Lebanon: At War in the Ancient Garden

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.  

Elias Khoury, Lebanese novelist, playwright, critic, and public intellectual, is the author of eleven novels, including Gate of the Sun and The Journey of Little Gandhi.  He is currently professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University, and editor in chief of the literary supplement of Beirut’s newspaper, An-Nahar.  He lives in New York and Beirut. (Picador)

+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

Writers and Offensive Opinions

Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke, and a thought on extra-literary matters

Back in the 1970's, Avon Books--a great source for European and Latin American literature in translation, now, of course, defunct as a literary press--issued an inexpensive paperback entitled Three by Peter Handke.  The volume contained two novellas (or novels, I can never tell the difference) "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick"; "Short Letter, Long Farewell"; and "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams," a memoir of Handke's mother, an "invisible woman," who committed suicide in 1971.  I reread "A Sorrow" a year ago at this time, right after my mother's death, and I was stirred again by the beauty of Handke's prose and the depth of the feeling he conveys for his mother.  "Short Letter, Long Farewell", an off-kilter meditation on a marriage, 70's-style angst, and American culture has been a favorite of mine since I first read it, though it is, I'm sorry to say, rather dated in its view of the United States. Especially off-putting is the hipster sensibility of the narrator and consequent naive nature of his view of Americans: he's no Tocqueville or Harriet Martineau* but a visitor more in the mold of Dickens or Lorca--collecting impressions rather than forming judgments.  "Short Letter" turns on the narrator's pursuit of his wife across the interstate highway system from Boston to LA, and on his encounters with what I guess Handke thought of as "authentic" Americans: workers and students and Negroes and, at the climax, the director John Ford (by no means an ordinary man, but a chronicler of America and, given Handke's involvement with film, an apt figure to provide the choral wrap-up to the journey and the novel).

Handke, born in 1941, has been a great traveler--his collection of essays Once Again for Thucydides is surely one of the better representatives of this genre--and always both a poetic and dramatic writer.  "Short Letter" is full of gems like this one:

"They [two lovers] were so engrossed in each other that the most trifling objects that had accumulated in the course of their life together became as precious to them as the parts of their own bodies."

One of the narrator's acquaintances says, "I'm completely cut off from life...It exists for me only in comparisons with my inner states. I haven't seen a fish being scaled for years, but last night when I woke up in a state of anxiety, I saw glittering scales all around me. I haven't been exposed to nature for ages, but when I reach out my hand for my glass, I feel like the body of a spider that's just been killed and is slowly, as though still alive, sinking to the ground on its thread. I've stopped noticing the commonplace acts of life, like putting my hat on, riding on escalators, or eating a soft-boiled egg; but later they come back to me as metaphors of my situation."

Legend has it that when he was just twenty-two, starting out as a writer, Handke proclaimed that he was the next Kafka.  Reading his plays and short novels, the comparison to Kafka seems inaccurate.  More apt would be to think of Handke as a German  Beckett, but then only as an approximation.  Handke is a unique figure, not exactly like anyone else, a writer whose concern with human identity, personal authenticity, the shallowness of Western culture, and the problem of communicating one's inner life through language (hence, his collaborations with Wim Wenders) remind me, loosely, of Max Frisch and Thomas Pletzinger (whose Funeral for a Dog has Handke tones and narrative misdirection).  It's not that these themes aren't common enough in contemporary fiction, nor is it true that Handke's loose (or non-existent) plots are atypical; but Handke has a style--poetic and vernacular, visually detailed and yet elusive, hip and cerebral--that is all his own. 

One cannot speak about or read Handke these days without mentioning his unspeakable comments on Serbia both during and after the genocide in the former Yugoslavia. He has defended Serbian atrocities against Croatians, Muslims, Bosnians and others and, in 2006, eulogized Slobodan Milosevic. I'm often embarrassed by the callous disregard of history evinced by certain writers--Brecht's defense of Stalin, Celine's anti-antisemitism and general bigotry, Knut Hamsun's Nazism, and so forth--it's as if some writers' imaginations cannot extend to actual human beings--this was certainly the case with Brecht, a revolutionary who had no feeling for people.  Handke has always been an iconoclast and something of an outrider, and one enjoys the spectacle of a writer challenging the tedious status quo; however, there are limits to one's toleration of cruel political views. Unfortunately, this time around I found myself losing patience with passages in "Short Letter" that never bothered me before, no doubt because I was recalling Handke's support for Milosevic, a man who was guilty of (at least) facilitating genocide.  My reaction to Handke upset me if only because it meant I would never be able to recapture the pleasure I had once taken in his books.  I loathe censorship--and am sorry that Handke has suffered suppression of his work since 2006.  But as important as art is in helping to define a life worth living, no art, or artist, transcends the boundaries of ordinary decency, and no reader should overlook an artist's complacency in the face of  cruelty. 

 

*Why Harriet Martineau's Society in America (1837), roughly contemporary with Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835), isn't more popular is a mystery to me--it's an insightful book by any standard.

Handke's Short Letter, Long Farewell has been published by New York Review Books.  One can still find the old Avon Three Novels for pennies.  

The Bewilderers: 1960’s Rhodesia

Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

The condition of native is a nervous condition.

It is no wonder that Zimbabwean author, Tsitsi Dangarembga, chose this line of Sartre's from his introduction to Fanon’s landmark study The Wretched of the Earth as the epigraph and title for her very fine first novel, Nervous Conditions. Indeed, arguably no one has ever written more cogently, more redoubtably, about the cultural and existential catastrophe of colonialism (and the need for violent rebellion against it) than Martinique-born, French-Algerian psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer, Frantz Fanon.

Early on in his book Fanon talks about what he calls ‘the bewilderers,’ that multitude of moral teachers and counselors employed by a colonial power to separate the exploited from those in power, to drop upon them daily—in their homes, in their workplaces and schools—what Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o calls the ‘cultural bomb.’ “The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.”

Filled with preachers and teachers, Dangarembga’s a novel wrestles with exactly that matter. Never dogmatic, never didactic in temperament or style, Nervous Conditions is a profoundly human, astutely articulated tale about a young girl’s coming-of-age in 1960’s Rhodesia* (now Zimbabwe)—one of the last, most stubborn colonial holdouts on the continent, excepting only Namibia (1990) and Eritrea (1993). With great attention to detail, Dangarembga follows the main character, Tambudzai, or Tambu, as she struggles against the odds to negotiate her way through the tangled web of life under colonial rule, that Gordian knot of Christianity, patriarchy, racism, materialism, and cultural self-loathing that defined (perhaps in part still defines) the experience of Black Africans from Morocco and Egypt to Namibia, South Africa, and Mozambique. Fortunately for Tambu, she is a quick study, so that when her spoiled older brother Nhamo, the prince and hope of her all but impoverished family, is swiftly destroyed by the colonial system, his identity shattered to bits, she is finally given a chance to make her way. This not to reveal the story prematurely, as the author herself gives us this and more in the novel’s opening paragraph, a provocative sketch of the story as a whole:

I was not sorry when my brother died.  Nor am I apologizing for my callousness, as you may define it, my lack of feeling.  For it is not that at all.  I feel many things these days, much more than I was able to fell in the days when I was young and my brother died, and thee are reasons for this more than the mere consequence of age.  Therefore I shall not apologize but begin by recalling the facts as I remember them that led up to my brother’s death, the events that put me in a potion to write this account.  For though the event of my brother’s passing and the events of my story cannot be separated, my story is not after all about death, but about my escape and Lucia’s; about my mother’s and Maiguru’s entrapment; and about Nyasha’s rebellion--Nyasha, far-minded and isolated, my uncle’s daughter, whose rebellion may not in the end have been successful. 

I came across the novel one year, while teaching at a boy’s school in Manhattan, when I set out to find a book, preferably by a female author of color, that I could pair with Richard Wright’s Black Boy. Nervous Conditions proved the perfect choice. As I wrote back in 1991, in an article for The Collegiate Review:

The mere juxtaposition of these books was enough for the students to begin comparing them after only the first reading in Nervous Conditions. Using each as a lens by which to view the other, the students were quick to recognize that in both cases the protagonist was an innocent child opening his or her eyes to a world in which, for reasons largely coded and obscure to them, they were outsiders and outcasts. We were forced to investigate the issues of cultural identity and the crippling, often paradoxical demands of assimilation. 

Seen in retrospect, through Tambu’s keen and dauntless eye, Nervous Conditions is a sophisticated, highly readable, deeply satisfying tale that you’re sure to find persuasive. Recommended by the African Book Club as “a thought-provoking novel that packs a huge number of complicated ideas into a simple and engaging story,” Nervous Conditions was awarded the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 1989.

Also recommended:  The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon and Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature and Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. 

* Rhodesia was named after English-South African mining magnate, founder of De Beers diamond company, politician, and ardent proponent of colonialism, Cecil Rhodes. In 1902 he established the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, which is funded by his estate. 

Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe, in 1959.  She lived in England from age two through age six. She then returned to Rhodesia and finished her schooling in a missionary school there. She later returned to England to pursue a degree in medicine at Cambridge University but homesickness soon drove her back to Rhodesia where she continued her studies, first in psychology and then in film production and direction. She has written a play called She No Longer Weeps and a sequel to Nervous Conditions entitled The Book of Not (thanks in part to www.wmich.edu).

Peter Adam Nash