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Can a reality lived in Arabic be expressed in French? Can a French-language literary work speak Arabic? In
Native Tongue, Stranger Talk Hartman shows how Lebanese women authors use spoken Arabic to disrupt literary French, with sometimes surprising results. Challenging the common claim that these writers express a Francophile or "colonized" consciousness, this book demonstrates how Lebanese women writers actively question the political and cultural meaning of writing in French in Lebanon.
Hartman argues that their innovative language inscribes messages about society into their novels by disrupting class-status hierarchies, narrow ethno-religious identities, and rigid gender roles. Because the languages of these texts reflect the crucial issues of their times,
Native Tongue, Stranger Talk guides the reader through three key periods of Lebanese history: the French Mandate and Early Independence, the Civil War, and the postwar period. Three novels are discussed in each time period, exposing the contours of how the authors "write Arabic in French" to invent new literary languages.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Michelle Hartman is associate professor of Arabic literature at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Canada. She is the author of
Jesus, Joseph and Job: Reading Rescriptings of Religious Figures in Lebanese Women's Fiction.
Zusammenfassung
This is the first study in English of French-language fiction by Lebanese women writers and therefore brings a relatively unknown literary tradition to light.
