Huda Barakat. Disciples of Passion.

• Author: Hayek, Ghenwa
• Position: Book review

Huda Barakat. Disciples of Passion. Translated by Marilyn Booth. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005, 136 pages. Hardcover $19.95.

Huda Barakat's latest novel to be translated into English, Disciples of Passion, shares some similarities with her two preceding novels, The Tiller of Waters, and The Stone of Laughter. As in her two earlier works, Disciples of Passion features a male narrator at the margins of Lebanese society. In The Tiller of Waters, the protagonist was stuck in Beirut's gutted center unable to escape the barricades, and the sea, surrounding him on all sides.

In The Stone of Laughter, the narrator was a gay man, in his apartment building as the city collapsed around him. In Disciples of Passion, Barakat's narrator is institutionalized in Dayr al-Salib, the country's most infamous mental institution, as the Lebanese civil war rages around him. All three novels are marked by stream-of-consciousness writing, which is heavily introspective, narrated in the voices of protagonists whose inner lives are disrupted by the outside world, especially the fighting that they do not want to, or cannot, participate in. However, to point to a pattern in Barakat's novels is in no ways a claim against the originality of her latest novel, nor its translation by Marilyn Booth. Barakat's return to the theme of isolation and alienation seem to indicate that she has not yet exhausted the creative possibilities and problems of the effects of violence, particularly war, on marginality, masculinity and memory.

Disciples of Passion's narrator is marginalized from society on many levels, which is often conveyed in sequences of different metaphors. He remains anonymous throughout the text, which creates a sense of disorientation in the reader, an inability to become fully familiar with the character while simultaneously privy to his utmost interiority. This narrative distancing is reinforced by the images of division and separation that recur in the text; the separation of the narrator's body and mind, his continual feeling of being outside his own body and of existing on the sidelines of the action that he is ostensibly participating in. The language of the novel reflects this most vividly in the narrator's introspections on his own words, "like many other things, they might well be mine, but they are certainly not parts of me" (76).

These images of internal division, of alienation from himself, also extend outwards from the narrator to his...