A House Not Her Own

Beverly Rasporich is an associate professor in the Faculty of General
Studies at the University of Calgary and the author of Dance of the
Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro.

Emily Nasrallah was educated at the American University of Lebanon in
Beirut, became a journalist and writer, and is one of several Lebanese
authors, called the Beirut Decentrists, who stayed on in Beirut during
the war to write about the conflict from a female point of view. This
collection of brief stories, translated from Arabic, evokes the
explosive fatality of war and the victimization of women as
disenfranchised figures.

The stories are, however, apolitical. The central voice is philosophic,
lyrical, observant—the courageous, female voice of the “silent
majority” outside the battlefield, described by Nasrallah in her
introduction as the “majority that receives the results of war, its
destruction and tragedies.” These are the people who, like the mother
and daughter on a shopping trip for a toy in “Explosion,” meet death
daily, unexpectedly. Technically, the stories are fascinating. The
sensibility is that of memoir, of life and lives, if only momentarily,
reviewed; the form—a few pages of story—is reminiscent of the
French-Canadian conte; the narrative flow, which verges on magic realism
as the decentred self floats through the smoke of war—or, as in
“They Are All His Mother,” is both audience and actor in the drama
of a continuous, circular story that embraces postmodernism.

A House Not Her Own is important fiction for its humanistic
understanding and anti-war messages born of the experienced, almost
inexpressible tragedy of Lebanon; for its evocation of the female
condition and a woman’s sensibilities; and for its intriguing
narrative style.