Same war, same city, different language

Wajdi Mouawad and Rawi Hage both reached Montreal as refugees from the Lebanese war. Each went on to win the highest literary honour of the language he adopted, and they are almost never named together.

At the 2021 census, two hundred and ten thousand six hundred and five Canadians claimed Lebanese ancestry, the largest Arabic speaking origin group in the country by a wide margin. Seventy eight thousand two hundred and ten of them are in Quebec, and roughly half of the entire Lebanese Canadian community is in and around Montreal.

That makes Montreal one of the largest Lebanese cities in North America, and almost nobody outside it says so.

IT STARTS IN 1882, WITH A NAME

Lebanese immigration to Canada begins with Ibrahim Abu Nadir, recorded there as Abraham Bounadere. He left Zahle at nineteen, went by way of the United States, and settled in Montreal in 1882. He sold dry goods and textiles door to door across Quebec and Ontario.

A peddler, on foot, with a pack. The same opening as Sydney, as Accra, as São Paulo.

And the same filing problem. Through the 1890s Canadian records labelled arrivals from the region Turks, because they came on Ottoman papers. Syrian only appears as a category from 1900. Anyone searching the Canadian record for its first Lebanese decades is searching under somebody else’s empire, which is the fourth country on this record where that is true.

Almost a century later, two boys left a war.

Wajdi Mouawad was born in Deir el Qamar and fled the civil war as a child with his family. France first, then Montreal in 1983, where he trained at the National Theatre School.

Rawi Hage was born in Beirut in 1964 and lived through nine years of that same war. He reached New York, and has lived in Montreal since 1992.

Same country. Same war. Same city. They arrive nine years apart.

Mouawad wrote Littoral in 1999 and won the Governor General’s Literary Award for French language drama in 2000. Then Incendies in 2003, which has become one of the most performed works of French language theatre of the century. Denis Villeneuve adapted it into a film in 2010 that won eight Genie Awards and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2011. Since April 2016 Mouawad has directed the Théâtre national de la Colline in Paris.

Hage published De Niro’s Game in 2006. It won the McAuslan First Book Prize, and then in 2008 the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth a hundred thousand euros. His second novel, Cockroach, won the Hugh MacLennan Prize. In 2019 he took the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award for a body of work.

One of them writes in French. The other writes in English. Both write, over and over, about the country they left.

They are almost never mentioned in the same sentence.

Not because anyone is hiding anything. Because Canadian culture files one of them under Quebec theatre and the other under Canadian fiction in English, and those two worlds have separate prizes, separate critics, separate festivals and separate readers. The line that runs between them is linguistic, and it is a Canadian line.

It is not a Lebanese one. From where this record sits, they are obviously the same story: two people who came out of the same collapse, landed in the same city within a decade of each other, and each took the highest honour the language in front of them had to give.

That is what a record is for. Not to discover facts nobody knows, because both of these men are famous. To put two known facts next to each other that the filing system keeps apart.

In 1920 a group of emigrants in Lower Manhattan renewed Arabic poetry from the outside. In 2011 Amin Maalouf was elected to the Académie française, and in 2023 became its Perpetual Secretary, with formal responsibility for the French language. In 2016 Wajdi Mouawad was handed a French national theatre. Rawi Hage wins in English.

Four generations, four languages, one move repeated. Arrive with nothing owed to the local tradition, and precisely because of that, be free to do something to it that an insider could not.

That is the outsider’s advantage again, and it is the same sentence this record ended on when it wrote about a man from Beirut restructuring the Swiss watch industry.

Lebanon has neither of them.

Deir el Qamar does not have a playwright running its national theatre. Beirut does not have the novelist. Those careers happened in Montreal and Paris because a war made them impossible at home, and no amount of pride in the outcome changes what it cost to produce it.

Both are true at once, and this record says both.

What can still be arranged is the small part. If the work is going to happen abroad anyway, the people doing it should at least be findable to each other, and the ones who come next should not have to discover them by accident.

Two men, one city, one war, two languages, and a filing system that kept them apart for twenty years.

Somebody should write it down.