War Memories and the Refusal of Male Dominance in Shakir's - "Oh, Lebanon"

Oct 15, 2026

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This study investigates how war memories shape female gender identity in Evelyin Shakir's "Oh, Lebanon." The female protagonist refuses to belong to her Arab identity while living in the United States, influenced by brutal war memories witnessed in Lebanon. These experiences prevent acceptance of a submissive gender role in Arab culture, motivating revolt against her father's will and enabling self-directed identity formation beyond Arab traditions. Close reading analyzes quotations from the story to trace these influences, concluding that war trauma activates resistance to male dominance.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages7

Reading Time11 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Gender identity and war memories in "Oh, Lebanon"

Violence, patriarchy, and Arab American women writers

Hegemonic discourse and resistance by contemporary writers

Ethnic past, nostalgia, and identity reconstruction

Advances in Language and Literary Studies ISSN: 2203-4714 Vol. 8 No. 1; February 2017 Australian International Academic Centre, Australia | | | | | --- | --- | --- | | | | | | Flourishing Creativity & Literacy | | | War Memories and the Refusal of Male Dominance in Shakir's "Oh, Lebanon" Hassan Ali Abdullah Al-Momani English Department, Tafila Technical University, Jordan [E-mail: hassan76us@yahoo.com](E-mail: hassan76us@yahoo.com) Doi:10 .7575/aiac.alls.v. 8n. 1p.118 URL: [http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.8n.1p.118](http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.8n.1p.118) Received: 17/10/2016 Accepted: 20/01/2017 Abstract This study investigates the role of the war memories in the construction of the female gender identity in Evelyin Shakir's "Oh, Lebanon," in which the female protagonist refuses to belong to her Arab identity when she lives in the United States because of the brutal war memories she witnesses in Lebanon. Such memories make the protagonist unable to accept her submissive gender role in the Arab culture. In other words, these memories of war motivate the protagonist to revolt against her father's will and to choose her own way of building her identity away from the influence of her Arab culture and traditions. The methodology of this paper is based on a close reading analysis of some quotations from Shakir's short story which will be analyzed to see how the war memories in Lebanon have influenced the construction of the protagonist's gender identity. The study concludes that the trauma of war motivates Arab female gender to react against the male dominance and traditions because war, with its dark memories, might uncover that hidden desire in female's subconscious mind to feel unlimited or constrained with the male dominance. Keywords: War memories, male dominance, gender idenity, cultural idenity, Arab culture 1. Introduction One of the themes raised in Arab American women writers is violence against female protagonists by their parents. Ammar (2000) discusses that violence against women in the Arab American community. She argues that the new immigrants from Arab countries to America brought with them oppressive tendencies against women. Ammar believes that it is not Arab culture which is only responsible for oppression against Arab American women, but also the “US patriarchal values and of the perceived looseness of American women (relative to Arab women) on Arab-American immigrants”(63) . She adds that the American culture “condones violence against women”(63), in which the efforts made in the United States to lessen the number of violence cases against women are not enough, and the proof is that“every three seconds a woman is battered in the US…[and] more than half of all women living in the United States will be victims of battering” (63) . Furthermore, Ammar asserts that one of the reasons behind the violence against Arab American women is due to the belief that “violence against women [is] a mechanism of reinforcing social distance from mainstream society”(63) . In other words, Ammar believes that Arab Americans always “view the status of women as one of the major distancing norms between their native culture and their new home culture”(63) . Arabs often tell their daughters that they do not them to appear and act like the American girls because of their cultural norms that restrict the behaviors of women (63) . Al Qutami (2009) investigates how two contemporary American women writers resist and dismantle the hegemonic discourse that “represents Third World women as a monolithic and homogeneous category”(iii) . The writer explains that the monolithic image of U. S. Third World women depicts the cultural imagery of the “veil and the house”(iii) . The writer selects both the Arab-American woman writer Mohja Kahf and the Latin American writer Sandra Cisneros to study their resistance for these images, in which they demonstrate “the ways those constructions are oppre

FAQs

How do war memories influence the protagonist's gender identity in "Oh, Lebanon"?

War memories connected to Lebanon prevent the protagonist from accepting a submissive gender role in Arab culture and push her toward resisting that expected identity.

What role does the protagonist’s refusal of Arab identity play while living in the United States?

Her refusal reflects an inability to reconcile her Arab gender role with the trauma she associates with brutal war memories she witnessed in Lebanon.

What methodology does the study use to examine these themes?

The paper uses close reading analysis of quotations from Shakir's short story to show how Lebanon’s war memories shape the construction of the protagonist's gender identity.

Oct 15, 2026

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