Refuge in the Imaginary: War Trauma and the Limits of Language in Ghada Samman’s Kawābīs Beirut and Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay

This chapter argues that the female protagonists of Ghada Samman’s Kawāb​​īs Beirut and Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay react to the utter breakdown of their social realities by retreating into the fantasy-laden, visual field of the Imaginary. Both protagonists write their stories under conditions of escalating violence as the Lebanese Civil War and the Syrian Civil War, respectively, erupt around them. They are personally subjected to chemical attacks, shootings, starvation, and witnessing the death of loved ones. Consequently, they evince axiomatic aesthetics of trauma, such as compulsive repetitions and silence, which revert to Freudian understandings of trauma.

However, by drawing on Jacques Lacan’s register of orders, the analysis shifts from an individual, pathologizing view of the protagonists to the wider psychosocial implications of how the respective wars have ruptured the Symbolic and revealed the traumatic Real, which I argue manifests as neopatriarchal hegemonic structures which continually generate war paradigms. As the Symbolic is a language-mediated order of signifiers, the protagonists display anxieties regarding language’s referential capacity to convey traumatic experience. Consequently, they retreat into an Imaginary realm of colors, shapes, hallucinations, and nightmares. In both narratives, a semiotic, pre-Symbolic dimension allows the protagonists to articulate trauma in a way that eschews the violent discourse of men. However, despite finding some refuge in the Imaginary, both are ultimately made to confront the Symbolic. I argue that Samman’s protagonist, as a writer, was predisposed towards the tools of the Symbolic, and eventually accedes to the logic of the war while Rima’s narrative ends with her abandoned without having submitted to the hegemonic neopatriarchal order.