Etel Adnan is a Lebanese-American poet, painter, and novelist whose novel, Sitt Marie-Rose is a fictional account of the real-life story of Marie-Rose Boulus. Boulus was a Syrian Christian social worker in Beirut who was abducted and killed by the Christian Militia during the early stages of the Lebanese Civil War. At once martyr and traitor, she gives a body to the political and sexual anxieties associated with the traitor. In this paper, I put Adnan’s novel in conversation with psychoanalysis, drawing on the study of traitors by Sharika Thiranagama and Tobias Kelly to examine how the figure of the traitor can be gendered. I take the figure of the traitor, in this case the female traitor, as a figure for that inner unsettling of our enchantment with ourselves and our nation. Thus, the novel renders visible the vulnerability and tenuousness of national belonging: Adnan proposes a model of love that upsets the fragile but hardened brotherhoods, leading to other solidarities that transcend the love of the same (brother) by introducing sexual difference, the woman, and the traitor.

   Salwatura A. Prabha Manuratne

Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

Abstract :- https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2022.2070750