“When I’m told I should write a certain way, I bristle,” Rabih Alameddine wrote in a 2018 Harper’s essay. “I even attempt to write in opposition to the most recent book I finished. If my previous novel was expansive, I begin to write microscopically; if quiet, I write loudly. It is my nature.” The 66-year-old artist and novelist has, over the course of a nearly three-decade career, turned this urge, which he self-deprecatingly calls “childish rebelliousness,” into a varied and sophisticated body of work.
His 1998 debut, Koolaids: The Art of War, juxtaposed the Lebanese Civil War and the AIDS epidemic—two tragedies that shaped the author’s early life—in a furious, fragmented tale, as if the book itself were shattered by its anger. Since then, Alameddine has continued to invent his own forms, but also drawn on more venerable ones: He’s written a novel made entirely of first chapters and another that uses camp to riff on the Thousand and One Nights; his seventh and latest, the National Book Award–winning The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (And His Mother), employs drag as a central metaphor that informs both its story and its layered structure. The only quality uniting his books, it can seem, is their literary fearlessness. For Alameddine, no storytelling challenge is too great.
The True True Story Of Raja The Gullible (And His Mother)
By Rabih Alameddine
And yet fear is among his recurring themes. Each of Alameddine’s books, dissimilar as they otherwise may be, is an attempt to wrestle with the terrifying arbitrariness of fate. This preoccupation seems to emerge from Alameddine’s personal understanding that the unpredictable swings of history can change a person thoroughly, irrevocably, and without warning. In “How to Bartend,” a wrenching yet humorous essay about living through the AIDS epidemic, Alameddine describes testing positive for HIV and his subsequent terror of getting sick, which did not happen. The piece concludes, “I did not die and I did not recover.” Sometimes his characters are frankly afraid of this fact; sometimes they treat it as a cosmic insult, a cruel joke, or, less often, a potential relief.
No matter the emotions he’s channeling, though, Alameddine maintains a sense of levity, one perhaps born of his feeling that, as he told NPR earlier this year, our society is “too earnest.” How do we deal with terror, he went on, if we can’t “laugh about it?” His writing style, which is relentlessly playful, matches this belief. In 2016’s The Angel of History—perhaps Alameddine’s saddest novel—Jacob, a gay Yemeni poet living in San Francisco, conjures friends he’s lost to AIDS and rages at the homophobia they faced as they died; he wrestles with deep survivor’s guilt and despairs at the next generation’s lack of interest in the pandemic.
Alameddine injects a spiky humor into Jacob’s shattering grief: In one scene, Jacob recalls exploding at a younger gay writer for his generation’s willingness to embrace straight culture in a monologue that begins, “All AIDS books are out of print because of you,” and ends, “We refused everything, rejected their heavens and their hells, and you turn around and accept both.” Jacob’s accusations are deadly serious; the first one about AIDS novels is also very funny. Together, they represent Alameddine’s preferred territory: the sliver of overlap between humor and rage.
Even Alameddine’s most frightened narrators make light of their situations. Raja the Gullible begins in the present day but tunnels back in time to the Lebanese Civil War, during which the then-teenage protagonist, Raja, was kidnapped and held hostage by a militiaman. Alameddine uses a mock Christmas carol to show time passing by: “On the first day of my captivity,” he writes in Raja’s voice, “my jailer brought to me a manousheh,” and so on to the sixth day, when “my jailer brought to me a sack of rice, a can of tuna, and three bottles of Pepsi Cola, and I hated cola, so I screamed at him for thirty minutes that just because he liked cola didn’t mean I did.” This comically petty and foolishly brave outburst is classic Alameddine, and would seem completely out of place were it not for his work’s overarching conviction that we may as well poke fun at even our worst, most helpless circumstances.
In Raja the Gullible, Alameddine writes a character who treats the capricious twists of his life—some huge and historical, some small and personal—not just lightly but with a willful positivity that is somewhat surprising. Never before has he reached for such optimism. Its presence makes humor easy. The novel’s anger, in contrast, is more hidden, even to its hero, and yet it is vital to Raja’s trajectory. Over the course of the book, Alameddine pushes his protagonist to admit that he can be content with himself and his existence, yet angry at the swings of fate that shaped it; to understand, as many of Alameddine’s earlier characters do instinctively, that laughing at terror and tragedy, important though it may be, isn’t enough.
Like The Angel of History, Raja the Gullible is about past pain. Both novels follow writers as they look back on the most difficult parts of their lives. But whereas Jacob is instantly furious, Alameddine leads a reluctant Raja slowly to his rage, as if coaxing a small child toward something new. In order to do this, he moves backward from Raja’s present as a beloved high-school philosophy teacher, occasional drag queen, and the author of one book—a long essay about roaming wartime Beirut that, serendipitously, has become famous abroad. When Raja is unexpectedly offered a literary fellowship in the United States, it sparks a spiraling reflection on not only his book’s surprise success, but the other shocks that have altered him, such as the coronavirus pandemic, Lebanon’s 2019 banking crisis and 2020 port explosion, and, above all else, his personal ordeal during the country’s civil war.
For much of the novel, Raja refuses to admit that these events not only shaped but harmed him. His equanimity seems buoyed by the good fortune that his literary career represents. He wrote his book not for publication, but in order to practice his Japanese. That he speaks this language at all, despite having never lived in Japan or among Japanese speakers, is one of Raja the Gullible’s main instances of a coincidence changing a character’s life for the better, a rare occurrence in Alameddine’s work.
Raja’s relationship with Japanese, we learn, emerged in reaction to his complicated sense of home—meaning both Beirut and his loud, large, excess-loving family. Raja himself is none of those things. He’s also not straight, which his relatives all sense when he’s young and which none but his mother can tolerate. In high school, not long before the kidnapping, he wanders into his Japanese upstairs neighbors’ peaceful apartment, devoid of ancestral clutter and homophobic aunts, and immediately sees in it a place of respite. Loaned a Japanese design book, he grows so entranced by the “banishing of the random, a celebration of order” in the book’s photographs that he decides he will learn its language. By adulthood, this study has become a sanctuary from the chaos his country is undergoing. During and after the war, he writes about embattled Beirut in Japanese, “dissociating from his surroundings” through his struggles with syntax and vocabulary.
Usually, any effort an Alameddine character makes to process a story by telling it is a failure. In 2001’s I, the Divine, Alameddine’s novel made up wholly of first chapters, Sarah, an artist who has lived through a string of haphazard losses, keeps restarting the memoir she’s trying to write; she wants to impose order on her life through narrative, but Alameddine won’t let her. He arranges the story of her life nonchronologically, in a way that is, of course, calculated and artful on his part, but that underscores the futility of her memoiristic efforts. But in Raja the Gullible, it works. According to Raja, who spends much of the story directly addressing the reader, writing about what happened to Beirut helped him mourn. In his eyes—and, perhaps, in his creator’s—that’s even luckier than his book’s eventual success.
Raja has not, however, written about his own wartime trauma: his kidnapping, which was a life-defining experience of randomness. In fact, as of the beginning of Raja the Gullible, he has spent decades refusing to tell his own story, even to himself. Slowly, Alameddine makes clear that Raja is fortunate, yes, but he’s also determined to see himself as fortunate. His luckiness, like his drag persona, is to some degree a character he creates. But as the novel burrows backward through Raja’s memory, remaining resolutely cheery in its tone, the memory of his bad luck gets harder for him to repress. Eventually the kidnapping not only bursts out, but becomes the centerpiece of the book. Alameddine initially casts it as a blundering, droll misadventure—the militiaman was a high-school classmate of Raja’s who captured him by mistake while trying to take some wealthier boys hostage. But soon he reveals it to be a profoundly disturbing story: Raja, who was just 15 at the time, fell for his captor.
Underground in a makeshift bunker, the boys built a relationship that was, in Raja’s words, both “horrific” and “exhilarating”; to use our era’s terms, it was at once consensual and not. Alameddine writes it as a swamp of sex and emotion in which joy and abjection, care and abuse, coexist without canceling each other out. Here, the sensation of wobbling on an emotional knife’s edge that characterizes much of his other work roars back as Raja recalls his first love. Boodie, the militiaman, fed and tended to Raja while keeping him in a state of dependency; if Boodie had ever failed to show up, Raja would have starved “to death in grimy darkness.” He treated Raja lovingly in bed while insisting that he cross-dress to seem more like a woman.
Interestingly, a similar request appears in The Angel of History, in which Jacob’s friend Lou falls in love with “Max the I’m-not-gay carpenter,” who demands that Lou “dress in drag or Max wouldn’t go anywhere near him.” Max loves Lou, but in a way utterly warped by his fear of his own sexuality. By comparison, Alameddine makes Boodie’s love for Raja seem straightforward. Raja chooses to recall it as if it were, anyway. He describes the cross-dressing request less as a show of Boodie’s power as a kidnapper than as evidence of his power as a lover: 15-year-old Raja was in sexual thrall to Boodie, and if pantyhose made the sex better, then he’d wear them every night.
Reading these scenes is challenging, sometimes wrenching, but they aren’t Raja’s greatest wartime trauma. Here, Alameddine’s attunement to the arbitrary reappears as a refusal to assign meaning where readers likely anticipate it. The event that changed Raja forever begins with a seemingly tiny detail: When the moment arrived for him to escape, he was wearing a dress. Of course, he wasn’t going to waste time changing—and, as he recollects, instead of welcoming him home, “people talked, and talked, and wouldn’t stop talking about me in a dress.”
His relatives spread rumors about him. His own father gave him the silent treatment. “When I was sixteen or seventeen,” Raja recalls, “I was told by a student in my class, and for the life of me I can’t remember why he did, that the image of me twirling continuously like a dervish with a rising skirt before seated men with machine guns resting between their legs was imprinted in his memory.” It is this image, which seemed to spread throughout Beirut, that meant Raja’s life “was never the same.”
For the adult Raja, the randomness of the kidnapping has no meaning. The randomness of the dress, though, is directly connected to the familial homophobia that has shaped much of his life—including his relationship with his mother, which is, by the time the book begins, by far the closest one either of them has. Precisely because his mother doesn’t reject him, their bond has a unique tenderness and strength. After the dress incident, his mother chooses her child over everything else, public opinion and her marriage included; Raja, in turn, chooses his mother over the rest of his relatives. In fact, he ignores them all—he even ignores a persistent rumor that one of his cousins is a lesbian, meaning he may not be alone in his experience of family prejudice—rather than deal with his anger at them.
Alameddine suggests that this willfulness is why his protagonist decides to cut Boodie “out of my memory,” as Raja reports triumphantly to the reader, explaining, “I forbade my mother to bring him up. I wouldn’t allow him any life in my life.” Seen one way, this claim is a victory. Seen another, it’s the direct analogue of Alameddine’s statement, at the end of “How to Bartend,” that he neither died nor recovered.
Of course, it’s also not true. Readers know Raja remembers Boodie because, at the time he announces that he doesn’t, he’s just told us about him in hair-raisingly randy detail. Raja would rather not acknowledge that he’s mad at Boodie. But when the other man suddenly reinserts himself into Raja’s present—he turns out to be pulling the strings at the mysterious American arts fellowship—Raja gets his chance to express the sort of fury that pours unstoppably out of Jacob in The Angel of History.
Boodie, who now goes by the Americanized “Buddy,” has decided he wants closure. He wants Raja to forgive and love him. He wants, in short, the most linear narrative of all: a redemption arc with a romantic happy ending. He does not get it. Raja the Gullible ends as a rejection of the sort of tale Boodie wants to tell, and yet it’s still an American story of self-actualization. During their encounter, Raja has no choice but to articulate his emotions—not in Japanese, as before, but in an English-language explosion of rage. He realizes that he could forgive Boodie and return to his status quo of determined cheeriness, but he doesn’t want to. Raja’s encounter with Boodie shows him that he’s proud of who he is, which comes as no surprise to the reader; after all, this is a man who took up drag in adulthood following an adolescence shaped by his family’s dress-induced hysteria. Still, the contrast with Boodie, who “chose to kill people who were not like him,” is potent. “I should forgive that?” Raja asks rhetorically. “Fuck no.”
Raja’s declaration of ongoing spite turns into a wider emotional opening. It lets him rebuild familial relationships he’s long turned from (see: lesbian cousin) and accept care from people other than his mother for the first time since he left Boodie’s bunker. For an otherwise-complicated novel, this is too close to uplifting. It’s nearly a happily-ever-after: Raja embraces anger, and anger sets him free. It may be true in life that this is part of the route to recovery from trauma, but as an ending rather than a stop along the way, it’s a little neat. If the rest of Alameddine’s work is a tug-of-war between laughing and shouting at fate, a tense expression of simultaneous resignation, terror, and mockery, the last portion of Raja the Gullible lets the rope go slack. Or maybe this is one last joke Alameddine is playing on his narrator; maybe Raja the gullible is getting fooled by anger. In that case, the joke’s on me too.
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