‘Everybody Sang’ is Sassoon’s most famous poem, and according to some critics, supposedly written in celebration of Armistice Day, 1919, just before he found out that his friend Wilfred Owen had died in the last week of fighting. Sassoon had been treated for shell shock and war neurosis in one of the UK’s most experimental war trauma facilities, the psychiatric unit at Craiglockhart, and had sustained physical wounds during his time at the Western Front.
In The Story of Zahra, Lebanese writer Hanan al-Shaykh presents betrayal as the very essence of narrative and narrativity. It becomes a postmodernist syndrome with various symptoms and multiple manifestations, predicated, as it is, on all manner of deception in the negotiation of female identification and self-defining modes. It starts from the enunciation of the title itself: the third person referent implies a certain detachment; a voice promising to unveil Zahra’s secrets and hence breach her interiority. This detached voice is the one behind the scenes, Zahra’s double and the marker of her schizoid self.
Sahar Khalifeh, a Palestinian academician and novelist, explores in her narratives, among other things, the impact of occupation on the day-to-day life of Palestinians in their cities and villages. In her 1980 Sunflower, Khalifeh vividly portrays the city of Nablus from the viewpoints of several male and female characters who see the city and themselves under occupation from the perspectives of class, gender, ethnicity and situatedness. Cut off from the outside by military occupation, cordoned by hostile settlements, and impaired sexually and emotionally, the city and its inhabitants in Khalifeh’s narrative suffer from excessive atrophy.