Author Rawi Hage. | Photo courtesy of Vancouver Public Library

For author Rawi Hage, Canada Reads 2014 contender, essentializing and categorizing is impossible – even about his own life.

“There is no one self. There is just a sequence of selves. My life is not homogenous, it’s a long trajectory, with many lives,” says Hage.

Raised as a Christian in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War, Hage immigrated to New York City in 1984 and has been living in Canada since 1992. Since his arrival in America, he has worked in varied professions, from freelance photographer to faculty advisor to novelist. His second book, Cockroach, depicts with realism and dark humour the life of an unnamed immigrant in Montreal. It is currently shortlisted as one of five novels for Canada Reads 2014.

Cultural meeting as a chemical reaction

Hage was exposed to French and Arab cultures during his time in Beirut, a city that has long attracted thinkers from around the Middle East and beyond.

“[Beirut] is a refuge for a lot of intellectuals from the Arab world. [Accordingly, its] contribution to the cultural scene is wider than the city itself, ” says Hage.

Today, while he lives in Montreal, he writes his novels exclusively in English, his third language. When asked how he marries his various cultures, he explains that it is not a conscious choice as he goes from one to the other organically.

“Cultures were always mixed, it is a process that has been happening since the beginning of time, through war, culture or trade. There is no pure culture.”

The self-described transnational writer asserts than when several cultures come together, they do not become diluted.

“This process is like a chemical reaction. You put two chemicals together and they become something totally different: a third identity gets created,” he states.

A wanderer’s perspectives

In his first book, De Niro’s Game, Hage follows the lives of two young men living during the brutal times of the Lebanese Civil War. In describing the war’s aftermath, he recounts how everybody acted as if nothing had happened. Unlike South Africa, where a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established, no similar action was undertaken in Lebanon.

“The only people who took it unto themselves to record it into history were artists,” says Hage.

In Cockroach, his second novel, he writes from the perspective of an immigrant coming to North America. Before setting foot in the United States, Hage’s idealized vision of the place was, in his own words, almost like a disease.

“For me, the West was a picture of money, excitement, with green meadows. Although,” he admits with a smile, “I don’t like nature.”

Far removed from this utopic existence, Cockroach’s main protagonist survives in a state of extreme misery. The book evokes Hage’s own experience of cultural shock in New York City while working odd jobs, including as a warehouse labourer where the building’s entrance was regularly used for drug dealing.

“I became part of the proletariat. I had grown up in the middle class in Beirut, gone to decent schools. In New York, my life went upside down,” says Hage.

A dialogue with his audience

Hage does not write his novels to articulate any particular morality but believes that, if writers have a responsibility, it is to exercise their freedom. Hage’s writing prompts the reader to question established modes of thinking and invites consideration of new possibilities.

“The point of fiction is to present possibilities. Human are very contradictory and good writers know how to write on these contradictions,” he says.

He believes that this embrace of contradiction distinguishes literature from religion, which prescribes a path to follow. In his most recent novel, Carnival, the protagonist constantly questions humanity’s apparent necessity for belief and detests the certainty offered by religion.

“Religion dictates; literature does not. [It] is one of the rare spaces where humanity is allowed to play,” says Hage.

Canada Reads 2014

March 3–6 on CBC Radio, CBC-TV
and online at CBC Books