The (be)coming of peace: Time, women, and war in Andrée Chedid's La Maison sans racines

SynopsisEgypto-Lebanese author Andrée Chedid's novel of the civil war in Beirut, La Maison sans racines [Return to Beirut] recounts in three narrative times a fictional background to the beginning of this war. Chedid incorporates references to the fable of the tortoise and the hare to emphasize the slow yet inevitable progression towards war. The relationship among women, time, memory, the arts of photography and film, and the start of war is examined in light of the insistence on time and space as malleable concepts. With its use of textual markers that underscore the theme of time and its relationship to space, Chedid's novel is best appreciated in the original 1985 edition since subsequent French editions and the English translation have modified those markers.