In a letter to her oldest friend, now dying of cancer, Myriam wonders about the nature of fear. In the course of her stay, she has an affair with a Lebanese American who is in the Middle East to find his “roots,” a task he fails to accomplish. (It is not without importance in this sometimes explicitly feminist novel that her status as heir, her brother having been killed, is seen as unnatural and resented.) Myriam is told that her time in Beirut need not be long, but bureaucratic complications extend it for months. Myriam herself will be constantly plagued by migraines.Īfter this first uprooting, she moves to Kenya with her husband, whom she does not love, then flies to the Beirut she has not seen for years in an attempt to repossess the family house. (The abortion, incidentally, renders Myriam infertile.) Her mother responds to the life around her by retreating into silence, and her father, a tiny piece of shrapnel lodged in his head, goes mad. Her lover, Georges, who has impregnated her-thus, in the world of the novel, necessitating an abortion because Myriam is “a good girl, from a good family, not a slut”-disappears on the very day of his attempted flight, perhaps the victim of murder preceded by torture. She and her family flee her home country for Australia to escape the civil war. The first-person narrator, Myriam, is condemned by the bloodiness of recent Lebanese history to suffer a deracinated life of pain and loss.

Her third work constitutes a rewarding and cohesive fictionalized meditation on the nature of place, emigration, and memory.

Iman Humaydan is a Lebanese writer with two acclaimed novels to her credit, B as in Beirut and Wild Mulberries.

Other Lives by Iman Humaydan