“How can a French text speak Arabic?” (x), asks Michelle Hartman, who argues that the novels she has studied, although written in French, use “representations of the Arabic language” (23) to challenge gender roles and hierarchies within Lebanese society and most particularly in its French-speaking elites. The introduction of this well-written and well-conceived book undertakes a thorough review of concepts that will be used further on, so thorough, in fact, that hearing the author's voice is sometimes somewhat difficult (this is, however, amended by the end of the introduction).
The following concepts stand out: world literature (with references to Franco Moretti, David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, and Aamir Mufti, among others), novelization, polyglossia and polyphony (as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin), foreignization (of translation—as discussed by Lawrence Venuti), postcolonial studies and the ways in which the empire writes back (with reference to Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith, and Helen Tiffin's work), relexification (a concept proposed by Chantal Zabus in The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel, Rodopi, 2007), and radical bilingualism (as defined by Abdelkébir Khatibi).
Throughout the book, close readings lead to in-depth discussions and reexaminations of concepts. The nine novels are studied in three distinct parts organized both chronologically and thematically. In the first part, “Gendered Interference,” Amy Kher's Salma et son Village (Salma and Her Village), Eveline Bustros's Sous la Baguette du Coudrier (Under the Divining Rod), and Andrée Chedid's Le Sommeil Délivré (From Sleep Unbound) are mainly read as ethnographic novels on the mandate and on a newly-independent Lebanon, written from an insider-outsider perspective examining the “use of footnotes and translated Arabic words and expressions” (63). Relexification is taken here as “the literal translation of Arabic expressions into unidiomatic, antiquated or awkward-sounding French” (54). While these three novels delve into customs and traditions of a somewhat idealized Lebanon, as presented by writers belonging to social and intellectual elites, it is difficult to separate them from their French counterparts of the time: novels of the 1930s, written by the likes of Jean Giono or Marcel Pagnol, that tried to rehabilitate the local or the regional, and expressed a form of nostalgia linked to a desire to resist modernization and social change. In many cases, the ideological hides behind the ethnographical.
The second part, “Arabic as Feminist Punctuation,” focuses on the civil war period and Vénus Khoury-Ghata's Le Fils Empaillé (The Son Stuffed with Straw), Evelyne Accad's Coquelicot du Massacre (A Poppy from the Massacre—strangely not yet translated in English, as noted on page 174) and Dominique Eddé's Lettre Posthume (A Posthumous Letter). Significant redefinitions of class and gender relations brought about by the long civil war, along with essential issues such as identity politics, sexuality and food culture (from coffee to tabbouleh), are examined in these novels through linguistic lenses (see, for instance, the discussion on the insertion of the Arabic expression taqburni (honey, darling), literally “may you bury me” (203)), and concepts such as polyglossia. Hartman uses Bakhtin's concept of billingsgate, which she defines as “the everyday and even vulgar language of the streets or marketplace” (130) to analyze Accad's and Eddé's novels.
The third part, “Writing as Translation,” is on post-war Lebanon, and analyzes in a quite convincing manner three contemporary novels: Leïla Barakat's Sous les Vignes du Pays Druze (Under the Vines in Druze Country), sometimes branded as the “first Francophone Druze novel” (242); Dominique Eddé's Pourquoi Il Fait Si Sombre? (Why Is It So Dark?); and Eddé's Cerf-Volant (Kite). Hartman rightly notes in her excellent introduction to this section that language is “the centerpiece of the French-language postwar novel in Lebanon” (225)—the novels do “create a textual language that reads as translation” (239).
Beyond language, Hartman shows how Eddé's novels challenge (often playfully) all kinds of conventions, be they generic (267), social- or gender-related. In each part, the first chapter gives information on the period studied (the mandate and early independence, civil war, postwar). These introductory chapters could have given more information on Lebanese history and society (the elites’ formation, for instance). It would have been useful to remind the reader how modern Lebanon was formed in 1917–1920, or to discuss differences between the mandate and colonial status, or even briefly to come back to nineteenth-century internal conflicts and external interventions, if only to contextualize and explain the specificity of Lebanese colonial and “postcolonial” history. Also, the comparison between Beirut and Alexandria (41) is relevant in many ways, and could have been developed more.
The French language is associated with elites throughout the book; however, part of the Lebanese middle class speaks French. Hartman could have referred more explicitly to the many publications on French, and education in French, in Lebanon; including statistics (even though these were scarce during the civil war). Close readings are effective and reinforced by a clear, original focus on “paratexts” (footnotes in particular) and (especially) vocabulary—through detailed studies of transliterated familiar or vulgar Arabic expressions, or (for instance) the mixing of French and Arabic in Khoury-Ghata's franbanais. Studying syntax and stylistic choices through a more comprehensive perspective would have benefited the discussion of linguistic aspects.
This is the first time that these novels are presented to the English-speaking public in a monographic form: this innovative work deserves praise and will be useful (including for case studies) to many in the field of Middle Eastern studies and beyond (linguistics; women's studies; so-called Francophone or littérature-monde studies; comparative/world literature; sociology; translation studies, etc.). Further, translating this interdisciplinary book in both Arabic and French seems to be a necessary endeavor, not least because this work clearly challenges lines of criticism that have often avoided questioning categories such as Arab-ness or Francophone-ness.
