Whose war is it anyway? Multilingual games as political encoding in Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game

Abstract

This article examines Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game (2006) by focusing on its sociolinguistics, its author-driven translating, transliterating, and glossing of Arabic words/terms, and the interplay between dialogical and textual code-switching. It demonstrates how these strategies amount to multilingual games that provide an indirect yet critical semantic dimension accessible only to the insider reader who has not only a grasp of English, but also knowledge of the Arabic language and of Lebanese culture and history. This dimension, I argue, is revealed through a deep multilingualism, which some critics contend no longer has currency in prize-winning twenty-first-century fiction by diasporic authors, most of whom use code-switching as window dressing for an Anglo-American audience. This novel’s Arabic usages help deliver an additional critique of right-wing Phalange political ideology, Christian sectarianism, and how they are linked to racism, classism, and views on Israeli military action. More generally, I argue that these multilingual practices allow this novel to subtly challenge both nationalist and postcolonial approaches by adopting a unique angle from which to critique warmongering, xenophobia, and sectarianism, both within and across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.