Rawi Hage’s Stray Dogs: Inside the Decisive Moments

When asked about choosing the decisive moment in his narratives, which often take brilliant and unexpected turns, author Rawi Hage points to his background in photography and his experiences during the Lebanese civil war. “Because I lived through the war,” he notes, “there was always this parallel between a bullet and a photograph – one is leaving, the other is capturing; there’s always that decisive moment.” This concept echoes Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”: the exact instant revealing a situation’s larger truth. Photography, both practically and theoretically, serves as a vital organizing force in Hage’s latest collection, Stray Dogs. After publishing four celebrated novels, including Carnival and Beirut Hellfire Society, Hage returns to the short story format where his writing began. His insights shed light on photography, exile, failure, and the unique power of short fiction, including pieces like The Stray Dog Short Story within the collection.

Stray Dogs
Rawi Hage
Knopf Canada
$29.95 cloth
216pp
9780735273627

Cover of Rawi Hage's short story collection Stray Dogs, published by Knopf Canada.

From Photography to Fiction: Hage’s Journey

Hage initially aimed to write a short story collection but “deviated into novels” when one story expanded into De Niro’s Game (2006), which later won the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The recent pandemic prompted him to revisit stories penned over sixteen or seventeen years, alongside composing several new ones rapidly. “I tend to associate short stories with statements against oppression,” Hage reflects. “Maybe because I read Chekhov as a young man, I also tend to associate short stories with humour. The Russians emphasized the absurd; they were very critical of their society.” This critical lens, targeting both the Lebanese state and Western societies, permeates the collection. It appears overtly satirical in “Bird Nation,” but more frequently resides in the subtle details of deception, complicity, and the contradictions inherent in living between states, in exile, or otherwise dislocated. These tensions build gradually, culminating in moments of devastating, sometimes fatal, clarity.

Exploring Dislocation: Key Stories

In “The Wave,” a Lebanese ex-academic in Montreal faces growing conflict with his white Québécoise wife. During a trip to Lebanon, she romanticizes mountain villagers before branding him a “Third World Elite.” He becomes obsessed with mathematically predicting natural disasters, convinced a tsunami is near, but a miscalculation leads him to lose his wife to different, unpredictable forces. The titular story, “The Stray Dog Short Story,” follows Samir. His Jordanian family disapproves of his choice to study photography over business in the US. While presenting at a Tokyo conference, news of his father’s death jolts him back to thoughts of home and grief. He understands his family won’t postpone the burial for his return: “The ancient Arabs had never waited. They moved through the dunes and under the heat of the sun, leaving behind what couldn’t be carried on their animals’ backs.”

While not strictly autobiographical, featuring diverse protagonists across Beirut, Baghdad, Montreal, Berlin, Tokyo, Warsaw, and beyond, spanning the 1970s to the present, Hage considers the book autobiographical “in a bizarre way.” This stems not from direct life descriptions but from its filtering through photography, a medium Hage has engaged with throughout his life.

Photography as a Lens and Deception

He recalls his early Montreal years after leaving Beirut, “trying to survive as a newly arrived immigrant,” studying photography at Concordia, completing an MFA at UQAM, and driving a taxi. Photography was his initial passion, but he shifted towards writing upon realizing the medium was undergoing significant technological and philosophical changes he couldn’t embrace. The 1990s brought capitalist outsourcing, diminishing the artist’s connection to the worker, making photography less appealing to him. He mentions the Arabic word مُخَضْرَم (mukhadram), describing those who live through two distinct eras. While referencing photography’s overlapping periods, the term aptly describes Stray Dogs‘ characters, who often endure the “almost fatal existence” of living “in between culture, in between affiliations.”

Hage observes that “photography makes a great literary subject because it’s so versatile, it covers the whole spectrum: from nation states spying on people, to wedding photography, to everything in between.” Characters in these stories are frequently transformed by photography or a single image. In “The Whistle,” the protagonist confronts his wartime youth in Lebanon, recalling forcing his cousin to drive around Beirut trying to photograph falling bombs. In “The Fate of the Son of the Man on the Horse,” a Montreal photographer’s life is disrupted by Sophia Loren, who brings a photograph hinting at his Italian family history. In “The Duplicates,” an obsessive photographic archivist foresees his death in altered prints of an eighteenth-century manuscript. Photography, Hage states, is “a very seductive medium.” He concludes, “If there’s any commonality in all these stories, it is about failure, about people who fail, and who are deceived by the medium of photography.”

The Burden of Hybridity

Failure, combined with the precariousness of existing between eras or national, class, and political identities, defines many protagonists in Stray Dogs. The opening story, “The Iconoclast,” offers a stark, incisive portrayal. Hage describes it as concerning “a man who knows the West well, is a product of the East, and is being rejected by both sides.” This hybridity breeds dislocation and pain. At a Berlin party hosted by artist neighbours, a man accuses the narrator of being a “developing-world, privileged [sort],” either “naïve or […] complicit with neoliberal capitalism.” Later, in a militia-controlled Beirut neighbourhood he usually avoids, a woman tells him to “go back to [his] beautiful neighbourhood,” questioning, “what are you people always so afraid of?”

“The fate of hybridity is to deal with perpetually explaining yourself,” Hage remarks. Belonging to what he hesitantly calls the “cosmopolitan strata” often involves a discourse critical of the West, coupled with a repulsion towards one’s “own Third World Elite.” He adds, “you are contributing to discourse, or you are able to contribute because the West is allowing you to speak, and also you are speaking on behalf of a proletariat from your own country that you don’t really belong to.”

The characters in Stray Dogs might grapple with expression, fall prey to photographic illusions, or struggle to rediscover home, yet they remain vividly present in their confusion, pain, and hybrid existence—a multi-voiced testament to enduring. In “The Whistle,” when the narrator tells his cousin in Beirut that miracles don’t exist, the cousin counters that they do, “and the proof is that we are here and alive, in spite of people’s stupidity and the terror we endured.” As a change of pace this summer, Hage is tackling a different kind of project: “I’m learning how to garden,” he shares with a chuckle. “Yeah, my biggest challenge right now is how to plant tomatoes.”