Lebanese writer Elias Khoury in a Beirut cafe on Sept. 9, 2007. (Credit: Marwan Naamani/AFP)
Beirut was one of his great loves. It inhabited him almost as much as he inhabited it. In the Lebanese capital's finest hours and its saddest, the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury never stopped coming back. It's where he was born, and where he breathed his last Sunday, at the age of 76.
It was here that he fought his political and cultural battles, organized his literary revolution and contributed to the influence of a city he saw as resolutely, passionately Arab. Beirut haunts his work and is one of its main characters, the place from which he began his career as a literary critic and novelist. It was from here that he became an activist for Palestine and participated fully in the debate of ideas through his role as a journalist, at a time when the region's intellectuals were publishing in the Lebanese press what they could not express at home for lack of freedom of expression.
Beirut was home to his commitments before, during and after the civil war, from fighting the Israeli siege in 1982 to opposing Rafic Hariri's Solidere reconstruction projects in the 1990s. But faced with the gradual decline of a city under the tutelage of Damascus and its allies and ravaged by the corruption of a lawless political class, he was never fooled: "The idea of a renaissance has been very important among Arab intellectuals and poets," he told Banipal magazine back in 2001. "I don't think we can raise Beirut from the ashes. In fact, I don't like the whole phoenix myth, because I think that when someone died, he had to die. You don't want it to be reborn, you want something else to emerge," he said, almost two decades before the double explosion in the port. He explained that Beirut was no longer Beirut in his point of view.
It's true that freedom of expression was still stronger in Beirut than elsewhere in the region. But not to the point of making it "a free place." "If Beirut were a free place today, someone like Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd [an Egyptian thinker specializing in Quranic studies, accused of apostasy in 1995 and forced to flee to the Netherlands with his wife] would have gone into exile in Beirut, not Holland. He would have become a 'Beirutite' like Adonis or Mahmoud Darwish before the war. Today, our journalism is marginal compared to Saudi journalism, which has become the only pan-Arab journalism. It's a new Arab world in which Beirut is no more than a shadow of its former self," Khoury said.
To his friend, Syrian filmmaker Ali Atassi, Beirut's decline deeply affected the writer. "Before his own death, he saw the agony of his city, with which he identified," he said.
The Nakba: Elias Khoury's 'haunting leitmotif'
Born on July 12, 1948, into a middle-class Greek Orthodox family, Khoury grew up in the neighborhood of Achrafieh, in an atmosphere steeped in religious culture and classical Arabic poetry. From an early age, he was passionate about the Palestinian cause, which was to become the driving force behind his political commitment.
A man of the left, he could have joined the Lebanese Communist Party, but instead became involved with the Fatah Movement following the defeat of 1967, after a stay in Jordan in a feda'ayeen camp. From 1975 to 1979, he was editor-in-chief of the magazine Palestinian Affairs, collaborating with the poet Mahmoud Darwish. He was also editorial director of the cultural pages of the Lebanese daily As-Safir (1983-1990) and, after the end of the war, editor-in-chief of Al-Mulhaq, the cultural supplement of An-Nahar. The latter became one of the most vehement platforms against certain aspects of Beirut's reconstruction. Until his passing, he was editor of the Institute for Palestinian Studies (Arabic-language edition).
Leading novelist, playwright and journalist, Khoury has worn many hats and is one of the most emblematic cases of the committed writer whose struggles permeate literature but are not limited to it. His literature goes beyond his battles to bring to the fore complex situations and characters with tormented identities. "His work has evolved considerably over the course of his novels. Firstly, in terms of length, he has gone from a novella of around a 100 pages to a 500-page novel for his most recently published trilogy, 'Children of the Ghetto,' which runs to over 1,500 pages for the 3 volumes," said Rania Samara, the novelist's French translator. "However, we find certain themes that have been present since his first novels: Interlocking narratives, the political reality of the Middle East, especially Beirut, his city, the multiplication of narrators and points of view, as in 'Little Mountain.'"
Two subjects recur in the writer's work: The Lebanese civil war and the Palestinian Nakba. Rania Samara emphasized that "they are constantly recurring in his work, like a haunting leitmotif." She also detected stylistic evolutions in a body of work where Arabic is first discreetly introduced into a narrative in classical language, before blending "naturally into his style" over time, to the point of becoming "characteristic of his writing."
Of the 14 novels published by Khoury, "Gate of the Sun" remains the most famous, and for good reason: It is the story of the Palestinian exodus and the Nakba. "Along with Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said, Elias Khoury was able to express the Palestinian soul. He wrote the most beautiful novels about Palestine," said Leila Shahid, former delegate general of the Palestinian Authority to France and the European Union. "The title 'Gate of the Sun' — 'Bab al-Shams' in Arabic — even became in 2013 the name of a protest village founded by Palestinian activists near the illegal settlement bloc of Maale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, to protest against the occupation," she added.
The novelist distinguished himself by his ability to explore the Palestinian question from all angles, including the Jewish. A case in point is the novel "Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea," which features young Adam Dannoun, a child of the Nakba, a Palestinian who grows up in the "ghetto" of Lod after the majority of the population had been expelled by Zionist forces, and who, from one event to the next, finds himself confronted with the identity of the Israeli “Other” and its traumatic history, marked by the Shoah.
Translated into 15 languages, including Persian, Turkish and Hebrew, his work has earned him several literary awards and his appointment as Global Distinguished Professor at New York University, a position he held from 2005 to 2014.
A pro-Palestinian activist during the Lebanese Civil War, Khoury cultivated a certain critical distance from the errors of his own camp, which can be seen in several of his works, including "The Scent of Soap," "Yalo" and "Broken Mirrors: Sinocal." "Elias Khoury was also opposed to the Oslo Accords and the Palestinian Authority, even if this was expressed somewhat belatedly, as it was necessary to support Yasser Arafat in the face of criticism from the Arab despotic camp, notably the Syrian regime," noted researcher and political scientist Ziad Majed, a close friend of Khoury's.
Elias Khoury and the democratic left
A leading figure in the Arab left-wing intelligentsia, the late novelist nevertheless belonged to a trend which — while raising the Palestinian question as a central political and regional issue — has never abandoned the democratic battle. In Lebanon, he fought against Syrian tutelage. "Since the Damascus Spring [2000], the An-Nahar supplement has become the main public forum for Syrian intellectuals opposed to the Assad regime," explained Atassi. In October 2004, along with other Lebanese activists, he co-founded the Democratic Left movement, which aims to combine the Left's historic commitment to Palestine with the demand for an independent, sovereign and democratic Lebanon. "Elias Khoury succeeded in showing that there is no divorce between the struggle for the liberation of Palestine on the one hand and opposition to the despotism of Arab powers on the other, especially the Syrian regime, which crushed Syrian society but also imposed its mafia-like hegemony on Lebanon for a long time," said Majed.
The writer represents a generation that saw the struggle for the liberation of Palestine as a lever for a renewal combining democracy and modernity throughout the Arab world: A position at the heart of an ongoing debate among the region's intellectuals. Some of them consider that the Palestinian question — instrumentalized by the powers that be — has, on the contrary, served authoritarian regimes and contributed to putting all other causes on the back burner.
Extremely weakened by successive operations since July 2023, the novelist has not given up writing. Above all, he continued to comment passionately on current events, particularly the horrors of Israel's war on the Gaza Strip. In one of his last columns, published in July in the daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, he confided that the resistance of Palestinians who had been bombed "savagely for almost a year" was "a daily call to love life." For many of his friends, the weekly publication of his articles, marked by pain, had become one of his only reasons for survival.
This article was originally published in L'Orient-Le Jour; English version edited by Yara Malka.
