Rabih Alameddine’s the Hakawati: Metafiction and the Arab- Islamic Oral tradition: Humanizing the Middle East

Abstract

The paper examines the utilities of metafictional narrative self-reflexivity of the sub-genre of storytelling in Alameddine‟s the Hakawati: A Story (2008). Following the 9/11 attacks, in order to resist Orientalism, Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia Alameddine exploits the orality of storytelling and folk myths for a manifold of reasons. Firstly, it demonstrates the performative powers storytellers and myths act on the experience of mankind. Secondly, it animates an authentic representation of the cultural identity of the Middle-East which renders as fellow human the inhabitants of the misrepresented geography. Thirdly, it chronicles the ramifications of the European Colonialism, American Imperialism and the Arab- Israeli conflict from the Arab perspective. Fourth, since Orientalism rests on the notion of having a unitary Western collective identity based on alterity, insinuated in the rigidity of the langue in Structural Narratology, by writing a narrative based on the hybridity of the Parole of the poststructural narrative theory, the novel envelopes heterogeneous myths, genres, languages, and histories, by so doing, Alameddine appeals for an alternative definition of the collective identity, characterized by fluidity and hybridity to advocate Multiculturalism in the place of monolithic Nationalism. Since the age of War on terror is epidemic presently, the appeal fails momentarily.