Sitt Marie Rose

Introduction

Adnan's novel Sitt Marie Rose is based on the 1976 death of Marie Rose Bolous and tells the story of the kidnapping, torture, and murder of its title character by three Christian militiamen during the early stages of the Lebanese civil war. Both the real and the fictional Marie Rose were divorced Christian women who supported the Palestinian resistance and taught disadvantaged Lebanese children.

Adnan's novel explores the conceptions of identity, community, and responsibility espoused by Lebanese civilians during the war and attempts to produce a new national narrative for Lebanon. Employing a multiplicity of contending narrative voices, Adnan provides insight into the experience and motivations of combatants, bystanders, resistors, and victims. Her novel shows how each nationalist movement re-imagined the shape of the Lebanese nation-state and redefined the criteria for membership therein. While Sitt Marie Rose offers a pointed critique of the war and of the hierarchical nature of Lebanese society, its narrative strategy problematizes readings that attempt to arrive at a straightforward understanding of the war or its participants.

Analysis

Sitt Marie Rose is divided into two sections, which are set at different times and voiced by different narrators. The first section, 'Time I: A Million Birds,' is set immediately prior to the civil war in 1975 and presents the omniscient perspective of an unnamed female narrator who has been asked to make a film with her friends Mounir, Tony, and Fouad about young Syrians living in Beirut. The outbreak of civil war during 'Time I' forces the narrator to re-evaluate her role in Mounir's film; feeling that she can no longer make the kind of apolitical film that Mounir plans, she informs him of her inability to participate in his project (Foster, 59).

The second section, 'Time II: Marie Rose,' is set a year later and seems connected to ...