Feeling Embodied and Being Displaced: A Phenomenological Exploration of Hospital Scenes in Rabih Alameddine’s Fiction

Rabih Alameddine is a Lebanese American author whose experimental work has been hailed as provocative for its rich exploration of Arab, Arab American, philosophical, queer, and transnational themes. Alameddine has published three novels—Koolaids: The Art of War (1998); I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters (2001), and The Hakawati: A Story (2008)—and a collection of short stories, The Perv (1999). Alameddine’s work features prominently in any discussion of contemporary Arab American literature because of his commercial success and critical acclaim.¹

Although Alameddine explores a variety of themes including sexuality, madness, and HIV/AIDS, most secondary literature written about Alameddine’s work tends to focus on the experience and implications of exile and displacement.² Some characters choose to leave Lebanon as a result of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90). Others are pushed away because of familial conflict, career, or sexuality, a narrative that corresponds with what we usually term displacement.

Critics’ focus on exile and displacement, however, foregrounds these concepts as a gateway to understanding Alameddine’s critiques of Lebanon, the United States, or the condition of exile itself, to the exclusion of the material body. Scenes that take place within hospitals imply that exile is tied not only to memory but also to illness. Instead of pathologizing exile, Alameddine’s fiction holds up the hospital space and illness as a means of working through displacement. Characters reject the idea that normalcy or belonging is a state to which they should aspire, regardless of whether that norm or belonging is constituted in sexual, bodily, or mental terms. They are most at home in themselves when they are in a state of difference. This article maps out a set of possibilities for understanding the relationship in Alameddine’s fiction between being physically displaced and feeling materially embodied.³

This essay’s analysis of embodiment draws directly on phenomenology as a mode of reading.⁴ Here, critics “[emphasize] the importance of lived experience, the intentionality of consciousness, the significance of nearness or what is ready-to-hand, and the role of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds” (Ahmed 2). This approach understands characters as subjects who act upon others (objective subjects) and who are also perceived as objects who are acted upon by others (subjective objects). Usually, they are simultaneously both “literally and figuratively mak[ing] sense of, and to, both ourselves and others” (Sobchack 2). However, there are moments in Alameddine’s fiction when his characters cannot or refuse to participate in these interactions, though nobody can ignore his or her grounding in the social and historical world, nor can he or she ignore the way that that grounding is perceived by others (Salamon 97).⁵ Consequently, parts of my analysis focus on the way characters’ perceptions are informed by their sense of visual, tactile, and spatial cues.⁶ Feminist phenom-enologists take for granted that one’s perception of the body is never divorced from discourses of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality (Grosz x-xi).⁷ These characters’ perceptions of such discourses fundamentally shape their experiences of exile and embodiment.

As this essay conceptualizes the relationship between being displaced and feeling embodied, it turns to three main topics within Alameddine’s fiction. The first task is to explore the meaning of the word care. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word derives its present-day definition from its etymology in Germanic, Old English, Gothic, and Old Norse; its earlier meanings included trouble, grief, bed of trouble or sickness, and fear. The obsolete definitions of care point to ideas of sorrow, lamentation, and mourning. Like any etymology, these terms shadow the contemporary cultural understanding of care so that current definitions assume the feeling of grief and sickness (“Care”). Moreover, care connotes “labor, an attitude, and a virtue” (Kittay 560). Despite contemporary concerns about caretaker fatigue, it remains taboo to consider caretaking a burden. As a result, caretakers (within and outside of the hospital) must pretend that their duties are welcome regardless of how burdened they feel. They must navigate the...