Carole Awit, whose first novel "Zadig et Zoe" was just published. Photo courtesy of the author.
The first novel by Carole Awit, "Zadig et Zoé" (published by L'Harmattan, collection Lettres d'ailleurs, 2025), is the long-matured fruit of a painful lived experience, a harsh reality endured by the Lebanese. The book opens with the dual explosion of Aug. 4, one of the many trials Lebanon has faced and from which it struggles to recover.
Tinged with poetry, this narrative delves into the tortured intimacy of the characters and addresses everyone with disarming simplicity. Zadig and Zoé, almost allegorical figures, reflect a Lebanese youth in search of meaning and peace. By giving voice to emotions of collective resonance — loss, fear, love, reconstruction — the author manages to transform a story deeply rooted in the Lebanese context into a universally relevant narrative.
L'Orient-Le Jour: Why address so many sensitive subjects (grief, collective trauma, eating disorders, self-harm, prostitution, and femicide, etc.) in one single text?
Carole Awit: In "Zadig et Zoé," I wanted to transcribe life in its complexity, to describe pain and violence in their multiplicity, as this is how they manifest daily. The characters I portray in this novel embody different ways of existing and surviving in an environment that seems hostile to them.
Like many Lebanese, they carry multiple scars: traumas, violence, grief, the weight of history, and the silence that accompanies every great pain. They live through it in their flesh, transform it, and master it as best they can in a country that exposes its citizens to successive violence.
The body thus becomes a battlefield, the site of a silent struggle that gradually becomes visible. In this chaos, the body seeks to express what cannot be said elsewhere. The self-harm, eating disorders, self-isolation, and depression mentioned in the text are symptoms of ailments that Lebanon scarcely heals from. These manifestations are paradoxically forms of survival, desperate yet human. They are also forms of resistance: as long as the body speaks, it is still alive.
OLJ: Your style blends poetry, intimate reflection, and initiatory narrative. What were your literary or personal influences in developing this hybrid form?
CA: I am an avid reader, and I have followed a literary training that led me to discover works that inspired me to embark on writing myself. Voltaire and Salinger are explicitly present in this novel, through the names of the twins, but also in the very essence of the text.
Voltaire for his lucid view of the world and his denunciation of absurdity, on one hand, and Salinger for his ability to capture the interiority of young beings searching for meaning and to let a form of spirituality surface in their daily lives, on the other. But there is also the influence of music, the wounded and vibrant voices I have listened to since adolescence – The Cure, for example, whose musical universe I particularly appreciate.
On a formal level, I chose to divide the narrative into three movements: gentleness, pain, colors. The alternation in the narration between the first and third person singular follows the streams of consciousness of Zadig, his ups and downs, his sudden starts, his dreams. The language sometimes had to falter, break, or unfold, taking on unexpected shapes — like pain.
But beyond the references, I believe my most significant influence remains reality. The one I live, observe, and wished to welcome in a text imbued with a touch of poetry. It is a way of crystallizing pain. I write as one projects light onto a scene or draws a line on a canvas, navigating between the clarity of vision and the haze of emotion.
OLJ: How did you build the dynamics of Zadig et Zoé, and what do these characters represent to you?
CA: Zadig and Zoé are twins and yet profoundly different. He is all about interiority, erasure, painful contemplation, and self-dissolution. She is rebellious, visible in her actions, trying to exist against all odds. But they are inseparable. They carry within them the same tragedy: the desire to regain a lost paradise at any cost.
Their often silent dialogue is at the heart of the novel. Their relationship is tender, ambivalent, fusion-like, sometimes violent. They also embody two ways of grieving. For the former, it involves paralysis, whereas for the latter, this process transforms into ultimately liberating change. "Zadig et Zoé" is the story of fraternal love but also a necessary separation. While for them, grief can only be traversed together, the passage to adulthood must, in turn, be a solitary journey.
Zadig is the observant, writing, doubting voice. He is the silent witness, the one who looks more than acts, but precisely through this keen observation, carries within him a sensitive truth. It is through him that the text speaks. He carries family memory, ruins, absences. He embodies the painful retreat we take when the world around us becomes too brutal.
Zoé is more solar. She turns pain into action. She is also the one who, through her revolt, compels her brother to emerge from his torpor. The connection between these two characters, their twinship, is a metaphor for what we all carry within us: the tension between the need for belonging and emancipation, the desire to cling to the past, and the will to rebuild by seeking liberation from it. These characters also embody a Lebanese youth marked by recurring tragic historical events, family silences, successive griefs.
Zadig is perhaps closer to me in his way of writing to avoid sinking. Zoé is who I would have liked to be at certain moments: freer, braver. Together, they form a being in search of healing.
Zadig and Zoé are, deep down, the two poles of our wounded humanity. What we all have within us: the part that collapses and the one that rises. They reflect our fears, memories, hopes. Within them are fragments of me, but above all, fragments of a country. A country oscillating between resignation and insubmission, between nostalgia and rebirth. A country that, like them, has yet to finish its mourning — nor to stop seeking, despite everything, the light.
Municipal councils elected by acclamation in several villages in Bekaa