Lebanon in the Devil’s Waters: the literary supernatural in Ghada al-Samman’s civil war trilogy

ABSTRACT In the early 1970s, Syrian-born author, Ghada al-Samman authored two essays on the supernatural based, in part, on her experiences in Beirut. These essays mark the beginning of what I identify as her sustained literary interest in the supernatural. While al-Samman’s political investments as a feminist and leftist writer have been the primary lenses through which critics have considered her work, this essay recenters her literary contributions. Focusing on her Lebanese civil war trilogy, I explore how she constructs and sustains a supernatural literary sensibility over the course of several decades, amalgamating Arabo-Islamic cosmologies, Euro-American psychoanalytic notions, and Shakespearean aesthetics. The result, I argue, is a supernatural hermeneutic which highlights the irreparable damage of both pre-war and wartime environs to the individual soul and the body politic.