Alameddine’s Koolaids illustrates that the geographical dislocation is not only the source of the protagonists’s, Mohammad and Samir, sense of unfriendliness in the adapted homeland, but the eccentricity, discrimination, and hybridity have much to do with the protagonists’s crises and struggles. Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain argues that the body in pain defines reality and ‘for the person in pain, so incontestably and unnegotiably present is it that ‘having pain’ may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to ‘have certainty’” (4). Thus, the agony of physical pain on the self and others is an expression of severe psychological suffering and exercise of power. Wail Hassan in Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and …show more content…
They are refugees from the Lebanese Civil War as they describe the violence of the war upon their experience of exile in the United States. Salah Hassan in Unstated: Narrating War in Lebanon states Lebanon as “unstated state” which “refers to a condition of a state that is no longer a state, a state that has little or no sovereignty, a state that is bereft to the means to uphold or impose the rule of law in its territory or at its borders through the mechanism of force” (1622). Hassan continues that one of the numerous outcomes of the unstated state is the stateless subject that includes migrants, refugees, and exiles. Mohammad and Samir are both refugees who struggle with the cracking of national and familial ties as they flee sectarian violence at …show more content…
Moreover, Lynne Rogers in Hypocrisy and Homosexuality in the Middle East: Selim Nassib’s Oum and Rabih Alameddine’s Koolaids states that this space serves to facilitate “a critical analysis of the political failings in the Middle East” (145), as well as those in the United States by zooming in on hypocrisy, be it political, moral, religious, social, and medical pharmaceutical. These characters Mohammad, Samir, and Makram are torn between the origin and the host countries which affect their identities and their family