Marking Territory: Rawi Hage’s Novels
and the Challenge to Postcolonial Ethics
Mark Libin
University of Manitoba
There has been a sustained interest in recent years, both in academic circles and in mainstream readership, in non-Western narratives
of trauma and conflict, evidenced in the popularity of novels such as The
Kite Runner, Half of a Yellow Sun, Beasts of No Nation, What is the What,
and A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, as well as non-fiction memoirs such as
Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. The attention
afforded to texts such as these, texts that describe the hardships that are
too often a symptom of the postcolonial condition, can certainly indicate
a trend in Western readership that is concerned with questions of social
justice, human rights, and cross-cultural ethics. The mainstream Western
reader and the scholarly Western critic seem united in a desire to bridge
the ethical gap between the First and Third worlds, a desire that ultimately
conceives of the reading of postcolonial literature as a vehicle for enacting
cross-cultural ethics and the betterment of the world.
It is no surprise, then, that Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game, a novel documenting the experiences of a Lebanese teenager in war-torn Beirut circa
1982, has attracted critical attention. What is significant about Hage’s fiction—specifically De Niro’s Game and his second novel, Cockroach—is
the way in which its narratives challenge conventional representations
ESC 39.4 (December 2013): 71–90
Mark Libin is an
Associate Professor
in the Department
of English, Film, and
Theatre at the University
of Manitoba, where he
teaches world literature,
modern British literature,
and critical theory. His
current research interests
focus on narrative
challenges to ethics in
world literatures and on
narrative voices in postapartheid South African
fiction. He has published
articles on South African
literature and culture,
Canadian poetry, and
Asian Canadian writing.
of postcolonial trauma and expose the imbalances in the standard models of cross-cultural ethics.1 Syrine Hout addresses this challenge in her
book-length study Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction, in which she
contends that the postwar generation of Lebanese literature is distinctive as a genre, insofar as both Anglophone and Francophone writers
are concerned primarily with “the debunking of two myths: the return
to a golden age of a romanticized Lebanon and the slavish imitation of a
supposedly superior Western lifestyle” (9). The protagonists in this genre,
Hout suggests, “neither idealise their country of origin nor shed their past
to embrace unquestioningly a Western mode of living” (9).
As Hout argues, Hage’s novels fall into a genre that is markedly diasporic, insofar as its subjects have no firm foundation in either the home
country or the new host country, in the past or in the present, upon which
to build a stable identity. As Salah D. Hassan suggests, Bassam, in De
Niro’s Game, “roguishly turns his back on history and embraces the figure
of the refugee: he harbors no thought of return and no desire to settle”
(1628). Similarly, Hout, in her analysis of Cockroach, describes that novel’s
unnamed narrator as a refugee or exile who “clearly has no interest in
acclimatising to mainstream Canadian culture—but nor is he keen on
flaunting his origins” (170). As well as offering a tangible manifestation of
Hout’s generic definition, however, I would argue that Hage’s fiction goes
further to consider how this diasporic state shines an interrogative light on
the standard formulations of postcolonial ethics and ultimately proposes
a much more complex but potentially enriching definition of postcolonial
hospitality.
The fundamental question of postcolonial ethics is deceptively simple:
How might citizens of the First World relate, ethically and productively, to
the diasporic subject, to the new immigrant, to the refugee? Rawi Hage’s
second novel Cockroach begins with just such a negotiation, as Genevieve,
a Montreal therapist, attempts to connect with and heal the unnamed
Lebanese refugee who narrates this text:
Last week I confessed to her that I used to be more courageous, more carefree, and even, one might add, more violent.
But here in this northern land no one gives you an excuse to
hit, rob, or shoot, or even to shout from across the balcony, to
curse your neighbours’ mothers and threaten their kids.
1 This essay was conceived and, for the most part, written, prior to the publication
of Hage’s third novel, Carnival (2012).
72 | Libin
When I said that to the therapist, she told me that I have a
lot of hidden anger. So when she left the room for a moment, I
opened her purse and stole her lipstick, and when she returned
I continued my tale of growing up somewhere else. (4)
In Hage’s novel the voice of compassion, the voice of cross-cultural understanding, is not only refused but deliberately sabotaged by his protagonist.
Hage’s narrator challenges the First World reader, particularly the mainstream Canadian reader, to reconsider the implied relationship between
him/herself and the diasporic subject, a relationship conceived through the
lens of Canadian national rhetoric, Canadian literary criticism, diasporic
theory, and trauma theory. Hage’s first two novels, De Niro’s Game and
Cockroach, function both subtly and explicitly to confront the mainstream
Canadian reader with the fallacies of these discourses and the false and
patronizing identity they construct for the reader of diasporic texts as well
as for the diasporic subject. Ultimately, Hage’s novels ask the mainstream
Canadian reader to reconsider the conventional idea of guest and of host
in a manner strikingly similar to Jacques Derrida’s radical reimagining of
the nature of hospitality: a hospitality that is so absolute that the master of
the house becomes displaced, held “hostage” by the guest, who, as a result
of the obligation to hospitality, becomes the “host’s host” (125).
The Western Reader as Analyst
In Postcolonial Hospitality, Mireille Rosello laments the lack of ambiguity
in “our contemporary discourses, where the refugee is always imagined,
or fantasized, as innocent.” Rosello even ventures that “this need to be a
victim is what makes the status of international or political refugees so
problematic” (156). Despite its reluctant acknowledgements to the contrary,
contemporary criticism continues to read the diasporic literary text as an
invitation for ethical engagement with the marginalized, displaced, and
essentially victimized other. The diasporic text all too often represents
the First World host country as the ideal site for receiving the tale of the
diasporic subject and in so receiving offering the subject an authentic
home. By extension, the mainstream Western reader of the text is made to
feel that s/he has made authentic experiential and ethical contact with the
marginalized other who constructs the text and, by doing so, has successfully welcomed the displaced subject into his/her secure and empathetic
homeland.
Marking Territory | 73
Canadian criticism in particular tends to buttress itself with long-held
ideals that valorize Canada as a haven for multicultural tolerance.2 In her
recent introduction to a special issue of Canadian Literature on “Diasporic
Women’s Writing,” Sneja Gunew begins by agreeing that the definitions of
what constitutes a diasporic text are highly political and problematic but
still turns to Stuart Hall’s 1994 definition of diaspora in order to ground her
discussion. Gunew cites Hall’s contention that “the diaspora experience
[…] is defined, not by essence of purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity: by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives
with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity” and that diasporic
narratives “signal the instabilities of hybridity, métissage, creolization, and
‘contamination’ ” (Hall cited in Gunew 7). Gunew further shores up her
definition of diasporic writing with a quotation from Avtar Brah, who
contends that “the concept of diaspora offers a critique of fixed origins,
while taking account of a homing desire which is not the same thing as a
desire for ‘homeland’ ” (8).
Gunew’s citation of Hall brings to the fore the key terms of postcolonial
criticism in the 1990s: hybridity, métissage, and, most importantly for this
Canadian context, contamination. The term “contamination” recalls the
Canadian postcolonial critic Diana Brydon’s influential essay, “The White
Inuit Speaks: Contamination as Literary Strategy,” a study that, if Gunew’s
essay is any indication, continues to shape Canadian critics’ reading strategies. Brydon’s essay remains widely quoted in English-Canadian studies,
First Nations studies, and abroad as a template for how to formulate a
positive cross-cultural encounter. Brydon contends that she focuses on
Kristjana Gunnars’s The Prowler and Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky
Was Here precisely because both texts embody the “utopian dream of the
quest for a just society, and [both] locate the quest in the contaminations
of cross-cultural exploration” (104). For Brydon and those who endorse
her position, the term “contamination” is surprisingly positive. Brydon
herself borrows the term from Lola Lemire Tostevin, who defines it as
“differences [being] brought together so they make contact” (Brydon 94).
In their rejection of this optimistic disposition and their resistance to
the idea that cultural contamination can result in any positive outcome,
Hage’s novels underscore the way in which Brydon’s equation privileges
the Western half of the exchange. Critics such as Penelope Ingram, focus2 Heike Härting’s and Smaro Kamboureli’s “Discourses of Security, Peacekeeping
Narratives, and the Cultural Imagination in Canada” interrogates Canada’s
persistent self-image as a non-aggressive nation destined to bring peace and
healing to the discordant world surrounding it.
74 | Libin
ing on First Nations studies, and Sebastien Hsien-hao Liao—who argues
that Brydon’s essay dramatizes the “scrambling for postcolonial status by
former settlers’ colonies […] at the expense of the already underprivileged
aborigines” (200, n 63)—have already critiqued Brydon’s essay as unaware
of its Western biases. Assuming this skeptical pose allows us to recognize how much of the fiction representing the immigrant experience in
Canada tends to privilege Canadian culture as a site of true contamination
or cosmopolitanism, a country where the social and political tensions,
historical traumas, or simply the individual frictions that arise in a crosscultural exchange may be successfully resolved. As respected Canadian
critics such as Gunew continue to trade in Brydon’s terminology, Canada
as a national ideal continues to be reified as the culmination of a utopian
quest undertaken by Canadian writers. Canadian culture perceives of
itself as a benevolent host, welcoming the battered and destitute guest
into its peaceful, secure dwelling space, inviting the newcomer to tell his/
her terrible story of trauma and in so doing begin to find empathy and
healing in his/her new home.
By beginning its narrative with the provocative, humorous, and
ultimately subversive scene in which the diasporic subject confronts a
Canadian therapist, Cockroach also explicitly invokes a model of trauma
theory which Syrine Hout has already proposed as a strategy for reading postwar anglophone Lebanese literature in general, including Hage’s
two novels. Just as in Brydon’s notion of cultural contamination, trauma
theory is predicated on the notion of an empathetic transaction through
which healing might take place. Shoshana Felman famously defines the
traumatic narrative as “an alignment between witnesses” (14), contending
that traumatic literature is so powerful and compelling a narrative that the
reader ultimately identifies almost seamlessly with the traumatic subject.
Cathy Caruth similarly posits that “trauma itself may provide the very link
between cultures” (11). One could argue, in fact, that critical conceptions
of cross-cultural dialogue are indebted to the classical Freudian model of
the talking cure that trauma theory has explicitly adopted as its methodological foundation, each theory dependent on situating the reader as the
authentically empathetic analyst who enables identity to be reconciled and
traumatic damage to be healed. Yet this model also confers a hierarchical
status on the bourgeois Western reader as analyst, who by engaging with
the traumatic testimony of the marginalized other is able to feel superior,
helpful, and even absolved of any complicity in that trauma, a conundrum
Stef Craps and Gert Buelens elaborate in their introduction to the issue
of postcolonial trauma novels:
Marking Territory | 75
Ultimately,
these novels
aim to unsettle
the privileged
Western reader/
host, shifting the
narrative power
to the diasporic
guest.
The respective subject positions into which the witness and the
listener/reader are interpellated are those of a passive, inarticulate victim on the one hand and a knowledgeable expert on
the other. The former bears witness to a truth of which he or
she is not fully conscious, and can do so only indirectly, making it impossible for his or her testimony to act as a political
intervention. The latter responds to the witness’s testimony
by showing empathy, a reaction that supposedly obviates any
need for critical self-reflections regarding his or her own implication in ongoing practices of oppression and denial, let alone
political mobilization against these practices. (4–5)
It is precisely this valorization of the good liberal reader, and indeed the
good liberal host country, that Hage’s novels confront, challenge, and
ultimately subvert. As is made clear in the opening scene of Cockroach,
Hage’s novels are interested in a diasporic subject who is more than simply
a “passive, inarticulate victim” waiting for the Westerner to help reconstruct a shattered identity.3 Similarly, Hage’s narratives use the trauma of
the Lebanese Civil War to trouble, rather than confirm, the mainstream
Western reader’s sense of an analytic empathy, a superiority bred in safety
and luxury. Ultimately, these novels aim to unsettle the privileged Western
reader/host, shifting the narrative power to the diasporic guest. In such a
way, Hage’s novels seem to answer the challenge issued by Jacques Derrida
in Of Hospitality, in which the “foreigner” or guest is recognized as the one
who “carries and puts the question”—the essential question of identity—
to the host (5). By investing the impetus for, and structure of, hospitality
almost entirely in the figure of the foreigner, and by emphasizing that this
figure is at once fundamental and detrimental to the host’s very identity,
Derrida’s definition of hospitality compels the host to acknowledge that
it is the stranger or foreigner who “holds the keys” to the master’s house
and that the master has become a “prisoner of [the foreigner’s] place and
his power, of his ipseity, of his subjectivity” (123). By insisting on their own
continued displacement, their own “foreignness,” Hage’s narrators forcibly
displace the Western reader and force him/her to “enter his home through
the guest […] thanks to the visitor, by the grace of the visitor” (125). In other
words, in Hage’s novels it is not that the diasporic subject finds a home
3 Petra Sapun Kurtin and Gordan Matas note, in their essay on Cockroach, that
Genevieve “trivializes” the narrator’s problem and, indeed, becomes a clear
caricature of the blinkered Western analyst by consistently attributing his problems to his mother (201).
76 | Libin
in the West but that he unsettles the West and renders the Westerner, in
terms of identity, diasporic.
Contamination and Ethics
By beginning its narrative in the therapist’s office, Cockroach pointedly
creates an association between the mainstream Canadian reader and the
well-meaning psychoanalyst, drawing attention to the all-too seductive
liberal ideology that the enlightened bourgeoisie are not only capable of
empathizing with the marginalized other but are equally capable of curing
him of his trauma. As psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dori Laub explicitly
asserts in his essay on Holocaust testimony, “By extension, the listener to
trauma comes to be a participant and co-owner of the traumatic event:
through his very listening, he comes to partially experience trauma in himself […] The listener has to feel the victim’s victories, defeats and silences,
know them from within, so that they can assume the form of testimony”
(57–58). One can see how easily Laub’s definition of the role of witness
in testimony can be transposed onto a model for how Western readers
engage in postcolonial and diasporic literature, how the reader/analyst
is figured as a “participant” in the trauma experienced by the diasporic
subject, and through that participation can help the traumatized subject
find a healing articulation in the form of testimony.4 The Canadian nation,
because it defines itself by these very principles of empathy, tolerance,
and concern for the dispossessed of the world, comes to stand in for the
Laubian therapist, grounding displaced subjectivities and giving them the
voice they need to sound their own identity.
Hage’s direct assault on this soothing national chimera certainly shapes
the way we might read Cockroach, but, more compellingly, it may also ask
us to revisit our reading of De Niro’s Game and re-examine whether or
not we succumbed, too easily, to that satisfying ideal of the reader as analyst. Certainly, De Niro’s Game initially presents itself as an unambiguous
attempt to represent the trauma of war (Hout, “Cultural Hybridity, Trauma
4 It is certainly not uncommon, and may even be seen as symptomatic, for the
figure of an empathetic, healing Westerner to be encoded into the traumatic
narratives of diasporic or postcolonial subjects. One can note the active role
of Americans in helping Ishmael Beah recover from his traumatic experience
as a child soldier in his memoir, A Long Way Gone. Similarly, the narrator of
Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, a fictional first-person narrative of a
child soldier, tells us that it is an American named Amy who incites him to
articulate his traumatic narrative: “She is sitting in her chair and I am sitting in
my own chair and she is always looking at me like looking at me is going to be
helping me. She is telling me to speak speak speak” (140).
Marking Territory | 77
and Memory in Diasporic Anglophone Lebanese Fiction” )—particularly
the 1982 massacre of thousands of Palestinian civilians living in the Sabra
and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in its presentation of two young men
from Beirut: Bassam remains cynical about the war and eager to escape to
the West while his best friend George becomes drawn into the Phalangist
militia in a way that eventually destroys him. Najat Rahman affirms that
the massacre in which George participates and then reports to the novel’s
narrator, Bassam, is the “central trauma and catastrophe in the narrative,
measuring the collective devastation and the individual psychological one
as well” (809), and Abdelfattah more clearly elaborates the way the narrative of the massacre not only stands alone but ends up aligning itself with
a childhood memory of Bassam’s, thus representing the “ ‘uncanny’ link”
between the personal traumas of Bassam and George and the national
trauma of Lebanon. The event also creates a dialogue with other national
traumas, argues Abdelfattah, through its direct associations with The Deer
Hunter, a movie about the trauma of the Vietnam War (4). Thus, Hage’s
novel not only becomes an important narrative of personal trauma but
access to that trauma allows the Western reader access to the national
trauma of Lebanon and, further, into a more generalized representation
of trauma that transcends historical and geographical limits.
It is this last move, of course, that gives the reader the sense that there
are no cultural, geographical, or historical limitations to his/her ability to
empathize and connect. As Laub suggests, the secure, non-traumatized
Western reader allows him/herself in, inside the traumatic narrative, and
comes out with a satisfying sense of sympathy: sympathy that, as Susan
Sontag has argued, “proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence”
(102). The mainstream Western reader is privileged not only because dark
foreign truths have been revealed to him/her but because s/he has been
able to comprehend those truths and because his/her privileged place
in Canada has allowed those truths to remain comfortingly distant and
detached from him/her despite the vicarious and heady illusion of proximity.
Although critics such as Hout and Rahman and Abdelfattah are clearly
responding to narrative cues in the text, those cues are constructed specifically in order to be subverted. The narrative structure of De Niro’s
Game is cannily devised not only to provoke the reader into the by now
default position of the sympathetic liberal analyst but also to see how the
diasporic subject rejects that position and refutes the idea that he can
be healed simply by giving voice to his story, by revealing himself to his
cultural other, by emigrating to the West.
78 | Libin
The most provocative rebuke to Laub’s image of a listener who feels
the “victim’s victories, defeats and silences” is manifest in Bassam’s reaction to his best friend George’s account of his bloody role in the infamous
Sabra and Shatila massacre. Although fictionalized in Hage’s novel, the
description George provides of his Phalangist militia’s murderous rampage
through a refugee camp in retribution for the assassination of their leader
parallels unmistakably the actual historical events of the brutal massacre,
in 1982, of Palestinian civilians living in the Sabra and Shatila camps in
Beirut. Rahman contends that “structurally the massacre in the novel falls
in the centre section; it serves as the grim climax for the war as well as for
the destiny of Bassam and George […] and it is the definitive separation of
George and Bassam from each other” (809). Yet, although George strives
frantically to connect with Bassam in order to share his story, Bassam’s
narration remains markedly impassive:
I killed today, he finally said.
I nodded without surprise.
I killed many. Many, he said as he played with his gun.
I nodded again and kept my silence for a moment longer.
Then: I have to go, I said. I was no longer interested in hearing
the sounds of the slaughterhouses, the rush of thick heels, the
fireworks. (173)
Throughout his manic account of the massacre George tries to reconnect
with Bassam as “my best friend and my brother” (174), but Bassam continually reacts with impassivity and even indifference. He appears unsurprised
by George’s revelations, he only incites George’s narrative by default, and
he reacts more with impatience than with sympathy, horror, or shock.
He continually rejects George’s attempts to connect with him through
testimony and rebuffs any potential gestures of empathy: “He tried to hug
me, but I pushed him away” (174).
What George describes is not just the centrepiece of Hage’s narrative,
integral to the narrative of Bassam’s escape from Beirut and the violent end
of his once fraternal relationship with George. Since it is unmistakably a
recounting of what might be called the horrifying centrepiece of the history of the Lebanese civil war, it is a description that engages the liberal
Western reader with the enticement of connecting with an authentic experience, of making actual revelatory contact with his/her Lebanese other.
Whereas George’s haunted and haunting invitation—“Do you still want to
hear? Do you want to hear more?”—might be answered in the sympathetic
affirmative by the reader, who may have given in to the liberal desire to
Marking Territory | 79
occupy the role of therapist as well as global peacekeeper (176),5 Bassam
refuses to engage with either George or the reader but, rather, as Dina
Georgis contends, “coldly proceeds with his plan to go [to] France” (143).
Just as the narrator of Cockroach uses his narrative of otherness
and trauma to manipulate his therapist, so too does Bassam later wield
George’s story of the massacre. Received with seeming indifference, Bassam confronts George’s half-sister, Rhea, with George’s testimony after he
has discovered the Mossad trap set for him in Paris. Before fleeing Paris,
Bassam accosts Rhea and forces her to hear the story of the massacre and
how George killed himself playing “De Niro’s game” with Bassam after he
had revealed his haunted memories to his “brother”:
I ignored her shouting. I ignored her small eyes, and her
twitching cheeks, her brown dress. I ignored her protest, and
when she tried to leave the room, I held her back, cornered her
against the kitchen sink. I told her about the night her brother
took me under the bridge.
This is all confusing, Rhea said. Your stories are not making
sense. I do not know these people you are talking about. You
come here like this, and expect me to listen to it all. I need to
leave, she said. Please let me go.
But I was merciless. (269–70)
Again, instead of establishing some sort of ethical dialogue between Bassam and Rhea, his host in Paris, instead of allowing for cross-cultural
contamination of the sort advocated by Brydon, the central and most
traumatic narrative of the novel becomes for Bassam an emotional cudgel
brandished not to establish connection but to sever any further relationship between Rhea and Bassam. It is deployed as an act of vengeance, and
when it has arrived at its destination, the novel itself moves to closure
without any emotion and with the same kind of merciless terseness as
Bassam has conducted himself:
I pulled back from Rhea. I had nothing more to say.
She didn’t turn away from me then, but still I left her in
tears. I went down her stairs and into Paris’s streets. (273)
In this conclusion, we can once again note the violent distinction
between the definition of contamination prized by the well-intentioned
Canadian postcolonialist and the desire to contaminate that drives Hage’s
protagonists. Both Hout and Dalia Said Mostafa remark on the impor5 Once again, Härting and Kamboureli remind us of the cherished ideal of the
Canadian citizen as a global peacekeeper.
80 | Libin
tance of recognizing Hage’s protagonists as both victims and victimizers:
protagonists who are “continuously seeking recognition as acting subjects
by inflicting physical violence on others” (Mostafa 31). Hage himself comments on how important it is for him to avoid writing immigrant characters who are simply pitiable victims:
In a lot of Western literature and maybe in Canadian literature
too, you cannot portray an immigrant as somebody that’s evil
[…] But if you create characters who do only good, who are all
oppressed, who were the victims of something and then come
here and are saved, you’re not presenting them as humans,
you’re representing them as somebody to pity. (cited in Hage,
Post-War 163)
In tandem with the physical violence that Mostafa notes, however, there
is also evident a mental violence made manifest in the protagonists’ desire
to contaminate the lives of those they encounter. This contamination, as
we see, does not revive Brydon’s “utopian quest for a just society” through
“cross-cultural exploration.” To the contrary, it confronts the previously
secure Western reader in his/her own home—the space, comprised of
idealized images of such notions as accepted differences and mutual empathy, from which the Western reader offers his/her hospitality to the diasporic subject as victim. By conflating the comforting distinction between
victim and aggressor, Hage’s narrative disturbs the similarly comforting
distinction between host and guest, analyst and patient, and in so doing
disrupts the conventional formulation of cross-cultural ethics championed
by Brydon, Gunew, and others.
Indeed, as the text revisits the story of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, and the suicide of George that follows on the heels of the atrocity, it
reminds the reader that Bassam is directly implicated in the assassination
of the Phalangist leader Al-Rayess, having passed along blueprints of AlRayess’s headquarters to the bombers.6 George picks up Bassam on that
final day in Beirut because the militia wants to interrogate him for his
role in the assassination, the act that inspired the massacre as retaliation,
and allows him to play Russian Roulette for his freedom. Yet Bassam does
not admit to any feelings of complicity, let alone remorse, for the human
catastrophe in which he played a prominent role and never seems to feel
6 In reality, it was the assassination of President Bachir Gemayel (by bomb blast)
that provoked the attack by Phalangist militiamen (supported by Israel) on
the refugee camps. The assassination was planned and executed by pro-Syrian
forces, not Palestianians.
Marking Territory | 81
By conflating
the
comforting
distinction
between victim
and aggressor,
Hage’s
narrative
disturbs the
similarly
comforting
distinction
between host
and guest,
analyst and
patient.
any real connection to the civil war and the massacre. Despite the clear
narrative set-up—the uncanny twinning of George and Bassam—the narrator does not seem to feel implicated or affected by the war raging around
him and certainly does not search out an empathetic ear in the West that
would allow him to turn his narrative into testimony. Rather, under Bassam’s authority, the narrative of the massacre becomes an invasion of the
West, breaking into the sheltered world of Paris—a city with unshakable
associations with romance, luxury, culture—and contaminating it with
the colonial legacy of which it had felt divested.
Hage’s narratives refuse to distinguish between the idea of the West
as hospitable host for the refugee and the idea of the West as the colonial
aggressor that initiated the wars and turmoil and created the refugee situations it now tries to alleviate. Hage has remarked, for example, that he
intended the incident of Bassam smuggling his gun from Beirut to Paris
to “be exaggerated and humorous so as to comment subtly on ‘our weapon
industry’ and on ‘the trajectory of a weapon going for the first time from
South to North’ ” rather than the opposite direction (cited in Mostafa 37).
The narrative’s insistence on representing George and Bassam as both
victims and aggressors has implications for the Western reader, who must
similarly recognize him/herself as both host and invader. This narrative
strategy reminds us of Sontag’s warning that sympathy can be frequently
deployed as a defense mechanism which absolves the (Western) spectator
from acknowledging complicity in the catastrophes s/he witnesses (102)
and similarly calls to mind Derrida’s call for absolute hospitality, which
involves just such an unsettling of the host, a process through which the
guest takes the host hostage and forces the host to relinquish his sovereignty. In Derrida’s formulation, the host enters his home through the
guest and, because of this movement, is forced to recognize the home
through the eyes of the guest. Such a re-visioning of the home place, in
this case the hospitable site of the liberal West, becomes a jarring displacement for the host.
Marking Territory
Rather than discovering in the West a haven that allows the diasporic
subject to re-connect with his traumatic past and articulate a new identity able to make peace with that past—the experience promised in the
methodologies of cross-cultural contamination or trauma theory—neither
Bassam nor the narrator of Cockroach are able to find a solid foothold
in their new, more peaceful, refuges. Indeed, the narrator of Cockroach
overtly mocks the notion of the diasporic subject who is living with one
82 | Libin
foot in each homeland by comparing them to dogs living in their own filth,
trying to mark their territory:
On Friday I walked to work, and as usual I stopped at the
Artista Café to sniff around and see which of the landed refugees had left a yellow trace at the edge of a seat, on the leg
of a table, or at the counter, but none of those welfare dogs
was there.[…] Lost mutts! They don’t know what colour they
are. They can’t decide what breed they belong to. They sit in
their own mess, feeling repulsed by their urine. They sprinkle
traces of their lives here and there for no reason except to
have the illusion of marking territory and holding vanishing
places. (144)
What repulses the narrator seems to be their status as refugees; their desire
to “hold on to the past,” on to the “vanishing places” from whence they
originated. Rather than bringing to fruition a cross-cultural contamination
with the rest of Montreal, the narrator portrays these refugees as “mutts”
who “can’t decide what breed they belong to,” so self-involved are they that
they “sit in their own mess.”
Yet, neither Bassam nor the narrator of Cockroach actually embraces
the normally assumed correlative to this disdain for backward looking,
namely, a headlong rush into assimilation and embrace of Western ideologies. Indeed, when Bassam first lands in France, his new life begins
in much the same way his life in Beirut had previously unfolded: he is
confronted by menacing young men whom he faces down with the gun
he has brought with him from Lebanon (191–92). Almost immediately, his
conception of Paris becomes overlaid with a fantasy of his own invention,
an imaginary vision of Paris that unself-consciously juxtaposes references
to the Napoleonic period with traces of memories from Beirut:
Now that I wore the sweater my mother had woven for me, and
had left my underwear soaking in the sink, I knew I could find
my gun in a second. Now I could defend this city that looked
so different from the old photographs in the history books.
Now I could kill Nelson, the British admiral, and become a
soldier in the emperor’s army. I would be the fastest shooter
on a horse. I would slay priests, and hang aristocrats on trees
filled with dangling biscuits. (204)
Rather than dwelling in the past of Beirut, or embracing the new world
of Paris and the West, Bassam contaminates and unsettles the geography
he now inhabits, overlaying it with a mélange of violent fantasies that mix
Marking Territory | 83
the Jacobin with the contemporary, and transforms the gun-toting Bassam
into an improbable defender of his new-found city. It is now, as Derrida
might put it, Bassam who holds the keys to Paris; he marks his territory,
overwriting the city with his own fractured, violent signature.
Despite Cockroach’s narrator’s use of the term to disparage his fellow
refugees, the idea that Hage’s narrators “mark” their territory with the
violence of Lebanon aptly describes the manner of cross-cultural contamination practised in these novels. As opposed to the other refugees, whom
the narrator sees as lost between the absent homeland and the new home
that refuses them any true identity—in other words, acting like obsequious
guests in the house of their master—Bassam and the narrator of Cockroach
mark their territory by seizing the authority in the relationship and forcing
their new host to confront the violent reality (and fantasy) of their former
home. Rather than accepting and conforming to the West’s notion of itself
as a sanctuary from the traumas of the non-Western countries, and as a
place where the identities fractured by the traumas of their homelands can
be reconstituted through the empathetic ethics of the Western interlocutor, Hage’s protagonists confront that notion by transposing the violence
and trauma directly onto the Western landscape they now inhabit. In De
Niro’s Game, what is remarkable is that the France Bassam encounters is
uncannily similar to Beirut. His initial arrival in Marseilles, as has already
been discussed, immediately becomes the scene of a violent confrontation.
However, more importantly, Bassam soon discovers that the supposedly
safe haven of Paris, where he is greeted warmly by George’s stepmother
and half-sister, is rife with almost as much intrigue and danger as was
Beirut.
In Paris, seemingly infatuated with love for George’s half-sister, Rhea,
and clouded in his perceptions of Paris through a lens of violent and anachronistic fantasy, Bassam continues to stalk Rhea’s male friends just as he
stalked potential enemies in Beirut. Although this behaviour seems merely
to confirm the delusional perspective Bassam overlays onto the streets
of Paris—delusions that intermix the civil war in Beirut and the French
Revolution—Bassam soon discovers that Rhea is in fact surrounded by
covert Mossad agents who have attempted to entrap Bassam in order to
coerce information from him about George’s final fate. As a result of the
survival skills he acquired in Beirut, Bassam is able to thwart the Mossad,
and the novel ends with him on the run again.
Bassam’s discovery of the Mossad trap effects the Canadian reader’s
engagement with the text in some important ways. First, it disrupts our
understanding of Bassam’s behaviour in Paris as a posttraumatic response
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to his past experiences, a sustained flashback to Beirut. Secondly, it blurs
the distinction between the past and the present, between the here and
the there, so that the relationship between the diasporic subject from
Lebanon and the sympathetic Western reader/analyst is put into crucial
question. Rather than portraying the West as an empathetic and ethical
site within which the displaced and traumatized non-Westerner might find
closure and the ability to articulate his trauma, the West now becomes
an extension of Lebanon. The arrival of Bassam seems to transport the
civil war of Lebanon to Paris, to such an extent that the idea of the West
as benevolent host becomes unrecognizable and incomprehensible to the
Western reader. It is the Western subject who is displaced by the conclusion of De Niro’s Game, while the diasporic subject continues to live the
life he has always lived.
This infiltration of the West by the ongoing present of the non-West—
the host country realizing that it must enter its home through the figure
of the foreigner—is even more clearly described in Cockroach, where the
unnamed narrator7 actively seeks to contaminate those who cohabit Montreal with him. Hage’s narrator persistently stalks the people he encounters
in his daily travails, even going so far as to break into their apartments, as
he does to his therapist, Genevieve: “I returned to Genevieve’s place and
watched her leave for work. Then I slipped past the building’s garage door,
went down to the basement, and crawled along the pipes. I sprang from
her kitchen’s drain, fixed my hair, my clothes, my self, and walked straight
to her bedroom” (80). As the description of his entrance suggests, the
narrator envisions himself, quite literally, as a cockroach in the instances
when he infiltrates the lives of the Canadians and emigrants surrounding
him. Unlike the secretive common cockroach, however, Hage’s narrator is
compelled to draw attention to the traces of his invasive presence. In the
case of his visit to Genevieve’s apartment, not only does he help himself
from her refrigerator—an action that might be considered ambiguously
because he is destitute and hungry—but before he departs he leaves the
red lipstick he has stolen earlier from her purse on her dining-room table.
As opposed to Bassam, then, who keeps his surveillance hidden in order to
turn information to his advantage, the narrator of Cockroach relishes the
idea of his fellow Montrealers experiencing the defilement and violation
7 One might be reminded again, in the namelessness of Hage’s narrator, of Derrida’s
definition of “absolute hospitality” as that which “requires that I open up my
home and that I give not only to the foreigner […] but to the absolute, unknown,
anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let
them arrive, and take the place in the place I offer them, without asking of them
either reciprocity […] or even their names” (25).
Marking Territory | 85
He actively
demonstrates
how soliciting
personal
narratives of an
other is an
invasion, an
infiltration, an
infestation, and
indeed an
invitation.
he apportions out to them. Indeed, each time the narrator invades someone’s personal space, it is to gather information: he examines Genevieve’s
personal items, steals love letters from his nemesis, the Algerian professor,
and in so doing he aligns contamination with the act of gathering personal
narratives. Precisely the act that the Canadian therapist/listener/reader
employs to facilitate cross-cultural understanding and garner empathy
for the other becomes the act that Hage’s narrator deploys to subvert that
idealistic ideology. He actively demonstrates how soliciting personal narratives of an other is an invasion, an infiltration, an infestation, and indeed
an invitation to rewrite that narrative in one’s own narcissistic image: “I
could enter the professor’s lover’s dream and kill all those pretty boys,
those older, sophisticated men with silk scarves around their necks. I could
change the background music, halt the soft lapping of the ocean, shoot
all the seabirds, and pull the towel from under sleeping swimsuits” (299).
We have seen that Hage’s narrator derides the marginalized of Montreal as much as he scorns the mainstream Canadian who, he feels, as Hout
suggests, “only welcome him as an exotic figure, by turns entertaining
and pitiable” (Post-War 161). His reasoning is consistent throughout: the
émigrés want to relegate their traumas to the past and convert them into
cultural currency to use in transactions with liberal Canadians, transactions guaranteed to reiterate the hierarchy between guest and host. Hage’s
narrator describes this behaviour manifest in the Iranian musician, Reza,
whose story of imprisonment and torture earns him favour with the leftleaning Canadian bourgeoisie, a ruse that the narrator himself used to
cynically deploy in order to gain entrance into the parties and beds of
modish Montrealers. Trauma is repeatedly invoked in Cockroach, but it
is invoked almost always as a strategy of manipulation and aggression: the
narrator wields trauma as a way of displacing all those around him, be
they fellow emigrants or white Canadians, from their previously settled
identities.
The challenge to this argument, though, is the novel’s conclusion, where
the narrator appears to demonstrate extreme empathy for his sometime
lover Shohreh. Shohreh shares her story of trauma, of being tortured and
raped in Iran, with the narrator because her former torturer, Shaheed,
has suddenly appeared in Montreal. Such an appearance resonates with
Bassam’s entanglement with the Mossad in Paris, in the way in which the
“past” of the Middle East remains consistently in play in the “present” of
the West, demonstrating again that Hage’s narratives show the Middle East
as an ongoing condition inflicted upon or infecting the West, evidencing
the ongoing complicity of the West in those distant conflicts, and defy86 | Libin
ing closure or resolution. In the conclusion of Cockroach, however, there
appears to be not only a satisfying closure offered but a closure actually
consummated by the narrator himself, when he first helps Shohreh gain
access to Shaheed in order to assassinate him and then, after Shohreh fails
in her attempt, actually kills Shaheed himself.
For critics such as Syrine Hout, the conclusion of Cockroach offers a
neat catharsis and denouement to the traumatic narrative that could be
said to begin in De Niro’s Game and culminate in Cockroach. According
to Hout, Shohreh as a victim of trauma offers the narrator the means to
exorcise his own demons:
Her request that he help her kill the Iranian who tortured and
raped her offers him a chance to overcome his guilt complex.
This he does, by shooting the man and then imagining himself
escaping like a cockroach through a drain. This vision constitutes a symbolic return to an equilibrium he had lost, to a self
cleansed from a burden, and thus to his dead sister, whose
presence had once provided his only sense of home. (“Cultural
Hybridity” 10)
According to Hout’s reading, the narrator finally acts in a way to restore his
identity and his “equilibrium,” to cleanse himself. It is no coincidence, of
course, that it is the Canadian setting that allows the narrator to recover a
new “sense of home” that his identity requires for its own equilibrium. The
narrator’s actions appear to represent a commitment to the real world and
a connection to real people, and therefore he appears to become real again.
Hout’s reading is satisfying precisely because it assuages the desires of
the Canadian reader/analyst/host. It provides the traumatic narrative with
a redemptive conclusion made possible by its Canadian setting. Yet the
skeptical reader—a reader made skeptical precisely through an attentive
reading of Hage’s novels—might note that the diction with which Hage’s
protagonist narrates this scene is conspicuously uninflected, detached,
and distant: “The bodyguard had his back to me. I stuck the knife in his
liver. He fell across two tables and crushed the candles with his body, and
flying plates landed and shattered silently on the floor. The gun fell from
his hand. I picked it up and aimed it at Shaheed. I shot him twice. I shot
him right in the chest and he fell beneath his tablecloth” (305). This diction recalls the way in which Bassam responded to George’s account of
the massacre and, indeed, the way he callously delivers the narrative to
Rhea. The narrator himself tells us that “I watched all this happen as if it
were taking place somewhere far away […] Everything was unreal, distant
Marking Territory | 87
and slow” (305). Perhaps most tellingly, at the outset of the struggle, while
Shohreh is shooting at the bodyguard and struggling for survival, the
narrator suddenly becomes distracted, and his mind drifts to a markedly
more insignificant incident:
As I watched the bodyguard, I thought how he reminded me
of a large man who once pushed me for no reason. I was in
a bar drinking, and the man next to me wanted to talk about
sports. When I told him that I did not give a damn about
sports or chasing an invisible puck, he fell quiet. And then,
for no apparent reason, he shoved me down from my stool.
[…] When the man walked out of the bar and went down the
street to his car, I picked up a large stone and flew at him with
all four wings and hit him on the head.[…] I thought he was
about to crush me, to step on me and twist his shoe sideways
so that my cartilage would crack and pus would squeeze out
of my entrails, but suddenly he collapsed. I took the stone
again and threw it at the windshield of the man’s car. Now
when the bastard goes on a long drive down the highway, he
will have a taste of what the insect thrown at him by the wind
can do. (304)
Judging from the energy gone into the description, particularly the figurative flourish at the end of the account, one can see that the narrator’s
encounter in a bar is far more resonant in his mind than Shohreh’s present
struggle. Rather than the novel’s conclusion being framed as a cleansing
catharsis that restores identity and equilibrium, the way the narrative is
structured drains any sense of relevance from the final pages in the same
way the narrative structure deflated the supposed catharsis of the massacre in De Niro’s Game. The conclusion of Cockroach, like the conclusion
of De Niro’s Game, is deliberately muted, flattened, rendered more banal
and commonplace than redemptive or heroic.
The conclusions of De Niro’s Game and Cockroach underscore the idea
of cultural contamination that has brought the monotony of casual death
and violence to Canada. Rather than resolving, or even articulating, the
horrors of the immigrant’s former homeland, Hage’s novel confronts his
reader with the notion of cultural mobility as an invasion and an inversion
rather than as a dialogue, a confrontation rather than an exchange. In so
doing, Hage’s novel unsettles the Western reader/host who feels s/he is
sheltered from such violence and trauma and as a result is able to serve as
a facilitator of the process that will recuperate the shattered identity of the
diasporic subject and bring closure to his traumatic past. Just as Derrida’s
88 | Libin
reconsideration of hospitality begins with the idea of the foreigner who
puts an essential question to his host, so too does each of Hage’s novels
structure their narration and narratives in such a way as to question the
security and stability of their hosts. Hage’s novels challenge the inherent
superiority of the liberal readership and their aggrandized definitions of
the diasporic subject as a guest who will find shelter and a renewed identity
in the West and instead portray, as in Derrida’s notion of hospitality, the
guest as the subject who forces the host to re-enter what he felt was his
sanctuary through the unsettling perspective of his de-centred guest. In
such a way, Hage challenges mainstream Western readers to rethink the
ethics of postcolonial hospitality and to put themselves, and their culture,
under the scrutiny of the foreigner’s question.
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