Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie-Rose
Nathan Vonnahme
World Literature
April 25, 1996
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Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose employs a very untraditional style of narration. The first section, "Time 1-- A Million Birds" is narrated by an author who is thinking about her male friends and their expectations of women, and about the beginning of the civil war in Beirut in 1975. The second section describes the detainment and execution of a school teacher in the first year of the war through seven different perspectives. It is hard on first reading to interpret the many different voices in the novel. For example, it is hard to understand how the two sections are meant to fit together; since the characters and events seem to share nothing except the male names of Mounir, Tony and Fouad. It is also difficult to understand the significance of each of the various voices in the second section. The first section is narrated by an adult, female writer whose friend Mounir wants her to write a script for the movie he's planning on making. The description of Mounir's film of his friends' hunting trip sets the stage for the later description of the violence of the war, and Adnan's description of the men hunting is full of military language which ties in with her description of male war. She writes, "The hunters aim their rifles toward the sky like missile launchers. They laugh. They show their teeth, their vigor, their pleasure" (2). Every detail builds the character of the males and makes it understandable when Fouad speaks of civilian casualties as "so many lost bullets" (16). This section also shows the reaction of women to the war, especially the writer. The women are excluded from war just as from hunting, and "they consider war like an evening of scores between men" (13). The writer wishes for a million birds in the sky "so that these hunters could practice on them, and this carnage could be avoided" (17). The interaction between the first section and the rest of the book is also interesting, but will be more easily discussed after we explore the voices of the second section. Time II-- Marie-Rose is composed of three "chapters" which have seven sections, written from the perspectives of the deaf-mute children, Marie-Rose herself, Mounir, Tony, Fouad, Bouna Lias, and a narrator. The section begins with the perspective of deaf-mute children as their teacher is detained in their classroom by four armed men. The children represent innocence in the face of violence, and they lend weight to the second narrator's criticism of war by balancing the violent and passionate confrontation of the adults with a more detached, childlike reality. The deaf-mutes also serve as a symbol of the innocent victims of the war, and their handicap makes their vulnerability even more poignant. Their perspective, like the narrator's, is detached from the adults' political ideologies, and finds the war both evil and fascinating. They do not like the war because they cannot take part in it (30), and they see the soldiers' guns as beautiful (30, 43). But they also love their teacher Marie-Rose and are convinced of her goodness, and they are shocked, bewildered and amazed by the soldiers' inhumanity: "Devils have come up from underground and they've fallen on her. . . . No human being would ever do what they're doing. Where did they come from? How did they get so wild? She's been drowned! She's been drowned! In blood. Perhaps one day speech and sound will be restored to us, we'll be able to hear and speak and say what happened. But it's not certain. Some sicknesses are incurable" (82).
The deaf-mutes, then, provide an emotional response and reaction to the war that balances the more moral, philosophical and sociological reaction of the narrator. The second section of each "chapter" is from Marie-Rose's perspective. Adnan uses her to powerfully express the violence of the men and the oppression of the Palestinians. Her female perspective sharply contrasts with the men's rhetoric of control, domination and religious judgment. It is obvious too that the author identifies most with Marie-Rose, as the similarity of her language to the narrators' seems to indicate. Her protestations against her captors are parallel to the narrator's criticisms of them. As the deaf-mutes provide emotional perspective that supports the narrator's evaluation of the war, Marie-Rose furnishes moral perspective. She says to Mounir, "I represent love, new roads, the unknown, the untried" (58) and confronts him with the naked tribalism of the war. Her moral sparring and stinging attack on Mounir and Bouna Lias' war rhetoric make her position strong and her death necessary-- the narrator writes: "Thus, when the impossible mutation takes place, when, for example, someone like Marie-Rose leaves the normal order of things, the political body releases its antibodies in a blind, automatic process. The cell that contains the desire for liberty is killed, digested, reabsorbed" (76).
How does Marie-Rose relate to the first section of the book? It seems at times as if she is the same writer that interacted with Mounir, Tony and Fouad in the first section, but a variety of details make this impossible. For one thing, the second section is set less than a year after the beginning of the war (29), and the men show much less familiarity with Marie-Rose than implied with the author of the first section. Mounir's relationship with Marie-Rose is informative too, since he is surprised to see her, for the first time in many years (53), and remembers how he has distantly kept track of her (34-5). This woman who Mounir remembers having an adolescent crush on must be different from the woman he casually asked to write a script for his film. Mounir is the third voice in the second section. The most developed male character in the book, he represents the rich, Europeanized leadership of the Christian faction in Lebanon. When he was sixteen he thought Marie-Rose worthy of him "because she had blue eyes" (34). Marie-Rose remembers how he wanted more than anything to be a Crusader, in his French school which knew a Christianity frozen in the catacombs and the Crusades-- "They dreamed of a Christianity with helmets and boots, riding its horses into the clash of arms, spearing Moslem foot-soldiers like so many St. Georges with so many dragons" (47-8). In the first section, Mounir is seeking to make a film about the Syrians because of his love for Syrian hunting trips and superiority over the uncivilized, less Westernized, land. Tony and Fouad are the fourth and fifth voices in each chapter. They represent masculine racism, power, ignorance and violence. Their sections are short, their thoughts simple-- while Mounir and Marie-Rose are arguing about the morality of the war, they are bored, waiting to kill her and get it over with. Fouad is described even in the first section as bloodthirsty: "He suffers from never having killed enough. . . . Fouad hunts as though obsessed. He prefers killing to kissing" (2). And it is he who shocks us with his dismissal of civilian casualties as "so many lost bullets" (16). Tony is tribal to the extreme. He swears by his cross (91) and emphasizes that his name will "never be Mohammed" (36). He sees the war as simple: his side against the enemy, which must be absolutely destroyed. He thinks of the conflict and of Sitt Marie-Rose, "It is as clear and inevitable as the succession of the hours. And no matter what anyone says, the will of the group rules. We are the Christian Youth and our militia is at war with the Palestinians. They are Moslems. So we are at war with Islam, especially when it crosses our path. If we were a flock of vultures against a flock of eagles, it would be the same thing. And in this war, there are no prisoners. There's nothing to be taken. That's how it is. We must suppress them. This woman is nothing but a bitch. Mounir should not regard her as an ordinary person" (36).
Tony and Fouad are the kind of men the narrator is fascinated with, who have "millenniums inside their bodies. . . superimposed layers of memory crammed in their brains" (40) which give them their nomadic, tribal obsession to destroy "everything which blocks the horizon" (40). Friar Bouna Lias, the sixth voice in the second section of the novel, differs from Tony and Fouad in that he feels the need to justify the war. In this he is similar to Mounir, and falls under similar vilification from Marie-Rose. But where Mounir argues with her and realizes his own lack of reason, finally having to change the subject (54-6), Bouna Lias answers Marie-Rose obliquely and counters her criticism with dogma. Mounir's conversation with her results in hostility, as he is reminded of the fogginess and superficiality of his justification for the war (75). But Bouna Lias simply becomes more pious and closed, and ends up blindly and hypocritically thanking God for the justice of her execution. His response to her final words is worth noting: "`In your schools that smell of incense and sweat they identified with Christ and the executioner, taking themselves first for the one and then for the other. They kill and mutilate with a rosary in their hands, believing that they serve the Virgin. And you want me to bow before such a fantasy?' `Your soul is going to sink Marie-Rose, you who bear the name of both the Virgin and her symbol. Families will speak of you and your treason for a long time to come, and without mercy.' `If I had to say what families are! . . . They are also your victims. You taught them that the ideal family consists of a Christ without a father, and a mother who like the Arab woman loves no one but her son.' `Stop, Marie-Rose. You're depraved and sacrilegious. You're swimming in madness. `Yes, Lord, Thy will be done. I tried to bring back one of Thy own and she resisted. The cries I hear now are the sign of a punishment Thou has sent from Heaven. These young men are executing Thy Providence. They leave nothing on the ground but a pile of dislocated members that was a sinner. I can give her neither extreme unction nor benediction. She no longer has a face. She has fallen before Thy Judgment. She is Thy responsibility. She will no longer be ours. On this earth we defend Thy interests, and those of Thy Beloved Son, so that Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven, and the keys to the Great Mystery stay in Thy hands alone. Amen'"(96-7).
Bouna Lias demonstrates the religious pretense of the war, and though Marie-Rose calls him on his hypocrisy and distortion of Christianity, he maintains his dogmatic justification of the war (63). The narrator describes this religious façade as well as she observes that the Churches of the Arab East are "not concerned with human pain. They're not in actual communication with any force other than the Dragon" (65). And, "Set against these churches is an Islam that forgets all to often that the divine mercy affirmed by the first verse of the Koran can only be expressed by human mercy" (65). At the end, she writes, "On the wall there is a crucifix. But, in this room, Christ is a tribal prince. He leads to nothing but ruin" (104). It is clear from Bouna Lias' obscurant piety and his lame sermonizing to justify the war that the violence, though ostensibly based on religion, is contrary to both religions and really is an effect of centuries of tribalism. The last voice in each section of Time II is a narrator. At first the identity of the narrator is confusing, but on further reflection we know her to be the writer of the first Time, again presumably Etel Adnan herself. In her first subsection in Time II, the narrator writes, "We have become strangers to each other. We're closed systems. I saw a plant and it seemed very straight to me, and to know where it was going. I allowed myself to say: I'm like that, I climb, I raise myself. I hover above this city, this country, and the continent to which they belong. I never lose sight of them. I have devoted myself to observing them up close. I identify with its geology. I've surveyed the currents which cross this part of the world, following some, opposing others, dismantling the mechanism of false alliances, and smelling out traitors like garlic in cooking. I know what's going on. But in fact, I am more like a four-footed animal than the plant. I go along with my head always to the ground" (39).
Her omniscient view seems to group her with the detached, impersonal narrators that we are all familiar with, but as the novel builds, she is as much of a personal voice as any of the others, and her judgment of the whole situation is anything from impersonal. Her language seems to link her to the writer of Time I, too-- compare the above quote to her description of herself during the outbreak of war: "My spine is like a twisted, stunted, fallen tree, disappearing in the sun" (18), or "My eyes are like plants that open during the day and close at night. I begin to wish that two rockets would pass through my head leaving me intact . . . that's what it means" (19). After considering how the parts of the story come together, it seems like the writer in the first section has, after a year of fighting, decided to write again about her three male friends, and elaborate on the diagnosis of violence she provided in the first section. In reality, it seems as if Adnan could have composed the two parts in either order, but juxtaposes them in order to show the beginning of the war and one of the many terrible acts of its fruition. Sitt Marie-Rose is a powerful statement about war in the Middle East. Etel Adnan's use of different voices allows her to give a more exhaustive picture of the ideological and psychological environment of the war. The result is terribly powerful in its violence.
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