Don’t Look for the Blade: Joumana Haddad, Autobiography, and Living on the Edge

In one of her most recent publications,I Killed Scheherazadethe Lebanese writer and poet Joumana Haddad dares to put an end to one of the world’s most well-known Middle Eastern literary figures. For Haddad, this centuries-old literary figure no longer represents the reality of Arab women. At the same time, Haddad recognizes something of herself in Scheherazade. As this study demonstrates, both women tell stories in order to keep the violence of their lives at a distance. Depersonalizing her story “Living it Up (and Down) in Beirut” through multiple narrators and sources and eventually deconstructing its plausibility, Haddad manages to avoid revealing her own experience. In the process, she raises an important question about the civil war, does returning to its memory actually aid in healing its scars or just reopen old wounds?