A TORTUROUS HISTORY, A SUPPLE MEDIUM: ELIAS KHOURY & GATE OF THE SUN

It’s a rare book that can embody a torturous history we all recognize yet at the same time come up repeatedly with on-the-button analogies for the medium of representation, the story of the history. Gate of the Sun has an epic subject, thoroughly painful. It relates the blasted lives of the peasants who composed the first wave of the Palestinian diaspora—the Fedayeen, just coming to adulthood in 1948, when they were driven from their orchard towns and fishing villages. Elias Khoury’s handling of their sorrow may be meaty with incident, but it often seems less like a novel of recent history than like a rabble of images coming together to drive history to a fresh end; again and again, it insists on the direction and significance that narrative can give materials of utter devastation. A quarter of the way in, we read:

How am I to bear the death…and my fear, if not through telling stories?

And not much further:

Prison is a storytelling school: Here we can go wherever we want, twist our memory however we please.

And not much after that:

I discovered how it was possible to open the book of history, enter it, and be the reader and the read at the same time.

Toward the end of his saga Khoury may even intrude authorially. The final episodes make recurrent use of his own first name, the Arab translation of the Old Testament “prophet of fire”—and of wheels within wheels.

Certainly Gate of the Sun is a book of fire, crackling with gunplay and howls, throwing off intense heat. In particular it traces the violent odyssey of two Palestinian guerillas. The warrior hero would be Yunes, the Arab “Jonah,” a bush fighter of legendary resourcefulness who also goes by Abu Salem and other names. The present action, however, finds Yunes stuck in a Leviathan from which he won’t emerge; he lies comatose in the threadbare hospital of the Shatila camp outside Beirut in the late 1980s. And the narrator of Gate, whose constant reflections on what he’s up to goes along with a certain bumbling quality, is Dr. Khalil, a less venturesome comrade in arms and a doctor without a degree. Sitting by the unconscious guerilla’s cot in a makeshift private room—“a relative paradise in a relative hospital in a relative camp in a relative city”—Khalil tells Yunes the stories of both their wandering lives,

The relative doctor hopes that the human contact will revive his friend. More than that, Khalil seeks to make sense of the experience they share with the rest of the uprooted Arabs of “Galilee.” As the narrator asks, in perhaps the most resonant of his many single-line paragraphs: “How did we get here?” So the novel’s accomplishment can never be appreciated by the standards of straightforward war story, revenge tragedy, or refugee survival drama. It claims all these elements, a story of fire, but its magisterial impact depends equally on its lack of closure and certainty, on recursive meditation and quixotic probing into things unknowable. The novel questions not only the route taken by its protagonists, but also its own reliability as a map. Tales of lost homes and loved ones themselves lose direction; even as Gate works toward repatriation-by-story, its style keeps leaping to aphorism (“the question of land sales in Palestine has ‘no end and no beginning,’ as they say”) or to far-reaching speculations (“the only solution to love is murder”), both devices that have little respect for borders. Strands of narration twist till cause and effect yield wheels within wheels.

Not that Elias Khoury, himself a Lebanese Muslim born in ’48, distrusts cause and effect. A professor at NYU and an editor for Beirut’s daily paper, he has four volumes of cultural criticism and has often reported on human-rights issues in camps like Shatila. In the novel, his shaggy-dog narrator pokes his snout now into an assessment of Dostoevsky, now into the nuts and bolts—the scraps and rags—with which such a camp hospital is maintained. Yet Khalil’s creator has also found time for ten previous novels and four plays. The Arabic Gate of the Sun (the title Bab al-Shams translates directly) appeared in 1998 and won ringing endorsements from the likes of Edward Said, as well as a number of international prizes, including Book of the Year from Le Monde Diplomatique. The near-decade it has taken to produce an American edition seems like another black eye for our publishing industry, the worse because no mainstream press would take on the task. There’s better news, at least, in what Archipelago Books has done with the book, bringing out a scrupulously checked and crafted hardcover, in handsome desert orange, as part of their Rainmaker Translation series.

Perhaps the problem for commercial publishers was that Khoury’s achievement depends not on simple reportage but on something less quantifiable, namely, sensibility—an imagination open to the power of both the ambiguous and the concrete. For this author must be counted a sensualist, composing a “Sort of Song” not unlike the one celebrated by Williams: no ideas but in things. Khalil’s tangled yarns may take shape as scenes half-hidden in smoke, beneath which honor and shame can never be sorted out, yet the doctor always fixes quite specifically the humble rewards of its battlegrounds. The novel’s first image for recovery is the branch of a fruit tree, brought to the displaced narrator from another destroyed hamlet. Elsewhere, bittersweet reductions of the vanished homeland are distilled from fish soup, from pillows stuffed with flower petals, from the odor of ground pork and onions simmering in olive oil. Details such as these, rendered with just a smattering of Arabic, bear out the quality of the translation by Humphrey Davies. Even the sex scenes, always difficult material, convey Khoury’s distinctive blend of murk and nug-get—of, for instance, a woman who “must be past sixty” yet whose “body became full, with…a complexion the shade of white wheat,” who “started to shimmer and change” in lovemaking.

For love, in both its small gestures and large, plays so great a role in Gate as to suggest an earlier story sequence of what used to be called “Oriental complexity,” namely, The Thousand Nights and a Night. Yunes, as befits his energy and charisma, has plenty of female attention right up through the evening of his stroke. The relationship that matters most—itself an epic of tenacity told in anecdotes, none of them quite complete—was with his late wife Nabilah, the mother of his ten children. Nabilah’s and her husband’s trysting place gives us the title: they meet in a cave they called Bab al-Shams, an underground that wound up taking them, like Dante’s, to the sun. And romance may scar the storytelling doctor more deeply, even, than his so-called patient. Over time, we come to understand that Khalil’s endless hours in this largely unknown private room have a less-than-altruistic second purpose. The doctor fears reprisal for his part in a saga of betrayal, as intricate as all the others here, involving his unfaithful lover, Shams. Not long ago, the woman was gunned down by the family of one of the other men in her life.

Yet Khalil’s love for Shams comes across as genuine. Her name too partakes of the intimate sweetness in the title, as well as being the word for the sun that defines this hardscrabble land. Then, too, the doctor’s not nearly so worldly as his manifold wanderings and wallopings might suggest. Khoury generates a terrific jolt, and underscores the toll taken by a life in exile, when it turns out that his narrator’s not yet forty.

Given such subject matter, it’s not surprising that another of this novel’s fixing particularities, along with foods and fruits, are tears. A widowed mother declares early on that “tears are our remedy,” and more than once Yunes—so philosophical a guerilla he recalls Jay Cantor’s Che Guevara—remarks on how the Palestinian after-dinner liqueur goes by the same word as “tear,” arak. Khalil, for his part, meditates on the artificial tears with which he doses his unresponsive friend, and so arrives, as always with the natural rhythm of talking to oneself, at perhaps the loveliest of his self-reflections: “All the stories of the exodus have collected now in your eyes—shut over the teardrops I put in them.”

The crux of the novel’s success is how it rises to the challenge in the first half of that statement, how it chronicles nearly half a century in the wilderness without stinting on the joy and lamentation implicit in the second half. Emotional richness, after all, goes hand in hand with narrative complication, and the novel’s fugal construction draws out a number of provocative shadings, many of them surprises. Khalil, all hemming and hawing aside, proves a cold-eyed recording angel when it comes to the repeated failures of other Arab nations to back up the Palestinian cause. And Yunes opposes the famed Black September kidnapping in Munich, and he can’t abide “the hijacking of airplanes…and the killing of civilians.” Even after joining Fatah, late in his career, he remains a soldier rather than a terrorist. “If you don’t respect the lives of others,” Yunes declares, “you don’t have the right to defend your own.”

And respect, for this fallen warrior and his doctor, extends as well to the women of their culture. If we consider this novel a tragic pica-resque—a paradox, to be sure, but then a masterpiece usually presents a paradox—the figures that deepen it from adventure to tragedy turn out to be, by and large, the wives and mothers and girlfriends. Nothing Yunes or Khalil suffers haunt them so stubbornly as when they cross paths with another abused or rootless woman.

After all, their brother Fedayeen help to map the route of their hejira. Indeed, their travels include more than a few returns to former villages. Such visits must be surreptitious, but again and again guerillas go on foot through old stomping grounds: a vivid demonstration of just how small a region has given rise to so much wailing and gnashing of teeth. The opening maps establish that “Galilee” occupies a rectangle about fifty miles by thirty. What’s more, in spite of how the displaced peasants mourn the loss of their olive groves, much of the land remains barely arable. In such close, sparse quarters, the chronic mistreatment of those supposedly nearest and dearest to the fighting men can’t remain hidden. Battered women turn up at every winding of these spiral stories, here “the Madwoman of al-Kabri” and there Kahlil’s own beloved Shams, suffering “humiliation and…beatings” at the hands of the man she was forced to marry as a teenager. The most decent among the male characters can’t ignore the moral vacuity of their position, and early on Yunes admits that “degradation of our women was the root of our failures, our paralysis, our defeats.” At the end, if Khalil is restored to something like faith, to believing he can climb “ropes of rain…and walk” back to wholeness and home—walk on water, yes—he’s been brought to this miracle by two women, the first an actual hospital colleague and the second a dream visitor to his kitchen and bed. Elias Khoury must know that, according to tradition, angels have no gender. But he knows better, too, and his Gate of the Sun illuminates a womanly host.

—Michigan Quarterly Review, 2007