Rawi Hage's Stray Dogs is a power collection of stories about people on the move — read an excerpt now
The short story collection is a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
The characters in Rawi Hage's short story collection Stray Dogs are restless travellers, moving between nation states and states of mind, seeking connection and trying to escape the past. Set in Montreal, Beirut, Tokyo and more, these stories highlight the often random ways our fragile modern identities are constructed, destroyed and reborn.
"Most of the characters, they tend to be wanderers — maybe stray people. Also, I think that Stray People would be an adequate title. It's just about a certain non-belonging. Most are either wanderers in their own mind or wanderers geographically. Just like stray dogs, they tend not to have places to host them or take care of them," Hage said in an interview with The Next Chapter.
"One of the characters, Samir, is like many people who left the Middle East from a certain generation. He's living in the States and encounters academia, photography, art, etc. His choice of studies is not approved by his family. They were expecting him to become an engineer or adhere to certain traditional conservative norms. But he strays and becomes an academic interested in photography. He was very attracted to the aesthetics of Japanese photography, which is a contrast between dark shadows and very bright light. It's very much about contrast.
"I think Samir made a comparison between his own culture, which tends to be, in his own perception, very gaudy, very flamboyant to a certain extent — and Japanese photography, which is all so austere. It's a complex story with many fragments to it. But there's also a theological discussion about the image and what the image represents in the Arabic culture."
Hage is a Montreal-based writer. His books include De Niro's Game, which won the International Dublin Literary Award in 2008; Cockroach, which received the Hugh MacLennan Prize for fiction, was defended by Samantha Bee on Canada Reads in 2014, and was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award; Carnival, which was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize; and Beirut Hellfire Society, which was on the shortlist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction.
Read an excerpt from Stray Dogs below.
In 2011, I was offered a writing residency in Berlin. I was given an apartment in Kreuzberg. I worked on a novel in the mornings and smoked outside on the balcony in the afternoons. Whenever I leaned on the edge of the balcony, I would see below me a street, a lamp and a garden. One day when I was out there, a woman standing in the garden waved at me. A moment later, her husband joined in. I waved back and nodded.
During the day, I spent a great deal of time alone, writing and reading. In the evening, it became my custom to join the couple in their garden for a beer or two.
Lukas was an erstwhile photographer. Hannah held a clerical job.
Well, I quipped, every hero is a being without talent. I was quoting the Romanian-French philosopher Cioran, but as soon as I realized my insult, I excused myself and rushed back up to my apartment.
We talked about our lives, politics, books. We exchanged anecdotes and political opinions. Photography was Lukas's profession, but he also had a long history of "involvement with syndicates," and in his youth had been a member of a German anarchist group.
One night, Hannah confided that Lukas had lost hope in the world. He had lost his belief in humanity. He talks about his causes, Hannah told me, but their defeat has been too much to bear. The radical in him has diminished, and he's retreating into himself.
A garden is every warrior's final objective, I said.
I wish he would go back to photography, Hannah said. He was happier back then.
Well, I quipped, every hero is a being without talent. I was quoting the Romanian-French philosopher Cioran, but as soon as I realized my insult, I excused myself and rushed back up to my apartment.
Another night, at a party at Hannah and Lukas's home, a man who looked like Marx — long beard, round face, broad shoulders and belly—approached and asked me what I was writing about. He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and patted it on his forehead, then on his cheeks, and finally inflated it loudly with his nostrils.
I said, joking, I am writing about the German soul. He chuckled, tucked his piece of cloth in his front pocket this time and asked me to explain.
I said, Germans have a distant and cautious approach to strangers, which I prefer to the overly familiar approach to others in French colonial history.
So, presuming the strangeness of others is right in your opinion? he asked.
It allows for curiosity and the possibility of a future dialogue, I replied.
So long as we are curious, he replied, we tend to tolerate.
Indeed, I said. Familiarity breeds contempt, to quote the French novelist Stendhal.
You studied French literature?
I nodded and volunteered that my work dealt with how photographic images appear in literature. The man nodded too and took a sip from his beer. You know, he said. He paused before continuing: This is a tight group. So I was not curious about you, I must admit. I was not interested. If any thing, I have some hostility towards your type. I am opposed to the money that our government squanders on foreign artists like you, on getting them to come and live here and spend time on their inconsequential bourgeois projects. This money should go to social programmes. You certainly fit the type they go for. Let me guess: you are French-educated, wealthy — and yet here is our government, sprinkling cash on developing-world, privileged sorts like you. I feel that the money spent on you could easily be put to better use. Because of you and the likes of you, our neighbourhoods now are gentrified, and our Berlin is changing. You are either naive or you're complicit with neoliberal capitalism masquerading as a cultural contribution to the world.
I think you're partially right about who I am, I conceded.
But what does our host Lukas think? The same, he said. We all think the same here about your kind.
I felt like leaving at that moment, but Hannah, who was watching from across the room, came over and led me by the hand into the kitchen. Let's have a photo of the three of us, she said, and she pulled Lukas over.
You looked upset, and I wanted to save you, she said in a low voice. Santa over there can be offensive. Don't listen to him.
Soon after, I left quietly.
LISTEN | Rawi Hage discusses his short stories with Shelagh Rogers:
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The next day, after my afternoon nap and feeling satisfied with the progress of my writing, I went down to the garden for my customary beer with Hannah and Lukas. I sat down and handed Lukas a bottle. We didn't talk about the night before. Over time, I had learned that the strength of a closeknit social group lies in its ability to compartmentalize.
Lukas asked me what I was up to.
I leave tomorrow for Beirut for a conference on photography, I said. You should come and visit my city sometime.
He nodded and replied, I will.
You are either naive or you're complicit with neoliberal capitalism masquerading as a cultural contribution to the world.
The conference was to be held at the American University of Beirut. I didn't expect many people to attend my lecture, as my subject was not directly related to anything overtly political — the Arab world, the Palestinian cause or any such stressful subjects. Instead, my presentation would be on the final passage in James Joyce's short story "The Dead," and I knew that exploring the topic of the spatial in the work of James Joyce would be seen as an indulgence, a luxury.
In the last scene of the story, the protagonist Gabriel gazes at a window and describes his memories in a gradual visual movement, evoking a series of photographs that simultaneously detail the spatial and the psychological. We see the window, a lamp, the River Shannon and, at the centre of the montage, the burial site of the young Michael Furey, Gabriel's wife's once-upon-a-time lover.
In reviewing this passage, I would emphasize the personal, local and national context of the objects and places we observe, expanding on the mention of the river in this text and in Joyce's work generally, and simultaneously exploring the idea of the photograph as a subject suspended between life and death. I would allude to Barthes's aphorism in Camera Lucida that every photograph is an image of what has passed, and I would even dare to say that photography functions as a prophecy of death — overtly linking these observations to the title of Joyce's story, "The Dead."
The more I thought about the presentation of my paper, the more I felt that I was ultimately describing a particular suspended existence—my own. And now I felt the temptation to introduce another metaphor: my own identity as a person perpetually suspended between cultures, religions and geographies. But a part of me also hated that narcissism and opportunism, so prevalent in academia.
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.
The day after the party at Lukas and Hannah's—the day before I left f or t he conference—I s trongly felt my state of suspension. All I could think about were the characters in "The Dead," the woman who had lost her first lover for the incomplete acquisition of another, and the inevitability that she would lose them both.
Excerpted from Stray Dogs. Copyright © 2022 by Rawi Hage. Excerpted by permission of Knopf Canada. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
