Converging Traditions in Rawi Hage’s Fiction

Beirut to Carnival City: Reading Rawi Hage is a collection of essays on Hage’s novels. Editor Krzysztof Majer has bookended these fine essays by European and Canadian scholars and literary critics with a masterful introduction, “‘Let’s Not Belong’: Situating Rawi Hage’s Elusive Fictions,” and an epilogue, “Beirut Hellfire Society: Beyond the Carnivalesque.” An additional essay by Majer, “‘The Commotion of the Tangible’: Gravity and Levity in Carnival” appears in the collection’s fourth and final part, “Bodies/Grotesques.” That section also contains Lisa Marchi’s “The Alchemy of Rawi Hage’s Fiction: Transmuting Frozen Indifference into a Desire for Change” and Ewa Urbaniak-Rybicka’s “Angels and Demons: Images of Women in Cockroach.” These titles speak volumes, and like other aspects of “Bodies/Grotesques”—and the three preceding sections, “Homelands/Cityscapes,” “Justice/Rights,” and “Languages/Narratives”—they orient the reader by providing a sense of the authors’ aims, as well as their relation to the larger project of this collection. It should be stated from the outset that the scope of this volume’s critical grappling with Hage’s fiction, and with Hage the writer, is ambitious. As far as I know, it exceeds previous efforts to map Hage’s oeuvre onto the terrain of anglophone Canadian Lebanese, Arab Canadian, immigrant/diasporic, or “minor” writing. Moreover, Beirut to Carnival City delivers considerably more than the sum of its parts. Together, the essays invite a deeper appreciation of the connections among Hage’s novels, their underlying ethos, and his literary affinities.

In his introduction, Majer eloquently shows that Hage has tapped numerous Western and Eastern literary, aesthetic, and intellectual traditions. Hage has co-opted some and subverted others, but above all he has scrupulously avoided being identified with any particular nationalist, political, or artistic mandate. Majer explains that the reasons for this avoidance are in no small way related to Hage’s personal history as an immigrant from a country decimated by religious and political sectarianism. Yet as contributors to this collection demonstrate, Hage’s work resonates with a range of critical approaches and frameworks. For the most part, these are helpfully outlined in the introduction. Thus, in addition to Majer’s highly informed readings of the novels Carnival (2012) and Beirut Hellfire Society (2018), the book includes essays by experts from a multiplicity of fields: postcolonial and exilic literatures of Africa and the Near East, Levantine poetry and prose, and postwar Lebanese fiction. Some essays reflect personal experiences of military conflict, migration, and efforts to reconstitute cultural identity or community in exile. As a whole, the book provides nuanced elucidations of thematic and formal preoccupations that persist across several or all four of Hage’s novels, and that justify renewed or supplementary attention.

Containment vs. Freedom

Novelist Madeleine Thien’s prologue is a poetic meditation on the recurring symbolism of light and flight in the subversive writing and paintings of Ma Jian and in Hage’s novels. Hage studied photography in the 1980s and 1990s, and Thien contends that the pronounced imagery in his novels bespeaks the constant longing—at times impossible—for freedom or escape from containment. Containment is tantamount to various forms of confinement, such as forced ideological conformity or allegiance to a nation-state. For Hage, the notion includes the physical limitations of human existence, which can exacerbate deprivation and suffering. In Cockroach, the unnamed protagonist, an indigent and suicidal refugee from a war-torn country, clings to a fantasized insect identity because it holds the promise of easy escape as well as access to nourishment and shelter.

The representational elements and related motifs that Thien emphasizes foreshadow, according to Majer, the readings in the ensuing essays. They show that Hage’s overarching intent is to expose the curtailments of human potential that all political, religious, and gender- and race-based ideologies enact. For example, the essays in “Justice/Rights” address governmentalities, their animating ideologies, and the prevailing attitudes they reproduce; although not everywhere to the same extent, these invariably and systemically oppress, marginalize, and naturalize the hardships of the displaced and vulnerable—migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. In “Expanding the Space of Human Rights in Literature, Reclaiming Literature as a Human Right: Cockroach and Carnival,” Rita Sakr shows how Hage’s novels contribute to the study of and advocacy for human rights. Sakr draws attention to the disturbing predicament of second-class citizenship, or of having citizenship withheld, and the abuse to which those who are marked with (un-)belonging are subjected: “Hage’s narrator rages against the socio-economic exploitation and marginalization of the low-waged worker whose situation renders him both highly visible and invisible in the neoliberal economy and its biopolitical system of governance” (93). André Forget’s “The Vengeful Refugee: Justice and Violence in Cockroach” builds on Sakr’s reading by exploring the strained and volatile subjectivities of those who have suffered violence but are denied justice, even within refuge-giving societies. Forget asks: “[W]hat does vengeance do (to the avenger as well as the offender), and at what point does it become not only justified, but necessary?” (105). Forget comments on the compounding of the protagonist’s and others’ psychological injury by unfeeling government officials, underscoring Canadians’ overt sense of superiority as well as expectations of unconditional gratitude from refugees: “This expectation that the narrator adopt a posture of gratitude for Canadian largesse is profoundly dehumanizing” (109). (Forget directs readers to Peter Nyers’ “Abject Cosmopolitanism”; see Nyers.)

In “Languages/Narratives,” Kyle Gamble, Ewa Macura-Nnamdi, and Dima Samaha tackle marginality and “refugeeness” using other theoretical means (Forget 109). While Gamble’s “A Political Representation of the Lebanese Civil War: De Niro’s Game as Minor Literature” does not, strictly speaking, address the scourges of displacement, it does offer valuable insight into Hage’s portrayals and repurposing of linguistic and cultural second-class citizenship in and through his fiction as a Lebanese immigrant in Canada. Gamble applies Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of linguistic deterritorialization in his analysis of embattled individual and collective identities and the reconfigurations of political power and influence that linguistic currency represents. Readers are invited to extrapolate from Bassam’s experience of wartime sectarianism in Lebanon, where how one speaks marks individuals as belonging to one side of the conflict or the other, and think about the struggles involved in the effort to reconstitute diasporic identities in host nation-states through assertive acts of enunciation—like, say, writing novels—wherein members of a cultural or ethnic minority are pitted against inhospitable social and political conditions.

In “Cockroach: Compassion, Confession, and ‘Wonderful Stories,’” Macura-Nnamdi deploys Foucault’s power-apportioning mechanism of confession to show that the narrator of Cockroach persistently undermines its intended function. For Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, confession “not only reflects the power relationship that gave rise to it but also (re)asserts this power and upholds the authority that compels it” (Macura-Nnamdi in Majer 154). The protagonist of Cockroach subverts the process of “therapy” with Genevieve through a mixture of silence, omission, and fabulation, or “wonderful stories” (Hage 48),f that gives him a measure of control over the narrative in the face of vampiric authority that sustains itself on confession.

In “‘Not Settling for Half the Story’: Speech, Fantasy, and Empowerment in Cockroach,” Samaha elaborates on the theme of “wonderful stories” as counter-narratives to what Ruth Amossy, in La présentation de soi: Ethos et identité verbale (2010), called “ethos préalable” (qtd. in Majer 178), which Samaha translates as “prior ethos” (178). This is the already-formed opinion about the presumed-helpless refugee held by an interrogator-therapist. In Genevieve’s case, it is an opinion based on “social and ethnic status, his background, and the sum of his experience available to her” (178). Samaha points out that the predicament of Cockroach’s defiant and astute self-constituting subject is analogous to that of Scheherazade, the resourceful protagonist of One Thousand and One Nights. The hidden goal of therapy, she states, “is to entertain the therapist, a woman invested in every word of her patient’s exotic tales and eager to hear ever newer tales of wonder” (175). Samaha helps us see that Hage has empowered his narrator and himself with this intertextual bridge to another teller and her tales, which spans historical time, literary traditions, and languages.

Cities and “Othering” Public Spaces

In “Diaspora and Double Consciousness” (1996), Samir Dayal writes that all refugees—individually and as entire communities—invariably have to confront and psychologically accommodate their host nation-states’ diverse national narratives and shared liberal fantasies, many of which are embodied incongruously in monuments and other symbols of war, conquest, and subjugation. Lauren Berlant would call such monuments examples of the “National Symbolic,” or the historical-cultural complex of “images, narratives, monuments, and sites that circulate through personal/collective consciousness” (Berlant 5),. “The National Symbolic,” Berlant explains, “seeks to produce a fantasy of national integration” that, like the Statue of Liberty, is “fully saturated by a century of collective fantasy” (22). Cockroach’s narrator demonstrates his grasp of the ironies contained in such constructs when he tells his therapist that he may be more forthcoming with confessions or “wonderful stories” if he were to walk “in the park across the street . . . around the war-hero statue” (Hage 48). As Sakr asserts: “[T]his is one of the most charged moments in the work . . . [mocking] the pertinence of a ‘clean’ monumental-natural space to the narrator’s war-scarred psychological and cognitive map” (95). Genevieve, like many Canadians, is largely sheltered from truths that are all too apparent to “others.”

The connection Sakr touches on between city spaces dedicated to the celebration of national identity (as with other “narratives” of nationhood) and their failure to evoke a sense of inclusion among immigrants and refugees continues a discussion that is central to “Homelands/Cityscapes.” The essays here, I believe, build on the tradition of a number of seminal works that theorize the relationship between cities and the subjective physical and psychological experience of navigating them. Michel de Certeau’s “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Frederic Jameson’s “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), and Kevin Lynch’s prescient The Image of the City (1960) lay the groundwork. Jameson extracted ideas, such as cognitive mapping, from Lynch’s book to explain the “situational representation on the part of the individual subject [in motion] to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole” (Jameson 40).

The three essays in “Homelands/Cityscapes” problematize the idea that the “practical reconquest of a sense of place” and the successful “reconstruction of an articulated ensemble” are always available, or available in the same coherent and mitigating way (Jameson 40). In “The Body and the City: Race, Sexuality, and Urban Space in Carnival,” Alex Ramon shows that Fly’s journeys across the metropolis exemplify the antagonistic “mapping”—racial, sexual, and political—that becomes part of navigating multifarious spaces (in Majer 62). At the same time, the city’s diverse social and topographical features resist efforts to map its totality. Analogously, in Judit Molnár’s “The Psycho-Spatial Continuum in Cockroach,” the “search for cultural acceptability . . . undertaken by the unnamed immigrant protagonist” across Montreal forces Hage’s narrator “to situate himself in liminal spaces—geographic, linguistic, cultural, religious, or sexual—which exist in unusual configurations of coherence or contrast, with hope and bare survival placed side by side” (74).

Motion vs. Stasis: New “Poetics of Subversion”

Samaha’s linking of Cockroach to One Thousand and One Nights is representative of the juxtapositions in Hage’s novels of different cultures, histories, and literary traditions; this volume’s highlighting of the complex intertextuality in Hage’s work endows it with its critical mass—its worldliness, in the best possible sense. Molnár notes, for instance, that “Hage lays claim to the long tradition of metamorphic plots, from Ovid and Apuleius . . . to more contemporary uses of the Todorovian marvelous” (77). Yet contributors to Beirut to Carnival City never lose sight of the fact that Hage underscores the common denominator in people’s lived experiences. In Cockroach and Carnival, Hage uses protagonists of unspecified nationality to highlight the universality of suffering and the universal in suffering. Cities, too, are left unnamed because they are stand-ins for metropolitan capitalism—spaces that accentuate global economic disparities, reifying extreme poverty alongside fetishistic and excessive types of conspicuous consumption.

In Carnival, far more than in Hage’s previous novels, universal experiences of itinerancy or transience are juxtaposed and contrasted; they become versions either of displacement and homelessness or of what Ramon calls “independent, peripatetic rootlessness” (62). Meanwhile, Elizabeth Dahab explains that Carnival’s “atmosphere of contrapuntal restlessness” is “an allegorization of motion and its reverse, stasis and permanence, in all their disregard for the human condition” (121-23). Yet another dimension comes to light in the way that motion functions in Carnival due to its associations with the city’s multicultural, multilingual, and cosmopolitan ethos. Dahab presents an illuminating passage that continues to play on the “thematic binary oppositions of movement/impermanence versus motionlessness/permanence . . . [and] that clearly celebrates and favours the former” (121):

We witness literal and figurative acts of motion, two systems of travel: on the one hand, a physical one . . .  on the other, the mental, abstract movement, encapsulated by an inherently intertextual narrative that evokes an array of writers from various continents, e.g. LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael, Albert Camus, James Joyce, . . . Jorge Luis Borges, Abdelrahman Munif, Jean Genet, or Bohumil Hrabal . . . [There is] an evocative wink to Le Clézio (himself a prolific transnational traveller/writer), from whose Book of Flights Hage selected a motto . . . “but those who flee over the wandering earth, and those who are motionless on the motionless earth: what should they be called?” (125-26)

Fly’s cosmopolitanism, in the sense of reading and adopting diverse and disparate literary and intellectual traditions and genres, is in itself an act of dissident contestation that “flies” in the face of nativists who would disparage the foreign-born “cosmopolitan” in their midst for lacking the expected values and loyalties to the nation-state that have given them succour. Significantly, Sakr, like Dahab, continues unpacking the literary implications of Carnival’s ambient and dissident cosmopolitanism—this time by quoting from Joseph Slaughter’s Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (2007): “many contemporary postcolonial Bildungsromane (like few of their European predecessors) translate these mise en abyme scenes of reading to construct literary genealogies that situate readers . . . in an international imaginary” (qtd in Majer 100). Like Fly’s literary immersions, Sakr argues, these Bildungsromans thus “imaginatively contribute to a trans-linguistic, intertextual order of literary resistance to all forms of parochialism and exceptionalism” (Sakr in Majer 100).

Levity vs. Gravity and Other Carnivalesque Reversals

In “Bodies/Grotesques,” Majer’s “‘The Commotion of the Tangible’: Gravity and Levity in Carnival” frames the transcultural Bakhtinian carnivalesque as another tool of resistance. Here, the binary of gravity/levity is added to motionlessness/motion; the former, according to Majer, is particularly well suited to an analysis of Carnival’s resistant and subversive body politics and its various biting carnivalesque reversals. Majer’s aim is to demonstrate “the remarkable ways in which Hage’s third novel enacts the Bakhtinian ‘debasement of metaphysics’ (a term proposed by Ruth Coates) through a complex network of metaphors related to weight and weightlessness—or, as per the chapter’s title, gravity and levity” (210). The deployment of this apparatus extends Marchi’s use of Bakhtin to shift the despised figure of the migrant-refugee from the periphery toward the centre of the West’s social imaginary. Just as Bakhtin used the body to make reality concrete, so does Hage “through grotesque realism . . . [bring] the abstract category of ‘the migrant’ down to earth, therefore re-inscribing both discursively and concretely his bodily presence within an actual world of material privations,” prompting readers “to acknowledge and critically judge his abject condition” (195).

Dogmas and Embodied Oppression

In “Angels and Demons: Images of Women in Cockroach,” Urbaniak-Rybicka examines features in Hage’s work that similarly attest to his empathy and compassion for the universal predicament of the bodily, and hence also gender-based confinement and suffering. The diversity of female characters in Hage’s fiction is certainly a mark of their essential role in his biopolitics. Indeed, Syrine Hout’s “Looking for Home in All the Wrong Places: The Various Lebanons of De Niro’s Game” plays on the multiple connections in Hage’s first novel between individuals and the idealized, fantasized identities others project onto them—particularly the ways that notions of domesticity, motherhood, and native land are turned by men into a set of entangled associations that trap women or expose them to violence.

Female characters are, in effect, manifestations of Hage’s ethical and literary-aesthetic investment in the universal protections of human rights. Urbaniak-Rybicka states that

Hage’s fiction blends religions, cultures, and literary styles, so the female protagonists in Cockroach become hybrids: selves formed in the process of juxtaposing the Middle East and the West, the Orient and the Occident, Christianity and Islam, along with their prescribed gender roles and literary traditions. (251)

It makes perfect sense, then, that in Beirut Hellfire Society, the twenty-year-old Ingrid returning to Beirut to claim her inheritance—the genetic and ethnic descendant of the deceased Lebanese protagonist—is Pavlov’s Swedish-born great-niece. Majer’s epilogue, “Beirut Hellfire Society: Beyond the Carnivalesque,” gives much-needed attention to Hage’s most recent novel. The epilogue helps us see that Ingrid, who “spoke Swedish and English, and could understand some French, but had very little Arabic” (Hage qtd. in Majer 258), is likewise a blend of the Middle East and the West. She is perhaps also emblematic of a hybridity that is restorative and liberating because, over time, diasporic life tends to eliminate the most corrosive components of painful pasts.

Beirut to Carnival exceeds its declared goal of expanding scholarship on Hage. For someone like me, a Canadian who writes about national and international literary prizes and the contemporary canons to which they invariably contribute (over time and as part of a complex set of canon-shaping processes), the book’s foregrounding of certain themes and topics renders it an invaluable resource for anyone doing critical work in the fields of contemporary national and world literatures. Indeed, in terms of their service to our national literature, Hage’s fiction and this superb collection are testaments to the firm and explicit ways that Canadian fiction and critical treatment of it are expanding the definitions of contemporary Canadian fiction and productively drawing it into the domain of “transnational textuality.”

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. 1965. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky, Indiana UP, 1984.

Berlant, Lauren. The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. U of Chicago P, 1991.

Coates, Ruth. Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author. Cambridge UP, 1999.

Dayal, Samir. “Diaspora and Double Consciousness.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 29, no. 1, spring 1996, pp. 46-62.

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. 1980. Translated by Steven Rendall, U of California P, 1984.

English, James F. “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Sociology of Literature After ‘the Sociology of Literature.’” New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 2, spring 2010, pp. v-xxiii.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. 1976. Translated by Robert Hurley, Pantheon, 1978.

Hage, Rawi. Beirut Hellfire Society. Knopf Canada, 2018.

—. Carnival. W. W. Norton, 2013.

—. De Niro’s Game. House of Anansi Press, 2006.

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke UP, 1991.

Nyers, Peter. “Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement.” Third World Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 6, Dec. 2003, pp. 1069–93.

Prizer, John David. The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice. Louisiana State UP, 2006.

Slaughter, Joseph R. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. Fordham UP, 2007.