Novelist pushes past his feelings of futility
Latest from S.F.’s Rabih Alameddine explores plight of refugees
There’s a restless questioning that runs as an undercurrent through Rabih Alameddine’s new novel, “The Wrong End of the Telescope.”
The story is set mostly in a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, where Western volunteers have descended to help. Among them is an unnamed, quasi-autobiographical novelist who, like Alameddine, is Lebanese American, gay and prone to lacerating self-doubt. He wrestles with the thorny question that has troubled the San Francisco author for nearly a decade: Given the scope of the Syrian refugee crisis, which has displaced more than 13 million people from their homes since the country’s civil war began in 2011, how is one well-meaning volunteer to have any confidence he’s really helping?
When Alameddine first started traveling from his apartment in the Castro to visit faraway refugee camps nine years ago, speaking with families who had fled violence at home for neighboring Lebanon and Greece, he couldn’t help wondering if his efforts would be futile. Does it provide meaningful relief, or just assuage a do-gooder’s guilt, to buy a refugee who’s lost everything a meal, a ferry ticket, a temporary hotel room? What about the simple act of listening to their heartbreaking stories and later recontextualizing them in a work of fiction as Alameddine has done?
He even wondered if literature itself was a futile enterprise when people’s lives are being shattered by conflict.
“I’m someone who questions everything,” Alameddine told The Chronicle recently on the phone from Charlottesville, Va., where he moved in August to teach creative writing this year at the University of Virginia.
Alameddine explained that doubts about the value of his life’s work surfaced when he was writing “An Unnecessary Woman,” his acclaimed 2004 novel that was a National Book Award finalist. “It’s about a woman who’s dedicated her life to literature, and then she questions whether she made the right decision. For those of us who love literature, art, theater or music, and it’s the very air we breathe, we think it is the most important thing. But how can you when most people in the world deem it irrelevant?”
When Alameddine returned to Beirut (where he hasn’t lived since 1975) with his friend, cookbook author Anissa Helou, the internal questioning took on more urgency. He recalls thinking, “What is it that I can do? What is it that anybody can do?”
“The Wrong End of the Telescope,” out Tuesday, Sept. 21, is a moving, philosophical and surprisingly irreverent response to that question and to the immense suffering he has witnessed. Alameddine remembers naively thinking he would talk to the refugees about soccer as Helou interviewed them about changes in Syrian cooking. Instead, on that first visit, Alameddine was “dumbfounded and unable to even talk,” he recalled. “I was overwhelmed for a while and hid in my mother’s apartment.”
He came to the conclusion that, “for the most part, we can’t change much. But just like with literature, not trying to is even worse.” So Alameddine did what he knows best; he spun a rich, multidimensional fictional world from the “inhumane mess” of the sprawling Moria refugee camp.
The novel presents a complex portrait of a Lebanese American trans doctor, Mina Simpson, who arrives from Chicago to provide aid at her friend’s urging. She’s been cut off from her family since transitioning, except for her brother Mazen, who joins her and the countless selfietaking “disaster tourists” on Lesbos. (Whatever you do, don’t f—ing call it “A Lebanese Lesbian in Lesbos,” Mina admonishes the anonymous author in the novel’s early pages.)
When a woman named Sumaiya arrives with what appears to be latestage liver cancer, Mina is illequipped to treat her properly and to contend with her patient’s desire to keep the truth of her fate from her family.
“What breaks us is rarely what we expect,” Alameddine writes.
He remembered during his own first trip to Lesbos experiencing the crushing feeling “of having a double identity, that I am more like the refugees than I am my friends, the volunteers.” The book began to take shape around the theme of straddling two worlds, “the coming together of East and West, even of male and female,” said Alameddine. “Where do we draw the lines?”