Instead of Once upon a time, Arabic stories begin with Kan ya makan (there was and there was not). The experience of the story is more important than its veracity because, as all good listeners know, the storyteller is a trickster. “Never trust the teller,” advises a character in The Hakawati, “trust the tale.”
And so, against a backdrop of emirs, jinns, the underworld, spurned wives and fortunate slaves, rehashed Bible stories and Beiruti gossip, Alameddine’s third novel begins: “Allow me to be your god. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story.”
Osama al-Kharrat, a Los Angeles software engineer, returns to Beirut to sit by his dying father’s bedside. Surveying Lebanon after many years away, he muses, “I was a tourist in a bizarre land. I was home.” The bizarre and the familiar intermarry (literally) as the hospital room fills with extended family, home-cooked meals, and stories. On his deathbed, Osama’s father wants to make sure his son knows the tales of his grandfather and the origins of the family name, which means the fibber.
Osama is descended from a line of hakawatis, or storytellers. His great-grandfather, the neglected son of an Englishman and his illicit Armenian lover, learned his trade in nearby cafés. He, in turn, passes it on to his son, and so on. The family saga is narrated with much wit and dizzying descents into underworlds, outerworlds and other worlds. No sooner do you get a handle on a character or a generation, the story breaks for intermission and moves on to the next – a sort of cineplex of a novel. Multi-coloured imps help Fatima enter the underworld to retrieve her hand; the stories of Adam and Eve and Orpheus are given a new perspective; two young boys, one “evil” and one “good” can’t keep their hands off each other; the boy next door grooms his dangerous image until a militia man emerges; the girl next door falls in love with him – or rather, his motorcycle.
An air of insouciance colours the book. Clearly Alameddine is having fun. He names two of his main characters Osama and Jihad. Another character gets caught up in the “delightfully dramatic” Palestinian resistance. In one of the fanciful tales an imp uses a swarm of “lesbian mosquitoes” to protect him. In another, when one character says he cannot live with the shame of having a promiscuous wife, she flatly tells him, “practice.”
Interestingly, certainly for the Western reader, while there seems to be a role and a place for the entire kitchen sink in this book, there is little space for Islam. The al-Kharrat family are a Lebanese house blend: English, Druze, Muslim, Christian. The neighbours are equally diverse and include Italian Jews, Orthodox Christians and the odd Frenchman. Discussion of religion is met with scoffs or shrugs. One gets the feeling that those who do concern themselves with piety are only feeding their baser instincts. Alameddine is concerned with the magic of belief itself, not its institutional facades.
A wondrous tour de force full of in-jokes, cultural references and flights of fancy, The Hakawati is also a touching account of one family keeping their heads down during Lebanon’s civil war. Neighbours mysteriously disappear and local boys suddenly sport machine guns. Uncle Jihad, the glittering wit of the family, is also a gay man who never quite finds love. Osama, sent to America to study and save himself, is lost without his family.
Just as we, upon reaching the last page and closing the book, are lost too.
Leila Marshy has been published in a number of literary journals such as Descant, Grain, Fireweed, as well as anthologies including Best Canadian Stories (Oberon Press). She works and plays in Montreal. She is also a regular contributor at www.haikuboxer.blogspot.com. Okay, she’s the only contributor.
