| JuryFury.com
Now Every 15th of the Month ! Online School of Politics |
|||
| Areas of Interest THE USA American Foreign Policy US House and Senate US Presidents State & Local Politics Regional Politics Politics of China The British Commonwealth Indian Subcontinent Middle East The European Union Africa Latin America ASEAN NATO United Nations The Non-aligned Movement Eastern Europe New Nations of the 20th Century General Topics Constitutional Law Human Rights Nuclear Disarmament & Treaties International Warfare Environmental Law Peace Treaties Economic & Social Alliances International Organizations Journalism & Media Racism and Democracy Women in the Workplace Family Law Courts and Practices The Judicial System Higher Education Education and Government Health Care & Insurance Rights of the Disabled Copyright & Working Online Legal Representation Legal Insurance Pornography Domestic Violence Religion & Law Workers Rights Employers Rights Prison & Life after Social Organizations Welfare & Poverty Taxation and Democracy Third World Aid Programs Space Exploration Alternative Energy Petroleum Industry & Cars Nuclear Power Programs for the Arts Sports Education Policing the Internet Privacy and freedom Immigration Food and Regulation War on Drugs War on Pharmaceuticals Public Housing Pollution and Control Sexual Harrassment Discrimination Electoral Process Consumers Rights Investors Rights Abortion Death Penalty Social Security Gender & Sexuality Grassroots Organization ACLU World Watch Oxfam UNICEF United Negro Fund Ford Foundation (suggestions welcome at our chatsite) Law of the Economy Join I-Traderschool, our sister magazine, for debates and news. |
Israel & Palestine Conflict
Hidden homeland: "Bab al-Shams" ("Gate
of the Sun") a book by Elias Khoury introduced by Sami Shalom Chetrit *** Hidden homeland "Bab al-Shams" ("Gate of the Sun") by Elias Khoury, translated from the Arabic by Moshe Hakham, Andalus Press, 543 pages, NIS 87 You won't find Bab al-Shams ("the Gate of the Sun") on the Israeli map. Not because it was wiped off the face of the earth like many villages during the conquest of Al-Jalil (Arabic for the Galilee) by the Israelis. "Bab al-Shams" is the name of a cave in the Galilee on the outskirts of the village of Dir al-Assad - the place where the hero Yunis returned from the battles for trysts with his beloved Nahila, who gives birth to his children in occupied Palestine. The Israelis did not succeed in getting their hands on Bab al-Shams, which became the secret homeland in the hearts of the lovers and their children - the hidden Palestinian village that neverr was occupied because it never was there, but was founded after 1948 by love, separation, longing and endless stories. "Shams" is also the name of the woman loved by Khalil, the narrator-protagonist. She, too, evades everyone - the Israelis, the men who humiliated her, the national myths and the chauvinist stereotypes - until she becomes a fearless warrior and a myth in her own right. Bab al-Shams and Shams are the rays of light grasped by Khalil the narrator as he drowns in the sea of despair, and at the same time, they are the sea of despair itself, for inherent in their death, there is really no opening for hope. This harsh pendulum swing between despair and the dream is the rhythm of this entire novel, in which the moments of laughter, which are not infrequent, also succeed in bringing tears of endless sadness to the eyes. Elias Khoury chooses to begin the novel with a death and to end it with a death, and the end is but the beginning and the beginning, the end: "In the beginning there was death," says the narrator in a painful paraphrase of the Creation story. Khoury tells the story of the Palestinian people not as a prophet from a high Galilean hilltop, and not as a war hero in a liberated Palestinian village. Instead, he tells it in a brilliant way to a forgotten national hero, bedridden and ill, who in fact is no longer ill and not really alive, by means of a broken-hearted storyteller who is not a prophet and not a hero - Dr. Khalil. He is a doctor who is not really a doctor in the Al-Jalil Hospital, which is not really a hospital and not in the Galilee, but rather in the Chatila refugee camp in Lebanon, which is no longer really a camp. After the massacre and the wars, the camp resembles one large cemetery, where even the living ceased really to live, when their sorrowful words died: "When speech stops being new and fresh, when the words are moldy in the mouth and come out of it used, extinguished and dead, everything is dead" (page 471). Rescuing memory The writer is above all worried about the fate of words, afraid for the story and the endless speech that create memory, the homeland that is stronger than any occupied territory. Therefore, he creates a narrator who is a chronic talker, whose role is to talk, who even in the Palestine liberation army becomes a political officer whose job is to talk and talk, to rescue the memory and to create the consciousness, "because our aim is not only to liberate the land, but also to liberate the man" (page 56). But the liberated man, of necessity, tells a story to create the homeland that is not there, to invent it each day anew: "Do you think that we will be able to create our homeland on the basis of this vague story? And why do we need to create it at all? A person inherits his homeland just as he inherits his language. Why is it that we, of all the peoples of the world, must invent our homeland anew every day, for if not all will be lost and we will sink into eternal sleep" (page 384). True to the writer's commandment, Khalil shares the work of telling the story with everyone, all the heroes and heroines who constitute the individuals and the smallest details of the Palestinian tragedy. Khalil, the main narrator, only passes the microphone among them, and the stories weave together and unravel and weave together again into the big meta-story. There are many moments when it is not at all clear who is talking about whom in this circular Rashomon soaked in blood and tears, olive oil and light, until the reader abandons the effort to follow the microphone and submits to the inundation of painful stories, as the narrator becomes a kind of collective threnodist with a wealth of voices and angles, until he becomes a breathtaking epic poem over 543 pages, 50 years, and one beloved and torn homeland. Khoury, a post-modern, critical and liberated writer, forgoes in advance the unified narrative, as he knows that one narrator would break down under this heavy burden: "I am afraid of a history that knows only one story. History has scores of different stories, but when it freezes into a single story, it leads only to death." He warns of sticking to the Israeli narrative as a counter-story: "We must not see ourselves only in their mirror, for they are prisoners of a single story, as if one story has shrunk and frozen them." Thus, this patched fabric is woven of the stories of women and ordinary people who join together into a huge story that is sometimes unbelievably painful, larger than life, at least as large as the lives of the Israelis who refuse to listen and harden their hearts that turn into stone, and which must ultimately shatter. Even Yunis the hero tries to preserve, more than all the heroic stories, his dangerous journeys from the Lebanese Galilee to his beloved Nahila in the Palestinian Galilee for another brief intoxication of love and separation. Story of insane survival Nahila is reborn seven times. The last time, it is she who breaks through her screen of silence and presents, in contrast to all the stories of heroism that Yunis whispers into her ear in the cave at Bab al-Shams, the story of everyday Palestinian life in Israel, a story of insane survival laden with daydreams yet realistic. There are also stories of unusual encounters, such as the story of Um Hassan, the village midwife who, after many years, returns to visit her village in the Galilee and finds there a Jewish woman from Beirut who rues the day she left that city. The one woman mourns her stolen home, and the other woman, who is living in it, will never feel at home. Stories of pain always inhere in the most marginal details, and here too they do not skip over the beloved olive trees that are blown up and uprooted, the sheep and the chickens that are killed with their owners, the water and the air. Khalil the protagonist-narrator is absorbed into the stories and their tellers; he weeps and breathes with them, falls in love with the characters and begins to live them and to speak with their voices. Above all, he admires the women and their ability to carry and give birth to the memory unflaggingly from generation to generation while the men get killed, go crazy or become mute like stone. This is a desperate attempt to grasp the innumerable edges of this human net without letting go for a moment - the story of the Palestinian diaspora. Dr. Khalil, the melancholic anti-hero who is really a sensitive male nurse, is in love with a liberated woman fighter. After he loses her and his entire world, he devotes himself solely to the living-dead national hero Yunis, tends him, prolongs his life with stories and tries to give birth to him anew. He calls him alternately "my father" and "my son," and promises an end that is all good. He finds it hard to let go of his hero and, in fact, of the dream of the revolution, which he believes died with the Oslo agreement. Therefore, he clings to him and shelters in the shadow of his heroism. He promises him that "the end for him will be the image of a man vanishing into the entrance of the Bab al-Shams cave." But Bab al-Shams, the hidden homeland, has died and its lovers have died with it. There remains only Khalil, a forlorn character in middle age, but at the end of his days, weeping over the fresh grave of his father hero. There is no sun in the sky, but at least the sky weeps together with him. "Bab al-Shams" is a metonymic story of all of Palestine by means of the Galilee, the way the Zionists tell their own story by means of the Jezreel Valley. Why the Galilee? Because that was an entirely Palestinian land with hardly any Jews, because that is where the olive tree and the village were, the well and the expanses of land, the sheep and the cattle, the sea and the fish, the mosque and the church. Because in the Galilee, there was a more brutal occupation than anywhere else. The instructions given to the Israeli army were to eliminate, destroy, exile and eradicate. Khoury succeeds in this mission impossible - reviving this Judaized and forcibly forgotten Galilee through the stories of its slaughtered and shunned refugees in the outskirts of Beirut. Of course, the appearance of this book in Hebrew, in the fluent translation by Moshe Hakham, makes this success even stronger and for this, Andalus Press is deserving of all praise. And I cannot conclude without a personal comment. Over two years ago in New York, I met the author of this novel, Elias Khoury, a Lebanese Palestinian writer who was born in exile in 1948. We sat with mutual friends in a cafe and we talked about the despair and the hope of this torn land. During the course of the conversation, we got to Beirut in 1982 and he asked me whether I had been there, that is, as a soldier of the Israel invasion. Yes, I said, greatly embarrassed and ashamed. But he rescued me from my embarrassment and joked that it was at least fortunate that we had not met there because he, too, had been there - a combat officer, in that bitter summer of besieged west Beirut. I am also glad we did not meet there over rifle barrels, but are rather meeting here on a bridge of words of culture. Nevertheless, I could not help but feel during the entire conversation then and while reading this book now (as in the background IDF soldiers are occupying the refugee camps once again) the hump that grew on my back, which will accompany me throughout my life. HA’ARETZ English Edition Friday, March 15, 2002 Nisan 2, 5762 Notes: *** Article originally published in Authorsden.com on Tuesday, August 27, 2002 and reprinted with Author's permission. About the Author(s): See under Our Contributors to find out about the Author(s) of this article. |
Yahoo! World News Headlines Our Winners Club Our Contributors Research Links Legal Advice ALL Awards & Internships Become an Activist Join an Organization Get Volunteerism Alert Write Letters to a local Politician Start your own Group Applied Politics Projects Suggest a Project Start your Yahoo Groups Get Internship Credit Funding for Projects Encourage Discussion Join Juryfury Chat Promote Juryfury.com Join online discussion Groups Be In the Spotlight Let us Interview you : Authors of political books Activists Journalists Lawyers Law Enforcement Politicians Politican Scientists Be A Columnist Get Internship Credit Write twice a Month Get Heard Start a Yahoo Group Advertise with Us Books (Free) Political Our Staff & Contributors Our Magazines Quietpoly.com I-Traderschool Juryfury.com The Company Our Address: QuietPoly Inc. 240 W. Saunders. Dr. (#146) Flagstaff, AZ 86001 Tel (928) 214-7365 quietpoly@yahoo.com |
|