To Paint and Die in Arabic: Code-Switching in Rabih Alameddine's Koolaids: The Art of War

Abstract

I focus on multilingual usages, specifically code-switching between English and Arabic, in Lebanese American Rabih Alameddine's 1998 novel Koolaids: The Art of War. While the novel portrays English as the emancipatory language of coming out and self-acceptance for gay Lebanese men living in the United States between the late 1970s and mid-1990s, Mohammad, a painter, only comes to terms with his impending demise by reverting to Arabic during the final stages of his losing battle with AIDS. Drawing on findings from psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, translation, and medical/neurological studies, I compare and contrast verbal encounters between Mohammad and various Lebanese and American characters to foreground strategies intended to exclude and/or include certain parties, be they characters or readers. While Arabic words actually employed are few, I argue that implied code-switching and the dynamics of speaker(s), interlocutor(s), setting(s), and context(s) establish links among AIDS, Arabic, art, and acceptance of death; Arabic resurfaces, when Mohammad is on his deathbed, as the language of his childhood and even serves as the bridge toward his “afterlife.” The primary theoretical impacts of my reading are twofold: minimal code-switching does not, as some claim, showcase shallow multilingualism, and a language-minded approach adds a new dimension to the definition of Lebanese (Arab) American literature by focusing on the emotional rather than the national/ethnic facets of the embedded native language.

Systematic Literature Review of Conversational Code-Switching in Multilingual Society From a Sociolinguistic Perspective

“…Code-switching (CS), as a common consequence of multilingualism, refers to a linguistic phenomenon where elements of two or more language varieties occur in the same place (Myers-Scotton, 2002). It has been widely studied in multilingual regions, such as Africa, North America and Asia, with diverse language combinations, including English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Indian and Filipino (Chui et al, 2016;Habyarimana et al, 2017;Hout, 2018;Kathpalia, 2018; Sá nchez & Pé rez-Garcí a, 2020). With the spread of English as a lingua franca (ELF) globally, all countries are moving out from being strictly monolingual, and have begun code-switching (Kyuchukov, 2019; Lee, 2019; Wang & Curdt-Christiansen, 2019).…”

Unpacking Language Hybridity: Functions of Code-Switching in Diasporic Arab Texts

“…switching in literature (e.g., Keller, 1979;Lipski, 1982;Callahan, 2004; Montes-Alcalá , 2012), whereas only a few have shed light on English-Arabic code-switching (e.g., Albakry & Hancock, 2008;Hout, 2018). The focus of most of these studies was on the functions of written code-switching and how this phenomenon is inserted in the narratives to more effectively express one's identity and sense of belonging while expressing certain cultural meanings.…”

“…With the intent to explore literary code-switching, Hout (2018) chose to study this phenomenon in Rabih Alameddin's Koolaids: The Art of War novel arguing how and why deep multilingualism does not inevitably correlate with the variety or even the frequency of the switched utterances obtained from the novel. Hout (2018) indicated that some of the novel's characters, especially Mohammad, used code-switching either to include or exclude certain individuals including both characters or even readers. Moreover, she discussed how code-switching and some other elements such as the context or settings can be linked with specific events or memories.…”