The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History

Point/counterpoint, shot/reverse-shot—tibaq. In his latest work, Children of the Ghetto: My Name Is Adam, the Lebanese author Elias Khoury presents us with a novel that is not a novel. A prolific writer, Khoury has established himself as one of the most prominent experimentalists of contemporary Arabic narrative, challenging and transgressing conventional novelistic forms. While Khoury’s signature aesthetic and formal elements, such as fragmented, nonlinear, intertextual, and openended narratives,¹ are present in Children of the Ghetto, it nonetheless marks a new beginning and a departure from Khoury’s earlier works, which are primarily consumed with the Lebanese civil war and the stories of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.² Published in Arabic in 2016, Children of the Ghetto is a culmination of Khoury’s innovations, achieving the aesthetic poise that his earlier works experimented with and paved the way for and transporting his work to new and unchartered territories formally, aesthetically, and textually.

In Children of the Ghetto, we are offered a richly layered, multivocal narrative laden with allusions, references, commentary, thoughts, quotes, and memories. This is a work of an author of many hats: the composer and performer as well as the writer, reader, and interpreter of the Palestinian story. The first part of Children of the Ghetto is a short prologue in which Khoury introduces us to the writings of a Palestinian man from al-Lidd named Adam Danoun, whom Khoury met in New York and whose series of unfinished notebooks happened to come into Khoury’s possession after Danoun’s death. Danoun’s writings constitute parts two, three, and four of the novel, which Khoury titles “Introduction/Will,” “Adam Danoun,” and “Days of the Ghetto,” respectively. Narrating, elaborating, revising, reinterpreting, re-presenting, rethinking, re-searching and reinventing, Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto reweaves anew the persistent threads and thematic fragments of the Palestinian story.

The Palestinian story, as a narrative of open-ended liminal fragments, is ripe material for counterpoint. That is, it is a story with the ability, as expressed in the musical concept of counterpoint, to “say two things at once comprehensively.”3 It is also, however, a story poised on the edge. Its capacity for repetition has made the Palestinian story a symbolic story—a narrative route well trodden. But repetition of a different kind, that of variations on a theme, of contrapuntal juxtaposition as invention, is precisely the untapped potential of the story that Khoury exposes to us in Children of the Ghetto.

Inspired by the musical concept of counterpoint, Edward Said, in his book Culture and Imperialism (1994), espoused a methodology of contrapuntal reading—that is, reading together what is written in the text and what is forcibly excluded from it.⁴ In this way, Said encourages the ability to think through and interpret together experiences that are at odds with each other, juxtaposing them and playing them off of each other, exposing both harmonies and dissonances, and dramatizing their antagonisms and discrepancies.⁵ Such a method, however, assumes the author’s act of exclusion, resulting from texts as culturally and historically determined and partially analyzed through ideological, national, or systematic schools of theory. But what of a text that includes the excluded, a text that ponders and narrates its own gaps and silences?

Children of the Ghetto, if it can at all be summarized, is a story about the contrapuntal reading of the Palestinian story. It turns the insides of narrative out to reveal to us the very stuff counterpoint is made of. We, as readers, must also read it contrapuntally. Guided by Said’s approach, the following sections are a meditation on the contrapuntal ingredients of Children of the Ghetto: the Arabic concept of tibaq, the link to invention, and the question of narrating silence.

How does this relate to the Palestinian story? I will argue that a deeper exploration of the tibaq the novel begins with can uncover previously untapped sites of narration and analysis. As it unfolds, Khoury’s novel reveals to us new narrative spaces for the writing together of fundamental dissonances at the heart of the Palestinian story: fragments/whole; beginning/end; life/death; documentary/fiction; poetry/prose; language/silence; literature/history; memory/forgetting; Palestinian/Israeli; Lidd ghetto/Warsaw ghetto; and even Nakba/Holocaust. The textured, layered narrative spaces the novel creates show us how a contrapuntal, horizontal approach can lead toward more democratic and ethical forms of narration that seriously grapple with the reality of simultaneous irreconcilables.

The tibaq of the epigraph comes laden with allusions beyond the immediate Koranic context. It recalls, for example, Mahmoud Darwish’s elegy to Edward Said, “Tibaq,”⁷ translated as “Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading.”⁸ In an immediate sense, this reference creates a link between the words tibaq and counterpoint. We are then led to consider Edward Said’s work on counterpoint, a concept he expanded beyond the realm of music to think about culture, literature, exile, the role of the intellectual, and Palestine/Israel.

The contemporary isnad (Khoury—Darwish—Said) is only one part of the literary chain Khoury evokes throughout the novel. He takes the reader and interpreter deeper into the Arabic roots of counterpoint. The epigraphic allusion to tibaq is a preliminary hint, a premonition of an Arabic literary continuum that will emerge through a narrative fabric that layers the modern/contemporary together with the medieval/classical Arabic literature. By invoking a negative tibaq for his epigraph, Khoury indicates to us readers that we are about to grapple with dissonance, disorientation, and decentralization that are set to dominate the tone of the novel.

Adam, the protagonist and narrator of the story, the man who is told he carries two names, tells us that he hopes to write his story in “two different ways at the same time”9—a story with two simultaneously different meanings and interpretations. He traces this idea back to two sources: a sheikh who was brought to teach him Arabic and the Koran in his childhood, and a foreboding comment made by his pseudo-father, Ma’moun the Blind. Adam explains that the Palestinians who managed to remain after the Nakba of 1948 felt that their existence and their Arabic language were being threatened with erasure after the establishment of the new State of Israel. He recalls that during his Arabic classes he would ask the sheikh a difficult question. The sheikh would present him with two different answers, and when Adam would ask him to assert which of the two answers was the correct one, the sheikh would say: “There are two different interpretations, and only God knows….”¹⁰

In the strange, upturned reality of what became known as the Lidd ghetto, a small area of the city that was barb wired to imprison and contain the Palestinians who remained after the exodus (or what the characters in the novel refer to as the “death march”)¹¹ out of the war-torn city, a young blind man named Ma’moun ended up in the storeroom of the shack that a young woman and an infant lived in. The infant, as the first child of the ghetto, came to be known as Adam. However, the blind man sometimes called him Naji (survivor), which made Adam furious, because he saw the importance of the name he carries, that of “the father of humanity.”¹² Ma’moun the Blind, who had become his father figure, would pat him on the back and tell him, “Time will teach you what it means to carry two names.”¹³

Adam’s emphasis on his two-ness, is not dissimilar to Edward Said’s contrapuntal approach, through which he endeavors to read together, horizontally not linearly or univocally, opposites, negatives, and discrepancies. In Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, for example, Said rereads the cultural, political, and historical archives with a simultaneous awareness of the interplay between dominant and suppressed, silenced, or invisible voices. In this way, Said’s method seeks to recognize multiplicity of voices, highlight limitations and shortcomings of history, and challenge the possibility of a monolithic understanding of the truth.

Said was attracted to that which is unreconciled, to the asymmetries and the unlikes of life, which he saw as the heart of counterpoint. In The Last Interview, Said likens counterpoint to parallel lines “operating together without the necessity of being reconciled at any one moment.”¹⁴ They could even be antagonistic to each other. “If you were to freeze a moment in time,” he continues, “let’s say in a fugue, you could hear maybe a terrible dissonance, but that doesn’t matter because what matters really is the flow, and the flow together, and the interweaving of lines—or voices.”¹⁵ Given that the world is not an exclusive place, the struggle and the effort for the writer, the intellectual, and the interpreter then is to create a “common space” that allows the possibility to record the dissonant and unreconciled playing off of each other. “It’s up to you to try to hold them together.”¹⁶ This, Said suggests, is the duty of the interpreter. In Children of the Ghetto, Khoury as the writer and interpreter creates a novelistic narrative “common space” that records the dissonances, assonances, fragments, and shards of the Palestinian story.

The tibaq in Adam’s case sees the similarities, not just the differences, between one thing and its opposite, or one word and its antonym. As he bids farewell to his house in the Ajami neighborhood in Yaffa, Adam dwells on the thought that when people immigrate, they often do so to start a new life, but his decision to leave for New York was, rather, a search for the end. With this thought, he begins to see that “the end resembles the beginning, and when I go searching for my end, the end will become a metaphor for the beginning.”17 In this way the word and its antonym, his thought continues, merge into one and that single word comes to mean “both the thing and its opposite.”¹⁸

Adam’s awareness of a simultaneous similarity and difference of one thing and its opposite leads him to reflect on a place, al-Andalus, that came to embody both home and exile at the same time. Feeling the “Andalusian shiver,”¹⁹ as Mahmoud Darwish, Ibn Zaydun, Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, and al-Mu’tamid have done before him, he ponders the secret stored in a legendary place that managed to create a “strange fusion between homeland and exile.”²⁰ Adam also considers the flip side of this possibility, the historic moment in 1948 that transformed the Palestinian inhabitants of al-Lidd from the people of the land to strangers and exiles on their land—“this feeling of loss, which transformed the people of al-Lidd to strangers,”²¹ he writes.

This precise moment of transformation in 1948 is one that Jean-Luc Godard hones in on to explain the cinematic technique of shot/reverse-shot. In his film Notre Musique,²² we see Godard giving a lecture on film to students. The viewers are brought in at the juncture where Godard is explaining the concept of shot/reverse-shot. “The shot and reverse-shot are basics of film grammar,”²³ we hear him say. As he juxtaposes two photographic frames we hear him continue: “For example, two photos of the same moment in history. Then you see the truth has two faces.”²⁴ He goes on: “For example, in 1948 the Israelites walked in the water to reach the Holy Land. The Palestinians walked in the water to drown. Shot and reverse-shot. Shot and reverse-shot.”²⁵

The visual effect of two similar but different photos of two peoples walking into the water is perhaps the best way to capture how 1948 becomes a moment of tibaq. It is a contrapuntal moment that will define the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis, and it brings together the Holocaust and the Nakba. Adam recognizes that the duality in such a tibaq is not just dichotomous but also dialogical. He elaborates this by referring to the concept of the muthanna (the dual)—a structural grammatical characteristic unique to the Arabic language—in the pre-Islamic poetry of Imru’ al-Qays. In his poetry, Imru’ al-Qays brings to life the split duality of the “I.” The “I” of the poet is divided into two: the “I” and its shadow,²⁶ the estrangement of the “I” from itself, and the ensuing dialogue between the “I” and the “I” that begins to resemble “the relationship between words and music.”²⁷

In other words, invention lies in the rethinking, revising, reworking, and reinventing of point/counterpoint combinations to create new aesthetic encounters and harmonic insights against a backdrop of conventions and constraints.²⁹ It is the organization of multiple voices, the polyphony, that attracts Said, especially “the way one voice becomes subordinated by another.”³⁰

Carrying these ideas over to literature, Adam too believes that “every piece of writing is a form of rewriting.”³¹ He goes further to boldly assert that “literary thefts,” much like those the Abbasid poet al-Mutannabi or the Soviet novelist Mikhail Sholokhov were accused of, are justified for whomever can pull them off. The so-called “Mutannabi thefts,”³² Adam believes, are equally creative as (if not more creative than) pieces of work supposed to be purely original. In fact, there is a double theft going on in the novel. The author, Elias Khoury, admits in the prologue to having considered “stealing [Adam’s] book and publishing it under my own name.”³³. In this way, Khoury could have fulfilled his dream of writing part two of his 1998 novel Bab al-Shams (Gate of the Sun), which is something he had been personally struggling to achieve. What is there to write, he asks, “after the killing of Shams and the death of Nahila?”³⁴ (his beloved characters in Gate of the Sun). He decides against this course of action and satisfies himself with arranging the structure and coming up with the titles for Adam’s writings. The reader, however, is not to be fooled by Khoury’s statements—the model of literary borrowing and “theft” becomes the backbone of the novel’s narrative structure.

In his attempt to write the story of the Umayyad poet Waddah al-Yaman, Adam aspired to become a literary thief but found himself a drafter instead.35 When he finally decides to write his own story, he begins to recognize the beauty of reinventing himself: such reinvention enacts another type of creative theft that allows for exploration of the variations and possibilities of the self and identity. A Palestinian who reinvents himself as a Jew and Israeli: shot/reverse-shot. But in this case, the tibaq is simultaneously juxtaposed and layered in one person, Adam, who becomes the single unit that carries the paradoxical duality and dissonance of a Palestinian citizen of Israel. Said writes in Culture and Imperialism that identities are contrapuntal ensembles, “for it is the case that no identity can ever exist by itself without an array of opposites, negatives, oppositions.”³⁶

How does Adam succeed in pulling off this almost Shakespearian riddle of mixed identities? In his case, one word was enough to create the double meaning. As a student at the University of Haifa, when asked where he was from he would answer with one word: “the ghetto.” The effect is one he knew well: “My colleagues would look at me with pity and assume that I am the son of one of the survivors of the Warsaw ghetto.”³⁷ In Adam’s estimation, he was not lying: “I know the stories of the Warsaw ghetto as well as I knew the stories of the Lidd ghetto. Stories of ghettos resemble each other just as dead people resemble each other. The former stories I read countless times until they were ingrained in my memory, and the latter stories are engraved like a tattoo on my soul,”³⁸ he explains. In fact, this was part of Adam’s mission to experience the reverse-shot of his identity—an overturning of dichotomies, in a way Godard perhaps could not predict in the Palestinian case. Earlier in the novel, Adam reveals: “I succeeded and I was an Israeli like all Israelis. I didn’t hide my Palestinian identity but I hid it in the ghetto I was born in. I am the son of the ghetto, and the word ghetto gave me the protection of Warsaw.”³⁹ In this way, Adam becomes the son of two ghettos at the same time: Lidd and Warsaw.

Writing in the prologue of the novel, Elias Khoury refers to what he calls the “iltibas al-shakhsiyya”⁴⁰ (shifting identity) that he believes Adam suffers from. He is suspicious of this man Adam, whom Khoury says he met in New York while on a teaching stint at the university. He wonders: Is he a Palestinian claiming to be Israeli or the opposite, an Israeli who masters Arabic—“al-filastini al-multabis” (the dubious Palestinian) who speaks Hebrew better than the Jews?⁴¹ Khoury is led to conclude that “the man likes it and doesn’t mind people thinking he is Jewish.”⁴²

Looking back at these processes of invention and reinvention, Adam boils it down to a Hamlet-like tibaq: to be/not be. “I needed to not be so I can be,” he writes. “This was the game that created the beginning of my life and accompanied me through fifty years.”43 Adam reinvented himself six times, he tells us, and the seventh is the story we are reading. He offers his own contrapuntal description of invention, “I invent my life by gathering it, untangling its threads, and reknitting it over and over again.”⁴⁴ Adam makes sure to distinguish invention from repetition. Repetition only yields symbols. Adam asserts that a specific form of writing, al-kitaba al-ta’wiliyya (moralizing narrative),⁴⁵ is prone to turning characters into symbols, and a good case in point is the Majnun Layla model. In this way, Adam wants to show that the love story of the poet Waddah al-Yaman and Umm al-Banin, the wife of the Khalifa in Damascus, is unprecedented, in the sense that it has not been repeated in the past nor will it be in the future.⁴⁶ In retelling and reinterpreting this story, Adam experiments with shifting perspectives. In On Late Style, Said, quoting Glenn Gould, refers to invention as “the cautious dipping into the negation that lies outside the system.”⁴⁷ This negation, or negative space in and around objects and subjects, is also part and parcel of the construction of stories and meanings.

So what is it that makes Waddah al-Yaman’s story unique and particularly inventive? Unlike the unrequited, single-perspective classical Arabic love story, the story of Waddah is one that can be told from multiple perspectives, opening up the possibility of contrapuntal invention. In Adam’s analysis, the story of Waddah produces two contradictory endings or interpretations. But, he retorts, “I will not find myself forced to choose between them, and this goes back to my decision to refuse turning it into a symbolic story.”⁴⁸ The story can be narrated from the perspective of the king, as previous narrators have done, or the queen, or the poet. If the story is told from the point of view of the king, Adam continues, then we will never know the destiny of Waddah except for his death, “thereby ignoring his tremendous experience inside the wooden chest.”⁴⁹

By writing from the perspective of the entrapped, silent poet, Adam can write the story “from inside the darkness of the chest.”⁵⁰ Writing from the king’s perspective would have only affirmed the status quo, which Adam asserts is “the writing of history from the point of view of the victor, and in this way we betray literature.”⁵¹ “The primary duty of literature,” he continues, “is to overturn this equation, so that the story of the history of the defeated, which historians don’t dare write about, is told.”⁵² Ultimately, Adam wants the reader to find in the story of Waddah al-Yaman “a humanist metaphor for the Palestinians, and all those oppressed in the world, including the Jews.”⁵³

Adam strives to write from the perspective of the silent. He questions the process of writing about silence and in the process interrogates the choices Ghassan Kanafani made in his novel Men in the Sun. The reason for the painful and terrible “Why?” (Why did they remain silent?) the reader is left with at the end of the novel, Adam surmises, is that Kanafani wrote it from a perspective outside the tank in which the three Palestinians were trapped as they were being smuggled across the Iraq-Kuwait border. Adam, on the other hand, wants to write from within that Kanafani tank and from within the chest Waddah was trapped in. In contrast, Adam praises the film based on the novel. In the film The Dupes (1973), the filmmaker Tawfiq Salih takes the liberty of changing the ending and switching the perspective. Instead of the novel asking the three Palestinians why they did not knock on the inside of the tank, the film shows us their corpses with their hands, fists clasped, frozen in knocking gestures. “So, the real question,” Adam concludes, “is not about the silence of the Palestinians but about the world turning a deaf ear to their cries.”54

How does one write a silent story with invisible characters? Adam’s mother would often ask him to wear an “invisibility cap”⁵⁵ in order to disappear, so no one would see him. “Because,” his mother would say, “we have to live as invisibles so they don’t expel us from our land or kill us.”⁵⁶ Silence, Adam writes, became “the address of my life.”⁵⁷ But once he takes the invisibility cap off, he finds himself “swimming in words and depression.”⁵⁸ He decides to write, only to discover that “silence is more erudite than speech.”⁵⁹ It is Ma’moun the Blind, the pseudo–father figure who abandons Adam, who invokes the simile that reading the literature of the Nakba is like “reading what has not been said.”⁶⁰ The tragedy of al-Lidd taught Ma’moun how to “read the silence of victims,” and by extension to read Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry through its “silent commas.”⁶¹

The “how” of the telling of a story of loss, dispossession, disappearance, absence, fragments, and silence is at the heart of Palestinian literature. A powerful analogy for this process of narration and reverse-narration is drawn through Mahmoud Darwish’s reference to the story of ancient Troy, defeated by the Greeks. “I am searching for the poet from Troy. Troy hasn’t told its story,” Darwish is heard saying in Godard’s Notre Musique. “I am the son of a people,” Darwish continues, “that until today hasn’t been recognized; I wanted to speak in the name of the absentee, who is the poet of Troy.”

In the film, both Darwish and Godard are heard saying the phrase “the truth has two faces.” This is especially poignant in the context in which Godard discusses the concept of shot/reverse-shot in relation to the historical moment of 1948 and in which Darwish talks about the Greek/Trojan story in his search for lost voices of the vanquished of history. After all, in Tibaq, Said’s poetic voice says: “I belong to the question of the victim. Were I not / from there, I would have trained my heart / to nurture there deers of metaphor….”62 In Notre Musique, Darwish makes a similar statement: “There is more inspiration and human wealth in defeat than in victory. There is great poetry in destruction. If I belonged to the victors, I would turn out for demonstrations of solidarity with the victim.” Darwish points to the little-acknowledged pleasure of the Palestinian story. It is a story with an open frame that provokes, dislocates, decenters, and creates “new kinds of thinking” and “new modes of apprehension.”⁶³ It has immense potential for the radical, ethical, and transformative, and even for the disharmonious, unresolved, and unreconciled, which can culminate in a great capacity for aesthetic and political freedom. In short, it is a story that can contain itself and its opposite and, in this sense, can contain both the Nakba and Holocaust, as Khoury shows us in Children of the Ghetto.⁶⁴

Although Khoury’s novel is only the first of a trilogy, it already marks an innovative beginning, in narrative terms, of the transcendence of the conventional representation of what Edward Said called “two communities of detached and uncommunicatingly separate suffering.”⁶⁵ Said asserts the need to make the connection by which “the Jewish tragedy is seen to have led directly to the Palestinian catastrophe, by, let us call it “necessity” (rather than pure will).”⁶⁶ Children of the Ghetto can be seen as a response to Said’s calls to go beyond violence and dehumanization and “to admit the universality and integrity of the other’s experience and to begin to plan a common life together.”⁶⁷ It can be said, in conclusion, that Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto has tapped into a formal and aesthetic formula that creates the space for irreconcilables and antitheses to come together to be read together. While in Gate of the Sun Khoury shocked the reader by articulating the Holocaust and the Nakba together, this was done in the form of a monologue/speech delivered by one of the characters. In Children of the Ghetto, Khoury carves open a narrative space that can contain, through its very structure, form and aesthetics, the different degrees of tragedy and trauma that inextricably link the Holocaust and the Nakba.

1. For an overview of Khoury’s previous works, see Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, “On the Necessity of Writing the Present: Elias Khoury and the ‘Birth of the Novel’ in Lebanon,” in Arabic Literature: Postmodern Perspectives, ed. Angelika Neuwirth, Andreas Pflitsch and Barbara Winckler (London: Saqi, 2010), 87–96. For an analysis of Khoury’s patchwork aesthetic, see Stefan G. Meyer, “The Patchwork Novel: Elias Khoury,” in The Experimental Arabic Novel: Postcolonial Literary Modernism in the Levant (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), 129–174.

2. For novel analyses of Khoury’s Gate of the Sun and The Journey of Little Ghandi, see Jacqueline Rose, Proust Among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Gretchen Head, “The Performative in Ilyās Khūrī’s Bāb al-Shams,” Journal of Arabic Literature 42, no. 2/3 (2011): 148–182; Wen-chin Ouyang, “From The Thousand and One Nights to Magical Realism: Postnational Predicament in The Journey of Little Ghandi by Elias Khoury,” in A Companion to Magical Realism, ed. Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang (Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2005), 267–279; Bashir Abu-Manneh, “Remembrance after Defeat—Gate of the Sun (1998),” in The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 162–168.

64. For an extensive discussion of the Nakba and Holocaust in Khoury’s Gate of the Sun through a reading juxtaposed with Holocaust literature and Holocaust-related critical theory, see Amos Goldberg, “Narrative, Testimony, and Trauma: The Nakba and the Holocaust in Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun,” in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 18, no. 3 (February 2016): 335–358.