Suchergebnisse

The aim of this article is to highlight the emergence of a coming-of-age trend in post-war Anglophone Lebanese literature and offer a postcolonial reading of the ways in which it explores the complexities of forming an identity in transnational subjects. Niko by Dimitri Nasrallah and Lifted by the Great Nothing by Karim Dimechkie adapt the form of the Bildungsroman to examine the role that diaspora and trauma play in shaping the identity of their young protagonists, whose self-realization depends on finding the parent they lost as a result of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). By analyzing these novels' spatial and temporal mobility, this article argues that their protagonists' transnational identity prescribes a fluid self which is not fixed to a specific home or to a present, but rather free to move between here and there and then and now.

In the period extending from 1975 to 1990, Lebanon entered a very dark phase in its history, as it became the battlefield of clashing communities and factions. The end of the war invited a willing erasure of fifteen years of violence from the national consciousness of Lebanese people leaving them burdened with the heavy weight of trauma. As the government deliberately refuses to keep the memory of the War alive, the novels written in the postwar period by contemporary immigrant Anglophone Lebanese writers seek to pull the bloody events out of amnesia and offer the Lebanese people the possibility to deal with their trauma publicly by coming face to face with the violence they had to endure.