Losing a library of one’s own : Ghada Samman’s Beirut Nightmares, feminist rebellion, and world literature -

Abstract

This study investigates the possibility of initiating a discourse about lost private libraries of Arab women writers. It situates this discourse in a larger framework of recent scholarly theorizations, such as B. Venkat Mani’s, about the substantial role of public and national libraries in problematizing academic discourses about the dissemination and circulation of world literature. The purpose of this thesis is to widen the scope of discussion about world literature and libraries to include private libraries of Arab women writers who, at least many of them, suffered from a loss of their cultural and intellectual capital as a result of various reasons, including war. I take Ghada Samman’s (1942-) private library, that was burnt during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), as an example of a contentious site that embodies several elements of cultural and feminist rebellion and resembles, in several ways, the stories of many destroyed private libraries of Arab women writers. I maintain that delving into the details of Samman’s private library as it exists in scattered bibliographic textual information allows us to pose questions about the absence of any discourse about private libraries of Arab women writers and the deficient role of world literature in highlighting the lost knowledge that takes place as a result of the destruction of such libraries. Moreover, this thesis applies a close reading of Samman’s Beirut Nightmares (1976; translated in 1997), a novel that vividly documents the everydayness of the start of the Lebanese civil war in a diary-like fashion and is divided into 206 nightmares recounted by an unnamed protagonist stuck in an apartment next to the Holiday Inn and the Phoenicia Hotel during the infamous ‘Battle of the Hotels.’ I specifically analyze the passages when the protagonist exhibits a complicated relationship with her library. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” I argue that the gendered d