Al-Shaykh Study Guide

Study Guide to The Story of Zahra by Hanan al-Shaykh.

I argue that throughout this work, Zahra's experience serves as a representation of that of Lebanon.

• Civil war connotes a family war.  Her dysfunctional family and the tragic lives of the individual members is a microcosm of a Lebanon that is constantly hopeful but perenially deceived and betrayed. 
  

• The Scars of Peace are like her pock-marked face.  Even though she knows it aggravates her problem, she keeps picking at her face, creating a metaphor for the scarred landscape of Lebanon.  Her pain seems to be almost self-inflicted.  She should know better but can’t help herself, displaying a masochistic desire to become the victim.  Note pages 24 and 126.

• Her constant flirtation with danger and reaching out to people, even though she knows instinctively it won’t work, reflects Lebanon’s grasping at straws to save herself.

  • The French, who ended up dismembering and polarizing the country.
  • The Palestinians, who were given refuge at first out of sympathy for their plight, heightened the internal conflict within Lebanon, particularly Beirut.
  • The Syrians and the Arab deterrent force come in to halt the civil war after 1975
  • The Israelis then come in and begantheir invasions of Lebanon, which end with their long occupation of southern Lebanon.

  Each time, Lebanon had hoped that some resolution to the conflict would happen and was met, instead, with further suffering.
  

• This metaphor would explain her loveless sexual encounters, her flight to Africa, her contracting again a loveless marriage, her abandonment, and finally her death at the hand of someone she trusted.  All these people could be any one or several of the ethnic groups in Lebanon.

  • P. 110: "Why is it that I am always finding myself in a hurtful situation?  A sense of helpless fatalism!"

• The sniper is the internal enemy, the one who finally killed Lebanon.

  • P. 147: "I had made myself into an easy target for assassination."
  • P. 148: 2^nd last paragraph: who was Lebanese?

• She gives intimate details of their sexual encounters—exchange of body fluids, p. 150: his sperm dripping down her thighs; her cries are like hot lava and sand p. 152.  When she goes to Dr. Shawky’s clinic, she sees her mother and her lover in the dark.   This signifies closeness to the sniper but also something illicit.  The sniper is someone she knows very well, or so she thinks. 

  • P. 161: "You sniper, you weigh on me like a vast but weightless mountain."
  • p. 164: lost innocence reflected in the anguished question: “Where is our childhood?”
  • p. 212: Final hopes are dashed; the enemy is not outside, but within.

• P. 144: The reference to a "demon inside" suggests Lebanon's failure to master its internal demons.  It was because of this that the country died.

  • p. 162: Questions that may never be answered: “never told me why he became a sniper”