Gate of the Sun
Elias Khoury; translated by Humphrey Davies Harvill, 501pp, £17.99
ISBN 1843431033
When Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in 1988, it seemed that at last the west had recognised Arabic literature. To Edward Said, however, Mahfouz's realist style had been overtaken by the innovative work of a new generation of Palestinian and Lebanese authors in which "form is an adventure, narrative both uncertain and meandering, character less a stable collection of traits than a linguistic device, self-conscious as it is provisional and ironic".
Elias Khoury belongs to this group. To digest the complicated narrative technique of Gate of the Sun requires familiarity with modern masters such as Beckett, Nabokov, Calvino, Marquez and Celine, and a close knowledge of Palestinian history. The narrator, Khaleel, tells the untold story of the Palestinians of Galilee, both those who were compelled to leave in 1948 and those who remained and became Arab Israelis. He also declares the undeclared death of national Palestinian politics, or what Palestinians used to refer to as "the fedayeen movement", "armed struggle" and "the revolution".
Starting from the infamous Shatila camp in Lebanon, Khaleel takes us back to the refugees' original homes, the Galilee villages that were largely demolished after the establishment of the State of Israel. Khaleel's direct audience is not the reader, but Yunis, the hero of the story. The two men are stuck in a hospital room: Khaleel is hiding from would-be revenge killers, while Yunis is lying in a coma. The name of the hospital, symbolically enough, is "al-Jaleel", Galilee.
The narrative moves from the mid-1990s back to the mid-1930s, encompassing most of the significant political events in between: the war of 1948, the birth of the fedayeen (Palestinian guerrilla fighters') movement, the Six Day War, Black September in Jordan, the Lebanese civil war, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the intifada and the Oslo Accord. But history in Gate of the Sun is only a background for Khoury's characters. Yunis appears as an epic hero: a freedom fighter, a lover, a fugitive, an indispensable link between the past and the present, the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and the Palestinians of Israel, the old generation and the new. His hiding place, Bab el Shams ("gate of the sun") is a cave in northern Israel, but also a mythical place that substitutes for the lost home.
Gate of the Sun is not, however, an epic novel. The narrator emphasises the contradiction between a character who lives according to absolutes and a world that seems endlessly fragmentary. Thus Yunis gradually becomes more of a myth than a real human being. And what seems myth-ological in the secular perception of the narrator is really a symbol of demise.
Surrounded by death, Khaleel sounds as if he is lamenting the past and the vanishing of the Palestinian revolution. But he is actually taking great pains to stifle a sigh of relief. Watching the White House ceremony during which Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on television, Khaleel cannot help feeling pleased: "I was happy as I watched the end and drew a false expression of sorrow on my face."
This is a challenging novel that demands from us an imagination potent enough to link its many loose threads. The good news is that Khoury's language is derived from everyday colloquial Arabic, rather than the formal language of intellectuals and the media. Humphrey Davies's translation is masterful, allowing us to appreciate Gate of the Sun's short, clear sentences and crisp metaphors afresh.
Samir el-Youssef is the author of Gaza Blues: different stories (David Paul)
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