How Does Alameddine Present Sarah To Lady Macbeth

Furthermore, Sarah attempts to describe the result of the rape. Years later in her apartment in San Francisco, she narrates:
“She steps into the tub. It is smaller than the one in Beirut. Still, she remembers being lost in that tub, totally immersed, she remembers trying to get clean. She scrubbed herself with loofah, over and over, as if there was some dark stain and she Lady Macbeth. Out, damn spot. She was dirty, all of her” (I, the Divine 82).
Alameddine relates Sarah to Lady Macbeth because the two ladies use to clean themselves from filths. Thus, comparing Sarah to Lady Macbeth is a postmodern intertextuality technique by borrowing literature references than reality.
Moreover, Sarah’s narrative is split up when she is unable to find
That evening was merciless I watched the cars drive by. No taxis in sight. (I, the Divine 113)
These short sentences create a regular rhythm as if Sarah wants to bring order to this part of her story which is ambiguous. This experience has affected all her future relationships. Wail Hassan writes on Sarah’s rape:
… things begin to fall into place: her chronic depression, her broken relationships, her inability to help the dying AIDS patients whom she volunteers to counsel, her restless wanderings from San Francisco to New York to Beirut and back again, and her obsession with storytelling coupled with total rejection of canonical narrative genres (Immigrant Narratives
Geoffrey Hartman in On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies stresses that the variety of trauma theory ranges from the personal to the collective due to its presence of ‘war and genocide’, ‘rape, and the abuse of women and children’ as well as ‘daily hurt’ (546). Patricia Resick emphasizes in Stress and Trauma that traumatic stress is ‘caused by life-threatening events that are accompanied by fear, helplessness, or horror’ (28), and may result in a range of problems such as stress disorder, depression, anxiety and substance abuse. Therefore, Sarah attempts to translate traumatic memory into writing by using a first-person female voice to create the difficulty of exploring into a dreadful past in a narrative form that mirrors the very symptoms of traumatic experience that results in textual fragmentation and postmodernist trauma literature. Thus, Sarah cannot recall the notion of home Lebanon without relating many acts of violence that have been committed against her. Altering into the personification of her disturbing experiences, Beirut slowly produces a love/hate relationship in Sarah’s personality, whose longing integrates a simultaneous sickness for and a sickness of this city,