I, the Divine is like Koolaids as an imaginative novel. It is a postmodern fictional autobiography; it is a work in progress; “provisional” and “shifting,” as poet Lynn Emanuel points out about life writing (The Practice of Poetry 67). Emanuel states the provisional and shifting as “that is all vision: revisions coming at us at the speed of light. Writing presents to us the nullity of ourselves, the inaccuracies of our perceptions of selfhood. We are both nothing and everything – provisional, shifting, molten” (The Practice of Poetry 67).
I, the Divine is a metanarrative commentary about the difficult procedure of recounting, retelling, and recordings one’s autobiographical narrative. Alameddine’s narrative framing in I, the Divine does not limit itself to specific genre, perspective, or character. He creates a fictional, nonlinear story line that picks up and leaves off at different points in the protagonist’s life, Sarah, and he complicates the reader’s expectation of straight forward and traditionally written style by moving through genres of memoir, novel, and epistolary. Alameddine in I, the Divine explores the connection between autobiographical voice and the narrative structure of a fictional
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I shuffled ad nauseam between the need to assert my individuality and the need to belong to my clan, being terrified of loneliness and terrorized of losing myself in relationships. I was the black sheep of my family, yet an essential part of it (I, the Divine 229).
Therefore, Sarah’s childhood and relationships memories serve only as a reminder of painful episodes. The security is normally associated with the word home, but home is completely absent from Sarah’s narration of her own story. Her relationship to a home, whether in Lebanon or in the United States or whether as an activity or a state of mind, does not exist to the very end of the