“By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across – each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip – is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale.”
If you want to know a culture, listen to its stories. This is exactly how Alameddine invites us to Lebanese culture and to the Middle East as a whole.
This novel is a contemporary gem about stories, and about the essence of the hakawati. A hakawati is the Arabic word for story-teller. For thousands of years, the Middle East flourished with hakawatis. They retold stories, folktales and fables, many making a living out of the art, with sometimes hundreds of people circling around them for months to listen to their narratives.
The beautiful narrative of this story compels one to say that Alameddine himself is an incredible hakawati. By intertwining three major plots, he centres the main plot on Osama who waits by his father’s deathbed during Lebanon’s civil war.
Through Osama’s grandfather, who happens to be a hakawati, we find ourselves traveling to many familiar tales and legends –some religious, some mythical– about training pigeons, jinns, great poets such as Abu Nu’as and Al Mutanabi, and even contemporary artists like Um Kalthoom.
It begins with “listen”, which emphasizes Alameddine’s role as a hakawati. This novel is a door that opens up many doors and many stories which are waiting to be told. Time passes quickly.
Every character seems to know a great deal of stories, with some stories lasting a few pages, and some as short as a few paragraphs. It feels rather like the stories are speaking about themselves, each major plot connected by some invisible string to the fabric of folklore.
One of the plots centres around Fatima, a slave who is fearless, strong, and survives by her wit. Through her we discover many adventures, and many truths behind current legends.
For one, we find out why the ‘evil eye’ (common in the Middle East and North Africa) is associated with a blue palm and an eye in the middle. We find many stories through her adventures that make so much sense of our current time through themes like romance, revenge, action, friendship and family.
Through these tales we see exactly why stories are distinctive of each culture, for if one wants to learn about people, they must learn about their literature. This novel is not only about Lebanon, it is about the Middle East as a whole. If culture could speak, it could sound a little like this.
