In May 1936, fifty-year-old Nahda feminist poet, critic and translator May Ziade was involuntarily admitted to the Lebanon Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders (popularly known as Asfourieh) at the request of her relative, Dr. Joseph Ziade. She would remain there for approximately 10 months, after which she was transferred to other hospitals for treatment, until her full discharge in 1938. May’s institutionalisation led her to launch a long-winded legal battle to re-establish her mental competence and regain access to her properties and assets. It also led to a raging public debate at the time over women, madness and mental illness, the echo of which still vividly resonates in literary and intellectual circles, among archivists, scholars and feminists today. This talk (part of work-in-progress) will provide an overview of May’s case, and the public debates that ensued in late 1930s and today. Why is May Ziade’s stay in Asfourieh still a matter of public debate today? What kinds of social imaginaries and critiques does this case foreground? The second part of the talk will offer a new reading of the case of May Ziade through the ecological and scientific historicity of her psychiatric diagnosis. It will engage the expertise of modern psychiatry in late 1930s with the questions of Nahda, women, madness and the limits of modernity itself.
Lamia Moghnieh received her PhD in Social Work and Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also holds an MA in Social Science from the University of Chicago and an MA in Psychology from the American University of Beirut. Her dissertation “Humanitarian Psychology in War and Postwar Lebanon: Violence, Therapy and Suffering” examined the politics of trauma and Sumud following war and humanitarian interventions in Lebanon in 1982, the July War and the Syrian refugee crisis. Her current project explores the cultural authority of psychiatry in Lebanon based on archival and ethnographic cases of clinical encounters.
