Imaginative migrations: An interview with the Lebanese-Canadian writer Rawi Hage

Abstract

The history of mankind is full of wars, divisions, the flow of blood, the flight of refugees and misery. I long for the day when an African child will be able to roam the world as if it is rightly his; I long for the day when Palestinian, Guatemalan, Iraqi and Afghan children will have homes to keep and build upon. I long for the day when we humans realize that we are all gatherers and wanderers, ever bound to cross each other’s paths, and that these paths belong to us all. (From Hage’s Acceptance Speech at the 2008 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award ceremony)

Keywords:

• novel
• intercultural
• migration
• trauma
• violence
• war

Notes

1. The war in Lebanon lasted from 1975 to 1990. As a result, “[a]bout 170,000 people have perished; twice as many were wounded or disabled; close to two thirds of the population experienced some form of dislocation or uprootedness from their homes and communities” (Khalaf 232).

2. Zuzana Kratka notes these influences in her review of De Niro’s Game, “Living with Civil War”.

3. A self-made secularist, Hage was born and raised as a Maronite Christian. In an interview with Arts & Opinion, Hage reflects on the “tribal loyalties” that harmed religious coexistence in Lebanon, and he defines his secularism as “no longer relat[ing] positively or negatively to people or groupings of people based on their religion or ethnicity. I much prefer to be in community with people with whom I share common values and morals or ideology” (n. pag.).

4. See T.F. Rigelhof’s “Howls from the Underdogs”, James Lasdun’s “Half Man, Half Insect”, and Colm Tóibín’s “The Anger of Exile”. These three reviews of Cockroach establish a link between the narrators of Hage’s two novels and a continuity between their respective fictional journeys. Lasdun and Tóibín emphasize the theme of exile underlying this link.

5. These include Jad El-Hage, Tony Hanania, Patricia Sarrafian Ward, and Nada Awar Jarrar. The tradition of anglophone diasporic and exiled Lebanese writers began in the early 20th century with the Lebanese-American Gibran Khalil Gibran. This cultural diaspora expanded significantly in the wartime and post-war years due to an emigration trend that resulted mainly from the physical, psychological, and socio-economic ravages of the Lebanese war.

6. There are numerous interviews with Rawi Hage: email and audio conversations (for example with CBC News and its cultural affairs show Q, and with Nigel Beale, and interviews of various length in newspapers and magazines: Arts & Opinion, Nox, Le Devoir, Le Monde, La Presse, The Daily Star – Lebanon, and many others. Although it complements the previous conversations with Hage, my interview differs considerably from these because it employs a multidisciplinary scholarly perspective to shed light on the links between the aesthetic/literary and the philosophical, psychological, and socio-political dimensions of his writings.