Apr 2001
In this issue:
Features
Thousand bombs
Centring on a friendship that is first consolidated then emboldened by Lebanon’s civil war, Rawi Hage’s DeNiro’s Game is a fearless novel about adolescence and loss
Issue: Feb, 2007
Guns shoved into waistbands of battered Levis, legs flung over motorcycles that race through deserted streets, neighbourhood girls taken into the mountains, stolen money, illicit liquor and dreams of escape; it’s Beirut, 1982, and Bassam and George smoke, dodge bombs, flirt with housewives and dream of Rome. In Rawi Hage’s award-winning novel, DeNiro’s Game, two friends pick their way through the country’s civil war and tear through their adolescence with the bravado of brotherhood – until George is recruited by a local militia that demands new loyalties to replace the old.
An intense, lyrical work, it’s Hage’s first novel and a creative departure for a photographer who managed to flee Lebanon for New York when just 14 years-old, just as the conflict began to envelop his country. It is, he considers, an exploration of “what if?” “The question that I often ask myself,” he says, Lebanese accent still very much in evidence despite 25 years as a resident in North America, “is what if I stayed, and not did not leave Lebanon. What kind of person would I have been? Who would I have turned out to be? It is a question that also applies to the collective, those who were desperate to leave, those who succeed in leaving, those who were not able to leave, and those who wanted to stay.”
NOX: I really enjoyed the landscape these guys inhabited; all adolescent passions and posturing. Is that how you remember Beirut when you left it in 1982?
Rawi Hage: Well, I drew on a landscape of a city in war and youth in power, with their feelings of invincibility and impunity. In a surprisingly fast period of time, guns become widely available and there was lawlessness on the streets. The story takes place in a transitory period, a community’s passage from a relatively peaceful and prosperous place into one of conflict. In the period where I imagined the story takes place, the war effort was still conducted by scattered pockets of armed men and unorganised pseudo-militias. Many of the young were attracted to the possibility of an ultimate power – which was justified by a religious and nationalistic ideology.
NOX: The title of the book, from The Deer Hunter, almost acts as a spoiler; I read it wondering how Russian Roulette would appear, or whether it a device to convey the random nature of conflict, that no one in Lebanon could control when the bullet would be in the chamber…
Rawi: The work is certainly an exploration of war and suicide, but I also tried to get away from titles that are overtly referential to a local culture. The main characters in the novel are existentialists – they are stripped of everything, family, religious beliefs and political ideologies, etc – and Bassam is well aware of the void around him. He is disillusioned with war; he refuses to belong to any system, he becomes remote from his surroundings.
NOX: The story takes George to the heart of the massacres at Sabra and Chatilla. Why did you want to introduce this very real, very traumatic event into the story? Have you had any reactions to this?
Rawi: For the most part, the media disregarded the Sabra and Chatila episode; a capitalist media often thrives on the consumption of news and not its value. It couldn’t be omitted. The only research I did in the book was on the Sabra and Chatilla massacre scene It is, in one out of many massacres that took place in Lebanon; my grandfather and nine members of my mother’s family were butchered by Muslim forces in 1976 in Cheka. That event was lightly hinted upon in the book but never pursued. But in the absence of an initiative by the Lebanese government to preserve a memory of the war, it was artists and writers who took upon themselves the task to create and recreate these events through the fictitious or the real. I believe that my novel is an addition to that independent project.
NOX: It’s interesting to say that, because you left when you were 14, after four years of war. In that sense, how faithful a witness did you feel you had to be…?
Rawi: In literature, reality and the lived experience is not a perquisite. Joseph Conrad wrote Nostroma, a novel that takes place in Latin America, without him ever living or visiting that part of the world. The author of a novel is in no obligation to tell or portray the exact truth or be bound to a faithful depiction of the real. It’s the act of creativity, the story telling, and the novelist’s views that should be predominant and valued as well. I guess the new cultural obsession with the real, and that obsessive effort of tying the fictitious to the hyper-real is undermining the imaginary and the creative process.
NOX: And, finally, will we ever find out what happens to Bassam in Rome?
Rawi: If he ever gets to Rome…
For the full version of this article, see NOX07.
