary work speak Arabic? In Native Tongue, Stranger Talk Hartman
shows how Lebanese women authors use spoken Arabic to disrupt literary
French, with sometimes surprising results. Challenging the common claim
that these writers express a Francophile or "colonized" consciousness, this
book demonstrates how Lebanese women writers actively question the political
and cultural meaning of writing in French in Lebanon. Hartman argues
that their innovative language inscribes messages about society into their
novels by disrupting class-status hierarchies, narrow ethno-religious identities,
and rigid gender roles. Because the languages of these texts reflect the
crucial issues of their times, Native Tongue, Stranger Talk guides the reader
through three key periods of Lebanese history: the French Mandate and
Early Independence, the Civil War, and the postwar period. Three novels
are discussed in each time period, exposing the contours of how the authors
"write Arabic in French" to invent new literary languages.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815652694
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	06/30/2014
Series:	Middle East Studies Beyond Dominant Paradigms
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Michelle Hartman is associate professor of Arabic literature at the Institute of Islamic
Studies, McGill University.

Table of Contents

Preface: Capturing the Music of Arabic ix

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction: The Politics of Language and the Languages of Poetics 1

Part 1 Gendered Interference

1 Gendered Interference: French Expressions of Arabic in the Mandate and Early Independence Novel 37

2 Jamil and Salma: The "Son of a Family" and a Peasant Girl 57

3 "May You Bury Me": Dying for Honor in Sous la baguette du coudrier 82

4 Language and Liberation in a Woman's Novel of the 1950s: Andrée Chedid's Le sommeil délivré 105

Part 2 Arabic as Feminist Punctuation

5 Arabic as Feminist Punctuation in the Novel of the Lebanese Civil War 129

6 Like Soap Bubbles on Our Tongue: French, Arabic, and "Franbanais" in Vénus Khoury-Ghata's Le fils empaillé 150

7 Lebanon Is Tomorrow's Sun: Feminist Nationalism in Coquelicot du massacre ? 173

8 Can a French Novel Speak Arabic?: Dominique Eddé's Lettre posthume 197

Part 3 Writing as Translation

9 Writing as Translation: Women's Fictions of Postwar Lebanon 225

10 A Francophone Druze Novel?: Postwar Ethnography and (Anti)Sectarianism in Sous les vignes du pays Druze 242

11 The Tightening Corset of French: Writing the Postwar in Pourquoi il fait si sombre? 266

12 The Arabic Language Leaked into It: Dominque Eddé's Cerf-Volant 287

Conclusion: Like a Garlic Dish without the Garlic? 311

Bibliography 321

Index 345

Editorial Reviews

For students and scholars of Francophone Lebanese literature, the primary strength of this book lies in the excellent footnotes and comprehensive bibliography that include sources in Arabic, French, and English.

Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

Introduces several little-known but intriguing novelists to English-language readers, and it supplies helpful historical contexts for their work.

International Journal of Middle East Studies

Native Tongue, Stranger Talk challenges the dichotomy of native and foreign, and serves as a resource for scholars of Lebanon, literature, and language.

Middle East Journal

The book is a tour-de-force about the creative modalities by which the works under study mount resistances to the colonial language through textured languages, producing new forms of understanding the so-called and heatedly contested title of 'Francophone novel' outside of its normative colonial gaze.

Journal of the Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World - Yasmine Khayyat