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The colonisation of the female body in Liana Badr's The EyeoftheMirror
(2017-12-27) Eshtya, Ala'; Dodin, Eman; Saeed, Jomana; Hindi, Rawand; Hamamra, Bilal
Lina Badr's The Eye of the Mirror (1970) is, by and large, a narrative documentation of the 1975-6 siege and fall of Tal el-Zaatar in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. Through her female protagonist Aisha, Badr introduces the Palestinian collective trauma as it is enacted on Aisha whose desire to free her body from the confines of traditions is a reflection of the Palestinian nostalgia to liberate themselves and their land from the Israeli occupation. We argue that Badr depicts the experience of women and reveals the ways that the Tal al Za'atar war both oppresses women by merging traditions and function as an arena of emancipating women from gender roles. In doing so, Badr undermines the masculine discourse that excludes and marginalizes women's war experiences and their roles in narrating and preserving Palestinian memory through the act of narration.