Elias Khoury (1948-2024): Chronicler of fragmented souls, keeper of forgotten histories
In the passing of the Lebanese novelist and critic, the Arab world has lost a towering literary figure who gave voice to the exiled of Beirut and Palestine; To read Khoury is to let your heart be wrenched.
In the death of Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury (1948-2024), who succumbed to prolonged illness at the age of 76 on Sunday (September 15), the Arab world has lost one of its most uncompromising and prolific voices — a writer who chronicled the history of his people, interrogating it with precision, empathy, and fierce honesty. Born in 1948 in Beirut, Khoury belonged to a generation of thinkers and intellectuals whose writing was shaped by war, displacement, and political struggle that defined much of the Arab experience in the second half of the 20th century. But to reduce his vast literary corpus — written over a span of five decades — to a mere reflection of his times would be a grave disservice. For Khoury was a relentless questioner of history, a literary cartographer who mapped the scars of the forgotten and the silenced, giving voice to the exiled, the marginalised, and the invisible. Similarly, to call him a novelist would be reductive for he was also a playwright, a critic, a political commentator, and a cultural historian.
Through the eclectic fusion of realism with myth, history with dreamscapes, and testimony with allegory, Khoury — who won the Prize of Palestine for his 1998 novel Gate of the Sun, ‘the magnum opus of the Palestinian saga’, in 2000 — sought to capture the fragmented nature of memory, particularly in relation to the Palestinian cause, a cause that haunted him, and permeated his work, like an unexorcised ghost. In his second novel, Little Mountain, (al-jabal al-saghir, 1977), translated into English by Maia Tabet in 1989 — which marked a break with the realist style in fiction, championed by the likes of Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz and harked back to the formal experimentation of Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani — he explored the psychic toll of violence, diving into the disillusionment and existential dilemmas experienced by those who lived through the absurdity of conflict. Written in the opening phases of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), it established Khoury as a distinctive voice in Arabic literature, heralding his commitment to capturing the personal costs of war beyond the political rhetoric.
The chronicler of fragmented souls
At the heart of Khoury’s literary oeuvre, however, is the Palestinian Nakba — the catastrophe of 1948, which resulted in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland. While not Palestinian by birth, Khoury became one of the most powerful literary voices chronicling the trauma and aftermath of the Nakba. In the sprawling and evocative Gate of the Sun (Bab al-Shams, translated by Humphrey Davies in 2006), which runs into nearly 500 pages, he uses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a backdrop, and weaves together the personal and political to create a searing universe soaked in the countless tragedies, pain and anguish of scores of Palestinian refugees following the creation of Israel. It's told in the first-person voice of Khalil, a Palestinian doctor in a makeshift refugee hospital in Lebanon, who tends to his comatose mentor, Yunes, an aging Palestinian freedom fighter. Khalil spends much of the book recounting Yunes’ life, both to himself and to Yunes, in an attempt to keep the memory of their shared struggle alive.
Gate of the Sun uses storytelling as a means of survival and resistance. Through Khalil’s monologues and recollections, the novel blurs the lines between history, memory, and myth. The act of telling stories — whether they are Yunes’ stories or those of other displaced Palestinians — becomes a way to preserve identity and culture in the face of erasure. Yunes’ stories, as told by Khalil, are filled with memories of villages that no longer exist, of families torn apart, and of a homeland that has been irrevocably changed. The title, Gate of the Sun, refers to a cave in Lebanon where Yunes would meet his wife, Nahila, in secret. This cave becomes a symbol of a lost homeland, a place where love, memory, and identity are preserved despite the physical separation of the Palestinian people from their land. The novel is suffused with this sense of yearning for a place that is both real and imagined, a home that exists only in memory and in the stories passed down from one generation to the next. “Do you believe we can construct our country out of these ambiguous stories? And why do we have to construct it? People inherit their countries as they inherit their languages. Why do we, of all the peoples of the world, have to invent our country every day so everything isn’t lost and we find we’ve fallen into eternal sleep?” wonders Khalil at some point in the novel.
A revolutionary in thought, and form
Khoury was a witness, a revolutionary in thought and form. Along with his 13 odd novels, he wrote several essays and critiques that became crucial in shaping the consciousness of modern Arabic literature. He was a man unafraid of confronting the most disturbing truths — of war, of exile, and of the desolation and despair of bruised and battered souls. To read Khoury is to let your heart be wrenched. Such is the beauty of his prose and the unbearable weight of the stories he tells that by the time you’ve closed the last page you realise you’ve been carrying his characters’ sorrows, their lost dreams, their longing for a home that might never be reclaimed. If you read closely, chances are that you will find yourself reflecting on your own understanding of loss, and home. It is an experience that transforms the act of reading into an emotional and moral engagement, where you cannot help but feel your heart stretched to its limits, both broken and expanded by the humanity his words contain. When I read Gate of the Sun, a question that I kept asking was: How does one recount a story that is constantly erased, denied, or forgotten?
Khoury’s literary innovations were not just aesthetic choices; they were deeply political. He was a master at dismantling the very form of the novel; his fiction refuses to be tidy or linear. His characters — refugees, lovers, exiles, soldiers — rarely move from beginning to end in a straightforward manner. Instead, they weave through time, much like the fractured reality they inhabit, bringing their past and present together in a swirling kaleidoscope of history and memory, dream and reality. They also refuse to be tethered to a singular narrative.
His muse: Beirut, a city of contradictions
No obituary of Khoury would be complete without reflecting on his profound relationship with Beirut, the city that was both his muse and his battlefield, his karma bhoomi. Little Mountain, unlike many war novels that reduce conflict to battles and casualties, dives into the psychological, emotional, and spatial fragmentation that civil war inflicts on a city. It reads like a fever dream — an intentional reflection of a city caught in the throes of its own destruction. His protagonists in the novel are not heroes or martyrs; they are ordinary citizens, caught in the maelstrom of violence, unsure of their allegiances, and constantly grappling with their identities. The novel does not provide easy answers or resolutions because Khoury understood that civil war, much like life, is a continuous process of negotiation.
Khoury’s Beirut is not just a city of ruins — it is a city of characteristic resilience, a city of contradictions — both a site of violence and a space for rebirth, both a place of exile and a home for the displaced. In novels like The Journey of Little Gandhi (Riḥlat Gandhi al-Ṣaghir) and Yalo, he examines the ways in which memory is manipulated, distorted, and weaponised, and the impossibility of remembering the ‘truth.’ Khoury’s work insists that forgetting is as much a part of the human experience as remembering. His characters often forget vital details, misremember events, and suppress painful experiences. Yet, through this forgetting, they are able to survive. In Yalo, for example, the protagonist is a former soldier accused of crimes during the Lebanese Civil War. Much of the novel revolves around his attempts to reconstruct his past. But as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the ‘truth’ of Yalo’s past is impossible to fully grasp. Memory, in Khoury’s hand, thus, is not a reliable guide — it is a constantly shifting terrain, marked by the scars of violence.
Literature as a form of resistance
As an intellectual committed to the liberation of Palestine and the larger Arab world, Khoury saw literature not as an escape from politics, but as a form of resistance. His novels, essays, and critical works are all infused with a deep commitment to justice, to the right of the oppressed to tell their stories. He was a key figure in the Palestinian Revolution, both as a participant and as a chronicler. He worked closely with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), edited the influential Al-Karmel magazine, and was an active voice in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. His political commitments were never separate from his literary work —instead, they were deeply intertwined. For Khoury, to write was to resist, and his novels are filled with the voices of the displaced, the oppressed, and the forgotten.
At the same time, Khoury was deeply sceptical of grand ideological posturings — nationalist or religious. In Gate of the Sun, Yunes is a committed fighter for the Palestinian cause, but he is also a man deeply divided by his personal loyalties and desires. To me, a key takeaway from Khoury’s impressive body of his work is this: the stories we tell shape the world we live in. In the end, we are all stories. And Khoury leaves behind a wealth of stories that will forever remind us of their power — to heal, to resist, and to bear witness.