Contemporary Authors

LC control no.: no2010147609

Descriptive conventions:
rda

LC classification: PJ7962.H74

Personal name heading:
Shuraytiḥ, Aliksandrā

Variant(s): شريتح، ألكسندرا
Shuraytaḥ, Aliksandrā
Sharītaḥ, Aliksandrā
Chreiteh, Alexandra

Special note: Non-Latin script reference not evaluated.

Found in: Dāyiman-- Kūkā Kūlā, 2009: t.p. (ألكسندرا
شريتح = Aliksandrā Shuraytiḥ) p. 4 of cover
(riwāʼīyah min Lubnān)
Always Coca-Cola, 2011: ECIP t.p. (Alexandra Chreiteh) data
view (graduate of Lebanese American University (LAU),
B.A. in English literature, pursuing her PhD in
comparative literature at Yale University.)
Ali and his Russian mother, 2015: ECIP t.p. (Alexandra
Chreiteh) data view (Lebanese novelist; she is
currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at
Yale Univ.)

Invalid LCCN: n 2011040271

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Alexandra Chreiteh
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alexandra Chreiteh
Education B.A. from Lebanese American University and expected completion of PhD at Yale University in 2015

Alexandra Chreiteh ألكسندرا شريتح is a Lebanese author known for her frank writing and portrayal barriers faced by Arab women.[1]

Contents

1 Early Life and education
2 Always Coca-Cola
3 Ali and His Russian Mother
4 Further reading
5 External links
6 References

Early Life and education

Alexandra Chreiteh was raised in a religiously conservative region by her Russian mother and Lebanese father. Chreiteh completed her Bachelor's degree in English Language and Literature at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon.

After being granted a graduate fellowship by Yale University, she began her PhD in Comparative Literature during the fall of 2009. While at Yale, Chreiteh has completed her Masters of Arts in Comparative Literature in 2012 as well as a Masters of Philosophy in Comparative Literature in 2013. She has also been teaching creative writing at Yale.
Always Coca-Cola

Chreiteh's completed her first novel, Always Coca-Cola, while studying at Lebanese American University, after drafting the story for an assignment in an Arabic creative writing class.[2] The book's protagonist is Abeer Ward, a college-age woman who is concerned with protecting her purity and closely following Muslim traditions.[3] Her close friend and model, Yana, is pregnant out of wedlock, and Abeer attempts to help her.[4] Yana's modeling career puts her into a soda ad that features her nearly naked body.[5] Abeer witnesses and experiences many attacks on women's bodies which lead her to experience a coming-of-age moment.[6]

The manuscript, which drew offers from three publishers, was first released in May 2009 and English translation by Michelle Hartman followed in 2012.[7][8] It received favourable reviews for shedding an intimate light on the lives of Arab women.[9][10] According to Chreiteh, she "wasn't trying to write something extraordinary - it's just the people you see every day".[2]
Ali and His Russian Mother

In 2010 Chreiteh published her second novel, Ali and His Russian Mother [ʻAlī wa-ummuhu al-Rūsīyah]. Like Always Coca-Cola, it was translated to English by Michelle Hartman who maintained Chreiteh's omission of chapters or subheadings in favour of a "continuous flow of words".[11] The story is about a homosexual Arab man who discovers that one of his ancestors was Jewish.[12]
Further reading
Sinno, Nadine (25 November 2015). "Milk and Honey, Tabbūleh, and Coke: Orientalist, Local, and Global Discourses in Alexandra Chreiteh's Dāyman Coca-Cola". Middle Eastern Literatures. 18 (2): 122–143. doi:10.1080/1475262X.2015.1110890. Retrieved 29 July 2016.

Alexandra Chreiteh is pursuing a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Yale University.

QUOTED: "In Ali and His Russian Mother, it was very important for me to address a very certain type of heroic discourse. It’s used a lot in times of war. Of course the woman’s body is discussed there always as a metaphor — the female body that’s raped stands for the loss of sovereignty over land, or is killed to be conquered; [there’s] the mother’s body that gives the nation its sons. And I wanted to show something else, the actual physical needs of someone, a woman, going though war."
"I needed to talk about the real, everyday struggles of war, about the huge dissonance between the “un-noble” need to go to the bathroom and the noble-sounding calls to sacrifice oneself for one’s country."

Alexandra Chreiteh on Writing About Menstruation in Modern Standard Arabic

By mlynxqualey on December 4, 2015 • ( 2 )

In what sort of language can an author write about something as banal and contested as menstruation? Should a character pee in colloquial Arabic or Modern Standard? In the first part of a two-part interview, Rachael Daum discusses urinary-tract infections, menstrual blood, and language with acclaimed Lebanese novelist Alexandra Chreiteh:

By Rachael Daum
Chreiteh accepting an award.

Chreiteh accepting an award for Always Coca Cola.

Something I really admire about both of your novels so far is your head-on approach to very, shall we say, earthly matters. In Always Coca-Cola, Abeer gets her period, and in Ali the protagonist is prone to UTIs, and you write very viscerally about the flow of blood and urine, respectively. I’m interested in this, and why you chose to have your readers confront these subjects? Particularly written in fus7a [Modern Standard Arabic]?

First of all, it is the source of a lot a lot of frustration for me — that is, I am really frustrated with the way that women are regulated in social and literary space. Women are always there as an erotic body, depicted in sexual ways, and naturally the issue of female desire is a big problem. There are of course female authors who write about female desire, and that’s great. But oftentimes women’s bodies are either sexualized or given a sort of sanctity, or both, and this sanctity is harmful. We, as Lebanese women, and I think as women in general, have to hide these things [such as periods and urination], we have to be ashamed of these things. The reality is that we deal with these things on a daily basis, and we need to explore them. I wanted to deal with the female body in a way that was explored not through someone else’s gaze.

I wanted a woman there just with her body, not constructing her identity against anyone or anything else. This is tricky, but I feel like it was important for me to give at least the protagonist agency over her own body, or to portray the ways in which women’s agency is complicated or lacking because of certain attitudes towards their bodies. I did not want to depict women as bad variations on men, which I feel is the way they are often portrayed in social space and discourse in Lebanon.

aliIn Ali and His Russian Mother, it was very important for me to address a very certain type of heroic discourse. It’s used a lot in times of war. Of course the woman’s body is discussed there always as a metaphor — the female body that’s raped stands for the loss of sovereignty over land, or is killed to be conquered; [there’s] the mother’s body that gives the nation its sons. And I wanted to show something else, the actual physical needs of someone, a woman, going though war. I needed to talk about the real, everyday struggles of war, about the huge dissonance between the “un-noble” need to go to the bathroom and the noble-sounding calls to sacrifice oneself for one’s country. Of course, in times of war, women are the biggest losers, but they are often reduced to metaphors. They are rarely allowed to exist for themselves. I kept asking myself: when is blood pure and when is it impure? I needed to address the contrast between these two levels of existence and discourse.

And remember: talking about periods in fus7a is not insulting, because periods are not insulting!

You choose to write in fus7a about very colloquial matters. Why did you choose to do this?

This was the most important thing for me to deal with while I was writing. For me, fus7a is a very difficult tool to use. Writing in fus7a is always already a translation, because you need to translate your own thoughts into writing, and the fact that the pulse of everyday life does not flow through fus7a makes it rigid, especially when it comes to the description of the mundane. It is a question of who owns language and who owns the right to express herself or himself, to make space for herself in society and in literature. You can reach more people in fus7a than you can in dialect. It’s a kind of locus of power: the social structures of authority are recreated within language if you do nothing to stop that.

For me, the way to stop it was to write about young women in Beirut dealing with really important issues, and some unimportant issues, but all of these almost never make it into fus7a in the voice of these women. They are always represented by someone else, through the authority of someone else, and not through their own authority. To break the authority of language and of social space, I tried to infect fus7a with the music of these women’s own language, while bending fus7a to make it do what I wanted. Everyone can use fus7a — why should it only address very “noble” ideas and “noble” causes? Why should authority only be held by a certain group that has grammar and the legal system on their side?

And of course there are colloquialisms in the novel, and the mixture was very important to me. Lots of slang, too, which is also important—it’s very subversive. Periods are subversive, everything is subversive!

What is your relationship with Michelle Hartman, your translator, like? As with any translation project, there is conflict and collaboration; how do you navigate this, particularly as your English is very good and you have the luxury (or curse!) of being able to read the translation?

alwaysMichelle and I are very good friends! We talk a lot. I respect her work as a translator—she is so involved in the texts she translates, and it’s important for her to respect the author’s intention. (If there is any such intention!) Basically she wanted me to be as involved as I felt comfortable in the translation. And she didn’t want to take away another woman’s agency! The issue with the translation of Always Coca Cola for me was that, in the original text, I tried to make the prose as clear as possible, and to make it flow as well as possible. Michelle’s political position made her do something very different with the English text: I felt it was choppy and sometimes awkward, and it was part of her political work as a translator. For Michelle, translated texts by Arab women risk being treated as commodities to be consumed. One way she tries to avoid this is that she makes sure the reader always know it’s a translation, by not allowing her or him to have too smooth a ride. In the end, we realized that we were dealing with two different texts.

What is your opinion of the Arabic literature landscape at the moment? Do you get to read a lot outside of your graduate readings?

Anyone would tell you that they read much less than they’d like to. I think there are a lot of very interesting things happening at the moment. There’s a move towards different types of narration I haven’t seen before. And there’s a movement to questions of identity — with special approaches not typical of previous Arabic literature. And there’s a lot of young Arabic writers, and I love seeing how many more young writers there are every year. At the moment, I am reading a poetry collection by a young Egyptian poet, Iman Mersal. I think she has a bold, unique voice. I’m really excited to see where young Arabic literature will go, especially where women will go.

So what are you working on now? I know you are a doctoral candidate at Yale University—what’s your research in?

My current work is about magical realism in Arabic and Hebrew. Even when these two literatures don’t communicate, they use magical realism in very similar ways. For both, magical realism is a tool of expressing minor identities within the nation that are repressed by national identity. For example, the Tawariq identity in Libya for Ibrahim al-Koni and the Kurdish identity in Syria in the case of Salim Barakat. In Hebrew literature, these minorities are the Arab Jews and Palestinians, who write in Hebrew and use magical realism in order to represent their own repressed narratives and histories.

The second part of this interview will appear on Monday.

Alexandra Chreiteh is the author of two novels, Always Coca-Cola and Ali and his Russian Mother. She is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Yale University. Her work has been translated to English and German.

Rachael Daum is a graduate student at Indiana University inflicting Russian literature and language on herself, and vice versa. She is also the Publicity Manager for the American Literary Translators Association, and you can find her @Oopsadaisical.

Alexandra Chreiteh is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Yale University. Her dissertation, Fantastic Cohabitations: Magical Realism in Arabic and Hebrew and the Politics of Aesthetics is a comparative study of magical realism, a genre that migrated to Hebrew and Arabic from Latin America, coalescing in the mid-1980s. The generic conventions of magical realism, characteristically read as a national response to colonial paradigms of representation, are transplanted into contemporary Hebrew and Arabic literature and film to express a post-national consciousness. Magical realist texts in Arabic and Hebrew subvert the state’s erasure of ethnic, religious, gender, and language minorities, redefining identity on their own terms. Alexandra is also an author of two novels in Arabic, Always Coca-Cola (2009) and Ali and his Russian Mother (2010). Her work has been translated into English and German.

QUOTED: "Though the protagonist’s voice is credible, the narrative tends to drag, with minimal dialogue. The action that should have driven the narrative is absent, as it is related to the reader too often rather than the reader experiencing it for themselves."
"Ultimately, beyond the realistic glimpse into what it is like to be evacuated from a country just past the threshold of war, Ali and His Russian Mother only disappoints."

In Review: Ali and His Russian Mother by Alexandra Chreiteh
January 7, 2016 | in Reviews | by Sawad Hussain

"Can you be loyal to your homeland and religion at the same time, even if they are at loggerheads in the grand scheme of things?"

As an avid fan of Alexandra Chreiteh’s first translated work in English, Always Coca-Cola, I couldn’t wait to dive into her latest effort, Ali and His Russian Mother (similarly translated by Michelle Hartman). While Always Coca-Cola possesses a dynamic, jump-off-the-page narrative, I found Ali and His Russian Mother to be quite the opposite, leaving me rather deflated.

The setting is July 2006. Israel has just declared war on Lebanon while our unnamed female protagonist (let’s call her “X”) is out for sushi. Over the course of the next three-some days, the reader is towed along as X is evacuated along with other Russian citizens to safety.

Novel or Novella?

It’s touted as a novel on the back cover, but Ali and His Russian Mother is really more of a novella. Michelle Hartman highlighted in her insightful translator’s note at the end of the piece (all publishing houses should adopt the practice of including translators’ notes!) that the original Arabic text was a “continuous flow of words” without chapters or subheadings. She has kept faithful to this format in the English, only adding in bullet points between certain sections “to improve the reading experience … and to punctuate certain moments.” Hartman’s structural tweaks further imbue the text with the qualities of a very long short story. This narrative technique, which propelled Always Coca-Cola to the fore and distinguished it in the field, falls short in providing the requisite urgency to a text delving into the subject of war.

War? What war?

One of the work’s stronger aspects is the unique teenage perspective of war and the narrative voice’s credibility. There’s a violent clash between her immediate reality—finding time to secretly liaise with her boyfriend; avoiding going back home; sipping on lemonade in a café—and that of the larger event at hand: missiles being launched at nearby neighborhoods; children’s mutilated bodies broadcast on television, and so on. Though we are kept abreast of how the war is progressing, the protagonist’s young, adolescent desires and needs (such as her growing attraction to Ali while they are being bussed to the Syrian border) are at the vanguard of the narrative. The portrayal of war as such leaves the reader pondering whether our protagonist is simply desensitized to war, having been fed on its haunting memories by her relatives in times past, or if she is naively unware of the magnitude of what she is witnessing. The artfully crafted ambiguity reflects what could be plausibly construed as a teenager’s experience with war.

What’s so funny?

Though the protagonist’s voice is credible, the narrative tends to drag, with minimal dialogue. The action that should have driven the narrative is absent, as it is related to the reader too often rather than the reader experiencing it for themselves. For example, when X needs to relieve herself on the side of the road she describes a lady who “said that she could stand in front of me and hold up a sheet to block the view from the road. I immediately agreed because I was afraid of postponing something as necessary as this. My mother joined me and urinated behind the sheet, as well. She said that this was a rare opportunity.”

What could have been depicted as a more humorous scene, with the reader hearing each character’s incredulity, falls flat. The one time dialogue is used to frame a comical scene, in X’s encounter with the border patrol where an exchange in mispronounced Russian provides fodder for a chuckle, is the exception to this unfortunate pattern.

Both the translator’s note and back cover underscore “Chreiteh’s unique, comic sense of the absurd”. Almost all the ingredients needed to whip up that comic absurdity are there, but save the aforementioned successful scene, the cake fails to rise, as the key element of dialogue needed to leaven all the other scenes is absent.

Who is Ali? (And why does he matter?)

Identity (and its attendant questions) collectively compose the most prominent issues driving Ali and His Russian Mother. Among the selfhood concepts of emigrants, immigrants, nationalists, religious tourists, and battered women, the ones chiefly addressed are homosexuals and Jews. Through Ali, the childhood friend our protagonist reunites with, Chreiteh raises poignant questions about what it means to be a Lebanese Jew, especially during an Israeli war. Do all Jews support the Israeli cause? Can you be loyal to your homeland and religion at the same time, even if they are at loggerheads in the grand scheme of things?

Ali also reveals he is homosexual and, as a result, he felt forced to leave Lebanon. But the repercussions of his sexuality on the narrative is neglected. The exploration of his sexuality is inchoate when compared to other Arab literary works, such as The Bride of Amman, that explore the same theme with considerably more depth. Ali falls into usual tropes of the gay man in Arab literature: he is excessively effeminate and spurned by trysts with European men. There’s nothing new about this; disappointingly little insight gained on the identity politics of living a taboo selfhood in a hostile environment.

* * *

Ultimately, beyond the realistic glimpse into what it is like to be evacuated from a country just past the threshold of war, Ali and His Russian Mother only disappoints. Perhaps, in this case, the wider dimensions of a full-fledged novel—one in which each character’s voice (the protagonist’s aside) and the wider plot are more fully developed—would have afforded Chreiteh the platform to deliver an encore to the compelling work that is Always Coca Cola.

*****

Sawad Hussain is an Arabic teacher, translator and litterateur who holds a Master of Arts in Modern Arabic Literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies. She is passionate about all things related to Arab culture, history and literature. Her dream job would be to translate and review Arabic literature full-time.

QUOTED: "This is a decent debut, and Chreiteh’s future work has potential if given the right attention, direction, and editing."

Always Coca-Cola: A Novel
Alexandra Chreiteh, trans. from the Arabic by Michelle Hartman. Interlink, $25 (126p) ISBN 978-1-56656-873-9

When university student Abeer Ward looks out the window of her Beirut bedroom, she sees a giant Coca-Cola ad across the street featuring her best friend Yana. The influence of the Occident persists not only in the billboard—and Abeer’s Coke-bottle-shaped birthmark—, but in the choices she and her friends make. Naïve, demure, and obedient, Abeer blends into the background compared to Yana, and similarly, Abeer’s very real problems tend to be given short shrift in relation to Yana’s unplanned pregnancy. Abeer’s name means “fragrant rose,” and like the flower, she feels that her value depends on beauty and purity. Living in fear that one wrong move will garner her father’s and society’s disapproval, she won’t use a tampon for fear that doing so would sully her virginity. Chreiteh’s character development and figurative language is strong, and there are moments of humor, but this debut—like its narrator—is not quite ready to face the world. Pacing issues persist: four pages are spent on an impending menstrual period, while Abeer’s crucial moment earns only a page, and the ending is rushed. The language is sometimes overly formal, though translator Hartman notes in her afterward that Chreiteh chose to write in Modern Standard Arabic, a formal language that differs from everyday spoken language. This is a decent debut, and Chreiteh’s future work has potential if given the right attention, direction, and editing. (Dec.)
Reviewed on: 01/23/2012
Paperback - 121 pages - 978-1-56656-843-2
Open Ebook - 120 pages - 978-1-62371-005-7

QUOTED: "Always Coca-Cola is about the simmering tension between tradition and modernity as experienced by young middle-class Lebanese women. This is a great premise for a novel. Though the final English-language product is probably less than the Arabic original, Always Coca-Cola is still an intelligent little book and worth the read."

Always Coca-Cola
Image of Always Coca-Cola
Author(s):
Alexandra Chreiteh
Michelle Hartman
Release Date:
January 9, 2012
Publisher/Imprint:
Interlink Publishing
Pages:
126
Buy on Amazon

Reviewed by:
Michael Adelberg

“Always Coca-Cola’s best moments illustrate the fault-line between tradition and modernity . . . Always Coca-Cola is about the simmering tension between tradition and modernity as experienced by young middle-class Lebanese women. This is a great premise for a novel. Though the final English-language product is probably less than the Arabic original, Always Coca-Cola is still an intelligent little book and worth the read.”

Lebanon is an Arab country that faces west. The Lebanese embrace Western institutions—i.e., European café culture, American retail brands—but Lebanon remains within the Arab world. When not dominated by its powerful neighbors, Lebanon’s bourgeois middle class flourishes. This makes cosmopolitan Beirut a most interesting hybrid: a westernized Arab city. It’s against this backdrop that Alexandra Chreitah and Michelle Hartman write Always Coca-Cola, a lightly sketched novella about young women in contemporary Lebanon.

Abeer, the main character, is studying at the American University in Beirut. The book is told from her viewpoint, but the plot unfolds around her two good friends, Yana and Yasmine. These friends challenge Abeer’s traditional Arabic values with their more western-feminist views. They also risk shaming Abeer because Yana is single and pregnant, and Yasmine is unabashedly butch. Abeer loves her friends, her Starbucks coffee, and her university classes, but she’s still an Arab girl.

Always Coca-Cola’s best moments illustrate the fault-line between tradition and modernity—a fault-line that Abeer must straddle. In one of the book’s more moving scenes, Ameer holds in her period blood during a quest for a feminine pad even after her friend has given her a tampon. She believes the tampon will compromise her virginity.

In another powerful scene, a male friend shames Abeer for her friendship with (single and pregnant) Yana. He shouts: “A young woman isn’t complete unless three attributes are found in her, and you do can’t do away with any one of them either. She must be a virgin, a wife, and a mother—in that order of course!” The authors’ greatest talent may be her ability to use a little scene to make a powerful point.

Abeer’s family is important to the book, but only as a foreboding off-stage presence. Abeer tells us about her strict father, but readers never meet him. A teeming family function, visited briefly, is the only exposure readers have to Abeer’s family (besides gossipy cousin Halla). Abeer tells readers how her family informs her decisions, but the reader never experiences it. A couple of scenes between Abeer and her parents might have added a great deal of depth to Always Coca-Cola.

Despite the setting and intelligent set-up, Always Coca-Cola steers clear of Lebanon’s stormy political situation. Police checkpoints, power outages, and rubble from past wars are nothing more than briefly mentioned inconveniences. Lebanon’s fragile emerging democracy is never discussed. For pages at a time, the American reader could easily forget that Always Coca-Cola is even set in Lebanon. The femininity vs. feminism tension at the book’s core could be examined just as easily in numerous settings, even certain subcultures within the U.S.

However, other parts of Always Coca-Cola did not easily transition from Lebanon to the U.S. The book has no chapters or breaks, and American readers might miss these landmarks of progress and closure. Also, jokes and wordplay that are, no doubt, funny in Lebanon do not translate well. Indeed, large parts of the translation read just a little awkwardly.

Always Coca-Cola is about the simmering tension between tradition and modernity as experienced by young middle-class Lebanese women. This is a great premise for a novel. Though the final English-language product is probably less than the Arabic original, Always Coca-Cola is still an intelligent little book and worth the read.

QUOTED: "although Abeer's preoccupations resemble those of a chick-lit heroine, this light-hearted introduction not only carries multiple layers of meaning, it also telescopes the central message of Always Coca-Cola, which embeds, in a deceptively simple story, a razor-sharp commentary on how young women in Beirut today are buffeted by the alternately conflicting and conspiring forces of hegemony, capitalism, and patriarchy—without, vitally, ever using such dry terms."
"Remarkably, given its short length—a little over a hundred pages— and its uncomplicated, at times even frothy, style, Always Coca-Cola comes off as a work of searing intensity that powerfully conjures the atmosphere of contemporary Beirut."

Alexandra Chreiteh’s “Always Coca-Cola”
Reviewed by Emma Garman
Image of Alexandra Chreiteh’s “Always Coca-Cola”

Translated from the Arabic by Michelle Hartman
Interlink, 2012

In the opening section of Always Coca-Cola, the savage and heady debut from young Lebanese novelist Alexandra Chreiteh, our narrator Abeer is flipping through a women’s magazine when an article extolling the importance of high-SPF lip balm catches her eye. Models, apparently, never leave home without wearing it: “It’s extremely important for models to protect their lips because the lips are the most important symbol of a woman’s femininity and attractiveness. Lip balm helps them protect their lips from dryness and chafing and thereby also protects their femininity.” Since she’s at a loose end, waiting for a friend who’s late for their meeting, Abeer decides to go across the street to buy some lip balm. “But the lip balm didn’t protect my lips,” she discovers as she walks in the strong Beirut wind, “on the contrary, dust started to build up on them!”

At first glance this hardly promises the most scintillating of plots. But although Abeer's preoccupations resemble those of a chick-lit heroine, this light-hearted introduction not only carries multiple layers of meaning, it also telescopes the central message of Always Coca-Cola, which embeds, in a deceptively simple story, a razor-sharp commentary on how young women in Beirut today are buffeted by the alternately conflicting and conspiring forces of hegemony, capitalism, and patriarchy—without, vitally, ever using such dry terms. “Protecting femininity” is the alleged purpose of the labyrinthine rules governing the behavior of someone like Abeer, a student at the Lebanese American University. And she tries to follow them, even though it sometimes proves impossible. A case in point: when she gets her period in a Starbucks, her friends give her a hard time because she wants a “disgusting”—by implication unfeminine—“Always” pad rather than a tampon, which, she thinks, “would for sure devirginize me!” But, as the author depicts with devastating clarity, Abeer’s best efforts to fulfill the omnipresent expectations of femininity—slippery chimerical notion that it is—will prove useless in protecting her from real danger.

Abeer, who lives with her religious, conservative parents, has two best friends who are each other’s perfect foils as examples of femininity: Yana, a Romanian model, and Yasmine, a sporty and tomboyish fellow student. Yana, whose larger-than-life red bikini-clad figure graces a Coca-Cola billboard facing Abeer’s bedroom window, is a media-perfected manifestation of “femininity.” Irrepressibly romantic and sexually liberated, she has long, straight hair, she waxes away all her body hair, and most enviable of all to Abeer, she has no cellulite whatsoever. Yasmine, on the other hand, is flat-chested, has short hair, wears no makeup, and enjoys boxing—“the kind of sport,” a horrified Abeer believes, “that strips a young woman of her most important attribute, her femininity.”

As fond as she is of her friends, both versions of femininity prove discomfiting to Abeer. When the novel begins, the three women are dealing with a crisis: Yana might be pregnant from the man she left her husband for—a man who, with sardonic, reverberating symbolism, works at the Coca-Cola Company. A pregnancy test is needed, but Abeer is terrified to accompany her friends to the pharmacy, in case her father hears about their purchase. Even at the best of times, walking around with Yana is difficult, because “everyone stares at her as if they were Bedouins faced with a lush oasis and they look away from me completely as if I were nothing, merely a mirage.” Yet it is equally problematic being seen out in public with Yasmine, who is gossiped about and called a lesbian: “I don’t want anyone to think that I am eccentric like her simply because she’s my friend.”

At moments like these, an ironic and illuminating distance opens up between the author and the narrator, and we see the serious intention behind the gentle satire. Alexandra Chreiteh is signaling that Abeer’s strongly held views are the unfortunate result of all the influences swirling around her: ancient religious and cultural traditions, the all-pervasive desires and prejudices of men, the venality of women’s media, and the imperatives of globalization. Hence her fervent wish for Yasmine to “take care of her natural assets” by tending “to her appearance and her femininity,” or her wholesale acceptance of all that is meant by the saying, “A girl is like a flower, she can only be plucked once” (not coincidentally, Abeer’s full name is Arabic for “fragrant rose”).

The juggernaut of globalization looms large in the novel, which opens with a description of Abeer’s pregnant and thirsty mother desperate for a Coke, which her husband refuses to get for her. This craving, Abeer reports, “left an indelible imprint on me: I was born with a small birthmark that looks like a little Coca-Cola bottle, on my upper back, right between my shoulder blades.” And it’s when Yana asks her boyfriend to give Abeer a job at the Coca-Cola Company that real horror strikes.

Remarkably, given its short length—a little over a hundred pages— and its uncomplicated, at times even frothy, style, Always Coca-Cola comes off as a work of searing intensity that powerfully conjures the atmosphere of contemporary Beirut; it’s a testament to translator Michelle Hartman’s skill that a novel written mostly, but not entirely, in Modern Standard Arabic, the “literary language” used in the Arab world, reads so naturally and humorously in English. As Hartman explains in her afterword, in creating a translation that did justice to the linguistic innovation of Chreiteh's novel, she faced unique challenges. Yet it is with impressive precision that, for example, she replicates in English the clinical, detached tone of the narrator's unflinchingly detailed account of a Brazilian bikini wax, which in both English and Arabic would typically be described with casual, slangy language. Conversely, even greater resourcefulness was required to represent the author's diversions from formal Arabic with jokes and local Lebanese vernacular, such as the wordplay of Yana's comical mispronunciation of Arabic, or a sexist rhyming joke in “texting Arabic” made at the expense of a man in shorts: “Shu hal-sa7beh ya 2a7beh?” (After much agonizing and crowd-sourcing, Hartman finally settled on “Legs so long and lanky, whoa that bitch is skanky.”)

Much of the comedy in Always Coca-Cola is a conduit for tragedy. There are no easy resolutions for the struggles faced by Abeer and her friends, which is another facet of the novel that renders it less like neat, pre-packaged fiction and more like messy, vivid reality. As Chreiteh herself has pointed out, “a lot of things change for the characters and a lot of things stay the same, and the fact that they stay the same is important because it’s sad.”

QUOTED: "Chreiteh is a fresh voice in the Arab world, though either she or translator Hartman is overly addicted to exclamation points."

ALWAYS COCA-COLA
translated by Michelle Hartman, by Alexandra Chreiteh
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KIRKUS REVIEW

The title refers to an advertising slogan, one that appears on a billboard in Beirut, for the ubiquitous soft drink.

Before narrator Abeer Ward (Arabic for “Fragrant Rose”) was born, her mother had a craving for only one thing—Coca-Cola. Ironically, 20-some years later Abeer’s good friend Yana, a sexually liberated woman and model in Beirut, becomes the visible emblem of the soft drink on a billboard that Abeer can see from her room. (It doesn’t hurt that Yana’s boyfriend is the manager of the local Coca-Cola company.) Yana is Romanian rather than Lebanese, but she’s established herself comfortably in Beirut…at least till she finds out she’s pregnant, and by her boyfriend rather than by her ex-husband. Although she wants to keep the baby, the boyfriend gives her a choice—get rid of the baby and continue to see him, or keep the baby and lose the relationship. Yana and Abeer have a third friend, Yasmine, who makes her own statement by boxing and working out in the local men’s gym. This slim novel, expanded from a short story, follows their day-to-day dealings with the crisis involving Yana, a crisis exacerbated when her boyfriend rapes Abeer. Worried that she’s pregnant, Abeer has to deal with some of the realities of modern life—like getting a pregnancy test from a local pharmacy without becoming branded, shamed or ostracized. Chreiteh keeps up a lively dialogue (trialogue?) among the main characters, and eventually they all learn what it means to be 20-somethings in modern Beirut.

Chreiteh is a fresh voice in the Arab world, though either she or translator Hartman is overly addicted to exclamation points that give far too many sentences an inflated and artificial oomph.

Pub Date: March 1st, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-56656-873-9
Page count: 144pp
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19th, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1st, 2012

QUOTED: "Always Coca-Cola introduces us to a young and highly gifted author who with a wonderful lightness of touch, holds up a mirror to the overly commercialised society in which we all live–West and East."

The agony and the allure
Written when the author was only 19, Alexandra Chreiteh's first novel "Always Coca-Cola", focuses in a highly entertaining way on how three young friends in Beirut are affected by Western commercialisation and contemporary beauty ideals. By Volker Kaminski

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The most important piece of furniture in Abeer's room is the mirror that hangs on her wall. The first hour of every day is spent in front of it, assiduously scanning her face for any new lines and anxiously examining her skin for tell-tale signs of cellulite advance.

She yearns for a mirror image that will reflect the notion of ideal feminine beauty, a wish that her diminutive stature and overly dark skin are enough to deprive her of.

Her friend, Yana, the star model in a Coca-Cola billboard advert, is the living embodiment of Abeer's ideal, and the comparison between the two is one with which Abeer is daily confronted as she gazes into her mirror. As fate would have it, her friend's image appears alongside her own, reflected from a billboard on the street outside her window.

This is not to say that Abeer is excessively vain. She comes from a traditional Lebanese family and studies at the American University in Beirut. Her friend, the daughter of Romanian-German parents, is much less deeply rooted in Beirut society, and consequently has a more relaxed attitude to life, an attitude that helped her to get the modelling job.

Permissive provocation

Cover of the English edition of Alexandra Chreiteh's "Always Coca-Cola" (photo: Interlink)
Alexandra Chreiteh's "Always Coca-Cola" is a multi-layered coming-of-age tale. Three friends in Beirut, at the outset of their university and professional careers, find themselves torn between the demands of a Western lifestyle and the expectations placed upon them by their traditional patriarchal home culture

Yana's permissive lifestyle is a constant source of provocation for Abeer even though she secretly tries to emulate her model friend. Abeer is made aware of alternative options to her own tradition-dictated lifestyle and Yana's supposedly more modern attitudes by fellow student Yasmine, who wears her hair defiantly short, spends her free time kickboxing and cares little about both society's rules and current notions of ideal beauty.

Most of the action in this highly entertaining novel revolves around Abeer. Yet the light, amusing tone of the narrative is deceptive: the narrator skilfully strings together multiple motifs that reflect the expectations and disappointments of the young woman.

Abeer appears trapped in an web of brand names: Coca-Cola, Always (sanitary towels), Starbucks and others constantly influence and determine her behaviour. The lives of the young women are very much dominated by the media, by mass advertising and by the dreams inspired by certain kinds of video clips, usually featuring palm tree oases and perfectly styled singing dancers.

Violent undercurrent

Beneath this web of entertainment and commercialisation runs an undercurrent of violence. There is much mention of blood – menstrual blood, the bloody injuries sustained during kickboxing or the pain experienced by Yana while waxing away her body hair at the beauty salon.

Abeer herself comes face to face with brutal violence when her employer rapes her in his office. Instead of reporting the incident, however, she is consumed by guilt and by the "scandal" of a possible "dishonourable" pregnancy. She then begins to look upon her own body as some men do – seeing herself as a spent rose, her bloom gone. In her desperation, she even considers having an operation to restore her hymen as a way of reordering her life, which she describes as having been scattered all around her like lots of little jigsaw pieces. Fortunately, her non-conformist friend Yasmine is on hand to dissuade her from going through with this plan.

Feel for dramatic situation comedy

Chreiteh has a nice feel for dramatic situation comedy, albeit with a dark background. At times the comedy ventures into the realms of the grotesque, and the already high pace of the narrative borders on the frenetic.

Despite the light-hearted almost frothy nature of the narration, this is an extremely adept and skilful first novel. The narrator succeeds in making us aware of the very real fears that confront the protagonist daily in a world that on the one hand bombards her with alluring yet delusive images (and songs) of an enticingly glossy world and on the other presents her with traditional values and identity patterns that are hardly a viable alternative for the modern women she is.

"Always Coca-Cola" introduces us to a young and highly gifted author who with a wonderful lightness of touch, holds up a mirror to the overly commercialised society in which we all live – West and East.

Volker Kaminski
© Qantara.de 2015
Translated from the German by Ron Walker