The novelist Elias Khoury was one of the last representatives of a species in danger of extinction, in the Arab world and beyond: the intellectual with real judgment. He died last Sunday, September 15, in Beirut, where he was born in 1948 in the Achrafieh neighborhood, the eastern hill of the city, which has traditionally been home to the Lebanese Greek Orthodox community. To say Achrafieh is to point at the same time to the most rancid and the most active part of Lebanon, one of the many contradictions of a country that has made them a way of being and, in the best cases, like Khoury’s, a way of transcending blind belongings. The little mountain (1976), in reference to Achrafieh, is precisely the title of his second novel, written at the beginning of the Lebanese civil war; it already reflected the contradiction between revolutionary euphoria and the reality of a confrontation between brothers.
Khoury was perhaps the greatest living Arab novelist of recent decades. Discreet in character, very different from other figures of Arab literature, Khoury was much more important than his fame. His career, solid and constant, is beyond the media discoveries of genius. He was a writer in the fullest sense of the term, discreet, cultured, incisive, politically committed to the freedom of Arabs in general and to the future of Lebanon and Palestine in particular. And he was, without a doubt, the one who best conveyed the living history of Palestine to narrative. He was Lebanese, which is as logical as it is paradoxical: 560,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon; however, as the poet and critic, also Lebanese, Abbas Beydoun, recalls, “with the exception of Elias Khoury, the Palestinian does not appear in the Lebanese novel.”
In a way, Khoury took up the baton from his admired Ghassan Kanafani, the great Palestinian storyteller, when he was assassinated by the Mossad in Beirut in 1972. His masterpiece is The Cave of the Sun (Alfaguara, 1998), an essential novel for understanding the Nakba (catastrophe), which he was one of the first to understand as a systematic process of violence and Palestinian dispossession at the hands of Israel, and not as a phenomenon limited to 1948. His latest book, published a few months ago, is entitled precisely The Nakba continuesan essay in which he addresses the forms of perpetuation of the Nakba in the light of the reflections that Palestinian intellectuals have made on it, from Kanafani, Mahmud Darwish and Edward Said to the younger Basil al-Araj.
Khoury fought with the Palestinians during the Lebanese civil war. He had already travelled to Jordan to join Fatah at the age of 19. This was not as unusual as it may seem: the history of Lebanese intellectuals who made the Palestinian cause their own, regardless of the sectarian affiliations that are in fashion today, is yet to be thoroughly revised. In daily contact with refugees on the one hand, and with the intellectuals of the Palestine Liberation Organisation on the other, Khoury understood the importance of opening up the narrative to individual memory and oral culture. Hence the importance he always attached in his novels and essays to documenting silent suffering and paying homage to its victims, such as women, the disabled and the old peasants left to fend for themselves in refugee camps while the men made the revolution.
Khoury was also, of course, a determined literary critic. He carried out this increasingly impoverished profession in various ways, including directing various publications, the last of which was the cultural supplement al-Mulhaq, from the main Lebanese daily, al-NaharHe co-directed with the poet Mahmud Darwish the magazine Shu’un Filastiniya (Palestinian Affairs), attached to the Institute for Palestine Studies, which was a primary target of the Israeli Army, along with the Sabra and Chatila camps, during the 1982 invasion of Beirut. Together they also embarked on the cultural magazine al-Karmelconvinced that Arab literature and culture could not survive in the wake of politics. In one of its first issues (1981) Khoury interviewed Cortázar in Paris, in a long dialogue in which one can read novel comparisons regarding the literary experience of the Arab world and Latin America, with language and exile as protagonists.
Khoury also worked as a teacher. He was a professor at various American and Arab universities: New York University (NYU), Columbia University, the American University of Beirut, and the Lebanese University.
He was also one of the very few Lebanese of the older generation – Abbas Beydoun is another – to whom young activists in recent years turned for answers, which he provided by stepping aside and insisting that intellectual leadership and mobilisation were their business. In a 2015 interview, he argued that “staying true to one’s convictions is often hard, sometimes even impossible, always difficult, but it is the most important thing there is.” In it, he also spoke of his experience during the Lebanese civil war, of the fratricidal fighting between Druze and Christians, which put his convictions to the test: he, of Christian origin, was part of the revolutionary groups allied to the Druze: “You cannot leave blood in the streets and walk away. At least you have to pick it up,” he summed up. The Arab world is losing, when it needs it most, the judgement of a figure like him.
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