Nadine Ltaif’s Ce que vous ne lirez pas
Born in Cairo, Nadine Ltaif grew up in Lebanon and moved to Montreal, Québec, in 1980 during the Lebanese Civil War. Her work is located at the crossroads between the geography of the Middle East and that of North America, classical Greek and Roman mythology and the urgent problems of our time. I argue in this chapter that Ltaif’s poetry participates in what Lise Gauvin has called, with reference to Québec’s tense linguistic reality, les “littératures de l’intranquillité” (the literatures of disquiet).1 She borrows this term from Ferdinand Pessoa, a writer who struggled incessantly to harmonize his multiple selves in The Book of Disquiet (1914), a kaleidoscopic work that Pessoa left unfinished. According to Gauvin, in a context such as that of Québec, language is never an object that the author possesses once and for all, but rather a constant challenge, a preoccupation, a matter causing permanent anxiety.2 A polyglot and translator like Pessoa, Ltaif confirms this condition of linguistic irresolution in “Écrire ou vivre l’échange entre les langues” (Writing or living the exchange between languages) and explains: “Arabic remains the unconscious of my text: the rhythm that structures the sentence, the musical composition of the poem. It’s like singing an Arabic language in French.”3
Reflecting on the historically tense relationship between language, literature, and social change in Québec, Louise Dupré underlines that literary works in Québec have often mirrored, and at times even anticipated, societal change.4 Poetry, in particular, has often been traversed by seismic shocks that have erupted in spectacular ways at precise historical moments producing social and political change. The 1960s and 1970s, in particular, were a period of political turbulence and national literary revival for Québec, culminating with the 1970 October crisis and the proclamation by the prime minister Pierre Eliot Trudeau of a state of emergency. Two years earlier, in 1968, the poetic manifesto “Speak White” had been publicly recited by Michèle Lalonde. This was a politically charged poem in which the speaker sarcastically condemned the racist taunt “Speak White,” which was hurled at people in Québec who chose to speak publicly in French and who considered themselves “the white Negroes of America” (Negrès Blancs d’Amérique).5 As Smaro Kamboureli notes, the multicultural agenda followed by the Canadian government in the 1980s in reaction to these events favored the emergence of a body of texts written by authors belonging to different Native and ethnic backgrounds.6 This was also the case of Québec. As Susan Ireland and Patrice J. Proulx observe, “The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the explosion of Québécois literature written in French by authors of immigrant origins.”7
The beginning of Ltaif’s work as a poet dates back precisely to those tumultuous years. In 1987, Ltaif published her first poetry collection, Les Métamorphoses d’Ishtar, later translated into English as The Metamorphoses of Ishtar by poet and translator John Mikhail Asfour (2011). In 1991, Entre les fleuves, finalist for the Émile Nelligan prize, was released, followed four years later by Élégies du Levant (1995) and in 1999 by Les livres des dunes (1999). Ten years later, Ltaif published Ce que vous ne lirez pas (2010), a poetry collection that represents the fulcrum of this chapter.8
Ltaif’s poetry, as I hope to show, is deeply lyrical and intimate; the tone is mournful and the language evocative. This is in line with a more general trend in the contemporary poetry of Québec written by women. As Laurent Mailhot and Pierre Nepveu note, the 1980s witnessed a reorientation of women poets from the public toward the intimate sphere in the attempt to offer “une expérience subjective du monde.”9 Ltaif’s voice is deeply humane and affected by loss; in that sense, it shares a strange commonality with other contemporary poets in Québec such as, among others, Monique Bosco (to which the collection is dedicated) and Mona Latif Ghattas.10
Ltaif’s artistic project stimulates a re-vision of traditional binaries, such as Christianity and Islam, East and West, local and global, and a transition from antithesis to entanglement. Her speaker is precariously located “dans l’entre-deux,” within a temporal, geographical, and existential in-between condition.11 It is precisely this condition of in-betweenness, I suggest, that grants her the experience of a “morte-vivante” (living dead) who is “en deuil perpetuel” (in perpetual mourning) but also capable of regeneration.12 In her poetry, the painful memory of a violent and traumatic past still haunts the present, and the speaker-voyager takes on the role of seer, dissenter, admonisher. The journey in her case becomes a quest for truth and is strictly bound to an activity of self-reflection and self-questioning.
Far from idealizing the past and reinforcing existing divisions, Ltaif takes audacious steps on a tightrope stretched taut between continents, cultures, and faiths not only to raise awareness on intercultural relations and convergences but also on the horror of cultural and religious antagonism. In her search for poise, lightness, and sharpness, she proves to be a skilled funambulist.
Drawing on Pierre Nepveu’s L’Ecologie du Réel, Elizabeth Dahab claims that within the poetry of Québec “the notions of exile/madness, alienation, and a sense of loss, as well as the feeling of an absent or incomplete country, were already quite prevalent.”13 Ltaif’s collection revisits these themes, seeing them through the filter of her personal story. The memory of the Lebanese Civil War, in particular, is a ghostly presence that looms over the entire collection and haunts the speaker as she wanders through the streets of Seville, New Delhi, Montreal, and Beirut.
Ltaif favors a subjective and mournful view to conflicts rather than an objective, documentary approach, developing a narrative based on affects such as vulnerability and grief and on the regenerative force of memory. Historical excavation in her collection is blended with mythical and phantasmagorical elements, since the poet is well aware of the impossibility of reconstructing the events faithfully and of documenting what happened precisely.14 There is no remedy to the material destructions and human devastations that took place in wartime. This is why the poet makes recourse to the imagination to fill in those gaps and lacunae.15
The collection Ce que vous ne lirez pas (What you will not read) is divided into six sections; three of them illustrate journeys that the poet made to Andalusia, India, and Lebanon.16 The first poem that opens the section “Exil Andalous, Espagne Novembre 2006” (Andalusian Exile, Spain November 2006) is “Guernica.” Here, the speaker reflects on the tangible traces left by the Spanish Civil War on the topography of Madrid, moving intermittently between past and present, the Spanish Civil War and her own tourist wanderings across the Spanish capital. The contemplation of Pablo Picasso’s famous painting triggers in the speaker a process of self-reflection and in the urban landscape a metamorphosis from touristic hub to landing-place for refugees:
Guernica
Toutes les rues
où nous sommes passées
hier: Fuencarral Atocha
Anton Martin
près de laquelle nous logeons
avaient été bombardées.
Dans le musée Reina Sofia
la métamorphose du tabeleau
Guernica.
Là où la violence
espagnole
s’est étalée
dans son ultime cruauté.
Des rues de la capitale
des métros
remplis de réfugiés.17
All the streets
we walked down
yesterday: Fuencarral Atocha
Anton Martin
close to where we spend the night
had been bombed.
In the Reina Sofia Museum
the metamorphosis of the painting
Guernica.
There where Spanish violence
has unfolded
in its extreme brutality.
Streets of the capital
subways
filled with refugees.
Picasso’s black-and-white mural-sized oil painting Guernica, representing the aerial bombardments carried out by the Italian Fascist Aviazione Legionari and the Nazi German Luftwaffe against the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, triggers the transformation of Madrid from holiday destination to devastated city. As Hisseine Faradj rightly notes, in Picasso’s painting, symbols denoting beauty and survival—a hand holding a flower in the foreground and another clinging to a kerosene lamp—are represented in close proximity to a horse in agony and a group of dismembered corpses.18 These incongruous juxtapositions bring the artistic practice of the Cubist painter in relation to Ltaif’s poetic credo that “écrire c’est peindre la vie / dans sa laideur / et sa beauté” (writing means painting life / in all its ugliness / and beauty).19
The poet returns to the idea that history is a complex tangle of beauty and horror in “Giralda.” As the speaker climbs to the top of the Cathedral’s bell tower in Seville, she is pulled back in time and reflects on the hatred and vainglory that this religious building simultaneously displays and hides. Originally erected during the reign of the Almohad dynasty in the twelfth century as the minaret for the Great Mosque of Seville, the Giralda was later transformed into the bell tower of the Cathedral of Santa Maria after the expulsion of the Jews decreed by Ferdinand and Isabella de Castilla in 1492 and the subsequent eviction of the Moriscos signed by King Philip III of Spain in 1609.20 As María Rosa Menocal notes, the politics of persecution, expulsion, and cultural epuration pursued by the new rulers happened in clear contrast to a long history of intercultural and interfaith coexistence marked by “flagrant contradictions” that had characterized the province of al-Andalus for over seven hundred years.21 This was a time, as Menocal notes, “when Jews, Christians, Muslims lived side by side . . . despite their intractable differences and enduring hostilities.”22
In “Giralda,” Ltaif evokes the sectarian divisions and conflicts that left a visible mark on the urban landscape; in “Séville (Giralda 2)” she further reads the tower as the unequivocal symbol of the cultural purge that took place at the expenses of Muslims:
A tower
and some walls
that separate cultures
between the sumptuous cathedral
irremediably crashing
under the weight of its catholicity
and the Arab tower
with its wiped out script
in Old Seville
in Veracruz
—some crimes
could remain
unpunished.23
While not denying that the story of al-Andalus is also one of coexistence, survival, and exceptional cultural flourishing and mixture, Ltaif refuses here to reproduce the myth of a multifaith utopia, highlighting the religious antagonism and brutal violence that also marked that history.24
As Eric Calderwood has clearly shown, the periodical “re-discoveries” of al-Andalus are emblematic of the ways in which culture has operated in conjunction with colonial power and of the risks and dangers embedded in the political use of memory and the instrumental reappropriation of crucial historical moments by political forces. In the nineteenth century, for instance, Washington Irving joined other Romantic Orientalists and described the splendor of the ruins of the Alhambra, spreading a fascination for anything Oriental, which—as Calderwood claims—opened the way to the colonial conquest.25 More than a century later, in the 1940s and 1950s, General Franco retrieved the memory of al-Andalus to reinforce his image as the protector of religion and as a supporter of Islam against the Communists.26 Besides having been periodically revisited for political ends, the story of al-Andalus, as Menocal has demonstrated, is also emblematic of the many ways in which myths of origin and national mythologies, such as the story of the Cid and of the Battle of Poitiers with roots in the history of the medieval province under Muslim rule, have been manipulated politically to foster national unity and spread the belief that national histories and literatures are internally homogeneous and were born out of the clash with other civilizations.27
Ltaif’s journey to the historical province of al-Andalus ends with the poem “San Sebastián.” This time the speaker is traveling on a plane taking her from Spain back to North America. The speaker identifies herself with Saint Sebastian, a mythical figure and a Christian martyr, thus blurring the boundaries separating reality and myth, life and death, historical account and popular religious creed. The figure of San Sebastián in this poem mirrors the in-between condition of the speaker as being caught between two “worlds”:
San Sebastián
Martyr
J’étais sur un cheval
Je combattais les Maures
Le cheval encore vivant
Moi le poitrail transpercé
d’une lance
Pégase m’emmène
dans l’au-delà
C’est un avion
qui me transporte
vers le Nouveau Monde.28
Saint Sebastian
Martyr
I was on a horse
I was fighting the Moors
The horse still alive
my chest pierced
by a lance
Pegasus leads me away
in the afterworld
It’s a plane
carrying me
to the New World.
Ltaif intermixes here Greek mythology, Christian hagiography, historical reconstruction, and her own imagination, representing the speaker fighting against “the Moors” and being rescued by a Pegasus. Life and death, survival and annihilation, reality and myth blur in this poem thanks to the figures of Saint Sebastian—a protector against the plague, according to the popular creed, which had revived earlier Greek and Roman myths—and that of the Pegasus. The association of the New World with an otherworldly dimension further confounds clear-cut categories separating a plane trip from a spiritual journey, life from resurrection. It is precisely this constant blurring of sharp divisions that complicates Ltaif’s writing and renders it unique. Her work is located at the crossroads of secular and religious dimensions, ancient and modern times, opposite cardinal points. This intricate tangle will become clearer in the following section, as we move further east, toward India.
In the section “Elles devaient être neuf pour avoir la force de l’éléphant, Inde 16 janvier 2006” (They had to be nine to have the strength of the elephant, India January 16, 2006), Ltaif writes about her journey to India and addresses a set of gender concerns by engaging once again in historical excavation and subjective reconstruction.
The poem celebrates the stylistic openness of Islamic art and the capacity of Islamic rulers in India to reshape local cultural elements promiscuously. The speaker looks with wonder at some human-made ‘ajā’ib, such as the Jami Masjid, the mosque in New Delhi that was built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58) and became the largest mosque in India at the time of its construction,29 and the majestic palaces of Rajaput, in Northern India, an area from which some of the stories of The Thousand and One Nights originated and then traveled to Europe via Persia, the Abbasid caliphate, and Egypt.30 What stupefies the speaker is not only the massive size of the building but the fusion of cultural elements in their rich ornamentation. The speaker’s appreciation of the aesthetic beauty of the buildings, however, cannot be separated from an ethical judgment. During the visit to one of the royal palaces, in particular, some dreadful details begin to emerge. As she wanders through the rooms, the speaker has the impression of being followed by a spectral body, whose vision evokes many other female figures of the ancient times:
At times voiceless at times
the philosopher Sappho
at times dancer of the Temple
Ishtar the sacred prostitute
or Greek cariatyde
A comrade follows me
I meet her in different places
At times mother
at times sister.31
The mysterious woman mentioned in these lines follows the speaker as she advances physically in the palace and bounces back temporally. We witness the convergence in this ghostly figure of other women, who have been sexually exploited or oppressed.32 From the sacred temple of Innana/Ishtar in ancient Babylon, readers are catapulted into the palace of a Rajpute prince (Maharaja) in twelfth-century India. As the speaker drifts through the rooms of this palace, where the women were kept imprisoned, it is her own exile that resonates with theirs:
Yamouna had no wish to be chosen
by the Maharajah to join his harem
She sticks to Radika and her other sisters
They are nine and they will have the strength of the elephant
to fight the injustice
. . .
In their golden cages
they live an exile.33
The speaker is shocked by the sudden realization that the palace she is visiting is not simply a touristic attraction but was in fact a place of confinement and torment for the women held captive there. The ghastly sighs she hears confirm her dreadful impression.
As she leaves the palace and wanders off into the streets of an unknown Indian city, the speaker is hit by the view of yet another female figure, this time a young, veiled bride who uncovers her face in front of her eyes. This act of unveiling leaves the speaker deeply unsettled:
I am surprised
how to understand
this offering
this desire to unveil oneself
in front of us who come
from the West?34
This time, the speaker no longer identifies with the female figure that stands in front of her but with a more general “nous,” a collectivity that is said to be coming from the West. The speaker’s unraveling of what she perceives to be yet another Indian “mystery” continues as follows:
Peut-être voulait-elle qu’on transporte son image avec nous en Occident
pour qu’elle exhale un parfum de liberté
Car elle sait qu’ailleurs
la liberté existe
pour elle aussi
Je tente encore
d’essayer de comprendre
mon malaise face
à ce don du visage
de la jeune mariée
toute orange
voilée.35
Perhaps she wanted us to carry her image over to the
West
for it to exhale a fragrance of freedom
For she knows that elsewhere
freedom exists
even for her
I’m still trying
to understand
my unease vis-à-vis
the gift of her face
of this young bride
all orange
veiled
The unease expressed by the speaker in these lines derives from her interpretation of the woman’s act of unveiling as an invocation for help. The speaker perceives the woman’s appeal and her own incapacity to intervene and liberate her as troublesome.
Overall, in the collection, Ltaif situates gender issues in a global context and in a historical frame. Her reflection on gender oppression and sexual exploitation stretches from ancient Mesopotamia to today’s India. Still, despite her sensitivity, when addressing gender oppression, the poet appears to remain entrapped in the East/West divide. Her portrait of the Indian maharani, for instance, is still soaked with the harem fantasy typical of nineteenth-century Orientalist writers, such as Gerard de Nerval and Gustave Flaubert, who portrayed women as wrapped up in veils and relegated to a secluded space.36 As Marilyn Booth has convincingly shown, the term “harem” has multiple meanings, and its understanding has changed over time and across geographical locations.37 While, in the previous poems, Ltaif represented the East and the West as intimately interrelated although at times conflicting, when addressing gender concerns the two appear to be at the antipodes. It follows that the speaker finds herself located in an uncomfortable position because caught between the two. Ltaif’s representation of the Indian bride, who uncovers her face in a spectacular way, is particularly problematic, since it reproduces the colonial/imperial representation of veiling as the visible sign of the oppression of women and of unveiling as a precondition for their emancipation.38 Despite these ambivalences, Ltaif’s poems raise interesting points on the tense relationship between secularism and religion, gender oppression and women’s self-determination, Islam and the so-called principle of laïcité, which has exacerbated the debate on the Muslim veil, particularly in France.39 Eventually, Ltaif’s poems appear to anticipate the travel of that heated controversy from France to Québec, where an anti-Muslim ban on face coverings was approved in 2017, six years after France became the first European country to impose a ban on full-face covering.
In the section “Square Saint-Louis,” Ltaif’s attention switches back to Québec. In “Acrobate du matin,” for instance, the speaker identifies herself with an acrobat, who struggles hard to find a precarious balance and to skillfully control her body, as she walks along a wire stretched above urban zones of exclusion and marginalization.40 What puts her balance at risk in one single morning is the shocking view of a homeless person in the city’s public park and the news of a man aged twenty-one, who committed suicide. As in the case of Rawi Hage’s gloomy novel Cockroach (2008), Ltaif’s poems are reminders that the immigrant contact zones of Montreal have not been always treated as pure conviviality and that the Canadian metropolis is no mythic al-Andalus.41
In “Fourmilière” (Anthill), in particular, the speaker observes passersby and compares them to industrious ants and mechanical automates, performing a series of repetitive operations while being afflicted by the weight of an unknown crime. The poem echoes Georges Abou-Hsab’s “Rue St. Catherine. 20 September 1997; 18h38,” in which Montreal is once again outlined as a “crepuscular city / crucified anonymous.”42 A similar sinister atmosphere can also be found in “Anthill”:
Il y a le poids la lourdeur du crime
que nos enfants n’ont pas commis
que nous-même n’avons pas commis
un mal qui n’a pas connu sa rédemption
et qui pleure
de siècle en siècle
un pardon non exaucé
en cette ville du Yom kippour.
There is the weight the burden of the crime
that our children did not commit
that we ourselves did not commit
an evil that has not known its redemption
and that implores
century after century
a forgiveness unrealized
in this Yom Kippur city.
The most solemn religious fast of the Jewish year—Yom Kippur—transcends its strict sectarian boundaries in this poem, since the atonement and repentance invoked by the Jewish believers during this festivity spreads over to include all passersby, who need to be forgiven for the wrongs inherited by their ancestors.
Historical wrongs and the blame but also forgetfulness that follows them link the cities of Montreal and Beirut in unexpected ways. In the section “. . . Et autre voyages” (. . . And other journeys), the speaker abandons the Nordic city of Montreal and travels South to the Mediterranean, engaging in the impossible task of circumscribing Beirut in a few lines.43 The poet outlines the city as gleaming in daylight and scintillating at night, while its religions cannibalize each other silently. A Phoenix that has arisen from its ashes many times, Beirut appears to be jeopardized by the treacherous residues of the civil war, the “muffled grudges” that, like a highly inflammable substance, can set the city on fire at any time.
A stroll across the downtown, in particular, prompts the speaker to excavate the traumatic history of the civil war and to capture in a snapshot the few tangible traces left by the war on the urban landscape:
Centre-ville
Je photographie seule, lors de ma déambulation brûlante sous le soleil.
Les vieilles maisons d’Achrafiyé. Et puis, deux immeubles encore criblés de balles. Des passoires restées pour mémoire de l’horreur. Enfin, Lui, le centre-ville, nouveau, astiqué. Je place dans mon cadre une mosquée et une église.
J’essaie toujours de me placer sous cet angle. L’horloge de l’Etoile. Des souks et Le Petit Café. Le soir: ce sera le narguilé qui fume de partout.
Difficile de faire le point dans tout ce méli-mélo historique.
Culturel. Multiconfessionnel. Pourtant je me sens appartenir encore à toutes ces différences. C’est une chance de pouvoir revenir sur place comme on retourne à son ancienne vie.44
Downtown
I take photos all by myself, during a stroll under the burning sun.
The old houses of Ashrafiyah. And then, two buildings still riddled with bullets. Colanders standing to commemorate the horror. Finally, Him, the downtown, in a new guise, glossy. I place in my frame a mosque and a church.
I always try to put myself in this angle. The clock of Nadjma square. Some souks and Le Petit Café. In the evening: it will be the narghile that smokes everywhere.
How difficult it is to take stock of all this historical mishmash.
Cultural. Multifaith. Quite surprisingly, I feel to belong to all these differences still. It’s a real luck being able to come back here as one returns to her early life.
By navigating Beirut’s most contested urban space—the Burj or downtown area—the speaker retrieves the city’s precarious topography divided along ethnic lines, which was razed first by bombardments and later by bulldozers.45 The poet sketches here an intimate portrait of the city center, refusing to support either a nostalgic and idealized reconstruction of it as an interethnic and interfaith utopia or a neglectful and profit-oriented developmental plan, as advertised by the private real estate company Solidère with the slogan “Beirut—An Ancient City for the Future.”46 Indeed, as Adrienne Fricke notes, “by providing a sanitized and safe vision of a happy, prosperous past, the Solidère architects are producing a nostalgia whose commercial and tourist value is as significant as it is repressive of more personal, troubled memories.”47
In “Downtown,” Ltaif acknowledges and mourns the material and human losses caused by the war, thus competing with the state-sponsored amnesia and the narratives of progress and profit circulated by real estate agents and businesspeople. For Ltaif, the downtown is not “a cleared-out blankness” invoking with force a reconstruction plan,48 but a wounded urban fabric haunted by painful memories, spectral buildings, and an incommensurable void.49
No other city exemplifies the paradoxical condition of lyrical beauty and brutal reality better than Tyre, a town south of Beirut that had been a major Phoenician port but also a city periodically under siege.50 Ruled by the Assyrians and the Achaemenian kings of Persia, Tyre was conquered after a seven-month siege by Alexander the Great in 332, who completely destroyed the mainland portion of the town and massacred or sold into slavery its inhabitants. The town was later destroyed again by the Mamluks in 1291 and, more recently, bombarded several times during Israeli attacks in Southern Lebanon. One should note that this town, which few today would be able to locate on a map, became renowned during antiquity for the “highly desirable and expensive” purple dye that was extracted from a shellfish and exported by the Phoenicians first to Carthage and later to Rome, where it became a symbol of power, prestige, and wealth.51 We need to excavate Tyre’s rich and multilayered history to understand fully Ltaif’s mournful representation of this postapocalyptic city and her firm stance on nonviolence, as epitomized by the following lines:
But suddenly Tyre calls me and obsesses me
It is empty
It is emptied of its inhabitants
It’s a dead city
They have all fled the enemy bombs.52
The sudden memory of Tyre functions for the speaker as an epiphany, as she suddenly realizes that the city with its ghostly silence and empty streets is both a reminder of past sieges and an admonishment for the future. The sense of weariness expressed by the speaker is particularly evident in the following lines, where she laments having spent most of her life watching men fight against each other:
On passe des vies
à regarder se battre
les hommes.
Je ne suis pas là
alors que je prépare
un guacamole
Ma tête s’est envolée
elle se trouve au Liban
alors que les avions
survolent la région
et se préparent à lancer
des bombes.
Les faibles bruits de la rue Clark
sont amplifiés dans ma tête
et j’écoute les bombardements
de l’autre côté du monde.53
We spend our lives
watching men
fight against each other.
I am not t/here
as I prepare
a guacamole
My head has flown away
it is in Lebanon
as airplanes
fly over the region
and prepare to launch
their bombs.
The hushed noises of Clark Street
are amplified in my head
as I listen to the shelling
on the other side of the world.
Even if physically distant from the conflict, the speaker in this poem feels emotionally involved and deeply affected by the news that report of bombardments in Southern Lebanon. And yet the hushed noises of the rue Clark in Montréal are deafening only for the speaker, an indirect sign of the general indifference to the plight of the people in Lebanon.
Reflecting on the relationship between crisis and memory in Lebanon, Andreas Pflitsch and Angelika Neuwirth have noted the following: “One may even state that virtually all the Lebanese literature written during and after the civil war is a work of processing memory, predominantly with a de-mythisizing, integrative objective.”54 I see Ltaif’s poetry as contributing to this type of project, one that uses memory to defy the brutality of violence and the cruelty of oblivion.
The poet’s emphasis on memory is not new in the literary panorama of Lebanon, even less in that of France and Québec. Yet Ltaif’s tireless historical excavation and accurate reconstruction of historical facts and places takes on an unexpected and original look in the Québécois context, since it offers a precious counterpoint to the widespread and indistinct Québécois statement “je me souviens.” Indeed, as Dahab notes:
the Québec motto, je me souviens (I remember), also used on Québec issued license plates, a motto that pertains to the multiple heritage of Québec, has evolved, according to Québécois noted historian Yvan Lamonde, into an intransitive aphorism that has forgotten what it should be remembering in the first place, thus becoming strictly self-referential: reminding one to remember (that which one has forgotten).55
Ltaif’s sharp use of memory is different from the self-referential and vague Québécois motto mentioned by Dahab; her act of remembrance is lucid, precise, and sympathetic. It further distances her from a French canonical figure like Marcel Proust, the pioneer of a rather self-absorbed and ephemeral type of memory. In his monumental novel In Search of Lost Time, the aristocratic narrator involuntarily recovers the forgotten memories of his childhood years, the moment he dips a small madeleine—a national symbol of France—in a cup of tea. By contrast, in Ltaif’s case, the speaker’s memory is not activated by a quintessentially French sponge cake but by some disturbing noises coming from afar, that the speaker hears as she is preparing a Mexican, transnational dip: a guacamole. More important, the memories she retrieves are not of family comfort and bedtime habits but of urban destructions and human devastations. The faint noises heard by the speaker in Montreal resonate with Tyre’s bombardments that no one hears, bringing back to life a familiar childhood landscape: that of war-torn Beirut. This spontaneously resurgent memory with lasting effects echoes Andrée Chedid’s personal account reported by Francine Bordelau, according to which, whenever she heard a horn, no matter what city she was in, the sound would immediately bring her back to the streets of Cairo during her childhood years. As she states: “It is also the landscape of my childhood, this landscape that impresses one to death. So when I hear a horn in any corner of the world, all the streets of Cairo suddenly come up again.”56
Organized at the MAXXI Museum in Rome in 2018, the exposition Home Beirut: Sounding the Neighbors while celebrating the cultural effervescence and sonic vitality of Beirut also reminded visitors of the deafening sounds of its bombs. Most of the visual works displayed in the museum’s rooms echoed the hushed voices and moral outcry that follow unacknowledged atrocities and the (loaded) silence that Ltaif’s collection so aptly captures and reverberates.57 The Rome exposition highlighted in particular Beirut’s baffling condition as a producer of world-renowned poignant melodies as well as a reverberator of global detonations. In the curators’ own words: “Beirut is a unique musical instrument that, oscillating between deafening explosions and romantic songs, constantly expresses the cacophony of the world. More precisely, it is a home resonating with the outcries of its neighbors, near and far.”58 Fouad Elkhoury’s installation “Le plus beau jour” (The most beautiful day), in which gorgeous photographs are projected on two white bedsheets lightly moved by a cooling fan, epitomizes Beirut’s pure splendor while also indirectly hinting at its bursting fury. Its fascinating soundtrack interrupted by the feverish lines of Etel Adnan’s “To Be in a Time of War” captures at best the contradictions, tensions, and breaks that make up Beirut particularly, and the contemporary world more generally.59
Ltaif’s poetic imaginary is populated with a plurality of myths, ghostly figures, and themes that span from North America to the Middle East and further east. A swarming Canadian metropolis with its zones of exclusion functions as counterpoint to the spectral downtown of the Lebanese capital, marketed alternatively as touristic attraction, archeological site, ultramodern and economically exclusive hub.60 Ltaif’s poems not only address typical feminist topics from a subjective perspective but also reiterate traditional Québécois themes with a surprising twist. The North, for instance, which traditionally represents in Québécois writing the mythical frontier and the end of the world coincides in Ltaif’s poetry with Lebanon’s South, which is perceived as inaccessible and out of reach. The Mediterranean sea rather than the river St. Laurent is reconfigured in her collection as a mythical gateway to access the larger world and, in Karla Mallette’s own words, as an incredible “engine of cultural transmission.”61
Ltaif’s poems chronicling her journeys eastward evoke the rich Arabic rihla (travelogue) tradition, which “involves travelers whose journeys are replete with references to lands, cities, and countryside.”62 Whereas Ibn Jubayr (d. 1217) and Ibn Battuta (d. 1368) took the pilgrimage to Mecca as the impetus for their travel narratives, Ltaif revisits the traditional Islamic pilgrimage, since in her poems the pilgrimage is not meant for worship but rather for an act of remembrance and mourning.63 Moreover, in opposition to Anne Blunt’s Orientalist travelogue A Pilgrimage to Nejd, which, as Ali Behdad has demonstrated, was heavily edited by her husband, Ltaif’s poetic account of her travels is not interrupted by a masculine voice that gives discursive authority to her narrative.64 The poet is nobody’s “traveling appendage” and her position is not that of a “note taker or sketcher” but of an authoritative writer.65 Nor does Ltaif follow what Behdad has called “the hedonistic tradition in Orientalism that viewed travelling in the Orient as a leisurely stepping out of the familiar reality of European home, a journey that would ease the cultural ennui associated with daily life.”66 In her case, traveling is not meant for sightseeing but for “making sense,” and it is animated by a true desire to know, understand, bear witness to the injustice, and eventually forgive.
Ltaif’s evocative and far-reaching poetics contests monolithic identities and a univocal sense of belonging. This is why her poetry can be included among the postwar Lebanese diasporic texts, which, as Syrine Hout notes, “inscrib[e] a homing desire while simultaneously critiquing discourses of fixed origins.”67 Hers, however, is not a poetics of the “non-lieu” nor a celebration of happy nomadism and hybridization. Her speaker, in other words, travels not lightly, to use Nadje Al-Ali’s apt formulation.68 She is neither a flaneuse—in the tradition of Charles Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century literary rendition: a stroller who lazily criss-crosses the urban center—nor a disengaged idler or simple voyeur. On the contrary, she is a lucid and participative observer who is alert to history and attentive to the time and place she happens to occupy.
Ltaif’s writing is never indifferent to local, national or transnational tragedies, no matter their scale. The poet participates to the private plights and sorrows of a young maharani imprisoned in a twelfth-century Rajaput palace as well as to the tragedy of the inhabitants of Tyre and Guernica forced to flee the bombardment of their city. Hers is a poetry in the tradition traced by Anne-Marie Alonzo, a poetry that is both “ici ou/et ailleurs” (here or/and elsewhere) and that takes on the duty to “tracer sans dire/expliquer: ceci est sable ou neige” (tracing without saying/explaining: this is sand or white snow).69 Finally, in line with the writing of Andrée Chedid, Ltaif’s poetry performs a constant investigation of the human condition in the attempt to escape the risk of “l’étroite peau,” of navel-gazing.70
Clearly, the poet is well aware and feels the weight of French as a language with a high status and a prestigious literary tradition, as was the case long time ago in the two colonial outposts of Québec and Lebanon. Her style is lucid, polished, and restrained, her aesthetics disciplined, formally rigorous, and harmonious. Ltaif’s linguistic craftsmanship, which avoids experimentation and linguistic disruption, may seem incongruous with her poetics of ruins (“la poétique des ruines”), yet responds to her attempt to patiently piece together the fragments of her own identity and of the bombed-out cities she visits or evokes.71 Her poetry takes the form of a solo recital, in which the speaker provides her listeners with a detailed account of things seen, heard, and experienced. Hers is a poetry that well fits Judith Butler’s double formulation of poetry “as evidence and as appeal, in which each word is finally meant for another.”72
The poet, in particular, breaks out of the traditional frame of war and counters its quotidian acceptance through an emphasis on vulnerability, grief, and loss. This is why she vehemently condemns the instrumental use of history and the biased or sanitized reconstruction of historical events that reinforce divisions, hatred, and sectarianism. It is precisely to counter institutional distortions and official silences together with the social forgetfulness engendered by political myopia that she engages in a complex literary project aimed to excavate memory, rescue it from oblivion, and employ it as a tool to redirect the future.73 Instead of commodifying and marketing a glorious past, Ltaif invites readers to carefully cultivate and preserve the memory of historical atrocities so that future wrongs can be avoided. Since she tightly binds together past and present, Ltaif joins Nicole Brossard’s idea that one should not cultivate memory out of a form of nostalgia but to stimulate an observation and critical questioning of the present. In Brossard’s own words: “The photo album does not make me nostalgic, it stimulates me, encourages me to observe and to question the visible and the invisible of our presence in the world. We must maintain our memory as we maintain a garden, with its roots and its life cycle, because in it hides largely what constitutes our living identity.”74 The danger of a recrudescence of the specters of the past in the form of sectarian divisions, ethnic conflict, religious fanaticism, and political amnesia is indeed always lurking. Nor is non-violence an uncontested and untroubled position, as Butler reminds us in this passage: “Non-violence is precisely neither a virtue nor a position and certainly not a set of principles that are to be applied universally. It denotes the mired and conflicted position of a subject who is injured, rageful, disposed to violent retribution and nevertheless struggles against that action (often crafting the rage against itself).”75
Ltaif’s narrative, although bleak and painful, is not disheartening. In “Voilà” (Look here), the poet invites readers to take notice of and be reinvigorated by the sight of a nature that cyclically revives after the long winter: “Look here everything is to start over again, restarting from scratch, the lawn, the grass, the first shoots, the stems, the plants, and so on and on.”76 These, I suggest, are Ltaif’s “āyāt,” the miraculous signs of survival of which she is also a great celebrant.
As I see her, Ltaif’s speaker positions herself in between conflicting temporal plans and geographical dimensions. Hence, the speaker’s private drama of exilic death and diasporic rebirth comes to mirror the urban drama of Beirut itself, whose iconic status has been compressed by Nadja Tuéni in this laconic line: “Elle est mille fois morte, mille fois revécue” (She is thousand times dead, thousand times reborn).77 As in the theater and fiction of her fellow compatriots Wajdi Mouawad and Abla Farhoud, Ltaif uses a self-reflexive mode and a series of nonrealistic strategies—ghostly apparitions, frightful sights, and reemerging visions of the past—to revisit a traumatic history. The past in her poetry still haunts the present, and the survivor feels the obligation to mourn, remember, and bear witness. Her poetic oeuvre, I claim, represents a memo—in Djelal Kadir’s poignant formulation, “a reminder of the past and . . . an advertence for a time to come.”78
All in all, Ltaif’s poetry is a recital that takes the form of a lamentation in the tradition of the Bible and of ancient tragedies. This is why her poetic work is directed to a chorus of planetary size, whose role is to observe, listen to, comment on, and make sense of the main recitation. Besides being a living testament, the collection is also a written dedication. The book is explicitly dedicated to Monique Bosco but also addressed to an anonymous female figure who, as the title and the opening poem make clear, will not be able to read the book, despite having been a source of inspiration and motivation throughout. In the closing poem, the speaker addresses this mysterious woman as follows:
Aujourd’hui chère madame
vous auriez fêté vos quatre-vingts ans
Il est 8h du matin
sur le toit un vent chaud
prépare une douce journée
on annonce 30 degrés
vous n’auriez pas aimé
cette journée
Ceci achève le livre de votre vie
votre corps a décidé de mettre fin
à sa vie matérielle
combien nous allons nous sentir seuls
dans notre quotidien
ce qui reste de vous
votre rire
votre présence
votre absence
et l’été sans vous
et l’automne sans vous
et l’hiver sans vous
le plus dur
sera le printemps
sans vous.79
Today dear lady
you would have turned 80
It is 8 a.m.
and on the roof a warm wind
prepares a sweet day
30 degrees are being announced
you would not have liked
a day like this
This one accomplishes the book of your life
your body decided to put an end
to its material life
how lonesome will we feel
in our daily life
what remains of you
your laugh
your presence
your absence
and summer without you
and autumn without you
and winter without you
the toughest
will be spring
without you.
As is typical of Ltaif’s writing, the closing poem is not cleansed of but soaked with pain; the cultivation of the memory of the speaker’s friend functions once again as a powerful tool to counter an otherwise unbearable loss.
A recognized and acclaimed poet with a thirty-year-long career, Ltaif today rejects the label “migrant writer,” striving instead to be included in the literary canon of the country in which she has been residing for so many years and whose culture she—together with so many other writers, poets, and intellectuals of non-Canadian or mixed descent—has contributed to enrich, diversify, and revitalize. As she poignantly asserts: “There was a time when the label ‘migrant writing’ was needed. It gave us a voice. Yet this same label has ended to lock us in a box from where we find it difficult to get out today.”80
A clear-sighted funambulist, Ltaif has managed to fearlessly cross the global landscape to bring together devastated lands and people. After this arduous tightrope walk, she is now ready to start a new challenge: the dazzling ascent to the canon.