Lebanese novelist further explores alienation in ‘Yalo’

FICTION | New book is a swirl of motifs that finally come together

 

January 18, 2008 BY RAYYAN AL-SHAWAF   Elias Khoury, the Lebanese novelist whose magnum opus, Gate of the Sun, masterfully recounts the Palestinian saga of dispossession and exile, continues his lifelong inquiry into alienation in Yalo. As with several of Khoury’s novels, the eponymous protagonist ekes out an existence on the margins of society.

 

When we first meet Yalo, he is undergoing interrogation for crimes committed in peacetime Lebanon. The war, during which Yalo fought in the ranks of a Christian militia, is over, yet “when it ended, [it] left an immense void in his life.” Though often unfocused, Yalo is a haunting tale of a man who can only do wrong — even when he means well — and of a vile correctional system that annihilates those who fall into its clutches.

 

Around torture-laced interrogation swirl several vague philosophic motifs that always fascinate, but only occasionally congeal as tangible story elements. Successful examples include: the uses and abuses of ethno-cultural identity — Yalo’s grandfather is a Syriac/Kurd/Arab who chooses to identify solely with his Syriac heritage; the perils of inheriting memories — contemporary Lebanese of all sects relate centuries-old traumas as though they experienced them personally, and the way meaning straddles languages — Arabic-speaking Yalo is rendered mute in France, but even in Lebanon cannot express his love to his beloved Shirin or explain his actions to the interrogator without recourse to the few Syriac words he knows.

 

Veteran translator Peter Theroux proves just as comfortable with the Lebanese vernacular of Arabic as he was with its Egyptian counterpart in Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley and the Arabian dialects he encountered translating the first three volumes of Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt quintet. Additionally, Theroux ensures that the modern standard Arabic in which Khoury has written the central narrative loses none of its evocative power. For example, Yalo’s creepy mother “would stand for hours in front of the mirror and say that she was washing the age from her face.” And thanks to his angst-ridden grandfather, Yalo’s mind brims with macabre images, including this Felliniesque gem: “A person’s body parts stopped growing, except for the nose and ears. Death was a mercy, for if a man kept living, he would turn into just a long nose and two giant ears, that is, a cross between an elephant and a donkey.”

 

Familial weirdness aside, Yalo might have turned out normal were it not for Lebanon’s aberrant trajectory between 1975 and 1990, his formative years. One of the most poignant aspects of the novel is Yalo’s passion for woodwork, and his doomed hope that he might yet return to the arduous but gratifying labor of which he lovingly explains: “You must know how to divide wood into two types, male and female, and join them as a man joins a woman. Nails kill the spirit of wood, whereas dovetailing returns its life by marrying it to itself and restores the fluid that flowed out when the trees were cut.” Sadly, a terrible force intruded and permanently derailed Yalo’s life. The protagonist puts it to his interrogator thus: “Yalo’s story, sir, has a name — war.”

 

YALO delves into mind of an accused rapist

2008-01-15

What is more damaging to a storyteller’s accuracy: time or torture?

Here is the heart of Elias Khoury’s mesmerizing new novel, Yalo, in which the title character, a young man, is arrested at the end of the Lebanese civil war and charged with rape, robbery and collaboration.

The charges against Yalo are serious in a country seeking to avenge its one-time avengers. If Yalo cannot get his story straight, he faces life in prison or worse.

Parsing fact from fantasy is not going to be an easy task, for Khoury’s troubled, shell-shocked ex-soldier is a man caught between worlds and languages.

He also inherits a legacy of forgetting. Yalo’s Kurdish grandfather grew up in Syria, speaking the dead Aramaic language of Syriac, but immigrated to Lebanon and became a Christian priest. Yalo’s mother was abandoned by his father and spent her life obsessed with a lover who refused to divorce his wife.

This family history emerges to the readers through flashbacks that spring open like escape-hatches during Yalo’s interrogation. In the book’s opening scene, Yalo sits before two court officers and Shirin, the woman he is accused of raping. As he is taunted and threatened, Yalo withdraws into his mind, where he recalls rapping his gun on the window of a parked car in which Shirin sat with a man not her fiancé. What happens afterward is to Yalo an act of love but in legal terms is rape.

Or was it? Asking the reader to sympathize with a rapist is probably as bold a gambit as Nabokov’s tale about Humbert Humbert in “Lolita,” but Khoury goes at it in a different fashion. As he did in “Gate of the Sun,” his powerful epic of the Palestinian diaspora, Khoury piles one story upon the next upon the next, clouding a reader’s perception of what is real and what is imagined, what is told to family members orally and what has actually happened.

At the same time, Yalo’s life expands concentrically before our eyes. We learn how he left school to fight in the war, lost friends, was abandoned in Paris, then rescued by a rich arms dealer. As the interrogation heats up, we hear the story of his robbing and raping over and over again and, with each telling, Yalo’s own faith in it erodes.

“They asked you things you had already confessed to,” Yalo thinks, “and when you repeated your confessions you made mistakes, which was an unavoidable thing because you cannot tell the same story twice.”

However you feel about crime and punishment, Yalo will make for difficult reading. In one horrific scene, Yalo is stripped of his clothes and dropped into a sack with a wild animal and then beaten.

One of the weaknesses of this novel is that while Khoury portrays Yalo’s torture in realistic terms, he does not step outside his head to portray his crimes. We are, therefore, trapped inside Yalo’s history and his mind.

Perhaps that is where Khoury wanted us to be, suffocated by the past, swirling around in a sea of recrimination and rationalization, cut off from Yalo’s effect on others. And so it is through such a blinkered perspective that war crimes are committed.

John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.

“Who does Jerusalem belong to, you or them?” Derek Walcott asks at the end of “In Cordoba.” Mahmoud Darwish does not answer; “It’s a hurtful question,” he says. When pressed on what he thought of the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, Darwish replied: “We write about the same place . . . so we compete: who loves it more? Who writes it better?” A River Dies of Thirst: journals, a late offering, alternates between the existential monologues of its prose poems and the lyric heights of its verse. In Catherine Cobham’s translation, we see French cafés, Lutheran churches, and Spanish gardens — but the senses retain their Arab sparseness: “The smell of bread mixes with the smell of coffee in the mornings, awakening in me the desire for a fresh life.” This (as Mourid Barghouti recalled in his obituary of Darwish, who died in 2008) from a poet whose most famous line is “I miss my mother’s bread.” With his “uncitizen” papers firmly in his pocket, Darwish’s cosmopolitan observations are enticing — in “Two Travellers to a River,” for example, he imparts his delight at seeing a French boy and a Japanese girl in the grip of first love in an airport’s departure lounge. The gems in this book are undoubtedly in the prose; Cobham’s handling of the syntax in the lyrics leaves something to be desired, and some of her lines are awkward. Her far more masterful handling of the prose reminds the reader of her success in translating Hanan al-Shaykh’s novels.

What is most appealing about these diaries is that for all the dream-like sequences and surrealist imagery, Darwish did not invent — he experienced. Twice divorced, childless and uncomfortable with the rising cronyism in Palestinian politics, he led a peripatetic existence that took him from central Italy to Paris, Stockholm, Morocco, Beirut and Egypt. Renowned for his shyness, he guarded his privacy jealously — and with humour. As with Cavafy, Robinson Jeffers,  and Robert Lowell, Darwish’s fascination with the dark undersides of both nature and history allowed him to glimpse the future over the terrible history of the past century, one shoulder slightly dropped so as to sneak a glance at Eden, Palestine, the homeland. History often got in the way of that. “What comes after history?” Darwish asks in “Right of Return to Paradise:” “The only smooth road is the road to the abyss, until further notice . . . until the issuing of a divine pardon.” Two further volumes complete the publication of Darwish’s later works: Mural offers John Berger and Rema Hammami’s co-translation of the poem which Darwish considered his magnum opus; the second, If I Were Another, translated by Fady Joudah, is a collection of epics spanning the poet’s final two decades. The former volume, illustrated by Berger, juxtaposes “Mural” — a Lorca-esque dramatic sequence on the subjects of art and mortality — with “The Dice Player,” its shorter, more light-hearted sibling. It is with slight regret that, opening the book to Berger’s foreword, one finds him immediately fixating rather opaquely on the political, leading one to suspect that the translators were more concerned with Darwish as a symbol than as a craftsman. Their lines suffer from a clipped, didactic tone and fail to sustain the flow of philosophical questioning and lyric sensuousness in the original. Unlike Joudah, Berger in his introduction provides no exegesis of the poems, no clear sign of appreciation beyond a perfunctory kind of respect he feels for the voice “raised in protest.” Yet as Joudah reminds us, Darwish was quite clear on the issue: “The Palestinian is not a profession or a slogan.”

If I Were Another, which includes Joudah’s own version of “Mural”, is a supremely commendable effort. (His previous volume of translations, The Butterfly’s Burden, was awarded the Banipal Prize in 2008.) Joudah is adept in his handling of both the syntax and Darwish’s satirical humour: “In each wind a woman toys with her poet: / Take the direction you gave me, / the one that broke, / and bring back my femininity: / nothing remains for me outside pondering / the lake’s wrinkles.” (Berger and Hammami give “In every breeze a woman mocks her poet.”) Joudah’s willingness to forsake a crippling adherence to transliteration frees him to focus on the language and tone of the original. This “Late Selected” skilfully unsheathes the sheer playfulness of Darwish’s reflections, the interplay between “we” and “I”: “we may get rescued / from our story together: you are so much yourself . . . and I am / so much other than myself.”

Despite the disparities in translation, it is good to see Mahmoud Darwish’s works become widely available in both Britain and the United States. There is no finer Arab poet for English readers to start with. By harnessing the mass appeal of poetry in the Arab world in his continual efforts to “humanize the enemy,” Darwish was invaluable in establishing a Palestinian literature in the second half of the twentieth century, one in which his troubled land was seen in the perspective of the wider human condition.

When a Nobel Prize judge last year accused American writers of parochialism, a flurry of righteous indignation arose on this side of the Atlantic. One of the judge’s remarks, however, seems indisputable: we do not translate enough foreign literature. Indeed, of all the new literature published in the U.S., less than 1 percent is international. Major publishing houses show an alarming indifference to literature in translation–a sad corollary to the steady diminishment of subtitled fare screened in U.S. movie theaters–and our mainstream book sections choose what to review almost exclusively from these publishers’ lists.

Consider the relative neglect of French writer Dominique Fabre’s The Waitress Was New, surely one of the best novels of 2008. The New York Times did not even think to review it. Why? That deadly combination: translation + small (and nonprofit at that!) press. [It was reviewed in the March/April issue of TBR.]

Against the tide of cultural parochialism, Archipelago Books holds steady. Just over five years old but already invaluable, Archipelago is dedicated, in its own words, “to promoting cross-cultural exchange through international literature in translation.” Among their 2009 releases is Dutch novelist Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin, a quietly gripping and unexpectedly humorous story of a man’s struggle to cope with the death of his twin brother. And in August, Archipelago released marvelous, idiosyncratic books by two mainstays from their catalog: Breyten Breytenbach and the recently deceased Mahmoud Darwish.

Composed of a series of reflections in a poet’s craft and vocation, Breytenbach’s Intimate Stranger: A Writing Book might be thought of as a down-to-earth cousin of Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet. Poet, novelist, essayist, and painter, Breytenbach writes in both Afrikaans and English (Intimate Stranger was written in English). He was born in South Africa, but in the early 1960s he moved to France, where he became a vociferous critic of apartheid. In 1975 he visited his native country and was promptly arrested (officially for having married a Vietnamese woman–interracial marriage was illegal at the time). He remained a prisoner for the next seven years. Currently, he divides his time among New York, France, and Africa.

In the essays that comprise Intimate Stranger Breytenbach argues for the centrality of poetic experience to civilization. “For when you hold a poem to your ear,” he writes, “you hear the deep-sound, the movements we are part of, conveying not so much a literal meaning as an existential sense. It constitutes the spinal chord of remembering.”

Writing to an imaginary student, Breytenbach sprinkles his text with quotations from and references to an inspiring range of writers, artists, and thinkers, from Yeats, Kafka, Yang Liang, El Greco, and Charles Olson to Karen Blixen, Stanley Kunitz, Czeslaw Milosz, David Hockney, and Dogen. While providing a fair amount of aesthetic advice, Breytenbach insists that writing is “not an art form, it is a life discipline.”

Above all, for Breytenbach, one’s art serves as a record of one’s ethical response to and engagement with the world. He insists upon poetry’s affective power. For him writing is not a matter of therapy or healing (he has little patience for psychoanalytical approaches to art); rather it is a matter of devoting oneself to a process in order to create not just poetry but life itself:

The act of creativity is the beginning of unleashing metamorphosis, of putting something out there, of starting a process. We become aware of the implications of tangling with matter, of engaging others. In the “making of things” (stories, poems) we shape identities, we forge links between aesthetics and ethics, we learn about the importance of an environment within which rhythms and resonance can take on meaning, we begin to understand about embellishing the existent, we reach out to the supposed non-existent, we bring new light to known objects.

Was there a writer of our time more committed to forging links between aesthetics and ethics than the Palestine poet Mahmoud Darwish? World literature lost one of its most inspiring figures this year when Darwish died of complications from open-heart surgery in Houston. (Earlier this year, Archipelago published Voice Over, Breytenbach’s tribute to Darwish.) Darwish was born in Palestine’s Galilee in 1941. When he was seven, Darwish and his family were forced by Israeli forces to move to Lebanon, an experience that would mark virtually all of his poetry. His family returned, but their village had been destroyed.

In his last years he repeated his long-held desire to be buried in Galilee, but the Israeli government refused his request. In terms of security alone, this refusal is perhaps understandable, for no poet in the world could match Darwish when it came to the size and devotion of his audience; in the Arab world, the audience for his readings could have filled football stadiums.

A River Dies of Thirst is a fascinating document. Rarely have the personal and the political been so plainly intertwined as in Darwish’s poetry, and this book is no exception. Drawn from journal entries containing prose reflections as well as poems — both drafts and final versions, and not always easy to distinguish — A River Dies of Thirst movingly conveys Darwish’s sense of impending death.

In “The rest of a life,” for instance, the poet imagines how he would choose to spend his last evening. Several pages, meanwhile, concern the struggle to hold on to hope amidst so much sadness and bitter disappointment. The speaker of “I did not dream” vows, “I will make my dreams from my daily bread to avoid disappointment.” The central disappointment, of course, is that of displacement — and Darwish knows there is no foreseeable end to the struggle that defined a life he must soon surrender. Still, he can only move forward in vexed division, as the constant sense of displacement extends even to his relation to self. The poet weaves these ideas together with his favored devices of allegory and dialogue in “I walked on my heart” (quoted in full):

I walked on my heart, as if my heart
were a road, or a pavement, or air
and my heart said: “I have tired of identifying
with things, when space has broken into pieces
and I have tired of your question: ‘Where shall we go
when there’s no land there, and no sky?’
And you obey me. Give me an order
direct me to do what you want”
So I said to my heart: “I have forgotten you since we set off
with you as my reason, and me the one speaking
Rebel against me as much as you can, and run
For there’s nothing behind us except what’s behind.”

Other entries tell of encounters with Naguib Mahfouz, Derek Walcott, and Mark Strand; of the pleasures of routines such as dishwashing; and of the dark routines of life in endless war, where
abnormal life appears to be running its normal course. The Devil still boasts of his long quarrel with God. Individuals, if they wake up alive, can still say ‘Good morning,’ then go off to their normal jobs: burying the dead.

Still, Darwish provides strategies for hopefulness (beta blockers can help!) and, in “If only the young were trees,” he imbues with humor the limitations of human nature:
When a tree becomes a boat and learns to swim. … When it becomes a table it teaches the poet not to be a woodcutter. The tree is forgiveness and vigilance.

Elsewhere, affirmation appears in moments of startling, lucid beauty, as when, after describing a canary, Darwish revitalizes a common metaphor — the lines speak for an occupied populace but could also serve as his own epitaph: “Singing in a cage is possible/and so is happiness.”

Fady Joudah is moved by a posthumous collection from Mahmoud Darwish.

First published in Arabic in 1981, this novel tells the story of a Lebanese civil servant’s disappearance and subsequent murder from the point of a former journalism student who was captivated by the mysterious circumstances of the death. Among the people he interviews are a garbage collector, the doctor who performed the autopsy, a widow, and a soldier. The characters’ interwoven stories reveal the horrors of the Lebanese civil war that wreaked havoc on the people of Beirut. Appearing after the wild success of Khoury’s previous novels translated into English, Gates of the Sun and Yalo, Maia Tabet’s new translation of White Masks draws the reader into a riveting tale of personal suffering within a corrupt society.

The action of White Masks, which was originally published in Arabic in 1982, takes place primarily during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). This was a bewilderingly complex war, at once sectarian, nationalist and even economic, involving Lebanese nationalists, Shiites, Israelis, Palestinians, Hezbollah fighters, Syrians and revolutionary Communists. The fourth novel by a prominent Lebanese intellectual and writer of plays as well as fiction, a former Fatah member and a Civil War combatant, White Masks is powerful, disturbing and important. Its many indelible scenes of violence and senseless brutality bring to mind more than once Jerry Kosinski’s Painted Bird. At the heart of the book is a murdered man, Khalil Ahmad Jaber, a one-time postal office worker and father of two daughters and a boxer son who becomes a soldier and, soon after, an official “martyr” when he is killed. The narrator of Khoury’s novel, an underemployed student with journalistic aspirations and few serious motivations for writing his book, interviews a number of people whose lives have intersected with the dead man’s—his widow, his daughters, the garbage collectors who find his tortured body—and their stories, moving backward and forward in time, digressing into incidents from their own and others’ histories, sometimes containing recitations of other narrator’s stories in the midst of recounting their own, create a complexly figured, blood-soaked tapestry of the horrors of war, like a Guernica painted in words by many different voices.
If the reader is sometimes confused (losing track of who is speaking or when events take place, a dislocation no doubt intended by Khoury), so are the characters in the novel and the “frame” narrator himself, the would-be journalist. Before presenting the results of his investigations, he writes a “Prologue”—a term that suggests a literary provenance, even as his first sentence assures us what follows is “not a tale”—and in this Prologue he confesses, as does a second time in his “Provisional Epilogue,” that he has failed in his attempt either to know who killed Jaber or to understand why he was killed. Indeed he tells us, before he even introduces all the testimony (the putative evidence, the clues) gleaned from the widow, the garbage collectors, and so on, that readers might do just as well to read the forensic pathologist’s report (which he obligingly provides) or the few pages of the Prologue they are currently reading as to wade through the several hundred pages of often feverish, distraught voices that follow.
All of this, of course, is fascinating. Who could resist such a quixotic quest, such a beguiling, seemingly humble narrator with, nonetheless, an array of tricks up his sleeve? The epigraph of the novel (the journalistic compilation the young man pulls together) suggests we, all of us, are living in a dream world where no reality truly exists; but the full text suggests at times that as a protective stance we retreat to the idea that we live in a dream world. At other times, in one of the book’s most tragic implications, the interior narrators achieve almost a kind of blasé acceptance of the horrors they tell us about. Horror becomes ordinary reality, more troubling, certainly, than mundane acts like making Chermoula or doing the laundry by hand, but the stuff of everyday life nonetheless. Thus there is the story of the first night of Fatima Fakhro’s marriage. She is forced into marriage with a much older man; as is typical of the women in White Masks, she does not complain about her lot. After the small wedding ceremony is over, her new husband takes her into another room, puts his hand over her mouth, and mercilessly beats her, then essentially rapes her. He utters not one word. One is left feeling this is the way things frequently are.  The marriage goes on to have other troubles, but its brutal beginning, its lingering aftereffects, is not one of them.
Private, intimate violence in this scene echoes the novel’s public, impersonal kind. The reader comes to see that the characters in White Masks survive if and only if they come to terms with, accept, horror and violence; those who do not, perish. There is no escape to a spiritual world (which, the epigraph hints, exists) nor any escape to a different culture, a different country; there is only this world. And the portrayal of the Lebanese world Khoury gives us is a damning one. Whether he meant to suggest that the Beirut we see in this novel—a city of “goons and bullies,” to quote one character—is representative of many more cities and countries in the Arab world I do not know, but certainly the stories we are told by witness after witness are as fresh and familiar as the headlines in The New York Times.
To be fair, some of the violence in White Masks is of a kind we are familiar with in the West. In the chapter “Perforated Bodies,” a medical doctor’s 65-year-old-wife is stabbed, raped, and shot in the course of a robbery attempt. The killers at their trial display no remorse, indeed laugh and joke, though they are angry that someone has “informed” against them. Then there is the kind of violence one doesn’t want to believe is practiced anywhere, given the practitioners of it. A gynecologist tells his astonished father, who is also a physician, that he doesn’t need to look for a wife because he has sex with all his patients, once they are unconscious, before providing the abortions they’ve paid for. Another doctor lets his students perform surgery on “hopeless cases”—people dying of cancer, for instance—removing parts of their brains or other organs because of the difficulties of getting decent (i.e., non-mutilated, reasonably fresh) corpses. For the most part, though, the atrocities spoken of by the various witnesses (who in disconnected and sometimes stream-of-consciousness testimony tend to drift away from the task of clarifying Jaber’s life or death) are atrocities committed for political or religious reasons, and sometimes for both.
Who was Khalil Ahmad Jaber? What happened to him? In Khoury’s “Provisional Epilogue,” the aspiring journalist (who has failed in several of the most fundamental of journalistic tasks), after discoursing about the usefulness or impossibility or pointlessness of discovering the identity of Jaber’s murderer, names several possibilities and then speculates further that perhaps Elias Khoury killed the unfortunate former postal worker. This is no journalistic coup: we begin White Masks, of course, knowing this. But it does point to Khoury’s text as a metafiction, in the way it reminds us that it is a fictional construction. Nevertheless, reality intrudes often: in the form of the Civil War, in the arguments about military strategy and Palestinian grievances, in the names that are linked (speculatively, to be sure) to real events, like the Black September attack in Munich in 1972, and these things have the effect of making us wonder whether what we are reading isn’t, after all, the real thing. The young journalist’s caution, in the Prologue—“I wish to state unequivocally that I am pointing a finger at no one, and that my aim is not to level accusations. It would be meaningless to do so in these fair time of ours”—is replete with equivocation and irony. But in general with this narrator, one must cast a skeptical or assessing eye. From the beginning of his “investigation,” he has insisted that the murdered man was as transparent as the narrator’s story itself. Neither proves to be the truth.
And what of Khalil Ahmad Jaber, the murdered man whom no one, including his wife and children, seems to understand, and who doesn’t receive the elementary justice of his murdered being called to account? We know that after his son is killed and his (Jaber’s) job disappears in the general chaos of Beirut five years into the incomprehensible war, he descends into madness. (To say this is to imply that the society around him is sane, which it is not, unless perpetual violence and random cruelty are sane.) He ceases to eat, to bathe, to go out of the house. After his wife hires someone to drive out the djinn from inside him, he essentially leaves his house forever. The fact that the posters of his martyred son are being ripped apart by children, ruined by wind and rain, or papered over by Beirut authorities with fresher “martyrs” (there is of course an unending supply of these) or with commercial advertisements particularly plagues him. Wearing a pith helmet, he takes to eating the remaining stores of posters he has been given for private use, bit by bit. Later he will erase the remaining copies of his sons’ posters, put white nail polish over all the images in the family photos, and later still attempt to whitewash all of Beirut’s walls. Confusing himself with his son, he tells a good Samaritan who offers food to the starving man with the paint pot that he is a boxer but has given up appearing on television because “the screen is so small and narrow I feel suffocated. I feel it pressing against my head.” Then he urges her to gather up her children and “get under the sheet me…The city’s all white. I’m painting it…”
Hi whitewashing all the walls of Beirut infuriates the authorities. He is brought in for questioning—he smells, we are told several time, like death, like a decaying corpse—but is let go. Soon after he is murdered, and the journalist, like the police, abandons attempts to find out why. Late in the novel, as the shelling of Beirut continues, even though “the war” is supposed to be over, a character who believe it is Jews who are doing the shelling says
“Looks to me like they want to kill every single person…there won’t be anyone left who’s witnessed this war to do the telling: if someone survived to tell the tale there’d never be another war. It seems that this country’s destiny is to spawn a new war every twenty years. That’s why everyone must be killed.”
Everyone in the present must be killed, in other words, to make way for new victims in the future. Plastering the city with posters of slaughtered, “heroic” youths, then later whitewashing those same bullet-pocked, bloody walls: it’s hard not to view the crazed Khalil Ahmad Jaber as a symbol of Beirut and Lebanon itself: a country that is “disappearing” or devouring its young, “disappearing” its history and culture, devouring itself. This novel may be even more important now, in this “Arab Spring” (whose course no one can predict), than it was when it was first published in Lebanon, thirty years ago.

In White Masks, Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury takes up the gauntlet laid down by Jose Saramago in the last great novel of the 20th Century, Blindness. As a character in Saramago’s novel notes, the world has not exactly gone blind; instead, everyone can see nothing but white. The characters in White Masks long to see a unifying white as well, a purity that can give them hope during the mid-1980s in Beirut, where the apartment buildings are bombed and the streets are wrecked by war.

Acting as a classic MacGuffin, the central figure of White Masks, Khalil Ahmad Jaber, a man whose son is killed in battle and who subsequently loses his sanity, figures strongly in the first chapter. As the novel progresses, Jaber, whom we know from the outset will meet a mysterious and gruesome end, becomes less of a person and more of a symbol for the collective soul of Beirut’s citizens. White Masks’s narrator, after outlining the nature of his interest in the Jaber’s story, proceeds to interview people who are in some way connected to him in his final days. As these connections become increasingly tenuous, the witnesses’ stories also become more compassionate and worthy of pathos; one gets the sense that the dead man, with his obsession with the color white, and his futile attempts to white out and whitewash his own family as well as the city of Beirut, could stand in for the other characters’ desire for redemption.

Of course, any novel with sufficient intelligence to touch on eternal truths while painting a painfully accurate picture of a specific place in time cannot stand on such a simplistic parallel. The whitewashing could stand for the danger of forgetting as much as the quest for purification. Indeed, much of the conflict arises from generational differences; the older men remember what “real” battle was like and are appalled at the reckless bravado with which their sons pick up and brandish the newer models of guns.

In a city where everyone tries to be the same and to put their personal and communal horrors behind them, Khoury does a masterful job at illuminating their differences. The distinctly human trait of inhumanity is mixed and tempered with profound love and compassion in this haunting and highly affecting novel about a time and a place that many of us only have glimpsed on news programs. (April) Dan Coffey

 Whiteness—or the absence of color—is one of Lebanese author Elias Khoury’s central obsessions. Khoury, arguably the finest living Arab novelist, may have first explored whiteness and violence in this 1977 Little Mountain, when a character “laughed a white laugh.” The idea becomes more prominent in his later works. In Gate of the Sun (1999), White Ayoub is alternately suicide or saint. In Yalo (2002), the protagonist is blinded by whiteness and cannot comprehend the world around him. Khoury’s white is violence and clarity, purity and destruction. If the Lebanese civil war had a color, it would be this.

The book is an early work of Khoury’s, published in 1981. The literal translation of the Arabic title would be “White Faces,” but it is titled White Masks in English to avoid a strictly racial reading. The novel is built around the narrator’s attempt to understand what he describes as the “wonderful, dreadful” murder of civil servant Khalil Ahmed Jaber.

The narrator assembles the book detective-style, appearing and then receding, leaving characters to tell their own stories. Jaber’s wife is the fist to be interviewed. She explains that, after the battlefield death of their son, her husband slipped into madness. He rubbed out faces in family photographs, whitewashed walls, chewed up newsprint. He stopped bathing and ate little. Then, for no apparent reason, he was tortured, murdered, and dumped in a pile of garbage. The unnamed narrator records other stories: those of Jaber’s daughter, of a woman who fed Jaber while he wandered the streets, of the garbage collector who discovered his body.

White Faces represents a turning point in Khoury’s work. At the beginning of the Lebanese civil war, Khoury actively participated in the fighting. He told Sonja Mejcher: “I used to write the opposite of what I was living but I used to really believe in the ideology of politics and … to think that literature was something else. …. My criticism became more explicit in al-Wujuh al-baydá … and I was considered to be against the revolution. … It was then that I discovered that my work as an intellectual and as a writer is, first, important and, second, meaningless, cannot be done, if I am not critical of the situation I am living in.”

The criticism is open and painful. White Masks examines not only the death of Khalil Ahmed Jaber but also the violence swirling around him and the role individuals play in allowing atrocities to happen. But the book doesn’t point fingers, or end with the discovery of who committed this ugly crime. It ends, instead, with a “provisional epilogue.” Here, the narrator leads us to believe he will reveal the fruits of his investigation, but then veers off into several new stories. The narrator asks: “Is the identification of the murderer the problem? Would it help us understand the motives for the crime?”

White Faces is a more straightforward work than Khoury’s “wonderful, dreadful” recent novels, Gate of the Sun (see WLT, January 2006, 12-16) andYalo. It is ultimately not as mature and layered as these works, but it is a compelling, thoughtful read.

 

I.

In the preface to All One Horse, Breyten Breytenbach, playfully writing under the moniker “A. Uthor,” explains the artistic impulse behind this book of 27 “minor pieces of writing” and their accompanying 27 watercolor paintings with the following bit of Eastern philosophy:

The title is culled from a Chang Tzu saying: “Heaven and earth are one finger, all things are one horse.” This, by the way, also precisely indicates the contents, made up of a structure wrapped in themes and motives. Arguments of course are informed and/or illustrated by imagery or texture, or both. Images, again, depend on how far the horse of association can travel, as do textures which would be blank were it not for imagination—and there the finger goes galloping over uncharted regions determined by the life from which they echo forth. And life, the translation in other words, is nothing if not severable.

I think it’s important to note that Breytenbach, a man who speaks, writes, and even dreams in multiple languages, not only uses the word translation in its usual sense (as in the author has attempted to translate his experiences into stories), but also means to achieve a subtler meaning, that of the word transformation: the transformation of life through language, the informing of argument by imagery and texture, the structured wrapping of themes and motives.

While a lesser poet could misunderstand how something so abstract might affect the creation of her work, Breytenbach lives up to his words: the 27 minor texts here—closer to stories than poems—truly feel as though Breytenbach has freed his language to explore life’s uncharted regions and has welcomed the various truths these expeditions discovered. In his hands, this “all one horse” metaphor encourages a kind of free association that reads quite freshly when compared to popular, purpose-driven texts like stories about mother/daughter relationships and associated morality tales. Moreover, although a few of the texts feel a little heavy with the philosophy of language, the vast majority of them tell some of the most fascinating stories I have read in a while.

Breytenbach seems to have developed this technique of free association during his time in solitary confinement; from 1975 to 1982, he served in a South African prison, having been charged and arrested under the Terrorism Act during a visit there to establish further anti-apartheid connections. In prison, he wrote as long as he could before the guards took away his pens and paper, and since this give and take occurred each day he was forced to carry on his writing without having access to previous drafts. Though it’s a little unclear as to how he replenished his dwindling stock of pens and paper or why the guards simply didn’t just keep him from writing anything ever, the point is that his writing process varied drastically from the norm: he revised in his head, began anew each day, developed a particular sense for the memory of language. In an interview with Ann Landsman, published in the November 2006 issue of The Believer, he said of his prison writing:

I felt that as I wrote, I was entering a world that started unfolding as you entered it. You didn’t know where you were going to go when you entered it. It took you—it took you to places which may have existed there before in your mind somewhere, in your memory, but that you could not be sure about . . . the sense I had was that the writing was a kind of thread into a maze that revealed itself to me as I entered it with the line of writing.

Of course, Breytenbach published several other books before the first edition of All One Horse came out in 1989, so I doubt that many of the texts included here directly came from work he composed during his time in prison (curious readers ought to look for Mouroir: Mirror Notes of a Novel and The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist); however, it is hard to read All One Horse, with its many surreal leaps between sentences, and not think that it’s in some way derived from Breytenbach’s time in prison.

II.

If Breytenbach truly has used writing to find his way through an otherworldly maze, then the texts collected here represent quite a vast number of twists and turns, even dead ends. In “dead at last,” for example, the narrator describes a man whose head is crammed with useless knowledge, such as “the answer to apartheid”; this phrase is perhaps one of the most arresting in the entire book, given that it follows this sentence: “This is not to say that his knowledge was exclusive, but it was precise and arcane and utterly unwanted.”

This mazelike structure allows Breytenbach to widely vary his subject matter, from the politics of the other and meditations on the doubling figure of brother to art as both a creative and destructive act of the self and memory. The breadth of the book’s content gives Breytenbach the opportunity to investigate more thoroughly the benefits of certain prose forms as paths to truth. His favorites seem to be the fable, the satire, and the philosophical meditation, and though these show up often, they in no way seem overused.

The most remarkable thing about the book and Breytenbach’s writing is the way both seem to maintain for the reader the rawness of newly discovered things. By this I mean that All One Horse seems to have escaped the author’s revising hand and the editor’s careful pen (I doubt this, but it does seem this way). Breytenbach has let remain all of the text’s odd turns, so that a reader can trace the author’s creative path. This is often more exciting than a carefully structured story, in which sentences move directly toward each plot point along Freytag’s triangle. Take this passage from “how beautiful the mountains”:

Sometimes the outside working population must revolt because it gives us the chance to air out and recapitulate our grievances. The male workers will gather in front of the ruler’s palace early in the morning when a thin fog still shrouds the public places. The strikers are young: labor is a question of virility. We show our discontent in a quaint but effective way—we unbutton our private parts to all masturbate together.

How one word here links to another is both unsettling and pleasing; the act of reading, by its very nature, allows Breytenbach to take full advantage of his wonderful sense of timing, comic or tragic. Notice how the language begins in the abstract and then falls into the simpler, concrete actions (compare “recapitulate” to “gather”), as if Breytenbach were searching for a way to describe his idea of revolution. Then the end of the second sentence offers the first hint of poetic lyricism: “a thin fog still shrouds the public places.” As if warmed by the exercise of the previous sentence, the third further leaps into the metaphorical realm, taking as its foundation the youth of the workers. And once Breytenbach has likened “labor” to “a question of virility” in the same sentence, he suddenly has the solution to his trouble. As a reader, I am unsettled by the connections he has uncovered—group masturbation as a form of civic action?—and yet I cannot help but admire the way the language leads to this political critique, and that is what is pleasing to me.

For all his twisting of language and form, Breytenbach has found some interesting ways to give his readers brief respite from the work of reading. The watercolors that go with each story contrast well with the black and white of the pages’ text. And while their imagery is as freely associative as the text, their presence seems to elicit completely different responses in a reader; the interpretive work is perhaps subtler, less conscious.

Subtle and also welcome is Breytenbach’s habit of taking his titles from the last few words of each text. The titles provide a hint of where the language in the story will end, a sort of final destination that the reader can have faith in during the trickier parts of the text. Part of the joy of reading these pieces, in fact, comes from the surprise at how Breytenbach arrives at each title.

Finally, the book itself has a kind of arc to it, perhaps not a narrative arc, but an arc nonetheless that seems to follow from what Breytenbach said to Landsman later in the interview: “We tend to forget that writing has this dual effect both of creating and of undoing that which it writes about or coming to stand in the place of, and it’s like the
story of the apple. You can’t unbite the apple once it’s been bitten.” The opening lines of the first story, “beween the legs,” echoes that idea, bites into the apple as he suggests:

In the beginning there is God. Or Creative Principle. If we take it that there must be a start and a stop, then there should be some entity to begin with or who/which can make the beginning begin?

As the book continues, the texts shift away from this concern for the beginnings of things and instead tell of the ends of things: death and destruction, a dead mother come back to haunt her son, a shooting at a hotel, Armageddon, imprisonment. Perhaps the clearest example of this shift comes in “no longer,” the fourth to last story in the book. The text describes the fictional contents of Ka’afir’s book, The First Book of Slow Gestures, in which it is recommended that “one should cut up in small morsels this entity known as Life. If not, how is one going to digest it? And unless one digests it entirely, how is one ever going to die?”

Ultimately, it’s not hard to understand why Archipelago Books decided to reprint All One Horse. The writing is such that a reader can open the book at any point and once again lose his way in the language, find new connections to puzzle through. It is a book not easily digested in one sitting, or even several sittings, and for that reason proves that writing of its kind will remain alive and well as long as there are readers out there patient and adventurous enough to enter the maze.

Ryan Call’s fiction appears or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Hobart, Avery, Caketrain, NO COLONY, and Sonora Review.