The Lebanese American author, who took a circuitous path to writing, talks about colonialism and literature. Just don’t ask him about peace in the Middle East

“I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic,” says Rabih Alameddine. The Lebanese American author, in New York to talk at Symphony Space, says he writes to prove people wrong. So after Arab characters from his previous books were perceived as “exotic pets”, he says his latest novel, An Unnecessary Woman, nominated for the National Book Award, runs away from “tropes”.

The woman in the title is Aaliya, a reclusive 72-year-old who lives in Beirut, spending her days translating books into Arabic. She starts a new project each January, and when done stores them in boxes in an empty maid’s room, never to be read by anyone else.

There is nothing cute or diminutive about Aaliya’s accidental blue hair, biting humor, solitary ways – or her semi-automatic AK-47. The book (the title is a reference to Polish artist and writer Bruno Schulz, who was kept alive in the Drohobych ghetto by a Nazi commander who wanted a mural painted in his son’s bedroom – his art deemed him “a necessary Jew”) is filled with clever reflections about her life and literature, with digressions and memories describing her life in Beirut. Yet it may be the least radically structured of Alameddine’s books. His second, I, The Divine, inspired by Italo Calvino’s If on a Winters Night a Traveller, was written entirely in first chapters. His debut, Koolaids, was written in the form of vignettes and had at its center San Francisco’s Aids epidemic, juxtaposed with the civil war-ravaged Lebanon of the 80s.

Alameddine, who lives in San Francisco, says he fits in the US (where he doesn’t belong) but belongs in Beirut (where he doesn’t fit). A master of the non-linear narrative, he traces it in his own life: he was born in Beirut, but went to study in England and Kuwait. He was good at maths and ended up studying engineering. But he tried to work, hated it and then got a master’s degree in business in California. Then he went to school again, this time to study clinical psychology. Soon afterward he became a painter, getting solo shows in New York and London before quitting to become a writer, publishing Koolaids in 1998.

He gained international acclaim when he published his third novel, The Hakawati, in 2008. Its protagonist, Osama al-Kharrat, goes from Los Angeles to Beirut to be by his dying father. Alameddine framed the novel as a series of stories characters tell each other as they keep vigil.

Inevitably, everybody called it the new Arabian Nights. “As much as I loved the great reviews The Hakawati got, a lot of it was about, “Oh look at how exotic these little people are, isn’t that fun? You know, like Scheherazade. Right now in the west, Arabs are the other.”

As a young reader, Alameddine says he was inspired by books like VS Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. “Yes, it was exotic, but it wasn’t. It made me feel part of the larger human race which was different than reading, say, Thomas Hardy, as much as I love him. Both [authors’ books] were about how to live with dignity and be human but it was wonderful reading Rushdie and seeing that we are worthy of being written about.”

Some critics decried the fact that though Aaliya in the novel is Lebanese, she didn’t talk about Lebanese or Arab writers, but rather finds meaning in her life as a translator of world literature. This comes from Alameddine’s own education in Lebanon, where French and English literature shaped his reading.

“I read Shakespeare when I was 14 because it’s what we were taught. I think that’s a problem, a remnant of colonialism, still. In school in Lebanon we were not allowed to speak Arabic during breaks – it had to be French or English. Because if you speak a foreign language, my god, you’re educated.”

His childhood in Lebanon is more than just a frame of reference. As a Middle Eastern author he is constantly reminded of his heritage when people ask him about the current restive political situation in the region. It annoys him: “Nobody ever asked Updike what the political situation in the US is,” he says.



He says that when he goes on stage to talk about his work he often is asked if he thinks there will be peace in the Middle East. His answer: “I don’t fucking know. ‘What do you think of Israel?’ Why are you asking me this?”



Yet his next project is about Lebanon; he is off to Beirut to interview Syrian refugees. “There are over 1 million refugees in Lebanon, a country of 4 million people,” he says. “How do we solve that? I have no idea. What’s going on, I really don’t know.” What he can do, however, is be a witness.

His next piece of fiction is about remembering: “remembering friends who died and how we deal with that.” Whether talking about wars or of loss, he wonders how people sustain what they feel. “People are like, ‘Oh, this is terrible, this is terrible,’” he says, mimicking the voices of faceless sympathisers. “And then they go on with their lives.”