Book of Queens Packs in a Century of Levantine Cataclysms

While many contemporary middle-to-upper-class Western writers tend to produce fiction characterized by an insular examination of the hardships of their protagonists, disregarding the political forces that have shaped and continue to shape their lives and times, the the same cannot be said of their contemporaries from Joumana Haddad’s part of the world.

The Book of Queensthe latest novel by the Lebanese writer probably best known to Western readers for two collections of essays, I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman (2010) and its follow-up Superman is an Arab: on God, marriage, machos and other disastrous inventions (2012), is a good example. The Book of Queens includes in its scope the Armenian Genocide, the Palestinian Nakba, the Lebanese Civil War, Lebanon’s intifada against Syrian “tutelage” – as it is called in Arabic – and the (unrelated) descent of Syria in the civil war.

Haddad went to the other extreme; while reading The Book of Queens, one cannot help but think that the constant concern of the author is to pack his story with a century of Levantine cataclysms. Perhaps this impinges on character development, especially since the focus is on the protagonists’ reactions – as provocative as they are – to such events. The women of The Book of Queens are never devoid of free will, but too often it is portrayed as a repression against an existential threat. A greater variety in the challenges that assail them, and even a greater dose of banality, would have done well.

Despite all this, the convergence of the novel’s protagonists and historical paroxysms of violence is explosive and often makes the narrative both suspenseful and emotionally touching. The fact that all the protagonists are women reinforces these qualities because in this story, as in life, when people are caught up in war or oppressed because of their national/ethnic/religious identity, the women and girls among them suffered the same outrages as their men. counterparts – and then some.

But they fight back. And Haddad, long known for her feminism, is keen to demonstrate the suffering, stoicism and resilience of Qayah, Qana, Qadar and Qamar.

The Tale of Qayah, which opens The Book of Queens, some of whose five parts span decades, is arguably the most engrossing of the lot. During the First World War, the Ottoman Empire under Turkish domination, involved in this bloody conflict and suspicious of its Armenian minority in which nationalism and separatism are developing, subjects the ethnic group to genocide. The consequences for the family of little Qayah, Armenians who live in the town of Aintab (now Gaziantep, Turkey), are devastating. As Qayah’s mother, a seamstress by trade named Marine, fondly realizes: “Memories are like morgues: endless rows of drawers that we sometimes reopen to check on our dead.

From the start, Haddad’s narrative is characterized in part by the interjection of the author. This takes the form of often pointless expositions and somewhat lavish observations on the nature of humanity and our struggles, as with “Life requires the skill to start over and over again.” Love too.” The second part adds a momentarily disorienting element to the mix in that Haddad skips the story of Qayah’s daughter, Qana, and dives into that of the latter’s daughter, Qadar.

Nevertheless, Part II, which straddles Lebanon and Syria, includes more than a few memorable elements, including the funniest scene in a book that’s not lacking in humor. When Qadar is proposed by Fouad, a Syrian dentist based in Beirut, she undergoes a procedure in his clinic.

She couldn’t wait to leave her parents’ house, so she immediately said yes. She didn’t say the word. She couldn’t, with her mouth wide open and her tongue completely numb from the heavy anesthesia. She instead squeezed her eyelids shut and that was it.

– The Book of Queens

The third part revolves around Qana (Qadar’s mother). By now the reader has become accustomed to Haddad skipping a generation forward or back. The problem is that the Qana section, which is set in Lebanon – mostly in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s – turns out to be rather anemic, with the author recounting the tragedies of the character’s life too hastily and usually without him. show struggling with them. Yet, by emphasizing how Qana, daughter of Qayah, is “a refugee and a descendant of serial refugees,” Part Three admittedly exposes an important commonality, besides family ties, between the four protagonists of the novel.

The last two sections of The Book of Queens take place in Gaziantep; Part IV focuses on Qamar, while in Part V her mother, Qadar, alarmed by her daughter’s life choices, takes center stage. Together, these twin entries bring the story full circle in more ways than one, but are short and jerky. Indeed, Part V concludes the novel far too abruptly.

The Book of Queens, which Haddad wrote in English, one of the many languages ​​she knows in addition to her native Arabic, is published by Interlink (full disclosure: Interlink published my novel three years ago). He followed an interesting path to publication. The book first appeared in Arabic and French translations (the Arabic edition is titled The dressmaker’s daughter). This, the original version, includes occasional linguistic infelicities and several poetic formulations.

For this reason, The Book of Queens would have worked better as a collection of short stories. On the one hand, Haddad almost certainly would have felt a more pressing need to complete each character’s saga so that it wasn’t just one episode in a larger narrative about the vicissitudes of ethnonational or sectarian politics in his part of the world. world. This might well have facilitated the crafting of tales marked by, but not subordinated to, the intrusion of tragedy.

Whatever, The book of queens remains commendable and often a poignant channeling of several violent and disruptive historical events in the trajectory of a single Armenian-Arab family. It is a family in which each generation produces at least one stubborn girl-woman, the kind who valiantly tries to lodge a splint in the mouth of this genocide or this Nakba or other civil war bent on devouring her and her loved ones.