How should we read this book? It’s several years since I read Khoury. Yalo and White Masks both looked at the Lebanese wars which ravaged Beirut during my youth. Here, he turns his attentions to Palestine and the Nakba. There are two narrators: Khoury himself, who in a preface tells us that what we are about to read are the notebooks of Adam Danoun, an Arab-Israeli who he knew in New York, who had protested against the fictions in his novel Yalo. So doing, the author validates the scrappy, discursive nature of the novel, which includes stories within stories, endless asides, and a long opening sequence about medieval Arab poetry. However, there is artifice at work here. Because the story of the Nakba cannot be conveyed in clean lines. Due to the way that history has sought to crush the Palestine soul and spirit, stealing its land and its right to speak, the events of 1948 are inevitably shrouded in speculation and myth, an oral tradition, as hazy and open to distortion as the stories of the early Arab poets. Khoury’s self-avowed unreliable narrator helps to lead us, tiptoeing through the story of his birth in the ghetto of Lydda, now renamed as Lod, and the terrible events of those days when the town was annexed by the IDF. Even the idea of a ghetto is one that has been imported by the Israelis from Europe and imposed upon a Palestine population whose lands and homes were being seized. Finally, Adam meets up in New York with a fellow Palestinian, fifteen years older than him, who experienced the gruesome war crimes, the burial squadrons, the hunger. All those things which are being repeated once more in the charnel house of Gaza.
If there was anyone I should like to talk to regarding Gaza, whose perspective I would value, it would be Khoury. The messiness of this novel feels like an honest reflection of the world it has taken upon itself to depict or reveal. Beneath the hatred, Khoury locates the common ground. He references other Palestine writers, but also Israeli writers, including Oz. The value of literature as a way of understanding what seems beyond the scope of understanding is fundamental to his work. The lengthy sequence on Waddah and the other Arab poets only serves to reaffirm this: from where will we gain our understanding of the medieval mind, if not from the words they left behind.
What interests me about this novel isn’t its admission of the crime, important though that is, but its ability to trace the outline of the mute Palestinian, who was to become one of the staples of Israeli literature, and to infer the underlying meaning of the founding of the Zionist state, which is that for the Jews to become a people like other peoples – “other peoples” here meaning European peoples – they had first to invent their own Jews.
“Listen, guys,” said Ma’moun. “These people know nothing. They think they’re in Europe. They’ve come and they’ve brought the ghetto with them so they can put us in it.”
“No! I bear no grudge against the Jews. They too die and as soon as they die become dead people just like us and cease to be Jews. We stop being us and they stop being them, so why the killing? I swear I don’t get it. I don’t have a grudge against anybody, but why?
The eaten-away face of the young girl became imprinted on my heart and has remained with me throughout my life. This is what people are. People are cadavers. Even children who look like angels are cadavers.
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