Farewell Elias Khoury, the journey isn't over

Elias Khoury (1948-2024), who died last Sunday in Beirut, once said: "I confess I'm scared. I'm scared of a history that has only one version. History has dozens of versions, and for it to ossify into one leads only to death."

This sentence remains highly significant when it comes to defining the career of the Lebanese novelist, storyteller, critic, and journalist.

In his career, in both literary terms and human, as all of the above, he never ceased to experiment and innovate, but more than that, his work showed his deep preoccupation with the search for the meaning in history and events, and the significance of this aspect is evident in most of his literary works.

It was perhaps the Palestinian issue, which took on a central place in many of his works, where he probed the sufferings which had befallen the Palestinian people and the dilemma of their fragmentation.

He did this by intertwining the human and political dimensions using characters and events, which were both rooted in reality – yet brimming with imagination.

This style was among what imbued his works with a literary depth and created a unique experience for the reader.

The way he interwove these aspects allowed him to explore psychological, political and cultural worlds, through characters and events which in some cases seemed unconventional, often relying on the technique of polyphony (using multiple voices), and alternating between narrative and inner dialogue.

Time, as a concept in his novels, was often non-linear, reflecting the complexities of life and memory.

This style is clearly evident in novels like Yalo and Gate of the Sun, where his poetic prose infuses the narrative with an aesthetic beauty.

However, when it came to addressing issues around identity and belonging, Khoury often relied on the emotional depth of the characters and events to tackle these aspects; he dealt with Palestinian and Lebanese identity in relation to their background of political unrest, occupation, and displacement.

In this way, he offered ethical and philosophical insights into the meanings of belonging in a world beset by constant upheaval.

The theme of Palestinian asylum appears extensively in his most prominent works, rooted in the many stories he collected from refugee camps during the long years of Israel's occupation.

Many critics consider his novel Gate of the Sun ("Bab Al-Shams") (1998) to be the first epic work with regard to the Palestinian narrative, which gave voice to their unfinished journey and their continuing torment.

The novel Gate of the Sun was associated with a later youth-led experiment opposing settler colonialism in the Palestinian territories in 2013, where young Palestinian activists gave the novel's name to a tent village they established that year on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Israeli forces demolished the site less than two days after it was erected.

In 2013, Khoury gave a speech from Beirut to a group of 250 Palestinian activists who had been involved in establishing the Gate of the Sun encampment.

He said among other things that day: "I will not say, 'I wish I were with you,' for I am with you … This is the Palestine that Yunis envisioned in the novel Bab Al-Shams."

The stories in this novel, although told from the viewpoint of Khalil, one of its protagonists, are written as different versions of the same story, with the narrator moving back and forth with the passage of time, as he wrestles with the evasiveness of memory, and questions of motive and identity, which reflect the instability of the truth, and the impossibility of capturing even one version of it.

In one interview, Khoury said: "I discovered, to my surprise, that there were basically no written accounts of the war. There was no archive to consult, there were only the whispers you might hear at home—the Druze killed your grandfather, the Christians murdered your uncle, that kind of thing.

"To me, this lack of a specifically written past meant that we Lebanese had no present, either. I’m not interested in memory as such, I'm interested in the present. But to have a present, you have to know which things to forget and which things to remember. Our lack of written history made me feel that I didn't even know the country I grew up in. I didn't know my place in it.

"I don't think I made any great discoveries as a historian, but when I began writing novels, a few years later, I found that I wanted to write the present—the present of our own civil war."

In his novel, White Masks (1981), which he wrote during the Lebanese Civil War, Khoury used a journalistic style to portray the physical devastation wrought on Beirut, its buildings and infrastructure, and the psychological toll of the war on its residents. He dealt with issues rarely addressed by Arabic novelists at that time, like women's rights, societal restrictions and religion.

Moreover, in his novels, Khoury did not simply describe the horrors that took place, but went further: he went into their impact on people, nature and relationships.

The relevance of the colour white in this novel is in its ability to reveal; its symbolism of light, which exposes things as they are, revealing scenes with all the absurdity, tragedy, and madness they contain.

Khoury did this, letting us read into phenomena and what lay behind them, to understand what was happening around us, so that we would not unwittingly become tools in a game in which we had no choice but compliance; to perform a part.

This is an edited translation from our Arabic edition. To read the original article click here

Translated by Rose Chacko   

This article is taken from our Arabic sister publication, Al-Araby Al Jadeed and mirrors the source's original editorial guidelines and reporting policies. Any requests for correction or comment will be forwarded to the original authors and editors

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