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WHEN MOTHERS ATE THEIR CHILDREN: WARTIME MEMORY AND THE LANGUAGE OF FOOD IN SYRIA AND LEBANON

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2014

Najwa al-Qattan
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Abstract

This article explores the experience of the Great War in Syria and Lebanon with a specific focus on the famine that, combined with other wartime calamities, decimated the civilian population. Using food as its primary register, it looks at a wide range of largely untapped Syrian and Lebanese poems, zajal, plays, novels, memoirs, and histories written over the course of the 20th century, in order to illuminate the experiential dimensions of the civilians’ war and to delineate some of the discourses that structured it. More specifically, it argues that the wartime famine in Syria and Lebanon gave rise to a remembered cuisine of desperation that is deeply informative about the ruptured world of the civilians’ war.

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Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 4: World War I , November 2014 , pp. 719 - 736
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

NOTES

Author's note: I thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for a summer stipend in 2001 that initiated this study.

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