“Thinking about imperial violence in terms of a camera shutter means grasping its particular brevity and the spectrum of its rapidity. It means understanding how this brief operation can transform an individual rooted in her life-world into a refugee, a looted object into a work of art, a whole shared world into a thing of the past, and the past itself into a separate time zone, a tense that lies apart from both present and future.”
— Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (as quoted by Guy Mannes-Abbott)
“In the light of Spivak’s invocation of the ‘epistemic violence’ operating in colonialist subject production, the works of Akhter and Ferdous could arguably be read as not only refusing the voicelessness of the subaltern, but also as participating in a decolonial project of epistemic counterviolence.”
— Tom Holert, “Epistemic Violence and the Careful Photograph”
1
In cinematography, DIRECTING THE EYE refers to using frame composition, camera movement, or lighting to make clear what is most important in the frame.
I am thinking about Andrew Davies' translation of Elias Khoury's The Children of the Ghetto: II: Star of the Sea, a book which took my breath away. Sonorous language makes it easy to get lost in the lyric of the Lebanese-born Khoury's efforts to make literature a conduit for stories and lives deprived of archives, particularly those of Palestinian refugees in camps near his hometown, and I said as much— though not enough— in my thoughts on the Barrios Prize finalists. Alas, I did not have a chance to say there what I will say now, namely, that one of the particular gifts of the past year has involved reading almost a hundred books in translation that were possible contenders for the National Book Critics Circle’s Barrios Prize, as led by Mandana Chaffa.
The shutter blinks, stutters, tries to focus . . . multiple lacunae distract the pen. This is where the panorama comes in, as opportunity to step back from the thing evading definition. In Star of the Sea, Khoury leverages narrativity to reveal the voices disinherited from their history by the Nabka. Rather than 'tell' the story, he shows us how the story has 'been told', in fragments and broken shards, in shame and terror, in hope and desperation. Each story opens into other tales, voices, and places; every proper noun links to another noun that has gone missing.
Al-Tantura, occupied on May 23, 1948.
The novel’s fifteen-year-old protagonist, Adam Dannoun, is a child of "the ghetto", one of the strategic containment areas created by Israel's army to set Palestinians apart from Israeli citizens. To be a child of the ghetto is to vanish before existing in the language of modernity and nation-state hegemony.
What the poet Mahmoud Darwish called "the presence of absence" echoes through Adam's life, as well as Khoury's narration, where the speaker is both present and absent, there and not-there—- and yet one feels so deeply entangled in Adam's efforts to find an identity that enables him to live, to exist, to speak as an "I" with a history. The author takes the “present absentee” of apartheid into himself, and works this self-ghosting into the third person point-of-view.
To draw loosely on Paul Celan, the name and the date mark us. The name and the date situate the text and turn it into a memorial site, a ghost-citation. Star of the Sea takes place in the 1960's in Haifa, where the scent of the ocean reaches across the rocks and shapes the imaginary, the identities available to Palestinian youth were premised on non-existence, on subterfuge and lying. No part of life, whether food, travel, education, marriage, was safe from this. Adam must be whatever Israelis need in order to continue living, and it is literature, in the end, that sets him on a path of confrontation with the self he constructs, a self fashioned from self-identification with Israeli Jewish citizens. He knows this, consciously—just as the Israelis around him know him, subconsciously.
2
Pronouns in Arabic are extraordinarily supple, unmatched in any other language. The written letters that take a person’s place are called “consciences”, but since the conscience is also an invisible moral compass, how can a novelist write using the conscience of one who is absent? And finally, what does its corollary—that the conscience must be absent in order for a person to tell their story really mean?
— Elias Khoury, My Name Is Adam (translated by Humphrey Davies)
Technically, one should begin with My Name Is Adam, the first book in Khoury’s “Children of the Ghetto” trilogy, which is precisely what my ever-insightful peer, Joseph Schreiber, does in a recent review. (I highly recommend reading it for a richer context.)
Once upon a time, there was a man. He opened his eyes and realized he lived in a garden. A god named him Adam. His author created a world that begins on the day of Adam’s birth in 1948. From the very beginning of My Name Is Adam, narration is problematized: the book consists of a scattered, unpolished manuscript written by Adam Dannoun, a Palestinian man in New York City who died before finishing his attempted novel. After Adam's death, Elias Khoury decides to publish the manuscript; he is, after all, implicated in its beginning. Adam never intended to write a book about his past in Palestine; he did everything to disconnect from what he had fled. He hides from history only to discover himself found by it. Adam changes his mind as a result of "two events—the screening of a film based on Khoury’s famous novel Gate of the Sun, and a conversation with a man he has not seen since he was seven years old," to quote Joseph.
A film and a conversation lead him Adam to commit to writing his life, a sort of self-narration that develops into a novel shaped by his relationship to the present. Archives and official history say little about the Palestinian experience in 1948, the year of Adam’s birth. Time, history, names, textbooks—- all conspire to erase the dispossessions that followed. The nature of narration is warped by what poet Mahmoud Darwish called “the presence of absence,” a way of seeing that inflects Adam's gaze when he looks back at his homeland. Memory mistrusts itself; the child cannot find words for the experience of the ongoing Nakba.
The title of the trilogy foregrounds this disinheritance: Khoury's subject is the resident Arab children who experienced physical, linguistic, economic, and social containment in what Zionist soldiers named a “ghetto.” To be a child of the ghetto is to vanish before existing in the language of modernity and nation-state hegemony.
Who is the ‘author’ here? Is it Adam disinherited from telling his own history, or the well-established Arabic novelist who feels driven to get it published?
Joseph mentions that Khoury's custodial role in (and of) Adam's novel is "assumed to be understood, but not mentioned" in the trilogy's second volume, Star of the Sea. Since my experience with this trilogy began in a disorderly fashion, namely, by beginning with the second volume, I can honestly say that the book felt complete to me. Khoury's narrative strategy moved seamlessly through its self-ghosting, and nothing about the book necessitated a precursor, to my reading. There is no information that Star of the Sea lacks in order to succeed as literature. Having read the first volume late last year, part of me still wonders if the second volume isn't a better first volume for this trilogy whose third volume remains (as of yet, to my knowledge) untranslated?
3
An ASYNCHRONOUS situation occurs when audio tracks are out of unison with the visuals in the frame, whether intentional or accidental.
Palestinians leave Haifa after Zionist forces enter the city, April 21, 1948. Source.
Khoury named his maternal grandmother as "the most important person in his life"— for she was the one who storytold the family history and gave the young Khoury a sense of narrative lineage. He said this in an extraordinary “Art of Fiction” interview for The Paris Review, to which I owe much of this information, as well as the living description of Khoury as a conversationalist given to stories “told in a low rumble, textured by decades of smoking Marlboros—which frequently end with him slapping the table and laughing. His anecdotes, often about fellow Arab writers, show his love of the mildly scandalous or seriously blasphemous. Khoury also enjoys an argument. When posed with a question, his impulse is often to correct or disagree with its premises.”
After mentioning his grandmother, Khoury quotes from one of his own novels, namely, Gate of the Sun, the novel whose film version inspired ‘Adam’ to write the first book in this trilogy. “My grandmother used to tell me stories as though she were tearing them into shreds; instead of gathering them together, she’d rip them apart,” says the protagonist of Gate of the Sun. Perhaps this gestures towards an explanation for the haphazard shape of My Name Is Adam, a book relying on the memories of a child (whose own experience is frequently narrated to him by elders) to reconstitute a history.
To add to the intertextual richness, Khoury titled Gate of the Sun after Ghassan Kanafani's Men of the Sun, a novel that consumed him in 1963, when it was first released. Later, while working in Beirut for the Palestine Research Center and its journal, Palestinian Affairs, Khoury met Kanafani, who was writing for the PFLP-associated paper, Al-Hadaf. Kanafani wrote like one who knew he didn't have long for this world. "He smoked nonstop and drank coffee and whiskey and was always writing something—journalism, novels, essays, children’s books, plays," Khoury said. Ultimately, Mossad assassinated Kanafani in a 1982 car bomb attack which blew his body to bits, leaving his friends to "gather the limbs off the sidewalk," as Khoury said.
Unlike Kanafani, whose novels condense and narrate, Khoury tended to work against brevity and clarity by expanding and drawing very close to the interior states of his characters. The most important part wasn’t the hero or narrative arc but rather the sidereal, Khoury said, in “the marginal detail or side story that we have to come to recognize as central.”
4
“The question keeping the writer of these stories awake at night is the following: how can the absentee write? Can they tell their own story using “I,” thereby writing as though remembering? Or should they employ the third person to write in their place?”
— Elias Khoury, My Name Is Adam (translated by Humphrey Davies)
Khoury’s novel, Little Mountain, was published in 1977, two years after the start of the Lebanese civil war. Although Khoury fought with the fedayeen during the first two years of the war, he insisted that the book was "not a memoir" but an act of imagination. The places may be real, but “the events are made up.” After he finished writing it, Khoury was mystified by genre and didn't know how to classify it. “I still have that feeling whenever I sit down to write that I don’t know how to do it, that I have to learn to write all over again,” he told an interviewer. What he knew—and continued to believe—was that Arabic literature needed to move away from its nineteenth century commitment to historical novels. “We needed to write things as they happened, to tell the story of the present.”
“I had no model,” Khoury said of Little Mountain, "I wrote like a blind man—”
5
There is a sensuousness that overtakes Khoury’s narratives—- the scent of the fruits, trees, salt on skin—- the particular enchantment of his phrasing. Khoury “writes about the scent of words, which take on such immaterial qualities that writing itself works like a sixth sense in his fiction,” Guy Mannes-Abbot said in his splendid review of As Though She Were Sleeping. I can’t think of a better way to describe Khoury’s structure of intersecting narrative circles than the one offered by Guy:
6
THE FOURTH WALL is the illusory, imaginary plane through which the audience is able to watch the film. The fourth wall is what gets broken when the audience is reminded that they are watching a film.
Elias Khoury’s experience with the fedayeen served as “a kind of training for life, and for death: which “required the utmost ethical commitment and the ability to see things critically, even at times ironically.” As he explained in the Paris Review interview, he did what felt necessary and what seemed clear based on the things he had witnessed. “For me the issue was straightforward— Palestinians have a right to their country and the refugees have a right to return to their land,” he said. The political specifics were tactical questions, but the conflict itself was “an ethical issue”: When you have a victim in front of you, you must identify yourself with the victim, not just show solidarity.”
What does identifying with the victim mean to Khoury? He considers himself an Arab, and thus refuses to identify 'as a 'Christian' minority in Lebanon, adding that “one’s religious heritage is essentially a literary heritage.” If he had been raised a Muslim, he would have written his books “in exactly the same way as I have,” Khoury told the interviewer.
What is the difference between identifying with and identifying as?
The question seems simple, but Khoury troubles the easy answer in Star of the Sea, which introduces us to a post-pubescent, fifteen-year-old Adam. It is now 1963, and Adam cannot bear watching his stepfather abuse his mother any longer. It is too much: he can hardly control his urge to defend her physically. He has to leave.
In a moving scene, Adam's mother seeks a goodbye from her son as he prepares to flee into the darkness. She gives him a parting deed: his father's will and testament. But which courts will acknowledge these documents? Who is in the position to judge or adjudicate the future of a disinherited teen?
As a runaway, or a human in exile from his family and community, Adam has no legible history. His future will involve creating a cover story that enables him to live safely, to become a person, to build his own home and future. But a cover story is not the same thing as a life.
Seeking work, Adam gets lucky when Gabriel, a Polish Jew who picks him up while hitchhiking, offers him a job as a mechanic in his garage. Gabriel is drawn to Adam because he resembles his fair-haired, light-skinned younger brother who is no longer living. He gives him a place to live, helps him get into a Jewish school, and Adam responds by changing himself to fit Gabriel's imaginary. Adam's survival depends on being what Gabriel needs him to be. Adam changes his name from Dannoun to Danon and learns Hebrew. In Khoury's words (which Joseph typed):
If the heroes of novels could break through the fourth wall (page) and speak without an intermediary, then Adam could very well have told his story not as the invisible man, but a man formed from his imagination. And indeed he had imagined an entire personality that both matched his true nature and was completely different. From the moment he left his mother’s house on the night of the rain, Adam realized that he could represent himself however he wanted by using certain true events to create a compelling background.
Open into room where Khoury is speaking with the interviewer again, parsing the distance between imagining the self as a writer and identifying as a writer. He names a book as transformative in his development.
Correction: he names the relationship he formed with this book as transformative. Khoury began thinking of himself as a writer after reading Albert Camus’s The Stranger and realizing that he had read it so closely and intensely, read it the way a lover reads the beloved's body, that he knew it "by heart."
Like the poets I saw in a panel at NOLA, Khoury brought the poems he loved into his body, creating a repertoire of memorized poems:
“I used to memorize huge amounts of modern poetry in Arabic—Adonis, al-Sayyab, Khalil Hawi. I didn’t study them, I memorized them. And after I memorized The Stranger, I felt like I was actually the author. The book became a part of me, it was inside me. This happened every time I read a book I really loved. My sense wasn’t that I wanted to write something similar to what I’d read—no, my sense was that the book had entered me and that I was its author. I became obsessed with literature. Even when I was training in Syria, I brought novels with me to read.”
When Emile Habibi asked why he chose to give his characters Christian or Muslim names, Khoury told him that was out of a fidelity to their society, where one can often recognize a person's religion by their name. Habibi gave his characters neutral names, and Khoury pointed out: "Your own name isn’t neutral, it’s Emile! Are you going to change that?"
7
Repetition is, I might say, a way of insisting that every story contains many stories inside it. The same story can be told in any number of different ways, of course. My novels try to suggest this richness, even though I can tell only a limited number of versions. In other words, I’m a student of Scheherazade—I don’t tell the story, I tell how the story has been told. There’s an important difference here. The whole tradition of Arabic literature teaches us how important it is. All classical texts tell us that there’s a prior authority or source for the story about to be told. There’s always a chain of transmitters, or translators, even though each version differs. And in Arabic, the word for “novel,” riwaya, also means “version.” In this sense, there’s no such thing as pure repetition. To write multiple versions of the same story is to suggest that every story is a form of potential, an opening onto other stories.
Literature cannot be a compensation for history, but it can point to an absence. It’s a form of accusation, if you like. [ … ] The novel indicates what isn’t there.
— Elias Khoury, “The Art of Fiction Interview”
Dheisheh Refugee Camp, Bethlehem, West Bank.
A Palestinian girl carries her laptop as she walks past a mural of Ghassan Kanafani, the writer and leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in Dheisheh Refugee Camp, Bethlehem, West Bank on May 12, 2018, as photographed by Anna Paq.
Red threads its way through this photograph, joining the Arabic inscription on the wall to the red laptop case carried by the girl and then climbing, quietly, towards the upper left corner of the frame where the evergreen magnolia bursts over the side of the wall, revealing two ruddy seed cones, poking upwards. I noticed it perhaps because the velour laptop case shares a velvety texture with that seed cone… and then catches the shirt of the boy riding the bike down the alley.
As part of his continuing effort to “write the present”, Khoury published an essay collection titled The Continuous Nakba in the year before his death . . .
8
While studying in Paris, Khoury attended some of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France; several auditoriums had to be opened to accommodate the crowds. Like Gen X teens camping outside the box office to get teens for a rock concert, Khoury says he and friends would arrive “three or four hours early with our sandwiches” in the hopes of scoring good seats. “Foucault was like a wizard, so erudite. No one dared to ask him a question after he finished lecturing.”
9
“It’s not true that the dying don’t know; if they didn’t, death would lose its meaning and become like a dream. When death loses its meaning, life loses its meaning, and we enter a labyrinth from which there is no exit.”
— Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun (translated by Humphrey Davies)
Photo from Hauntologies by Elia Ayoub.
To return to The Star of the Sea— the man who gives Adam his job, the Polish Jew named Gabriel, has a daughter named Rivka. And perhaps there is an Eden in this, for she becomes Adam's first love. Both of them depend on the same man, the same god, as it were, the king of the garden. The rules were put in place before the birth of the lovers—and all that remains is for them to “sin,” or to upset the order of the garden where what is known is known solely by Gabriel.
Of course Khoury selects the name Gabriel to evoke to angel that appears that offers respite, and it is a testament to Khoury’s brilliance that he plays mythical characters and religious figures against each other continuously, complicating the scriptures themselves as part of the narrative strategy. In these religions of the book offered by monotheism, humans are given a world created by the authors. This is what good fiction does: it creates a believable world that sucks us into its topography and conventions. So Adam lives there, in Haifa, under an assumed Israeli identity, an existence that depends entirely on the goodwill and complete trust of Gabriel.
To Israel and the IDF, the Adam inherited from his father’s will and testament— the Adam on paper— is an Arab, a foreigner, a potential threat. In an effort to understand his oppressors, Adam becomes a student of Hebrew Literature and comes under the mentorship of a German-born professor, whose passion for literature inspires him. The class takes a trip to Warsaw, Poland, where the eighteen-year-old Adam finds himself so deeply embroiled in lies and disguise that every moment demands constant vigilance. Fear of exposure fuels his social interactions. The problem of recognition and identity returns in the tour of the Warsaw Ghetto— a tour that has become increasingly common for students in Israeli schools— where he hears the stories of the tour guide and other survivors narrated to the students, all of whom are listening, learning history, so to speak, a history that, for many Israeli students, is their history. His peers are proud to be Israeli; the future belongs to them. What sort of life is the “present absentee” allowed to imagine? What can he dream that isn’t a threat to the occupiers? What part of Adam’s breath isn’t a ‘danger’ to the mythos of the ethnonationalist state that punishes those who are born there for being born in the wrong religion?
10
“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 the Jews but because their death meant the death of humanity within us.”
— Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun (translated by Humphrey Davies)
Lacuna. A thing held in brackets. A gap in the manuscript. A silence between pages that constitute a life narrative. A date inscribed upon the memory of every Palestinian. A date all the more painful for its absence from any public acknowledgement in the US, where much of the diaspora finds itself. April 9th, 1948. No camera in the US dares to touch it— and yet, the postcard of the depopulated al-Tantura connects to it, the two divided by a month and a small distance.
”Meanwhile, in the Black Sea near Crimea, there is a garden of dismantled Soviet statues deep beneath the water, a stunningly blue cathedral of water where Stalin and Lenin sit near the poet Sergei Esenin, while Yuri Gagarin, the first human to enter outer space, lives out eternity at the other extreme. I’d love to rent scuba gear and meet these monuments under the sea – I think of that song in The Little Mermaid, ‘Under the Sea’ – to bring that song to it, to combine these different realities in water, the juxtaposition of their solidity and permanence against my weightlessness. Reality is complicated; nothing is as binary or simple as we want it to be. And I’m very comfortable with something that doesn’t erase the past but interacts with it in a way that challenges the past. Changing the tense of history. Darwish does that or can give us a route into doing that. He can say we are present with absence. And we are responsible for imagining the next part.”
History may be owned by the victors, but truth is not. Truth waits for the day when the lies of the victors cause the victory to fall apart. Every child raised in a dictatorship or personality cult secretly knows that the lies will dissolve eventually: the only question is how long will it take for the adults to wake up?