Symposium
& Festival: "The World Republic of Literature"
Lannan Symposium,
April 11-12, 2006
Gonda Theatre, Georgetown University
Elias Khoury
A strident and eloquent novelist, critic, and intellectual, Elias Khoury has made a decidedly transformative contribution to the modern Arabic novel and field of letters. The author of eleven novels including al-Jabal al-Saghir (1977) (The Little Mountain, 1989), Rahlat Gandhi al-Saghir (1991) (The Journey of Little Gandhi, 1994), Abwab al-Madinah (1993 )(Gates of the City, 1993), The Kingdom of Strangers (1996), and Bab Al-Shams (1998) (Gate of the Sun, 2006). Khoury is a radical cosmopolitan. His novels and criticism have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, and Hebrew. In 2000, Gate of the Sun was awarded Prize of Palestine; in 2002 Le Monde Diplomatique named it the Book of the Year.
An epic of an extraordinary human achievement, Gate of the Sun restores the often suppressed memories of the Palestinian experience of dispossession and expulsion to a humanity to whom lost stories belong and to whom he returns them. The epic animates the silences and sounds of an overlapping, intertwined past in ways that are as demanding as they are restlessly modern. A dislocated and subjugated population of human beings whom the poet Mahmoud Darwish once lamented existed only as “a country of words” has found in Khoury’s novel a polyphony of interwoven voices who refuse to be silenced by the prevailing forms of historical and journalist accounts that deny the ruins of an iniquitous history of conquest, expulsion, occupation, and the forced enclosure precisely because this novel, this epic, gives narrative of this experience an intransigent life.“Elias Khoury … is an artist giving voice to rooted exiles and trapped refugees, to dissolving boundaries and changing identi-ties, to radical demands and new languages. From this perspec-tive Khoury’s work bids Mahfouz an inevitable and yet pro-foundly respectful farewell.”—Edward Said