Sexual intimacy with his niece becomes Hashem’s peculiar way of returning home. He declares: “After those long years, it seemed that I began to breathe again, and even to touch the fabric of my commitment to family and homeland. I felt I wanted to touch her hands and face and the hem of her dress. Through her I hoped to absorb all my life, both here and in Lebanon” (69).
To overcome the sundering pain spawned by her uncle’s insufferable abuses, Zahra retreats into a sort of sleepwalker’s trance; a cocoon-like state of sensory numbness that muddles temporal coordinates. At one moment, she claims: “Time cheated me” (37). Even time seems to have betrayed her, which eerily echoes Hamlet’s famous “Time is out of joint.” What happens with Hashem triggers another memory of abuse (at the hand of her cousin Kasem) in a game that emulates the structure of language itself wherein each signifier refers to yet another signifier in an endless process of différance: the inherent fragility of language echoes Zahra’s own frangibility.
Her trauma, which is the outcome of the accretion of several acts of betrayal, engenders apathy and silence. She lapses into a condition verging on catatonia: she is always “motionless”, expressionless” and inert, first with her father, then Malek, her uncle Hashem, and later her husband Majed, Hashem’s associate whom she marries in Africa. After she undergoes two abortions, she suffers from a mental breakdown that is partly entailed by her incapacity to act out the panoply of roles traditionally allotted her gender12 or live up to the apotheosised representation Arab men harbour about morally respectable women. When Majed discovers on their wedding night that she is not a virgin, she is transformed in his eyes “from being a quiet, modest girl into an abominable, scheming woman” (86). She fails to match the stereotypical fantasy he has been cradling for so long about what a decent virtuous girl should be like and they become estranged. The strain and “pretense” of her married life reaches such a pitch that Zahra’s psychological state deteriorates even further. She is unable to negotiate the tension generated by the clash between her desire to live for herself and a crushing external reality. So she tumbles into madness which turns into a form of psychic death that is a mandatory step to slough off the false self that has been smothering her: “Women . . . need to ‘die’ to something before a new self can be born . . . Perhaps women . . . need to die to the false system that patriarchy has imposed on them, whatever form it has taken. This is not the same thing as the annihilation of the ego but dying to the false self would necessarily precede the birth of the true self” (Demaris Wehr qtd. in Fido 336-37).
After she forces Majed to grant her a divorce, Zahra goes back to her parents’ house in Lebanon, a country devastated by civil war. At this point in the narrative, we get an illustration of how the personal and the political constantly dovetail and superimpose: Zahra’s pock-marked face and scarred interiority become the constituents of an intimate map of pain and desolation, which is the counterpart of the map of war-torn Lebanon. Zahra’s rended body/spirit acquire a dual significance since they parallel the situation of the mother-land, wrecked by a raging civil war that betrayed the integrity of the nation. The personal realm of Zahra’s quotidian life at her parents’ house, in times of intense bombings, can be subsumed within the framework of a “politics of intimacy” that helps her cope with her trauma: “When I heard that the battles raged fiercely and every front was an inferno, I felt calm. It meant that my perimeters were fixed by these walls . . .”(125). The personal imbricates with the political as the tumult rocking the country paradoxically provides what might pass for purpose and order in Zahra’s life; a situation that culminates into her love affair with the sniper to whom she, at first, offers herself as a distraction to save other people’s lives.
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