Elias Khoury 1948-2024
The Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury died yesterday at the age of 76. When his early book The Little Mountain (1977) was translated into English in 1988, Edward Said – contrasting him with Naguib Mahfouz – described Khoury in the LRB as a ‘politically committed, and, in his own highly mobile modes, brilliant figure’. A journalist, publisher and ‘highly perceptive critic’ as well as a novelist, Khoury ‘forged (in the Joycean sense) a national and novel, unconventional, postmodern literary career’. He had also been ‘a political militant from his early days, having grown up as a 1960s schoolboy in the turbulent world of Lebanese and Palestinian street politics.’
Gate of the Sun (1998), set in the Shatila refugee camp over the half-century since the Nakba, was translated into English in 2006. ‘Even though Palestine has been his main preoccupation as a journalist and political activist,’ Jeremy Harding wrote, ‘Gate of the Sun is the first of Khoury’s novels to tackle the subject head on.’ To write his piece, Harding spent time with Khoury in Beirut and they travelled together to southern Lebanon, which a few months earlier had been devastated by an Israeli invasion, the fifth since 1978, in response to a Hizbullah cross-border raid that killed five Israeli soldiers:
We drove past little storefronts (‘Salon Elégance’), pits of rubble next to sagging balconies and collapsed apartments hanging sheer, like enormous blinds, from twisted reinforcing rods. Parts of Bint Jbeil, where the IDF were ambushed in July, are now like worked-out quarries. The whole area is littered with unexploded cluster-bomb components. In several villages, men with shovels and diggers were clearing debris. Wherever we went Khoury provided a rough inventory of damage, a figure for the dead and a population estimate, with a breakdown by confession.
Khoury wrote about the invasion in July 2006:
The Israelis say they do not want to occupy Lebanon. This is also what the Americans say about Iraq. The issue, however, is not what they want but what they are doing … Before me I see the same images of death that I witnessed 24 years ago. The pictures themselves, the noise of invading aircraft in the skies of Beirut and all over Lebanon, are the same. Do I see or do I remember? When you are incapable of distinguishing between what is in front of you and what you remember, it becomes clear that history teaches nothing.
‘You will describe me as a political person,’ Khoury said to Harding. ‘You’ll make too much of that. I am a journalist, sure, and I write what I think. I’m interested in the Democratic Left Movement because it’s a duty for people like me to try to make this place into a secular democratic culture. It is irresponsible not to do this. Especially now. But the truth is I’m a writer. This is really what I do and I’m too old to stop doing it.’
The second part of Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto trilogy, Star of the Sea, translated by Humphrey Davies, will be published by Archipelago in November.