In January 2013, a group of Palestinians and foreign activists erected 25 tents on Palestinian land in the West Bank, as an act of resistance against Israeli attempts to build settlements in the area. Two days later, the tents were violently destroyed by the Israeli army, and their inhabitants scattered, beaten, or arrested. In the teeth of this, the Palestinians persevered, and rebuilt — only for the second encampment to be demolished as well. This is an event that lives on in the annals of Palestinian attempts to resist their occupation, dispossession, and erasure from their own homeland.
The Palestinians named their first encampment “Bab al-Shams,” or “gate of the sun,” and their second encampment “the Grandchildren of Yunis.” Their inspiration was a novel by the Lebanese writer, Elias Khoury, called Gate of the Sun, and its protagonist, a Palestinian revolutionary called Yunis. Khoury — who spoke to the Palestinians on Skype during the brief existence of the encampment(s) — would later say that this was the greatest prize he had ever won, worth more than any award that the literary establishment could give him: life, imitating art.
Elias Khoury passed away on September 15, 2024, at the age of 76, after battling an illness. Amidst the tributes that poured in upon his passing, there is perhaps none more fitting than the living memory of Camp Bab al-Shams. Khoury was many things: a partisan of the Lebanese National Movement during the country’s destructive civil war (in which he fought, and was wounded); a politically committed cultural critic and editor; a playwright; but what he will be remembered for, most of all, is his novels, which brought the Palestinian national cause to life in incandescent and unforgettable prose.
‘Epic of the Palestinian people’
Of these, his magnum opus is undoubtedly Gate of the Sun. In a hospital bed in a Beirut refugee camp, Yunis, an old Palestinian freedom-fighter, lies dying. By his bedside is his spiritual son, Dr. Khaleel, who believes that by telling Yunis stories about his past lives, he can resurrect the dying man through words and tales.
And so begins the “epic of the Palestinian people”: from the 1948 Nakba (“catastrophe”) — the great ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their homeland to make way for the state of Israel — to the formation of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, the Six-Day War, the Lebanese Civil War, the massacres of the Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps of Lebanon, and beyond. Gate of the Sun follows Palestinian exiles through village and camp and battlefield, entwining individual stories of love, loss, betrayal, struggle, sorrow, and joy with the battles and massacres that set their stamp upon the political map.
Gate of the Sun gives to its readers some of the most vivid images of homeland, of memory, of grief, and of hope. Early on, Yunis angrily critiques a tradition of a refusal to eat oranges because they are symbols of lost Palestine with the memorable words “the homeland is not oranges; the homeland is us.” A grandmother stuffs her pillow with flowers because they remind her of her village; the pillow turns into a “heap of thorns.” The same grandmother also wears a broken watch — “as though she’d killed time at her wrist” — and now exists only in limbo. A refugee puts olives on the top of his tent, and sings the homeland. In the camps of Sabra and Shatila, Palestinians rename the lanes and the square after the ones in their old homes. These images are connected by the thread of Yunis’ life, a life that comes to symbolise the decades of loss and resistance that have characterised the Palestinian national movement. There is even a heartbreakingly prescient — and wry — observation about Gaza, “the first place to be collectively Palestinian.”
Mirroring a shattered world
In his other novels, Khoury would explore these themes further. Little Mountain, perhaps the most autobiographical of his works, paints a lurid, staccato portrait of the Lebanese Civil War, where young men run “clutching rifles and dreams” — dreams of destroying all prisons, forever — until those dreams meet the intransigent reality of shrapnel filled-rooms: it is a story told in bits and pieces for a shattered world. The Broken Mirrors: Sinalcol is the story of a doctor who flees Lebanon upon the outbreak of the Civil War — and then, many years later, accepts an offer to return to a changed Beirut. Sinalcol tells us of an individual — and a nation’s need for mirrors, and the temptation of “turning things into symbols” as an escape from life and from responsibility. The Palestinian struggle is ever-present, as is the resistance to turning it into a symbol and an escape. Sinalcol is best described with a line from its own text: “written with needles on the eyeballs of insight.”
In My Name is Adam, the last novel to be published before his death (a sequel will be published posthumously), Khoury returned to centre Palestine. My Name is Adam is set in one of the most horrifying events of the 1948 Nakba: the ethnic cleansing of the city of Lydda (now Lod), accompanied by a brutal massacre and a death march. Through the thread of devastation, Khoury pierces a needle of beauty with his words so that, along with him, his audience can “learn how to read the silence of victims.” “Art weaves us a shroud of words and colours” Khoury writes, “in which we wrap ourselves”: the most fitting of summaries for a book like My Name is Adam.
Elias Khoury’s passing comes in the midst of the ongoing genocide in Palestine. “Art doesn’t conquer death,” he wrote, and he would perhaps be the first to concede the helplessness of art to make the bombs stop falling.
But as Camp Bab al-Shams shows us, the language of art can speak when all other tongues have been torn out from their roots.
Every word that Elias Khoury has left us is testament to that.
Gautam Bhatia is a Delhi-based lawyer.
Published - September 19, 2024 08:30 am IST
