Native Tongue, Stranger Talk

Can a reality lived in Arabic be expressed in French? Can a French-language

literary work speak Arabic? In Native Tongue, Stranger Talk Hartman

shows how Lebanese women authors use spoken Arabic to disrupt literary

French, with sometimes surprising results. Challenging the common claim

that these writers express a Francophile or "colonized" consciousness, this

book demonstrates how Lebanese women writers actively question the political

and cultural meaning of writing in French in Lebanon. Hartman argues

that their innovative language inscribes messages about society into their

novels by disrupting class-status hierarchies, narrow ethno-religious identities,

and rigid gender roles. Because the languages of these texts reflect the

crucial issues of their times, Native Tongue, Stranger Talk guides the reader

through three key periods of Lebanese history: the French Mandate and

Early Independence, the Civil War, and the postwar period. Three novels

are discussed in each time period, exposing the contours of how the authors

"write Arabic in French" to invent new literary languages.