"Forgetting is a blessing"

One of Lebanon’s most prominent intellectuals, Elias Khoury died on Sunday at age 76 after months of illness. A leading figure of Arab literature, the acclaimed novelist, playwright, and critic appeared on the international stage upon translation of his work from Arabic to English, French, German, Spanish, Hebrew, and other languages.   

Beyond Beirut, where he was a professor at the American University of Beirut, his reputation as a novelist took him to the US and the UK, where he taught at universities like Columbia, Princeton, New York University (NYU) and the University of London. When he passed, alluding to his capacity as a writer to cross borders, Arab-American writer Diana Abu-Jaber told me, “His books deepened insight not only into the Arab world but into the human experience.” From New York, award-winning author Sinan Antoon recalled reading Khoury long before he met him at NYU where they both taught, “I started reading Elias Khoury when I was an aspiring writer back in Baghdad. He is one of my favourite authors in any language.” 

Born in 1948, the year of the Palestinian Nakba, to a middle-class Christian family in Beirut, Khoury’s life in Lebanon was further imprinted by the Palestinian struggle when he decided to join Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organisation's (PLO) armed wing in the late 1960s. His 1981 novel “White Masks”, one of Khoury's many about Lebanon’s Civil War (1975-1990), attracted the attention of the PLO as it revealed details about various factions of the organisation. In reaction, the PLO pulled the novel from bookstores for years until Khoury published a series of articles on the Israeli invasion of Beirut and was considered redeemed. 

“White Masks” was not the first time doubt was cast on Khoury’s credentials as a revolutionary. In a 2021 interview, he claimed his novel “Little Mountain”, written at the start of the civil war, also drew suspicion: “Everybody who read it thought that I was not a real revolutionary because I was fighting and at the same time criticising the civil war in my writing.” He explains this doubt as borne from a “contradiction between the euphoric optimistic ideology we were living and what I was writing.” The dissonant realities experienced during the civil war, of a nation incapable of reconciling with its own self-destructive madness, are indicated by the figure of a conflicted fighter-intellectual in the novel, who reflects Khoury’s own predicament.  

Some would say the self-described “militant” traded politics for literature when he left Fatah and the Lebanese National Movement (a leftist, pro-Palestinian front that operated during the civil war). But it would be difficult to distinguish between the creative oeuvre of Elias Khoury and the political – Khoury’s writings depicted both macro and micro-politics through wars, familial and national trauma, private and public grief, and memory thereof. 

With the 2006 English translation of his 1998 novel “Gate of the Sun”, more international acclaim followed. An “epic of the Palestinian people”, as described by one of the novel’s characters, it recounts multiple historic events through a collection of personal, familial, grief-ridden, exilic, romantic, heroic, and bewildering narratives of Palestinian people – though, of course, it was not written by a Palestinian. 

The novel begins with a doctor recounting stories to a comatose old man in a refugee camp hospital in Beirut. Over the course of these stories, a deeper relationship between the two characters is slowly revealed – the old man in the coma is a Palestinian freedom fighter, and the doctor his adopted son. The doctor’s stories advance through history, from 1948 to the PLO’s creation, the Six-Day War, and the Intifada. From refugee camps to massacre grounds and battle fronts. Like a modern Shahrazad, who told stories to stay alive, the doctor does so to keep the dying freedom fighter alive, or perhaps to wake him. 

The phrase, “We forget, and forgetting is a blessing,” is often quoted from the novel. The doctor, who tries to reason and cajole his patient into waking, poignantly pleads, “We remember in order to forget, this is the essence of the game. But don't you dare die now!” Khoury himself testified to the necessity of releasing the burden of trauma in order to simply live, to be, as they say, “resilient”. In the same 2021 interview, he states, “It is a human necessity to forget. People have to forget. If I do not forget my friends who died in the civil war I cannot live, I cannot drink and eat…”  

But, of course, for writing to be healing, the tragic event itself must come to an end. The Lebanese Civil War has come to an end, but in the case of Palestine, the struggle has not. As Khoury stated in a 2018 interview, “Normally, when the tragedy ends, you write it, and writing becomes an act of healing, a way of forgetting. When you make a monument of your pain, then you forget it. In the case of Palestine, you cannot make a monument of the pain, because it is still there.” Moreover, so much of what has already been recounted and testified to in the case of Palestine continues to be repeatedly denied and ignored. 

But forgetting is also about putting down the burden of memory, to be picked up as a legacy by the following generation. As the doctor says to his adoptive father in “Gate of the Sun”, “You have to finish organizing your forgetting first, so that I can remember afterwards.” In the case of Elias Khoury, I hope we can always remember his legacy, especially since so much of the violence and brutality he recounted and narrated is still subject to erasure.

© Qantara.de 2024