Friday, November 17, 2006

Telling the Palestinian story

The new London Review of Books runs a deeply informative article by Jeremy Harding about the Lebanese-Palestinian novelist Elias Khoury, which included an interview as well as a close reading and a capsule biography of this chronicler of the Palestinian experience. Not many people have told the Palestinian story in art -- or at all for that matter. (Ideas did run a story by David Green earlier this year, though, about Palestinian art.) It is an important aspect of any people's quest for recognition, it would seem, to have its perspective aired outside of the realm of political activism and violence.

Khoury's background is complicated and not politically one-sided, as Harding explains. As a matter of fact, Arafat expressed deep displeasure with an article in a magazine Khoury edited:

In the late 1970s Arafat’s eagle eye fell on an article by an Iraqi contributor in Shuun Filastiniya. Khoury no longer remembers, or cares to remember, what it was that caused such a row. Still managing editor, he was lucky that an understanding was reached after the initial threat of a spell in PLO custody. (A passage in Gate of the Sun describes the brutality of Palestinian prison conditions.)

Khoury is now famous enough to grant him a place on the world stage, though the US public has failed to embrace him so far. (He is published by a small but wonderful Brooklyn imprint, Archipelago.)

[Updated 4:57 p.m.]

Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:05 PM

Print | E-mail to a friend | Permalink | Subscribe via rss