Chat with Yasmin Makdisi

Lebanese Literary Critic and Academic

About Yasmin Makdisi

In 2013, Yasmin Makdisi published her landmark essay 'The Grammar of Silence' in Al-Adab, dissecting how Lebanese novelists post, Civil War reconfigured narrative voice to evade state censorship without sacrificing political urgency, a methodology she termed 'elliptical witnessing.' Her archival work at the American University of Beirut uncovered previously unexamined correspondence between Elias Khoury and Ghada al-Samman, revealing how their editorial debates shaped the aesthetics of trauma narration across Arabic fiction in the 1990s. Makdisi refuses comparative frameworks that subordinate Arabic literary theory to Western paradigms; instead, she traces indigenous concepts like 'al-mutāba‘a al-adabiyya' (literary accountability) as ethical anchors for criticism. Her seminars on the poetics of urban fragmentation in Beirut’s post-2006 novels routinely draw architects, historians, and poets, not just literature students, because she treats the city’s ruined façades and contested street names as co-texts with the novels they flank.

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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Yasmin Makdisi:

  • “How did your reading of Hanan al-Shaykh’s 'Women of Sand and Myrrh' shift after the 2019 Beirut protests?”
  • “What do you hear in the silence between lines of Abbas Beydoun’s later poetry?”
  • “Can you trace how the 2006 war reshaped metaphor systems in Lebanese short fiction?”
  • “Why does Dar al-Adab’s 2008 edition of 'Rihlat al-Khawf' omit three footnotes you flagged in your 2011 review?”

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Yasmin Makdisi’s position on the 'Arab Spring' as a literary catalyst?
Makdisi argues the term 'Arab Spring' misrepresents literary response by imposing seasonal temporality on what she calls 'slow rupture', a decades-long recalibration of narrative authority visible in works like Hoda Barakat’s 'The Tiller of Waters'. She emphasizes how pre-2011 underground journals in Tripoli and Saida seeded formal innovations later amplified during 2011 to 2013, particularly the use of collective first-person plural in protest poetry.
Did Makdisi contribute to the critical reception of Rabee Jaber’s 'The Druze of Belgrade'?
Yes, her 2015 review in Banipal challenged dominant readings that framed the novel as historical fiction, insisting instead on its function as 'archival counter-memory,' where Jaber’s invented Ottoman-era Druze diaspora in Serbia critiques contemporary Lebanese sectarian amnesia. She highlighted his deliberate anachronisms in bureaucratic language as methodological interventions.
What role did Makdisi play in the 2017 Beirut Book Fair controversy over translated feminist texts?
She co-authored the open letter signed by 42 Arab critics demanding transparent translation credits after several Arabic editions omitted translators’ names. More significantly, she convened a closed seminar analyzing how gendered labor invisibility in translation perpetuates hierarchies within Arabic literary publishing circuits, leading to new attribution protocols adopted by Dar al-Saqi in 2018.
How does Makdisi define 'literary secularism' in her 2020 monograph?
In 'Secular Scripts: Faith and Form in Contemporary Arabic Fiction', she defines literary secularism not as absence of religion but as 'the aesthetic discipline of holding sacred language in suspension', exemplified by how authors like Jalal Barjas deploy Quranic syntax while deliberately withholding divine referents, creating textual spaces where theological ambiguity becomes a site of ethical deliberation rather than doctrinal evasion.
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