ACROSS A SEA OF STORIES WITH OSAMA’S FIBBING CLAN;
MALU HALASA

Arts & Book Review
June 27, 2008

Book: The Hakawati By Rabih Alameddine PICADOR £16.99 (513pp) £15.29
(free p&p) from 0870 079 8897

Despite Naguib Mahfouz’s Nobel Prize, there has been much discussion as
to whether the novel is an appropriate form of Arab expression. While
love and adventure abound in Middle Eastern storytelling and poetry,
few portrayals of hothouse family life exist. The tour de force of
Rabih Alameddine’s novel The Hakawati ("storyteller" in Arabic) is that
it moves effortlessly between the classic narrative traditions of The
Thousand and One Nights and the psychology of modern Western fiction.

At the heart of Alameddine’s saga of four generations of a Lebanese
family is a hakawati of such dubious origins – a bastard Armenian who
escaped the 1915 genocide in Turkey – that his employer and patron,
a Lebanese bey, gave him his surname al-Kharrat: fibber or liar. From
this lowly position, within one generation, a family empire was spawned
and the hakawati’s rich oral traditions were replaced by mundane
commerce: Lebanon’s first car dealership. Only family outsiders –
the protagonist and grandson Osama, who returns to his country for
his own father’s death, and his unmarried uncle Jihad, a raconteur
and pigeon fancier – continue the grandfather’s survival strategy of
spinning tales within tales.

Like the hakawati whose exploits of Scheherazade thrill audiences
to this day in Damascene cafes, Alameddine reveals his intent
by listing the influences for this, his second novel – including
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales and Jim
Crace’s The Devil’s Larder. He explains, "By nature, a storyteller
is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across… is a coffee bean
that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom,
sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served
as a piping-hot tale."

While the book’s religious references are fabricated, the fictionalised
lessons of the Old Testament Abraham, caught between two wives, the
determination of the servant sorceress Fatima to retrieve her sawn-off
hand – considered a mystical amulet across the Middle East – and rise
of Baybars, who herald the reign of the Mamluks, the slave kings of
Egypt, are stories about reshaping identity and destiny. These are
self-help lessons from a mythical past that reverberate in Osama’s
family stories.

In The Hakawati, both ancient and modern women are powerful
and pragmatic. Homoerotic love, while not universally accepted,
is acknowledged and expressed. Osama’s mother, from a prominent
Lebanese family, the Khourys, marries beneath her social status into
the al-Kharrats after meeting the man who becomes her soul-mate:
not Osama’s father Farid, but his uncle Jihad.

When Jihad unexpectedly dies on a trip abroad, one of his many
mistresses – his mother, like the sorceress Fatima – seizes the
moment. She brings her husband back home and effectively saves him. In
Alameddine’s world, the present and present always collide. A decade
ago, his remarkable first novel Koolaids: The Art of War also told
simultaneous stories, about death in San Francisco and civil war
in Lebanon.

If the novel has the transformative power to reveal an age, The
Hakawati conjures a complex Middle East, where those who stay at
home are frustrated. Elie, the neighbourhood bully and son of the
superintendent of the al-Kharrats’ building, becomes a militia leader
who oozes sexual charisma. After a shotgun wedding to Osama’s sister
Lina, he retreats to the company of men in the city’s abandoned
cinemas for porn and drugs, while she finds fulfilment in selling
cars. Another of the al-Kharrat cousins likes to pretend to be a
tourist in his own country.

Osama, like his Jewish childhood neighbour Fatima, a gold digger
in Saudi Arabia, represent the lost generation in the Middle East
diaspora. He attempts to come to terms with where he lives, in
California, with a conservative Lebanese upbringing. As the receptacle
and transmitter of his grandfather’s tales, only he can reconcile
the fractured generations of his family through a miraculous bridge
of stories – Alameddine’s language of hope for a beleaguered region.

Malu Halasa and Rana Salam’s ‘The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie’
is published by Chronicle next month

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