by Elias Khoury
Initially, I decided to put these passages, which are more like sketches, into the footnotes. Then I thought I should put them in bold. However, I dropped both ideas, convinced that I had no right to do so and that these passages invite the reader to join the game within the text, to find, as I had found while reading the manuscript, the beauty of beginnings and the intrigue that ties a writer to what he writes. Similarly, I have made the preface, which I found on its own in a notebook with a blue cover and which is a short text resembling a will, into an introduction to the work.
* * *
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The manuscript had no title, and I actually compiled a list of possibilities before eventually arriving at the idea of making the author’s name the title, which thus became The Notebooks of Adam Dannoun. That way, the author of the book would have succeeded in doing what other authors have failed to, namely, transforming himself into a hero of a tale that he himself had lived and created.
I changed my mind at the last moment, however, just before sending the manuscript to the publisher. I decided that the book should expose a truth to which no one previously had paid any attention, namely, that the Palestinian women and men who had managed to remain in their land were the children of the little ghettos into which they had been forced by the new state that had taken over their country and erased its name.
I decided therefore to give the book the title Children of the Ghetto, thus making a contribution, insignificant as it may be, to the writing of a novel that I am myself incapable of writing.
Finally, I wish to apologize to Sarang Lee for failing to consult her on the publication of these notebooks as a novel written by Adam Dannoun, while being certain, at the same time, that she will be delighted to find herself numbered among its heroes.
Elias Khoury
New York/Beirut, July 12, 2015
THE WILL
I SIT ALONE in my fifth-floor room, watching the snow falling on New York. I don’t know how to describe my feelings looking out this rectangular window in whose glass I see my soul refracting. It has become my mirror, in which my image loses itself among the other crowding images of this city. I know New York is my last stop. I shall die here and my body will be burned and my ashes scattered in the Hudson River. This is what I shall request in writing in my will: It’s true I do not have a grave waiting in the country I left behind and cannot be buried there, in the arms of the spirits of my ancestors. In this river, I shall embrace the spirits of strangers and encounter those who find, in the meeting of stranger with stranger, a lineage to replace one they’ve lost. (I realize I’ve just turned two lines of Imru’ al-Qays’s poetry quite unpoetically into prose but I don’t care: no one is going to read these words after my death because I shall ask in my will that these notebooks be burned along with me, so that they too can be thrown into the river. Such is the fate of man, and of words: words die too, leaving behind them an expiring wail like the one our souls give out as they disappear into fog at the end.)
I’ve made this window my mirror so that I don’t have to look at my face in an actual mirror – my face dissolves into the other faces, my features vanish, and thus I fashion an end for the end that has chosen me and put an end to the dream of writing a novel that I don’t know how to write or even why I should. The novel was lost to me the moment I thought I’d found it. That is how things are lost. It’s how Dalia – the woman who vanished from my life at the very moment when I believed that I could write my life in her eyes, and who’d agreed we should have a child and start – was lost. The beginning, or what we thought was the beginning, was the end. However, the true beginning, which led me to leave my country, seemed more like a false start, when I imagined I could find a substitute for life in writing it. This delusion seized me when the Israeli film director, who was my friend because he spoke the language I’d resolved to forget, suggested that every individual’s life deserves to be a novel or a film.
* * *
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I’ve put my notebooks in this file and I shall ask that they be burned and their ashes placed in a bottle, and I shall ask my young friend to mix their ashes with mine before everything is thrown into the river. Strange, my relationship with this young woman who came out of nowhere, and who is nowhere still! Did she love me, or did she love her New York University professor? Or did she love the idea of love, allowing it to rise above the two of us?
* * *
—
When I decided to emigrate to New York, I was determined to forget everything. I even decided, at the moment when I obtained my US citizenship, that I’d change my name, though it looks as though I’ll die before that happens. Death is a right. I’m not ill. Nothing requires that I think of death so unceasingly. Normally, it is the sick and the elderly who die, and I am neither. I’m over fifty and on life’s last lap, as they say. My lust for life has become sluggish due to a woman who decided, in a moment of insanity, to abandon me and her love for me – and she was right: we have to make sure we abandon things before they abandon us. I, though, have begun to rediscover how lust creeps into our joints – and I don’t just mean sex, I mean everything, but especially the lust for vodka and wine that sweeps over me, so that I feel a tingling in my lips and my ribcage as I sip the first drop.
A renewed lust for life stationed on the shores of death is a paradox that throws me into confusion, but I know that death will be victorious in the end, for death is vested in me and cannot be defeated.
The death whose phantom I see before me isn’t born out of despair at anything. I live in the post-despair age and am neither despairing nor lonely. I have fashioned my own despair and made of it a shade under which to take refuge, one that protects me from naivety and futility. My solitude has been a deliberate choice: as soon as I finish work, I return to my room and start writing. Writing is my solitude, it is my only address. I had failed to write the novel that I wanted to, so I decided to create a great metaphor, a cosmic metaphor, that of an obscure Arab poet who lived in the Omayyad period and died a hero’s death – and then suddenly I discovered that metaphors are futile. New York has taught me that nothing in our world is original or authentic, everything has been borrowed, or so it seems to me. Why should I write yet another metaphor to add to the others?
At first, I wrote the metaphor that I’d chosen to express the story of the country from which I’d come. Later, having decided that metaphors were futile, I didn’t tear up what I’d written, but reworked parts of it to allow me to recount the circumstances in which the idea had been born, and the reasons for it. Then, in an absolute fury, I decided to abandon the metaphor altogether, stop writing the novel, and devote myself to my own story, so that I could write the unadorned truth, stripped of all symbols and metaphors. No doubt I’ve failed to realize my new goal, but I uncovered many things as I was writing that had escaped my memory or sunk into its folds. Memory is a well that never runs dry, it both reveals and conceals, either so that we may forget when we are not able, or so that we may remember when we forget, I really don’t know!
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I don’t recall ever reading anything about the relationship between anger and writing, but my decision to write my own story was a result of rage, a savage rage that overwhelmed my being and that had two, unconnected, causes. One was my meeting with Blind Ma’moun, whose fragmentary story about my parents stunned me. It meant nothing to me at first but began to assume terrifying proportions following the visit of Israeli director Chaim Zilbermann to the restaurant and his invitation to attend the screening of his film Intersecting Glances. There – and this was the second spur of my rage – I witnessed the story of my friend Dalia being torn to pieces, followed by the author of the novel Gate of the Sun standing next to the bald Israeli director, presenting himself as an expert on Palestinian history, and lying.
Both of them told lots of lies, and I couldn’t restrain myself from shouting at the
m and leaving the cinema, Sarang Lee at my side. She took hold of my arm and led me to the café, but instead of supporting me, she started explaining that I was in the wrong.
It’s true. I was in the wrong, and what I’ve written is a record of my mistakes. I’ve written of both my rage and my errors. I told myself it was my duty, that I had to end my life with a story. Ultimately, all of us live to become stories. This is why I wrote so much, only to discover that silence is more eloquent than words and that I want these words to be burned.
All the same, I am a coward. I’m incapable of committing suicide, incapable of sending these notebooks to their death, and incapable of going back to my country to recover my soul – as Karma, a Palestinian woman I got to know as a sister, and who then disappeared from my life, advised me to do. I ran into Karma again by coincidence here in New York and promised her I would, but I don’t know, I may not be sincere. I’m not sincere I guess, I don’t really know, which is why I gave Sarang Lee a short letter and asked her not to open it unless something should happen to me, and why I burdened her with the job I’d been unable to carry out and asked her to burn these notebooks after my death.
I’m not certain I really want the flames to consume these papers, but it’s too late now, which is better. I am sure that the little sun that has illumined a small part of the darkness of my soul will do what it thinks is right.
I hesitated at length before making up my mind not to send these papers to any Arab publishing house, not because I don’t believe that what I’ve written is important but out of despair at the relationship between writing and the world of publishing, where writers rush to seek immortality for their names. I don’t believe in immortality, of souls or of words: it’s all vanity. The vanity of vanities, as Solomon wrote, is us. I don’t know how poets and authors can dare to write, after The Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes! The writer who was a prophet, a king, and a poet, the lover who loved all women, the mighty ruler who reigned over the kingdoms of the jinn, wrote that “all is vanity,” so why add my vanity to his?
I’m sitting alone now. My window is open onto the mirrors of the snow. I inhale the whiteness and listen to the crying of the winds that bluster down the streets of New York. I sip a drop of wine and take the smoke of my cigarette deep into my lungs. I open my notebooks, read, and feel thorns in my throat. I close the window and shut my eyes. My story is like thorns, my life is words, and my words are gusts of wind.
THE COFFER OF LOVE
(concept paper for a novel, first draft)
Waddah al-Yaman
(POINT OF ENTRY 1)
HE WAS A poet, a lover, and a martyr to love.
This is how I see Waddah al-Yaman, a poet over whose lineage, and very existence, the critics and the chroniclers of his verses differ. To me, though, he represents the most extreme sacrifice of which love is capable – a silent death. The poet kept silent because he was trying to protect his beloved, and the coffer of his death, in which the caliph al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik interred him, was the coffer of his love.
The title of the novel will be The Coffer of Love, and I’m not going to play the allegory game with it. Love is the most sublime of all the emotions – their lord and master, indeed – and is what gives things meaning. Only love and words give meaning to life, which has none.
No, I refuse to write an allegory, and the reader who searches for the Palestinian symbol in Waddah’s history will find instead a human parable relating to Palestinians, Jews, and all men that have been persecuted on earth.
I don’t want to go on about semantics – I’m not confident of my ability to write anything on the topic – but whenever I read contempt or criticism in the faces of my Israeli friends, or in Israeli texts, for the Jews of Europe that were driven to the slaughter like sheep, I almost choke. I think the image transforms them into heroes and the hollow criticism directed at them only points to the folly of those who think that the power they possess today will last forever; indeed, that contempt may have been the first sign of the racism that would later spread like an epidemic through Israeli political society.
* * *
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That discussion is of no interest to me. I love the image of the slaughtered sheep – an emotion I may have acquired from my Christian mother who, whenever she looked at the picture of her brother Daoud, who’d been lost to exile, would say he looked like a sheep because there was something about his features of the Lord Jesus.
The idea for the story had nothing to do, however, with the “sheep that is driven to the slaughter and never opens its mouth,” as per the prophet Isaiah; rather, it was conceived when I saw Tawfiq Saleh’s movie The Dupes, a Syrian production directed by an Egyptian and based on the novel Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian. The movie shook me to the core; it made me reread the book and decide to write this story.
I didn’t like the cry of protest at the end of the novel. The three Palestinians who got into a water tanker, driven by a man whose name and appearance are shrouded in mystery, died of suffocation in the tank, in which they were supposed to be smuggled from Basra in Iraq to the “paradise” of Kuwait. They died in the furnace of the cistern before crossing the Iraq–Kuwait border and they didn’t make a sound, causing the author to scream into the driver’s ears a near-stifled “Why?” The Egyptian director, Tawfiq Saleh, changed the ending though, so that instead of us asking the three Palestinians why they hadn’t banged on the sides of the tank, we instead see their hands banging away on the sides of the tank.
The banging, however, is meaningless as it would have been impossible for the Kuwaiti border officials, barricaded inside their offices, their ears deafened by the sound of the air conditioners, to hear anything, thus making the real question not the silence of the Palestinians but the deafness of the world to their cries.
I’d thought the perspective from which I would write my novel would be different: I wouldn’t devote a single word to Palestine and that would save me from the slippery slope that turned Kanafani’s novel into an allegory whose elements you have to deconstruct to get to what the author wanted to say.
I don’t feel comfortable with messages in literature. Literature is like love: it loses its meaning when turned into a medium for something else that goes beyond it, because nothing goes beyond love, and nothing has more meaning than the stirrings of the human soul whose pulse is to be felt in literature.
I repeat: literature exists without reference to any meaning located outside it, and I want Palestine to become a text that transcends its current historical condition, because, based on my long experience of that country, I’ve come to believe that nothing lasts but the relationship to the adim – the skin – of the land, from which derives the name of Adam, peace be upon him, that they gave me when I was born. My name goes back to the father of mankind, the first signifier that binds man to his death.
* * *
—
Waddah al-Yaman fashioned an astonishing love story, one unsurpassed before or since. He was unique among his kind – a poet who played with words, rested on rhymes, rode rhythm. In the end, he decided to keep silent to save his beloved and died as the heroes of unwritten stories die. It never occurred to him to bang on the sides of the coffer, and I, unlike Kanafani, will never ask him that wretched “Why?”
I shall let him die and shall live his last moments in the coffer with him, and I shall give his mistress – for whom Arabic literature provides no name other than the conventional Umm al-Banin, or “Mother of the Sons” – a name, and so make of her death a final cry of love that will ensure the story a place in the ranks of those of “the lover’s demise.” This mistress – the caliph’s wife – was, I hereby declare, called Rawd, meaning “meadow.” I give her that name because the poet’s love for her began with a confusion over names, in that, following the death of his first beloved, Rawda, he found in Umm al-Banin both his meadow and his grave, and the two beloved
s, both killed and both killers, became confused in his mind, and he himself, through the silence that he chose as the correlate of his verse, became the victim, for the only correlate of poetry are the interstices of silence, whose rhythms are matched precisely to those of the soul.
The Life and Sufferings of the Poet Waddah al-Yaman
(POINT OF ENTRY 2)
SAID THE CHRONICLER:
“O Rawda of Waddah,
Waddah of Yemen you have exhausted and distressed!
Revive then your lover with a draught
of a clear wine by dirt unsoiled,
Its scent that of quince,
its taste that of wine from the cask, made of grapes unpressed.
Two doves on a branch
make me yearn for you to slake my thirst.
The husband calls to his mate
and each feeds the other with homely bliss.”
So declaimed the lover to his beloved, but the poem got mixed up in the poet’s head: of which Rawda did he write? Had the two women with the same name become one?
What is love? And how can passion so overwhelm us that we become its plaything and go to our fate unresisting?
What is this mystery, which caused a poet – who had almost gone insane when he saw his beloved Rawda wasting away in the valley of the lepers – to leave his homeland in the Arabian Peninsula for Syria, only to meet his end in a new love story?