In Defiance

Elias Khoury, who died last month at the age of 76, was one of the most gifted Arabic fiction writers of his generation. Yet to describe him as merely a ‘Lebanese novelist’, as have most obituaries in the Western press, is to betray the spirit of his life and work, which were animated by many passions and causes, to each of which he seemed to devote all his energy and time – a logical impossibility I imagine Elias would have smiled at. Although he happened to live mostly in Lebanon, and to write mostly about Lebanese and Palestinians, he was a member of a global avant-garde, and dreamt beyond forms and borders.

Like many who came of age during the civil war, I knew Khoury first as a journalist who wielded his pen as a whip against the corruptions of the establishment. Though a specialist in cultural matters – he edited the cultural section of two leading Beirut dailies, as-Safir (1983-1990) and an-Nahar (1992-2009) – Khoury was indefatigably political. He was born in 1948 to an Oriental Orthodox Christian family in Beirut, attending church but also reading the Qu’ran and learning classical Arabic. Palestine occupied his imagination from his teenage years. In 1967, he travelled to Jordan to volunteer at a Palestinian refugee camp. Following the Six-Day War, he joined Fatah, the leading faction within the PLO. Black September and the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan in 1970 came as a major shock: he realized that what happened could easily be replayed in Lebanon, and the Palestinians would be on the march again to another exile.

Khoury spent the early 1970s in Paris, where he undertook a doctorate in social history with Alain Touraine at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. His thesis dealt with the Mount Lebanon civil war (1840-1860) between the Druze and Maronite communities – a subject about which he discovered, as he expressed later in an interview with Robyn Creswell, ‘there were basically no written accounts’. ‘To me, this lack of a specifically written past meant that we Lebanese had no present, either…Our lack of written history made me feel that I didn’t even know the country I grew up in.’ Khoury then returned to Beirut, where he began a career as a journalist and critic, and resumed his activism. He was deeply involved in the foundation of Fatah’s Student Brigade, formed by Palestinians studying in Lebanon alongside many local volunteers (including two cousins of mine).

When the civil war broke out, Khoury joined the fighting, but was injured in its first months. He realized that the pen could be an equally potent weapon, and one better suited to his gifts and the demands of his young family. Between 1975 and 1979, he edited the Beirut-based journal Palestinian Affairs alongside Mahmoud Darwish, a collaboration that had an immense impact on him. Over the next decades he would be involved in editing numerous local newspapers and small journals. Ahmad Samih Khalidi, with whom Khoury co-edited the Arabic edition of the Journal of Palestine Studies, describes him as having engineered, through his ideas and boundless energy, a ‘renaissance’ in the life of the quarterly. Alongside journalism, Khoury went on to teach Arabic literature at various universities in Lebanon, the US and Europe, and assumed the artistic directorship of the prestigious Théatre de Beyrouth (1992-1998).

On the Relations of the Circle (‘An ‘Ilaqat al-Da’irah, 1975), Khoury’s first novel, seemed to anticipate the coming conflagration – not unlike the playwright Ziad Rahbani’s Happiness Hotel (1974). Yet as Khoury’s friend, the sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, told me, the novel that he considered his ‘first’ was the next one: The Small Mountain (al-Jabal al-Saghir, 1977). Its impetus was the outbreak of civil war. As Khoury put it in a conversation with the historian Ilan Pappé, it presented an opportunity to break from the shackles of poetry that had hegemonized literary expression up to that point, and from approaches to novel-writing that entailed nostalgic renderings of imagined pasts. Khoury referred to this opportunity as ‘the moment’; he believed that ‘without facing the present with open eyes, we (novelists) cannot write, we cannot really produce literature.’

Facing the present meant taking ownership of one’s history: ‘to have a present, you have to know which things to forget and which things to remember’. The historian Walid Khalidi was an important influence in this regard, impressing upon Khoury the importance of memory and testimony. Alongside a few contemporary pioneers – Ziad Rahbani in theatre, Marcel Khalife in music – Khoury bode a respectful farewell to old styles, ushering in a new era of literature, using a more fluid, colloquial Arabic, which confronted life as lived and experienced, however horrific or dispiriting. In Lebanon, we call it ‘the literature/art of defiance’ (al-adab/al-fann al-muqawim).

His ninth novel, the epic Gate of the Sun (Bab al-Shams,1998), about the plight of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon since the Nakba, brought him international fame. A cascade of tales relayed by a peasant doctor at the bedside of a comatose Palestinian fighter, it drew on stories Khoury had spent years collecting from Palestinian refugees. It became a best-seller and was later made into a film. But for Khoury its highest honour was an unexpected gesture. In 2013 a group of Palestinian activists erected a camp on a piece of Palestinian land near Jericho, confiscated by Israel and earmarked for an illegal Jewish settlement. They called the encampment Bab al-Shams after Khoury’s novel and asked him to talk to them via Skype. The incident was like a baptism: it made him realize that he had become a Palestinian, and had a seat in the intellectual pantheon of the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

Across Khoury’s many novels, one can trace a gradual shift of focus from Lebanon to Palestine – or from the struggle of the Palestinians in exile in Lebanon, to the suffering of the Palestinians in Israel and Palestine. His last three novels, the trilogy Children of the Ghetto (Awlad al-Ghetto), chronicle the life of a 1948 Palestinian refugee named Adam Dannoun from the city of Lydda, who ends up living in New York. A major theme of the series is the legacy of the Nakba, which Khoury famously argued was not a discrete historical event but an ongoing experience: ‘we are living the Nakba’. Yet the deeper concern of the books is the psychological battle between self-censorship and self-emancipation: the struggle to reconstruct the memory of what really happened in 1948 and in its aftermath, overcoming the reluctance of many to confront its horrors.

The turn of the century ushered in a period of despair for Khoury – the aftermath of the Oslo Accords, the death of Edward Said in 2003, the assassination of Khoury’s close friend the journalist Samir Kassir in 2005, the death of Darwish in 2008. The assassination of Kassir in particular soured Khoury against pro-Syrian parties and politicians in Lebanon, and he became a vocal critic of the crimes of the Assad regime. Yet Khoury remained attuned to the younger generations pushing for social and political change, and was galvanized by the Arab Spring. The October Revolution in Beirut brought him back into the fray of local politics after years on the sidelines. I vividly recall his eagerness to rally popular energies, and to find ways to cohere the mosaic-like Lebanese left.

On peace with Israel, Khoury was always wary of the lies and false promises of Israeli and US politicians. He regarded the Oslo Accords as ‘a colonial trap’. Yet his opposition to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians did not blind him from seeing a more humane alternative, which he pursued with Jewish and Israeli colleagues. He described his friendship and collaboration with Shenhav-Shahrabani, who translated eight of Khoury’s novels into Hebrew and is at work on the others, as follows: ‘We represent profoundly a real human approach, a real vision that we deserve life, and that life is more important than nationalities, ideologies, territorial borders’.

Khoury’s passing on 15 September saved him from witnessing the new round of horror that Israel and the US have unleashed against Lebanon. Knowing him, I would say it robbed him of another unique ‘moment’ to harness global anger against the insatiable appetite of the criminals who rule our world.

Read on: Suleiman Mourad: ‘Riddles of the Book’, NLR 86.