Anti-Systemic Departures in Lebanese-Canadian Writing: Mouawad and Hage

Abstract

This thesis examines the antisystemic writing of Wajdi Mouawad and Rawi Hage, two of the most compelling authors to emerge out of the Lebanese-Canadian diaspora. In their Canadian setting, the writers’ politics of unbelonging serves a countercultural purpose by rearticulating the race, class, and gender disparities eschewed in multicultural discourse. As writers of a growing Lebanese diaspora, they recall the collective injuries sustained during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) and which remain underexamined by Lebanese society and government. In this way, Mouawad and Hage assume a subversive position in both the Lebanese and the Canadian contexts by reinscribing histories and experiences that risk erasure. In my analysis of Mouawad’s play Scorched and Mouawad’s novels De Niro’s Game and Cockroach, the differential allocation of precarity and grievability proves the common thread that runs through all three texts. Mouawad and Hage’s representation of their character’s disproportionate exposure to harm and suffering coincides with the broader claims of antisystemic politics. My intervention brackets these texts’ thematic concerns with the critical theories that best explain some of Mouawad and Hage’s more radical depictions of immigrants under duress.