Refugees are suffering. This novelist won’t look away

About nine years ago, as thousands of Syrians fled the violence in their country for neighbouring Lebanon, novelist Rabih Alameddine visited some of the refugee camps to speak with them. He didn’t know what would come of it, but he had experience listening to people in extremis — including dying friends during the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco — and he knew the power of the act. At the very least, he thought, he could talk to the kids about football.

What he heard was excruciating: stories of families killed, homes destroyed, history eradicated. Distraught, he hid under the duvet at his mother’s home in Beirut.

But Alameddine kept trying. At one settlement, an abandoned Pepsi-Cola plant in the coastal city of Sidon, he encountered a woman who was exasperated and tired of repeating her story.

“If I talk to you, will anything change?” she asked. He told her no. She appraised him for a moment, but once she started, he said, she wouldn’t stop talking.

“This is when I realised, again, that the service that I was providing was just as an ear,” Alameddine said during a video interview from San Francisco in July. “There is absolutely not one thing I can do, but not doing something is a crime.”

His new novel, “The Wrong End of the Telescope,” out this month from Grove, is his effort to process his encounters with refugees in Lebanon and, later, Greece. It follows Mina, a Lebanese American doctor, who has come to the island of Lesbos to volunteer at a refugee camp and is woefully unprepared for what she sees.

“The beach was a scene from a disaster movie, postevent, when the survivors get together and try to make sense of what happened,” she observes, watching as shivering children and traumatised adults reach the island by boat. But the worst of what happens at the camps remains off the page. Later, Mina thinks: “Lesbos was a somewhat humane mess when we were there. Shortly thereafter it became an inhumane one.”

There is also a personal dimension to her trip. Mina is the closest to Lebanon she’s been in years — since her family disowned her and she transitioned genders — and the refugees are her people.

Alameddine, 61, the author of six books in addition to “The Wrong End of the Telescope,” often focuses on Lebanon, upheaval and the people who go unseen and disregarded in the world. Refugees are particularly invisible, he said. “We step over them.”

His 1998 debut, “Koolaids,” leaps from San Francisco during the AIDS epidemic to Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. Alameddine, who is gay, was frustrated by what he saw as cultural amnesia when it came to both crises. “I hated what was passing for gay literature, for AIDS literature,” he said. “And forget anything Lebanese.”

“He’s angry about all the right things,” said author Aleksandar Hemon, a longtime friend. “It is an aspect of his deep involvement and care for the world.”

Despite the outrage that can fuel them, Alameddine’s books are funny and irreverent. The arts — literature, poetry, paintings — provide an escape for characters in unbearable situations, and classical allusions abound. Humour, sex and grief collide, often on the same page, and there’s plenty of camp: Death, in his 2016 novel “The Angel of History,” appears as a fey, beret-wearing figure with a black manicure, who thinks, “Arabs make my life worth living, such pleasure they have given me through the years.”

“There are many terrible things about being Lebanese, but to be any kind of storyteller in our part of the world,” Alameddine said, “there has to be a lightness of touch.”

Born to a Lebanese family in Jordan, Alameddine lived there, then in Kuwait and Lebanon before his family, sensing the stirrings of the civil war, sent him to England in 1975. He eventually settled in San Francisco, living there for decades.

In California he earned an engineering degree and an MBA — “it never occurred to me to go get an MFA” — tended bar and painted. He helped start a gay soccer team, though by the mid-1990s, half its players had died of AIDS complications.

Alameddine was nearly 40 by the time “Koolaids” was released, and at the beginning of his literary career, he was invited to join a writing group with “some really important writers,” he recalled.

“I lasted for about four months — they kicked me out,” he said. “And we’re still friends.” (In August, he moved cross-country to teach at the University of Virginia’s creative writing programme.)

Alameddine has never felt “totally accepted, whether in Lebanon or the US,” in the gay community or the writer community, he said. “I always get accused by the Lebanese that I’m writing for a Western audience. I get accused by the West that I’m writing for a Lebanese audience. The truth is, I don’t care about either of them.”

Hemon, his friend, put it simply: “Each book is a kind of a new homeland for him.”

Hamed Sinno, the lead singer of Mashrou’ Leila, a popular Lebanese indie-rock band, said that encountering Alameddine’s work was a revelation. Alameddine represented “someone from another generation who survived AIDS and lived to write about it, and survived the civil war and lived to write about it,” Sinno said.

Alameddine is baffled when readers express surprise he could inhabit the mind of a character who doesn’t resemble him. “I was able to write a book where the narrator is a masochist who gets whipped,” he said of “The Angel of History.” “My idea of rough sex is sleeping on cotton sheets that are less than 600 count.”

His outsider perspective helps him find the “Goldilocks distance” from his subjects. With “Telescope,” he set out to write a novel that encompassed his own experiences and the stories of the refugees he met, but, unable to extricate himself enough, he developed the character of Mina, someone whose life differed from his own.

But he doesn’t vanish from the story. An unnamed author scuttles along the margins of the novel, and his inability to write about his volunteer work on Lesbos or to comprehend the crisis is a running theme. (At one point, the author, so overwhelmed by what he’s seen on the island, locks himself in his hotel room and blares Mahler.)

Mina herself pokes fun at the writer character. “You once wrote that you felt embarrassed when critics and reviewers classified your work as immigrant literature,” Mina says. “You joked that the worst immigration trauma you had endured was when your flight from Heathrow was delayed.”

According to Alameddine, that Mina is trans isn’t incidental, since “she has had to kill off and bury her past on more than one occasion.” At the same time, Susan Stryker, a transgender scholar and a friend of Alameddine’s, said it was refreshing to encounter trans characters whose gender identity isn’t their overriding story line.

“Trans people transition gender at some point — duh. It’s one thing we do, but it’s not all we do,” Stryker said. And seeing characters like Mina in this setting — doing deeply moral, humanitarian work — rejects a stereotype of trans people as “evil deceivers and make-believers,” she said.

In some ways, Alameddine said, writing the refugee characters was the easiest part. Mina has an especially close relationship with one family, headed by a woman with advanced liver disease. But dozens of migrants cycle through the novel, from a gay Iraqi couple puzzled by the Syrian families processed before them, to a gaggle of children who charm volunteers into buying an unholy number of chocolate bars.

One chapter, titled “How to Make Liberace Jealous,” was inspired by the dwelling of a woman Alameddine met in Lebanon. She had painstakingly decorated her pantry with sequins, with results “so over the top that many a drag queen would kill for it.”

“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?” Mina thinks. “A fabulous one, of course, a lovely, most wonderful human being.”

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