Every year I try to convince my sister not to celebrate Christmas. I tell her we’re not Christians. She says I’m wrapping the children’s presents wrong. I tell her the kids will tear the paper anyway. She tells me to please be quiet and keep working.

My family has always had a love/hate relationship with Christmas. My sisters love it, I hate it.

My family is Druze, not Christian. We were raised in a tradition that is not supposed to have silly manifestations of faith. The only feast we celebrate is Adha, Abraham’s sacrifice. We don’t have a food orgy at the end of Ramadan, we don’t flagellate ourselves during Ashura, and for Christmas, we certainly don’t shower our children in gold, frankincense, and Dolce & Gabbana.

My father never wanted to celebrate Christmas. My mother did. She still does. Every year she decorates her tree with only red ornaments. As she puts up the tree, she tells me that she feels terribly guilty now that my father has passed away since he disliked Christmas so much.

Though she’s a Lebanese Druze from the mountain, just like my father, she was born in Jerusalem where my grandparents were living. Her mother placed my mother and her sisters in a Catholic school. She didn’t want her daughters to grow up to be Lebanese Druze from the mountain, but wanted them to become sophisticated and debonair. When the nuns asked my grandmother if her family was Christian, she said, “Mais, bien sûr.”

My father may have loved his French wine, his single-malt scotch; he may have adored his four-ply cashmere sweater, his Lanvin tie; he may have enjoyed his foray to Paris, and the memorable dinner at a small bistro in Geneva. But in his heart of hearts, he really and truly wanted to remain a Lebanese Druze from the mountain, just like his father.

For the children, my mother would say. She put up a Christmas tree, with presents underneath for the children, every year for the forty-five years they were together. The compromise was that the tree would be simple and classy, not ostentatious, not decadent, only red ornaments. My father would curse when we sang Christmas carols. He would grumble as he helped open the presents he bought us.

My family now puts up more than one Christmas tree. My two sisters each decorate a tree—for the children, of course—and my mother has one, for when the grandchildren come to visit. Every year.

My mother’s tree has remained simple, but not my sister’s. My sister always wants to have the best tree in all of Beirut. Sometime in late November, my sister’s home is transformed into a holiday monster. She has a collection of at least two-dozen Santa Claus dolls. She has a life-size red reindeer. She puts lights on not just the tree, but on every plant in the apartment—including the cacti. She covers every object in sight with a bowed red ribbon so that it looks like a present, and she buys a present for every child she’s ever met.

She drives me crazy. I tell her we’re not Christians. She says Christmas has nothing to do with Christianity. I tell her Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Christ. She asks, “Who?”

She doesn’t stop at Christmas. Of course, she cooks lamb for Adha. She hides painted eggs for the children on Easter. She has an orgiastic dinner for all her friends at the end of Ramadan. This year, she cooked a giant turkey for American Thanksgiving—except she did it on a Friday. She couldn’t have a big dinner in the middle of the week, she said. It’s impractical.

I told her she’s not American. She told me to stop being a Lebanese peasant from the mountain.

Every year, I complain and try to convince her not to celebrate Christmas. She tells me I am wrapping the children’s presents all wrong. I tell her that it’s pointless since the kids will tear through the paper anyway. She tells me to please be quiet and keep working.

I grumble and mumble—sometimes to myself, sometimes loudly—whenever I come across a delightfully decorated tree.

Every year, I try to be at each of my sisters’ homes when the children open their presents. I grumble and curse as the children squeal in delight.

Every year, as I gingerly try to remove my father’s noose from around my neck, it is with my own hands that I nearly strangle myself.

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That letter led me to consider a paradox: Why do so many of us, as readers or maybe as a society, assume that originality springs forth out of nothing, although at the same time we understand that every idea, every story, has a precedent? In the acknowledgments of The Hakawati, I wrote:

By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across—each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip—is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale.

Rodin's The Thinker

Every story in the novel is influenced by another—maybe not by an episode of The Twilight Zone, but by a tale from elsewhere. Every story anywhere is inspired by a coffee bean of some sort. A plant sprouts from a seed.

Rodin said: I invent nothing. I rediscover.

The Greek playwrights used tales that their audience knew quite well. Shakespeare’s audience had heard the stories of his tragedies, his comedies, and of course his histories, long before they entered the theater.

An original writer brings a pair of fresh eyes and a new pen. She makes us think that the story we’re reading has never been told before. While reading a great book, a reader rarely thinks about the story’s influences; he is taken in, swallowed by a new universe. The reader’s eye is directed to what the writer wishes it to see.

Critics and literature professors insist that a good novel opens your eyes. Rarely do they remind us that it also blinds you.

Influenced by his predecessors, Rodin might have been rediscovering, but what we see is originality, something we’ve never encountered before.

In the notes for one of my earlier books, The Perv, I wrote, “A writer is as original as the obscurity of his sources.” I cannot recall whether I had heard this or something similar before, or whether I had come up with it myself. I searched online and found a Benjamin Franklin quote: “Originality is the art of concealing your sources.” I knew this quote hadn’t directly influenced mine, since I’ve never read Franklin. It could have indirectly, of course—like a story, a saying will move from mouth to ear, getting distorted and rediscovered along the way, until a day comes when we think it’s a new saying, and ever so original.

I am intrigued by the idea of influences, the obvious and the not so, the visible and the hidden, and the transformation of those influences into something new. V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas may have descended directly from Balzac to Tolstoy to Forster, but by turning his eye to immigrants, by writing about a family of third-worlders, the author created a new way of telling the story. Fresh eyes.

V.S. Naipaul

Writer influences writer; sometimes the influence is glaringly apparent, sometimes not. Story influences story.

Yet, what arouses my interest most are the influences of real life. Naipaul’s childhood in Trinidad, his escape to Oxford, his relationship with his father, are subjects that are repeated in his novels. How do real-life stories affect originality? If a writer uses real experience as a springboard, as a seed, is he as original as someone who doesn’t? Which is more original: Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, a novel that isn’t based on any discernible real experience; A House for Mr. Biswas, a novel based on the author’s experience (Nabokov calls this auto-plagiarism! ), or Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, a non-fiction novel based on actual events?

Fresh eyes, all three.

None of these authors concealed their sources. Benjamin Franklin is probably wrong. Probably I am as well. But then, maybe not.

Henry James once wrote, “Everything about Florence seems to be coloured with a mild violet, like diluted wine.” It’s a most lovely description. But imagine this, only as a possibility, mind you: James walks the streets of Florence. Rain had kept him cooped up inside for a while. A man, slightly drunk and having finished lunch, exits a tavern carrying his glass of wine (he’d refused to give it up). The slick pavement makes him slip and spill the wine, which mixes with the still rainwater on the ground. Diluted wine, James thinks, and it is the same color as the stone it is covering, the same color as Florence, this mild violet.

Would the description still seem as original as it did when we didn’t know how James came up with it?

In Microcosms, Claudio Magris described Mitteleuropa as the “grand, morose laboratory of civilization’s discontents.” Utterly brilliant.

Imagine Magris as a young boy, maybe eight years old, at home. His father says, “They treat us like animals. These great powers from the east and from the west try out their wars on us, experiment on us.” His mother sits at the dinner table looking grand, but so morose. Imagine.

When Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Originality is the art of concealing your sources,” he was being funny, but he was wrong. A writer doesn’t have to conceal his sources. Often he does not know what his sources are. No story is created out of a vacuum. Originality is not Immaculate Conception. A writer’s work is the stew of numerous plants that have sprung forth from many a seed.

I don’t know whether the seed of my story was an episode of The Twilight Zone or something else. Either way, I’d hope I, and the reader, would see it with a fresh eye.

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In March of this year, I was at a literary festival in Chengdu, China. On my last day, having finished all my festival obligations, an Irish troublemaker (redundant?) took me out to lunch. My flight out was later that afternoon. Since it was the anniversary of the Tibetan uprising, he asked if I wanted to eat in the Tibetan part of town. It was sure to be heavily policed, he said.

How could I refuse? Batons and yak butter tea.

The motorized rickshaw driver wouldn’t take us there. I didn’t understand a word he said, but it was apparent that he was nervous and upset that we’d want to go to that neighborhood. A taxi drove us, but not before the driver asked a few times where exactly we wanted to go.

Traffic was heavy and flowing on a thoroughfare, but a side street was blocked by a number of machine-gun toting policemen dressed in engorged navy. Bullet proof vests are never slimming, that’s for sure. So, of course, that’s the street the Irish provocateur had to go through.

I only know two good restaurants in the area, he said, and both are on this street.

Tibetans were allowed through, police watched them like cats watch caged birds. We came along and the cats descended upon us, five of them, fully armed. Now, I have to admit I was a little nervous, but really, not all that. I’m from Beirut, you see.

They asked rapid questions in Chinese (Mandarin, not Tibetan, one presumes). My Irishman valiantly tried to reply. They were able to communicate. I hoped we wouldn’t get arrested since I had a plane to catch. That’s when two earpiece-wearing plainclothes, a man and a woman, joined our celebration. I smiled, trying to look friendly and dumb. Lunch, I said. Déjeuner? But no one was paying attention to me. Sign language, I thought. I rubbed my stomach, pointed down the street, and licked my lips. The plainclothes were explaining to the Dubliner that he couldn’t go through. I uttered the one food word I learned on this trip, pork bun (steamed, of course). One of the policemen looked at me as if I had special needs.

Oh, well, said my new friend. They’re not going to let us through.

My crazy friend and I walked another street trying to find a restaurant. The street looked like a tourist trap with old shops selling Chinese baubles and knickknacks. Street food vendors sold skewers of strange looking creatures.

You should watch your wallet, the Dubliner said. Everyone around the world thinks Tibetans are gentle, loving people, but in this city, they behave like most persecuted minorities everywhere. They resort to crime.

At which point, two monks appear on the street, and my friend begins to chat them up. I resume my idiotic smiling act, and slowly, I begin to walk a few steps behind them. I’m not that stupid.

They’re going to take us to a place for lunch, my seemingly rational friend said. Good Tibetan food. We have to walk behind, though, because we’ll get arrested if we’re with them.

We followed them for a bit, and of course, they led us right to the street. The police let the monks through, but as soon as we approached, the felines pounced, the same ones. I recognized their machine-guns. Blah, blah, blah, you can’t get through, blah, no way, no how, blah, blah. We must have lunch. Tell them it’s my last day, I said. I want to have Tibetan food before I leave.

One of the policemen, tall, recommended a restaurant around the corner. He seemed intransigent for some reason.

No one knows how many Tibetans died on the street the year before. The clashes were extremely violent. No reporters or television crews were allowed anywhere near this street. Monks immolated themselves, their souls moved on unwitnessed except by their unmoved persecutors. Many of the citizens of Chendu, whipped into frenzy by radio and television, believed foreigners and expats supported the uprising. There were large demonstrations against foreign businesses, a couple of French supermarkets were torched. Expats were stopped on the street and beaten up.

Were you hurt? I asked my new friend.

No, not really, he said. I was beaten up only twice. Walking home from work.

The restaurant we ended up in was exquisitely good. The policeman must have been a foodie. There were at least three tables with Tibetan monks having lunch. My Irishman began to talk to them. I collected stories.

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When I was about to publish my first novel, a writer tried to prepare me for what was to come. It doesn’t matter what novel you write, she said, you will be asked how true it is. If you write about a colony of rabbits, someone will ask, which rabbit are you? She was right, of course. I am asked the is-this-autobiography-in-disguise question all the time.

Nothing I write is true, I always reply. I write fiction. Even if I attempted to write an autobiography, I know it would not be true.

What can I say? I’m a liar.

The narrator of my new novel, The Hakawati, is a storyteller, a fibster, and so am I. The whole story is imaginary, untrue, fabulous in the word’s original sense. book is all lies, lies, lies. The book is all lies, lies, lies. You might blame my childhood, I suppose.

Ever since I was a young boy, I created imaginary worlds to inhabit. In these worlds I became a different person — to my mind a better, more interesting person. I became my own imaginary friend. I placed myself in all sorts of situations and the new me behaved accordingly. My life moved from quotidian to quotable, banal to bon mot. I had style, panache, grace, and most important, good looks. People viewed me with a mixture of awe and envy, wanted to be my friend or, failing that, at least bask in my sunshine. Now, I will admit that not everyone seemed cognizant of the transformation, but I was, and I have continued this self-soothing exercise, I hope in a somewhat mitigated form, to this day.

Some of my friends in this country gave me the nickname Hyperbolia. I embellish anecdotes into better narratives, transmogrify kernels of truth into mountainous tales. I become the protagonist of events in which I was only peripherally involved, even not involved at all. By the third or fourth telling, I can no longer distinguish the kernel from the tale. A spinner of tales, a ripper of yarns, a liar — that’s me.

Show me a storyteller who doesn’t embellish, and I’ll show you a dull one.

I come from the lands of Scheherazade, who could not afford to be dull. Had she not dressed her tales in fineries — oy, vey. In the Lebanese dialect, to embellish is to “salt and pepper” a story, to add spice, so to speak, to make less bland. Without it, one might as well eat Kraft Singles.

I suppose it was inevitable that I would one day become a writer of fiction, using the same silly techniques from my childhood. I became a dying man, and his hallucinations were mine. I became a woman who couldn’t write beyond the first chapter of her memoir (she lied throughout, of course.) In my new novel, I became a hakawati — a storyteller — but the teller of the stories isn’t really me. When I write, I fabricate. Art, after all, comes from “artifice.” I’ve always considered novelists to be grifters, charlatans, the greatest of them marvelously proficient liars.

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We readers tend to ascribe to fiction a certain level of veracity. I assume that for most of us, the more involved we are with a novel, the more likely we are to think it’s real — so much so that something similar must have happened to the author. All of us do at some level, a few of us more than others: Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha, tells a story of a fan at a reading asking if the picture of the geisha on the cover was he — he does have elegant features and fine skin, who knew? Susanne Pari, author of The Fortune Catcher, tells of the disappointment her readers experience when they discover that unlike her novel’s protagonist, she was never tortured. Right after the publication of Koolaids, my novel about the AIDS epidemic and the Lebanese civil war, a man, upon meeting me, exclaimed, “I thought you were dead!” He became a good friend, and it wasn’t because he was a necrophile. We may know it’s fiction — it says so on the front cover — but we get taken in by the lies.

So let me answer before I’m asked.

The Hakawati isn’t autobiographical. It isn’t true. The narrator is not me, the narrator’s family isn’t mine. The story is all lies, lies — well, not completely.

When I said it was all lies, I lied — just a little.

Rabih Alameddine

There are some similarities between the narrator and me: we’re approximately the same age; we’re both Lebanese men living in California. Details. In this case, I created similarities to simplify things. If the narrator is the same age then I know what was happening in Beirut or Los Angeles when he was, say, twenty, or thirty. I had the narrator’s father in the hospital at the same time as mine was because I knew what the weather was like then, what the skies looked like as we kept vigil in the room. Yet everything is fabricated. The protagonist plays the oud, and its modern-day incarnation, the guitar. I wouldn’t know how to hold either one, let alone play them. I have never known a hakawati, nor have I ever heard one perform. And unfortunately, I have not yet visited the underworld or coupled with jinn.

Lies. Fibs. Falsehoods. Fabrications.

Moreover, the narrator’s grandfather, the original hakawati of the novel, worked for a pigeon fancier as a young boy; the narrator’s uncle raised pigeons himself. And my family?

A few years ago, in a small plot of land behind her house in the mountains overlooking Beirut, next to the vegetable garden, my youngest sister placed a few chickens so that her children would be able to gather eggs, after picking vegetables. My sister wanted her kids to be able to understand where our food came from. Unfortunately, within a few months, a couple of cases of avian flu were reported in nearby Turkey, and as a precaution, the chickens ended up as family dinner. When her children (my nephew is five, my niece is two and a half) asked where that meal came from, my sister, ever calm and present, replied, McDonald’s, of course.

So no, trust me, my family didn’t raise pigeons. Chickens, interrupted, yes.

And none of us have encountered imps, as far as I know. Eight imps float in and out of The Hakawati: Ishmael, Isaac, Ezra, Jacob, Job, Noah, Elijah, and Adam. They are mischievous, wise, silly, greedy, generous, foolish, loyal, psychotic, powerful, magical, neurotic, intelligent, decent, wondrous, murderous, human, humane, violent, lively, klutzy, avaricious, and parrot-like (no avian flu in those days).

So if you ask me, Is the novel autobiographical, I can answer an honest no.

Yet I’d be stumped if you asked, Which imp are you?

In closing, let me add a confession: I lied when I said I was a liar.

Can you trust a hakawati?

D.H. Lawrence once said: Never trust an artist. Trust the tale.

In The Hakawati, the narrator’s uncle tells his nephew: Never trust the teller, trust the tale.

I lie. But what I say is true.

***

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Rabih Alameddine is the author of The Hakawati, Koolaids, and I, the Divine. He divides his time between San Francisco and Beirut.

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