Marking Territory: Rawi Hage’s Novels and the Challenge to Postcolonial Ethics

Abstract

THERE HAS BEEN A SUSTAINED INTEREST in recent years, both in academic circles and in mainstream readership, in non-Western narratives of trauma and conflict, evidenced in popularity of novels such as The Kite Runner, Half of a Yellow Sun, Beasts of No Nation, What is What, and A Sunday at Pool in Kigali, as well as non-fiction memoirs such as Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. The attention afforded to texts such as these, texts that describe hardships that are too often a symptom of postcolonial condition, can certainly indicate a trend in Western readership that is concerned with questions of social justice, human rights, and cross-cultural ethics. The mainstream Western reader and scholarly Western critic seem united in a desire to bridge ethical gap between First and Third worlds, a desire that ultimately conceives of reading of postcolonial literature as a vehicle for enacting cross-cultural ethics and betterment of world. It is no surprise, then, that Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game, a novel documenting experiences of a Lebanese teenager in war-torn Beirut circa 1982, has attracted critical attention. What is significant about Hage's fiction--specifically De Niro's Game and his second novel, Cockroach--is way in which its narratives challenge conventional representations of postcolonial trauma and expose imbalances in standard models of cross-cultural ethics. (1) Syrine Hout addresses this challenge in her book-length study Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction, in which she contends that postwar generation of Lebanese literature is distinctive as a genre, insofar as both Anglophone and Francophone writers are concerned primarily with the debunking of two myths: return to a golden age of a romanticized Lebanon and slavish imitation of a supposedly superior Western lifestyle (9). The protagonists in this genre, Hout suggests, neither idealise their country of origin nor shed their past to embrace unquestioningly a Western mode of living (9). As Hout argues, Hage's novels fall into a genre that is markedly diasporic, insofar as its subjects have no firm foundation in either home country or new host country, in past or in present, upon which to build a stable identity. As Salah D. Hassan suggests, Bassam, in De Niro's Game, roguishly turns his back on history and embraces figure of refugee: he harbors no thought of return and no desire to settle (1628). Similarly, Hout, in her analysis of Cockroach, describes that novel's unnamed narrator as a refugee or exile who clearly has no interest in acclimatising to mainstream Canadian culture--but nor is he keen on flaunting his origins (170). As well as offering a tangible manifestation of Hout's generic definition, however, I would argue that Hage's fiction goes further to consider how this diasporic state shines an interrogative light on standard formulations of postcolonial ethics and ultimately proposes a much more complex but potentially enriching definition of postcolonial hospitality. The fundamental question of postcolonial ethics is deceptively simple: How might citizens of First World relate, ethically and productively, to diasporic subject, to new immigrant, to refugee? Rawi Hage's second novel Cockroach begins with just such a negotiation, as Genevieve, a Montreal therapist, attempts to connect with and heal unnamed Lebanese refugee who narrates this text: Last week I confessed to her that I used to be more courageous, more carefree, and even, one might add, more violent. But here in this northern land no one gives you an excuse to hit, rob, or shoot, or even to shout from across balcony, to curse your neighbours' mothers and threaten their kids. When I said that to therapist, she told me that I have a lot of hidden anger. So when she left room for a moment, I opened her purse and stole her lipstick, and when she returned I continued my tale of growing up somewhere else. …