Always Coca-Cola
Always Coca-Cola ( Arabic دايما كوكاكولا) is the debut novel by Alexandra Chreiteh ( Arabic ألكسندرا شريتح). It was published in Beirut in 2009 . In 2012 it was translated into English and in 2014 into German.
In a seemingly simple story in a sharp tone with daring, cynical humor and multi-layered meanings, the theme is how tradition and modernity clash with relish in the life of three women around the age of 20 in Beirut. It deals with the dangers inherent in the blind idealization of Western notions of beauty. The title of the work combines two brand names: Always , a feminine hygiene product, and Coca-Cola . As a Coca-Cola slogan, it has been ironically broken several times throughout history.
The story is told from the perspective of Abir Ward ("fragrant rose"). She studies at the American University in Beirut . In terms of her parents, she is the most traditional of three friends of the same age. Jana and Jasmin tend to have western feminist views. Jana comes from Romania. She is a model for Coca-Cola, single and unintentionally pregnant. Jasmin is a fellow student and Butch . She has a German mother, does boxing and has short hair. For Abir, this is no reason not to like the girlfriends. Despite all the differences, the three women stick together.
content
Abir lives with her parents in Beirut. She is waiting for Jana, who should bring her news whether it will work out with an internship at Coca-Cola that she needs for her studies. Jana is in a relationship with the Coca-Cola manager. Jana is late and comes with Jasmin. First she says that she might be pregnant. Jasmine suggests buying a pregnancy test at the pharmacy . Abir doesn't want to come. She is afraid that her father might see her doing it or the pharmacist will recognize her. Then she would fall badly on herself.
When Jana and Jasmin come back, Jana wants to take the test with Abir. She fears that someone from her family could burst in at any time. The test is positive, but the friends don't trust the result. Jasmin says she can get money if Jana doesn't have enough for an abortion . But this is out of the question for Jana. The friends are looking for a gynecologist in a distant part of town, so that Abir has less to fear of being seen by acquaintances. To pass the time until the appointment, they drive together in Jasmin's car to a Starbucks . Before that, they pick up their sports gear from Jasmin in another part of the city because they want to go to kickboxing training half an hour later. Abir says of Walid, a tall, broad man who often stands in Jasmin's house entrance, that he doesn't look like a man. So she prefers to stay in the car with Jana, who remembers that she has an appointment with Abir's cousin Hala because of a tailor's appointment for her wedding dress.
Abir wants to prevent her family from finding out that her friend Jana is pregnant. So she prefers to call the cousin herself and cancel the appointment for Jana because she is unwell, in Arabic. Otherwise, the three of them speak English to each other, because Jana only knows a few words in Arabic that she remembers from pop songs. Once at the café, Abir is afraid that there might be menstrual blood on the outside of her clothes. Jasmin offers her tampons , but she hesitates to accept the offer. She asks another woman in the toilet room for a pad . When she returns to the table, Jasmin has already left and Jana has decided to meet her boyfriend to tell him about the pregnancy.
Abir accompanies Jana home. When their manager friend arrives, he says that Abir could start the Coca-Cola internship in two days. Abir is embarrassed that Jana and her boyfriend are having sex. She withdraws into the kitchen to a parrot, which instead of Arabic poetry utters only swear words. When the boyfriend leaves, it is clear that the relationship is over: Jana wants to have the child, but he does not want a lover with a child.
The next morning Jasmin picks Abir up and the three of them drive to the doctor's office. On the way there, Jasmin fends off an intrusive man by suddenly opening the car door from the inside and throwing him off his motorcycle. At the doctor's, Jana finds out that the result of the test was correct and that she is pregnant. Jana just wants to go home and Abir asks Jasmin to take her to her grandmother's house, because that's where the whole family meets for lunch after Friday prayers.
The three-room apartment is full of women and children, an aunt sends her son out to buy Always around the corner for her. Out of shame she doesn't want to do it around herself. When the men arrive, they wait until the women have put on their headscarves, then they spread out on the sofas and there is food. Abir is asked what about her friend Jana, to which she replies evasively: Nothing is.
On the huge Coca-Cola poster that Abir sees behind her at home when she looks in the mirror, Jana has recently ceased to be seen in a bikini, everything except her face and hands is covered by black paint. When Jasmin comes to visit, she remembers at this sight that she wants to ask Abir to accompany her to the funeral service for Walid, because she wants to find out what actually happened to him instead of a heart attack. However, Abir says she has to go to university.
There she meets some acquaintances who are listening to a fellow student telling a sexist joke with which he insults the women around. Everyone already knows this and applauds for the show. Abir is afraid of the tone this student takes, because he speaks like a benefactor who wants to get all non-Muslim people back on track and gives traditional behavioral rules for women to the best. She prefers to say nothing and go to her seminar.
Then Abir has an appointment with Jana, who made an appointment in the beauty salon to have her whole body, including the intimate zone, depilated with wax; an ordeal she couldn't go through alone. So Abir watches, holding hands, as Jana is tortured. Jana has barely recovered and wants to go home when Jana's ex-boyfriend, now Abir's internship manager, calls and demands that she come immediately because he cannot find certain documents. She is late and lets a moped driver take her with him on the condition that she is allowed to wear the helmet in order not to be recognized. She feels "surprisingly free all the way and suddenly filled with great power" (p. 103).
When she arrives at the internship, she is yelled at and raped by Jana's ex-boyfriend. Back at home she is surprised that she thinks more about Jana than about what happened to her. She takes a pill for the pain between the legs. She panics that she might have become pregnant and she thinks about Jana again, because as a foreigner she is free to become pregnant without getting married. Jasmin shows up unannounced, sees Abir's condition, finds out the reason, comforts her and at Abir's request they drive to a distant pharmacy, where Jasmin brings Abir to come to the pharmacy to buy a pregnancy test.
Jasmin tries to convince Abir that she would have escaped rape with boxing skills and Abir goes to kickboxing training with Jana, where she is amazed to discover that the trainer is a pregnant woman in her fourth month. When Abir's period sets in two weeks later, she is relieved. Jasmin wants Abir to tell Jana about the rape, but it doesn't come to that, because the next thing she hears from Jana via email from Romania, where she has returned, with plans to show the child one day in Beirut, where his father lives.
reception
The variants of womanhood offered by Jana and Jasmin don't really convince Abir, wrote Emma Garman in her review of the English translation in February 2012. Terms such as hegemony, capitalism and patriarchy are not used, but it is shown how these social forces lead to conflicts in the lives of the three women on the one hand and how a feeling of togetherness arises on the other. Abir thinks he is obliged to take great care of her “femininity” and therefore only use pads instead of the more modern tampons, which the two friends find disgusting. The author explains with stunning clarity how Abir is not protected from actual danger by traditional rules of this kind. Much of what is presented in a funny way is actually to be seen as tragic, because no solutions are in sight. Abir describes events that are actually very close to her, light-footed and often ironic, poking fun at the Western lifestyle of her friends as well as her own Arab traditions. wrote Rebecca Nordin Mencke in her review for NDR in December 2014. The translator had succeeded in translating Chreiteh's immediate, rapid narrative style into German. It is entertaining reading that gives a highly topical insight into Lebanese living conditions. The carefree narrative tone, however, proves to be deceptive. Chreiteh has a keen sense for drastic situational comedy with a dark background, sometimes this comedy becomes grotesque, whereby the already high narrative speed almost overturns, according to Volker Kaminski in his review for the German-language portal qantara.de in August 2015.
In contrast to other contemporary Lebanese novels, Always Coca-Cola is about intimate conflict zones, according to M. Lynx Qualey's assessment in June 2012: How can a young woman in Lebanon defend her physical limits when she is pushed by others pulled, attacked and seduced? It is not a story that leads to completion, but rather it consists of a series of attacks and retreats, of scenes of agreement and misunderstanding, in which what is further elaborated elsewhere seems almost irrelevant. It is described how Abir, while being raped, registers the oversized Coca-Cola advertisement behind the rapist's shoulder, so that the banner is given almost the same importance as the rape.
To the translations
The German and English editions of Always Coca-Cola contain an epilogue by the respective translator in which the procedure is explained. Because here the intimate body-related concerns of the three heroines are spoken for the first time in Arabic high-level language, so that a change of register became necessary. In addition, attempts had been made to do justice to the text, which was peppered with word jokes, as best as possible, which made it necessary to rewrite it in places.
literature
- Christine Battermann (2014): Epilogue in the German edition, pp. 143–148.
- Michelle Hartman (2012): Translator's Afterword in the English edition, pp. 112–121.
expenditure
- Alexandra Sherayteh: دايما كوكاكولا (Dāyiman - Kūkā Kūlā) , Arab Scientific Publishers, Beirut 2009, ISBN 978-995-387-660-3 .
- English: Alexandra Chreiteh: Always Coca-Cola: A Novel , translated from the Arabic by Michelle Hartman. Interlink Publishing, Northampton, MA 2012, ISBN 978-1-56656-873-9 .
- German: Alexandra Chreiteh: Always Coca-Cola , translated from Arabic by Christine Battermann. (= Swallow Editions , edited by Rafik Schami ), Schiler , Berlin / Tübingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-89930-415-2 .
Web links
- Rebecca Nordin Mencke: (Podcast) , 4'24 ″, ardmediathek.de / SWR 2 Literatur, March 26, 2015
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Emma Garman: Alexandra Chreiteh's Always Coca-Cola , wordswithoutborders.org , February 2012
- ↑ Always Coca-Cola on the publisher's website , verlag-hans-schiler.de
- ↑ Rebecca Nordin Mencke: Alexandra Chreiteh: Always Coca-Cola , swr.de / SWR2 Die Buchkritik, for the broadcast on March 26, 2015
- ↑ a b c Volker Kaminski : Alexandra Chreiteh's novel "Always Coca-Cola". Beauty must suffer , Qantara.de , August 5, 2015
- ↑ a b M.A. Orthofer: Always Coca-Cola by Alexandra Chreiteh , complete-review.com , February 18, 2012
- ↑ Always Coca-Cola: A Novel. Alexandra Chreiteh, Author, Hartman Michel, Translator , publishersweekly.com , January 23, 2012
- ↑ Always Coca-Cola , p. 27
- ↑ Michael Adelberg: Always Coca-Cola , nyjournalofbooks.com , January 9, 2012
- ↑ a b Rebecca Nordin Mencke: Coca-Cola as an object of longing. Always Coca-Cola by Alexandra Chreiteh, from the Arabic by Christine Battermann ( memento from October 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), ndr.de / Neue Bücher, December 23, 2014
- ↑ M. Lynx Qualey: Defining (a Lebanese) woman: Alexandra Chrieteh's Always Coca-Cola ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , egyptindependent.com , June 3, 2012
- ↑ Michelle Hartman (2012): Translator's Afterword in the English edition, pp. 112-121.
- ↑ Christine Battermann (2014): Epilogue in the German-language edition, pp. 143–148.
