Tag: Lebanese

The invisible man’s story: Children of the Ghetto II: Star of the Sea by Elias Khoury

The first volume of Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto trilogy, My Name is Adam, presents itself as a collection of writings by a Palestinian falafel maker living in exile in New York City. Never intended for publication, they include an aborted attempt to write a novel about a seventh-century Yemini poet and the unedited attempt by the author, Adam Dannoun, to understand himself by writing his own story. After a lifetime of trying to leave history, his own and his people’s, behind, two events—the screening of a film based on Khoury’s famous novel Gate of the Sun, and a conversation with a man he has not seen since he was seven years old—motivate this decision to finally commit an account of his life to paper. He will then set the stage for his own death. Elias Khoury supposedly comes into possession of Adam’s notebooks after he has died and, following some consideration, decides to publish them as they are, unedited. The result is an often troubled and circular narrative beginning in New York and making its way back in time in an effort to reconstitute what he knows of his earliest years, during and in the immediate aftermath of the Nakba. Born in Lydda in 1948 he wants to piece together as much as he can about the horrific events of the massacre in the city, the containment of the Arab residents in what the Israeli soldiers labelled a “ghetto,” and the harsh conditions he and his mother endured.

The double-authorship of the first volume—Khoury as the custodian of Adam’s writing—is assumed to be understood, but not mentioned, in Star of the Sea. Rather, the entire tone and approach of the work shifts as Adam steps back from his own story to adopt a distanced perspective: Point of Entry: the Third Person, or the Absent Conscience. That the narrator and author of the novel (and he does call it a novel at this point) is also the protagonist is not a secret, but as he makes clear in the opening passages, it does raise certain challenges:

The question keeping the writer of these stories awake at night is the following: how can the absentee write? Can they tell their own story using “I,” thereby writing as though remembering? Or should they employ the third person to write in their place?

Pronouns in Arabic are extraordinarily supple, unmatched in any other language. The written letters that take a person’s place are called “consciences”, but since the conscience is also an invisible  moral compass, how can a novelist write using the conscience of one who is absent? And finally, what does its corollary—that the conscience must be absent in order for a person to tell their story really mean?

So, although Adam’s account now takes a more straightforward and generally chronological quality, the multi-layered reflective and metafictional elements of the first volume persist, now that the present self (the writer) has separated himself from his past invisible, absent self and reluctant hero of his story.

Although he made passing references to his adolescent and young adult years in the first part of his grand life writing exercise, the primary focus of My Name is Adam was on a period of his life  history of which he had either no direct memories or only a child’s recollections. Now, Adam is on much firmer ground, memory-wise, and in a position to try to face his conflicted emotions about the choices he faced as he navigated life in a country to which he could never fully belong. This is, then, a story of one man’s relationship to his own identity and his desire to live without any history or nostalgia. Even if it means living a lie.

This second volume begins in 1963, with fifteen year-old Adam’s decision to leave home. He had moved to Haifa with his mother, Manal, following her marriage to Abdallah al-Ashal, and, after years of watching his relentless abuse drive her further into a lifeless shell, he knew it was time to get away. Manal seemed to know too and, on the night Adam left, she quietly saw him off, handing him his father’s will before he disappeared into the stormy night. He was now on his own.

With a short detour, Adam makes his way to the garage of mechanic named Gabriel, a Polish Jew who had picked him up one night when he was hitchhiking. Struck by the boy’s fair hair and skin, Gabriel saw in Adam the image of his deceased younger brother. He had promised that he could help him out, thinking of possibly teaching him his trade. But Adam was determined to continue his schooling. So the mechanic not only offered him a place to stay in return for odd jobs in the shop, but also helped him get into a Jewish school. His old life now behind him, this period marked the beginning of Adam’s new story. He changed his name from Dannoun to Danon, and with it he assumed a new identity. He looked the part, spoke Hebrew well, and his existing ghetto origin was malleable:

If the heroes of novels could break through the fourth wall (page) and speak without an intermediary, then Adam could very well have told his story not as the invisible man, but a man formed from his imagination. And indeed he had imagined an entire personality that both matched his true nature and was completely different. From the moment he left his mother’s house on the night of the rain, Adam realized that he could represent himself however he wanted by using certain true events to create a compelling background.

This new story follows the reinvented Adam through his first teenage love—unfortunately for him, it is with Gabriel’s daughter Rivka, a situation not destined to end well—into his university years and beyond. Although he enjoys new freedoms with his assumed Israeli identity, he cannot escape his official Arab designation so he often straddles the Jewish and Palestinian communities, spending his days in one and working and living in another. Along the way he meets an assortment of interesting individuals who will influence his life in varying ways, but the central focus of this second volume of Children of the Ghetto lies with the ghetto he where allows others to believe his origins actually lie—in Warsaw.

As a student of Hebrew Literature, Adam develops a close friendship with his German-born professor Jacob Ebenheiner, a relationship based on shared intellectual curiosities and interests. Jacob does not pry into Adam’s life, and the latter offers no details. But a class trip to Warsaw at the end of the first term will ultimately lead to a betrayal of his secret. The visit to Poland has huge impact on the eighteen year-old Palestinian-in-disguise—walking through the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto and listening, through a translator, to the stories of the guide and survivors. But it is an evening spent in the company of Marek Edelmann, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and life-long anti-Zionist who remained in Poland and became a famed cardiologist, that unsettles him most. Adam is not only left questioning who he is and where he belongs, but it brings to light the extent of the gap that exists between himself and his defiantly proud Israeli teacher.

Throughout this book, Adam relies on a degree of invisibility afforded by his appearance to continue to live a lie into his adult professional life, but in his personal life the balance is more difficult, and not all ghosts can be left in the past, no matter how much he may want them to be. For many years he will keep to himself as much as possible, the personification of the “present absentee.” That is, until he meets Dalia, the young woman who turns his world upside down when he is in his mid-forties, the woman who finally makes him believe in love. But we know, for he has often told us, that it will not last.

Although familiarity with the first volume is assumed, Star of the Sea is building on a much wider story with a fresh angle on questions about what it means to write about one’s own life, about truth, and about what one can really tell. Given his reluctance to talk about his past, Adam does not detail his early experiences, nor does he explain things we as readers know about his true origins, facts that he himself was unaware of until much later in life. Here is focused on telling this aspect of his story in a specific manner. Yet, by the time the novel ends he has glossed over much of what will be the most significant romantic relationship of his life, so one can only assume that Dalia will take centre stage in volume three. But where will Adam be standing as he tells this part of his story? The final part of the trilogy only came out in Arabic in 2023, so it seems that Anglophone readers will have to wait for a translation to find out.

Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea by Elias Khoury is translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies and published by Archipelago Books.

Memory is a wound in the soul that never heals: Children of the Ghetto I: My Name is Adam by Elias Khoury

I want to clarify things for myself first. What I write now, and what I shall write, isn’t a novel or an autobiography and it isn’t addressed to anyone. It would be logical not to have it published as a book, but I don’t know. I shall let myself address itself as it desires, without rules, I will not change names to make myself think that I am writing a work of literature, and I shan’t cobble together a framework. I shall tell things as I told them to my young friend.

These are the directives the narrator of the first volume of Elias Khoury’s Children of the Ghetto sets for himself as he abandons his past literary ambitions to dedicate himself to his own story. But as he allows memory, investigation, and reflection to guide his pen, he is inadvertently, and unintentionally, moving toward something much grander even if the result, My Name is Adam is presented as an unedited collection of writings never intended for publication. In a post-dated fictional introduction, Khoury claims that these notebooks were passed on to him after the death of Adam Dannoun, a Palestinian born falafel seller living in New York City, by a mutual acquaintance, Sarang Lee, who was the young friend Adam refers to above and a student of Khoury’s. By his own admission, Adam himself was neither a friend nor an admirer of the famed Lebanese novelist. It was his contention that Khoury had “stolen” the stories of his friends and used them to write his epic novel Gate of the Sun which had then been turned into a movie. When Khoury comes to possess Adam’s texts—which include a series of attempted approaches to a novel he had hoped to write, along with an extended autobiographical effort that combines remembered detail with information gathered from a range of sources—his first inclination is to rework the material into a formal novel and pass it off as his own. At the last minute though, he decides to simply send Adam’s writing, as is, to his publisher in Beirut.

The resulting novel is a masterful, unconventional work, and a complex, multilayered meditation on the nature of memory—individual and collective—truth, and the search for meaning. Adam is a man trying to find himself within the history of his family and his own people. Although he is only in his fifties, he has already decided he wants to die, but first he needs to write his own story, not for posterity but for his own ends. He had long dreamed of writing a novel based on the tragic fate of seventh century Yemini poet Waddah al-Yaman, a man driven to a silent death, buried alive for love—an effort preserved in its formative stages in the earliest sections of My Name is Adam. But this task is set aside for his personally directed endeavour as the result of two events: an unexpected meeting with Blind Ma’moun, an important figure from his childhood who reveals an unsettling truth about his parents, and the screening of the film based on Gate of the Sun in which he sees the story of Dalia, a woman he once loved. He realizes that he must reclaim his story, and that of his friends, from the darkness of the past and the distortions of literary accounts.

I don’t like playing games with life. We aren’t heroes of novels that our fates and stories should be played around with like that. I’m not a child and I hate heroes. I’m just a man who has tried to live and has discovered the impossibility of doing so. I’m not saying life has no meaning, because meaning has no meaning and looking for it seems to be boring and trivial. I’m a man who’s lived all his life in the postponed and the temporary.

Yet, to resolve this suspended state, even if he is only writing toward his own death, the tale he will need to address is one that involves loss, historical tragedy, assumed identity, and ultimately, self-imposed exile from his homeland.

The central focus of Children of the Ghetto I: My Name is Adam is the brutal massacre at the city of Lydda in July 1948 and the trials of the months that followed when the remaining Palestinian survivors were forced to live in an area enclosed within barbed wire fences, described, by the Jewish Israeli soldiers guarding them, as the “ghetto.” Adam, thought to be the first child born within this space—hence his unconventional name—was an infant during this period, but he grew up as the child of a honoured martyr and carried with him a legacy born of the stories told to him by his mother and many others. Blind Ma’moun’s late revelation shatters the foundations of his identity (even if it was something he was never quite at ease with) and drives him to work his way back to lay bare the details of one of the many horrifying and disturbing incidents that accompanied the forced formation of the new Jewish state. When the IDF moved into Lydda—an ancient town recognized as the martyrdom site of a figure revered by Orthodox Christians and Muslims alike, Saint George or Al-Khadr—hundreds of residents were killed and 50,000 were forcibly displaced. But, that is just the beginning, Adam knows, recalling, Blind Ma’moun’s powerful New York University lecture some fifty years or so after the massacre:

“I shall not fall into the trap of saying that the Nakba was a unique historical event. History, ancient and modern, is a series of catastrophes afflicting numerous peoples. I might tell you the story of the corpses we had to collect from the alleyways, fields, and houses of Lydda, or I might tell you about the men who were executed in al-Tantoura and how the soldiers of Israel’s Alexandroni Brigade ordered the Palestinian men of the village to dig their own graves using their hands—but what benefit would there be in that? The issue isn’t just the crime of the expulsion of the Palestinians from their land, because a bigger crime followed—the crime of the imposition of silence on an entire people. . . the silence imposed by the victor on the vanquished through the power of the language of the Jewish victim, which dominated the world, meaning the West, following the crimes of the Second World War and the savagery of the Nazi Holocaust. No one listened to the cries of the Palestinians, who died and were dispossessed in silence. This is why literature came to forge a new language for the victim, or in other words to proclaim a literature of silence, and to take us, with Mahmoud Darwish, to ‘wherever the wind blows.’”

As a child of the Nakba, Adam believes that only by going back to his own origins can he hope to make sense of where he comes from and who he is, and begin to understand the relationships and choices that have shaped his life. His autobiographical journey may have started with a cynical attitude toward the notion of “meaning,” but as he fills the pages of his notebooks with memories and research, the more existential questions he asks, of himself and those he loved. It is not just the unspeakable pains his mother endured or the secrets that may have been kept from him that trouble his inquiry, he is also struck by the resilience and resourcefulness of the inhabitants of the Lydda ghetto who are forced to secure their own food and water, and share limited resources and accommodation. He wonders at the human capacity to keep living against the odds.

Because this a work that evokes the often unstructured gathering and reworking of remembered elements, “derived from the scraps of stories that I patch together with the glue of pain and arrange using the probabilities of memory,” Adam’s narrative is one that tends to circle back on itself, digging deeper, and going farther with each turn, while bringing up references to aspects of his youth and adult life that he continually places aside as “a story for later.” If that sounds frustrating, it is not, for the momentum is maintained as he pushes closer to a fuller picture of the extent of the massacre, the deprivation that ensued, and the deeply buried scars borne by those who survived. And, of course, in light of the current situation in Gaza, the parallels are clear even though, in 1948, the displaced still had a place to go and the escaped had a place to run to.

My Name is Adam is an imaginative, prescient novel that lives within the literary, artistic and historical threads of Palestinian history. Adam is likewise well-versed in Arabic and Israeli literature, while at the same time being aware of himself as both a protagonist and an insecure writer. “Am I merely a story, fashioned out of words?” he asks. He is much more. And his story, beyond his early years in the Lydda ghetto, will cross paths with that of the occupier—he will change his identity and pass as an Israeli Jew (“from the ghetto,” implying Warsaw) for a period of time, revealing his truth only for love. But that is, one would guess, primarily a tale for book two. In the meantime, as he is composing his autobiographical account, in wintery New York City, years after leaving the Middle East, he is writing to reframe a Palestinian identity that goes beyond simply making falafel and other authentic dishes. He is writing, he says, to forget. Perhaps he also is preparing to make peace with the past, but if so, that too awaits the second volume.

Children of the Ghetto I: My Name is Adam by Elias Khoury is translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies and published by Archipelago Books. Children of the Ghetto II: Star of the Sea will be released in November 2024.

Each person has their own star: The Fiancée Rode in on a Donkey by Vénus Khoury-Ghata

Deep in the desert, excitement is building. Among the Qurayza, a Jewish nomadic tribe, young girls are being readied for the arrival of a special visitor. An important rabbi is coming to select a bride for the great Algerian military and religious leader Emir Abdelkader. He has wives already, of course, but another, a Jewish girl, is to be offered to secure protection for her people.  For the girls, scrubbed and polished and hennaed, to be chosen would mean a chance to escape a prison of sand for a better life. Or so everyone believes.

Just one look around is enough for the rabbi to find the chosen one. He picks Yudah for her name, a contraction of Yahuda, and for her eyes which she lowers when he looks at her. Every woman is beautiful to the rabbi as long as she isn’t one-armed or one-eyed.

Each one of Khoury-Ghata’s spare novellas is different, exploring a different time and place, and The Fiancée Rode in on a Donkey is no exception. Set in the mid-1800s, this tale follows Yudah, the promised fiancée, from her desert home to the streets of Paris in a year rocked by revolution. Although, if time frames are correct, her journey lasts little more than ten or twelve months at the most, it will test the courage and resolve of this young heroine.

When Yudah arrives on the back of the rabbi’s weary old donkey, she is dismayed to discover that Abdelkader’s entourage is not housed in town, but in an encampment nearby. She realizes that she has traded one kind of tent life for another, but the welcome she might have anticipated is not forthcoming. The Emir is away on campaign, engaged in a battle that he will not win, and no one seems to know what to make of this scrawny teenager who claims she is his bride-to-be, destined for his bed. An outsider trying to find a small corner in the camp or wandering around town alone, she begins to mourn the desert community she has left and the boy, her cousin, to whom she had given her heart. It is but the first of a series of displacements to follow.

Before Yudah has a chance to meet the man she has been led to believe would become her husband, Abdelkader is forced to surrender and exiled to France with his family. Yudah, with no formal connection to him, is taken to Île Sainte-Marguerite with the great man’s followers—hundreds of men, women and children, few of whom will survive the winter on the island. But here, too, the young daughter of the desert is still an outcast. She does find refuge in a convent where she is, for a time, renamed Judith, until her stubborn nature and—at least to the eyes and ears of the nuns—cultural coarseness disrupts the strict order of religious life. She is forced to move on several more times until she eventually finds herself in Paris in the spring of 1848.

Alone and forced to repeatedly adapt to circumstances and customs that her fifteen years of life have in now way prepared her for, Yudah clings to the superstitions of her tribe:

The Qurayzas say that the sound of a badly oiled drum can unleash a war, but who among all these people has ever heard of the Qurayzas? Do they know that the inhabitants of the desert see farther than life? That their gaze goes beyond the horizon that separates the living from the dead? That the parched camel drivers who dream of wells and rain drown in the sand as in the sea? That the palm tree at arm’s length is only a mirage and that what they think is a galloping horse coming to meet them is only the slow steps of the evil spirits crying between the dunes? Female spirits, they point out, the only ones authorized to accompany the lost at the time of their death.

Her conviction that a special destiny awaits her, born less out of any sense of superiority than out of a belief that the well-being and security of her people depend on it, keep her from losing all hope even when she falls into thinking that she is insignificant and could disappear from life without anyone ever noticing. Uneducated and illiterate, Yudah carries a traditional wisdom that belies her age, one that intersects with French society at such a distinctly foreign angle that it allows her to see and measure things differently. This otherworldly charm will lead her into the most unlikely situations, both fortunate and tragic.

What allows this historical, yet slightly magical, tale to work so well is the light touch with which it is told. As a poet, Khoury-Ghata is capable of creating memorable characters, and capturing settings and interactions with a devastating economy of words, whether she is working with well-known figures like Osip Mandelstam or Marina Tsvetaeva, or someone like this young Jewish girl from the Algerian desert. In tracing the fate, not only of Yudah but of the other young men and women she meets, this novella offers an unexpected view of a well-known period of French history, highlighting the challenges endured and the damage that can be done to ordinary people caught up circumstances they cannot control.

The Fiancée Rode in on a Donkey by Vénus Khoury-Ghata is translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan and published by Seagull Books.

A wanderer between two worlds: The Postman of Abruzzo by Vénus Khoury-Ghata

“Rifling through the papers of a dead man isn’t enough to bring him back to life.”

Ten years after her geneticist husband died following his return from a village in a mountainous part of southern Italy, Laure leaves her home in Paris in search of something—she’s not sure exactly what—that will help her understand why he kept returning to this isolated community of displaced Albanians again and again. As Luc travelled to collect samples from populations scattered across the globe, being left behind became such a constant condition of their marriage that Laure can’t quite accept that he is really gone for good. The only way to come to terms with this unsettled absence, she is certain, is to visit the one place he had returned to fifteen times and where, on his last trip, his “heart had broken down.” Armed with a folder of his final notes on the Albanians and her portable typewriter, she arrives in Malaterra in the region of Abruzzo, and rents a house.

This is the set-up of Lebanese-French writer Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s 2012 novella, The Postman of Abruzzo, the latest of her works to be released by Seagull Books in Teresa Lavender-Fagan’s English translation. But, if Laure embarks on her journey under the illusion that she will somehow be able to put names to the anonymous donors of blood, urine and saliva recorded in her husband’s files, as if some code rests in the notes she has yet to transcribe, she soon recognizes the foolishness of that idea. What she encounters instead is an eccentric collection of characters who hold fast to beliefs and traditions long since forgotten back in their homeland, preserved in Abruzzo like a fly in amber, and she discovers she is not the only one mourning an unresolved past.

The first and most essential villager Laure meets is Yussuf, the postman of the title. On her first day, he arrives on the doorstep of her cave-like temporary residence high on the exposed mountainside above the valley where the villagers are spending the hot summer months. He has come, he tells her, to feed a litter of kittens, and promises to return every day regardless of whether or not he has any mail to deliver. As one of the only people in town who can read, having learned in prison, he knows everyone’s secrets and has an opinion on everything, sharing his knowledge and uncanny insights with the newcomer as he see fit. Yet, although he can read, the postman has no time for writing:

Putting words on top of words doesn’t construct a house, doesn’t make a child or a tree grow, doesn’t plough a field or prevent locusts from devouring an entire crop of corn. The pages one writes on a table don’t change the shape of the table but make the brain of the one writing explode. Too many word’s crack one’s skull and shorten one’s life.

With his mailbag and his tendency to hold fast to the letters that he feels are too painful to deliver or too important to release to the vagaries of the postal system, Yussuf plays a critical role linking the residents of Malaterra to one another, and Laure, as an outsider, to the community where she hopes the answers to the questions Luc has bequeathed her lie.

The only person in the village who professes to have a true respect for words is the Kosovar, the sole Muslim in a community of Catholics, who has, over the years, bitterly retreated into the confines of his dusty bookshop. In Laure he hopes he has found a kindred spirit, but his desperation and general state of deterioration unnerve her. The other residents are of a much earthier stock, including Mourad, the lusty baker, who proposes marriage despite the fact that he already has a wife and household full of children and the local women who, guided by superstitions, eye the skinny, short-skirted foreigner with distrust. Most are widows, by fact or fate, as economics have driven husbands and sons away to seek work in cities from which they rarely return. And they all seem to remember a Luc very different from the one his wife thought she knew. But the one person who interests and terrifies Laure most is Helena, the woman who cared for Luc in his illness and sent his washed and ironed shirts to Paris after his evacuation to a hospital in Rome. Helena has been waiting thirty years, rusty rifle at hand, to avenge the deflowering and subsequent death of her daughter—by hanging from a fig tree with her mother’s assistance.

Even the mountains mourned the girl, only the mother’s eyes were dry. She cried inside. Condolences poured in from every direction: plastic buckets of every colour, aluminum pans, wicker baskets, even a nightingale in a cage, but nothing consoled her. The priest who refused to give her absolution because of suicide was immediately replaced with another priest. No people are more solidary than Albanians. It makes sense! The same blood flows in their veins . . .

This blood, O negative, not only binds this community and attracted the interest of the foreign medico, but nurtures a deep-seated tradition of blood tax and blood debt imported and preserved through generations of migrants. Laure’s agitation is heightened when Yussuf reveals that a letter sitting undelivered in his bag indicates that the “boy” Helena has been waiting for, known as the Australian because he was rushed off to an uncle in Sydney for his safety, is finally on his way back to Malaterra. His arrival will affect the entire village, Laure included.

The Postman of Abruzzo reads a little like a fable set in a place caught between the modern world and a past that is filled with a complicated network of ancient traditions and carefully maintained prejudices. Laure is also caught between two worlds, half-underground and half-aboveground as the Kosovar keenly observes. Khoury-Ghata’s prose, characteristically poetic, spare, and unsentimental, is perfectly suited for the telling. Sometimes it is simply breathtaking to experience the way she can conjure a vivid and moving image with just a few well-placed words. With this work she uses this gift for precision to craft a story of loyalty, love and loss that is both tender and gently absurd.

The Postman of Abruzzo by Vénus Khoury-Ghata is translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan and published by Seagull Books.

“You weren’t made for this life” Marina Tsvetaeva: To Die in Yelabuga by Vénus Khoury-Ghata

It begins as it ends. With a beam, a rope, a chair and a window looking out on a hill, a cypress tree and a potato field. With a heart turned to stone through so many trials.

In her stark, poetic elegy The Last Days of Mandelstam, Lebanese-French poet and writer, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, aimed to bear witness to the final days and hours of Osip Mandelstam’s life that had passed unrecorded in a transit camp near Vladivostok, alternating between the dying poet’s feverish thoughts and delusions and delicately sketched moments from his past. With Marina Tsvetaeva: To Die in Yelabuga, she again begins with the final hours of another great Russian poet whose work was supressed during her lifetime, but her approach here is more direct. Woman to woman, poet to poet, Khoury-Ghata wants to trace the long, troubled journey that led Tsvetaeva to take her own life in 1941 at the age of forty-eight:

Hunched over your huge 750-page journal for months, I try to assemble the scattered pieces of your life, understand the reasons for your infatuations and your disappointments, especially your frantic desire to connect with men, women (some loved with words, others with hands) before you ended up alone, destroyed, bitter, unrepentant, ready to begin again.

Addressing her subject directly, Khoury-Ghata paints a spare, unsentimental portrait of a complicated, gifted woman whose creative intensity and constant need to be loved not only attracted but suffocated those around her. It is an effort to understand her demons and her pain.

Born into privilege, the daughter of a friend of the tsar who founded the Moscow Fine Arts Museum, Marina Tsvetaeva was a prodigy, studying music and French as a child, and publishing her first collection of poetry at age seventeen. She was soon drawn into literary circles where, through critic Max Voloshin, she met Sergei Efron whom she would marry in early 1912. Later that year, she gave birth to her first child, Ariandna (called Alya) just before her twentieth birthday. Her fame as a poet grew over the following years with the publication of further collections. Then, with the October Revolution, her fortunes rapidly began to unravel.

You had to learn how to live humbly, become invisible, not attract attention, expect at any moment to be denounced, arrested, deported shot.

As her late father’s connections become a liability and her husband joins the counter-revolutionary White Army, Tsvetaeva is reduced to begging from friends and struggling to get by, now with two children to support. She finds creative expression through writing plays and physical expression with lovers, but she allows her youngest daughter Irina to die of starvation at an orphanage where she had taken her girls in the hope that they would be fed. Her death is one of the many ill-fated decisions and situations that will haunt her.

Khoury-Ghata follows Tsvetaeva’s escape from the USSR to Berlin in 1922 where she plans to meet up with her husband whom she has learned is alive and studying in Prague. She falls in love while waiting, as is her nature, an act that never seems immoral to her, simply an outlet for the many passions that course through her being. When she and Alya, finally reunited with Sergei, settle near Prague, a new lover, her husband’s friend Konstantin Rodzevich, occupies her day, while writing commands the nighttime hours:

In the evening after supper, only the scratching of your pen on paper can be heard. Your fierce writing coupled with the desire to destroy what you have just written. Alya and Sergei, powerless spectators of your self-destruction. They watch you racing to the abyss but do nothing to stop you. The involuntary tear that you believe you wiped from the corner of your eye dilutes a word in passing. No tenderness for yourself. The horror is behind you.

In 1925, her son Gregory (known as Mur), in Tsvetaeva’s imagination the product of three men—her husband, her lover, and her great, impossible love Boris Pasternak—is born. Later that year the family leaves for France where she will live for more than thirteen years before finally returning to the USSR in 1939. New loves, including an passionate correspondence with Rilke, follow along with important literary output, but, over the years, continued economic strife will drive the Efron family into increasingly desperate situations. When she is unable to find a market for her poetry, Tsvetaeva reluctantly turns her hand to prose. Sergei, and ultimately Alya, who is often treated little better than a servant by her mercurial mother, become more politically engaged. It is impossible to feel safe and settled. The poet, so highly lauded in her teens, so desired by countless friends and lovers, finds herself alone and unloved. Most painfully, her long time supporter, yet elusive love object, Pasternak, is now lost in a new life as father and husband and no longer has time for her letters:

Pasternak has taken back the only gift he ever gave you: exaltation.

You blame your despair on everything around you.

The mirror above the sink is responsible for your wrinkles.

Too narrow, the worktable is guilty of drying up your inspiration.

Too noisy, your neighbours prevent you from concentrating.

Volatile, dynamic and passionate, the woman who comes to light in these pages is hopelessly dependent on the praise of others. She knows that she is not well liked among her fellow ex-pats, she has no qualms about engaging in romantic activities outside her marriage but is shocked and unsettled when she learns Sergei is contemplating divorce. Both her children come to lose patience with her; over time others learn to either humour or avoid her. Yet as with similar human emotional whirlpools, the one she ends up hurting the most is herself.

Khoury-Ghata’s Marina Tsvetaeva is not a strictly chronological account. Although she traces the general course of the journey that leads to the chair, rope and attic window in Yelabuga, because she is addressing her subject intimately, like a respected correspondent, a friend even, time is porous. Thus, a circle of Tsvetaeva’s friends, lovers, fellow poets and their assorted, often tragic, fates are recurring ghosts, living and dead, that delight, distract and trouble her throughout her life right up to that key final moment that is always present in the interrogatory second person narrative. Pasternak, Mandelstam, Mayahovsky, Biely, Akhmatova and more. Fragments of poems, letters and diary entries offer brief insight into the heart and mind of a woman who would come to be known as one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, whose life sadly coincided with a dramatically turbulent time that was not made for her.

Marina Tsvetaeva: To Die in Yelabuga by Vénus Khoury-Ghata is translated from the French by Teresa Lavender-Fagan and published by Seagull Books.

Words are rocky tears: Alphabets of Sand by Vénus Khoury-Ghatta

Where do words come from?
from what rubbing of sounds are they born
on what flint do they light their wicks
what winds brought them into our mouths

Their past is the rustling of stifled silences
the trumpeting of molten elements
the grunting of stagnant waters

– from “Words”

My first encounter with Vénus Khoury-Ghata was with her novella, The Last Days of Mandelstam, a spare, poignant portrait of the Russian poet’s life and lonely death that I read several months ago. It left me keen to explore her poetry and prose further. I soon discovered that American poet and translator Marilyn Hacker has released translations of several collections of her poetry and one novella, so, uncertain where to begin, I opted for the evocatively titled Alphabets of Sand (2009) from UK publisher, Carcanet. A wise choice it turns out, because this collection draws on material from three of Hacker’s earlier US translations along with an insightful introduction.

If poets dwell in language, Khoury-Ghata exists in a world threaded with letters of alphabets scattered like sand in the wind or like stars cast against the blackness of the sky. Born in Beruit in 1937, into a French-speaking Maronite Christian family, the dual French and Arabic cultural and linguistic influences of her childhood animate her poetry and colour the world that she imagines—a place filled with magic and marred by misery. Although she has lived in Paris since 1972, much of her writing looks back to the country of her birth and its tragic history.

Alphabets of Sand gathers five poems or sequences and selections from a sixth. The title of this collection comes from the wonderful piece “Words” which plays with and celebrates language as a primal life form, born and nurtured in the soils of the continents of the earth, taking shape, searching for and finding tongues, mouths and speakers to breathe words into being. As such, language is a collaborative magic between nature and humankind:

Language at that time was a straight line reserved for birds
the letter ‘i’ was the cleft of a hummingbird
‘h’ a ladder with one rung necessary to replace a charred sun before nightfall
‘o’ a hole in the sole of the universe

Unlike the consonants with their rough garments
the vowels were naked
all the weaver’s art consisted of humouring them
in the evening they counted each other to make sure no one was missing
in the rocky countries men slept without dreaming

Khoury-Ghatta’s native Arabic and French speak to one another in the course of this sequence, their respective alphabets moving from left to right and right to left, but the Word she evokes, belongs to neither language but to all languages living and lost.

As translator Marilyn Hacker describes it: “Khoury-Ghatta’s work bridges the anti-lyrical surrealist tradition which has informed modern French poetry since Baudelaire, and the parabolic and communal narrative with its (we might say Homeric) repetitions of metaphors and semi-mythic tropes of poetry in Arabic.” She writes, as she herself puts it, “in Arabic through the French language.” The confluence of these traditions is especially evident in the poetry collected here. “The Darkened Ones,” for example, written during the 2006 war in Lebanon, adopts a communal voice of unfathomable depth—a chorus of women speaking to generations of the dead, displaced and disrupted—echoing the unanswered questions that accompany the sorrow and pain of senseless conflict.

An idiosyncratic personal mythology permeates the most powerful works here, a magical sense of place that pays tribute to a world where ghosts mingle with a shifting present. “The Seven Honeysuckle Sprigs of Wisdom” paints a portrait—by turns affectionate, coarse and funny—of the eccentric cast of characters who people a village where time is “in a hurry,” but the river “turns back toward its source.” The hairdresser, cemetery caretaker, beggar, shepherdess, prostitute, schoolmasters and others appear, alongside saints and spirits and a host of struggles and dreams.

However, it is the sequence of poems from “Early Childhood” that carry, for me, the most weight and shimmering energy. Central to these pieces, most of which are dedicated to individuals including the author’s sister, the writer May Ménassa, is an enigmatic mother figure:

I write Mother
and an old woman arises in the uncertainty of evening
slips into a wedding dress
stands on tiptoe on her windowsill
calls out to the hostile city
addresses the haughty tribe of streetlights
bares her chest to the clocks
shows them the precise site of her sorrow
disrobes gently for fear of creasing her wrinkles
and unsettling the air

My mother had her own way of undressing
as one would strip the medals from a disgraced general

The poems that comprise this sequence move from a familial to a wider universal sense of mother as teacher, keeper of wisdoms and memory. Language again features prominently, not simply as a alphabets deciphered in books, but as read in nature:

The books we browsed in came from the forest that watched us read
from the peeled bark’s shriek which continued under the pages’ skin
We read in the darkness of August
when the galaxy disposed of its excess stars
when, without  margins, night stretched itself out until night.

As presented, the lasting sensation that this collection leaves me with is one of the kindling of a connection with the roots of Khoury-Gatta’s poetic sensibility. Her love of language and her comfort with repeated metaphor—dead leaves, pebbles, wind, streetlights, stars, trees, alphabets—make sense within the context of her dual language, culturally rich upbringing. Again, I am left wanting to read more and know more. Now in her 80s, she has many honours and an extensive body of work to her name, most of which is yet to be translated into English. Nonetheless, I plan to explore more of what is out there in the new year.

Alphabets of Sand by Vénus Khoury-Ghatta is translated by Marilyn Hacker and published by Carcanet Press.

The living dead man: The Last Days of Mandelstam by Vénus Khoury-Ghata

The premise is very simple. It is December 1938. As the year draws to a close, Russian poet Osip Mandelstam lies on the very edge of death in a transit camp near Vladivostok. There he will die, far from his beloved Moscow, away from the friends who have either abandoned him or confronted their own tragic circumstances, and separated from his devoted wife Nadezhda. His body will be tossed into a mass grave. Yet, the final days of this man who stood by the power of the word and the primacy of poetry remain unrecorded, lost to time. This slender volume, The Last Days of Mandelstam, sets out to address this silence, to bear poetic witness.

Such a project is, by its nature, a delicate task. It calls for the right touch—the appropriate sense of drama—for it is probable that the waning conscious hours of a man as desperately diminished by typhoid fever as Mandelstam would have been occupied by memories, dreams, hallucinations and brief moments of awareness. At least that is the way that French-Lebanese poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata imagines them in this haunting novella, originally published in French in 2016 and now available in English, in a sensitive translation by Teresa Lavender Fagan.

Lying for months—how many?—on a wooden plank, his mattress, Mandelstam wonders if he is dead or still alive.

After the first month he stopped counting.

Less ill than he, his neighbours might let him know if he is still alive.

But typhus is decimating the camp.

Three out of four deportees are stricken.

The opening passages offer a clear, unsentimental portrait of a man who knows his end is near. Unable to speak, beyond hunger, he listens to his struggling heart. His conscious thoughts are vaguely aware of the present, but more often tangled in the past. His nightmares and hallucinations are dominated by the figure of Joseph Stalin who stalks, taunts, and berates him, echoing, in the process, some of the regrets and doubts that may have plagued the dying poet himself. In our dreams, the monsters we face reflect our own fears. Two lines from (the original version of) Mandelstam’s infamous satirical poem known as the “Stalin Epigram”—All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer / The murderer and the peasant slayer—form a kind of subconscious refrain that surfaces throughout the book.

The poet on his meagre deathbed serves as the fulcrum around which the narrative turns, reaching back into his earlier life and, on occasion looking ahead, years beyond his death. As expected, the story that emerges is a sombre one, a tale of exile, poverty and disgrace into which threads drawn from the lives of Mandelstam’s fellow poets and his fellow transit camp prisoners are woven. Carefully chosen vignettes, repeated images—worn-out coat, moth-eaten blanket, boots made from old luggage—together with the choice of present tense and a strong poetic sensibility combine to create a moving tribute to a man who held to poetry and his principles in the face of unspeakable cruelty.

As the narrative moves between the dying poet’s thoughts and delusions and moments from his past, Khoury-Ghata sketches scenes punctuated by strong images. The years Mandelstam and his wife spent in Voronezh after he was banned from Moscow in 1934, are especially poignant. There they share a noisy communal apartment with several families; to find creative space Mandelstam takes to the icy streets:

The sound of the poem composed in the dark the same as that of his shoes crunching in the snow. A suctioning sound, the cold and the words are sucking his energy.

He returns exhausted from his wanderings, and joins Nadezhda under their moth-eaten blanket, reciting the poem written in his head. Nadezhda collects the words like breadcrumbs from a feast, transcribes them, waits for daylight to distribute them among the trustworthy.

Poetry is, of course, the crime that sentences Mandelstam to his fate. Poetry is his weapon against Stalin. As such, fragments from his poems and from Nadezhda’s memoir are incorporated into the text. Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, and, as a later admirer, Paul Celan also make poetic contributions. Countless artists and intellectuals faced similar persecution under the regime, but this is a story about the power of the poem.

The Last Days of Mandelstam is, for its difficult material, a finely rendered work. Neither morbid nor maudlin, it holds to a tight emotional course as the narrative repeatedly laps at the shore of Mandelstam’s death—imagined, dreamed and finally realized—a quiet passing likely unnoticed for a time. The dramatic energy is sustained, the sparseness of the account gives the sorrow breathing room, and, in the end, Mandelstam’s troubled life is granted the dignity it deserves. A sad, but beautiful book. One that makes you want to return to his poetry, to allow him to continue to live for you again and again.

The Last Days of Mandelstam by Vénus Khoury-Ghata is translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan and published by Seagull Books.