Always Coca-Cola

January 23, 2012
When university student Abeer Ward looks out the window of her Beirut bedroom, she sees a giant Coca-Cola ad across the street featuring her best friend Yana. The influence of the Occident persists not only in the billboardâand Abeerâs Coke-bottle-shaped birthmarkâ, but in the choices she and her friends make. Naïve, demure, and obedient, Abeer blends into the background compared to Yana, and similarly, Abeerâs very real problems tend to be given short shrift in relation to Yanaâs unplanned pregnancy. Abeerâs name means âfragrant rose,â and like the flower, she feels that her value depends on beauty and purity. Living in fear that one wrong move will garner her fatherâs and societyâs disapproval, she wonât use a tampon for fear that doing so would sully her virginity. Chreitehâs character development and figurative language is strong, and there are moments of humor, but this debutâlike its narratorâis not quite ready to face the world. Pacing issues persist: four pages are spent on an impending menstrual period, while Abeerâs crucial moment earns only a page, and the ending is rushed. The language is sometimes overly formal, though translator Hartman notes in her afterward that Chreiteh chose to write in Modern Standard Arabic, a formal language that differs from everyday spoken language. This is a decent debut, and Chreitehâs future work has potential if given the right attention, direction, and editing.

March 1, 2012
The title refers to an advertising slogan, one that appears on a billboard in Beirut, for the ubiquitous soft drink. Before narrator Abeer Ward (Arabic for "Fragrant Rose") was born, her mother had a craving for only one thing--Coca-Cola. Ironically, 20-some years later Abeer's good friend Yana, a sexually liberated woman and model in Beirut, becomes the visible emblem of the soft drink on a billboard that Abeer can see from her room. (It doesn't hurt that Yana's boyfriend is the manager of the local Coca-Cola company.) Yana is Romanian rather than Lebanese, but she's established herself comfortably in Beirut...at least till she finds out she's pregnant, and by her boyfriend rather than by her ex-husband. Although she wants to keep the baby, the boyfriend gives her a choice--get rid of the baby and continue to see him, or keep the baby and lose the relationship. Yana and Abeer have a third friend, Yasmine, who makes her own statement by boxing and working out in the local men's gym. This slim novel, expanded from a short story, follows their day-to-day dealings with the crisis involving Yana, a crisis exacerbated when her boyfriend rapes Abeer. Worried that she's pregnant, Abeer has to deal with some of the realities of modern life--like getting a pregnancy test from a local pharmacy without becoming branded, shamed or ostracized. Chreiteh keeps up a lively dialogue (trialogue?) between the main characters, and eventually they all learn what it means to be 20-somethings in modern Beirut. Chreiteh is a fresh voice in the Arab world, though either she or translator Hartman is overly addicted to exclamation points that give far too many sentences an inflated and artificial oomph.

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