Threats to the Swords
2006-08-07

I recently received a generous package of review copies from Archipelago Books, a fast-growing Brooklyn-based publisher of international titles. This came in handy because I had been trying to find Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun since hearing the Palestinian author speak at a PEN conference in March, and no bookstore was carrying it. I’m glad that companies like Archipelago exist, because we’d never hear of these books otherwise.

Like many people, I feel very personally and emotionally involved in the new war that’s exploding in the Holy Lands (but we don’t treat them like they’re holy, do we?). I’m not even sure I can disengage my own emotions enough to objectively review these new books by Mahmoud Darwish and Elias Khoury. Both books are completely infused with awareness of Palestinian identity, especially Khoury’s, which relates history by telling the life story of a (choose one) terrorist/freedom fighter who lies dying on a hospital bed. I am not going to try to offer full reviews of either of these books, but I have enjoyed the opportunity to read and try to learn from them.

Elias Khoury is a strong and ambitious novelist. His Gate of the Sun is meant to be epic in scale, like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind or Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The narrative sweeps between 1948 and 1967 and 1982 and back again; we meet many people of many ethnic backgrounds, and the author’s gentle understanding illuminates each anecdote. The moral messages are sometimes heavy-handed, but the prose always maintains a light touch, with pleasing pastoral notes that remind me of William Saroyan and sad ironic dashes that recall Milan Kundera. I’m only about a third of the way through this book, but it has already made me feel a closer personal affinity towards a people I don’t know well enough.

Elias Khoury was born in Beirut, and has just published his thoughts on the current war in the London Review of Books.

Khoury is an impressive writer, but I found Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s work more stunning and distinctive. The enigmatic and crystal-clear poems in his new collection Why Did You Leave The Horse Alone? combine ancient and contemporary voices:

A bit of speech of God for the trees
is enough for me to build with words
a safe shelter
for the cranes that the hunter missed

and speak of grand problems and epiphanies:

The curtain fell
They were victorious
They crossed our entire yesterday
They forgave
the vicitim his sins when he apologized in advance
for whatever came to mind
They replaced time’s bell
and they were victorious

After reading this book, I read the poet’s biography. It is truly Kafkaesque that as a child he and his family were legally classified as “present-absent aliens” in the land where they’d lived their whole lives.

It’s fascinating to read these rich poems and become absorbed in the depths of a civilization currently glimpsed in America only through horrific newspaper headlines. I hope some Israelis are reading these books, and I hope some Palestinians are reading Israeli books as well.

Darwish has described his poetry as a “threat to the sword”. Amen to that. I highly recommend both of these books to anybody looking for something new to read.

The Iconoclast

2006-05-19

Writers seldom make headlines these days, and when they do their names are usually painted with the sparkling gold of great financial windfall or the deep red of political controversy. It was in the latter camp that Elias Khoury found himself last week. A famed Lebanese novelist, playwright and public intellectual, Khoury was concluding a year-long professorship at New York University when he was invited to attend the PEN World Voices New York Festival of International Literature, a prestigious annual event drawing prominent writers from across the globe. On the agenda, he was told, were several discussions with Israeli novelist David Grossman, the chief of which was to take place on a Sunday afternoon at the Center for Jewish History. And so, the week passed: On Monday, Khoury and Grossman, old acquaintances, sat down for a lengthy interview for a future PBS documentary about literature and politics in the Middle East. On Wednesday, both authors participated in a reading in Manhattan’s Town Hall. That morning, however, an acquaintance phoned Khoury with a troublesome bit of news: The festival’s Web site, he said, was thanking the Israeli government for its support in making Grossman’s participation possible, having paid the Israeli writer’s travel expenses. Khoury was angry. “I think,” he recently told The Jewish Week, “that my authenticity as an independent writer and intellectual prevents me from being sponsored by any government.” On stage at Town Hall, he announced that he was withdrawing from Sunday’s panel discussion. He had nothing, he stressed, against Grossman, and was happy to debate him earlier on that week. And it was not just because the sponsoring government was Israel. “I don’t participate in anything organized by my government,” he said, referring to several instances, occurring over the past several years, in which he had turned down invitations to participate in events sponsored by Lebanon. “So there was no point in participating in something sponsored by the Israeli government, especially when the Israeli government is occupying Palestinian lands. This is a point of principle,” Khoury said. Khoury was quickly replaced by the writer Jonathan Levi, sending some in the world of letters into an enraged romp and causing such noted men of letters as Andre Aciman, the Egyptian-born Jewish author, and Carlin Romano, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s literary critic, to accuse Khoury of everything from betraying the festival’s universal spirit to harboring trepidations about Jewish wealth. But the controversy, in a sense, perfectly captures the delicate, complex and often impossible challenges secular Arab intellectuals are faced with as they struggle to navigate the tempestuous waters of regional identity politics. Khoury is a case in point. In March of 2001, for example, he was among the most visible signatories of a fiercely worded statement opposing the holding of a Holocaust denial conference in Beirut. The Israeli ambassador to France, speaking to Le Monde, praised Khoury for his courage, only to receive a sharp response from the writer, condemning Israel’s policies in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It is precisely such intellectual insubordination that renders Khoury’s writing, even more than his activism, its depth, clarity and force. Take his latest novel, ”Gate of the Sun” (Archipelago Books). Published in the United States in January, it is a reconfigured “1,001 Nights,” in which Khalil, a young Palestinian refugee in the Lebanese camp of Shatila, tells stories to his aged friend Yunes, a once-famed guerrilla fighter lying comatose in a hospital bed. The stories are rich with history, deftly narrating the events of the Naqba, the word meaning disaster that Arabs use to refer to the flight of Palestinian refugees as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Into the stories of Yunes and his wife Nahila, two lovers who find themselves living on opposite sides of a suddenly impassable border, he in Lebanon and she in Israel, Khoury weaves facts, insights and observations that bring to life, for the first time ever, what is arguably the seminal event of Palestinian nationalism in particular and of modern Arab political thought in general. But Khoury insisted he is no historian. “I do not pretend that I can make a Palestinian history,” he said. “All I wanted is to create a love story, because I think a tragedy like the Palestinian tragedy can only be dealt with through love.” Love, the ideal conduit for humanism, not only makes the Palestinian tragedy palpable and personable, but also creates an atmosphere conducive to uncompromising honesty and sensitivity. It allows, for example, for Khalil to make a statement about the importance of Holocaust commemoration. “You and I and every human being on the face of the planet should have known and not stood by in silence, should have prevented that beast from destroying its victims in that barbaric, unprecedented manner,” Khalil says in the book. “Not because the victims were Jews but because their death meant the death of humanity within us.” In another instance, Khalil, deriding an attempt to conceal a theft of livestock by blaming it on Israeli soldiers, laments, “Everything foolish we do, we blame on the Jews.” Such passages, Khoury said, irked some Arab critics who, while praising the book as “filling the gap” and being the first narrative of the Naqba, nonetheless took umbrage with its nuanced approach to a conflict so often debated in bold, stark terms. And still, Khoury doesn’t despair. “When I was younger,” he said, “I thought literature can change the world. Now I think that literature can change literature. But changing literature is not a small thing. Changing literature is very important because you change the perception. But it’s a long route. When you are in a historical dead end like the one we’re at now, I think the role of literature becomes more important, because it can open windows to the soul.” In that respect, he added, his Israeli counterparts, while he respects them a great deal as writers, still have a considerable distance to travel before they succeed in changing perceptions. “In their literature,” he said of authors such as Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman, “they try to, everyone in his way, to put forward what was not put forward in Israeli culture, which is that the Palestinian culture is there.” Still, he pointed to the Israeli authors’ recurring choice to portray the Palestinians in their books as dumb, mute, young or mad as a sign that Israeli literature, even when allowing Palestinian characters to flourish, is nevertheless not ready to award them with the most precious literary gift of all, the gift of agency. “[The Israeli authors] did not arrive to present Palestinian characters as human beings, as they must be presented, for many reasons,” Khoury said. “One can be ideological obstacles,” mainly adherence to mainstream political thought, “and another can be that they don’t know them. It’s not evident that you know the other. You have to work on it.” Khoury himself did just that; to write “Gate of the Sun,” he interviewed extensively, talking not only to Palestinian refugees but also to Lebanese Jews, Israelis and everyone else relevant to his 550-page opus. And it is just such an attempt at embracing points of view, he said, that could bring a solution to the conflict. While he believes that certain steps, such as complete Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state are non-negotiable and vital, and while he supports the two-state solution despite believing, like Martin Buber, that only a bi-national state will finally bring about peace, he is also persuaded of the power of honest dialogue. Just like he prompted his literary protagonist to speak of the Holocaust, he expects Israel to apologize for the plight of the 1948 refugees, take moral responsibility and acknowledge the Palestinian right of return. These, he was quick to add, are not necessarily political imperatives wi
th concrete implications, but rather a starting point in which both national narratives are brought forth. After all, he said laughingly, it’s very much like poetry. “You cannot practice poetry. Poetry is to be poetry. Many poets think about madness, they love madness, because it’s beautiful in literature, but madness, in life, is terrible.” Similarly, asserts Khoury, an admission of right to return, while it may have some concrete implications, stands primarily as an important symbolic statement. And yet the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he acknowledges, does not exist in a vacuum. Khoury sees an overall solution to the region’s problems in the framework of a struggle against religious fundamentalism, a struggle that is often a harrowing one for secular Arab intellectuals such as himself. “We are in danger,” he said. “The fight is not to accept to be marginalized. On the cultural level, we’re not marginalized, we are still the bulk of the Arabic culture. But on the political level it’s very difficult now, and the major tendency in the world is to marginalize people like us.” In the battle against marginalization, then, literature is a sturdy bastion. Addressing why it had to be him, a Lebanese-born Christian with no family relations to Palestinians, who wrote such a seminal Palestinian narrative, Khoury said that “for the Palestinians, the Naqba is not finished; now the Naqba is taking place in the West Bank. You cannot write about something that’s going on. You feel like you have to defend what’s left. Literature must defend what’s left.”

Palestine Lost

2006-06-12
Elias Khoury’s landmark novel of the Palestinian ‘catastrophe’ traverses 50 years of trauma and abandonment, with most of its criticism focused inward.
“Umm Hassan is dead.” The story starts with an air of finality and doom, although, like a dream, this saga has no clear beginning or end. Umm Hassan, an aged Palestinian refugee, matriarch and midwife who helped bring forth life amid the desolate ruins of the Shatila camp on the outskirts of Beirut, has passed away. And with her go the memories. By now, the generation of Palestinians who ended up in Lebanon in 1948, and who are old enough to have some firsthand recollection of the Galilee they left behind, is fading away. The link with the lost land becomes more tenuous, only to be replaced by a creeping nothingness. The remaining exiles are dislocated, forlorn and oddly incapacitated. Tied to a disappearing past, their flights of imagination become increasingly surreal. InGate of the Sun, Elias Khoury has woven a lush tapestry of haunting beauty, of mystery, fantasy and raw truth. The winding threads and the myriad characters, whose tales are mostly tragic, spin a literary odyssey of extraordinary breadth and depth. First published in Arabic in Beirut in 1998, the novel, though a work of fiction, is based on research and anecdotes accumulated by Khoury, an acclaimed Lebanese author, over the years. A committed advocate for Palestinian rights, he was involved through the 1970s with the PLO-affiliated Palestine Research Center in Beirut. Humphrey Davies’s often poetic English translation sparkles like a jewel. Gate of the Suntells the story, or stories, of the Palestinian exodus—the nakba, or “catastrophe”—of 1948, and the consequences stemming from the establishment of the Jewish state. It is a chronicle of love and death, wars and shattered communities, fragmented families and ambiguous identities. Protagonists go by multiple names, and even the “I” switches characters mid-episode, as the narrator, Dr. Khalil, seems to get absorbed into the jumble of memories he conjures up. Dr. Khalil, like a modern-day Scheherazade, is trying to stave off death. In this version of the Arabian Nights, he hopes to breathe new life into his comatose mentor, Yunes, a locally renowned Palestinian fighter with the fedayeen and a latter-day PLO minor “official” who has suffered a stroke. Everyone else in Shatila has given up on Yunes, and treats him as if he is already a corpse as he lies in the camp’s Galilee Hospital. Khalil, however, a one-time junior fighter, feeds him, cleans him, tends to his sores, and, mostly, attempts to rouse him with incessant talk. “If talking were a cure, we’d have liberated Palestine long ago,” Dr. Khalil’s corrupt boss berates him mockingly. As Yunes’s story unravels through Dr. Khalil’s monologue, so does Khalil’s own and those of countless relatives, neighbors, lovers, comrades and acquaintances. Echoes from the distant past mingle with the present. At the core is Yunes’s lifelong affair with Nahila, his child bride, whom he grows to love only when it is almost too late. After their Galilee village, Ain al-Zaitoun, is destroyed by the Jewish Palmah forces in 1948, Nahila moves with her parents-in-law to nearby Deir al-Asad, another village that survives to this day, while Yunes goes to join the fighters in Lebanon. For years, he slips across the border for visits with Nahila, and fathers a small tribe. Because Yunes is a fugitive from the Israeli authorities, the pair meet in a cave on the outskirts of Deir al-Asad that they have named Bab al-Shams, Arabic for “Gate of the Sun.” Nahila’s presence transforms the dank cavern into a palace. For Yunes, Bab al-Shams is more than a refuge: It is a secret village, a country, a world; it is a liberated patch of Palestine. The book’s narrative strands span across time, with no particular chronology or order, traversing 50 years of trauma and abandonment with nostalgic empathy and compassion. Yet Khoury does not wallow in sentiment. Dr. Khalil, a self-deprecating, 40-year-old who was born in the camp, holds a mirror up to the cause and is far from convinced by what he sees. He realizes that his erstwhile hero Yunes, like the unfortunate captives in the allegory of Socrates’ cave, has been observing life through the shadows of images. When Nahila finally forces Yunes into the sunlight to face reality, pouring out her heart to him about how he left her to raise a brood of children alone, he finds the truth perplexing. After that visit, it is unclear whether he ever returns. Dr. Khalil, abandoned by his own mother as a child, questions the heroic version of Palestinian history that he’s been fed. “Like all the other children who grew up in the camps, I heard all the stories, but I never understood,” he relates. “Do you imagine it’s enough to tell us we weren’t defeated in 1948—because we never fought—to make us accept the dog’s life we’ve led since we were born?” He questions the romantic longing for the impoverished, primitive society of old, in which Umm Hassan “had gotten married at fifteen ‘to chase away the chickens from the front of the house,’ as her mother-in-law had said when she’d asked for her hand.” When another old woman is dying in the camp, but is obsessed with the fact that she hadn’t managed to bury her dead husband properly before fleeing in 1948, nobody will put her mind at rest by pretending that he has been reburied. “We’re not even capable of lying,” Dr. Khalil remarks cynically. “Incapable of war, incapable of lying, incapable of truth.” He is as harsh on himself. He acknowledges that he is not a real doctor, having received a few months’ training in “revolutionary medicine” in China. And that Galilee Hospital is not a real hospital. It has gone from being a glorified clinic to an improvised old-age home, a storage facility for medicine, and a kind of purgatory for Yunes as he hovers between life and death. Nor does Dr. Khalil spare us his own tale of cowardice, revealing that he survived the 1982 massacre in the Shatila camp by telling the armed Christian militiamen who broke into the hospital, in his Chinese English, that he was a Turk. They believed him. Then he ran away. While there are reports and rumors among the refugees that the Jews have turned Israel into a “European” country, the Galilee Hospital of Shatila festers in filth and misery, mainly because nobody cares. Dr. Khalil bemoans the fact that the Palestinians have not properly documented their history. The names of those massacred in Shatila were never collected, only numbers, and even those are disputed. “We can’t even manage a decent burial ground, let alone a monument,” he laments. “For the fifteen hundred individuals who fell at Sabra and Shatila, we built nothing. The mass grave has turned into a field where children play soccer.” Khoury’s fedayeen fighters are depicted as a relatively benign and bumbling bunch, dissociated from such cruel historical incidents as the murder of over 20 Israeli schoolchildren in Ma’alot in 1974. Khalil describes himself and Yunes as having been opposed to hijacking and the killing of civilians, though in his vegetative state, Yunes is not in a position to confirm or deny anything. Likewise, Khoury’s treatment of Israeli Jews remains largely in the realm of fiction. The Zionist forces in 1948 are predictably brutal, but Palestinian and Jewish identities are purposely blurred in places, perhaps to suggest what Khoury sees as the nonsensical phenomenon of one people having replaced another in the land, or to hint at a utopian future where the two can swap places, or even unite. When Umm Hassan embarks on a journey to visit her ruined village, she finds her old home inhabited by a Lebanese Jewess called Ella Dweik, who pines for her native Beirut. So the Palestinians are the authentic heirs of the land. The Israelis replace indigenous, life-sustaining olive trees with foreign pines and palms. Decades later, the Palestinian exiles still know where to find the village spring with the sweetest water, while the Jews, according to Umm Hassan, “don’t drink water, just fizzy drinks.” At the same time, Khoury portrays the Palestinians as h
aving become strangers not only in their own land, but to one another as well. The nakba produced a degree of national cohesion: Describing the influx of refugees into Gaza in 1948, he writes, “It almost seemed as though there were no Gazans left in Gaza—Gaza dissolved in a sea of refugees and became the first place to be collectively Palestinian. It was there the Palestinians discovered they weren’t groups of people belonging to various regions and villages; the disaster had produced a single people.” But the few times that Khoury’s protagonists refer to the nascent Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip 50 years on, they speak of those places, too, like a foreign country. Dr. Khalil ponders aloud what might have become of him had he left Beirut on the boats for Tunis with the other PLO fighters in 1982. “I’d probably be in Gaza,” he says, “and my status would be ambiguous. Do you think they’d have accepted me as a doctor there? Our leaders, as I understand it, are setting up a legal authority, and this authority needs educated people, crooks, merchants, contractors, business men, and security services. Our role has come to an end. They won’t be needing fedayeen anymore.” There are no heroes in Gate of the Sun, only heroines. “Ordinary” Palestinian wives, mothers and daughters, who manage to create a home out of nothing, and who bring about the rebirth of a nation through grit and determination. In the end, Yunes’s only tangible achievement is the family that his beloved Nahila has raised in Deir al-Asad without him. Two sons become car mechanics and fulfill their dream of opening a garage. Another studies for a doctorate in Arabic literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The children get married and have their own children. All name their first sons Yunes. “The hundred thousand have become a million,” Dr. Khalil quotes Yunes as having said of those who stayed behind in 1948, “and the eight hundred thousand who were thrown out have become five million. They bring in immigrants and we have children, and we’ll see who wins in the end.” Gate of the Sun has no end, because the saga is not over yet. There is a sliver of hope that the refugees may somehow be redeemed. But Dr. Khalil, for one, would probably find it ironic—and telling—that this epic masterpiece of the Palestinian collective experience was composed not by a refugee who lived through the “catastrophe” and remembers the Palestine that was lost, but by a Lebanese Christian who was born in 1948.

A Lebanese Writer’s Palestinian Story
2006-04-14

Elias Khoury has enough to deal with in his hometown. The editor in chief of the weekly literary supplement of An Nahar, the secular, leftist Beirut daily, recently lost two colleagues: columnist Samir Kassir and publisher Gebran Tueni, both of whom were presumably murdered by the Syrian government. “Everybody like me—intellectuals who are still playing a part in the struggle for independence and against the dictatorship of Syria, people like us are in danger,” Khoury noted in a recent interview with the Forward.

And yet, for his new novel Khoury has taken on a different topic: the “Naqba,” the term given by the Palestinians to the “tragedy” that befell them when Israel was created. This book, “Gate of the Sun” (translated from Arabic by Humphrey Davies), has been a success around the world: A five-hour film based on the novel (a joint French-Egyptian production) was shown at the most recent Jerusalem Film Festival; The New York Times Book Review called it “an imposingly rich and realistic novel, a genuine masterwork,” and Ammiel Alcalay, writing in The Village Voice, noted wryly that “the first true magnum opus of the Palestinian saga, ‘Gate of the Sun,’ has been written by a Lebanese novelist.”

Khoury—a Christian by birth, a graduate of the University of Paris in social history and a fierce secularist—is still marked by his radical student days in Paris in the 1960s. He has been engaged with the Palestinian cause ever since. His novel’s three main characters are Khalil, a young Palestinian who lives in the Shatila camp while caring for his mentor; Yunes, a weathered Palestinian fighter who, before his sickness, fought alongside non-fictional characters like George Habash and Yassar Arafat, and Nahila, Yunes’s wife, who remained in the Israeli Galilee with their children. “Gate of the Sun” graphically tells the story of Palestinians from the northwest Galilee, where the Palmach Israeli fighters fought during Israel’s War of Independence to retain the Galilee for Israel. The story extends to the aftermath of what happened to the Palestinians who ended up in Lebanese-based refugee camps and those who stayed in what became modern-day Israel. Yunes is in a coma in a Beirut hospital. By way of nursing him, Khalil is retelling stories to Yunes about his family and village, and about the Palestinian exit from Israel from 1948 to the present.

In the atmosphere of the Middle East—where each fact, figure and inch of land is heavily debated—a novel employing real people and real events alongside fictional ones was bound to raise some eyebrows. Indeed, when the book was published in Hebrew it met with critics even among the Israeli left. “Stories of this kind actually minimize or undermine the Palestinian tragedy to focus on things that didn’t happen,” Ha’aretz journalist Tom Segev wrote, referring to Khoury’s mixing of fact with fiction when describing the reminiscences of Palestinians who fled from Israel in 1948. Yet, historian Mordechai Bar-On, former chief education officer of the Israel Defense Forces, told the Forward: “The film and the novel give a strong image of the fact that what the Palestinians call the Naqba [the disaster] actually happened, and some 650,000 of them became refugees.”

Ironically, critics in the Arab world have also attacked the novelist, because, as Sasson Somekh, professor emeritus of Arabic literature at Tel Aviv University, said, “Khoury was steadfast in preferring to promote a literary dialogue with Israeli readers.”

For Khoury, the larger point of the novel was to portray the broad, collective Palestinian consciousness. “The art of writing is the art of listening to your characters,” he said. “If you don’t feel that the characters become independent and real, the whole work is a failure.”

“I never pretended that I’m writing history; that’s not my job,” he added. “These stories are real in the sense that they reflect the atmosphere in which the Palestinians live…. The novel tried to rebuild the atmosphere of both collective and individual memory in order to arrive at a point when the story can begin…. What the novel is saying is that this is the Palestinian memory.” Khoury—who, with a handful of other Arab intellectuals, including Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, protested against a 2001 Beirut conference that denied the occurrence of the Holocaust—also makes a point of raising this example of Jewish tragedy in his novel. As he sits beside Yunes’s bed, recalling Yunes’s past and the political turmoil of the Palestinians from 1948 onward, Khalil says to his comatose mentor: “Don’t tell me you didn’t know, and above all, don’t say that it wasn’t our fault. You and I and every human being on the face of the planet should have known and not stood by in silence, should have prevented that beast from destroying its victims in that barbaric, unprecedented manner. Not because the victims were Jews but because their death meant the death of humanity within us.” At a time when some Arab leaders are denying the Holocaust, Khoury is insistent on understanding the Jewish trauma.

Reflecting on the present, Khoury said that his “political position is that the only recourse for Israelis and Palestinians is a two-state solution, but to arrive in a decent way to a two-state solution we must arrive at a deep, deep understanding on an intellectual level. First, Israelis must admit that the Naqba was a crime and apologize for it, and the Palestinians and Arabs must integrate into their memory the tragedy and catastrophe of the Holocaust. To accept the other in a deep way is to accept its memory. I cannot accept the Jewish state if I don’t accept the Jewish memory and vice versa.”

In a few weeks, Khoury—who also teaches at New York University each spring as the global distinguished professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies—will leave the respite of Greenwich Village for Beirut, where daily realities will intrude. “We paid a price. It’s really sad and terrible,” Khoury explained, recalling his dead colleagues. “The only crime was in writing and defending freedom of speech and the independence of Lebanon. Death is terrible, this absence of people you worked with and loved, but freedom is so precious, you are willing to die for it.”

Jo-Ann Mort is a co-author of “Our Hearts Invented a Place: Can Kibbutzim Survive in Today’s Israel?” (Cornell University Press, 2003).

The Sanford Herald
Wednesday, April 19, 2006 Author pens acclaimed epic of the Palestinian saga One of the Arabic world’s most higly regarded authors, Elias Khoury was vaulted onto the international stage when “Gate of the Sun” was published in Arabic and then translated into Hebrew and French. Now, through Humphrey Davies’ brilliant translation into English, it is available for the first time in the United States. “Gate of the Sun” is a remarkable novel that ushers the reader inside the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. Here, barely existing in the deserted Galilee Hospital, are two men—Yunes, an unflinching hero of the Palestinian resistance, who has fallen into a coman, and his friend, Dr. Khalil, a teller of stories. Striving to bring some semblance of life ot the patient, whom he addresses as “my swimmer in sheets,” Khalil opens the floodgates of memory to reveal the history of people expelles from their villages in Galilee and wandering without hope through the wasteland stretching in time from 1948 to the present. Khoury’s exquisite descriptive passages humanize the complex Palestinian struggle, turning it into a multihued tapestry of life and death. During the horrendously orchestrated, catastrophic exodus of 1948, known in Arabic as the Nakba, approximately 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their lands. As his reminiscences begin, Khalil says, “I sit with death and keep it company.” Then he carries the comatose Yunes on recollection’s rambling journey followed by Palestinians, driven from their villages into Lebanon, where it is impossible for refugees to obtain a worker’s permit. Thus, people whose faces are etched with pain and sadness, spend time in recalling stories of unbelievable suffering. In their haunted memories, souls of the dead live in treesm which must be cut down “so that the souls fall and find peace in their graves.” Threading through the narrative are accounts of torture so explicit they are difficult to read. “They stood me up—I couldn’t do it on my own—and one of them propped me up against the wall while the other started hitting me on my mouth with a chain wrapped around his fist…I spat and gagged, and the man held my mouth shut with his hand to force me to swallow my shattered teeth.” Replete with incidental anecdotes about individual sufferings, “Gate of the Sun” affords numerous dizzying glimpses of the vast Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “History is our becoming gods and monsers at the same time,” writes Khoury, who shows us in sometimes contrived flashbacks how the whole of society suffers from such destruction. Because the novel, told without chronology, jums from event to event, it is difficult to follow without having a rudimentary knowledge of the region’s history. Still, this is an imposing epic that demands to be recognized as an indisputable masterwork, one whose insights have gained even greater importance since the ascendance of the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas. A Christian born in Beirut, Khoury is the author of 11 novels, three plays and several books of internationally-acclaimed literary criticism. He is editor-in-chief of Beirut’s daily nespaper, An-Nahar, and had taught at the American University in Beirut and Columbia University. Currently a Global Distinguished Professor at New York university, he divides his time between Beirut and New York. Davies holds a first-class honors degree in Arabic from Cambridge University and a Ph. D. in Near East studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He has spent 36 years working and living in the Arab world, 20 of these in Egypt, with lengthy periods in Palestine, Sudan and Tunisia. His translations include Naguib Mahfouz’s “Thebes at War” and Alaa al-Aswani’s “The Yacoubian Building.”

Gate of the Sun

Spring 2006

Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun, marvelously translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies, is far from the only fictional or poetic treatment of the events following the 1948 Arab-Israeli war—dubbed “the catastrophe” by the Palestinians—but it is certainly one of the grandest. Two Palestinian men are in a room in a makeshift hospital in a refugee camp outside Beirut in Lebanon. One lies comatose, slowly expiring. The other tells him stories, hoping to talk him back to life. These stories, which begin as anecdotes, grow in length and power until the room overflows with them. They are stories about the life of the dying man, Yunes, a fighter in the Palestinian resistance, who for years crossed into Israel at great risk to visit his wife, Nahilah, in Galilee. They are also the stories of an entire displaced people. One suspects it is not just the dying Yunes that Khalil seeks to keep alive: hope itself is the secret, battered protagonist of this enormous 20th-century reworking of the 1001 Nights.

The stories Khalil tells about Yunes’s life are woven into an immense fabric that encompasses many other lives, from Umm Hassan, Palestinian midwife and beloved figure in the Shatila refugee camp, to Ella Dueck, a Jewish woman originally from Beirut now living in Umm Hassan’s former home in Galilee, to Nahilah, forced to raise her children alone and to deal with decades of fear and uncertainty in the face of Yunes’s long absences, to a host of other characters, including Khalil himself. Indeed, a great deal of Gate of the Sun‘s power derives from Khoury’s placement of his narrator directly in the story. Again and again, we return to Khalil’s voice, intimate, labyrinthine and seemingly tireless; again and again, we return to a character fully implicated in the events he describes. “I was seventeen when I saw flares for the first time. At the time, I was a fedayeen fighter, one of the first cadre that came through Irneh in Syria to southern Lebanon to build the first fedayeen base.”

Given the seamlessness between Khalil’s stories and his own role and/or stake in them, it is perhaps not surprising that he allows himself to speak not just to or of Yunes, but as Yunes and the voices that comprise his psyche. This proliferation of points of view and voices is remarkably seductive; when during one of their meetings Nahilah lays determined siege to Yunes’s sense of self-importance, the reader is likely to feel that he or she is being addressed:

“You don’t know,” Nahilah said. “You don’t know anything. You think life is those distances you cross to come to me, carrying the smell of the forest. And you say you’re a lone wolf. But my dearest, it’s not a matter of the smell of the wolf or the smell of wild thyme or of the Roman olive tree, it’s a matter of people who’ve become strangers to each other. Do you know who we are at least?”

This passage, like so many others, takes place in Bab Al Shams, or the eponymous Gate of the Sun, the cave where the majority of Nahilah and Yunes’s life together occurs. It is appropriate that Khoury would choose a cave as one of the central locations for his epic, as this is a novel about the Palestinian situation that deals as much with interiors as with exteriors–as much with the deep complexity of human minds and hearts as with the heartbreaking ravages of loss and exile surrounding them. Stories proliferate and bifurcate and fold in on themselves in Bab Al Shams, as they do in Yunes’s hospital room, where Khalil can’t stop telling them, even when he wants to:

My eyelids are weighed down with stories…. Stories are for sleep, not for death. Now it’s time for us to stop telling stories for a while, because one story leads to another, and night blankets the words.

But first tell me, what is the story of that spirit woman and that man who drowned in the circles of the red sun?

In Khalil’s stories, which are also Yunes’s, Nahilah’s and—through the power of Khoury’s magnificent writing—ours, illusions are built up, punctured, and built up again in an inexorable cycle that leaves behind it the kind of searing clarity that is ever-more indispensable as the troubling events in the Middle East continue to unfold.

Violence and blighted hopes

2006-01-15

With this long, demanding, powerful novel, Elias Khoury, Professor of Arabic Literature at New York University, born in Lebanon in 1948, presents the whole tragedy of Palestine through a tangle of individual stories. He shows how such stories, told and retold, become myths, how myths can inspire and also destroy, and how hard it is to discover, let alone tell, the truth.

His chief storyteller—the book is written in the first person—is a youngish man, Dr Khaleel, who works in a crumbling hospital in a refugee camp on the edge of Beirut. Khaleel spends his days and nights at the bedside of a comatose older man, Yunis, trying to keep him alive not just by devoted nursing but by reminding him of his life as one of the veteran leaders of Palestinian resistance. Khaleel’s task is hopeless, but he desperately needs to understand not just Yunis’s life but his own, which has also been determined by exile and war. Memory is the weapon with which he fights death.

It would be a mistake, however, to see this novel as fundamentally political or symbolic. It is not about abstractions, but about people. Khoury is not a propagandist; he, like Yunis, is always on the side of life.

Khaleel recalls many conversations with Yunis, in which his admired friend and mentor remains resolutely unheroic. ‘You were a hero, and you laughed at heroes,’ says Khaleel, as he recalls the savage story of how Yunis and his family were thrown out of their village in 1948 and how for the rest of his life Yunis fought the Israeli occupation and lived on the run, slipping back over the border to snatch time in a secret cave with Naheeleh, his beautiful wife.

Khoury’s account is based, apparently, on years of listening to exiles and refugees’ own stories of displacement, violence and blighted hopes. With this novel he celebrates not only the fighters but the women of Palestine, old and young, their anguish, their courage and their realism. Naheeleh speaks some of the most telling lines in the book: ‘Why did you promise you’d all come back?’ she asks Yunis. ‘Why did you make me believe you, even though you knew otherwise?’

The novel reads well (the translator is Humphrey Davies) but remains a challenge for anyone not familiar with Arab names and six decades of Middle-Eastern history. In the end, though, what stays in the mind is not a history lesson but the rich humanity of a wise and generous-spirited novel.

After Elias Khoury’s GATE OF THE SUN (Archipelago Books, $26), readers can no longer pretend that Palestine is merely a fugitive state of mind, a convenient Arab myth, a traumatic tribal memory, and somebody else’s problem. This remarkable novel out of Lebanon, a skillful reshuffling of the 1001 Nights with a doctor in a refugee camp playing the part of Scheherazade, fills in the blank spaces on the Middle Eastern map in our Western heads—Palestine as history, as literature, as casualty list, as psych ward, as inferiority complex, as principality of exile. Yunes, a hero of the resistance, a legend of Fatah, lies comatose in Shatila, attended by a self-doubting motormouth named Khalil, more a nurse than a doctor by virtue of several months medical training in revolutionary China, who seems to believe that he can bring Yunes back to consciousness by telling him stories: “This way we can save some time and kill it before it kills us.” These stories, moving through time from body to body and place to place, across borders and genders, from the living to the dead, recapitulate more than half a century of atrocity and oppression, defeat and displacement, betrayal and recrimination. It is one long catastrophic exodus, with hundreds of victims and thousands of alibis. Yes, there is an excess of politics, death, and polemic; of Amman, Beirut, Algiers, and Tunis; of quicklime on puffed-up corpses and martyrs on the threshing floor. There is, on purpose, an excess of everything, up to and including the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Each story is a cave, within which nest other stories—of olive trees and blood clots, arak and sesame, wild chicory and columbine; bags of bones, Sufi poets, the music of Fairouz, and pillows full of thorns; temporary doctors in temporary hospitals in temporary countries and photographs that die unless they’re watered—not to mention a troupe of theatrical French, hoping to mount a play by Jean Genet that will tell the truth about the Arabs. But with Gate of the Sun, the Arabs no longer need Genet, if they ever did.

Tale of a hurt that does not heal

2006-02-21

Gate of the Sun by Lebanese writer Elias Khoury is probably not going to soar to the top of bestseller lists in the United States. And that’s a shame, because it really should.

Admittedly, at first glance, the novel seems to have a couple of strikes against it. It’s lengthy—in fact, ‘sprawling’ is probably a better description. And it tells stories of the Palestinian people—stories some readers may be quick to assume will be angry, violent, and partisan in their presentation.

The violence is, in fact, impossible to omit. This, the narrator tells us, is “a desolate people that has grown accustomed to losing its children,” a culture in which “war became a ghost that seeped into people’s clothes and walked among them.”

But anger and ideology do not tinge this haunting saga. On the contrary, humanity and compassion are what give this rich and teeming narrative its shape, creating a work that in its essence is a heartfelt plea for sanity and peace.

The book was originally published in Arabic in 1998. It has since achieved acclaim throughout the Arab world and Europe, and now makes its US debut in an English translation. “

Gate of the Sun” is best explained as a contemporary version of “1001 Nights.” The novel is a long string of stories one Palestinian tells another as he sits by his hospital bed.

The narrator is Khalil Ayyoub, also known as “Dr. Khalil.” The only medical training he has had was a three-month crash course in China. However, Khalil asks, in the world of the Palestinians, where so many dwell in illusion so much of the time, what does it matter?

Khalil is working in a hospital in a crumbling Palestinian refugee camp. One of the patients, he discovers, is a man he knows—a friend and even once a hero of Khalil’s, Yunes Abu Salem, a fabled warrior of the Palestinian resistance. Yunes is now in a coma and not expected to live, but Khalil sits by his bedside for hours, telling him stories.

The stories that Khalil tells are a heartrending, interlocking tangle of loss and hurt. They describe a people who have never ceased to ache. They long endlessly—and perhaps pointlessly—for houses and villages that no longer exist. They carry ancient keys, they swap photographs, video tapes, and stories, and they wait—even though the future they are waiting for often seems to have little connection with reality.

Many of the stories, Khalil admits, may no longer be accurate. They have been told and retold so many times that it’s impossible to know. Khalil himself is part of a generation too young to remember Palestine. Yet his entire life has been shaped by the idea of it. It makes him wonder if “memory is a sickness … a sickness that has made you imagine things and build your entire lives on the illusions of memory?”

Some of the stories that Khalil tells Yunes are actually Yunes’s own stories that he once shared with Khalil. But Khalil has now begun to question them.

Yunes told him of a cave dug out of rocks (Bab al-Shams or “gate of the sun”) where he lived for years while hiding from the Israelis. But others have told Khalil that there is no such place. Yunes has also long glorified his love for his brave and devoted wife, Nahilah. Yet now Khalil wonders: Was that really love or just a long series of painful sacrifices that finally exhausted Nahilah?

Other stories are of people Khalil and Yunes have known in common, ordinary villagers who since 1948 have been dreaming of houses, animals, and land they once owned. In their world the loss of children, parents, siblings, and even a meaningful sense of existence has become almost commonplace.

They include the story of Umm Hassan, the midwife whose anguish finally drove her to walk out of a refugee camp and back to her house in Palestine. There, she found an Israeli woman. Far from denouncing her, the Israeli woman showed her an earthenware water jug she’d been keeping for her in the exact spot where Umm Hassan left it. And when she learned that Umm Hassan now lived in Beirut, she began to cry. That was her real home she explained—the city she missed and longed to return to.

The Palestinians, like the rest of mankind, should have risen in rebellion against the Holocaust, Khalil concludes. Not, he says, “because the victims were Jews but because their death meant the death of humanity within us.”

Khoury is not a Palestinian himself but he has spent years talking to Palestinians and recording their stories.

His sense of connection with their plight is obvious. Perhaps it required an outsider, however, to fully grasp the fragility of their situation. Without a land, what holds a people together? Only a language—and stories.

And yet, what a tenuous and burdensome tie it is. “Why do we,” Khalil asks an unconscious Yunes, “of all the peoples of the world, have to invent our country every day so everything isn’t lost and we find we’ve fallen into eternal sleep?”

Opening the ‘Gate’

Elias Khoury’s magnum opus of the Palestinian struggle, “Gate of the Sun,” finally has its day in the sun in American literary circles. Since it was first published in Beirut in 1998, Elias Khoury’s “Gate of the Sun” has been translated into 10 languages (including Hebrew) and garnered wide acclaim in Europe and the Middle East. The novel won the Palestine Prize and was named book of the year by Le Monde Diplomatique in 2002. It was also adapted for film by Egyptian director Yousry Nasrallah. Despite all the accolades and attention, a U.S. edition of “Gate of the Sun” didn’t appear until last year. Khoury, who was born in 1948 and raised a Christian in Beirut and now teaches at New York University, seemed at a loss to explain the difficulties of finding a publisher in this country. “It really is astonishing that it took so long,” he said in an interview. “I don’t know, maybe you’re in a better position to explain that to me. I suppose the story itself is something that might cause problems for American publishers.” Khoury’s “Gate of the Sun” was preceded by 11 novels (two of which were originally published by the University of Minnesota Press), three plays and several volumes of literary criticism. But with “Gate of the Sun,” Khoury said, he finally pulled off something he’d been striving for in his other works. “I struggled for a long time to find the adequate means of communicating the Palestinian struggle,” he said. “I’ve been working in and visiting the refugee camps for a very long time and absorbed a lot of stories. My work as a journalist played a large role in the learning process — asking questions, learning to listen and trying to distill things with a sort of journalistic clarity. The challenge is always to address the complexity of a present that is loaded in the same moment with memories of the past and uncertain prospects and hopes for the future, and I think I found a way to do that through the classic oral storytelling tradition of Arabic culture. I feel like with this book I finally arrived at a kind of purity of style.” Khoury worked on “Gate of the Sun” for seven years, and he says the process was “a journey to learn and know things I didn’t know or understand. If literature is not constantly rethinking everything, it is not doing its job. That’s the job for every writer: to forget all his or her presuppositions and strive to discover new perspectives and realities. A writer, of course, is the first person to learn something from what he writes, and this novel changed my life, changed my way of looking at the world. Writing this book was a kind of deep and human experience for me. Ultimately, I truly feel that I was simply an agent; the real author of this book is the Palestinian people.” Brad Zellar is a Minneapolis writer for the Rake magazine, where he produces the Yo Ivanhoe Web log. Minneapolis Star Tribune
February 25, 2006 ‘Back to the beginning’ A man tries to keep his dying friend alive by telling him the story of his own life in this profoundly realistic novel of the Palestinian experience. John Freeman, Special To The Star Tribune In “1001 Nights,” Scheherazade staved off death by telling her would-be executioner one story after the next. The narrator of Elias Khoury’s profoundly moving novel, “Gate of the Sun,” employs a similar strategy. Stuck in a rundown hospital in a refugee camp in Beirut, Khalil tries to revive his dying friend Yunes by telling the man the story of his own life. In doing so, Khalil also attempts to keep alive their remembrances of Galilee, the land that in 1948, through force and decree, became Israel. Like many Palestinians, Yunes became homeless that year and went on the run. While his wife raised their children, he moved from camp to camp, foraging in deserted towns for olives, dodging bullets. Each year he buried more friends, and missed out on more of his life and his dear love, Nahilah, whom he secretly met in a cave called the Gate of the Sun. One night his wife came to him there with their dead son, his skull smashed in by an Israeli settler’s rock. Yunes planned revenge and then backed out, ashamed, humiliated. As he spins this tale, Khalil pauses to feed Yunes his daily meals, washing him before bedsores develop, clipping his nails and trimming his beard. He occasionally tries to convince Yunes that this is all a dream. “You think you’re in a hospital, but you’re mistaken. This isn’t a hospital, it just resembles a hospital. Everything here isn’t itself but a simulacrum of itself. We say house but we don’t live in houses, we live in places that resemble houses. We say Beirut but we aren’t really in Beirut, we’re in a semblance of Beirut.” This powerful sense of dislocation reverberates throughout “Gate of the Sun.” As he talks, Khalil picks up stories and adds them to the mix. He recalls poets who were assassinated, friends who were killed when Beirut was shelled in 1981. He reminds Yunes of how he was once forced to swallow his own teeth, when Lebanese interrogators caught him trying to sneak over the border into Israel. This is a profoundly realistic novel. There are no flowery 10-car pileups of metaphors, no willowy sentence fragments. There is a reason for this, as Khalil explains: “I won’t describe the darkness to you, because I hate describing things. Ever since I was in school I’ve hated describing things. The teacher would give us an essay to write: Describe a rainy day. And I wouldn’t know how, because I hate comparing things. Things can only be described in their own terms, and when we compare them, we forget them. A girl’s face is like a girl’s face and not like the moon. The whiteness and the roundness and everything else are different. When we say that a girl’s face is like the moon, we forget the girl. We make the description so that we can forget, and I don’t like to forget. Rain is rain, isn’t that enough?” In giving this testimony as directly as possible, Khalil — and by extension, Khoury himself — has told the long, sad story of Palestinians. He has recounted their humiliation and betrayal. He tells of the massacres that occurred in the refugee camps, such as Shatila, carried out by Lebanese Christians and cheered on by Israeli soldiers. He tells of the souring of spirit among refugees as they remain in exile in spite of international support. After all, in 1948, the U.N. approved resolution 194, which stated “The refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” Every year this resolution is reaffirmed, but not realized. As “Gate of the Sun” reveals, the most powerful right of return possessed by Palestinians is contained in their stories, where their past exists forever and their right to it is unmediated. “Do you remember when you used to say, ’Back to the beginning!’ and would stamp your foot?” asks Khalil of his silent friend. “And after the Israelis went into Beirut, after each new thing that happened, you’d spit as though you were wiping out the past, and you’d say, ‘Back to the beginning.’ ” “The Gate of the Sun” is his powerful deliverance on that promise. John Freeman is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in New York City.