Book review: Rabih Alameddine’s The Angel of History – a Yemeni poet’s painful memories

A Yemeni poet must confront painful memories and demons, in this world-spanning narrative which fuses Arab Nights-esque tales with folk literature.

Men walk by a mural of a US drone and a dove in a yin-yang symbol in Sanaa, Yemen. In The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine we learn about the adventures of a drone that crash lands in Yemen. MohamShow more

Through most of the second millennium, Arabic literature had two knockout genre champions. One was the self-contained Nights-esque tales, such as The Three Apples. The other was the sprawling folk epics, like Antar and Sirat Al Zahir Baybars. Both forms were discouraged by tongue-clucking classical scholars – after all, these genres were for mere entertainment.

In his powerful new novel, The Angel of History, Lebanese-American novelist Rabih Alameddine takes no note of the tongue-cluckers. He embeds Nights-esque tales within an epic frame, modifying both to tell a story in English that's at once ambitious and entertaining.

In the opening epigraph, Alameddine quotes Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Just so, The Angel of History holds on to the stories of the powerless against corporate, military and cultural erasures. Yet if a man holds on to every memory, he'll go mad. Such is our hero's conundrum.

The epic’s hero is Jacob, or Ya’qub, who struggles to stay sane under the weight of a lifetime of painful memories. Jacob/Ya’qub was born in Yemen, raised in Cairo, schooled in Beirut, and came into his own in 1980s San Francisco. There, the Aids epidemic raged across the city and he watched his beloved and closest friends die.

The action takes place several decades later, when Jacob brings himself to a free Crisis Psych Clinic. He hopes to get himself committed for a few days, or at least suppress the voices he’s been hearing. But this is not contemporary realism and these are not ordinary voices.

Jacob’s co-narrators are Satan, wearing a “suit the colour of sunlight”; Death, “in black cashmere”; and the 14 holy helpers, who arrived in his life by way of a Lebanese nun.

The book opens as Satan interviews Death, who tells of our hero’s birth in a small Yemeni village. Satan goes on to interview each of the holy helpers about their role in Jacob’s life: Acacius, Barbara, Blaise, Catherine of Alexandria, Christopher, Cyriacus, Dionysius of Paris, Erasmus, Eustace, George, Giles, Margaret, Pantaleon and Vitus.

Alameddine’s majestically world-spanning narrative moves between the oral method of an epic or cabaret act, spun for a live audience as they sit in a coffee house or private home, and the written tradition of Nights-esque stories. The stories are ostensibly penned by Jacob/Ya’qub, who is a marginalised, impoverished poet. But Satan is none too pleased about Jacob’s dabbling in lowly prose.

In the short story The Drone, we hear of a drone that crash-lands in Yemen, where he (the male drone) falls in love with a boy named Mohammad. It's almost love at first sight. But, the American drone says, "once [Mohammad] took one step down the mountain and the sun no longer obscured as many details, I saw him for what he was, a possible terrorist. His swarthy complexion gave him away, as did the ascetic aspect of his billowy clothing: no colour, no denim, no Gap Kids, no Diesel." Nonetheless, the drone ends up falling for Mohammad before he is rescued by his fellow Americans.

While recovering, the drone has to decide whether or not he can kill his beloved: “collateral damage”. Their star-crossed affair gets a tongue-in-cheek neoliberal ending, as the Americans – courtesy of our sentient drone – bring chain restaurants, democracy and a Nike factory to Mohammad’s village, where the boy gets a sweatshop job.

Not only that, but, “We improved the lot of women in the area. You’re welcome, oppressed women everywhere.”

Along with these stories and Satan’s interviews, we have Jacob’s journals, which tell us about his time in 1980s San Francisco and the deaths of those close to him.

All this – his personal history and his friends – is what Jacob has been struggling to bear.

Alameddine is at his best in this post-realist landscape, by turns cynical, generous and funny. Jacob the ordinary man wants to forget, but his muses insist that he must remember: struggle, refuse medications and fight for the histories of the marginalised.

Jacob/Ya’qub isn’t sure he can. But, when he calls, the holy helpers come to bear him up. As the sainted Catherine says, all reality is memory: “Look up at the stars, look, they are not there, what you see is the memory of what once was, once upon a time.”

In the end, Jacob takes a marker and writes his way through the city. Much like the author, Jacob simultaneously unburdens his memories and carries them for all.

M Lynx Qualey is a freelance writer based in Cairo who blogs at arablit.wordpress.com.