To Paint and Die in Arabic: Code-Switching in Rabih Alameddine's Koolaids: The Art of War

Syrine Hout

doi:10.13169/arabstudquar.40.4.0277

Abstract

I focus on multilingual usages, specifically code-switching between English and Arabic, in Lebanese American Rabih Alameddine's 1998 novel Koolaids: The Art of War. While the novel portrays English as the emancipatory language of coming out and self-acceptance for gay Lebanese men living in the United States between the late 1970s and mid-1990s, Mohammad, a painter, only comes to terms with his impending demise by reverting to Arabic during the final stages of his losing battle with AIDS. Drawing on findings from psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, translation, and medical/neurological studies, I compare and contrast verbal encounters between Mohammad and various Lebanese and American characters to foreground strategies intended to exclude and/or include certain parties, be they characters or readers. While Arabic words actually employed are few, I argue that implied code-switching and the dynamics of speaker(s), interlocutor(s), setting(s), and context(s) establish links among AIDS, Arabic, art, and acceptance of death; Arabic resurfaces, when Mohammad is on his deathbed, as the language of his childhood and even serves as the bridge toward his “afterlife.” The primary theoretical impacts of my reading are twofold: minimal code-switching does not, as some claim, showcase shallow multilingualism, and a language-minded approach adds a new dimension to the definition of Lebanese (Arab) American literature by focusing on the emotional rather than the national/ethnic facets of the embedded native language.

Highlights

ARAB STUDIES QUARTERLYCode-switching is very common among multilingual speakers, who outnumber monolinguals on the global level (Kolehmainen and Skaffari, 2016: 131)
I focus on multilingual usages, code-switching between English and Arabic, in Lebanese American Rabih Alameddine’s 1998 novel Koolaids: The Art of War
The two quotations from Koolaids: The Art of War—Lebanese American Rabih Alameddine’s 1998 debut novel—are attributed, respectively, to an anonymous narrator and to Mohammad, the main character; they bespeak two radically different phenomena in what John Gumperz (1982), in an early study of multilingualism, defines as conversational code-switching: “the juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passages of speech belonging to two different [languages], grammatical systems or subsystems” (59)

Summary

ARAB STUDIES QUARTERLY

Code-switching is very common among multilingual speakers, who outnumber monolinguals on the global level (Kolehmainen and Skaffari, 2016: 131). Almost all of Alameddine’s novels feature gay characters to whom this statement applies, as I show later with one example of social code-switching Koolaids is both a pioneering work in the corpus of post-war Anglophone Lebanese fiction (Hout, 2012) and “a milestone in the modern Arab American literary tradition” (Salaita, 2007: 73). Kifah Hanna (2017) praises Koolaids as one of the most significant English-language novels on Arab non-normative sexualities because of its author’s “expression of and attention to the ‘anxieties’ experienced by homosexual Lebanese individuals” abroad (391) She makes a point similar to that of Kellman, arguing that writing in English in the United States during the late 1990s offers Alameddine the “luxury” of such an upfront attitude (391). Alameddine’s sparse use of Arabic is by far more symbolic than mimetic and, I believe, at the root of a hitherto unexplored dimension in his oeuvre to date (five novels and a collection of short stories): the relationship between multilingualism and identity, as revealed in social but mostly in personal, that is, mental and emotional, states.

Defining the Untapped Potential of Arabic in Koolaids

Conclusion