At one point in Syrine Hout's rich analytical work on postwar Anglophone Lebanese literature, she references Elias Khoury on the nature of memory and civil war. Khoury writes, "civil wars can be erased from neither reality nor memory. Instead, they are reborn or reincarnated…if erased from memory, they colonize the subconscious" (151). In many ways, this passage seems to encompass much of what Hout argues in this work-namely that despite the years that have elapsed since the Civil War was officially declared to have ended, Lebanese writers in the diaspora have continued to meditate on the meaning of this event and its profound reshaping of their lives in farflung locations. Put another way, the very fact of its repression or "erasure" in Lebanese society, Hout reminds us, compels artists to construct literary "testimonies" to attest to their experiences of the violence and trauma of the war (202). There is no moving on, at least not yet, for this generation of writers. Hout's work is strong in many regards, though it is terrain that has been covered extensively in other works related to Lebanese literature

No abstract

No abstract

I focus on multilingual usages, specifically code-switching between English and Arabic, in Lebanese American Rabih Alameddine's 1998 novel Koolaids: The Art of War. While the novel portrays English as the emancipatory language of coming out and self-acceptance for gay Lebanese men living in the United States between the late 1970s and mid-1990s, Mohammad, a painter, only comes to terms with his impending demise by reverting to Arabic during the final stages of his losing battle with AIDS. Drawing on findings from psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, translation, and medical/neurological studies, I compare and contrast verbal encounters between Mohammad and various Lebanese and American characters to foreground strategies intended to exclude and/or include certain parties, be they characters or readers. While Arabic words actually employed are few, I argue that implied code-switching and the dynamics of speaker(s), interlocutor(s), setting(s), and context(s) establish links among AIDS, Arabic, art, and acceptance of death; Arabic resurfaces, when Mohammad is on his deathbed, as the language of his childhood and even serves as the bridge toward his “afterlife.” The primary theoretical impacts of my reading are twofold: minimal code-switching does not, as some claim, showcase shallow multilingualism, and a language-minded approach adds a new dimension to the definition of Lebanese (Arab) American literature by focusing on the emotional rather than the national/ethnic facets of the embedded native language.

No abstract