National epics typically come in one of two packages: the journey within the country or out of it and back again. The quintessential exemplar of a nation leaves it, testing their nationality against the outside world; or a young someone travels the nation encountering all that it has to offer, sharpening themselves into a literary citizen. In America, think Moby Dick (the American spirit out to sea) against Huck Finn1 (the trip into the interior, the picaresque encounters, the resolve into a kind of Americanness at the end). Greece, of course, has the Odyssey, and one can make an argument for the Iliad as a drama of Greek mores of hospitality and adjudication, given that they brought 10,000 ships over to Ilium and formed their own little country on the beaches; Virgil mixed the two forms for Rome in the Aeneid. England has the domestic dramas of Middlemarch and Howard’s End to decide, once and for all, who will inherit bonny old England, while Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe brings a steward of the English empire out to the wild world. We could go on, and as with every rule there are exceptions, but the more interesting thing to consider is how one might go about writing about the quintessence of a nation when it is denied to you, when one is expelled and refused reentry, when it is under threat of erasure. Such is the project of the Lebanese author Elias Khoury’s 1998 novel Gate of the Sun (translated by Humphrey Davies), which attempts to build, from a chorus of many voices, a monument to Palestine and its people, displaced as they are. One voice in the book, a writer named Samih, tries to encapsulate what such an epic would entail:
Samih would always talk about his dream about writing a book without a beginning or an end. “An epic,” he called it, an epic of the Palestinian people, which he’d start by recounting the details of the great expulsion of ‘48. He said we didn’t know our own history, and we needed to gather the stories of every village so they’d remain alive in our memory.
The people of the novel – mostly in and around Beirut in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps after the massacre of 1982 – have a memory of home but no access to it, have to maintain their national identity in the face of its denial and extermination, have to gather their stories to keep memory alive. It is the plight and the duty of its people: “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?”
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