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13 - 19 June 2002 Issue No.590 Books |
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Through the gates of memory
La Porte du soleil (Gate of the Sun), Elias Khoury, trans. Rania Samara, Paris: Actes Sud/ Le Monde diplomatique, 2002. pp630
La Porte du soleil, a translation of Lebanese writer and journalist Elias Khoury's 1998 novel Bab al-Shams, has received a great deal of attention in France, the book being published jointly by Actes Sud, a small independent publisher, and the heavyweight political monthly Le Monde diplomatique. Comment has focused on the novel's contribution to Palestinian collective memory, specifically on the experience of the post-1948 generations in exile in Lebanon, the French newspaper Le Monde writing that the novel combines "a wealth of stories" with a "sometimes ironic view" of life in the refugee camps and of recent Palestinian history.Khoury himself, who is cultural affairs editor of the Lebanese daily Al-Nahar and a well-known commentator on Lebanese affairs, has said that his intention in the novel was to "write history on a small scale". Struck by the "lack of historical documents on the Nakba," the 1948 "Catastrophe" that saw the beginnings of the Palestinian refugee crisis, he wanted to write a novel from the "perspective of the defeated," capitalising on literature's capacity to flesh out historical facts through individual experience. His novel, therefore, is "polyphonic", different voices and stories being woven together in a narrative that begins in 1948, though frequently referring to earlier events, and includes at least oblique reference to most of the defining events of subsequent Palestinian and Lebanese history.
Told by Khalil, a doctor in a hospital in a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, Khoury's novel is set in the present as Khalil, who it turns out gained his smattering of medicine while training to be a fighter in China in the 1970s, attends to Younes, a veteran Palestinian fighter now on his deathbed. Younes's memories of his career, told to Khalil in frustrating bits and pieces and then repeated, or puzzled over, by the doctor himself, lead Khalil to reflect on his own experience and on that of his generation. How do these fading memories of a dying man, so urgent and demanding when they were fresh, relate to present experience and the present situation? Can they be stitched together to yield a coherent narrative, one that will serve for future reference, and, more to the point, should they be? As Khalil sometimes admits, there may also be virtues in forgetting.
Khalil -- and perhaps Khoury -- seems struck as much by the opacity of Younes's memories as by their capacity to yield a future political programme. All that violence and all those deaths, he seems to be saying, now reduced to one man's free association on a hospital bed, recalling the events of 1948, 1967, 1970, 1982, and of many other years in between, to ask what direction these now point in, or rather what directions. For, if one understands Khoury aright, they do not point in any one single direction; memory, he seems to be saying, is not as simple as that, and it can be mobilised, or harnessed, for different purposes.
Perhaps this feature of the novel should be linked to Khoury's hopes for contemporary Lebanon and for the future of the Palestinian refugee population within its borders. Arriving in waves in 1948, 1967 and 1970-1971 this population, largely excluded from the Lebanese economic boom of the 1960s and 70s, living in a "poverty belt" of refugee camps around the larger Lebanese cities and suffering frank discrimination from the Maronite regime, was the object of frightful massacres in 1982 at the Sabra and Chatilla camps in Beirut, carried out by Phalangist fighters under the eyes of the city's Israeli's occupiers. Shortly before, and under US protection, 10,000 PLO fighters had been evacuated from Lebanon.
It would be difficult for anyone to forget this, and Khoury's novel spends over 600 pages reminding the reader of it, together with the circumstances of the refugees' flight from what is now northern Israel in 1948, earlier events in what was then the British Mandate Territory of Palestine in 1936, events in Jordan in 1970-1971, episodes from the Lebanese Civil War and other less familiar territory. And yet there is a certain scepticism about the point of going back over this old ground: the emphasis is always on what purpose memory of the past should now serve, and what kinds of memory should be conserved. Khoury's answer to the second point is straightforward, preferring personal stories and private meditation to public grandstanding and memorials, his answer to the first being more exploratory and tentative, if indeed he has any single answer.
"Once upon a time," Khalil muses, was once considered the best way to begin a story, once upon a time there being a people expelled from their country by foreign forces, spending the next 50 years trying to get it back. "But I promised to begin this story at the end" -- trying to find the beginning, "I jump from one story to another, lose the thread, forget where I started from". "You want a story?" he asks, one in the manner of Ghassan Kanafani, a remembered hero, spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, assassinated in Beirut in 1972, "always on the look- out for symbolic tales." But that "was the time of heroism, whereas today is the time of non-heroism". "I am approaching my forties, and it is difficult for me to begin again, just to take off again from nothing...Why not forget though? A horrible thought took hold of me: people are only the ghosts of their own memories."
Khoury has said that war in Lebanon in 1975 "was inevitable. For people like me on the left, there was a belief that the coalition between the Lebanese and the Palestinians would give something new to the Arab World. It didn't work." Now, he goes on, "Lebanon's new ruling class wants to make Lebanon part of the petro-dollar system and to convert it into a small Hong Kong... This is one option. We have another: to make Lebanon part of the search for democracy, identity and change in the Arab World."
This search is linked to Khoury's literary experiments, this one in particular being frankly given over to finding a route forward out of the past, and not only for Dr Khalil. "The novel is a relatively new literary genre [in Lebanon]," Khoury writes. "It permits societies or groups to think about themselves...For someone like me who experienced the civil war, it was very important to write how people actually lived and spoke...Literature, in our situation, must put together two elements: seeing and inventing; it must tell the truth and lie... What is taking place in Lebanon today can be placed in the context of Lebanon's role as a mirror for the Arab World. What is not done in the Arab World is done here as an experiment."
The most striking feature of Bab al-Shams is its commitment to the future, even at the expense of the past. Reviewers in France have ignored this, asking themselves either whether this is an "oriental novel", since it "rests on the notion of orality" (Le Nouvel Observateur), or whether it is an ironic one, reviewing youthful excesses from the perspective of maturity (Le Monde). In fact, Khoury seems to be saying, the past has left mistakes, heroism and possibilities for new beginnings in more or less equal measure, and it is important that people remember it. It is up to present generations, sifting through the past as Khalil sifts through the experience of his forty-odd years, together with Younes's stories, to use it as they may. For his part, Khoury has chosen Lebanon's second option.
Reviewed by David Tresilian
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