Little Mountain by Elias Khoury
What is it you were doing in the
ancient garden three hundred years ago.
“Responsibility is what
awaits outside the Eden of creativity,” writes South African author, Nadine Gordimer,
in her well-known essay ‘The Essential Gesture.’ “I should never have dreamt
that this most solitary and deeply marvelous of secrets—the urge to make with words—would become a
vocation for which the world, and that life-time lodger, conscionable self-awareness,
would claim the right to call me and my kind to account. The creative act is
not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it. The
writer loses Eden, writes to be read, and comes to realize that he is
answerable.”
The idea—still deeply rooted—that
the best literature is Olympian in nature, politically and emotionally detached,
that it is fashioned in a manner somehow independent of the messy human lives
that comprise it, is not and has never been true. This is not to say that dogma
has a place in art; it does not. Yet to believe, as Flaubert tried so very hard
to believe “that great art is scientific and impersonal,” involving “neither
hate, nor pity, nor anger” is to deny the nature of art itself. No novel, no
poem, no play has ever been written but that it is covered with fingerprints, dirty
human prints. That is the particular brilliance of the novel as form, that it
is simultaneously a site of political and personal accountability (for the
author, for the characters themselves) and—as
Milan Kundera puts it—“a realm where moral judgment [itself] is suspended.”
Impossible? Perhaps, yet it is a dream to which so many of the world’s best writers
aspire.
Not least among them is
the Lebanese author, Elias Khoury, who smudges everything he writes with
prints. What interests him and often characterizes his fiction are the seemingly
formless works of such pioneering Arab writers as Tawfik al-Hakim and Taha
Hussein, a style of writing that Edward Said describes in his introduction as “that
combinatorial amalgam of different elements, principally autobiography, story,
fable, pastiche, and self-parody, the whole highlighted by an insistent and
eerie nostalgia.” In other words, everything but the kitchen sink—and sometimes
that as well, whatever Khoury finds at hand, whatever he finds useful in
telling his tale. His novel Little
Mountain is a case in point. Told in a poetic, often disjointed style
complete with maps and footnotes and what he calls “scenes” rather than
chapters, brief tableaux one might find in a Hollywood script, Khoury attempts
to chronicle, to fathom, the country’s calamitous civil war (Arabic: الحرب الأهلية اللبنانية), a sectarian struggle for supremacy that lasted
from 1975 to 1990. How else to describe
such murder and destruction, such cultural, religious, and political
splintering, but with fragments, with bits?
In at least one respect,
the story of modern Lebanon, as sketched here in this novel, is not unlike the
story of modern Israel. Created originally by the French in 1943 as a home and
safe-haven for Maronite Christians, Lebanon has been under siege ever since, a
struggle finally brought to a head in the bloody, protracted, almost infinitely
convoluted Civil War. This was no straightforward struggle between Christians
and Muslims, between East and West, but was positively Byzantine in its tangle
of loyalties and aims. Apart from the ‘legal’ Lebanese Army, which quickly
split into a Muslim-led and Christian-led troops, there were no less than
twenty different armed Arab factions, not to mention the various Christian,
Druze, Armenian, Kurdish, communist, and Marxist-Leninist militias, each
fighting for their own bit of turf. Add to that the intervention of Syria,
Israel, the United Nations, and the U.S., add an approximate death toll of 120,000
and the fact that more than half of the nation’s population is now living in
exile, and it is nothing less than a miracle that Lebanon, as a country, still exists.
Yet, as with all war
stories, Little Mountain is only
partly about war. It is of course really about people, a tale of memory, identity, and exile, the story of three
young men stumbling their way through a landscape made surreal by violence,
madness, and grief. It is a “plaintive, yearning prose poem of a novel,”* a
grim, if significant transformation of the war and its consequences—for Khoury himself
a brave and essential gesture.
+lead image called ‘The Boy From Cerrado’ by Guilherme Oliveira
*from a
review in L’Est Républicain.
**www.ghazi.de/civwar. http://ddc.aub.edu.lb/projects/pspa/conflict-resolution.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanese Civil War
Peter Adam Nash
No comments:
Post a Comment