This was a difficult book for me to follow. The ellipses, which were possibly signify Khalil’s own hesitation in his thoughts and deeds, caused me to hesitate in my reading and had the effect of pulling me out of the narrative and distancing me from Khalil’s story. I have to wonder if they are a result of the translation or if they are a style choice by the author, and if they are a style choice what that choice was intended to achieve.

Something that struck me as absolutely fascinating was the life of the city. It was almost as if it had a life of its own and though it was under attack and wounded it was surviving and as long as it was surviving people would inhabit it. The empty rooms, formerly inhabited by those who fled the war (oftentimes because someone in their family had been killed as a result of it) were soon filled again by people coming to the city from the country looking for a better life. Never having lived in a situation like that it was very hard for me to understand this.

Despite the undying vitality of the city Khalil remains lonely, only occasionally reaching out to friends, more often seeking solace in late night FM radio broadcasts. Like Khalil, “the FM people” lived in the city’s “eternal night” and “knew neither how to get into its day nor into its streets” (65). Khalil gets to know these people better—and become more comfortable with them—than with his own family who at one point move upstairs and occupy the rooms left abandoned by Naji and his family.

I was torn over the portrayal of Khalil as a homosexual man. He seems not at all comfortable with his own sexuality nor with his own masculinity (as defined by himself and by his society). He believes women to be “repulsive” and calls says they are “a cavity that’s always sucking” (193). However he is no more comfortable with The Brother who he knows desires him, not wanting to sleep with him because “we certainly become like the people we have sex with and [he does] not want to become this man” (195).

The epilogue of the book is highly disturbing, containing the tale of Khalil’s violent rape of a woman after which he thinks:

“Now things are even. Now I begin the real story of humility, of submission, submission to my belonging to my brothers, submission to the glorification of life, to the general misery of life.” (208).

It’s a shattering moment after the trust we the reader have built up in our narrator, Khalil. He was lonely, confused, disturbed, but not before this someone who would violate. He was, rather, someone violated. Even the author herself mourns: “Khalil is gone, he has become a man who laughs. And I remain a woman who writes.” (209) I wonder, from this, what the author was attempting to achieve with this book. She showed us a man confused by his society’s notions of masculinity and femininity, and that is clear through the entire book. What is not clear to me is the dichotomy she draws between laughing and writing, why one should be aligned with masculinity and the other with femininity. ( )

SUMMARY

This summary is cribbed from my M.A. thesis on Lebanese women's lit. It contains some spoilers.

Barakat’s novel The Stone of Laughter, which is set during an unspecified period of time in the 1980s, focuses extensively on the social and psychological world of Khalil, a gay Beiruti.

The Stone of Laughter is told from the perspective of an undescribed omniscient narrator who observes Khalil, the novel’s protagonist, and the people with whom he interacts.

Khalil initially remains aloof from the war, refusing to take up arms and instead busying himself cooking, cleaning, and other stereotypically feminine activities. Over the course of the novel, the reader observes Khalil’s physical and psychological torment as he experiences the loss of friends through either emigration or death and struggles to retain his own identity in the face of societal pressure to ‘be a man’ and fight for his community’s cause.

In the wake of a serious illness and a psychic breakdown, Khalil embraces his femininity and begins to love himself. Surprisingly, however, this self-love leads not to an acceptance of others but to Khalil’s decision that he must protect himself against others at all costs; he must become an aggressor in order to avoid being a victim. By the end of the novel, Khalil has accepted a ‘masculine’ role and joined his friends in militia activity.

Barakat shows how the civil war reshaped individual and communal identities, interpersonal relationships, and conceptions of the nation. The novel offers a powerful critique of masculinity, sectarianism, and nationalism. Its examination of the roles that both civilians and combatants play in the destruction of their country suggests that all Lebanese bear responsibility for its reconstruction.

REVIEW

I loved this book. I read it twice completely and re-read different parts a number of times because I wrote my M.A. thesis on it. Each re-read provoked a number of new insights and thoughts. I thought it really provided a window into the ways in which the lives of ordinary people were affected by the civil war in Lebanon and showed how everyone adopted different coping mechanisms to deal with an all-encompassing war.

The understanding of the relationship between gender and war is perhaps a bit problematic, as Barakat seems to break things down a little too neatly into "masculine-war" and "feminine-peace", but I think she also effectively shows that these are social constructions - and negative ones at that. But I don't really think that anyone escapes blame in this novel.

The novel also deals with sectarianism and politics in a really interesting way. No one is ever explicitly identified as belonging to a specific group or sect, even though these divisions are very much in evidence. For me, this indicated that Barakat felt that all groups and sects were equally responsible for the war and that ultimately, there was no just cause in the Lebanese civil war. This is a nice contrast to something like Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose, which is very much about condemning one faction and exonerating another. Highly recommended. ( )