1. “The Beirut Decentrists”, adapted largely from mariam cooke, War’s Other Voices, 1988 (an excellent resource!) Who were they? Etel Adan Emily Nasrallah Daisy al-Amir Ghada al-Samman Hanan al-Shaykh and many others… Took Beirut – and the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) – as the locus of their literary attention and activity; “[The Beirut Decentrists] are a group of women writers who have shared Beirut as their home and the war as their experience” (cooke, p. 3). The Lebanese Civil War generated immense literary activity, at the center of which were women writers whose works explore the relationship of literature and language to war, the role of marginal voices in literature and society, and frequently critique the most basic assumptions of political and literary commitment, including the notion that “war is a man’s affair.”

2. What does “Decentrism” mean? “[The Decentrists] have been decentered in a double sense: physically, they were scattered all over a self-destructing city; intellectually, they move in separate spheres. They wrote alone and for themselves. They would not conceive of their writings as related to those of others, yet their marginal perspective, which gave insight into the holistic aspect of the war, united them and allowed them discursively to undermine and restructure society around the image of a new center” (cooke, p. 3). “However, in Lebanon there were not two sides, there were not a hundred sides, there were as many sides as there were individuals. The literature could not rightly deal with causes but with moments of commitment. The only continuity was individual reaction, and the writers reacted, creating a discursive truth which sometimes reflected historical truth, and sometimes did not” (cooke, p. 38). “These voices in myriad forms express similar themes – from Beirut but outside the expected, now dead, center…Men write of the war as random, localized, transient phenomenon. Yet the war was a constant reality that varied only in intensity. It was an experience shared by men and women equally. As the war dragged on, and middle and upper class Beiruti women found themselves increasingly alone, they began to write about their particular experiences as women, and to recognize through articulation their previous oppression and marginalization. As negative awareness of otherness crystallized, the selfness of the “center” came into question. Intensified, this questioning became the first step in the deconstruction of a dominant discourse” (cooke, p. 11).

3. What are literary characteristics of the “Decentrists”? “Men wrote of strategy, ideology, and violence. The Beirut Decentrists, regardless of confession and political persuasion, wrote of the dailiness of war. The men wrote of existential Angst; these women of abandoned loneliness…The Beirut Decentrists wrote from the inside margin, compelled to participate because the war was everywhere. The men write from the epicenter” (cooke, p. 3). “The Beirut Decentrists were recording their experiences as they occurred. By writing, they perceived their participation and at the same time were making others aware. They were creating a new war myth whose protagonists were both male and female. Mythologizing transformed the anomalous into a shared, lived reality. Individuals saw themselves as involved and could then situate themselves as active elements. They could relate to the war in new and different ways. Irrational motivations were exposed as irrational. Depersonalized forces were shown to be personal: the sniper was a microcosm of the war, but he was also human; he was, above all, a child” (cook, pp. 38-39). “By the late 1970s, the Beirut Decentrists were using language to create a new reality. Their writings were becoming transformative, even prescriptive. As self-censorship gave way to uninhibited expressions of self-assertion, the hold of the oppressive male critic was shaken. It was only with the breakdown of Lebanon’s identity as an independent patriarchal polity that women began to assert their female identity publicly” (cooke, p. 12).