Women’s Stories during the Lebanese Civil War: Centering Beirut Decentrists

The Beirut Decentrists are women authors who lived through the Lebanese Civil War in Beirut and wrote about it through fiction novels, poems, and diaries. They never consciously formed a movement, as the term “Beirut Decentrists” was coined by Arabist literary critic Miriam Cooke who considered them pivotal in creatively retelling the minutiae of daily life and the violence of the war. Cooke considered the women decentered in two senses: physically, they were in different neighborhoods of the war-torn capital, and intellectually, they belonged to different social spheres and hailed from Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq, but they shared a despise for the violent armed militias.