‘We Are the Stories We Tell Ourselves’: Rabih Alameddine On The Truth In Fiction

130917093



Q: What was the inception of this book?
A: A couple of years ago, I was reading this Korean short story. The writer said the sound of rain was like ‘one, two, cha cha cha’... So right away, I get this image of these two boys dancing, two boys in an underground apartment... And I think of Persephone. Then Demeter has to come into the story. And so the mother came into the novel and when the mother came in, it took over completely. So the thing for me is something has to obsess me and the obsession has to last for a long time because a novel takes a long time to write...
And this image really grabbed me. And I didn't figure out why until I realised that 25 years ago, I wrote a story that had the same thing in the middle, which is these two guys falling in love in a garage... And then I remembered that when I was 11, the teenagers in my neighbourhood in Beirut decided to have a party in the garage. And, telling me I'm so special and so smart, they recruited me to clean it. So I did. Then they brought these pillows down into corners in the garage and behind the car. And I couldn't figure out why. And then I did, because obviously I'm smart and very special, that they were going to have sex,. So that night when I went to bed, all I could imagine was that they were having sex in the garage... And then I realised that there's this obsession with garages. So you could say that I have been thinking about this novel since I was 11 years old.

Q: What is it about the storytelling form? You experiment with the form.
A: In my book, every story needs its own form. The story will determine how it is told... We have been telling stories for thousands of years. The stories in some ways are no longer as Interesting. We just keep having to find new ways of telling them... in a way that dazzles the reader or the listener... I grew up in a family that easily tells stories. Nothing professional, we sit at the table. The mockery, the jokes — they're all stories. So let's just say I was trained at a very early age...
I wrote basically a novel about storytelling. And I said at the time that I believe we are the stories we tell ourselves. We are also the stories that the family tells about us. We are the stories that the culture tells about us... But the other thing that was really present for me is that events matter little. It is the stories we tell ourselves about the events that matter.

Q: This puts you into this grey zone where you're thinking about the sense of lawlessness. And in it you find that little spot where life cycles have to continue.
A: When you have lived in a country where chaos and violence is constant, most people adapt. Beirut is being bombed right now, yet my sister, who is a director of an elementary school, still goes to work and the kids come, you know, so what is the mentality that allows us to adapt so quickly? But also there was a conscious intention on my side because I also live in the US And over here, we almost have raised trauma to become an identity — if something bad happens to you, you define yourself by that. And I wanted to come at it from a different angle because a lot of horrifying things happen to the Lebanese, but they keep going on because as humans, we adapt...
Raja had many terrible things happen to him. The way that he deals with it is he makes his own goals and he tries to live his life by his standards. And to me, that is an amazing thing to do.

Q: The book becomes a vehicle to talk about a period of modern Lebanese history which is cyclical, like the storytelling you engage in. A: I say I begin this book with a lie. Because fiction is about lying. But in a weird way, fiction lies to tell a deeper truth. I am always asked, is this biographical? And I always say, yes and no. The details obviously are not biographical. I have very little in common with Raja. But a lot of the feelings are the same, the reactions are the same. I have a good imagination, but I don't have an imagination that's able to go way beyond me. I cannot write about a peasant in China, for example. I cannot write about an attorney in the US. But I can imagine Raja, you know, who is not me, but not that distant, you know? So I always say I am my character's adjacent. It's both me and not. So it's both true and fiction.

Q: It's a very unsettling experience at one level to read.
A: If you are reading something and not being slightly unsettled, something's wrong with the novel.As Kafka says, it's an axe to break the frozen sea within us. It has to get through. What is interesting to me, again, is how do you tell the story of someone without telling the story of the place where he lives? It's like you cannot understand Raja or his mother or the people living there without understanding where they're living and how they're living. It seems to me that there's a lot of writing these days that ignores the city. You could put it anywhere. Raja is very specific to the city he lives in, and so are most people around the world. Except we tend to ignore that these days, it's like you could be in Bombay or in New York, it's the same thing. No, it's not. I wanted the stories of the city to mix in with the stories of its people because they are constantly influencing each other.