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Loneliness far from home
Ghada Samman, is a prolific writer who has produced more than forty works in a variety of genres, including journalism, poetry, short stories, and romance. She was born in 1942, in Damascus, Syria. Candid, innovative and provocative, Samman is highly respected in the Arab world, although sometimes controversial. Several of her works have been translated from Arabic into English, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, German, Japanese and Farsi.
Her mother, also a writer, died when she was a child and she grew up under the care of her father, a university professor, rector of Damascus University and cabinet minister. She claims that it was her father who fostered within her an appreciation for both hard work and learning.
As a young woman, she chose to pursue a bachelor's degree in English literature at Damascus University rather than medicine, as her father had hoped. She then obtained an MA from the American University of Beirut, where she wrote her thesis on the theater of the absurd.
She then went to London to do a doctorate, but ended up abandoning the project. Her father died while she was in London. During that crucial year of 1966, Samman also lost her job as a journalist for a Lebanese newspaper and was sentenced in absentia to three months in prison for leaving Syria without official permission, but the sentence was revoked under a general pardon by the Syrian government. At this time Samman was completely alone, an unusual position for a young Arab woman of her social class.
Samman willingly traded the personal freedom he experienced in the West for a sense of belonging in the Arab world. She chose to reside in Beirut because, according to her, it allowed a degree of freedom within the Arab world and embody the battle between enlightenment and oppression. During the war in Lebanon, she resided in Paris for about fifteen years with her husband and son. Today, she maintains two homes, one in Beirut and one in Paris.
The Arab Spring and the wars in Lebanon and Syria
Between 1975 and 1990, Lebanon went through a bloody civil war, involving Christians from the Falangist Party, Muslims from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israeli Jews. The conflict emanated from the deterioration of the Lebanese state and the gathering of militias that provided security where the state could not. These militias were formed along the following communal lines:
Lebanese Front (LF), led by the Falangists (or Falange) - represented Maronite Christian clans whose leaders had dominated the traditional elite of the country's sociopolitical fabric. Maronites are part of a Catholic religious order that recognizes the Pope as the highest leadership of the church. The institution originated in Lebanon, through Saint Maron, a hermit who lived until around the year 410 and whose preaching resulted in many conversions;
Lebanese National Movement (LNM) - coalition of secular leftists and Sunni Muslims sympathetic to Arab nationalism. Sunni Muslims are the members of the group who recognized Abu Bakr as their successor and follow the precepts of the Islamic religion according to the Quran and Sharia. They also base their beliefs on the Suna, a sacred document that narrates the experiences lived by the Prophet Muhammad. The word Sunni comes from Ahl al-Sunna or the people of tradition. Tradition in this case refers to practices based on precedents or accounts of the actions of the Prophet Muhammad and those close to him. For this group, religion and the State should be a single force. Their religious leader is called the Caliph. Sunnis consider themselves the orthodox and traditionalist branch of Islam;
Amal (Hope) – also an acronym for the Afwāj al-Muqāwamah al-Lubnāniyyah (Lebanese Resistance Detachments) movement, comprising Shia populists; and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which represented Lebanon's large Palestinian refugee population. Shia is a sect of Islam, which means supporters of Ali. Shia consider Ali Bin Abi Talib (cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad) to be the legitimate successor to Islamic authority. The Shiite sect considers the Sunnis, who took over leadership of the Muslim community, after the death of Muhammad, illegitimate. Their religious leader is called the Imam.
War in Syria
The Middle East and North Africa region was shaken by the Arab Spring, a wave of protests against the government, which began on December 17, 2010 and ended in mid-2012. In some cases, such as Libya, the top leader of the country was removed. The same did not happen in Syria. The War in Syria began in 2011, when there were a series of protests against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. The war took a heavy toll on the civilian population, estimated at more than 24 million people in its first five years.
The war was triggered after allegations of corruption revealed by WikiLeaks. In March 2011, protests were held south of Derra in favor of democracy. The population revolted against the arrest of teenagers who wrote revolutionary words on the walls of a school. In response to the protest, the government ordered security forces to open fire on protesters, causing several deaths. Outraged by the repression, protesters demanded the resignation of President Bashar al-Assad.
The opposition armed itself and fought against the government security forces. Brigades formed by rebels began to control cities, countryside and villages, supported by Western countries such as the United States, France and Canada, among others.
Both sides in the conflict have imposed a blockade of food from civilians and the interruption or limitation of access to water. On several occasions, humanitarian forces were prevented from entering the conflict zone.
The Islamic State took advantage of the country's fragility and set out to conquer important cities in Syrian territory. Survivors reported that harsh punishments such as beatings, gang rapes, public executions and mutilations were imposed on those who did not accept their rules.
After Russia's entry in 2015, Assad's government began to win the conflict. In March 2020, shortly before the pandemic worsened, an agreement was reached between the government and democratic protesters with the help of Russia and Iran.
Features of Samman's writing
Her writing is also characterized by the same impulse for individual freedom and free expression of thought that guides his personal life. Working as a journalist, she explored aspects of Lebanese life that were largely ignored by ideas, attitudes or activities considered normal or conventional, namely the plight of the poor in neglected areas of northern and southern Lebanon. In 1977, Samman established her own publishing house so as not to be subject to social or literary conventions, thus, she was able to publish her own books without editorial interference.
Samman's work displays a boldness that defies all restrictions. Although her writing sometimes seems repetitive, her interesting mix of surrealism and verisimilitude, along with her command of the Arabic language, allow her to be simultaneously poetic and political in her prose writing.
Magic realism
Magical realism or fantastic realism is a literary aspect that, on a language level, is characterized by the constant use of symbols and metaphors and, on a thematic level, by the occurrence of plots in which magical and bizarre things happen to the characters.
In The Square Moon, a collection of supernatural tales set in realistic contexts, her ability to appropriate non-Western literary traditions for specifically Arabic contexts is best illustrated by her employment of an Arabic type of magical realism. In it, Samman explores the difficulties and internal contradictions faced by several Arab immigrants living in Europe.
Far from their origins, the characters encounter liberation for women, but also racism, displacement and alienation. As they struggle with questions of identity, loyalty, separation, and personal freedom, they also discover the tenacious hold of old traditions over their lives that appear in various forms, some positive, some negative.
Through symbolism and allegory, Samman addresses sensitive social and political issues that could be very dangerous or less effective if confronted directly. A distinctive feature of his work is his symbolic use of animals to present his vision of the human condition.
Symbolic use of animals
In his book Beirut '75, the turtle and the performing monkey are the only figures who react with fear to the intimidating sound of Israeli fighter jets as they break the sound barrier above Beirut. The animals' instinctive and natural reactions provide relief from the Lebanese people's indifference in ignoring both the portentous warnings of threatening planes and the worsening socioeconomic and political situation.
The turtle, who plays the shadow of Yasmina, one of the main characters, is able to “come out of his shell” and find “wings” to fly out the window of Yasmina’s apartment in search of freedom.
Unlike the turtle, and more like the characters themselves, the colorful fish hanging from a vendor's stall in Beirut's popular market district can only escape their transparent prisons through a desperate attempt at death.
Samman makes this point poignantly when Farah, Yasmina's counterpart, compares herself to the fish she realizes is “trapped inside a glass jar” and she only witnesses the bag containing the fish open and “spilling its contents onto the sidewalk.” .
Beauty and horror store
Perhaps the strongest symbolic use of animals in Samman's works is found in Beirut Nightmares. The pet store, which the writer, narrator and protagonist repeatedly visits both in her dreams and awake, starts to function as an extensive political allegory, recreating in microcosm the socioeconomic and class conditions in Lebanon at the beginning of the war.
The difference in the physical appearance of the entrance and back of the pet shop exposes the superficial, hypocritical, and exploitative aspects of pre-war Lebanon. The entrance to the store is reserved for customers. It presents a beautiful, modern, clean, and urban environment. The protagonist sneaks a glimpse into the back of the store which reveals the cramped, dirty, and horrible conditions in which the store owner keeps the animals.
Just like the poor and oppressed Lebanese masses, animals remain in horrific conditions to ensure the commercial success of the animal owner, whose wealth depends not only on the mistreatment of his animals, but also on the presentation of a convincingly modern and progressive model that can be observed at the store entrance.
Confusion in the face of freedom
The use of the symbolic is not only firmly anchored in concrete socio-political and historical conditions. He is also present in the world of fantasy and the surreal. This style, as several critics have noted, is similar to the fantastic realism developed by important Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende.
As Samman reveals in Register: I'm not an Arab Woman, the ghosts in The Square Moon are of a different variety than those in Gothic or Hollywood cinema. They are not limited to palaces and the rich, nor do they wear white sheets and burst into laughter. Instead, they take on modeled forms found in Arabic folk superstitions and literary traditions.
The Parisian swan that bewitches the Arab protagonist of The Swan Genie has specifically Arabic qualities. Nicknamed “Intelligent Hasan” by the protagonist, the swan is reminiscent of her grandmother's tales, Arabic myths and the tower, from The 1001 Nights. Through these means, Samman highlights the ways in which his use of magical realism is specifically Arabic, not only expressing the concerns of this people but also drawing on Arabic literary precedents.
Although the use of the supernatural is most consistent in The Square Moon, it can also be seen at significant moments in each of the three books about the Lebanese civil war. In an eerily prophetic moment in Beirut '75, a minor character, a soothsayer, declares: “I see a lot of pain and I see blood – a lot of blood.”
In apparent fulfillment of the fortune teller's prediction, the nightmares in Beirut Nightmares often take on a supernatural aspect, as the protagonist's flights of fancy blur the distinction between her waking and sleeping states, allowing her to see, hear, and report aspects of Lebanese life. which even the fortune teller in this second book is afraid to utter.
Indeed, the protagonist's insistence on recording and rescuing her manuscript is itself a Schahrazadian move, an attempt to prolong her life by telling politically engaged but fantastic stories in the face of apparently imminent death.
In Laylat al Milyar (The Night of a Billion Dollars), the wizard's mysterious incantations hark back to the witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth, but they also find their source in a specifically Arabic superstition and the use of magic still practiced in certain parts of the Arab world . His magic, along with his own psychological breakdown at the end of the novel, allows for the symbolic representation of the various characters' inner feelings and desires.
Negative reviews
Unconventional both in his personal life and in his literary works, Samman is not intimidated by the negative reviews that some of his works have suffered. She portrays “taboo” topics such as political corruption and female sexuality and exposes everything she considers hypocritical, exploitative or repressive in Arab societies. To this end, she creates strong but flawed characters in specifically Arab sociocultural locales, and relies heavily on stream of consciousness, symbolism, allegory, and fantasy in much of her work.
Escape from the clutches of your unbearable reality
The implementation of the surreal in all of these works is successful thanks to the use of the nightmare motif. Beirut '75 ends with a series of nightmares for Farah, which seem to function as a release from her madness, which is itself an escape from the grip of her unbearable reality. In a highly absurd gesture that combines introspection with self-affirmation, the novel ends with Farah replacing the poster announcing the entrance to Beirut with a sign that reads: Hospital for the mentally ill.
Beirut Nightmares picks up where Beirut '75 left off. The title and chapter titles, together with the grotesque comedy, the absurd and the macabre, recreate the nightmarish aspect of the civil war, experienced in a suffocating way by the protagonist narrator in her waking and sleeping states.
The recurring fantastic excursions that are the protagonist's nightmares function as a literary device, allowing variations in the action scenario. Furthermore, they are a forum for political criticism and questioning of diverse topics such as corruption, inequality, the situation of the poor, the role of violence in the revolution and, especially, the relationship between the pen and the gun.
In one of many repetitive Kafkaesque episodes, the absurdity of war is portrayed in the plight of the protagonist's brother whose attempt to escape the confines of his front-line apartment lands him in prison for possession of an illegal weapon.
The final book in the trilogy, Laylat al Milya, reveals how Samman's characters appear to have “fled the nightmares of their homeland to discover the nightmares of exile.” Moving the action from the confines of Beirut to Europe, Samman exposes the ways in which so many Lebanese emigrants manage to recreate, in exile, the same sociopolitical conditions of exploitation that perpetuate the war in Lebanon.
In Beirut'75, the internal madness experienced by Farah triggers the “nightmare” sections of the book. In Beirut Nightmares, the external madness of the war around her traps the protagonist in a nightmarish world of dreams and political reality. In Laylat al Milyar, drug-induced hallucinations evoke a surrealistic world, which in turn reveals the characters' nightmarish real conditions. We see this through the eyes of Khalil, who is coerced into becoming a drug user.
In an almost hallucinatory state, Khalil is taken to a “circus”, where he watches several surrealist “shows”. In one, people live in a cage whose roof drops imperceptibly but safely over its sleeping occupants. When Khalil tries to warn one of them about the impending disaster, the response is: go mind your own business!
In another “show,” poor revolutionaries break into a gilded cage only to replace and then take over the positions of the wealthy occupants in their seats. In this circus world, the police have the role of silencing or expelling anyone who speaks out against the show. Participating women are satisfied with traditional female roles and refuse any alternative to their daily domestic tasks.
The “common man” refuses to take responsibility for his fate, certain that only “what is written” will happen to him. Others fall to their deaths, jumping into a pool that proves to be just a mirage, while onlookers watch them, unwilling to warn them of their misperceptions because they are “of a different religion” than theirs.
It is easy to see how the varied episodes at the circus represent the sad state of Arab, and especially Lebanese, life as Samman sees it. It is a state of forced silence and voluntary surrender, a condition far removed from the glories of Arab civilization as epitomized (and idealized) in the Andalusian Arab past, a time and place in history to which one of the circus' stunted performers allows Khalil to travel in secret in time.
Notes of hope and triumph
Despite their nightmarish atmospheres, Samman's works inevitably end on a hopeful note. Beirut Nightmares ends with the promise of a new life, symbolized by the burning rainbow that the protagonist sees in the Beirut sky after she manages to rescue herself and her manuscript from her apartment.
Laylat al Milyar ends on a similar note of hopeful triumph symbolized by the colorful kite that flies over the Beirut skyline despite the bullets aimed at it and which Khalil spies upon returning to the city with his two sons.
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