Emily Nasrallah recalls a night under heavy bombardment in 1984 during Beirut`s civil war. Without a bomb shelter in their building she and her family were huddled in the corridor of their house. Just outside the door she could hear screaming, a man yelling in pain and the wailing of a woman. In the midst of this panic, Nasrallah sat with pen and paper.
”I wanted to write to see if I could concentrate under these conditions,” said Nasrallah, who now lives in Cairo. ”We had this feeling of grasping the fire, catch it, grasp it. It`s burning. You wanted to carry this feeling to others.”
Before she moved to Egypt, Nasrallah, 61, a novelist, lived through 13 years of the 15-year Lebanese war, through nights in other bomb shelters, isolated from friends and neighbors. She endured the death and emigration of loved ones and the constant fear during moments of peace that the bombing would start again, and the next time would be more deadly than the last. Three times Nasrallah`s home was bombed. In one bombardment during the 1982 Israeli invasion, 30 years of her work was burned.
A Christian, Nasrallah witnessed the slow but constant destruction of a country once revered for its tolerance, heterogeneity, political openess and beauty. The Lebanese civil war pitted neighbor against neighbor, Christian against Muslim and the rich against the poor. It even became embroiled in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
Nasrallah and a group of six other upper- and middle-class women, communicating in English, French and Arabic, sought relief from the war`s horror and isolation through their writing. Miriam Cooke, a professor at Duke University in Durham, N.C., called these women Decentrists because
”physically they were scattered all over a self-destructing city;
intellectually, they moved in separate spheres,” Cooke wrote in her book,
”War`s Other Voices” (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
”As the patriarchal structure was falling apart and the country was collapsing, women were finding a voice,” Cooke said.
While men wrote of revolution, anger, strategy and violence from the center of the war, the Decentrists wrote from the fringes-of loneliness, emigration, emotions behind the gory news broadcasts and the day-to-day events that went on despite the war.
”Our way of life has turned our nightmares into reality,” Nasrallah wrote in her short story ”Yearning.” ”And the two states have merged together with the frequency of bomb-interrupted sleep and heavy shelling. We no longer know dreams from reality; we no longer differentiate between the circle of peaceful, restful sleep and the maze of nightmares.”
A collection of Nasrallah`s short stories from the war, ”A Room Not Her Own” came out in English this year, published in Canada by Gynergy Books. These stories vary between fantasy and reality, between a dead father returning to Earth and a woman hearing of a friend killed by a car bomb just minutes after seeing her.
In one fictionalized story based on fact, ”The Green Bird,” a refugee sits outside his apartment day and night waiting for his son to return in the form of a green bird. An explosion had killed the son, and the father lost his mind while holding the boy`s remains for a night, cradling the body and speaking softly to it.
The war liberated women, Nasrallah said. It gave them more courage and independence. They lived for each day, free from tradition and their elders`
demands.
During the war many middle- and upper-class women helped clothe and house refugees. But now, with the economy suffering, they are forced to concentrate on their own needs, Nasrallah said.
Some Lebanese women are organizing to fight for greater rights in other fields that have traditionally excluded them, she said. Still, it is difficult accomplishing anything right now.
”The war is against them (women activists),” Nasrallah said. ”Go to Lebanon and see the destruction. Nothing is moving in the regular channels.” (Sporadic fighting continues in the south of Lebanon between certain Christian and Muslim forces.)
The country is trying to rebuild, but the economy remains depressed, and the Syrian military and political presence is still great. Phones work intermittently; electricity is rationed, and streets and buildings remain in their ravaged state. Not even traffic lights are working.
Like some of the other Decentrists, Nasrallah was a well-known novelist before the war. Her first novel, ”September Birds” (1962), which won two Lebanese literary awards, uses migrating birds as symbols for the emigration of young men from the country to the city.
Coming from the small southern village of Kefr Zeitoun, Nasrallah is like the novel`s main character, Muna. Both rejected tradition and moved to the city instead of staying behind in the village with the other women, awaiting the men`s return.
After sitting through the top elementary school grade three times in a desperate attempt to continue her schooling, Nasrallah convinced an uncle to finance her studies in Beirut. So at age 12 she left the security of her village for the excitement and challenge of the city.
”I was very eager to learn,” she said. ”In the village I didn`t have anything to read. The Bible was the only book, the only reading, except for pieces of newspaper, which shopkeepers wrapped things in. So I made the best of my four years in high school.”
After high school Nasrallah began writing for the Beirut weekly Al-Sayyad to put herself through the American University in Beirut. This is when she began developing a consciousness of women`s rights.
”I felt a responsibility for the girls in my village, who did not have the chance to get out,” she said. ”That was my first concern, to show women are not free. They are still accepting tradition, accepting the power of their men without saying a word.”
Five years later Nasrallah began writing fiction. Since its publication,
”September Birds” has been reprinted seven times and has been translated into German. Her best-known novel, ”Flight Against Time” (about emigration of the older generation during the war), was published in 1981 and translated into English in 1987. To date she has written and had published six novels and four collections of short stories.
Nasrallah`s writing continues to win acclaim.
”Emily has managed to grasp what is essential, the essential aspects of war,” said Lateefa Al-Zayyat, English literature professor at Cairo`s Ain Shams University. ”She doesn`t deal with war directly. She discusses the results of war. In `Flight Against Time,` for example, she writes of the loneliness and estrangement that emigration brings.”
In 1988 Nasrallah left Lebanon to live with her husband, Phillip, in Cairo. He had left Beirut earlier to start a farming business in poultry and olives. Today she lives in a modern, comfortable apartment with works of Arab artists filling the walls nine floors above the city`s chaos and noise. Weekends are spent at the family farm in the Egyptian desert, 100 miles northwest of Cairo. A wide expanse of green lawn, fruit trees and vegetables, it is a far cry from her days in war-torn Beirut.
But just as Nasrallah never forgot that the girls of her village were denied the opportunities she had had, she is conscious of her privileged status, compared with many other Lebanese.
Even though her house in Lebanon was bombed, at least her family could afford to rebuild it, she said. The war never left them homeless, and her four children were able to leave and attend universities in the West. Her two sons work with their father in the farming business. One daughter is an architect and artist living in Beirut; the other daughter is a medical student at the American University in Beirut.
Like Nasrallah, many of the other Decentrists also have left Lebanon, taking up residence in London, Paris or the United States.
While she is living in Egypt, Nasrallah`s thoughts are still with Lebanon. She is worried about her country, but she remains optimistic.
”I have hope because I believe in the Lebanese people. They have survived a very harsh war. When there was a bombardment and the windows were shattered and the houses were ruined, the next day the people were repairing their windows and rebuilding their houses.
”This is not a hope based on logic,” she said. ”It`s built on intuition. You know writers always rely on their intuition.”
