Nourriture et poétique du retour dans Sīnālkūl (2012) d’Elias Khoury

In Sīnālkūl (2012), Elias Khoury depicts the return to Lebanon of a man who emigrated to France during the Civil War. Karīm Šammās, the protagonist, returns to Beirut while the war is not yet over and embarks on a journey of remembering his past through encounters with several women who embody different faces of the lost nation. In this novel, the protagonist’s individual search for identity is linked to the collective identity search of the nation, ravaged by war. Khoury exploits several images related to the Lebanese gastronomic tradition that acquire a symbolic role by configuring a “poetics of return”. Food, presented through the prism of war and exile, marks the changes in the characters’ identities: the passage from childhood to adulthood, the different models of masculinity and femininity, and political and religious affiliations. This “intersectional” use of food helps to highlight the unstable, complex and processual nature of identities, beyond the simple binomials of “homeland” vs “exile”, and “belonging/authenticity” vs “loss/nostalgia”.