The Tribe

The Tribe is a collection of three novellas portrayinglife in an extended Muslim Allawite Lebanese-Australian family, as seen by oneof its youngest members. The first novella describes the family house in theSydney suburb of Alexandria, and the three generations who live, often in somediscord, in its rooms; the second details the marriage of a cousin, and thethreatened appearance of an estranged branch of the family at the ceremony; thethird rounds off the cycle with the death of the family matriarch, the boy'sgrandmother. Together they offer an intimate insight into a communitynegotiating the conflict between tradition and modernity, and the complextribal affiliations of the extended family.