The Wrong End of the Telescope

by Rabih Alameddine

You suggested I write this. You, the writer, couldn’t. You tried writing the refugee story. Many times, many different ways. You failed. And failed again. Maybe failed better. Still you couldn’t. More than two years after you and I met in Lesbos, you were still trying. You tackled it from one direction, then another, to no avail. You were too involved, unable to disentangle yourself from the tale. You said that you couldn’t calibrate the correct distance. You weren’t able to find the right words even after numerous sessions on your psychiatrist’s couch.

Every idiot thinks they’re a writer; they’re not.

I should write my story; no one has to read it. There are enough books out there, you said. Why add more? I should write to make sense of my world, to grasp my story.

Writing simplifies life, you said, forces coherence on discordant narratives, unless it doesn’t, and most of the time it doesn’t, because really, how can one make sense of the senseless? One puts a story in a linear order, posits cause and effect, and then thinks one has arrived. Writing one’s story narcotizes it. Literature today is an opiate.

Memory is a wound, you said. And some things are released only by the act of writing. Unless I go in with my scalpel and suction to excavate, to clean, to bring into light, that wound festers, and the gangrene of decay will eat me alive.

I knew that I would belong to her, that I would do anything for her, when she began to look at her plate in the middle of the dance floor. She picked an apple slice, a red one, brought it close to my face. I opened my mouth, her pinky and ring finger caressed my cheek, her thumb and forefinger placed the fruit on my tongue, and it exploded in my mouth, not with taste, mind you, but with possibility.

You said California suited you better than the East Coast because you couldn’t bear the idea of the sun being reborn out of the sea every morning. Apollo’s chariot needed to plummet at the end of the day. The sun must drop into the water, drowning and dying for our eyes.

He said you used him as a narrator, an interpreter of stories. I liked that term. I wondered if that was how you interacted with those around you. You wanted people’s stories, not them. You cared for the tale, not the teller.

Someone smashed your car window with a baseball bat in the parking lot of a gay bar on Santa Monica Boulevard, while you were inside the car no less. Would you consider that an immigrant trauma or your run-of-the-mill gay bashing? How unfair. You hadn’t even gone into the bar. You’d been sitting in your car for fifteen minutes to make sure that no one was carding at the door and another fifteen trying to build up the courage to walk in.

You talked to a mother in Oslo whose son was being beaten on a regular basis by the other boys in school. She told you Europe may have once been a sanctuary but no longer. Europe was like the light of a star that kept going long after the star itself had died.

I transitioned in college; I changed from a depressed person to an angry one. The humiliations of my childhood—the don’t-do-this, the boys-don’t-do-that, the you-must-try-to-be-normal—all those sticks and twigs, dry kindling, burst into a furious bonfire. Everything was my family’s fault, of course it was. My cracked cup ranneth over with molten rage that no saucer could contain.

Lot’s wife was a cowardly weakling. I was no prophet’s wife. Don’t look back in anger or in sorrow. I galloped forward, focusing on the lure of the mechanical rabbit before me.

In the essay, you wondered what kind of person would think it was a good idea to donate thousands of sequins to Syrian refugees who had nothing left, whose entire lives had been extirpated. Bright, shiny, gaudy, useless sequins? A fabulous one, of course, a lovely, most wonderful human being.

A gay bar was not a safe space for you, was it? How could any space be when it was peopled?

Within a month after we left, the European Union began to smother refugees in more and more bureaucracy, the empire’s most effective weapon.

To alleviate the discomfort of the sailors who had to listen to the cries for help from drowning refugees, the British ships played loud music on their speakers. Refugees wailed while listening to popular tunes of the time.

You wanted to know, desperately wanted to, as if knowing what song thousands of refugees were forced to listen to as they drowned could help ease your suffering.

“But yesterday is gone. It’s a new day. I must forget where I came from.”

Every nation needed an enemy, you wrote, every group a nemesis. Quite a statement, though you should have left it at that. But you added that the stronger a nation was, the more defined the enemy needed to be. I thought that wasn’t right. I know it was one of the characters in your novel who said it, not you; nevertheless, it gives me pleasure to point out that you were wrong and your character too. Who would have expected that the new enemy would be terror? Who would have thought that we’d declare war on an abstract noun?

You knew, I knew, everyone from the Middle East knew. Hell, every immigrant knew. Our country was redefining the enemy and it was us.

But first let’s bomb them over there. Shock and awe, baby. Let all of us who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom blindly destroy their countries, shatter their political systems, economies, infrastructures, and create millions of refugees for generations to come. Bush called that civilization’s fight.

First you were an enemy because you were queer, but suddenly being a Middle Eastern immigrant was a bigger threat. A shift of wind. A sailboat has to adjust to the whim of the wind, not the other way round. You adjusted.

Every time you returned to the United States from Beirut, the new Homeland Security people gave you a funny look, until you figured out how much the sail needed trimming, how to jibe the boat. You learned how to camp it up at passport control, a sashay here, a seductive grin there, a small drop of the shoulder, as if saying, “Look at me, I’m no threat at all.” Worked like a miracle.

Smile more often. You want whoever is talking to you to like you. No, not because you want them to process your application. You want them to like you because you’re a gay man. You get used to smiling because they have power over you, not just when it comes to an application. Wherever you go, they will have power over you. Appeasement is your friend. Always smile nervously.

All the places I truly loved are gone, and countless people. The regime destroying my house can’t hurt me. I lost everything a long time ago, and I will outlive them all.”

I bet you wouldn’t have disagreed. In one of your gloomy essays you wrote, “What is life if not a habituation to loss?”

She had lost too much, she had a hole in her heart, and grief had rushed in like a high tide to fill it. In time, her grief withdrew. She now had nothing except for the hole.

Have you ever considered the phrase “out of one’s mind”? As if someone who was confused, addled, or angry would no longer be using her mind. Was one in one’s mind only when rational with full faculties?

What could you do? You were in graduate school. You had to get another degree in order to become a productive member of an evil society. You gobbled up hamburgers and quenched your thirst with Coke. You dove into gay sex clubs every night. You were assimilating, for crying out loud. You did not wish to remain an outsider in your adopted country. How could you explain to your father that you were not coming back, that you were choosing to become a citizen of the country that destroyed his dream with a single sixteen-inch shell? Which side were you on? You would try to become an American, become one with people who would rather see your family dead. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.

In spite of quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, I like to think of the world as kind, of humanity as decent if flawed, my misinterpretation of the just-world fallacy. I like to think that we humans try to do the right thing.

Not an accident, not random, not a desultory fluke. Fate could not be capricious. There must have been a point. He had done something wrong and had to pay for it with a miserable life. His great loss must have some significance. As Francine says, “Insanity is the insistence on meaning.”

The chasm between African Americans and Africans was immense. As time passed, he began to realize that whenever he visited a new village, he would feel guilty. He began to understand that he was using the pain of others to alleviate his own. He couldn’t keep going, he told me. As much as he was helping, he could no longer live with the fact that he was using the suffering of poor villagers to satisfy his sentimental needs. He needed them to suffer, he told me, in order to feel needed, in order to reinforce his privilege.

He couldn’t go on pretending. After all, he said jokingly, he wasn’t white.

When we saw you at the restaurant, you may not have made much sense at first, but the one thing that had their hearts fluttering was this: when the food arrived, you said that Greek food felt to you as if an incompetent chef was given all the correct ingredients to make a fantastic Lebanese meal and proceeded to fuck it up by using the wrong mixtures. They found that delicious.

You tried to find a way to write about refugees and break the wall between reader and subject. You said you wanted people not to dismiss the suffering, not to read about the loss and sorrow, feel bad for a minute or two, then go back to their glass of overly sweet chardonnay.

“Why is it that you live in such a safe place yet consider the world so dangerous?” “I’m an American.”

Any work that has to be done can and should be done slowly. Think tortoise. It lives to one hundred and fifty years because it is smarter than humans. Do your work deliberately and unhurriedly, whether it’s around the house or to earn a living. Relax. Don’t ever walk fast. Be methodical. Keep your heart rate slow.

everything and everyone had more control over what happened to her. She’d had it. Enough. She wanted autonomy.

“When I talked to people in Lebanon,” you said, “I was always the writer. I did the interviews officially. I would go around with a handler from UNHCR, and she would introduce me as a writer of some significance. There was a barricade between the person I was talking to and me. I could hear the stories, and no matter how sickening they were, I felt protected. I was able to listen dispassionately, impersonally. They were stories, after all, simply stories. I deal with stories all the time. I haven’t been able to do that here. Metaphor seems useless now, storytelling impotent.”

Did you believe that writing about the experience would help you understand what happened? You still cling to romantic notions about writing, that you’ll be able to figure things out, that you will understand life, as if life is understandable, as if art is understandable. When has writing explained anything to you? Writing does not force coherence onto a discordant narrative. You knew that, you told me that. But still, you thought this novel would be magically imbued with your dreams of respite. Even though none of the previous novels you wrote helped you in any way, this one, you thought, would heal your pain. Like a faithful analysand, you believed if you worked hard, wrote long enough, you’d come across the clue that would unravel the puzzle, the one key that would unlock your mystery. Keys, if they even exist, darling, are not found in literature.

Did you hope that readers would empathize? Inhabit a refugee’s skin for a few hours? As if that were some kind of panacea. You still hoped even though it had never happened. At best, you would have written a novel that was an emotional palliative for some couple in suburbia. For a few moments they’d think how terrible it was for these refugees. They’d get outraged on social media for ten minutes. But then they’d pour another glass of chardonnay. Empathy is overrated.

Not all of us have the privilege of living separately. Not all of us have the privilege of the biggest thing happening to us is cheating on one’s wife. If you engage the world, you see it. In some ways I’m envious of writers who can make such great literature from a place of safety. Unfortunately for a lot of us, safety was never a given.

That’s why probably my favorite chapter in the book is how Francine and Mina met, with the dance. I wanted that because it brings joy, and the world is about joy. Even though they try to fuck it up for us. It’s about joy. And they can’t take that away from us. No matter what those fascists think. They can’t take it away. We’re still here. I keep thinking as to how many times we’ve been pushed down. How many of my friends didn’t make it. How they’ve tried to crush us—whether it’s the queers or the Arabs. It’s important for me that no matter what is going on, that a part of me still has joy.