The stone of laughter by Hoda Barakat

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Hoda Barakat is a Lebanese writer whose first collection of short stories, Za’irat (Visitors), was published in 1985. The novel under review first appeared in Arabic in 1990 and won a prestigious Arab literary prize, the al-Naqid Award for a first novel. The Stone of Laughter is set in Beirut against a backdrop of the civil war that ravaged Lebanon beginning in the mid-1970s and has only recently abated. It explores the theme of the civil war and its impact on the beleaguered populace of Beirut. The novel is structured around the tension within Khalil, an androgynous young man who is torn between his desires and the traditional role society has assigned to him as a man. Khalil struggles to keep a lid on the side of his self with “many intricate and ambiguous matters, the least of which were his erotic dreams.” The conflict within Khalil is eventually resolved by his assuming the “masculine” role assigned to him by society. This resolution is brought about by the brutal realities of war.

The novel depicts how Khalil is sucked into the destructive war machine by the allure of power and by the grim realization that to survive in a brutal world he must relate to this world, acquiesce to it. By doing so, he gains power and acquires both identity and status. He rationalizes this as a means of self-preservation. Khalil’s gentleness is shattered by the shells that keep pounding the city, destroying not just its buildings but also its social and moral fabric. The new Khalil who emerges is a ruthless man who murders and rapes apparently without compunction. Through the use of subtle irony, the author mocks all the players in the strife: warlords, patriarchs, sectarian leaders on both sides of the religious divide, ideologues, social climbers, political leaders cum opium dealers, et cetera. Behind this irony, however, a cri de coeur is discernible.

One of the features of the novel is the constant shifting from a third-person narrator to the first person, from the past to the present. Also, the form of the work draws explicit attention to itself, as the reader is reminded at the end of the fractured narrative that Barakat is the storyteller: “Khalil is gone, he has become a man who laughs. And I remain a woman who writes.” One striking aspect of the novel is the way the author skillfully fuses the private and the public, the personal and the national, so that it is difficult to disentangle the one from the other. A lament for the loss of the gentle Khalil to the war culture, The Stone of Laughter is also, on a symbolic level, a lament for the loss of innocence, of a peaceful way of life the country once knew. Hoda Barakat’s novel is a profound and complex treatment of the theme of the civil war in Lebanon.

In The Stone of Laughter, Hoda Barakat accentuate the disintegration of community in war, and the separation of experience, when she gives elite focus to the figure of Khalil. Homosexual craving is still less than satisfactory as a literary theme in Arabic literature, even though writers all through the region are challenging that taboo. Posing desire as permeating all planes of survival, Barakat delightfully questions social constructions of sexual category and sexuality through Khalil`s way of treatment the war. Compulsive about his flat`s cleanliness, Khalil lives the war through habitual housework intermittent by long musings, word games to ward off the horror, and infrequent visits from or to his friends and companion that leave him in a mood of more distant. The absences that enclose him become the fall of a household, the dead cockroaches on their backs and the decomposing smells from the fridge. Khalil`s distance from the war in the streets is harmonized by Barakat`s careful pensiveness on the parties to the war: they are all the same; religious membership is irrelevant; quarrel fulfills personal needs, and so a party in the newspaper head office becomes another moment that perpetuate the war as it offer a brief break out. The potency of social training is such that Khalil cannot persuade his own break out from war or from the dictates of gender as social organization. He cannot steer clear of participation: Time after time Khalil used to knob on the radio at night … a small, orange plastic radio which used to get unclean quickly and which, for the duration of his everyday, methodical night-time bouts of cleaning, he used to clean with a large piece of cotton wool drenched in white spirit, wiping the radio very carefully, poking the ends of the cotton wool into the comers and crevices with a matchstick … once, as he was cleaning it, he began to listen by chance (p. 73; ellipses in text).

Khalil`s claustrophobic monologues irregularly worsen into pontifications that deteriorate the novel, but they do shape a likely passage for Khalil`s own crisis and its declaration. Barakat`s translator retains the regular ellipses of the Arabic text, which are wholly out of place and distracting in English (and not much better in Arabic, but at least more conventional). There are illogical sentences that turn out to be incorrectly translated: `Abou Ahmad turned towards the drawer and began to go up the stairs` (daraj, staircase, is mistranslated as durj, drawer) (pp. 50; 54 in the Arabic). Choices are made that succumb the wrong connotation: h. amas (p. 92) should be rendered as `with more fervour` or `fanatically` rather than as `with more eagerness` in the context. Repetition and run-on sentences additional suspend the reader’s pleasure. The translation of Bakr`s novel services the question of whether this novel is translatable. Bakr`s fine evocations of place and persona depend on her action of colloquial Arabic tropes and expressions, and their comic job within a `literary (written) Arabic` context, and on strange sequences and interminable sentence small not easy to make with poise and powerfully in English.

Reference:

BOUSTANI, SOBHI. Middle Eastern Literatures, Jul2003, Vol. 6 Issue 2, p225, 11p

Amyuni, Mona Takieddine. World Literature Today, Winter99, Vol. 73 Issue 1, p37, 6p, 4bw;

Booth, Marilyn. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Nov96, Vol. 23 Issue 2, p232, 4p;

Kadhim, Hussein. World Literature Today, Winter96

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Tags: al-Naqid Award, Arab literary prize, Hoda Barakat, Lebanese writer, The Stone of Laughter, Za'irat