The Hakawati
SynopsisPlot
In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his father's deathbed. As the family gathers, stories begin to unfold: Osama's grandfather was a hakawati, or storyteller, and his bewitching tales are interwoven with classic stories of the Middle East. Here are Abraham and Isaac; Ishmael, father of the Arab tribes; the beautiful Fatima; Baybars, the slave prince who vanquished the Crusaders; and a host of mischievous imps. Through Osama, we also enter the world of contemporary Lebanese men and women whose stories tell a larger, heartbreaking tale of seemingly endless war, conflicted identity, and survival.
Story
About this book
In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat travels back to Beirut from the United States to be at his dying father's side. The return draws his extended family together, and as they wait, old and new stories surface. Osama's grandfather was a hakawati, the Arabic word for a storyteller, someone whose role is to hold an audience through spoken narrative. The novel layers his grandfather's tales alongside figures from scripture, legend, and medieval history, including Abraham, Ishmael, Fatima, and Baybars, the former slave who rose to command Mamluk forces against the Crusaders.
Rabih Alameddine, a Lebanese-American writer, builds the book as a nest of overlapping narratives. Traditional stories sit beside present-day scenes of Lebanese life shaped by decades of conflict and displacement. The structure mirrors a storytelling tradition in which one tale opens inside another, each carrying its own logic and characters, including imps and supernatural figures drawn from regional folklore.
Running through these layered accounts is the question of what stories do for the people who tell and hear them, especially when family, identity, and home have been fractured by war. The contemporary sections follow Osama and his relatives as they navigate divided loyalties between Lebanon and life abroad.
