Private Narratives as Alternative Spaces of Memory Work and Identity Reconstruction in Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game and Hilal Chouman’s Limbo Beirut

Abstract

Since the military phase of the Lebanese civil war ended, no collective memory has been established, only sectarian narratives. This lack of a proper representation of the atrocities of the war left the victims with no space to work through their traumas. In this thesis, I read the two post-war novels, De Niro’s Game (2006) by Rawi Hage and Limbo Beirut (2016) by Hilal Chouman – whose events are 26 years apart yet in terms of publication, a decade apart – as an attempt at reconstructing a memory of the war that turns away from political agendas to focus on the psychological experiences of individuals, marking a socio-political shift that Aleida Assmann terms “the ethical turn’’. To demonstrate this, I reframe my comparative analysis within Zeina Tarraf’s concept of turning inward that describes the recent shift, in Arab countries, from commitment literature or adab al iltizam to more relatable and subjective narratives of wars. Using this framework, I uncovered the personal narratives that the characters developed in lieu of the contested collective ones, and analyzed the ways in which they serve as alternative spaces of memory and identity work. My study of private alternative war narratives across post-war Lebanese literature contributes to the very reconstruction of this alternative cultural memory of the war.