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No Sacred Cow Unbutchered


A Review of Najwa Barakat, Oh, Salaam! Trans. Luke Leafgren. Interlink, 2015. 

Once upon a time, Beirut was a famously cosmopolitan capital, its cafes and clubs overflowing with culture in multiple languages. Riven and demolished by decades of sectarian conflict, civil war, and the predations of its neighbors, the city and its country, Lebanon, have joined the list of failing states whose citizens struggle to pick up the pieces and live in peace.

“Peace,” of course, is the meaning of “Salaam,” and it is hard not to read Najwa Barakat’s novel in allegorical terms as her character, Salaam, is courted, exploited, and brutalized in the aftermath of war. The allegorical register, though, is only one among those audible here, and by focusing the novel through the amoral id of Luqman, a bomb-maker during the war who finds himself broke and on the make in peacetime, Barakat cranks up the satirical volume as well. One thing these two narrative modes have in common is the thwarting of readers’ emotional identification with characters (who are representative types rather than fully rounded and realistically psychologized agents) and the denial of the easy emotional catharsis that too often accompanies stories set in similarly war-torn locales. Barakat doesn’t care how moved you are by the awfulness of life in postwar Lebanon; she doesn’t need your sympathy, and neither, this novel suggests, do her fellow citizens. Instead, we have simply to see the wretchedness that we -- through the geopolitical machinations of our states and the neglect or ignorance in our attitudes toward the world beyond our borders -- have wrought.

Luqman the bomb-maker is one of a trio brought together by the war. He joins forces with his sniper buddy, Najeeb, to run a rat-extermination business (Najeeb has come out of the state mental hospital with the notebooks of a mad scientist who had developed advanced chemical and biological methods for exterminating rats). The third member of their group, a torturer nicknamed the Albino, is dead, but he is a lingering presence for the survivors.

Salaam is a hub around which the group and the narrative are organized. Orphaned during the war, she owns her family’s apartment. Informally engaged to the Albino before his death, she takes care of the torturer’s mother and controls the old woman’s money (this enables her to finance the extermination business). Employed by the telephone exchange, she puts up with institutional sexism and chicanery, and she literally nurses her brother, Saleem, who languishes in the state mental hospital as a case of war trauma and arrested development. Barakat makes the invitation to allegorical reading subtly but insistently as Salaam suffers not only the loss of family and fiancé, and not only the whining, cadging presence of Luqman, but also the sadistic ministrations of Najeeb:

"[Luqman] discovered the matter of her relationship with Najeeb later on, when he started noticing marks on her face and other traces left behind from the time she spent with Najeeb. At first, she would hide these signs of her newfound love with stylish scarves tied around her neck, with pants, which she seldom used to wear, or with long-sleeve shirts. When Luqman hinted he knew full well what was going on behind his back and that he wasn’t opposed, but on the contrary was delighted with how things were turning out between her and Najeeb, she relaxed and began taking pride indisplaying the marks she bore, showing them off as badges of honor and decisive proof of her promotion in the ranks of love and relationships."

Salaam/Peace nurtures everyone who comes to her and, in return, takes one abuse after another.

In short, Barakat leaves no sacred cow unbutchered and no shibboleth undesecrated, skewering Lebanese state and civil society in twenty-two short chapters and just over two hundred pages. Luke Leafgren’s translation is crisp and lively, content to undersell, as Barakat does, the allegorical and satirical notes so that they can open on their own in the reader’s understanding. The novel’s episodic plot allows Barakat to expose postwar Lebanon to scathing satiric attention. The day begins with a “festival” to which Luqman does not want to be late, the hanging of two criminals. Barakat narrates the event as radio commentary delivered by an anchorwoman on whom Luqman then performs oral sex. The extermination company is propelled at once by Luqman’s willingness to import rats to the apartments of the wealthy and by Najeeb’s obsessive search for the ultimate extermination solution. Luqman scores a way out of Beirut when he meets Shireen, a Lebanese-born archaeologist brought up in Paris during the fighting and temporarily living in Beirut while working on a dig. Masterfully playing her, Luqman gets the well-off and well-placed young woman to fall in love with him and, when local politics kill the dig, to provide him with a visa so that he can join her in France. “We’ve lost our fight in the civil war,” he tells his penis, which he calls “Partner,” “yet we have won something much harder: the decisive campaign in our war with peace.”

But not so. As it turns out, Najeeb contracts the plague from his experiments and dies, Salaam medicates Saleem to keep him quiet (he has been kicked out of the hospital and she is hiding from Najeeb so that she does not lose her lover) and accidentally overdoses him so that he dies. In her grief, she falls into delusions that both are still alive and only sleeping, and when, after his final visit to her, Luqman goes upstairs to the apartment of the Albino’s mother to steal from her the money he is sure Salaam has hidden there, he is brained and tied up by the old woman, who, in her own delusion, thinks he is the son she killed when she accidentally witnessed him at work in his wartime profession, torturing the innocent. Pshew.

All’s terrible that ends terribly.


Michael Thurston is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at Smith College and author of The Underworld in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).  

            


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