The Dominion - literature

July Books

Moira Peters — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:19:39 +0000

Non-fiction by Prince, graphic novel by Hill

The Politics of Black Women’s Hair
Althea Prince
Insomniac Press: London, ON, 2009

Black women’s hair has always possessed a certain sort of magnetism that attracts (often unsolicited) pats and tugs, as well as inquiries about its properties and care. However, recently the hair of Black sistas has been drawing unusual attention, and not just on The View. Between Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair, Tyra Banks reveal of the hair that lies beneath her weaves, and general fascination with Michelle Obama’s fashion sense—hairdos included—Black women’s hair has become quite a “hot topic.”

To provide further insight into the phenomenon of “Black women’s hair”, sociologist and novelist Althea Prince presents readers with The Politics of Black Women’s Hair, a brief anthology that analyzes the complex relationship that women of African descent have with their tresses, through the use of the personal essay form, interviews, excerpts from the media, and observations.

Prince begins by tracing the subject back to the negative historical depictions of Black people, as seen in the late nineteenth-century Golliwog and Little Black Sambo storybooks, which caricatured stereotypical “Black” features, such as pitch-black skin, huge red lips, and woolly hair. She argues that the mainstream beauty ideal, reinforced by such imagery, was internalized by Black women and girls and has “dictated” their hairstyle choices ever since. Natural black hair has thus been equated with “political” hair. This notion, which is addressed throughout the book, is highlighted in a chapter dedicated to the significance of the “relaxed,” and therefore relaxing, nature of Michelle Obama’s hair.

Prince also features personal essays by Black mothers and daughters from Canada, the US, the UK, the Caribbean and South America, providing a glimpse into the Black female hair experience from a diasporic perspective. Their stories illustrate the psychological and sociological impact that attempting to measure-up to the “yardstick of mainstream beauty”, namely the European aesthetic, has had on Black women. The essayists speak about how their efforts to attain the beauty ideal (by straightening their hair with chemicals and hot combs), or their lack of desire to do so (by opting to go shaven or wearing it in its natural state), has affected both their personal and professional lives.

The Politics of Black Women’s Hair could have benefited from expanding its scope to include the perspectives of African women and Black men (whose perceived views are mentioned frequently in the text). Given the author's intention to write a "little book," Prince successfully outlines the complexities of a topic that can get rather hairy. The Politics of Black Women’s Hair achieves its purpose: to establish that Black hair is beautiful and assist Black girls and women with learning how to embrace that fact.

—Ndija Anderson

The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book
Gord Hill
Arsenal Pulp Press: Vancouver, 2010

Comics aren't always known for treating serious subjects, but Gord Hill's The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book adds a dose of reality to the genre.

Hill, of the Kwakwaka'wakw nation, has taken the topics of dispossession, genocide, and the colonization of First Nations in the western hemisphere and, surprisingly, pulled off a rendering in comic book form. The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book, published by Arsenal Pulp Press, presents in black-and-white panels the history of the overseas invasion by Europeans and the resistance of Indigenous peoples.

As a medium, comics have many attractions. They engage visually. They give information in bite-sized chunks—ideal for the modern reader's short attention span. They are fun.

Much of colonial history in the Americas has been sanitized—indeed, current Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper denies colonization ever occurred in Canada. Today, the European invasion of Indigenous territories is often depicted in popular culture as the settlement of an untamed wilderness, a terra nullius, not the homeland of sophisticated civilizations who often fiercely contested Europeans' claims to their lands.

Hill seeks to visually combat this narrative. “The story of our ancestors' resistance is minimized, or erased entirely," he writes in the preface. "This strategy has been used to impose capitalist ideology on people, to pacify them, and to portray their struggle as doomed to failure.”

Knowledge is key to fighting an oppressive system. “When we know and understand this history of oppression, we will be better able to fight the system it created,” he writes.

One way to counter the colonial depiction of history is to “always call things by their right name" as enjoined by Philip Deere, a Muskogee-Creek involved with the American Indian Movement. For instance, Hill places British Columbia within quotation marks, thereby questioning the legitimacy and morality of so-naming unceded First Nations territory. 500 Years of Resistance does this unevenly, though; Hill and Ward Churchill in his introduction use inaccurate designations for Indigenous peoples: “American Indian,” “Mohawk” instead of “Kanienkehaka,” “Huron” instead of “Wyandot.”

500 Years of Resistance roots invasion in the voyage of Genovese navigator Christopher Columbus, who encountered the Taino people in the Caribbean during his infamous 1492 voyage from Europe. It continues through to 1890—describing the Incan Mapuche, Pueblo, Pontiac, Seminole, Apache, Lakota, and Pacific Northwest Indigenous resistances to the colonists—and the fight to maintain their lifeways on their territories—at which point Hill signals the end of military Indigenous resistance. Millions of Original Peoples had been wiped out, many by warfare, but mostly by European-introduced diseases. The treaty process then picked up (a process noticeably absent from much of "BC"), and assimilation took over.

Hill tells of colonizers imposing slave labour, of barbarity, of disease epidemics, of greed for gold, of land theft and of the insinuation and imposition of the capitalist system during settling of the "New World." To maintain the dispossession of their land and resources, the invaders tried to assimilate the remaining Original Peoples into European ways of being through religious conversion, the Indian Residential School system, and the imposition of the capitalist economic system.

Despite diligent colonial efforts to break them away from their identities—so closely tied to their land—Indigenous peoples persist in struggles for self-determination. Hill captures this graphically—from war on the Pacific Northwest coast, to the '68 rebellion and Wounded Knee, Oka, Chiapas, Ts'peten, and Aazhoodena. 500 Years of Resistance is a well-drawn comic book that resurrects the history “erased, replaced by the occupying nation.”

—Kim Petersen

Kim Petersen is Original Peoples editor with The Dominion.

Ndija Anderson, a law student at McGill University, was a 2006-2007 Thomas J. Watson Fellow, which allowed her to travel to seven countries to research the practice and aesthetic of hair braiding and locking in various cultures.

The Politics of Black Women's Hair

500 Years

March Books

Moira Peters — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:00:31 +0000

New translations by Bolaño and Storm

2666
Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

The reception of 2666, Roberto Bolaño’s latest and last novel to be translated into English, has often resembled an exercise in literary myth-making more than literary criticism. Critics have been competing for more lavish adjectives to praise 2666 ever since Bolaño’s other major novel, The Savage Detectives, gained a cult following. Now, just a few months after its release, the discussion has turned away from the novel itself and to the biographical details of the man who wrote it. Bolaño enthusiasts defend his romantic-bohemian image and viciously debate whether he really opposed Chilean President Pinochet, whether he was a drug addict, or whether 2666 was even close to complete when he died almost seven years ago.

So how did a 900-page tome by a formerly obscure Chilean nomad spark a fanatic following with English audiences? Its success has less to do with plot or genre and more to do with Bolaño’s ability to submerge his readers in hundreds of interconnected plots while he borrows from countless genres. To link its disparate parts, the novel has two thematic poles which become entangled by the end. The first narrative link—a reclusive German author who writes under the name Archimboldi—frames the first and last sections of the book. But the major backdrop is Santa Teresa, a fictitious stand-in for Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and the ongoing mass killings of women there.

Bolaño’s depictions of rape and murder in Mexico go beyond merely graphic. They are painful to read, and that’s exactly the point. Bolaño’s political and moral outrage is expressed by forcing his readers to confront the carnage in its rawest form. There are times when every reader will pause and wonder if Bolaño is perversely enjoying the excuse to spew out lurid details that would make “true crime” fans salivate. After the hundredth continuous page describing the decomposed remains, the coroner’s report, and the known details of another teenaged victim, you’re either shocked, repulsed, or bored.

This boredom is one of Bolaño’s central concerns and it surfaces throughout the novel, starting with the epigraph from Baudelaire: “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” Bolaño doesn’t expound the banality of evil; instead, evil becomes one escape from banality and poverty. Creativity and literature, as embodied by his character Archimboldi, form the alternate sort of escape. Unlike his other books, which obsessively document the creative process, Bolaño rarely details Archimboldi’s motivations as a writer. In one of several indications that 2666 is not quite a finished work, Archimboldi is left as a vague literary silhouette in a world of beauty and boredom where it seems everyone writes books, makes love, or kills people.

Bolaño once wrote: “We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.” The several life stories in 2666 inevitably intersect, drift apart, and get forgotten. To digest each of these stories would require never-ending re-reads. And for Bolaño, now the most acclaimed Latin American author since Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his life and legend seem to be more vital than ever.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

The Rider on the White Horse
Theodor Storm
Translated by James Wright
New York Review of Books Classics, 2009

Theodor Storm's classic novella The Rider on the White Horse contains some meaty pearls of wisdom nestled within a portrait of Germany's sodden Northern Friesland region, but blink and you'll miss them: these flashes of Storm's perceptive strength never take precedence over his evocation of the setting. The land emerges as the focal point for Storm and the novella's characters—a rural community of no-nonsense types who would rather discuss the structural efficacy of their town's protective dykes than allow themselves the sinister distraction of philosophy.

Nevertheless, pearls there are, such as the disturbingly clear sketch of the protagonist Hauke Haien's seething drive to become the town's dykemaster:

Suddenly he felt furiously angry at those faces, and he actually reached out to grasp them, for they obviously wanted nothing better than to block his way to the very position which suited him and only him. These thoughts were never wholly absent from his mind. In such ways, in the living presence of the honor and love in his young heart, ambition and hatred grew up side by side. But they rooted deep inside him, and even Elke failed to suspect their existence.

If the heart of Storm's story offers pastoral beauty and occasional peace (albeit within a community where a catastrophic flood could strike at any time), there is a tension to be felt at its edges: the main tale comes mediated by no fewer than three mysterious narrators, layered one upon the other as the narrative slowly rolls out in the opening pages. We are offered at once a haunting ghost story and the poignant recounting of the life that produced it, a wondrous blend of fantasy and futility that spans over a century and a half and still feels remarkably contained, flanked by the North Sea's frigid depths.

—Robert Kotyk

October Books

Moira Peters — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 03:29:14 +0000

New works by Bolaño, Lerch and Ohle

The Romantic Dogs
Roberto Bolaño
New Directions Press: 2008

Five years after his death, it’s hardly surprising that Roberto Bolaño’s name is becoming increasingly familiar in the English-speaking world. The lauded Chilean’s works reverberate with sex, exiled Latin Americans, literary obsessions, literary pretensions, violence, politics, and, well, more sex. While Bolaño is mainly known for his novels and short stories (The Savage Detectives being the best known), he wrote in prose only as a reluctant admission that, like many of his characters, poets earn one lousy living.

This collection of his poetry, the first to be translated into English, serves as an intriguing complement to Bolaño’s prose, but it probably won’t convert many readers who haven’t encountered Bolaño before. Although his romantic subject matter is well represented here, Bolaño’s novels are addictive largely because of the wild, ecstatic voices of his narrators. In his poetry, Bolaño takes on a more contemplative, detached tone that makes his poetry, if nothing else, less fun.

Most of the pieces in this collection are short vignettes that recall the loneliness and desperation of Bolaño’s formative years as an exile from Pinochet’s Chile. In front of this political backdrop, we find his preoccupation with love and literature. The short pieces give us some glances into Bolaño’s sense of black humour and satire: “Father, in the Kingdom of Heaven that is communism, is there a place for homosexuals?” (from “Ernesto Cardenal and I”). But it is the longer pieces that allow Bolaño to really be himself. One of the longest, “Visit to the Convalescent,” gives us a youthful narrator who has escaped from a fallen country to run wild in Mexico City while “the rest of the world’s cities are drowning in uniformity and silence.” Such sentiments show Bolaño at both his best and most irksome. These laconic verses make it nearly impossible to determine the depth of his irony and naivety. Bolaño’s writing is impossibly cool to the point that we are never sure whether the author is laughing at himself or his readers. In these short poems, Bolaño still manages to draw us in with his wanderer’s tales. Then once we are comfortable, he offers the occasional stab to the rest of the world who sat at home while he spent his life drifting from country to country, book to book, and love to love.

– Shane Patrick Murphy

Witness and Resist
Marilyn Lerch
Morgaine House: 2008

The very first poem in Marilyn Lerch's Witness and Resist makes clear what the poet feels a poem should accomplish: “to witness for beauty and resist despair.” This is a collection that confronts the state of the world with all the compassionate empathy and emotional activism essential to giving the individual a voice and sense of importance within that world. Lerch boldly takes on a wide range of personalities: Chilean tour guide Maria Luz, who has flashbacks to being raped and seeing her baby burned alive; dead soldier Joseph Terry Riordon, who "dutifully toured the First Sitting Duck Gulf War;" and widely looked-up-to intellectual role model Dick Clapp, who became a small town judge and "put a bullet in his brain." Lerch ups the ante by assuming the viewpoint of a dying man whose black skin is “shiny on knobs of bone:”

My life,
like the diamonds and zinc and oil
that lay under those black voids
on the old maps,
is being taken from me.

This powerful New Brunswick poet not only plays the empath, but unashamedly includes herself in a universe of vulnerability with a ten-page exploration of and letter to her father: "Your absence was our intimacy, so/ how could I not believe/ this profound indifference to life/ included me?" Although the narrators' unselfconscious tales do at times get lost in obscure references that over-shelter the greater implications of the work, any confusion is quickly surmountable. Fearless of dealing in darkness, it is no surprise that this wide-eyed work also catches sight of the light: "Yes,/ always the dark and/ new stars in the making,/ the bombs will fall, compassion/ always possible.”

— Maya Rolbin-Ghanie

The Pisstown Chaos
David Ohle
Soft Skull Press: 2008

Whatever one might think of Cormac McCarthy’s father-son doomsday travelogue The Road, it is a novel that may present as doleful an elegy for the debasement of the American family as anything yet written this century. In a related (but different) vein, The Pisstown Chaos, the zany and strangely beautiful new novel by David Ohle, exhibits none of McCarthy’s penchant for scenes of sad kinship at the end of the world as we know it, even as it mines our cultural moment of extreme uncertainty in the service of a similarly apocalyptic mode. Ohle’s novel is a family dystopia in a more eccentric key: it whizzes between the radically divergent fates of its characters, the formerly wealthy Balls clan, with scatological merriment, from one depredation to the next, like some strange unproduced episode of Arrested Development collectively written by Anthony Burgess, George Saunders, and the Marquis de Sade.

In so doing, Ohle frequently opens up space for trenchant satire in the form of short news stories and community bulletins, collagistically laid out before each chapter. As one begins: “An imp herder working one of the Reverend’s meadows is fit to be tied. He found his most productive female dead in her pen yesterday. The belly was scissored open, the teats cut, the heart carried off. The herder wants to blame stinkers for the latest raid on his stock. The incident is doubly sorrowful, coming so soon after the same herder discovered the wings of his favorite banty imp nailed to the stump of an oak. Neighbors testify that he now spends his time stalking the reaches of the Reverend’s property, pistol drawn, so anxious to shoot a stinker that he has accidentally killed three of his best stud imps.” The bulk of the story pits ordinary citizens against the “stinkers,” a parasite-ridden lower caste of zombies, while the nation’s despot is a political bloviator and reverend seemingly modeled after right-wing American talk show host Bill O’Reilly. The result is a weird and precious addition to the growing literature of the gloomy. Bleakness has never looked so rich.

— Robert Kotyk

September Books

Moira Peters — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:27:32 +0000

New works by Venart and Stiles

Woodshedding
S.E. Venart
Brick: London, 2007.

If her work is any indication, S.E. Venart’s poems are made up of dispatches from a writing life that is underway with admirable vigilance. Woodshedding, her first collection, ferrets out space for its intellectual labours around the contemplation of the ordinary, but time moves neither too fast, nor too slow; the poems emerge from life’s infrequent furrows of solitude with refreshing tranquility.

The poet shares this pursuit with bird-watchers, monks and joggers: inhabitants of what Venart calls “privileged openings,” pockets of inspiration that open up with circumstance (“There are sudden canopies/of silence between the low tones/of speedboats”), but which become worthy of safeguarding when the moment lingers (“Touch, I think, is mostly overrated.//It makes for only the luckiest/misunderstandings. I prefer the syllables of birds.”).

The full end-stop between the line about touch and the next reflects the exalted status that Venart affords to this sense of aloneness and sequestration, but the poems encourage a certain level of interior play even amid the hustle and bustle of one’s daily commute. This dual mode, mingling worldly tumult with the concerns of the self, can be heard in a line from “Sightings”: “I’m back in the city, stopped for a red light, reading the off-ramp’s/sprayed messages,” which echoes an earlier poem, “Lanes,” ending with “The sun overcoming me. . . /throwing light down on me as I bring/flesh and soul together, and fall/again into the moving traffic of myself.”

When a musician friend of mine makes a trip “out to the woodshed,” he means to remain there; anywhere, that is, so long as he cannot be reached by phone, e-mail, Facebook message, or any of the other brazenly intrusive gizmos of this early 21st century; for as long as it takes to learn a part on his tuba.

References to musicianship pervade Venart’s work-—her own epigraph invokes the improvisatory play of a jazz musician—-but as another definition of the collection’s title included in the epigraph attests, “woodshedding” also refers to the administration of a “sound parental thrashing.” Venart perhaps means that her work reveals itself only with the avoidance of easy pleasures and through an embrace of an ascetic self-discipline. If so, her collection reflects this principle with uncommon beauty and maturity.

– Robert Kotyk

Taking the Stairs
John Stiles
Nightwood: Gibson's Landing, BC, 2008.

Stiles' protagonist, Jarod, is a struggling writer whose phone is simply ringing off the hook with job offers. His friend Elliot wants to pay him exorbitant amounts of money to write a screenplay, and it's all Jarod can do to evade his would-be benefactor so he's free to endlessly re-read his abortive short story attempts and fret about his unfinished novel. High doses of implausibility and inaction can kill just about any novel and Stiles' choice of subject matter only furthers these problems.

The “writing about writing” genre is an extremely tricky one to make engaging and Jarod spends a tedious amount of time bellyaching about what a chore it is to stuff his work into envelopes and mail it off to literary magazines.

Although Taking the Stairs is written in the first person, Jarod's personality remains curiously opaque. He fights with his girlfriend; he works odd jobs; he holds circuitous telephone conversations with people he's trying to avoid. Stiles has included in Taking the Stairs several excerpts from Jarod's oeuvres, which are bad without being atrocious enough for comic effect and it's unclear just how much we are meant to sympathize with Jarod.

Stylistically, there's not much here to save this book from itself. “He says that when people jump off bridges, they land on their feet and their legs get jammed up inside their bodies and have to be pulled back out with a huge set of tongs,” is as interesting as it gets, unless you count the anatomical curiosity of the phrase, “She looks fine with her round spanish ass in a tight, tasteful blouse.” Must be quite the figure.

– Linda Besner

Some thoughts on the utopian novel

dru — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 18:21:42 +0000

From Kim Stanley Robinson:

Dystopian science fiction has its place, as a warning sign, saying "Don't go this way." So it can be important. But the dystopian cliche of our times is just too easy, it no longer says "Don't go this way" but rather "This is the only way no matter what you do, so don't try to fight it." That kind of dystopia is reinforcing of the status quo, it's a capitulation. I'd say most dystopias today are of the latter type: people don't really suffer (not the book's protagonist anyway, they're too "street smart"), and the reader is told that no alternative world is possible, the dystopia being the most likely of all possible worlds.

Okay, say that we're in trouble at the end of the 20th century. We are. Resources are depleted, populations are rising, we're in a race to invent a kind of living that will work before our problems overwhelm us. That being the case (and who but the rich think tank experts can deny it?), what kind of political art do we create? The utopia is the only choice. And for a novelist, the problem then becomes the utopian novel; which is a kind of bastard genre, from two very different kinds of parents, because the novel is about what IS, while the utopia is about what should be; so what then is the utopian novel? No one knows.

Lebanon: Shadows of War

dru — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 04:36:46 +0000

Rawi Hage’s <cite>De Niro’s Game</cite> renders civil war-era Beirut from the Diaspora

Turning the pages of De Niro's Game, one is transported to the war-torn streets of Beirut in the midst of Lebanon's 15-year civil war, a tragic reality of flying bombs and bullets. A debut literary work from Montreal author Rawi Hage, who conveys this era of Lebanon's turbulent history through the experiences of a pair of youths from Beirut, childhood best friends growing to adulthood in the political quagmire of civil war.

"De Niro's Game started as a short-story," Hage explains at a café in Montreal's Côte-des-Neiges district. "Initially I wanted to write a piece about an incident that I remember of some kids who started playing Russian roulette after watching The Deer Hunter, which screened in Beirut at the beginning of the war in the 1970s. Guns were available everywhere in Beirut so kids starting playing."

De Niro's Game is a fast-paced poetic novel detailing historical events and the gritty details of life in Beirut during Lebanon's civil war; from the bombs falling erratically on residential districts, to the dirty economy of armed political factions, to the soaring voice of Lebanese diva Fariuz echoing on Beirut streets and the massacre of Palestinian refugees by Israeli supported right-wing Lebanese militias at the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila.

Through the eyes of the novel's main characters, Bassam and George, Hage confronts the existential and pragmatic debate surrounding the question facing everyone living through the civil war era in Lebanon: to remain in mortal danger upon familiar ground, or to flee westward toward hostile nations? Expansive contemplations on forced migration from Lebanon's civil war appear in the first chapters:

Ten thousand bombs had landed, and I was waiting for George. Ten thousand bombs had landed on Beirut, that crowded city, and I was lying on a blue sofa covered with white sheets to protect it from dust and dirty feet.

It is time to leave, I was thinking to myself. My mother's radio was on. It had been on since the start of the war, a radio with Rayovac batteries that lasted ten thousand years. My mother's radio was wrapped in a cheap, green plastic cover, with holes in it, smudged with the residue of her cooking fingers and dust that penetrated its knobs, cinched against its edges. Nothing ever stopped those melancholic Fairuz songs that came out of it.

I was not escaping the war; I was running away from Fairuz, the notorious singer.

De Niro's Game has received broad acclaim in Canada and internationally, nominated for both the Governor General's Award for fiction, the Giller Prize for literature and winner of the Quebec Writers Federation's Prize for Fiction. A national best-seller in Canada, De Niro's Game is a startling success for a first-time author.

Hage, born in Lebanon, lived through nine years of the civil war in the achrafieh district of Christian East Beirut, in which the fictional narrative of De Niro's Game occurs. As a witness to a war that continues to haunt Lebanese politics until today, Hage through fiction offers a biting critique toward the sectarian fighting, foreign intervention and gangster politics which fuelled the civil conflict in Lebanon, resulting in over a hundred thousand dead.

"I grew up with Beirut divided," Hage recounts. "Through this novel I presented a secular element amidst all the sectarian chaos, as I think that Lebanon has maintained an understated, undermined secular element throughout the past 100 years, which is why I presented the main character in the novel as an atheist who doesn't believe in organized religion."

Currently Lebanon's confessional political system enshrines sectarian divisions in the nation's constitution, a fact which many Lebanese point to as a fundamental cause of the civil strife which still frames political life in Lebanon today.

Dating to Lebanon's independence from France in 1943, Lebanon's constitution divides the nation's 128 parliamentary seats equally between multiple Muslim and Christian religious communities. Lebanon's civil war ended in 1990 with the signing of the Ta'if Accord by warring Lebanese factions, an agreement sponsored by the US, Saudi Arabia and Syria that reinstated constitutional sectarian political divisions.

"De Niro's Game champions secularism," says Hage, "while illustrating how ugly sectarianism is, and the corruption of organized religion."

Hage's novel provides an essential historical context to current political turmoil in Lebanon, a nation which in the past two years has experienced an Israeli invasion, unprecedented internal political strife and a string of bloody assassinations of national political figures.

"I like to think of the novel as a small slice of the collective memory of Lebanon," explains Hage. "In Lebanon there was no conscious decision from the government to preserve the history of the war, to understand issues that created war in the first place."

"Quickly the entire downtown area of Beirut, where the major fighting took place was eradicated, no monument built, while the civil war is not in the national school curriculum," Hage adds. "Authorities in Lebanon are still not dealing with our history."

"Until now, there has been no governmental project of national reconciliation in Lebanon."

"I think that some of the only people who are attempting to deal with the history of war in Lebanon are independent artists and writers," says Hage. "I am one of those artists, who through writing, is trying to come to terms with and understand the history of war because I think that we have to deal with it, as Lebanese, for future generations."

De Niro's Game renders, in vivid prose, the deadly 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut, in which over 10,000 Lebanese and Palestinians lost their lives. A historical recount of the aerial attack offered by Hage will strike any current reader as a historical shadow to the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon.

Israeli jets flew over Beirut and bombed houses, hospitals and schools. The radios trumpeted from every window on our street. On the west side, people were fleeing for their lives, and on our east side, in the night, we could see flashes of resistance aiming at the skies. I went to the roof and looked at the west. The landscape was lit up under lightning bolts that fell from Israeli airplanes. There was one consistent line of red that reached to the sky. It never ceased, and I wondered if my uncle was shooting at the gods. And I wondered if cheap whisky bottles would turn into Molotov cocktails in Ali's hands.

Today, historical realities of war and conflict are not shades of a violent past but the looming crisis of the future, as political tensions are rife in a nation still recovering from the 2006 Israeli attack which resulted in major damage of the national infrastructure and 1,300 dead Lebanese civilians.

"I was extremely upset during the war this summer," reflects Hage. "It was a different type of war than the one I lived, conducted mainly from the air by a state trying to impose hegemony over the region without regard for the human costs."

Stefan Christoff is an independent journalist based in Montreal, you can contact him at: christoff -at- resist.ca

De Niro's Game, by Rawi Hage

Rawi Hage