Al-Shaykh’s Zahra is in a constant state of displacement throughout the novel. Whether in Lebanon with her family or in Africa, Zahra feels no sense of home. Neither routine nor habits help nurture within her a feeling of homecoming. Childhood memories serve only as a reminder of painful episodes in which she was silenced and assaulted physically for her mother’s perceived sins. The security normally associated with the word home is completely absent from Zahra’s narration of her own story. Her relationship to a home, whether in Lebanon or somewhere else or whether as an activity or a state of mind, is non-existent to the very end of the novel. In contrast, however, Hashem’s and Majid’s interrupting narratives tell a more familiar tale in terms of their relationship with Lebanon as home.
Both uncle and husband inhabit a physical and mental exile in Africa, both of them seek to establish a connection to an imagined and a remembered Lebanon from which they are separated. As Marianne Marroum elucidates, it is in these two narratives that “the topoi of exile, uprootedness and homecoming loom large” (2008: 502). Despite their respective reasons for departing Lebanon, both narratives stress equally the lament of being uprooted
and the painful alienations and loneliness imposed by exile. Hashem’s presence in Africa is characterized by a focus on the past evident in his inability to develop his engagement with the party’s activities and the lack of any attempt to settle down with his own family. His narrative exposes that he
is afflicted with nostalgia. He succumbs to dejection and entropy and is incapable of engaging with his present and of moving forward. He fails to envisage a tomorrow elsewhere and cannot but yearn for what he considers a lost edenic world and a prelapsarian past....he continuously dreams about repatriation (Ibid 503).
Hashem refers continuously to Lebanon as Wa%an and he imagines it as an idealized entity which can cure all his ailments of exile. He maintains his hopes for repatriation as an eventual cure. His nostalgia is restorative and not reflective. His memory insists on elevating the past to a position of glory and debases the present and the future as painful and futile. Hashem reflects:
Memories grow stronger after one leaves one’s homeland. Memories belong to the past, but one wants them to be alive in the present, as glossy as my photographs showing my nephews and nieces, among them Zahra and Ahmad in Shaghour Hamana. We stand with our hands reaching out for the cold water. I remember the taste of that water to this day (The Story of Zahra 50).
Unlike Ashraf the central protagonist in The Last Migration who attempted to revive the memories of Lebanon through the continuous cultural manifestation in the food, music and art of his Lebanese identity, Hashem freezes his past memories without renewal. His memories are fixed, idealized in glossy pictures and letters from the homeland of which, eventually, Zahra becomes his only correspondent. Similarly, in Africa, Majid continues to find ways to form ties with other Lebanese expatriates in order to affirm and fulfil his emotional ties to Lebanon. In his marriage, Majid attempted to attain “a triumphant comeback in physical absentia to his homeland” (Marroum, 2008: 509). In both cases, it is through Zahra that the two men try to remedy the afflictions of exile.
This female embodiment of the homeland is not a novel feature of Arabic literature. However, al-Shaykh’s work “explores the dangers of using the female form to represent the contours of a conflicted country” (Adams, 2001: 202). The female form which represents the Lebanese nation to the two exiled male figures in The Story of Zahra is restless, displaced and physically deformed by acne and repetitive abortions. Her loss of virginity out of wedlock could mark her out probably as not a symbol of purity but as one of pollution. She is
neither forgiving nor sympathetic to the two Lebanese expatriates. She represented a shock to both men’s fantasies and expectations. In fact, al-Shaykh ridicules the way in which the two exiled figures idolized Lebanon by presenting Hashem as a sexually abusive uncle, whilst the husband is obsessed with intact hymens – brilliantly capturing and exposing the absurdity of the Lebanese civil war.
As Mona Fayad explained, The Story of Zahra, presents an attempt by an Arab woman writer to offer a “counter narrative” to the dominant Arab male fiction – and, even more generally, Arab culture, which attempted to use women as metaphors for nations, and to “reclaim history and specificity” (1995: 149). Fayad explained that, in this manner, the fiction of al-Shaykh and other Arab writers such as Assia Djebar and Nawal al-Saadawi attempted to assign to the female body an active role which, in a national allegory, resisted the role of the passive metaphor (Ibid 151). Through Hashem and Majid’s unfounded projection of the Lebanese homeland on Zahra, al-Shaykh illustrated “the ways in which women are ossified and abstracted in national discourses” (Adams, 2001: 203).
Then, Zahra becomes more than only a metaphor for a war-torn nation; for The Story of Zahra is both by Zahra and about Zahra. Told from her point of view, it offers only measured space for her uncle’s and her husband’s narratives. Her body is not simply the site of conflict of the warring factions of Lebanon but, also, one that experiences pleasure with one of the threatening sources. Zahra prospers whilst her fellow Lebanese are dogged by the violence of the war as al-Shaykh makes clear that the national story and the women stories are quite distinct. The miraculous loss of acne, the rapid weight loss and the pleasure filled relationship with the sniper attest to the divergence between the national and the women’s narratives. In so doing, Hanan al-Shaykh highlights the oppressive nature of the national discourse which stifles the voices of women. Zahra’s dismal end, as she is shot by the sniper, signifies the betrayal of the nation and its failure to preserve its only hope: Zahra’s dream of settling down with the sniper and the father of her third unborn child.