Ṭābiq 99 (2014) by Janā Fawwāz al-Ḥasan: Revolutionary Love, Identity and Humanity

In her last novel, Ṭābiq 99 (2014) – shortlisted for the 2015 IPAF – Janā Fawwāz al-Ḥasan, a Lebanese novelist born in 1985, narrates the love story between Majd, a young Palestinian man, and Hīldā, a young Lebanese woman, who met in New York in 2000. Majd survived the 1982's Sabra and Shatila massacre and grew up in exile. Hīldā belongs to a wealthy Lebanese Christian family from Mount Lebanon, thrived on the power of the Christian right wing, responsible for the massacre at Sabra and Shatila during the Lebanese civil war. When she decides to go back to Lebanon to rediscover her roots, Majd's identity begins to be torn between his painful experience of loss and violence in the past, and the possibility of love, in the present. The identity of the two characters is divided between the memory of their past, characterized by violence and conflict, and the present of exile, characterized by losing their sense of belonging. Love seems to be the only chance to overcome the logic of violence which upset the Lebanese society during the civil war. Love can be interpreted as a revolutionary strength/energy capable of subverting normative strategies of subjectivation, based on the opposition between “identity” vs “otherness”. Even if the past of the two young protagonists is marked by violence, their love story represents the possibility to overcome war's non-humanity and to establish a new conception of humanity defined by the acceptance of other's difference.