Other Lives

by Iman Humaydan

In Other Lives, Myriam’s travels take her from her Shouf mountain village to Beirut, Melbourne and Paradise, Australia to Nairobi, Mombasa and Cape Town. Unwilling to be tied down by geography, language or men, Myriam forges a path through the world that is at once hers uniquely and also deeply informed by her life’s experiences. Again and again, she is drawn back to the Lebanon of her birth and childhood, only to find it no longer there. She is forced to confront the ghosts of the civil war—her dead brother, her disappeared lover, and the life that she left behind when she immigrated to Australia. Humaydan deftly explores one woman’s negotiation of love and war, intimacy and loss, migration and home in a way that speaks beyond individual but to a collective experience.

Genres: Fiction, Lebanon, Middle East, Literature, Asia, 21st Century

140 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Born in 1956, Iman Humaydan studied sociology at the American University in Beirut. She is a writer, anthropologist and journalist and has a weekly column in the Lebanese newspaper Assafir. Her novels have been translated into English, French, German, Italian and Dutch.

Reviews

[Anastasiia Mozghova · Rating 5 out of 5]

an extremely relevant book for everyone whose home is in the state of a war or anyone willing to get a tiny bit closer to understanding what that hell is like. the main focus in on the aftermath though. what is it like to live with loss? how to rebuild your life and your whole self from scratch again and again?

Humaydan explores complex subjects, such as identity and belonging. and she does it in an incredibly beautiful and poetic way. I have loved reading this book, and i will definitely revisit it again and again.

[Fleur · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure what to think, what it was about, it was not really gripping me unfortunately.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Other Lives, by Iman Humaydan. Translated from Arabic by Michelle Hartman.

“When will you be back home?”. The opening line of Iman Humaydan’s Other Lives sets the stage for this intimate novel of diasporic longing. Miriyam, an exiled Lebanese Druze, returns to Beirut fifteen years after her family’s departure during the civil war, seeking some kind of resolution to a war that broke up her family and destroyed any sense of permanence. Her political uncle is exiled by the deadly nationalist struggle, her father is driven to madness, her mother is driven into silence. These losses, she finds, have produced in her a longing that is “not for a specific place . . . [but] for what’s inside myself that I’m losing everyday”.

In anticipation of return, Miriyam reflects on her own series of exiles—in Melbourne, Nairobi, Mombasa, and Cape Town—with a surreal sense of detachment and a deepening awareness that what is lost is, for the most part, irretrievable. Miriyam’s narrative is a shattering lament against her mother’s restrictive silence and the collective silences surrounding the unresolved horrors of Lebanon’s war. It is a quest for human connectedness with “other lives,” including her own multiple lives in diaspora, marked by a proliferating number of suitcases that stand in for home.

This meditative novel from Humaydan is set in 1996 and concerns the journeys of alienated Lebanese expatriate Myriam. Formerly employed as a language tutor, she lives in Mombasa, Kenya, with her inattentive British husband, Chris, a doctor absorbed by his work developing a malaria vaccine. Left infertile after a traumatic abortion some years before, Myriam now yearns to bear children. Feeling bored and distant from Chris, she takes a return trip to Beirut, ostensibly to sell her family’s old home. Myriam meets the married journalist Nour at the Dubai airport, and they begin a passionate affair. After reaching Beirut, she continues her affair with Nour, while also thinking back to the tragic events which prompted her family to leave Lebanon—namely, a rocket strike that killed her brother Baha’ in 1978 during the Lebanese Civil War and left her father, Salama, with mentally debilitating head trauma. Myriam’s visit also allows her to reunite with Olga, her friend and lover when both were teenagers. By the end of Humaydan’s sad but satisfying book, readers should be pleased to see that Myriam has found, if perhaps not lasting happiness, then a degree of contentment.

Listening to the music of Asmahān (Amal al-Atrash, 1912 – 1944), a Lebanese - Syrian Druze singer, while reading this novel was a bonus.

[Flora · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tantalizingly disjointed journey through time, space, memory and trauma, in which the reader creeps deep into the crevices of the brain of a woman who has lived through hell. A very realistic point of view showing how this kind of trauma doesn't necessarily render a person steelier, or weaker, but rather more jumbled and unable to process life in a way that makes sense. I really enjoyed this read, even though the translation choices sometimes vexed me - but the translator's notes in the end, where Michelle Hartman explained just how much of the original Arabic text she tried to refract instead of reform and sanitize, did put it into perspective for me.

[Carmen · Rating 3 out of 5]

With the first glass, I feel strongly that I'm living another life. A life that in no way resembles my previous lives in Beirut, Australia or Kenya. My other lives.

[World Literature Today]

"Iman Humaydan is a Lebanese writer with two acclaimed novels to her credit, B as in Beirut and Wild Mulberries. Her third work constitutes a rewarding and cohesive fictionalized meditation on the nature of place, emigration, and memory." - M. D. Allen, University of Wisconsin, Fox Valley

This book was reviewed in the September 2014 issue of World Literature Today. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://bit.ly/1piJdl3