On Lebanon, the war and the ‘silent identity’

“Silent Identity” is the title of the new novel by Lebanese writer Laila Abi Samra (photo), published in Paris by “Dar Larmatin”. The novel, published in French, comes after a first novel, published years ago, by the house itself, entitled “Wrinkles of a dream”, and was dedicated to monitoring the results of the Lebanese civil war, and individual and collective ruptures resulting from it that struck a whole generation, and pushed its individuals to emigrate and then Distribution in cold areas.

The “silent identity” emerges as a continuation of the suspended questions workshop that printed the first novel by Abu Samra, in search of “mental, psychological, emotional and even moral security that was dissipated” with the intractability and impossibility of the Lebanese change, and the not a few effects that result from this impossibility in the heavy diaries of voluntary spatial alienation. The writer who lives, consciously and consciously, the division of the place in which her choice was imposed and the time she lived, refuses to surrender, insists on retaking and awakening the dreams that prompted her and her generation to bet on the change that was only possible by the war imposed by the adherence of the curators of the rotten regime and its protagonists to what was invented by colonial deception and deception. The illusion of the ability to break the inherited or manufactured divisions of a country that made a lie and lived on it, did not lead, according to the author, to the realization of the great dreams that haunted her generation, which was forced to mount. the warship in pursuit of social justice away from war-making Lebanese fabrication.
The “silent identity” is characterized by its fluid narrative and rich content. Like its predecessor, it contains a rich reserve of personal observations by the writer and her own well-preserved impressions. It also delves, albeit indirectly, into the fragility of human existence, which is far from its “first” reality related to free and active belonging, in search of questions of deep existence that have no answer.
In the silence of the identity that Abi Samra chose as the title of the novel is the loudest of accumulated components that are difficult to replace. True identity, according to the lines of the novel, is lived with consciousness and what is connected to it from the unconscious, not with what is acquired by necessity or desire.
It is noteworthy that the novelist, born in Shebaa, lives between Paris and Beirut, her hometown, which nurtured the flowering of her dreams before being forced, like others, to move away in the hope of returning and trying to repeat the realization. of what was impossible to achieve.

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