Essays and Features

The valley was flooding with apparitions...Silence, followed by a crescendo. A sound that will echo in the valley years later. ("Apparitions")… Radwa Ashour—novelist, educator, human rights activist, politically committed intellectual figure, and critic—opened her 1998 autobiographical novel "Apparitions" (or“Specters”) with this powerful scene. Seventeen years later, on November 30, 2014, Ashour would join those apparitions, her gentle soul forever filling our valley with her inspiration, resistance and writings.

Hanna Batatu, 74, a leading authority on the contemporary Arab world best known for his writings on Iraq and Syria, died June 24, 2000, at his brother’s home in Connecticut after a brief battle with cancer.  He passed away just a few days before American University of Beirut was going to honor him as one of its Millennium Scholars.

This photograph lingers in the consciousness of the viewer. It displays, against a background of dust clouds, an exhausted woman accompanied by two children, fleeing the danger and distress of the bombing. There is something desperately poignant about her expression. Distress and shock mark her state of mind, as some newspapers wrote, but one wonders whether that does full justice to her mental state. She is flanked by her two children…

Lebanon and Algeria: Collective Memory and Cultural Trauma

Wided Khadraoui writes an analysis of two plays, Algerian playwright Slimane Benaissa’s “Les fils de l’amertume” (Sons of Bitterness,) and Lebanese playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s Incendies (Scorched). Both works examine themes of collective memory, repression, and cultural trauma instigated by violent upheavals within Algeria and Lebanon. This leads to a fascinating discussion of the role that these issues have played in stifling “Arab Spring” movements in these two countries.

Taking the form of a dialog between a terrorist, Farid, and journalist, Youcef, “Les fils de l’amertume” explores the overlapping influences of religious fundamentalism and nationalism in Algeria. The play also addresses the fall-out from a devastating civil war, economic crisis, and a multitude of social injustices. Even Algeria’s attempts to control violence creates unforeseen consequences.

Unlike Benaissa’s play. Mouawad’s Incendies, never reveals the setting, although that anonymous land obviously represents Lebanon. The plot centers on the theme of hiding and demystifying secrets. Twins Janine and Simon return to the Middle East to fulfill their dying mother’s wish, after sending off two letters from her, one to the father they thought had died before their births, and one to the brother they never knew existed. As shocking as these events may be, many more surprises await discovery. Like other survivors of war hoping to make sense of what has happened, the twins will encounter “…a truth that is like a green fruit that has never ripened,” but which, with exposure, finally become digestible, if not palatable. Students, scholars, and those who appreciate intelligent, well-written and reasoned drama, will not want to miss this beautifully crafted analysis of two unique and timely plays.