When his father’s family had left their village in Palestine, the last thing his father had ever seen of that place was the road leading back to his house and a few stray dogs. We left, his father said, but the dogs stayed. And his father had looked behind at those strays and laughed. ~Stray Dogs
Peopled with countless expats (mostly from the Middle East; mostly working as photographers or academics; mostly living in Montreal), Stray Dogs is a collection of eleven short stories that I would categorise as slices of life. I’ve read, and for the most part loved, each of Rawi Hage’s novels, and while his writing at the sentence level in the short form is still of the highest quality, these stories (with the exception of maybe one or two) are missing that frisson of urgency or swerve that I so love in the work of my favourite short story writers (like Alice Munro or George Saunders). Interesting as slices of life, not quite to my personal taste for the format. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The Iconoclast
After reflecting on this for a while, I concluded that while my work was indeed about ephemerality, it was not about the ephemerality of the self. Rather, it examined the ephemerality of the image of the self. Every hybrid was a partial death, an incomplete acquisition of the original.
A Lebanese academic who studies how photographic images appear in literature is challenged on the authenticity of his identity by a local while on a writing residency in Berlin.
Bird Nation
Lebanon’s renowned cuisine could well be considered one of the most diverse and healthy in the world. Well, without the wheat factor, of course. Wheat, or more precisely bread, is the country’s misdemeanour, perhaps even its unappreciated tragedy, alongside its unbearable rulers, noise, corruption, the constant threat of war and its mad traffic. It did not have to be this way.
An ironic, and ultimately fabulist, take on the condition of the modern Lebanese citizen. (One of my favourites in the collection, for the tone.)
Stray Dogs
In the car, she told Samir that his analysis of photography and Islam, a religion that forbade representation, could well be as offensive as his attempt to connect the meaning of Japanese photography to the ancient religion of Japan. If what you propose is true, then all meaning comes from history, and therefore our attempts to overcome the historical and social in our art have failed, and everything remains stagnant. Maybe in the Arab world that is the case, she added, but not in Japan.
In a family that might be considered “stray dogs” themselves (refugees from Palestine to Jordan, the father commutes to Saudi Arabia for work and the son now lives in Minnesota), a young academic — whose Philosophy thesis was written on photography — challenges his father’s, and the art world’s, orthodoxy.
Mother, Mother, Mother
Mother, Mother, Mother, I shouted as I banged at my parents’ bedroom door. She opened it wearing a flimsy, transparent robe that barely covered her thighs. My father lay under the quilt. I stood at the door and neither of my parents said a word. My mother did not go back to bed, and my father lit a cigarette, his lips transforming into a fuming locomotive hauling a chain of silent wagons, sliding doors open.
When an expat man learns that his mother back in Beirut has died, his memories of their family’s relationships unspool in unpredictable ways. Set against the backdrop of war, the story of this one family reveals quite a lot about the Lebanese experience.
The Whistle
When I was sixteen, I convinced my cousin to chase falling bombs in the streets of Beirut with me. The objective was to get a photograph of a bomb before it reached the ground or landed on a building, on a car, on a street — before it caused death and mayhem. The camera was his, but we shared its use. The car we drove in pursuit of falling bombs was my father’s. Our attempts to capture these images never produced anything. We sent the film off for development, but all we got back were photographs of blue skies, clouds, roads and the tops of buildings. The decisive moment — to use Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous expression — was not determined by our visual anticipation of what would come into the frame of the camera; our moment was decided by the sound of the bomb’s whistle. My cousin and I stood on highways, or in alleys between buildings, aiming our lens towards the trajectory of whistles.
After taking a trip to Beirut and spending time with the cousin he hung out with as a kid, a Montreal-based man becomes depressed. While discussing it with a friend (a fellow former art student with whom he can knowingly agree “all photography is about death”), the surprising heart of the matter becomes clear.
The Fate of the Son of the Man on the Horse
Giuseppe stole a glance at the painting of the horse behind him and then at the man upon the horse. He hurriedly left the church by the back alley that led to his apartment. Perhaps one of his mother’s mysteries was in the process of explaining itself.
An unsuccessful Montreal photographer has his luck, and self-image, change after an unexpected visit from Sophia Loren.
Instructions for the Dance
He was known as the dancing photographer — although some thoughtlessly called him the Monkey for his camera antics, his shrill screams of “Smile !”, his endless clicking, clicking. And soon the owner of the studio, Mike Gold, was less in demand than his assistant.
Another story that seems to be about an expat Montreal-based wedding photographer, but as Anatol fled Communist Poland in his youth, this is really a story about what happens when he tries to go home again.
The Veil
I thought of Zahra. I thought of my son, and then I thought of my existence. I passed the days that followed in fasting and prayer. No veil shall obstruct your light. I repeated this chant until the veil dropped and you were revealed to me.
A British-educated Iraqi professor is brought to a secret location to help with some translations, and as he finds himself caught between East and West, between the reality of his country’s present and his personal past, he finds comfort in the lifting of the veil between himself and God.
The Duplicates
He was a master of analog photography and in private would often theorize on the role theology and the Enlightenment had played in the evolution of the medium. Al Awad believed that humans’ obsession with the passage of time, our insistence that existence must mean something, was merely an attempt to preserve an image of our fleeting reality.
Another Montreal photographer (this time an archivist at McGill), Basilidis Al Awad has his personal philosophies about the artistic value of photographic negatives challenged when working with a rare manuscript on loan from the Vatican.
The Wave
There is a disaster coming, and for the past twenty years I’ve been warning the authorities about it. No one believes me — but it will happen. It will happen tomorrow, July 9. The first tidal wave will hit the shore at 3: 45 p.m. sharp. The location? The Beirut shore. The tidal wave will decimate my place of birth, and I am excited to watch it happen.
A crockpot ex-professor of Geology (born in Beirut, educated in Calgary, working in Montreal) foresees the destruction of his birth city, but it might have more to do with wish fulfillment than science.
The Colour of Trees
The universe before his eyes, beautiful and wondrous as it was, did nothing to convince him that there was anything to discover beyond the self, the inner world that limited our relations with the outside world. How destructive and alienating, he thought, was that dialectical relation between the inner world of the self and the outer self of the world. Perhaps this was what lay at the heart of his decision to retreat to such a remote place. The best the outside world could offer the professor was the spectacle of a few changes and fleeting colours.
When a Philosophy professor retires to his dead wife’s rural cottage, a tragedy provokes an obsession with Heidegger in the professor (concerning the tyranny of technology and the aesthetic decline from a Michelangelo self-portrait to a modern cliffside cellphone selfie). This was probably my favourite in the collection; a really strong note upon which to end.
