Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community (BRAKC) presents:
LITERATURE SYMPOSIUM - Francophone Writing of the Lebanese War
by Dr. Aude Campmas, Dr. Claire Launchbury, and Dr. Helen Vassallo
23 February 2011, 14:00 - 15:30
Birkbeck, University of London, 43 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury
Free entry; open to all
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/brrkc/events.html
***
Le sang des promesses: Liens et lignages dans Incendies de Wajdi Mouawad.
(Please note that this paper will be delivered in French)
"The mother of Jeanne and Simon, Nawal, dies locked into a silence that her children do not understand. The testament she leaves them is a mission, an inquiry: they have to give out two letters, one to their father (whom they believed dead); the other to their brother (whom they never knew they had). From Canada, therefore, begins an Odyssey of the memory to Lebanon. This spatial journey mirrors a journey in time, taken to understand the dramas as yet hidden from a family, from a country; to discover the links that unite and define kinship, communities and above all the individual. Of all the links, the promise is the only one which resists war and family blood-ties: Wajdi Mouawad replaces blood with promises. Using the work of Maurice Blanchot and Hannah Arendt as a starting point, I propose to study how the promise to the other defines the identity of these characters, how this link replaces family ties, and how it is the only link that lets people forgive. The promise is a word-bond: an engagement but also a sign to decipher."
Aude Campmas
***
Le futur de mon temps : Topographies of dwelling and belonging in Francophone writing of the Lebanese war
"Beirut and the experience of its destruction through the course of the Lebanese war took on a figurative resonance that challenges the contingency of time in the selection of woman's writing under analysis in this paper. While divisive factions fundamentally undermined communities, and identities were reconfigured through political and social expediency, the desire to chronicle and to document through an imaginary that encompasses the archive (Nadia Tuéni), dwelling places (Andrée Chedid) and the everyday (Fathia Saoudi) brought together mixed consciousnesses of Lebanese topographies of memory. Negotiating a literary space within the linguistic, ethnic and religious diversity of the divided city involved reassessment of belonging, carving out a space and finding a voice while the very security of a personal dwelling place was under persistent threat. Specifically through examination of the figure of the archive in these texts and how it is situated at the intersection of temporal contingency and the continuity of representation, this paper examines the topographies of the dwelling place in accounts of war-ravaged Beirut."
Claire Launchbury
***
‘Nous n'avions ni communauté ni confession': The alienation of ‘liberation' in Darina Al-Joundi's Le Jour où Nina Simone a cessé de chanter
"This paper examines the 2008 text Le Jour où Nina Simone a cessé de chanter, written by Lebanese author Darina Al-Joundi. Le Jour où Nina Simone a cessé de chanter recounts Al-Joundi's true story of growing up in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, with a father who was a ‘laïc fervent' and who tried to raise his daughters to be ‘free women' in a male-dominated society torn apart by religion and conflict. However, because of this freedom that her father wanted to give her, Al-Joundi was later to experience the most fundamental kind of restriction and servitude – public revilement and imprisonment in a mental asylum.
Using contemporary theories of alienation and otherness, the paper will examine the ways in which the paternal desire to ‘liberate' his daughters (which, in his mind, equates to raising them to be without religion and to be sexually adventurous) actually leaves them vulnerable. The paper will focus on the tension between the kinship offered by the immediate family unit, a notorious Beirut family setting itself up against all major factions during the civil war, and the lack of kinship that Darina experiences as her father is able to protect her less and less from those who object to her way of life.
The analysis will consider how, as Darina attempts to negotiate her way through war-torn Beirut in accordance with the lessons taught to her by her father, her attempts at finding or creating a community end in exclusion, abuse, and even death. Then the conclusion will propose that when her father dies, a ‘negative' sense of community is generated by the resulting insistence that she become a submissive woman, and the apparent impossibility of existing in any ‘other' way."
Helen Vassallo
Contact:
Dr Andrew Asibong & Dr Nathalie Wourm
Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community
Birkbeck, University of London
43 Gordon Square
London WC1H OPD
England
Email: brrkc@sllc.bbk.ac.uk
Visit the website at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/brrkc/
Find BRACK on Facebook:http://www.facebook.com/pages/Birkbeck-Research-in-Aesthetics-of-Kinship-and-Community/114266815250688?v=wall