Elias Khoury is a Lebanese novelist, writer and critic. A lecturer at the American University of Beirut and the cultural editor of the Beirut daily al-Safir, Khoury is also a frequent contributor to literary and cultural journals throughout the Arab world. An English translation of his second novel, Al-Jabal al-Saghir (Little Mountain), has just been published (University of Minnesota, 1989). Barbara Harlow spoke with him in Austin, Texas, in November 1989.
Could you articulate some of the changes that you’ve seen over the last decade and a half, particularly as a writer working in the midst of the civil war?
Forty years of history and the issues appear to be remarkably the same: national identity, the confessional system, electoral reform, the viability of the state, economic reconstruction and ideological realignment. What is Lebanon? Does it exist? Can it survive? The questions are not new. More than four decades ago, British and US officials were pondering the very same questions.
World War II was over. Lebanon celebrated its formal independence on December 22, 1943, but it was not until 1946 that the French were persuaded to abandon their occupation of the country. In the interim, French pressure to hold on to its privileged status led to conflict not only with Lebanese nationalists but with British forces.
The plain and mountains of the ‘Akkar are the northernmost part of the Lebanon, beyond Tripoli and the Koura region to its south and east. Partly because of the insistence of some influential Maronites, and with misgivings on the part of only a few French critics at the time, it was included in le Grand Liban in 1920 by the French League of Nations Mandate authorities, along with the Bekaa Valley and what is now south Lebanon. ‘Akkar’s predominantly Sunni Muslim population (in one of the most thinly inhabited areas of the country) led some to fear that its incorporation would lead to later problems of confessional balance since it was also the hinterland of the Sunni and nationalist city of Tripoli, whatever its advantages as a granary.
The state is the cohesive factor in a social formation. But what happens to the social formation where the state disintegrates? This is not a mere polemical question if we consider the Lebanese experience.
Lebanon’s people have paid a tremendous price for 15 years of invasion and civil war — an estimated 150,000 killed, tens of thousands wounded, and hundreds of thousands displaced and left destitute. Lebanon is the only developing country in which, despite high birth rates, population growth has stagnated and even declined in the last 15 years, from some 2.59 million in 1976 to 2.50 million in 1987, owing to war deaths and emigration.
It was Beirut, all over again,
it was Beirut on the radio
El Salvador on TV
it was Sabra & Shatila
in the memory
it was Usulutan in the heart
It was Beirut, again,
when we thought Beirut went
to rest, but Beirut will not sleep
until El Salvador sleeps
and San Francisco will
not eat
until Eritrea eats
and El Salvador
will not die
It was Beirut all over again
in Managua, in Antigua,
in the shantytowns of
Marseilles,
wherever the radio blares its
sounds
and I mean everywhere
in this electronic age
and the caveman suffers
in the belly of El Salvador
Nothing stays new for long in the torpor of Beirut, where everything is worn out by so much violence. If the word “ruin” suggests a comparison with the remains of ancient Tyre or Pompeii, it shouldn’t be used to describe Beirut, not even the blasted remains of the central city. The age and monumental character of the ancient ruins exclude human presence, and we view them from the distance of time, but the decay of Beirut is happening right before our eyes.
Mansour Raad is the pen name of an Arab journalist who recently left Beirut and has followed the Lebanese war closely. Joe Stork spoke with him in Europe in late November 1989.
Who is Gen. Aoun and what does his “war of liberation” represent?
Gen. Michel Aoun’s “war of liberation,” and the Syrian army’s obliging response, has left another thousand killed, thousands more injured, a third of the population transformed into refugees and the worst destruction and damage the country has suffered since 1975. Aoun tried to “convince” his Muslim compatriots to liberate themselves from “Syrian occupation” by pounding heavy Iraqi-furnished shells upon their heads. His frank “populist” language, proclaiming loudly what many Lebanese from all confessions think to themselves, at first brought him overwhelming sympathy.
Even after 15 years, the Lebanese conflict has never taken the form of mass communal violence, of ethnic riots and massacres. There are no cases where the population of one neighborhood raided another, looting and killing. Exactly the reverse: Groups have found shelter from the fighting among other groups. In Lebanon, the militias caused the violence, random and otherwise, among the population. At any point in the conflict the number of fighters participating in all the different militias never exceeded 30,000. Over the 15 years, at one time or another, maybe 90,000 or 100,000 out of a population of 3 million were ever part of this. So 80 percent of the population has not participated actively in the conflict.
Most of the already very large literature on the Lebanese conflict has focused on the etiology of Lebanon’s civil strife: its roots, causes, origins, antecedents and facilitating factors; its inherent or contingent characteristics. And, as one might expect, many conflicting readings and interpretations have been offered to answer the controversial question of the origins of the Lebanese conflict.
Much less has been written (except descriptions and reports) on the process of the conflict, on the dynamics of factors and forces that have come to constitute a conflict system that reproduces itself, generating its own economic sphere and social strata and an ideology of discord to justify and legitimize its continuation.
The government of Israel fiercely maintains its rejectionist stance toward any political accommodation with the Palestine Liberation Organization. This is not merely a diplomatic posture, but undergirds the ideological structure of its policies of dispossession and occupation. Ha’aretz reported last June that close to 50,000 Palestinians have been jailed in the first 18 months of the uprising. The number continues to climb — some 250 administrative detention orders in October alone, according to the DataBase Project on Palestinian Human Rights, plus the many arrests stemming from Bayt Sahour’s tax revolt.
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s well-documented, theoretically informed, innovative history of the jute mill workers of Bengal, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), poses this central question: “Can…third-world countries like India…build democratic, communitarian institutions on the basis of the nonindividualistic, but hierarchical and illiberal, precapitalist bonds that have survived and sometimes resisted — or even flourished under — the onslaught of capital?” (p.
Mahfoud Bennoune, The Making of Contemporary Algeria, 1830-1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.)
Mahfoud Bennoune has written a rich and highly informative book on the political economy of Algeria, both under colonial rule and since independence. The Making of Modern Algeria is a thoughtful and challenging study of social change in the Arab world and post-colonial societies in general. Bennoune provides an important synthesis of Algeria’s political economy that should interest scholars and policy makers concerned with the social dynamic that has emerged in the Third World out of the process of modernization.
Hisham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Values in Arab Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.)
Intifada Chic We’re not really sure what this tells us about the present state of the Israeli Jewish psyche, almost two years into the intifada, but here are some of the designer T-shirts being sold these days in Jerusalem:
July 25 The predawn landing, with the swollen Nile below and a touch of freshness in the air, feels reassuring after two years away from Sudan. But at the airport exit a nervous officer holds back the passengers: security is tight since the inqilab, he mutters, using the Arabic word for “overthrow” instead of the official reference — “National Salvation Revolution.” The drive into town — usually a ten-minute dash, swerving around potholes and debris — slows drastically. Soldiers stop the car six times, scrutinizing the special papers that allow us to travel during the nighttime curfew. After this wary silence at night, what will be the mood on the sun-blasted streets during the day?
In 1988 Sudan reaped its best harvest in at least a decade, yet as many as half a million Sudanese may have died of starvation. Most were victims of the civil war raging in the southern provinces, and anarchy in the west. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled the war zones, seeking refuge in camps in Ethiopia and other neighboring countries or in northern Sudan.
Amira is explaining to some village women how to use herbal medicines that grow in their neighborhood. “I learned the skill from my grandmother when I used to help her harvest the wild plants,” she says. Amira describes the plants, carefully differentiating those for colds: babounij (chamomile), khatmiye (athea), na’na (peppermint), zatar (thyme); those for abdominal colics: yansoun (anise), krawya (caraway), shemra (fennel); and those for diuresis, shoushet dura (corn stigma), bakdounes (parsley), and bu‘atheran (millofia). She is also very precise with her instructions.
Over the past two decades, public health workers have successfully developed primary health care: basic preventive and curative services that address critical health problems and are available close to people’s homes. Primary health care includes immunizations; maternal care; education for health, hygiene and nutrition; family planning; availability of essential drugs; and first aid. The difficulty now is in making primary health care widely available and of good quality. In most countries high technology hospitals in the capital cities, and exotic, expensive drugs still dominate the expenditures for health care.
