Rawi Hage was born in Beirut where he lived through the early war years—the Lebanese War lasted from 1975 to 1990—until 1983/4 when, like tens of thousands of Lebanese people who emigrated to flee the conflict, he left for New York City and then immigrated to Quebec, Canada. He has been living in Montreal since 1991. Trained in photography at Dawson College and in Fine Arts at Concordia University, his work as a photographer and visual artist has been exhibited in the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the Musée de la civilisation-Québec, and in many galleries around the world including Colombia, Japan and Lebanon. While Hage’s artwork comprises fragments of writing, his visual-artistic experience has strongly influenced his novelistic techniques and has been directly referenced in his fourth novel where one character asks “Do you know why I take photographs?” (Beirut Hellfire Society 262).
Growing up as an Arab Francophone, Hage now belongs to a particular group of award-winning Anglophone novelists whose work stands at the intersection of world literatures in English, migrant writings, and new postcolonial literary outpourings while exhibiting what Hage describes as a “trans-geographical approach” (qtd. in Majer, “Introduction” 7). One of his many short stories that were published in small magazines (Fuse, Minza, Jouvert, The Toronto Review, The New Quarterly, Montreal Serai, and al Jadid, among others) grew into De Niro’s Game, his first novel that mediated his forceful entry into the world republic of letters. With a title that draws inspiration from the Russian roulette scene in Michael Cimino’s 1978 Vietnam film drama The Deer Hunter, Hage’s De Niro’s Game received the 2008 International (IMPAC) Dublin Literary Award (in a competition that involved Margaret Atwood, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o), among many other honours including the McAuslan First Book Prize and shortlisting for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. It was translated into more than twenty languages, including Arabic, in addition to the multiple prize-winning French translation Parfum de Poussière. Combining fierce realism and surrealist stylistic energy, De Niro’s Game presents the nightmarish experiences and troubled longings of two young friends, Bassam and George (a.k.a. De Niro), in war-torn and besieged Beirut in the early 1980s.
A self-made secularist, Hage exposes the disastrous impact of religious tribalism and militarism on a divided nation. In De Niro’s Game, he breaks national and communal taboos and engages Lebanon’s buried sectarian monsters in the larger context of the regional conflict with Israel. The main character Bassam’s coming-of-age journey across a devastated landscape and shattered dreamscape reaches a turning-point when he escapes Beirut to Paris as a clandestine migrant on a ship crossing the Mediterranean to Marseilles. In Paris he uncovers a personal-political conspiracy (linking George with the Mossad) and embarks on a final journey to “Rome”, his mythically significant dream destination. De Niro’s Game (henceforth DNG) imaginatively creates indelible surrealist images of the intertwined geographies of war and displacement as well as the shared human experience of trauma across divided communities:
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. […] 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. (DNG 145-46)
Cockroach, his second novel that has been viewed by some critics as a kind of sequel to the first, was translated into over eighteen languages, won the 2008 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Appearing alongside A Girl Made of Dust by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi and The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine on the 2010 International Dublin Literary Award longlist, Cockroach has played an important role in establishing an emergent Lebanese diasporic literature in English, published in Canada, the US, the UK and Australia (cf. Syrine Hout). In Cockroach, Hage explores the material and psychological tribulations of an unnamed narrator who feels “split between two planes and aware of two existences” (119). A violent war in his unspecified country of origin from which he fled has left an indelible traumatic impact on his life. Yet his traumatic experiences are also embedded in present forms of alienation experienced in his host country. This narrator is incapable of establishing solid and constructive links with any group or individual in either the Quebecois or migrant and refugee circles of Montreal.
After a failed suicide attempt, Cockroach’s narrator is estranged from almost everyone: his naïve court-appointed therapist who eagerly consumes his “wonderful stories” (Cockroach 48) of a war-ravaged childhood while he breaks into her apartment and steals food, other migrants who enter poor clinics to “say ‘Ahh’ with an accent, [and] expose the whites of their droopy, malarial eyes” (79), the rich Quebecois to whom he sells over-priced drugs, as well as Montreal’s symbolically aggressive winter that he imagines as telling him “with tight lips and a cold tone [ . . . ] to go back where [ . . . ] [he] came from if [ . . . ] [he does] not like it here” (193). The narrator experiences overt and covert forms of violence as his own as well as fellow migrants’ and refugees’ memories of war, persecution, torture and sexual abuse encounter the realities of unequal socio-economic, cultural and political provisions in seemingly peaceful democracies that are however involved in arms-deals with dictatorships. Against authoritarian and neoliberal regimes of governance that divide, hierarchise and terrorise, the narrator presents a magical realist imaginary of an underground where
[…] all that is killed, beaten, misused, abused, all that have legs, all that crawl, all that is erected, all that climbs, flies, sits, wears glasses, laughs, dances, and smokes, all shall disappear into the underground like a broken cloud. (Cockroach 249-50)
The narrator’s seeking refuge in the underground and celebration of a concomitant freedom to “tolerate filth, cockroaches” (Cockroach 52) emerge as symptoms of estrangement from the structures of states of exception. However, they also represent a revolutionary vision of alternative solidarities articulated through an affinity with the unclean and a tentative connectedness with what lies outside an exclusionary humanity. The narrator’s hallucinatory engagement with his alter-ego, a resentful and vengeful cockroach, mediates his anxieties with respect to issues of belonging, rights and violence. This central dynamic in the novel has been variously read in terms of “a complex but potentially enriching definition of postcolonial hospitality” (Libin 72), “an interrogation of the limits of the human” (Dobson 263), “more-than-human relationality” (Sakr 95), as well as in the context of “the long use of metaphors of pestilence and plague to mobilize xenophobic and racialized discourses that demonize and dehumanize the migrant other” (Kraus 106). After his final act of “refugee violence” (Forget 106) against the man who formerly abused his lover in an Iranian jail and who is involved in the negotiation of an arms-deal with the Canadian government, the narrator/cockroach “steers” an imagined leaf/gondola “with [his] glittering wings towards the underground” (Cockroach 305).
The imaginative exploration of more-than-human alternatives to dehumanising realities continues in Hage’s third novel, Carnival (shortlisted for the 2012 Writers’ Trust fiction prize) through the characters of an empathetic wanderer, Fly, and his radical activist friend, Otto, in an unnamed North-American city. Carnival examines the potentials and limitations of literary-cosmopolitical visions as they are represented by the protagonist Fly, a taxi driver and iconoclastic reader—two of several occupations that Hage himself had before his writing career took off. When he accepted the International Dublin Literary Award for De Niro’s Game, Hage described himself in terms of a positive form of personal, linguistic and literary cosmopolitanism:
Born as a Christian Arab, a group whose existence is an integral part of a great Arabic and Islamic civilization, I grew up learning two languages and different histories, and at the age of eighteen learned the English language and imbibed the canon of its great poets and writers. Later, as a traveler, a citizen, a worker, a reader, and a writer, I was, fortunately, bound to become a global citizen.
Nevertheless, in the same speech, Hage emphasised the planetary socio-political awareness of uneven mobilities and forced displacement as a prerequisite to qualify the aforementioned cosmopolitical perspective:
The history of mankind is full of wars, divisions, the flow of blood, the flight of refugees and misery. I long for the day when an African child will be able to roam the world as if it is rightly his; I long for the day when Palestinian, Guatemalan, Iraqi and Afghan children will have homes to keep and build upon. I long for the day when we humans realize that we are all gatherers and wanderers, ever bound to cross each other’s paths, and that these paths belong to us all.
These significant literary-cultural and ethico-political questions pervade Carnival perhaps more sharply than any other novel by Hage. Fly’s circus childhood and Otto’s upbringing in a dislocating foster care system impact their later wanderings into the margins of the city where disempowering inequality as well as carnivalesque subversiveness and more radical pathways to justice are examined. Born to “the applause of elephants and seals” (Carnival 153), Fly displays a more-than-human imaginary that lacks the vengeful resentment of Cockroach’s narrator and instead is deeply intertwined with his belief in “radicals, writers of conscience, revolutionaries, debauchers, and liberators” (220), a perspective imparted to his neighbor Zainab as “[t]he world is a circus and it will always be. By the way, I have a book to show you” (29).
Fly’s literary wanderings underpin his keen sense of the role of the imagination in empathetically and impactfully bearing witness to persecution, genocide and forced displacement (cf. Sakr):
through those ancient lands of guns, trenches, and blood, the troubled lands of Slavs, Germans, Latins, Assyrians, Arabs, Turks, Kurds, and Greeks. In those nations where young men were drafted and women wept and populations were transferred and people starved and burned by the millions, I landed my carpet, I witnessed, I rectified, and I flew again. (29)
Rendered through yet another reinvented magical realist instance of narration, Fly’s closing act at the end of the novel finds him again in flight from fixed dogma and earth-bound humans: “I unrolled my flying carpet and I flew above the city. I veered into a side street, went through an alley, and finally escaped the crowd” (289).
While Fly’s perspectives on the socio-political role of literature emphasise “a good dose of mockery and laughter” (30), Otto radically reconsiders literary activism in response to being beaten by police officers “for dirtying [their] shoes” (108) and then violently interrogated and detained for protesting a summit seeking “to impose a series of neoliberal economic policies” (110). In the aftermath of his unjust incarceration, Otto, dressed like a carnival clown, forces the psychiatrist who “so-called treated” (126) him to read Amiri Baraka’s “A Poem Some People Will Never Understand”. According to F. Elizabeth Dahab, “[t]his carnivalesque ‘Revenge of the Fool”, wherein power, dignity and impunity are briefly bestowed on those in lower ranks, once again points towards a poetics of marginality within a sub-narrative portraying dregs of stasis, death, power, and social injustice” (131). However, Otto’s impassioned commitment to marshalling the power of literature against various oppressors becomes increasingly violent and tragically ends in a murderous attack on a French journalist who just happens to disagree with him on Albert Camus’s connection to empire.
Otto’s manifesto-like declaration that “the final battle is between those who love, respect, and liberate the body and those who hate it” (132) is a central theme in Hage’s most recent novel, Beirut Hellfire Society (2018; henceforth BHS), that returns to his war-torn city in the fictionalised late 1970s and was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize as well as the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Upon the death of his father, the protagonist Pavlov inherits both the former’s public job as undertaker and his secretive involvement in securing the unsanctioned cremation of the Hellfire Society members who include “hedonists, heathens, idolaters, infidels, […] happy debauchers” (BHS 34). In his critique of the lethal paradoxes of a violently sectarian, overtly conservative yet covertly lustful country, Hage brings his secularist vision to converge with a larger, anti-speciesist vision of relationality exemplified in Pavlov’s affinity with his dog Rex. Whereas Pavlov, in an altercation with his avaricious uncles, is metamorphosed into a canine who “laughed […] Then he barked and bared his teeth, and the uncles slunk away” (BHS 63), the dog Rex responds to the excess of violence that even targets funeral processions with: “And why not laugh? […] I blame those Semitic gods and their austere, somber, humourless ways […] And Rex laughed a human laugh” (BHS 100-101).
Moreover, extending Hage’s ongoing interest in the precarity of “belonging” to nation-states, Beirut Hellfire Society addresses the issue of the gradual disappearance of minorities, in this case “left-over Christians”, from a conflict-ridden Middle East, but even more poignantly in the larger context of universal “acts of extinction” (BHS 72). Repeating with some difference Carnival’s “[a]lternat[ion] between social realism and magic realism, sometimes within the same paragraph” (Hage and Taras 14), Hage’s latest novel presents an un-bordered perspective on the chaotic futility of war where “[s]keletons, like playful dolphins, flew out of the earth and pirouetted through the air to land again in the mud” (BHS 227-28). Adding a twist onto his three previous novels’ preoccupation with “flight”, Hage’s Beirut Hellfire Society proposes, in the words of Pavlov’s father and in Pavlov’s final act, that: “Earth and the ground are over-rated, his father had said. It is smoke that matters, that fleeing gesture of escape that reaches beyond lands and borders and claimed territories. He remembered his father speaking of the universality of fire, the antiquity of the flame” (BHS 57). Still, Pavlov’s vanishing into fire does not foreclose the possibility of an imaginable aftermath to conflict and displacement since the novel ends with the return of his grand-niece Ingrid from Sweden to Lebanon to rebuild his house with the help of Syrian refugees. Krzysztof Majer argues that “despite its morbid subject, this may be the first novel by Hage to envision a non-apocalyptic, ordinary future, and to entertain a direction that leads ‘home’” (“Beirut Hellfire Society” 255). Warned by an uninvited guest that “Your people are no longer here. They vanished, they moved away” (BHS 278), Ingrid’s response “[a]nd some are buried here” (278) suggests both a common ground to rebuild the future from the ashes of the past and a reclamation of a minoritarian space in the negotiation of conflictual memory.
Works cited
Abi-Ezzi, Nathalie. A Girl Made of Dust. London: Fourth Estate, 2008.
Alameddine, Rabih. The Hakawati. New York: Knopf, 2008.
Dahab, F. Elizabeth. “‘To Roam a Boderless World’: The Poetics of Movement and Marginality in Carnival.” Beirut to Carnival City: Reading Rawi Hage. Ed. Krzysztof Majer. Amsterdam and New York: Brill/Rodopi, 2020. 120-131.
Dobson, Kit. “Neoliberalism and the Limits of the Human: Rawi Hage’s Cockroach.” Textual Practice 29.2 (2015): 255-71.
Forget, André. “The Vengeful Refugee: Justice and Violence in Cockroach.” Beirut to Carnival City. 103-119.
Hage, Rawi. Beirut Hellfire Society. New York: Norton, 2019.
---. Carnival. New York: Norton, 2013.
---. Cockroach. Toronto: Anansi, 2008.
---. De Niro’s Game. Toronto: Anansi, 2006.
---. Parfum de poussière. Trans. Sophie Voillot. Montréal: Alto, 2007.
---. Rawi Hage’s Acceptance Speech June 2008. www.impacdublinaward.ie/2008/Rawi%20Hage%20Speech.doc.
Hage, Rawi and Ray Taras. “Manichean Taxis and Murderous Readers: A Conversation with Rawi Hage.” World Literature Today 87.4 (2013): 12-17.
Hout, Syrine. Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012.
Kraus, Brittany. “The Roach’s Revenge: Suicide and Survival in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 51.1 (2020): 105-129.
Libin, Mark. “Marking Territory: Rawi Hage’s Novels and the Challenge to Postcolonial Ethics.” ESC: English Studies in Canada 39.4 (2013): 71-90.
Majer, Krzysztof. “Beirut Hellfire Society: Beyond the Carnivalesque.” Beirut to Carnival City. 254-264.
---. “Introduction: ‘Let’s not Belong’: Situating Rawi Hage’s Elusive Fictions.” Beirut to Carnival City. 1-22.
Sakr, Rita. “Expanding the Space of Human Rights in Literature, Reclaiming Literature as a Human Right: Cockroach and Carnival.” Beirut to Carnival City. 87-102.
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Citation: Sakr, Rita. "Rawi Hage". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 May 2011; last revised 16 May 2020. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12898, accessed 18 May 2026.]
