Abstract
Maruja Torres, a Spanish journalist and war correspondent for El País, and an expert on the Lebanese wars, introduces her knowledge of Beirut into several of her novels as well as in three autobiographical works. In La amante en guerra (2007), the author provides an autobiographical narrative of her romantic reunion with the Middle East capital during the 2006 war, in which the urban landscape functions as the main character of the story. The narrator’s immersion in a city characterized as one of the most culturally diverse in the world helps her to circumvent a problematic position as a border subject, experienced both in her beloved city and in her native Barcelona. This precarious location as well as her passion for Beirut demands the narrator to engage into a process of “autoexoticization”, that serves to remove the traces of Orientalism expected from a foreign correspondent, replacing it with a less polarizing notion of the Middle East. The narrative encapsulates Torres’s struggle to reconstruct herself as a complete and feminine subject through an act of enunciation that, through the special attention to the Lebanese women’s maternal bodies, the differences among these women and their experiences of hybridity, facilitates the author’s ultimate integration in Beirut.
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Notes
Torres’s novels Hombres de lluvia (2005) and Fácil de matar (2011) are set in Beirut. Mujer en guerra (1999) is an autobiographical text in which Torres includes reflections about her work covering the Lebanon wars. In Diez veces siete: Una chica de barrio nunca se rinde (2014), Torres reiterates her love for Beirut but denies any Orientalism associated with her passion for the city (Diez 166–68).
Beirut functions as a “third space of enunciation” (Bhabha 37), given the absence of a clear divide between the Muslim and Christian worlds. Frontier soldiers, NGO volunteers and war correspondents have left a fixed social structure in order to enter a transitional zone, behaving in a similar fashion than the liminal person in the rite of passage (Turner).
According to Edward Said, Orientalism depends, as a strategy, on the superior position of the Western observer, who might be a scholar, scientist, trader, missionary, soldier (or war correspondent, we might add), who only occupies this position because of a lack of resistance from the Oriental observed (Orientalism 7). The Oriental material is never evaluated by the West, which exhibits a permanent male gaze due to its focus on the Oriental people’s supposed tendency to despotism, exaggerated sensuality, backwardness and feminine penetrability (Orientalism 205–9).
Besides, Torres’s interstitial location as a European journalist and her struggle for integration into the city, parallels her liminal condition in Barcelona due to her precarious Catalan identity (“charnego”) as the daughter of emigrants (Mujer 102).
I follow the distinction between place and space formulated by Yi-Fu Tuan, according to which “Place is security, space in freedom; we are attached to one and long for the other” (Space 3). Other theorists, such as Gaston Bachelard and Henri Lefebvre offer similar definitions of the concept of place, as Tim Cresswell notes, explaining that “there are all spaces which people have made meaningful. They are spaces people are attached to in one way or another. This is the most straightforward and common definition of place—a meaningful location” (3).
Eighteen creeds are officially recognized in Lebanon.
Tomás Alcoverro, the most senior war correspondent in the Middle East, quotes Federico Palomera’s verse “Hay ciudades que tienen nombre de puta exótica”, referring to Beirut (99).
Similar to Revathi Krishanaswamy, Torres invites the reader to reconsider Said’s explanation of the process of feminizing the Orient, since she does not perceive it as a rhetorical monolithic phenomenon that is stable, unchanging, and univalent, as well as natural and, for that reason, unavoidable (2). Said criticizes later depictions of the Middle East culture in which the plurality and differences among the Arabs are eliminated (“Shattered” 410–4).
Torres declares that it is in Beirut where “la mujer escindida que era yo empezó a reunir sus fragmentos” (Mujer 267).
Torres’s definition of her text as a novel coincides with Eakin’s views about autobiographies, which are not so much the reproduction of reality as the invention of the self.
Her emotions towards Beirut go beyond the physical urges to tour the city and extend to her affection to its inhabitants. For Torres, her professional goal is to report the human dimension of the conflict: “Yo cubro Beirut a mi manera, la guerra en su vertiente más cercana. Pongo nombres, doy el perfil humano, trato de convertir las estadísticas en personas con rostro, nombre y emociones propias.” (La amante 84).
On this spot, Torres states that “Para ver bien la postal del recibimiento de Beirut-edificios blancos que destellan en la distancia, pulidos por el sol de mediodía; y la primera dosis de Mediterráneo oriental-hay que detenerse aquí” (La amante 157).
As Ángel Loureiro asserts, the autobiographical subject is never autonomous for it is inscribed under the other’s gaze as a product of power relations with others, who are also registered in the text, and placed under the double subjection of the institutions and its disciplines, and the self-consciousness (44). For Silvia Molloy, the autobiography captures the tension between the self and the other, allowing other voices to be heard (10).
Henry Lefebvre links in The Production of Space, the theory and the praxis in relation of space as well as its mental and social reality (4). For Lefebvre space is socially produced, and urban spaces are culturally constructed as locations where people of different status negotiate with the hegemonic classes through capitalism (375). Similarly, for Manuel Castells, “space is not a ‘reflection of society’, it is society” (4); space is produced by human action and expresses the interests of the dominant class under a specific model of production and development (Castells 4). See Edward Soja, for an overview of the critical work on space articulated by Lefebvre, Foucault, Harvey, and Castells.
Jean Said Makdisi is the author of Beirut Fragments and Teta, Mother and Me.
Torres’s insecurities are not matched by a lack of professional success. To the contrary, she has been the recipient of the most prestigious awards in Spain, both in journalism and in literature.
The Palestinian author questions the common perception of this garment as a symbol of women´s oppression and instead suggests that it might very well signify political protest. As she points out, two women wearing a chador necessary might not share the same perspectives or ideals, nor do two women wearing a bikini (Madkisi, Beirut 145).
The author´s passion for the Mediterranean city facilitates the resolution of inner tensions related to a fragmented femenine subjectivity: “todas las mujeres que hay en mi recibieron el amparo de esta amante lenta y cuidadosa que es Beirut, hasta en su crueldad con aquellos a quienes elige” (La amante 190).
For more about cultural feminism, see, for instance, Mary Daly, Adrianne Rich, or Alice Echols.
Torres claims that “Hamra es nuestro hogar, que solo con acercarnos a sus límites... nos encontramos ya a salvo. Es una condición del alma: Hamra nos protege, creemos, estamos convencidos, Hamra es para mí como en rincón de la máquina de coser del piso en que crecí, y del que me decían-del rincón de la vieja Singer-que durante la guerra nuestra familia se salvó de los bombardeos porque se escondía allí.” (La amante 113–14).
For Bachelard, the house is one of the most powerful means by which the individual integrates thoughts, memories and dreams (6).
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Martínez-Góngora, M. Self and the City in Maruja Torres’s La amante en guerra: Reconstituting Feminine Subjectivity in Beirut. Neophilologus 106, 91–107 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-021-09698-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-021-09698-2