This chapter focuses on three novels: Rashid al-Daif's Taqaniyyāt al-bu's (1989), Elias Khoury's al-Wujūh al-bayḍa' (1977) and Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim's Bayrūt Bayrūt (1984). It centers on ordinary citizens who navigate the city in a fragmentary and disconnected manner. The city speaks through pedestrians who experience a delimited space in the city, subverting the panoramic controlling vision that attempts to know the city in its wholeness. As a result, the city is experienced as an opaque, labyrinthine locale rather than as known and transparent.

In a dangerous and unpredictable locale of wartime in Beirut, the male protagonist of Taqaniyyāt al-bu's develops a problematic relationship with the hostile environment of the city by traversing the streets with utmost vigilance where his itineraries in the city are restricted to brief encounters triggered by a city at war. By walking the streets, the character Hāshim transgresses the structures that thwart his freedoms and force him to hide in the private space.

Unlike Hāshim, Khalil the protagonist of al-Wujūh al-baydā' confronts the city headlong in order to express frustration and incomprehension at a situation where death is meaningless and accountability is no more than an exercise in futility.

In Bayrūt Bayrūt, posters of martyrs, miscellaneous ads, graffiti, cafes, sidewalks, streets, cars, vendors, pedestrians and militiamen constitute the cartography of the city, and it is through these visual and lettered landmarks on the alien streets that the characters map their movements on the streets of a city at war.

Strategies of Navigating the City

While Beirut emerged as the protagonist of the novels discussed thus far, one could say that the subject of Rashid al-Daif's Taqaniyyāt al-bu's (1989) are the strategies of walking a city burdened with war.