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A manuscript page from Yalo (2002). “I had no model. I wrote like a blind man.” The Art of Fiction No. 233 ELIAS KHOURY lias Khoury is the foremost novelist writ- ing in Arabic today. Born in Beirut in the fateful year of 1948, he published his sec- Eond novel, Little Mountain (1977), during the open- ing phase of the long Lebanese civil war, in which he fought with pro-Palestinian forces against his Christian coreligionists of the Phalange. Khoury’s early work is fearlessly contemporary, addressing itself to Lebanon’s conflict even as events were unfolding. In novels such as White Masks (1981) and The Journey of Little Gandhi (1989), Khoury held up the broken mirror of his fiction to a country on the verge of falling apart. Khoury’s best-known novel is Gate of the Sun (1998), which the New York Times labeled “a genu- ine masterwork.” It is the fruit of Khoury’s many years spent in the Palestinian camps of Lebanon, where he listened to refugees’ stories about the fall of Galilean villages during the 1948 Nakba. 21 The novel is an epic patchwork of such tales, “worth reading twice,” wrote Claudia Roth Pierpont in The New Yorker, “because it is so hard to see whole the first time, and because it is so insidiously rich.” At its heart, the novel is the story of a Palestinian couple separated by the 1948 Arab-Israeli War: the guerrilla Yunes and his wife, Nahilah, who secretly meet and make love in a cave—called “gate of the sun”—in a Galilean village near the Lebanese border. It is, Khoury said to me, one of the very few love stories in literature about a married couple. Khoury is also among the most respected critics and editors in the Arab world. He began writing essays for the monthly Palestinian Affairs in the early seventies (collections of his critical work fill several volumes in Arabic), and he edited Al-Mulhaq, the cultural supplement of Beirut’s Al-Nahar newspaper, throughout the nineties, turning it into a forum for debate over Lebanon’s postwar reconstruction. For Khoury, the razing and rebuilding of central Beirut was a missed opportunity for the country to come to terms with its recent past. In place of the sober recognition of responsibility, the Lebanese elite imposed a form of national amnesia. Under Khoury’s editorship, which lasted until 2009, Al-Mulhaq also became a platform for dissident intellec- tuals from Syria during the reign of Bashar al-Assad. Today, Khoury writes a weekly column on culture and politics for the pan-Arab daily Al-Quds al- Arabi and is editor in chief of the Journal of Palestinian Studies in Beirut. In person, Khoury is animated, funny, and attentive. He will repeatedly stop dead in the middle of the street to listen to what you are saying or to make his own point more emphatically. His conversation is full of stories— told in a low rumble, textured by decades of smoking Marlboros—which frequently end with him slapping the table and laughing. His anecdotes, often about fellow Arab writers, show his love of the mildly scandalous or seriously blasphemous. Khoury also enjoys an argument. When posed with a question, his impulse is often to correct or disagree with its premises. He has firm political views and states them bluntly, regardless of his audience. He also has several tics, such as always referring to Israelis as “our cousins” and reciting the Arabic bismallah—“In the name of God, the most compas- sionate and most merciful”—with faux formality before drinking an espresso or taking a phone call he’d rather not answer. This interview took place over two days in an office at New York University, where Khoury was a popular professor in the Middle Eastern 22 and Islamic Studies department for many years (he now lives year-round in Beirut). The office was plainly unused, its bookshelves bare, the only decora- tion a New York City subway map taped on the wall next to the door. A sliver of Washington Square Park was visible from the window. Our conversation was in Arabic. The translation is mine. —Robyn Creswell INTERVIEWER Arabic literature is often read in this country for its relevance to current events. It’s read as ethnography or journalism. You’re known here as someone who has written about Palestine and also the Lebanese civil war. Do you find that reputation limiting? KHOURY It’s true that, most of the time, American reviewers read Arabic literature as if they’re reading the newspaper. Even Naguib Mahfouz is treated as if he wrote reportage from Cairo. What made me happy about the American reception of Gate of the Sun was that reviewers—some of them, anyway— actually treated my novel as a work of literature. They wrote a lot about its political aspects, of course, but they also wrote about its narrative technique, the love story, things like that. This was very gratifying for me. And of course your reputation is never entirely under your control. In Beirut, afterGate of the Sun was published, people assumed I was actually Palestinian. Even the people in my own neighborhood thought so—and this is the place where I grew up, where my father and grandfather lived their whole lives! But I was honored by my compatriots’ mistake. INTERVIEWER You have a long history with the Palestinian national movement. When and why did you decide to join? KHOURY It was a matter of my environment. I grew up in Achrafieh, in East Beirut, in a deeply Christian milieu. Christian in the sense that it took love for the other and care for the poor very seriously. When I was a student at the Lebanese 23 University in the sixties, I got involved with Christian groups, although of course we called ourselves Maoists and Guevarists and supported the Vietcong. Then in 1966, Lebanese security services killed a Palestinian guerrilla named Jalal Ka‘ush—there’s an episode in White Masks that references this—and stu- dents organized a demo. It was the first protest of my life. The army shot at us and several people were killed. Still, at the time I would say my feelings of soli- darity with Palestinians were primarily moral ones, and were a little bit abstract. After the defeat in 1967, I felt we had to do more. The war created a wave of refugees fleeing the West Bank. Most went to Jordan and one group set up a camp outside Amman, in a place called Baqa‘a. A group of us Christian students from Lebanon went to visit the camp. The conditions there were unspeakable, enough to make you weep. So we ended up staying to help— cooking meals, building homes, cleaning. When we returned to Beirut, I argued that the only ethical thing to do was to join Fatah. Some of us did. INTERVIEWER How did one go about joining Fatah at that time? KHOURY I took a taxi to Amman and stayed in a hotel where you could sleep on the roof for one dinar. The next morning, I got in a taxi and told the driver, Take me to the fedayeen! The driver thought this was very funny, because most cabbies in Amman worked for the Jordanian security services. Any one of them would have taken me straight to the interrogators. But I got lucky— this cabbie was a Palestinian. He took me to Salt, where the PLO leadership was. I knocked on a door and the man who opened it was Abu Jihad, the cofounder of Fatah along with Arafat. Abu Jihad took one look at me and told me to go home. But I was stubborn and I stayed. INTERVIEWER Where did you train? KHOURY We trained in Syria, in the camps at Hama and Maysaloun, just off the Beirut- Damascus highway. This is where the fedayeen had their camps. Later on, we worked in the south of Lebanon as well as around Beirut. 24 INTERVIEWER You went back to Jordan a third time, after Black September, when the regime expelled the PLO. KHOURY We arrived just as the Jordanian army was chasing the fedayeen into the mountains at Jerash and Ajloun, in November. We didn’t go into the moun- tains. We went back to Lebanon, and the guerrillas were massacred. At the time, I felt we had acted too soon. We believed we were the vanguard of a wider Arab revolution. None of us were so stupid as to think we could lib- erate Palestine while the whole Arab world was ruled by dictators, but the extreme leftists created a conflict with Jordan before the wider movement had matured. These were the leftists who created the slogan “All power to the resistance!” They started setting up soviets in Irbid, in northern Jordan, and other places, too. Our actions in Jordan were very premature. It was lunacy. INTERVIEWER Jean Genet lived among the fedayeen in Jordan at just this time. In Prisoner of Love, he writes that there was something essentially theatrical about the Palestinian camps. He even called them “Potemkin camps.” Did you feel there was something theatrical about your own experience with the guerrillas? KHOURY I met Genet in Beirut in the early seventies, and I remember being amazed by his ability to look at himself from the outside—to study himself pitilessly, cyni- cally, as if he were someone else. I now think this ability to divide oneself in two, which all actors have, is also a condition for writing and even for living.

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