Huda Barakat. Disciples of Passion.

Huda Barakat. Disciples of Passion. Translated by Marilyn Booth. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005, 136 pages. Hardcover $19.95.

Huda Barakat's latest novel to be translated into English, Disciples of Passion, shares some similarities with her two preceding novels, The Tiller of Waters, and The Stone of Laughter. As in her two earlier works, Disciples of Passion features a male narrator at the margins of Lebanese society. In The Tiller of Waters, the protagonist was stuck in Beirut's gutted center unable to escape the barricades, and the sea, surrounding him on all sides.

In The Stone of Laughter, the narrator was a gay man, in his apartment building as the city collapsed around him. In Disciples of Passion, Barakat's narrator is institutionalized in Dayr al-Salib, the country's most infamous mental institution, as the Lebanese civil war rages around him. All three novels are marked by stream-of-consciousness writing, which is heavily introspective, narrated in the voices of protagonists whose inner lives are disrupted by the outside world, especially the fighting that they do not want to, or cannot, participate in. However, to point to a pattern in Barakat's novels is in no ways a claim against the originality of her latest novel, nor its translation by Marilyn Booth. Barakat's return to the theme of isolation and alienation seem to indicate that she has not yet exhausted the creative possibilities and problems of the effects of violence, particularly war, on marginality, masculinity and memory.

Disciples of Passion's narrator is marginalized from society on many levels, which is often conveyed in sequences of different metaphors. He remains anonymous throughout the text, which creates a sense of disorientation in the reader, an inability to become fully familiar with the character while simultaneously privy to his utmost interiority. This narrative distancing is reinforced by the images of division and separation that recur in the text; the separation of the narrator's body and mind, his continual feeling of being outside his own body and of existing on the sidelines of the action that he is ostensibly participating in. The language of the novel reflects this most vividly in the narrator's introspections on his own words, "like many other things, they might well be mine, but they are certainly not parts of me" (76).

These images of internal division, of alienation from himself, also extend outwards from the narrator to his relationships with others. His personal inability to communicate, and commune, with other people, even those closest to him such as his sister, lover and friends increases his isolation, and leads him to feel rejected, which is conveyed through a series of metaphors, the most potent of which is the metaphor of the dung-beetle of the desert, forsaken by God and not allowed into the company of the forest dung-beetles, the external social world. A more ominous sequence of metaphors has the narrator comparing dialogue to premeditated murder, the violence of the image searing through more facile ways of thinking about communication.

The narrator's isolation and introversion is further exacerbated by his physical isolation in the asylum, surrounded by other inmates whom he is incapable of talking to, and medical staff who often misuse their powers. And finally, the circles of division and isolation extend further outwards, the divisions caused by the war adding to the impressions of distance and separation, since the physical presence of roadblocks and barricades that have created areas of separation all over the country make movement, communication, and mixing difficult. The divided individual is as fragmented as the society that he is a part of, its rejection of its unity reflected in his inability to think of himself as whole.

The events of the war also deepen other, psychological, divisions, exacerbating the existing psychical tensions at the asylum. In the novel, the fighting not only divides the country, but also creates two separate camps: those who fight, and those who do not. Those who do not, such as the narrator, eventually lose the ability to interact sexually with their partners. The paradigms of masculinity have been affected by the war, the gun replacing the phallus as the marker of potency. Even at the asylum, it is clear that those "who do not fight in these wars have no sex to offer to our women" (114). In a society that places such a high value upon male sexual performance, these men are crippled by their impotence, and have been rendered useless to the new war mentality.

The emasculating effect of the war is not its only physical manifestation upon the body of the narrator, but is complemented by the scars left by the ordeal of his kidnapping. However, the physical remainders of the latter experience eventually heal, unlike the various mental repercussions. The narrator's amnesia has impeded his ability to reconstruct his past without external help: he has to be reminded of events that happened to him by his sister and his doctor. This situation turns him into both narrator and audience, subject and object of his story. The loss of his memory textually highlights the unreliability of his narrative, particularly the alleged murder that transports the narrator to such ecstasy--and the reunification of his divided soul and body. The violence of the narrator's kidnapping has become internalized, his memory wiped out, replaced by--and endlessly reproduced in--the violent fantasies that he plays out upon the body of his former lover.

Disciples of Passion is a novel concerned with the consequences of violence upon the bodies and minds of all individuals who are "vessels of a special light" (136). The narrator's physical and mental scars, and the loss of his memory distance him from his own past, and confuse his present. Because he has no past, and because of his experiences of violence, he can only fill up the gap and become whole again, with fantasies of violence. Fantasy has replaced memory, and the mistakes of the war are not confronted, but warped and repeated. As Lebanon emerges once again from renewed violence, Huda Barakat's persistent preoccupation with the effects of violence upon the minds of Lebanese men, in particular, seems increasingly opportune.

Ghenwa Hayek is a PhD candidate at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.