50 pages • 1 hour read
Michele MarineauRoad to Chlifa
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Legacies of Violence
Violence shapes the lives of all of the characters in this novel. Karim and Maha are born into a city that has been at war for their whole lives,and both children view bombs as commonplace, even mundane. When her home is bombed and her family is killed, Maha is incredibly calm, collected, and focused on her next step. Karim is horrified by Nada’s death, but able to move on. The world they live in has made violence and death almost banal. As they walk through the countryside of Lebanon, Karim and Maha encounter ruins and monuments to past violence, realizing that each historical epoch is shaped by violence, even if future generations ignore that reality and romanticize the past.
When Karim feels personal responsibility for Maha’s death, his relationship to violence changes. He falls in to a state he describes as “vegetative,” and which could be described as depressive. He carries that experience of violence with him in Canada, and reacts quite violently himself when he sees Dave groping My-Lan. It is implied that Karim could no longer restrain himself: that past experiences of violence replicate themselves in the perpetual warfare of Beirut, and in the halls of high schools.
However, when Dave stabs Karim, and Karim survives,that survival seems to change everyone’s perspective: Karim’s, the narrator’s, even Dave’s. Karim is able to see the value of his own life and survival. Dave stops his bullying. The narrator says that everyone gets along better. Although violence’s main effect is to perpetuate itself, a critical consideration of it—recognition of it as more than banal—can lead to real change.
The Heterogeneity of the Immigrant Experience
The book begins from the perspective of a (presumably) white, native Canadian, who eroticizes Karim as a “desert prince,” unaware of whether or not Lebanon has deserts. She then calls Karim a “catalyst” whose presence upends the fragile equilibrium of the high school. What Karim, as catalyst, reveals is at the very least the implicit bias that the narrator and students like Sandrine hold, and the explicit bias displayed by Dave and others.
Sandrine presumes that all immigrants aspire to assimilate: that the world would be a better place if everyone was the same. In particular, she thinks about how hard it must be for My-Lan to be so sheltered. Pascale’s response explicitly states that immigrants are not a homogenous block, and she shares her story as a black Haitian woman. Pascale’s perspective serves to underline the absurdity of Sandrine’s.
Karim’s whole back story—Section Two—thus serves in part to correct Sandrine and the narrator’s perspective. His story is different from Pascale’s—and from My-Lan’s—and has nothing at all to do with the desert. This narrative frame suggests that each of the immigrant students briefly alluded to has a backstory as unexpected and rich as Karim’s.
Nature vs. Culture
Antoine tells Maha and Karim that “Nature will always be kinder than other human beings” (82), and this adage holds true in The Road to Chlifa. The “Green Line” dividing the Eastern and Western sides of Lebanon is so named because, between the two war-struck zones, nature has taken hold again.Here, nature thrives, a distinct line of peacefulness in a warzone.
Maha and Karim find a sense of peace and escape as soon as they leave the city where they’ve grown up; it is quiet, and bombs can scarcely be heard in the distance. They do not come to harm as they traverse mountains, walk along the side of a cliff, or endure cold nights. In nature, they find both peace and joy. They even fulfill Maha’s fantasy of living in peace alongside animals once the goat, Black Beard, joins them.
When their joy is interrupted, it is by men; specifically, by the man (or men) who rapes and kills Maha, leaving her body behind. Nature is a peaceful place in this book, but winds up contaminated by human violence.
Classical Mythology and Lebanese Culture
While Karim’s classmates assume that he comes from a culture distinct from their own, his journey with Maha takes them through a number of Roman sites, reminding the reader of the Greco-Roman culture woven in to Lebanon’s ancient past.
When Karim describes the story of anemones, the red flowers that come from Apollo’s blood, he describes two star-crossed lovers in an incestuous love affair. This myth is somewhat parallel tohis relationship with Maha. While the two are not related, and do not have sex, his previous affection for Nada, their ad-hoc role as co-parents to Jad, and his clearly conflicted sexual feelings for Maha make their relationship taboo. Maha, like Adonis, spills her blood on mountains. This equivalence elevates the story of the two young, star-crossed lovers to mythic proportions.
The Importance of Storytelling
Karim’s diary entries are his way of telling his story without an audience, putting his feelings and experiences into the world in order to process them. However, upon his recovery from the fight with Dave, he comes to realize that part of the reason why he must go on with life is so that he can tell Nada and Maha’s stories to Jad so that they will not have died in vain. Storytelling is a way of honoring the dead, and connecting the living to their heritage.
Storytelling also has importance for instigating social change. At the end of the book, the anonymous narrator tells us the class will be putting on a play called “I ain’t racist, but…,” and that she hopes this will help the students to better understand each other. Like The Road to Chlifa itself, this play tells a specific story in order to utilize issues of difference and race as a pedagogical tool.
