From Georgia Makhlouf’s ‘Bitter Country’

Georgia Makhlouf’s Pays Amer, or Bitter Country, (Presses de la Cité, 2025) won the 2025 Prix Méditerranée des lecteurs, awarded by the “Des livres et nous” circle of the Perpignan Media Library, and is a finalist for the 2025 Prix de la Littérature Arabe. This excerpt — in Mishka Mojabber Mourani’s translation as part of our Women in Translation Month series — comes from Chapter 18.

From ‘Pays Amer’

By Georgia Makhlouf

Translated by Mishka Mojabber Mourani

The photograph is beautiful. Beautiful and peaceful, at least at first glance. A scene of summer life in the thirties in Mount Lebanon. Lebanon under French mandate, when profound transformations are taking place. These changes are welcomed by some, a source of anxiety to others. Overall, though, the future seems auspicious. Quality of life has improved, and innovations bring more and more comforts to everyday life. Clothing has become more westernized, with men donning suits and ties, and women’s outfits becoming lighter and more likely to reveal the occasional ankle, though not yet more of their legs.

Hair is collected in a bun or cut shorter than ever before. Parisian fashion has invaded the wardrobes of Lebanese women, with hats replacing scarves and the coquettish among them wearing fancy necklaces.

My discovery of Marie has plunged me into a history I knew nothing about until a few weeks ago, but it has delighted me and attached me to a country I was beginning to abandon.

Each of these photos is a journey. Each of them moves me as if I were discovering an aspect of our family saga, with its pleasures, its confrontations, its silences, its secrets.

It must have been a genial afternoon, with people visiting. Cane chairs were set up on the terrace to take advantage of the breeze. These chairs surrounded the rocking chair where the lady of the house usually sat. To her right was a man who smoked a water pipe. He appeared to have stopped for the picture. Near him was a low table for his coffee, biscuits and the diafé, treats offered to guests, usually sweets, cakes, and fruit. He sported a handsome moustache and, probably to make himself more comfortable, had unbuttoned his vest.

Not so the man standing behind him, whose light-colored linen suit was tight around the thighs and stomach, and whose high-collared white shirt was buttoned snugly around his thick neck. Clearly, he was a visitor and not a member of the household or the family. Perhaps he had come from Zghorta, or a neighboring village farther away. Perhaps he had stayed for lunch and would soon be on his way.

Just behind the lady of the house stood a man in a collarless white shirt, a tarboush, and high-belted sherwal, as the traditional loose pants were known. He was the only one standing up and not dressed in western attire. Marie must have asked that he keep his tarboush on, for it was not customary to keep one’s hat on when visiting someone’s home. But Marie, who had carefully arranged the six people featured in the picture, sought to create a symmetry along the center axis formed by the rocking chair, while ensuring the picture gave off an aura of natural relaxation. The tarboush of the man who remained standing added a nice touch, as well as a verticality that delicately structured the composition. Without the man and his tarboush, the picture would have been flat, lacking in depth.

The standing man is surrounded by the visitor in the tight suit and another man who looked a little like the water-pipe smoker: the same curly hair with a side part, the same western suit and tie with a white shirt and relaxed demeanor, as though he felt at home. He was probably a member of the household or a close relative. It is very possible that the two men who looked alike were Marie’s brothers, Charif and Khalil.

Then there was a young woman seated to the left of the rocking chair. She was biting into a piece of fruit and not looking at the camera. She seemed distracted. Perhaps she was bored, or thinking of something else: a man who was not in the photograph, whom she would have wished present. Or perhaps she did not wish him to be there: a man she met in secret, in the darkness of a room, in haste, filled with the desire to give pleasure and receive it, to take for oneself and give of oneself.

The six characters compose a peaceful tableau against a background of North Lebanon’s rugged mountains, in the soft light of a summer afternoon. But this banal serenity contrasts with the seventh character in the photograph.

He is neither seated nor standing. He is kneeling in the foreground. How he is dressed is unclear. All that can be seen is part of his chest, a dark vest, the edge of a white shirt. One can guess at a mustache, but his face is partially wiped out. Someone tried to erase it by drawing vertical and horizontal lines over the face so that he is covered in a grille of scratches. Those scratches violate the peace of the image and reveal what the picture does not. Someone wanted to destroy the serenity of that summer afternoon on the terrace at Tallet Karam. Someone wanted to tear out this man’s eyes. That someone was Marie. Marie wanted to obliterate his presence, as if he had never been a part of her life, had never sipped coffee on the terrace at the moment when she took that picture. A passing man selected by Marie’s scratches and plunged into anonymity, for we will never know who he was. It is difficult to identify him. Edouard? Camille? He whose name begins with G? Someone else? Who wounded Marie? Who betrayed her? Abandoned her? Violated her? By word or by act? What Marie did to the photo was draw a line through him, through their story; she obliterated his existence. Today, erasing someone is as easy as using Photoshop. All she had then was the tip of a needle and a pair of scissors to fix this tranquil moment that wasn’t, because of that man who had been there but shouldn’t have. The peaceful picture seemed to catch fire, the lightness it depicted weighed down with secrets and deceptions, with regrets and devastation. That is all we see: Not a squatting man but the lines ravaging his face. All we see is Marie’s rage and pain. A wound was delivered later, during an assignation. Something happened after that peaceful—even joyful—afternoon, something that made the presence of that man unbearable. Marie could have torn the photograph, but she did not. Instead, she rendered the man unrecognizable, thus preserving the traces of her pain.

Georgia Makhlouf is a journalist, literary critic, and writer who resides in Paris and Beirut. A correspondent in Paris and member of the editorial board of the Orient Littéraire monthly, she has been in charge since 2016 of the Franco-Lebanese literary prize awarded annually by ADELF, the Association Des Ecrivains en Langue Française. She joined the Parliament of Francophone Women Writers in 2022. She has received several literary awards, including The Senghor Prize for her first novel Les Absents. Her latest novel Pays Amer (Bitter Country), was published in January 2025 by the Presses de la Cité. It has just received the 1st Mediterranean Readers Prize and is shortlisted for the Arabic Literature Prize 2025.

Mishka Mojabber Mourani is the author of Balconies: A Mediterranean Memoir. She co-authored a poetry collection entitled Alone, Together [Kutub], a project in which Aida Y. Haddad translated Mourani’s poetry from English to Arabic, and vice versa. Mourani writes in English and in French, and translates from Arabic and French. Her work has appeared in numerous on line and print journals, and several collections including Hikayat:  Short Stories by Lebanese Women; Lebanon Through Writers’ Eyes; The Exquisite Corpse anthology; Arab Women Voice New Realities; Fruits Confits: Journal de
confinement; Beyrouth à Coeur ouvert; Sursauts d’une nation, Le Liban 18 communautés et bien davantage; Plumes à vin, Des mots pour Gaza; and Dire le Liban In 2018, she was made Knight of the Order of Academic Palms by the French Republic for services rendered to education and culture

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Also read:

‘Pays amer’: Georgia Makhlouf Revives the Memory of the Pioneers

Pays Amer: A Story of Art, Feminism, and Lebanese Destiny