Etel Adnan (1925–2021)

"You didn't see anything, really," Mounir says, "I can't tell you what the desert is. You have to see it. Only, you women, you'll never see it. You have to strike out on your own, find your own trail with nothing but a map and compass to really see it. You, you'll never be able to do that."

The man speaking is a Christian Lebanese from a rich family and he's talking about the Syrian desert to a company of male and female friends, all Christian. The men are arrogant machos preening in front of show more the despised female sex. They are in Beirut in 1975, they are modern, they are better than the retrograde Muslims, and better than the Syrians. Mounir and his friends Tony, Pierre, Fouad travel to Syria and Turkey to hunt birds--actually simply kill them. There is no capture, no using of the carcasses, they just drop as many birds out of the sky as they can manage.

When the war breaks out in April, after the neofascist Christian Phalange massacres a bus of Palestinian refugees, Mounir and his male friends take to dropping Palestinians, Muslims, and dissident Christians with the same easy cruelty, the same unconcern for life.

" They dreamed of a Christianity with helmets and boots, riding its horses into the clash of arms, spearing Moslem foot-soldiers like so many St. Georges with so many dragons."

But Adnan sees behind the lying banners of a war of religion.

"The Crusade which I always thought was impossible has, in fact, taken place. But it's not really religious. It's part of a larger Crusade directed against the poor. They bomb the underprivileged quarters because they consider the poor to be vermin they think will eat them. They fight to block the tide of those who have lost everything, or those who never had anything, and have nothing to lose. They have turned those among them who were poor against the poor of "the others". They have perverted Charity at the heart of its root. Jerusalem is the great absent. That city, founded a few thousand years ago by the Canaanites, their ancestors, where Christ died and rose--they've never been there. They don't plan to go. The spiritual Jerusalem is dead, in their consanguineous marriage, and under the weight of their hatred."

The Phalangists capture a Christian woman who had spent years assisting Palestinian refugees, Marie Rose. Mounir knows her, they went to high school together and at sixteen were each other's first love.

"I don't consider the Palestinians an enemy. They belong to the same ancestral heritage the Christian party does. They are really our brothers."
"Do you know that they yell Allahu Akbar at the moment of assault?"
"And the crosses that you wear, aren't they also a sign of allegiance to the same God, and therefore also a kind of battle-cry?"
"Their presence in our country has been a constant provocation."
"Because they were on vulnerable ground. Someone killed their poets when you were off hunting. Someone killed their political leaders in their sleep, while you were off driving around like wildmen on the mountain roads mimicking a Monte Carlo auto rally or the Italian Grand Prix. Someone bombed their camps while you were out dancing. ..."

Mounir leaves the room as dozens of Phalangists file in to rape Marie-Rose one after another, in front of the deaf-mute children in whose school they have set up their interrogation and torture chambers.

"In this superstitious country", Adnan notes, no one takes notice of the disabled, they are forgotten with the blindness of fear.

"She was, they admit, a worthy prey, though they don't consider her a museum piece, real booty, an exemplary catch. She was a woman, an imprudent woman, gone over to the enemy and mixing in politics, which is normally their personal hunting ground. They, the Chabab, had to bring women back to order, in this Orient, at once nomadic and immobile. On the Palestinian side, they dealt with crimes similarly. The stakes were different, but the methods were the same.
She made the mistake of venturing into their territory. ...

Mounir, Tony, Fouad, and even Bouna Lias, an orphan who had never known his mother, finding themselves before a woman who can stand up to them, are terrified. She breaks on the territory of their imaginations like a tidal wave. She rouses in their memories the oldest litanies of curses. To them, love is a kind of cannibalism. Feminine symbols tear at them with their claws. For seven thousand years the goddess Isis has given birth without there being a father. Isis in Egypt, Ishtar in Bagdad, Anat in Marrakesh, the Virgin in Beirut. Nothing survives the passing of these divinities: they loved only Power, their Brother or their Son. And you expect Marie-Rose to hold her head up in this procession of terrible women, and find grace in the eyes of the males of this country?" show less

Told in the first person from various perspectives, this short but powerful novel deals with the murder of a teacher during the Lebanese civil war that destroyed Beruit in the 70s. Her "crime" being that, as a Christian, she taught deaf-mutes on the Palestinian side of the line. It is a novel with a lot of anger about the tragedy of useless, arbitrary death, but more than that, it is about the coarsening of minds warped and limited by the seductions of power and violence and soul-deadening show more effects of religious fanaticism that rationalizes any barbarity and precludes any vestige of humanity in consideration of the "other". The writing is tight and the psychology is acute. The only difference between the antagonists is their religious carpaces....otherwise they are the same small, blind fanatics. show less

This is definitely one of the most unique novels I've read this year. Marie Rose is an Arab Christian with facial features that could pass for European, all of which wins her acceptance in a number of Lebanon's tightly knit ethnic and religious communities. When Civil War breaks out in 1975, her humanitarian activities in Palestinian refugee camps inflames fellow Christians, leading to her capture by the army. The book is told from a variety of points of view, but the characters speaking are show more rarely identified overtly. Both the dialogue and exposition are dense with metaphor, allusion and existential debate. The writer adds further layers of complexity by never allowing us to see outside each narrator's narrow point of view, so it's hard to figure out what, if anything, is actually a fact. All of these things demonstrate how dehumanizing and primitive warfare and tribal affiliation truly is.

This is an engaging and thought-provoking book, but don't read it until you're in the mood for something intellectual. At 100 pages, you could swallow it in one sitting but if you want to understand, you'll need to read slowly and possibly more than once. Recommended for readers with a strong interest in the Middle East and readers who can appreciate a book that's more about ideas than characters. show less

"Look at them! These four men set upon that passing bird...She was, they admit, a worthy prey...She was a woman, an independent woman, gone over to the enemy and mixing in politics, which is normally their personal hunting ground. They, the Chabab, had to bring women back to order, in this Orient, at once nomadic and immobile. On the Palestinian side, they dealt with crimes similarly. The stakes were different, but the methods were the same."

This novel takes place during the 1975 civil war show more in Lebanon. Marie Rose is the childhood friend of one of four Christian men who capture her when she ventures into her old Christian neighborhood. She now has a Palestinian partner, and lives in the camps and helps the refugees. The four men must decide whether to release her or kill her.

Each of the four men, and Marie Rose narrates a section of the novel. Is this a war of ethnicity, of religion, of the sexes, of the old ways versus the new ways? These questions are examined in prose that is lyrical and disturbing. This short book is worth a read. show less