Hello Gentle Reader,
Elias Khoury was a renowned novelist, journalist, playwright, and public intellectual. Khoury greatly opposed the authoritarian governments that run through out the Middle East and North Africa, as well as a staunch defender of freedom of speech, and critic to the acceptable promotion of holocaust denial in the region. A proponent of the hopeful Arab Spring, Khoury celebrated the small victories, while lamenting the missed opportunities. Elias Khoury’s literary work explored universal concepts of collective memory, identity, war, exile, plights of the refugee and displacement. Khoury’s novels “Little Mountain,” and “Yalo,” directly dealt with the Lebanese civil war, which Khoury also fought in and was injured. “Little Mountain,” is a triptych of perspectives from a Joint Forces fighter, a distressed civil servant, and a chameleonic third, whose shifts and shapes between fighter and intellectual. These three perspectives provided a panoramic and layered review a lengthy and brutal civil war. In “Yalo,” the civil war is returned to once again, but from the perspective of a prisoner, whose accused of rape. Interrogated by means of beating and torture, the titular Yalo save himself by telling a new story through each interrogation. In this confinement and brutal oppressive regiment of torture, Yalo also discovers himself and reconciles with his own past and sense of history. What separates Khoury away from being a simple political oriented writer, is not only a lushness of prose and flourish for the poetic, but the human ability to transcend the horrors and achieve or strive for something greater. Khoury was a novelist who traced not only political horror and destitution, but explored the vastness of love, memory, and the resilience of the human spirit. In “White Masks,” Khoury creates a mystery, as a journalist seeks to piece together the ambiguity of a civil servant’s suspicious death, his body discovered in a mound of garbage. Through his investigation, the journalist hears how the Lebanese civil war still reverberates within the citizens and survivors. How the horrors and actions of those fretful events have carved deep wounds and trenches within the citizenry. Beyond his creative prose, Elias Khoury was an accomplished journalist in his own right and edited many publications throughout his lifetime. At his death, Arabic literature has taken a direct hit to one of its most important and steadfast writers, who stood on the sanctified grounds of democratic values and freedom of speech. The driving ideals of revolution, which now find themselves once again under threat and attack.
Rest in Peace Elias Khoury.
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
M. Mary
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