Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Roots and Routes
- Part I Homesickness and Sickness of Home
- Part II Trauma Narratives: The Scars of War
- Part III Playing with Fire at Home and Abroad
- Part IV Exile versus Repatriation
- 6 Cockroach and A Good Land
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Cockroach and A Good Land
from Part IV - Exile versus Repatriation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Roots and Routes
- Part I Homesickness and Sickness of Home
- Part II Trauma Narratives: The Scars of War
- Part III Playing with Fire at Home and Abroad
- Part IV Exile versus Repatriation
- 6 Cockroach and A Good Land
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I have chosen to juxtapose Nada Awar Jarrar's third novel, A Good Land, with Rawi Hage's second, Cockroach, because of their treatments of the respective themes of repatriation/homecoming and expatriation/exile, and the corresponding portrayals of lives spent, in the present, entirely in or outside of Lebanon. The epigram preceding A Good Land is a telling quotation from Austrian psychiatrist, existential analyst and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl:
For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.
The unnamed protagonist in Cockroach, convinced he never had a purpose in life to begin with and feeling neglected by the universe to the point of attempting suicide, finally finds the appropriate moment to infuse exilic existence with a meaning relative to him, one that brings him as close as possible to ‘being at home’. By contrast, Layla, in A Good Land, returns to Lebanon for the purpose of physically being at home and resuming a life interrupted by war and long years spent abroad in anticipation of this moment.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Post-War Anglophone Lebanese FictionHome Matters in the Diaspora, pp. 159 - 198Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2012