Coming Of Age In Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Literature: The Search For Identity In Niko And Lifted By The Great Nothing

Abstract

The aim of this article is to highlight the emergence of a coming-of-age trend in post-war Anglophone Lebanese literature and offer a postcolonial reading of the ways in which it explores the complexities of forming an identity in transnational subjects. Niko by Dimitri Nasrallah and Lifted by the Great Nothing by Karim Dimechkie adapt the form of the Bildungsroman to examine the role that diaspora and trauma play in shaping the identity of their young protagonists, whose self-realization depends on finding the parent they lost as a result of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). By analyzing these novels’ spatial and temporal mobility, this article argues that their protagonists’ transnational identity prescribes a fluid self which is not fixed to a specific home or to a present, but rather free to move between here and there and then and now.