It is a cool, evening in Norman, Oklahoma, and Rabih Alameddine, author of Koolaids:The Art of War, I, the Divine, The Perv and The Hawkawati, lights a cigarette. Alameddine is Lebanese, but he spends the majority of the year in his home in San Francisco, California. “Do you travel to Beirut often?” I ask. “I spend about four months out of the year there,” he answers as he flicks the ash from his cigarette. I comment on the ongoing unrest in Syria and ask about the effects it has on his home country. Alameddine explains some of the differences between Syria and Lebanon, neighboring countries who have different perspectives on the way they interact with the West.“[Syria] hasn’t been as developed. In Lebanon they, sort of, destroyed everything to build skyscrapers.” Alameddine says.
This is one of Lebanon’s complexities that appear in Alameddine’s writings when he references a label Beirut has come to be known by: the “Paris of the Middle East”. It is one of the Middle East cities that welcomes and embraces Western culture. Adding to the mix in cultures is the diversity in the religious communities found in Beirut. Sunni, Shia, Jew, Druze, Protestant, and various sects of Catholicism are present. I ask Alameddine if his book reflects the real Beirut, and if he feels that his American audience tends to see him as the sovereign voice of Middle Eastern literature.
“Even if you read my book, you’ll get a different side, but you still won’t know.” He pauses to take another drag from his smoke. “Whenever you get something outside of the dominant culture, say American Indian, a lot of people will read one book and think, ‘Oh. Now I understand!’ But nobody would, say, read John Updike and go ‘Oh! I know America now!’ For anything outside of the dominant culture the assumption is the writer carries everything.”
Alameddine encounters this assumption fairly regularly. It is one of the quirks we Americans have come to practice when dealing with non-dominant cultures. “I went on NPR, I swear to God, for an hour the questions were all about Islam. And you know finally I had to say ‘Do you guys know that I am not a Muslim? I can answer these questions to the best of my ability…When I go to a festival nobody ever asks me ‘How do you write?’ it’s always ‘Do you think there will be peace in the Middle East?’ Hell if I know!”
There is some benefit to be had by being a cultural outsider. It allows one to observe cultural elements in ways that those inside the culture may not have the ability, or luxury, of doing. “There’s something wonderful about watching another culture from the outside.” says Alameddine, “As an outsider you can also be a good observer of American culture…of what I would call the dominant culture. There’s a lot of non-dominant cultures in the United States, but there is one dominant culture.”
This idea of observing something like culture from an outsider’s perspective does not necessarily mean that you have to be totally detached from the subject. Alameddine is well aware of this and the role it plays in his writings. “You cannot write about something if you’re totally enmeshed in it, and you can’t write about something if you are totally distant from it. It’s finding the right balance. How far can you pull out without being too distant, but if you’re totally in it, you can’t see it.” remarks Alameddine.
Alameddine’s novel Koolaids: The Art of War presents stories revolving around the AIDS pandemic and the Lebanese Civil War in a fragmented and non-linear format similar to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. “When you write these stories,” I ask, “do you start out and finish a whole story, or do you take a story to a certain point and start the next one?” Alameddine responds, “With Koolaids I did. But, also, Koolaids was just a run on thing I did very quickly, but I had been building up for it for a long, long, long time. So the stories were in my head and I just sat down and [wrote them]…I think non-linearly, but I write linearly, so it comes out linearly, but I usually start at the beginning and end at the end. With the later book [The Hawkawati] I actually moved things around a lot, with Koolaids I didn’t, and sometimes I think I should have.” The first thing I noticed when I read Koolaids was the way Alameddine plays with time the way Vonnegut does in Slaughterhouse-Five. “The important thing about Slaughterhouse-Five that’s also similar to Koolaids in some ways,” says the author as he stomps out the remaining ember of his cigarette, “is it’s not just non-linear and fragmented, it’s repetition…it goes like a sort of constant cycle…Nietzche said something about ‘eternal return’ what [has] happened will happen again.” It will be interesting to see what stories this observer of cultures will share next.
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