Customer Reviews

Sitt Marie-Rose: A Novel

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

As a Lebanese, and, more importantly, as an anti-war activist, I found this book to be one of the most powerful testaments against the horrors and inhumanity of war. For Etel Adnan to have expressed the irrationality and insanity of war, and yet equally expressed the strength of human dignity and beauty is a testament to her writing.

I strongly recommend this short yet powerful and deeply poetic book to all Lebanese and to all those fighting for peace and justice.

Contact either the publisher: Post-Apollo Press, Sausalito, CA, or SPD (Small Press Distribution, Inc), Berkeley CA 800-869-7553

Despite Amazon's omniscience, this book is not out of print.

I read this novella for a Middle Eastern Humanities course sixteen years ago in college and, through my instructor, had the good fortune of meeting Etel Adnan. The book was powerful and moving, granting me insight into a world so foreign from mine and yet similar in strange ways. I relished the discussions with Ms. Adnan after reading it. Her experiences, skill with language and unique vision make anything she writes worth reading. This novella is easy reading, but will definitely leave a lasting impression. After ten years in education, I still loan my copy to students for summer reading and have had each student I've loaned it to thank me for the experience.

This novel was a truly amazing piece of literature. It serves as a testament to the atrocious nature that human beings can evolve into. Adnan portrays the primary dilemmas that were inherent in civil war era Lebanon in a most articulate manner, depicting with absolute vindication the savagery human beings are capable of attaining towards their brothers and sisters. The story also serves as proof of the contrivance of religion by men to serve their own dastardly purposes.

A must read if one wishes to try to grasp the historical intricacies and animosity of Christian and Palestinian relations. Told through a unique narration style, this book is a must read for anyone interested in Middle East relations without the typical watered-down bias of western corporatism. A truly wonderful novel.

This is at best partisanship masquerading as literature masquerading as history.

Besides the fact that the English "Sitt Marie-Rose" is an awful, awful translation of the (otherwise sublime) French, the novel itself aimed at vilifying Lebanon's Christians painting them in clichéed lazy and facile reductive labels that ignore the social, ethnic, and cultural complexities of Lebanon.

For instance, for a novel couching itself in metanarrative, slotting Lebanon's Christians as "Phalangists", "Crusaders", "Europeans", and "Right-Wing militias"--while refering to the other parties in the 1975-1990 Lebanese conflict in innocuous and sympathetic, ostensibly "nativistic" terminology like "Palestinians", "Refugees", and "Muslims"--does not only fly in the face of Lebanese political and social realities, it is outright hypocritical, unscrupulous, and ultimately sloppy fabrication. Knock offs can sometimes be deceivingly close to the "authentic"; not Adnan's "Sitt Marie-Rose"!

No one in their right minds and with the most tenuous grasp of modern Middle Eastern history can deny or dismiss the Palestinian plight and dispossession. But at the same time, it is infinitely condescending to the Palestinians themselves to, in order to buttress their victimhood and suffering, mock and delegitimize the cultural and historical accretions of their Lebanese adversaries. The Palestinians were not hapless victims in Lebanon! They were refugees living in abject conditions, yes! But they were also shapers of their own destinies, living under their own laws, in their own camps (which were NOT camps in the traditional sense, but more like modern cities with their own--Palestinian-run--functioning hospitals, schools, police forces, weapons, bunkers, armed-forces, banks, military-baracks, businesses, and "public" transportation systems.) The Palestinians in Lebanon were outside of the purview of the Lebanese state. In other words, they were illegitimate, armed, foreign, non-state political actors, thumbing their nose at Lebanese national prerogatives and DARING the Lebanese state to disarm them (the way King Husayn of Jordan had done in 1970.)

THIS is the background against which Adnan's "metanarrative" should have been set. Lebanon's Christians did not, just out of the blue, decide to take up arms one day and fight the hapless Palestinian "refugees" in Lebanon just because "they loved hunting" as the intellectually dishonest Adnan insinuated! They took up arms NOT because they were trigger-happy inauthentic "Right Wing Phalangist European wannabe Crusaders" doing Israel's and America's bidding (as Adnan's simplistic and dishonest pseudo-history would have readers believe)!! They took up arms because their state (until 1975 the only Middle Eastern "Arabic-speaking" state not dominated by Muslims and not beholden to the silly orthodoxies of the Arab-Israeli conflict) was cowed and intimidated into "accepting" the Palestinians' violations and floutings of Lebanese national prerogatives and Lebanese legality.

And by the way, those nasty Lebanese-Christians to whom Adnan ad nauseam referred as "Phalangists", belonged to the Lebanese Kataeb Party (officially chartered and known under by name "The Lebanese Social Democratic" party); the party that in the 1950s brought Lebanon the 40-hour work-week, paid holidays, and a social security system.) They were anything but the hackneyed "Right-Wing" label that lazy Adnan chose for them. As Bernard Lewis said (in "Right and Left in Lebanon") "The seating arrangements of the first French National Assembly after the Revolution do not express a law of nature, and the practice of classifying political ideas, interests and groups as right and left obscures more than it illuminates even in the Western world where it originated. As applied to other societies, shaped by different experiences, guided by different traditions, moved by different aspiraitons, such imported lables can only disguise and mislead."

Futhermore, in a post-religions west--namely in anti-clerical anti-religious Republican France, the audience of Etel Adnan's "literary" output, since she wrote exclusively in French--referring to a Lebanese group as "Christians" is guaranteed to defame and demonize them in the eyes of "secular" Western readers and observers. Never mind that identity in the Middle East, ever since the Arab conquest of the 7th century, has been defined religiously for upwards of 13 centuries.

If you're interested in reading a bitter vicious distortion of history (mascarading as a literary metanarrative), then Sitt Marie-Rose is certainly the work for you (and a painfully sloppy translation at that; e.g, "The Kharrat Stores" were translated from the French "Etablissements Kharrat" into the English "Kharrat Establishment"... et j'en passe!!!) Otherwise, if you seek an honest examination of the richly textured and complex mosaic of cultures and histories that is Lebanon, I would stick to Theodor Hanf's stellar work of cultural anthropology "Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon"...

As I reflect back on the events that are taking place in the Middle East today, as Israel is attacking Lebanon, I am speechless. Reading this book three months ago, I understand what the people in Palestine, in Lebanon are feeling, as they have to deal with yet another war, yet another bully. I highly recommend this book, it speaks to humanity. It brings us together.

I did not enjoy this book whatsoever. I was terrible. DO NOT waste your money on it!! Reading this book was a waste of time. I'm neither a Christian nor Palestinian; I'm not saying this book was awful because I was offended by it (as some might be). Very objectively, I judge that this is poor, horrible, boring literature...A waste of time and money. If I could I would not give it a star at all. One star is more than it deserves!

This book is BORING and USELESS; it only leaves you with an
awful feeling that you've wasted one minute too many even
looking at it.