Nada Awar Jarrar Analysis

With the horrors of the First World War it became clear that war is indeed highly contradictory in that it encourages soldiers to kill so as to preserve the kind of civilized society. Since the First World War people comprehend that war is a legalized murder under the pretext of a patriarchal noble duty. Destruction of war seems as inevitable as it is impersonal, war "was like one of the blind forces of nature; one could not control it, one could not comprehend it, and one could not predict its course from hour to hour" (Scarry 46). Killing tends to present legalized murder as either normal or necessary. War reduces people to targets who must be killed to satisfy military objective. Such scenes tend to suggest that the conditions of war strip men of their humanity, to reveal the primitive animal instincts. Consequently, war

She was born in Beirut to an Australian mother and a Lebanese father, Nada Awar Jarrar attended school at the International College in Beirut and went on to complete an undergraduate degree in the History and Politics of the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. She subsequently gained a Masters of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the American University in Washington DC. She lived in London, Paris, Washington DC and Sydney before returning to Beirut in the mid-1990s where she worked as a journalist. She wrote three novels: Somewhere, Home, published in 2003 and won the Commonwealth Best First Book award for Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, Dreams of Water in 2007, and A Good Land in 2009 which was shortlisted for Best Book for the Commonwealth. Her remarkable novel, Somewhere, Home, tells the story of three Lebanese women. All of whom are still searching for somewhere that can be called home. Nada Awar Jarrar’s novel tells three distinct, thematically linked stories of modern Lebanese women living in the shadow of war and