22 The New York Review
Lebanon’s Infernal Circle
Robyn Creswell
Beirut Hellfire Society
by Rawi Hage.
Norton, 278 pp., $26.95
Cockroach
by Rawi Hage.
Norton, 305 pp., $23.95 (paper)
De Niro’s Game
by Rawi Hage.
Harper Perennial,
277 pp., $13.95 (paper)
“Tell me more,” says a therapist in the
Canadian writer Rawi Hage’s second
novel, Cockroach (2008). And
again, “Tell me. I love long
stories.” She’s speaking to the
book’s unnamed narrator, an
immigrant who recently tried
to hang himself from a tree in
one of Montreal’s public parks.
Therapy is part of his state-
mandated rehabilitation. Like
Hage himself, the narrator is
from Lebanon’s Christian Ma-
ronite community (though his
home country is never named),
and the sessions remind him un-
pleasantly of the Catholic sacra-
ment: “If you sit, wait, behave,
confess, and show maybe some
forgiveness and remorse, you,
my boy, you could be saved.”
As with several of the protag-
onists in Hage’s work—he is the
author of four novels, all writ-
ten in English—the narrator of
Cockroach knows a lot of sto-
ries, most of them rather grim.
He grew up in Beirut during
Lebanon’s long civil war, in a
milieu of militiamen, murderers,
and petty crooks. The therapist,
named Genevieve, thinks that recount-
ing the events of his youth will speed
his recovery. But the narrator sees that
Genevieve is also excited, against her
better judgment, by his tales of kidnap-
ping, honor codes, and sexual violence.
“I knew she was hooked,” he thinks
toward the end of one session, playing
Scheherazade to her Shahryar. “The
doctor, like sultans, is fond of stories.”
This exchange between a wised-up
storyteller from the East and a Western
audience seemingly starved for thrills
points, with some subtlety, to Hage’s
own situation as a writer whose fiction
returns again and again to the subject of
Lebanon’s brutal civil war. Who really
wants to hear these kinds of stories,
and who wants to tell them? Can one
do it without confirming the worst ste-
reotypes of Middle Eastern savagery?
One of Cockroach’s subplots involves
another immigrant, an Iranian musi-
cian, who seduces Canadian women by
telling them about having his instru-
ment broken and his fingers bent back-
ward when he played the wrong song
for Ayatollah Khomeini. The narrator
mocks the musician’s “exotic tunes and
stories of suffering and exile,” but they
are obviously fellow spirits.
This worry about offering up one’s
trauma as entertainment for foreign-
ers is common among Lebanese artists,
and not only those who left the country.
Since the end of the civil war in 1990,
Lebanon’s political elite have pragmat-
ically opted for amnesia. No side won,
all of them committed atrocities, and
many of the warlords are still in power,
having exchanged their fatigues for
suits and ties. In response, Lebanese
artists have tirelessly analyzed and
memorialized the bloodshed—even
as much of their financial support and
audience have come from outside the
country. Lebanon’s postwar film in-
dustry, for example, is largely funded
by European sources and dominated
by films about the war; similarly, Leba-
nese novels translated into English
or French almost invariably have to
do with the decade and a half of civil
conflict.*Many of these artists chafe at the
demand that they should serve only as
expert witnesses on sectarian violence
and urban dystopia. One of the central
ironies of Cockroach stems from the
therapist’s assumption that the nar-
rator’s problems have to do with his
past, that his present unhappiness is
somehow the fault of his mother or his
country of origin. But what if his sui-
cide attempt was the result of being
poor and hungry and depressed by Ca-
nadian winters? Hage’s novel is in fact
more concerned with immigrant life
in Montreal than it is with Lebanon. It
may even be that his refusal to name
that country is a protest against the de-
mand to dig up his traumatic past.
A deeper irony of Cockroach is that
at the center of the narrator’s memories
of Lebanon is not an act of violence,
but rather his inability to perform
one. When he has the chance to take
revenge on his sister’s killer, he can’t
bring himself to pull the trigger—a fail-
ing he implicitly tries to make up for in
the novel’s violent finale. The past can
haunt you not only for the things you
did, but also for the things you could
have done but didn’t (what Catholic
theologians call a sin of omission).
Hage’s work suggests again and again
that trying to escape one’s past is the
surest way to tighten its grip.Violence has always been central to
Hage’s concerns as a writer. His novels
anxiously circle around acts of blood-
shed, then trace their effects on his
characters and their communities. To
commit violence is to trap oneself in a
cycle that never ends. “We killed him,
because he killed her,” says one charac-
ter, a prostitute, in Beirut Hellfire So-
ciety, his newest novel, expressing the
basic law of Hage’s fiction.
This law is at once an anthropologi-
cal donné—Hage alludes to the writ-
ings of René Girard, the philosopher of
“mimetic violence”—and a way of un-derstanding the Lebanese war, a con-
flict Hage views as a kind of sectarian
revenge tragedy (leaving its political
and historical background somewhat
blurry). Many of Hage’s characters try
to escape this infernal circle through
emigration—he himself left the coun-
try as a twenty-year-old in 1984—or, in
the most extreme case, by suicide.
Hage’s more pointed suggestion is
that acts of violence are the result of a
person’s embracing a particular iden-
tity. This usually means a sectarian
identity, though Hage is also interested
in how his characters define themselves
as men (his female characters are no-
tably short on self-reflection). They
are caught in a peculiarly Lebanese
dilemma: either accept one’s role in a
community defined by its antagonism
toward others, or else become invisible,
impotent, disposable.
Hage’s special interest is Lebanon’s
Maronite community. He studies its
customs and codes not with an insider’s
sympathy so much as the bitterness of
someone still trying to get out. He por-
trays the Maronites as an insular Medi-
terranean tribe—violently patriarchal,
excessively attached to the symbols of
religion, and incipiently fascist in their
respect for power. In his later writing,
this bitterness loses some of its edge,
but in his fine first novel, De Niro’s
Game (2006), you can feel the rage in
each detail:The men watched the late-Friday-
night Egyptian movie, smoking onsmall balconies, gulping cold beer
and araq, cracking fresh green al-
monds, and with their filthy yellow
nails crushing American cigarettes
in folkloric ashtrays. Inside their
houses, the impoverished women
carefully, economically, dripped
water from red plastic buckets over
their brown skins in ancient Turk-
ish bathtubs, washing away the
dust, the smells, the baklava-thin
crust, the vicious morning gossip
over tiny coffee cups, the poverty
of their husbands, the sweat under
their unshaven armpits. They
washed like meticulous
Christian cats that lick their
paws under small European
car engines.De Niro’s Game is the story of
two friends from East Beirut,
George and the narrator, Bas-
sam, “longhaired teenagers”
who ride through the city on
George’s motorcycle “with guns
under our bellies, and stolen gas
in our tanks, and no particular
place to go.” The deep theme of
the novel is escape, announced
in its epigraph from Heraclitus:
“How, from a fire that never
sinks or sets, would you es-
cape?” When George graduates
from petty crime into the local
militia and heads to Israel for
training, Bassam is incredulous.
“Thieves and thugs like us,” he
says, “since when have we ever
believed in anything?” But as it
becomes more and more diffi-
cult to avoid believing in some-
thing, Bassam flees Beirut and
its lethal ideologies.
The crux of De Niro’s Game is
George’s harrowing account of his role
in the butchery of Sabra and Shatila,
the massacre of Palestinian civilians
carried out by Maronite militias with
the support of the Israeli army in 1982.
It is a story of trauma that sets the tem-
plate for many other confessions in
Hage’s fiction. Beirut, in his writing, is a
kind of cursed city, a vast charnel house
just barely covered over by its modern
slums and shiny hotels. His novels are
full of images of violent excavation, in
which a buried past explodes into the
present, and his characters are acutely
aware of history’s repetitions:I climbed onto George’s motor-
bike and sat behind him, and we
drove down the main streets where
bombs fell, where Saudi diplomats
had once picked up French pros-
titutes, where ancient Greeks had
danced, Romans had invaded, Per-
sians had sharpened their swords,
Mamluks had stolen the villagers’
food, crusaders had eaten human
flesh, and Turks had enslaved my
grandmother.Bassam is morally compromised but
clear-eyed about his own failings; he
has the honor of a reluctant mafioso or
noir antihero. The narrator of Hage’s
second novel, the immigrant storyteller
of Cockroach, is harder to pin down. He
too has escaped from the demimonde
of Lebanon’s civil war, but has nothingA Palestinian woman pleading with a Christian militiaman during the Lebanese civil war,
Beirut, January 1976Françoisede^ Mulder/Roger^ Viollet/GettyImages*For two recent examples, see my
“Tripoli Nights with a Master of Ara-
bic” in these pages, March 9, 2017.