Forbidden Love
Charlotte Toubia
The cries of children are no longer play, but distress.’
Charlotte Toubia remains an elusive figure in contemporary Francophone Lebanese literature. Unlike more widely documented Lebanese poets, such as Etel Adnan, Toubia has thus far left behind little in the way of formal biography, academic commentary, or critical anthology inclusion. Yet the collection Forbidden Love (L’Amour Interdit, 1985) stands as a singular testimony: a long sequence of short lyric poems that weave together personal heartbreak, relational turbulence and the ruptured social fabric of a war-torn homeland. Here we present the first English-language version of these poems, alongside this essay which seeks to situate Toubia’s work in its literary, cultural and historical frame.
At the formal level, Forbidden Love presents the motif of a “metaphorical male lover” throughout – he is at once individual, absent, violent, enchanting and destructive. The female speaker addresses him in direct voice: “The man I love …” (Un Amour Pour Deux), “You are my breath of life” (L’Amour Merveilleux), even “Stranger … do not come near me” (L’Étranger). The lover, however, remains at once intimately known and remote. He is the one who “reduced me to pieces” (La Trahison), who “sold my tears to buy your scissors” (L’Amour en Morceaux). He is both the source of passionate worship and the agent of emotional ruin.
This duality invites a reading of the lover not only as a personal-psychological figure but as an allegory of Lebanon itself – her beloved, her betrayer, her devastated homeland. In Le Martyre du Liban, Toubia explicitly mixes the national and the sacred: “It is in Lebanon that God planted his cedar … My homeland is neither to be bought nor sold … Like the Phoenix, it will rise again from its ashes.” The lover/land metaphor is thus twofold: the beloved man and the wounded country overlap, merge and separate across the sequence.
In that light, the many poems of relational anguish – loss, betrayal, yearning, violence – echo the trauma of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90). There is in lines such as “I have suffered ever since that last night” (La Dernière Nuit) or “Death loiters among innocents in every corner” (Le Martyre du Liban) a palpable sense of collective calamity filtered through first-person emotion. The poetry posits that intense personal suffering and national wound are not parallel but intertwined.
Although formal markers such as meter and rhyme are loose or absent, Toubia’s style is characterised by repetition, direct address, and heavily metaphorical diction. The line-by-line translations presented preserve the structural economy of the originals – short stanzas, accessible syntax. The rhythmic pace is often driven by the repetition of verbs (“I run and I run …”), by accumulation (“I love you more and more deeply only to suffer more”) and by rhetorical questions (“How can one flee when there is no escape?”). This simplicity belies a structural tension: between the colloquial (“I cried when you looked at her – she was beautiful”) and the religious-epic.
Given the scarcity of reviews or critical commentary on Toubia’s work, part of this edition’s mission is archival: to recuperate a neglected voice of the Lebanese Francophone poetic field. Its reception has been virtually undocumented; no major monograph or peer-reviewed article appears (as of this writing) dedicated to Forbidden Love. That very obscurity may speak to its position as a ‘minor’ modern text – outside canonical selection yet offering vital insight into Franco-Lebanese women's poetry of the 1980s.
Forbidden Love is more than a collection of romantic poems. It is a testament to layered loss: the individual lost beloved, the woman losing her lover, the citizen losing her country, the exile losing home. The act of loving what is “forbidden” (whether by society, by history, by war) becomes an act of radical persistence. Toubia’s voice registers not simply “I loved and lost,” but “I loved, I suffered, I remember, I resist.”
In republishing the first English translation of these poems, we invite readers to confront a tripartite wound: love, memory, homeland. We hope that Toubia’s metaphors – broken glass, shattered hopes, martyrdom, forgotten children, endless farewells – resonate not only as personal lament but as cultural archive. Out of the ashes of cedar, the soul of a country, and the body of a woman, a voice emerges – and demands to be heard.
Toubia’s choice of French as her poetic language places her within a particular Lebanese constellation. Lebanon’s Francophone literary tradition remains substantial yet under-explored: French has served not only as a colonial-heritage language but as a medium for cross-cultural and transnational articulation. As Etel Adnan (Lebanese-American) has articulated, Beirut is a multilingual city where Arabic, French and English coexist in uneasy tension; similarly, Toubia’s poems seem to operate in French while the emotional referent is Arabic-speaking Lebanon.
Within that multilingual field, French allows a certain distance and lyric precision: the speaker’s heartbreak, the violence, the metaphors of home and exile – all gain a kind of elegiac clarity in French. At the same time, the Lebanese context remains omnipresent: the cedar, the war, the sadness of mothers, the abandoned homes. The result is neither purely francophone nor purely Lebanese‐Arab; it is hybrid. The poems suggest that the “forbidden love” may be for the man, or for joy, or for a country that is itself forbidden to itself.
One striking feature of L’Amour Interdit is its constant invocation of violence (psychological, domestic, political) and fragmentation. Poems such as Trop d’amour (“I loved you until I killed love itself”) or L’Amour en Morceaux (“When you cut our love into pieces … you sold my tears to buy your scissors”) reveal a vocabulary of damage, rupture and surgical cruelty. The body-metaphors (heart, body, stone, teeth, knives) abound.
Parallel to that is the theme of memory’s persistence: “My thoughts are dark – as dark as my heart … For the sake of a handful of memories … I nearly lost my life” (Je me souviens). The act of recollection itself becomes a torment. The wounded country returns in Le Martyre du Liban, where the blood of martyrs “enriched its soil,” yet the war’s toll continues. The poet uses memory both as a means of relational survival and as a rehearsal of pain.
In religious-symbolic registers, too, there is much: references to the Cross, the cedar (sacred tree), the body as temple, the orphan, the child desired, the martyr. These images suggest a sacrificial logic: the beloved, the country, even the poet vanish or are offered up. In so doing, the poems participate in what might be called the “poetics of martyrdom” that run through Lebanese literary production of the Civil War period. The body battered, the home divided, the lover lost – all become sites of public and private testimony.
January 2026
Japanese Hand-Sewn Paperback
148.5 x 210 mm – 72pp
+ Insert – 105 x 148.5mm – 8pp