Ghada Samman's 'The Square Moon':
Ghostly Warnings of the Past

By Christopher McCabe

THE SQUARE MOON: SUPERNATURAL TALES,
By Ghada Samman,
Translated from the Arabic by Issa J. Boullata,
Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1999, 203 pages.

Fiction plays a game on readers. As we turn a story's pages, we often turn to the past; call this the "once upon a time" syndrome. Ghada Samman plays this game, sometimes quite artfully, in her collection, "The Square Moon: Supernatural Tales." The past, she stresses, is always with us. It is impossible to leave behind lovers, families, and other partners through difficult times. Trying to deny the effects of historical figures and events on our psyches is equally a fool's game.

"The past does not really go away," a Samman protagonist reflects somberly in the tale, "An Air-Conditioned Egg." "It remains deep inside me like an engraving on stone that time cannot efface. No exorcist can expel the faces of yesteryear's loved ones who inhabit me like dear ghosts."

In the collection's 10 stories, Samman's characters are frequently unsettled by past and present lovers, spouses, and new financial responsibilities while attempting to reconcile changes in the geographical and cultural landscape of their lives. Though war impelled them to leave Beirut, peacetime in Paris (or London or New York) does not secure inner tranquillity. They are haunted by spirits from their native land -- most often ghosts of relatives and former lovers -- as they confront the personal and professional decisions of their new lives. Samman refrains from making quick judgments. She exposes the turmoil and complexity within the hearts and minds of her characters, dealing gently even with those who are not her likely political and social allies. Her sympathies are clearly feminist, but she does not adhere to any strict political code. Her concern for every woman's (and man's) plight is rooted in her overriding compassion for all human beings facing dilemmas not easily resolved.

The first story in the collection, "Beheading the Cat," presents Abdul, a self-described "old man at 35," who, on the day he has planned to propose marriage to Nadine, is "visited" by an apparition, his mother's late sister from Beirut. In the Paris apartment he shares with his parents, the ghost offers him an alternative to Nadine, an illiterate "rare white bride" whose moral habits are promised to never waiver. In public she would be the model of restraint, the ghost explains, and in his home he would only see her smile as she served his every whim. She would even find him another wife if he so wished. For this vision to come true, the ghost instructs, Abdul must "behead a cat" in front of the bride so she will know to never disregard him, lest her end be as gruesome as the cat's. Abdul knows that Nadine, an assertive Lebanese woman of 20, would likely stop such a killing or be the first to report Abdul to the animal protection league. She has, after all, recast herself in the Western world, and values her liberty and autonomy from a potential husband. Studying finance at a famous institute and bungee-jumping from the bridges of Paris, she appeals to Abdul's mind, but the ghost reveals to him that his heart truly longs for the archaic Lebanese bride.

"The Square Moon" is less compelling after the first tale, a common characteristic of such collections. An author's style is unassailably unique if one story is read individually in a literary journal or magazine, but the style's special qualities can appear redundant when many stories are gathered together. The reader becomes attuned to Samman's "announcements" of ghostly moments ahead, and her reliance on similar events, particularly traffic accidents, to denote the real and the unreal, becomes predictable. When surprise is forfeited in the writer's self-proclaimed "supernatural tales," her narrative strengths are quickly undermined.

Nonetheless, well-crafted and poignant stories in "The Square Moon," such as "The Other Side of the Door" and "The Swan Genie," deserve the reader's attention. "The Swan Genie" sympathizes with a woman who has seen her life flourish in her meager, workaday world as a sales clerk in a Paris fashion house. When her husband demands that she return with him to share a wealthy, yet kept, existence in Lebanon, his request strikes her like a prison sentence, and she resolves to stay in Paris with the riches of her independence. In "The Other Side of the Door," a mother confronts her guilt and anger after her son is hit by shrapnel during the war. In despair she wonders: am I not as guilty for the turmoil around me as those I hate? At the moment when she realizes that she may no longer be able to endure her son's physical disability and, worse, his deepening sadness, a ghost appears to show how she can instill happiness in her child again.

Samman's penetrating questions deepen her fiction and make it transcend mere categories of genre or culture. When she observes in "Visitors of a Dying Person" that one woman's crying eyes "are like the walls of a cave corroded by salt over the centuries," her own timeless prose is evident. Samman's use of such precise metaphors to capture the darkest sufferings of so many continues to make her writing a fine antidote to the hazards of forgetting.

This review appeared in Al Jadid, Vol. 5, no.29 (Fall 1999)