الإفلات من مؤسسات الهوية والثقافة: جورج شحادة مسافراﹰ / Georges Schehadé, The Traveler

Program

ALIF

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http://www.jstor.org/stable/521956

All Authors

الخشاب, وليد; El Khachab, Walid

Document Type

Research Article

Publication Title

Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics

Publication Date

2000

doi

https://www.doi.org/10.2307/521956

Abstract

[Lebanese-born Georges Schehadé's Francophone poetry and theater are parts of a dynamic world in perpetual becoming. His writing criticizes and deconstructs some of the epistemological foundations of Western modernity, such as the necessary and static correspondence between the individual and a defined sole territory, the elaboration of means to express this territory's spirit, the idealistic faith in science and technical progress, and the military-like mobilization under the nation's banner. In Schehadé's works the frontiers separating political, mental and ideological territories are blurred. This explains why he seems to be in a continuous state of deterritorialization, in the Deleuzean sense of the concept. No wonder that the theme of voyage is so obvious in the poetic and theatrical works of the author. His characters are constantly traveling and his poems often deal with the same subject. To Schehadé, traveling is not a mere displacement nor a move from one country to another. It is more of a state of in-between being. Traveling in Schehadé's worlds is closely related to the absence of frontiers. Within this perspective, it poses the basis of a liberation geography, not of a political one. The historical dimension is hence absent from our poet's works, because his worlds are those of primordial elements, ones unwilling to be imprisoned in limited contexts. Because Schehadé's production does not yield to recuperation in static conceptual tables, it stands as problematic vis-à-vis institutionalization and classification. He is precisely on the margin of the model with which he is being associated. He is part of French national literature, yet he is identified as an Oriental. He is recognized as one of the new wave of playwrights, but is referred to as a poet writing for theater. Starting from the seventies, he has been considered as a Lebanese Francophone writer, though nothing in his works can be identified as particularly "Lebanese".]

First Page

54

Last Page

76

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