{"id":28878,"date":"2023-10-16T09:07:10","date_gmt":"2023-10-16T07:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=28878"},"modified":"2023-10-16T09:07:10","modified_gmt":"2023-10-16T07:07:10","slug":"in-praise-of-khaled-khalifa-friend-artist-humanist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/in-praise-of-khaled-khalifa-friend-artist-humanist\/","title":{"rendered":"In Praise of Khaled Khalifa\u2014Friend, Artist, Humanist"},"content":{"rendered":"
On Sunday, Oct. 29 at 1pm Eastern\/19:00 CET, The Markaz Book Group will be discussing the late Khaled Khalifa\u2019s novel <\/span>No One Prayed Over Their Graves<\/span><\/i>, a sweeping tale of Aleppine society at the turn of the twentieth century from provincial villages to the burgeoning modernity of the city, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived and worked together.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Robin Yassin-Kassab<\/span><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

I remember Khaled in a beer garden in Bristol. He was sitting at a table performing the English language: \u201cSo so so,\u201d he sang. \u201cAnd and and, but and but! and so\u2026 but! so\u2026 but!\u201d Khaled inhabiting his stocky body, his warm, brimming smile, his big head of fluffy white hair.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course he knew far more words than those. He somehow managed to communicate very well in English without speaking it very fluently. In Arabic he talked and talked, like the tide. Sometimes he broke into song. His writing was brilliant, the kind that will last for many generations. A poet, screenwriter, novelist \u2014 he was endlessly playful with words. And he was gentle with life, and with people. He took them very seriously.<\/span><\/p>\n

I was with him at the BBC one evening in June 2013. ISIS had captured Mosul, and using the money looted from the city\u2019s banks, and the American weapons captured from the fleeing Iraqi army, the organization had rapidly seized vast swathes of eastern Syria \u2014 areas which had been previously liberated from the Assad regime. The radio presenter asked Khaled what he thought of it all. His answer \u2014 \u201cIt\u2019s important to pay attention to the role of Iran\u201d \u2014 may have confused non-experts at the time, but was absolutely apt.<\/span><\/p>\n

He was politically acute, although he wasn\u2019t primarily a political person. He was a humanist, an artist, and a Syrian who cared deeply about Syrians. Once, as we toured England to introduce the <\/span>Syria Speaks<\/span><\/i><\/a> anthology, Khaled met refugees from villages near his own in the Aleppo countryside. \u201cThey asked me about the olive trees and the seasons,\u201d he grinned afterwards. \u201cI love these people.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

To read is to defy the Syrian regime \u2014 Khaled Khalifa<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He liked the concrete, material detail of life, and was aware of the dense social webs connecting people. This comes through in his writing, in its sensuousness and physicality as well as in its careful intricacies of plot and character. His novels are beautiful and rewarding, but not necessarily easy reading. The stories proceed in narrative swirls and mosaics rather than in linear fashion. This form manifests a kind of realism, because in real human life everywhere, not only in Syria, characters are woven from stories, and stories link to further stories \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Khaled loved the endless diversity of humanity in general and of Syrian society in particular. He saw Syria as heir to many civilizations, and rejected as absurd the notion that it might fit into a single rubber-stamped identity. He opposed all forms of authoritarianism. He grieved that the world\u2019s powers had opposed the Syrian revolution, and was angered that international extremists had been allowed to travel so easily to Syria. He rejected the imposed binary of religious tyranny or secular dictatorship, and hoped instead for democracy, which he called \u201cthe future.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Syria Speaks<\/em><\/a> is published by Saqi.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

He saw Syrians as plural, and understood their diversity as a strength. But he lived under a regime which considered diversity a weakness to be exploited, or a weapon to wield.<\/span><\/p>\n

His books were banned in his own country, but still they were widely read there. He used to tell the following story: He was returning to Syria from Lebanon, and at the border post a guard squinted at him through the car window. \u201cAre you Khaled Khalifa?\u201d he asked. \u201cWait there.\u201d So Khaled waited, wondering what was coming next. A few minutes later the guard returned with a copy of one of the novels. \u201cPlease sign it,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s for my wife.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Khaled called the novel \u201cthe most effective art form for dismantling the narrative of tyranny and oppression.\u201d His life was lived on this frontline. When I first met him, in 2012 in Beirut, his arm was still in a sling after being broken by regime goons during the funeral of murdered musician <\/span>Rabee Ghazzy<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

That was shortly before his third novel, <\/span>In Praise of Hatred<\/span><\/i><\/a> \u2014 winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction \u2014 was translated into English by Leri Price, bringing him international as well as regional fame. (I was honored to write the introduction to the English version.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The book prefigures the current social breakdown by returning to Aleppo in the 1980s, when the violence of the Baathist regime clashed with the intolerance of the Muslim Brotherhood. It takes on sectarianism and misogyny, and recommends tolerance. The novel after that, <\/span>No Knives in the Kitchens of this City<\/span><\/i><\/a> \u2014 winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature \u2014 ranges over three generations from World War I to the invasion of Iraq. It paints a picture of multicultural Aleppo and its open possibilities, on the one hand, and the dictatorship, and shame, and the rage to conform, closing them down, on the other. \u201cIt is the <\/span>duty of writing<\/span><\/a>,\u201d said Khaled, \u201cto help break down taboos and clash with fixed and backward concepts.\u201d And in <\/span>No Knives<\/span><\/i> he created a gay character (the narrator\u2019s Uncle Nizar) which he treated with sympathetic sensitivity.<\/span><\/p>\n

An open-hearted tolerance may have been Khaled\u2019s defining characteristic as a man as much as a writer. He was a remarkably social man, very highly valued by his friends. I didn\u2019t spend much time with him, but I certainly felt he was my friend. I suspect countless other people felt the same. He was entirely without conceit or pretense. Even after his fame, he preserved his absolute humility.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

His fiction was always set in Aleppo, the city and its countryside, and that was where he was rooted. But he moved to Damascus, and all through the war he remained in his flat in the suburb of Barzeh, on the mountainside, with a view of the active destruction. He endured years of bombing. Sometimes planes hovered above his building to fire missiles south into the Qaboon neighborhood. At first, he stayed because he thrived in the social context of the capital, but that faded as people left and the streets became clogged with checkpoints. \u201cCities die just like people,\u201d he wrote in <\/span>No Knives<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Beirut in 2012 he\u2019d told me that he found it easier psychologically to be in Syria than outside, despite the violence and repression, that he worried more for his friends inside Syria when he wasn\u2019t with them. But by the following year, he\u2019d changed his reasoning. \u201cEvery time I leave the house I look at my things for the last time,\u201d he said. \u201cBut what can I do? It\u2019s my country, my revolution. My situation is no different to any other Syrian\u2019s. As a writer, it\u2019s important to stay and to reflect the reality of what is happening.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In Lina Sinjab\u2019s short film <\/span>Exiled at Home<\/span><\/i><\/a> (2019) he talks of his solitude. By then, most of his friends had left. He too sometimes left for a few months at a time, to do residences abroad, but he always chose to return to Syria.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the end, though, war is war, and it wouldn\u2019t be over easily or quickly. It carried its stench with it wherever it reached, wafting over everyone, leaving nothing as it had been. It altered souls, thoughts, dreams; it tested everyone\u2019s capacity for endurance. \u2014from Death is Hard Work<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThis is my country,\u201d he says in the film. \u201cMy home is here, my family\u2019s here, my mother is buried here. So it\u2019s my country. I don\u2019t have anywhere else.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And nowhere else had Khaled. Syria and Syrians are immensely proud of him. It was important to Syrians that in this time of infamy they could boast such a consistent producer of world-class culture as Khaled, such a crafter of jeweled beauty, word to word, sentence to sentence.<\/span><\/p>\n

And it is important that Khaled chronicled the current collapse, for our present and future consideration.<\/span><\/p>\n

His novel <\/span>No One Prayed Over Their Graves<\/span><\/i>, which was published in Arabic in 2019, opens with two friends returning home after a night of drinking to find that their whole village, their families and friends, have been wiped away by a flood. As a metaphor, it works very well for the last Syrian decade.<\/span><\/p>\n

Death Is Hard Work<\/span><\/i>, in English also from 2019, addresses the war directly. This novel recounts the journey of two brothers and a sister bearing their father\u2019s corpse from southern to northern Syria for burial. The journey by road should take a few hours. It lasts three days through endless checkpoints. The corpse degenerates as does the relationship between the siblings. In many of his novels, Khaled was a keen observer of the Arab family fracturing under the stresses of war, politics or social mores.<\/span><\/p>\n

The idea for the <\/span>Death Is Hard Work<\/span><\/i> was sparked in 2013, when Khaled was lying in hospital after an earlier heart attack. He lay there and wondered, if he died, how his family would be able to take his body home in these war conditions.<\/span><\/p>\n

He was buried in Damascus. He wasn\u2019t taken home.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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