my name is adam: children of the ghetto volume 1 (elias khoury, tr humphrey davies)

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.

white masks [elias khoury]

Khoury’s novel is a patchwork quilt of a book; a murder mystery with the mystery stripped back as far as possible and the murder itself reduced to the role of an accomplice. Because this isn’t a novel about a murder; it’s a novel about a society, the society within which the murder occurred. Khoury, going against all the rules of the genre, isn’t really interested in the murder; he’s interested in what war and sectarianism can achieve, how they can tear the social fabric asunder. Each of White Mask’s 7 chapters, apart from the first, narrated by the victim’s widow, offers a tangential take on the life and death of Khalil Ahmad Jaber, a civil servant who starts to lose his mind after his favourite son is killed fighting. An architect, a blinded soldier; a doctor; a widowed mother, among others, all are granted their opportunity to tell us what they know about Khalil, but more than that, to tell us about themselves and the way their lives have been transformed by the civil war. Thus, voice by voice, chapter by chapter, the writer constructs his quilt, revealing the values and the desperation of his Beirut. 

After reading Khoury’s Yalo, I realised it was one of the few books I’ve come across that offered some kind of insight into what’s occurring now in Syria. You can glean all you want from non-fiction; you can watch documentaries; you can feel informed. But you can’t know what it is to live there, how daily life functions, the compromises that have been forced upon people merely in order to survive. Only literature can begin to achieve that.

Neither Yalo nor White Masks deal with Syria: both are novels that address the dreadful, seemingly endless Lebanese civil war which was part of the backdrop of my own youth. However, without going into the political history of the region, to find parallels between Syrian and Lebanese society is not that much of a stretch. These books might have been written about a war which ended over thirty years ago, but the societies are similar, as is the gruesome nature of the civil wars which both countries have endured. Khoury’s writing retains its immediacy and importance; there are few sources as valuable as his novels for understanding the decades of strife and conflict which continue to afflict the Middle East.

yalo [elias khoury]

Months which are not turbulent in the Middle East are welcome. This last couple of months have been particularly lacking in this respect. When people look back in twenty years at the Summer of 2014 in Palestine, Syria and Iraq, will they remember the terrible events which have befallen them, or will it just blend into a generalised history of catastrophe and violence?

Khoury’s epic and terrible book is set in the Lebanon, in the nineties. I recently read that a new synagogue is being built in the Lebanon, a sign of its current stability. A whole generation will have grown up which will have no memory of the events in that country, events which destroyed Beirut and made the Lebanon a basket case for over a decade. Every day from my youth seemed to bring a fresh tale of woe, a tale which at the time seemed as though it would have no ending.

Khoury’s novel is set in the aftermath of that civil war. However, that war, just like the ones currently raging in the region, was part of a wider conflict. The anti-hero, Yalo, traces his roots to Aleppo, Damascus and Turkey. He can’t be sure if he’s Arab, Assyrian or Kurdish. His grandfather is a priest from the last Christian sect which speaks the language of Christ, or so he claims. He berates his grandson for not being able to speak the language himself, telling him: “To whom do you think you will talk at your second coming?” The Grandfather’s religious philosophy offers an overbearing Gnosticism, one that Yalo can never get to grips with. “’I am Mar Afram’ the grandfather answered, and he smiled because his grandson was such an idiot that he didn’t know that all the writers of the world are merely copyists and there is only one, hidden book on the face of the earth, a book not written from human inspiration, and that when people write literature or poetry, parts of this book are revealed to them and they copy them down a rearrange them.”

Yalo is born into this confusion and is a product of it. He is not particularly religious, although he believes in the miracle he thinks his mother and grandfather performed when they drank the seawater of the Mediterranean. He is pliable, unsure of his identity, gullible. He fights briefly in the war and then is easily convinced when a fellow fighter suggests they steal from the company safe and run away. That same fighter then leaves him high and dry in Paris. He is brought back by a Lebanese arms dealer as a guard. He discovers that he lives in what would now be called a notorious dogging spot, in the country, and begins a brief career as a rapist and thief, a career which comes to a halt when he falls in love with one of his victims, who will later denounce him.

Yalo has plenty in common with Mersault, Camus’ anti-hero from L’Etranger. Any sympathy we feel for him is grudging and hard-earned. Seen from the outside he’s a miserable character. However, we watch Yalo as he buckles under hideous torture and gradually his whole construction of his self, his identity, starts to fall to pieces and then reassemble itself. So much so that by the final part of the book, the narrator, who is Yalo, has come to see his former self as another man, whom he observes and talks to.

The novel narrates Yalo’s story in a circuitous flashback. Its present tense is the interrogation cell, where Yalo recollects his past and tries to assemble it in a form that will appease his interrogator. Yalo’s is a terrible journey which comes at the end of the terrible journey which has been his pitiable life. It’s the life of any young man who has the misfortune to become caught up in the internecine strife of the region. Whose world view is constructed around the myths of his family, the urges of his masculinity and the peer pressure of the militarised world he inhabits.

The book was intially published in 2002. Twelve years on, its bleak vision appears to be more apposite than ever.