L as in Lebanese

In her second novel, Iman Younes leaves Beirut for the countryside. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie misses the pace of the city.
Wild Mulberries Iman Humaydan Younes Interlink Publishing Group Dh52
Scanning the shelves of any bookstore or library with a substantial section of Lebanese literature in English translation, it is easy to conclude that one story, and only one story, links all of the Lebanese novels of the past 20 years. That story being, of course, life during civil war. Consider the list: Hanan al Shaykh's The Story of Zahra, Rashid al Daif's Passage to Dusk, Elias Khoury's The Journey of Little Gandhi,  Hoda Barakat's The Stone of Laughter, Hassan Daoud's House of Mathilde and Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game. All of these novels wrestle Lebanon's chronic violence into lucid prose.

But there are other stories in Lebanese literature, and even the many civil-war centric books are threaded with subjects other than war. Iman Humaydan Younes's first novel, B as in Beirut (published in Arab as Ba Mithla Bayt Mithla Bayrut, and translated to English by Max Weiss), belongs to the war camp: it tells, in four intersecting vignettes, the stories of four women who live in the same apartment building in Beirut, from which they witness the chaotic, militia-led destruction of their city. But her second, Wild Mulberries (published in Arabic as Tut Barri, and translated to English by Michelle Hartman), inhabits an altogether different niche. Set in the 1930s, it tells the story of a young woman coming of age in Ayn Tahoon, a tiny Druze village in the Shouf Mountains that relies on silkworms to survive.

Compared to B as in Beirut, Wild Mulberries might as well be the work of another writer entirely. Where the former is jazzy, urban and driven by a fast-paced, staccato plot, the latter is spare, languorous and lyrical. Sarah, Younes's first-person protagonist, narrates her life as if witnessing it from a distance or through a window, in a moment of reflective repose. One chapter begins, for example, with this rumination: "One year passes, another one comes and the life I had thought was interrupted - its present unconnected to its past - weaves its threads together independently of me." The reader learns what is actually happening to Sarah either in passing or by inference. She speaks about the weather, the light or the seasons changing, and then reveals that between, oh, spring and summer, she has found herself sexually experienced, then married, then pregnant.

Sarah's father is a stubborn sheikh who clings to the agrarian business of silk production even as disease, bad weather conditions and a worsening economic climate plunge the village into near destitution. Her mother disappeared years ago, but Sarah remains obsessed with her mysterious absence. Orbiting around her is a cast of additional characters - best friends, aunts, a half-brother, other relatives and altogether unhappy village women - who drift ethereally through the novel without ever quite touching the ground.

The most solid structure in the book is the haara, the old house where Sarah lives with her family in an arrangement of long, independent, high-ceilinged rooms that open to a common courtyard. Younes describes the haara in exquisite architectural detail, and this is what most strongly connects Wild Mulberries to its predecessor, which portrays the apartment building at its center in equally vivid prose.

But while B as in Beirut skillfully registers the city's resilient cosmopolitan spirit, Wild Mulberries sees Younes devoting her attention to the rhythms of rural life - how the silkworm's eggs are spread out, cleaned, heated, coated in lime water, hatched and fed on the leaves of mulberry trees; how the cocoons are harvested; how merchants and silk brokers bid on the season; how labourers arrive and leave; how expectations of crop yields and revenues rise and fall.

Sarah breaks her leg, falls in love and longs for her mother, whose face she can barely remember. Not much seems to happen until toward the end. Sarah consummates her affair with her half-brother's friend Karim, marries, leaves for England, returns to Ayn Tahoon, receives perplexing letters from her husband (who is trying to strike black gold in the Gulf) and bears a child, a daughter, on whose image the novel ends, signalling a hopeful yet uncertain future.

Sarah never finds her mother or discovers the true story of her disappearance. Clues present themselves - half-stories that suggest a scandal, an escape, a murder, a village priest who knows the truth - but Sarah only considers them obliquely, as if she does not really want to know the truth, or suspects there is no satisfying truth to be told. She lives close to the priest, but puts off visiting him; by the time she does, the old man is dead. "There is no use continually trying to sketch out my mother's life and history," she says. "She has a history, surely there is a history, but I do not know it. It is an absent history and I must simply get used to its absence." Twenty pages later, having taken no further concrete initiative, she concludes: "I have wasted my life searching for my mother. I exhaust myself and I do not find her."

Wild Mulberries is rich in atmospherics that evoke desire, lust, sexual awakening, love, trust, disappointment and loss. But it is scant on the type of concrete details that are so often necessary for a compelling story. Were the book a musical composition, the patterns of the silkworm season would make for an intriguing rhythm, but the piece would be missing a melody. It is intriguing to note that Younes, as a graduate student in the anthropology department of the American University of Beirut, focused her research on narratives of disappearance, and immersed herself in the stories told by families whose sons, daughters, brothers and sisters went missing during Lebanon's civil war. By wrenching her second novel out of the civil war setting, Younes usefully illuminates the extent to which even those stories and novels saturated in the violence of Lebanon's unending internal strife are ultimately human dramas, regardless of their specifics of time or place. Wild Mulberries pits rural against urban, women against men, agriculture against industry, architecture against nature, the individual against family and society. These are Lebanon's, and Lebanese literature's, true archetypal conflicts; Wild Mulberries gently - perhaps too gently - traces the rifts and ridges they leave on Lebanese lives.
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie reports from Beirut for The National. @email:kwg@thenational.ae