The ambivalent narrative in Tony Hanania's Trilogy : Homesick, Unreal city, Eros island

Abstract

The writing of Lebanese-born, London-based novelist Tony Hanania heralds a new voice into the wealthy spectrum of postcolonial literature in English. At the age of eight, by accident of war, Hanania moved to England where he received his education at an English public school. This unexpected shift (from a homeland plagued by political turmoil and the looming civil war to the very heart of the British empire) and his later stays in the Lebanon, constitute the backbone of Hanania's intriguing, highly autobiographical trilogy. What Isobel Montgomery defined as 'this curious mixture of cultures' expressed in the trilogy is in fact one of the attributes that distinguish it. There is a whole fictional oeuvre written against the background of the Lebanese civil war, and various novels have emerged from post-war Lebanon to great acclaim, those of Hanan Al-Shaykh and Hoda Barakat being perhaps the most prominent. But both these women writers express themselves largely in Arabic, as they themselves have frequently remarked, that, despite their migrant condition, they still view the world in Arabic. Alternatively, as expected of an ex-French protectorate, the Lebanese experience has also been rendered in French. In this light, Hanania's novels evoke a specific contemporary scenario that, in the context of postcolonial literature in English, has been virtually unaddressed. Montgomery's curiously mixed cultures converge in a narrative uncomfortably split between life in England and the haunting recollections of wartime Beirut; Sidon and Jerusalem. Edward W. Said in his introduction to Culture and Imperialism, confides that 'for objective reasons that I had no control over, I grew up as an Arab with a Western education.