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MY LAI VET SAYS: HERE IT
COMES AGAIN IN IRAQ
Tony Swindell
recalls "Butcher's Brigade" in '69; says "gooks"
have now become "ragheads", every adult male is an
"insurgent" ... atrocities against Iraqi civilians
are soon going to explode in America's face; US Government's courtroom jihads against terror
stumble. Alexander Cockburn on Lodi case where Feds paid $250,000
to man who "saw" world's three top terrorists at mosque.
As neocons
and Israel lobby howl for US to bomb Teheran, an Iranian outlines
simple path to peace. CounterPunch
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"I Know I'm
Not Dreaming, Because I Can't Sleep Any More"
By RON JACOBS
A few years back I was talking with
a young socialist organizer about books. He had just asked me
why I wasted my time reading fiction when there was so much non-fiction
that needed to be read. Culture, I replied, reflects and illuminates
a society just as much, if not more, than history or economics.
Even when the fiction one reads is bourgeois fiction the story
reveals the society within which the story takes place. If there
is such a thing as proletarian fiction, it too reveals the lives
and desires of that class. Peter Weiss's narrator in his marathon
work The
Aesthetics of Resistance, notes that "art could
not be versatile and inventive enough....Painter, poets, philosophers
reported on the crises and confrontations, the concretions and
awakenings of their time....one might social upheavals, yet in
the multiplicity of mirrorings, of visual concentrations, one
could always find a unity...."
In 1998, the Lebanese writer
Elias Khoury published his novel Gate
of the Sun in Arabic. This work is a powerful piece
of literature that illustrates quite evocatively why fiction
is important. The publication of the English translation in
2006 by the small Brooklyn, NY company Archipelago Books was
an important event missed by much of the US cultural media.
This is unfortunate for all involved. Although I do not read
or speak Arabic (to my regret), I found reading the English translation
by Humphrey Davies spiriting me into the soul of Palestine.
Dream and reality flow back and forth becoming one. Fears,
hopes, love and anger are more than theories on a page. Khoury's
story makes these emotions real in the souls of the people and
the Palestine they want to maintain.
Dr. Khalil, the narrator, is
a former fedayeen who works as a doctor at a makeshift Palestinian
hospital somewhere in Lebanon. It is sometime after the beginning
of the first Intifada and the doctor is watching his adopted
father die, having lost his blood father when he was very young
when Israeli troops murdered him in the doorway of their home.
Afraid for his life because of a threat on his life over a murky
love affair, the doctor is also using the hospital as a hideaway.
Since he has all the time in the world, he spends hours talking
to his "father," a famous Palestinian fighter now in
a coma. He is a man with many names, one of which is Yunes.
This one-sided conversation is a collection of stories about
the lives of the doctor, the fighter, the women in their lives,
and the villages and camps where they have lived and fought.
It is also a story of Palestine, its occupation and the struggle
to free it. The doctor's tale covers the story of Palestine
over the last seventy years. The story he tells reminds us
that every side has its own history, indeed every individual
on every side has their own. Despite this, the histories are
more similar than they are different and all of them are filled
with tears.
The comatose fighter to whom
Dr. Khalil speaks is a hero in the sense that any fighter is
heroic. Yet it is the women in the story whose heroism really
shines through. They are the keepers of the stories and the
carriers of the water. It is the mothers, grandmothers and wives
that keep the memory alive of the lands from which they were
driven. It is the women that carry the children and the old
people as the Israelis drive them from one place to the next.
Yes, there are women in this tale who are victims, but it is
those that stand up to the tragedy constantly unfolding around
them that provide hope in an otherwise hopeless story. Perhaps
the best illustration of this is an episode where Nahilah, the
wife of Yunes the fighter, is arrested by Israeli troops because
she is pregnant. The troops know that she is married to Yunes
and hope to extract his whereabouts from her. Despite torture
and other abuse, she refuses to provide the information. Instead,
she tells then that she is a prostitute and has no idea who the
father of the child in her womb is. By risking shame and degradation,
she protects Yunes' whereabouts and life. The Israelis finally
let her go, not knowing what to do in the face of Nahilah's heroic
lies.
What is nationhood? Why does
it matter? These questions are seem to be a curse of humanity.
The search for their answer is also what gives us hope and heroism.
Khoury's narrator struggles with the meaning of these concepts
on almost every page. Is it the land and the homes from which
his people have been driven? Or is it the ideas and the culture
that the people share? Is the loss of the land what makes the
idea of a homeland even greater? Does the blood of battle render
such an idea less sacred (if it was ever sacred in the first
place)? These are the questions that Palestine represents and
these are the questions that Khoury so eloquently asks in this
tale of Dr. Khalil and his people.
The linchpin of this novel
is the Lebanese civil war. More specifically, it is the massacre
of Palestinians at the Shatila and Sabra camps in 1982. As most
readers know, these massacres were carried out by Falangist forces
with the assistance of the Israeli Defense Forces. The numbers
killed are believed to be around 1500 women, children and old
men. Dr. Khalil refers to these events in flashes of memory
and as points of reference. He remembers the deportation of
the fighters from Beirut and the eventual dissolution of the
camps during an intrafraternal war he calls the battle of the
camps. This episode is a metaphor for the greater reality of
battle and suffering, Khalil tells the comatose Yunes, where
the fighters fight and the women and children suffer and die.
Is it so different from the story of the Jews in Nazi Germany,
he asks?
Mr. Khoury has written a modern Exodus in a period of history
that has seen way too many such stories. He has done so with
an eye for the truth that is hidden in memory. Not always completely
accurate in matters of sequence and detail, tales like Gate
of the Sun relate the truth of the human condition better
than any government or non-governmental agency. Perhaps it is
a historical irony that the location of Khoury's contemporary
Exodus is also the location of the one so many humans are familiar
with from their holy books. Perhaps it's just a cruel coincidence.
This book is art that illustrates what Peter Weiss called a "multiplicity
of mirrorings" in his aforementioned novel. It is also
a work that achieves the unity Weiss says we seek from such art.
Either way, it is not only a story that is worth reading, it's
a story one shouldn't miss, if only for how beautifully it is
told.
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