Elias Khoury in Beirut Review

The Beirut Review: In a number of articles in the Mulhaq, you have asked whether the Lebanese war is over. In your view is it over?

Elias Khoury: Technically it is over. We always speak about Lebanon as a myth, however, and we have never sought to understand the country's structure. Just Before the civil war in 1975, I was working on a thesis in sociology; the subject was the war of 1860. I discovered that the whole history of modern Lebanon was a history of civil war. The period between 1840 and 1860 was a twenty-year civil war. Then, at the beginning of this century, in the twenties, there was a small civil war in the South and the Biqa`. Then you had the 1958 civil war and the 1975 civil war. In one hundred years we practically went through four civil wars. So to say that the war which began in 1975 has ended, is not correct. The Lebanese war ended because, in a sense, it died. It reached a point where it became totally meaningless. And as during Lebanon's other civil wars, there was an international decision to stop it. In 1860, it was the European powers who stopped it; in 1958 it was Mr. [Robert} Murphy; and in 1989 another Mr. Murphy [Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy] tried, but failed, so the Taif Agreement was accepted; it is very similar to what happened in 1860.

BR: Yet were all Lebanon's civil wars the same in your opinion? If not, what differentiated them?

EK: I feel that the 1975 civil war differed from the other civil wars. If you want to find out anything in Lebanese literature about 1860 you find practically nothing. Either documents on the conflict exist but are not available, or they do not exist at all. Yet the 1975 war was written about while it was still going on. So I think this is the first time in our modern history where we concede what happened. I think the end of the 1975 civil war could, theoretically, be a point of beginning for a new history in which we will not be destined to engage in civil wars; yet this depends on many factors which, unfortunately, are not taking place. I don't think that the way the civil war ended, and the existence of a new oligarchy - a mixture of rentier money and old militiamen - will lead to the building of a real state.

BR: And yet there appeared to be much idealism at the outbreak of the civil war, precisely with the intention of building a new state. Did your generation, in particular those like you on the left who wanted to change Lebanese society, fail to achieve your objectives?

EK: I was not against the war at the beginning. We felt in 1975 that the war was inevitable. We voluntarily fought in this war. For people like me on the left, there was a belief that the coalition between the Lebanese and the Palestinians would give something new to the Arab world. We were trying to build a new type of democratic and secular regime in a part of the world which had never experienced such a regime. It didn't work. We failed, and people like me were defeated. I think in all wars everybody is defeated. In Lebanon both we on the left and they on the right were defeated. [In the predominantly Christian areas], there was a kind of fascist revolution led by Bashir Gemayel and his associates. They were idealistic too, maybe even more than we were. But we were idealistic and they were stupid. They formed an alliance with the Israelis, which was total stupidity. On both sides there was idealism about the future of Lebanon, and both sides were defeated.

BR: Can anything be salvaged from this defeat? For example, do you believe that a new national culture is required for rebuilding Lebanon? If so, what are its elements?

EK: The word 'national' is problematic in Arabic. In Arabic we differentiate between Wataniyya, which, although it means 'nationalism,' is closer to patriotism, and qawmiyya, which has a wider connotation, as in qawmiyya 'arabiyya, or Arab nationalism. Lebanon, as a state, was not accepted by half of its population. Half of its population rejected it because they wanted Arab nationalism, and the other half accepted it, yet saw it as a prolongation of a mythical Lebanon that existed 6,000 years ago. Both Christians and Muslims didn't want this country as it was. This is why it was always collapsing. The Lebanese now understand that this is a country which can be built and can be accepted, based on acceptance of Lebanon as an Arab country. To be Arab has many meanings. There is nothing mythical about Arab nationalism or Arab unity. Being Arab means that the destiny of this country is related to the destiny of the region. How the destiny of this region will look is a big question mark because it is mainly dependent on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

When we speak of a national culture it has anti-democratic or dictatorial connotations. In the last 30-40 years, we have experienced dictatorship and an absence of democracy throughout the Arab world and all over the Third World. I think that national unity must be based on democracy and difference. Democracy means accepting a certain national consensus, yet also being allowed to differ. The meaning of Lebanon and its importance in the Arab world, was that it was the only place in which democracy existed. Lebanese democracy, before the civil war, was based on a kind of equilibrium between different communities and forces. They all had to accept democracy. Now democracy must be built upon a real belief that Lebanon can only be governed through democratic means. In this sense, the meaning of Lebanon is to give to Arab culture what it did after the civil war of 1860: in the wake of the 1860 disaster, what was called the Arab Awakening began in Beirut and Cairo, and maybe Lebanese intellectuals formulated the ideas of Arab nationalism and encouraged the separation of religion and state. The main role of Lebanon today is to be a place where all the democratic forces in the Arab world can congregate, debate, and plan the future of the Arab world. This is the real meaning of this country, if we want to give it any meaning.

As I said before, there are different ways of being Arab. Lebanon's new ruling class wants to make Lebanon part of the petro-dollar system and to convert it into a small Hong Kong for the Arab-Israeli peace. This is one option. We have another: to make Lebanon part of a search for democracy, identity, and change in the Arab world. Part of the responsibility for the destruction of Beirut - I say 'part because, in the end, we the Lebanon destroyed it - but part of the responsibility for the destruction of Beirut, maybe even the major part of it, was held by two groups: one was the Arab regimes which did not want to see Beirut become a forum for the Arab opposition; this is why we witnessed such hate directed against the city. The other was Israel, which also wanted to destroy Beirut because it was democratic, and because it was the only place to welcome the Palestinians, give them a refuge, and provide them with a base to conduct their struggle. Only Beirut could do this, not because it was better than any other Arab city, but because it was democratic. This is why the Arab regimes and Israel both had the same objective: to destroy the spirit of the city. It was a spirit which threatened both the Arab regimes and Israeli domination of the Arab world.

BR: Has anything changed today? Most Arab regimes remain anti-democratic and Israel continues to fight the Arabs primarily in Lebanon. Why should either side allow Lebanon to regain its place as the region's democratic alternative?

EK: The situation is very complicated. If they want to make a Hong Kong out of Lebanon, then they will have to accept the consequences of this. For example, there is currently a play on in Beirut called al-Ightisaab The Rape) written by a Syrian, Sa`dallah Wounous; the actors are Palestinian and the director is an Iraqi. Performances of the play were not officially allowed in any Arab country. The play condemns the Israelis and yet it could Not be shown in any Arab country. I think there are two reasons for this. First, because it deals with the Israeli police and torture, and in any Arab country, if you see this, you will make the association with what is going on in the Arab world. Second because the Arab regimes are oppressive, they use their opposition to Israel to justify not showing Israeli characters on stage. But if you go and see the play, you will not only see Israeli characters but Palestinian characters as well.

This is what I mean. If they want to make Lebanon a Hong Kong, then one of the conditions of a Hong Kong is to have freedom. You cannot only allow freedom for capital; you are obliged to permit other kinds of freedom as well. You can see that there is an internal contradiction in the whole set-up. the Saudis and Kuwaitis used to come to Lebanon in the summer and spend their money here. But if you open Lebanon to the Arabs again, not only will the emirs come, but so will those who were tortured by the emirs. As I said, the situation is very complicated, and those who want to transform Lebanon along these lines will not be able to control it, through political and intellectual action we will be able to defend democracy in this country.

BR: In this context, how do you evaluate the Hariri government's creation of a ministry of culture? Is it one step in the direction you are advocating, or is it, on the contrary, an effort to control cultural output and thus limit freedom?

EK: For someone like me it's a very frightening thing to have a ministry of culture. Not because a ministry of culture is bad in itself. The ministry of culture in France is very good. But all over the Arab world you have ministries of culture and what happened to culture under these ministries was very bad. Culture was totally dominated by the state, and when culture is dominated by the state it becomes a part of oppression. Culture can be only part of expression. What frightens me now is that, even though the minister, whoever he is, may be a good man who believes in democracy, he may not remain the minister of culture forever. We are waiting to see how this ministry will function. Apart from this problem of principle, there are many problems that a normal ministry of culture must deal with. If you look at the situation of culture in Lebanon it is unbelievable: for example, in terms of taxation, theaters are treated like cabarets. We don't have a national theater in Lebanon. In Britain and France theaters are subsidized by the government, otherwise they cannot work. Here we reopened the Beirut Theater and we are collecting money from private individuals so we can keep it alive. Writers have no rights, no rights at all in Lebanon. There is censorship of films and plays. Do you know who is responsible for censorship here? The ministry of the interior. Any policeman can come and censor Shakespeare. All these things must change if there is to be a good ministry of culture. I think it will have a lot of work to do to separate culture from the police, to protect the rights of the writers, and to forbid pirating. All this must be dealt with by the ministry of culture.

BR: Is censorship systematic in Lebanon today?

EK: Censorship of plays and films is done systematically and in a very silly way. Books, however, are not censored. Lebanon is the only Arab country where you can send a book to the printer's without passing through the censor. But things pass; you have to wait a little, you have to be nice, and, in the end, most things pass. So censorship is not very tough, in itself. The structure of censorship, however, since it is related to the ministry of interior, can become a hell at any moment. So, structurally speaking, it must be separated from the ministry of interior and placed under the authority of the ministry of culture. There, we can discuss the ideas behind censorship; but with cops you can't discuss ideas.

Writing and the Lebanese War

BR: How did you begin writing?

EK: I studied sociology before working in the socio-political journal Shu`un Falastiniyyeh. At university, I spent most of my time being a militant, yet I read a great deal of literature. Suddenly, through Shu`un Falastiniyyeh, I found myself writing articles of literary criticism. Then I decided in 1971 to write a novel and I published it. It was called `ala Ilaqaat al-Dai`ra (On the Relations of the Circle). It was either praised highly or attacked. Then I didn't write anything until 1976 during the civil war. I wanted to write about my experiences, but I didn't think of doing this in a novel: I wrote al-Jabal al-Saghir (The Little Mountain), but it was not conceived originally as a novel. Instead, I thought I had to write portraits of the war. I published them one by one and it so happened that everybody liked them very much so I decided to combine them into a book. After Little Mountain, I accepted the idea that I was a writer.

BR: As a writer and a former combatant, do you believe that there can be a dividing line between culture and politics in Lebanese society, particularly in postwar Lebanese society?

EK: The two cannot be divided today because we are in a situation which is highly politicized. There is a very French notion of the intellectual as someone who takes public positions, and who deals, in one way or another, with politics. In theory, we can separate literature from politics; but if you are in Lebanese or Palestinian society, this is impossible because everything is politicized and everything has to be re-thought; in rethinking society you cannot say "I am not political." You cannot do what Western intellectuals did when they dealt with the literature of Eastern Europe: while they would describe anti-communist works as 'literature,' they would dismiss pro-communist writings as 'political literature.' In fact, they both were political. In societies in transition you cannot separate what is political from what is literary.

BR: Is it your objective to turn political writing into an art?

EK: No not at all. I went through the war, and could not avoid writing about it. But literature is about rethinking everything, including politics; it is not mainly about politics.

BR: If literature is about "rethinking everything," as you suggest, then it must exist in a society where this is possible. What does it mean to be a writer in Lebanese society?

EK: Lebanese society allows for unity and diversity at the same time. This is part of what is interesting in Islamic civilization. Islamic civilization did not wipe out civilizations and cultures that came before it. It integrated part of them and left part of them to live inside the boundaries of Islam. You can find this in all modern Arabic cultures, whether Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian, or Palestinian. In Lebanese society this diversity expresses itself in one unity. The idea of unity is based on diversity and not based upon one hegemonic element which destroys other elements. I think the Lebanese novel is obliged to reflect this.

BR: You have written a number of novels on the Lebanese war. Can we say that there is such a thing as a Lebanese war novel, and, if so, what distinguishes it from novels of war in other countries?

EK: I don't think there is a Lebanese war novel. Civil wars do not lead to big literature. Forget it. War is a human experience. If you take Shologkov's And Quiet Flows the Don, the importance of the novel is not that it gives you information about the Russian civil war but that it gives you information about the human situation. In Lebanon, the interesting thing about the literature of the Lebanese civil war is that it might present a new beginning for Lebanese literature, because Lebanese literature has traditionally been mainly poetic. The novel is a relatively new literary genre. It permits societies or groups to think about themselves. If, in a society, you don't have novels then you don't have a mirror. Before the civil war, novels were written in Lebanon, but they were out of the ordinary, very intellectual, very separated from our historical experience. Exceptions can be cited Tewfiq Yusuf Awwad, a small number of writings by Maroun Abboud, one or two short stories by Fouad Kan`an, and that's it. The war led to a new wave of novels and a new way of thinking about Lebanese society. We will probably have to wait more than ten years to really be able to evaluate this civil war literature. The specificity of these novels is that they provide a social testimony of what went on in Lebanon. Yet this is not necessarily good literature. Good literature is that which uses this experience to deal with man and his problems everywhere and anywhere.

I can speak about my literature, for example. My second book, al-Wujuh al`Bayda`, was received as literature, not merely as a testimony to the Lebanese war. I don't think my literature could be written except in Lebanon. Here we can examine the relationship between the real and the unreal, because we are in a way in a real country and an unreal country. Lebanon is a very special case. The war opened literary language to the spoken language. This is the big evolution that Arab literature must go through. the Arab nation is the only place in the world where language has not changed for 1,500 years. All other languages have changed except ours, because our language is derived from the Quran and related to the sacred. Yet as a result of this, we also went through centuries of quietude. For someone like me who experienced the civil war, it was very important to write how people actually lived and spoke. There is nothing like this in modern Lebanese literature. The important thing this war taught us is that, to express reality, we have to change our language. I don't mean that we have to abandon classical Arabic. I mean we have to introduce the syntax of colloquial Arabic into the syntax of classical Arabic.

Something which differentiates the Lebanese novel from other novels, for example those of Latin America, is that in Latin American novels, authors combined past elements of Hispanic and Indian culture, united them with modern culture, and created what we call 'magical realism.' In the Lebanese experience, we discovered that what is unreal, the fantastic, is not in the past, but is part of the present. The fantastic is here. Since the fantastic is here, we must find a way of discovering it through a realistic way of writing. Literature, in our situation, must put together two elements: seeing and inventing; it must tell the truth and lie; it must combine the real and the fantastic at the same level and at the same moment. This is the line of my research in literature.

BR: Now that the Lebanese war is over, do you think that many writers no longer have the benefit of major events to inspire them?

EK: I can speak for myself. The experience of the civil war was a very important one. The civil war was a big school. All wars are schools for the spirit and for the mind. All Lebanese were part of the civil war. It taught us a great deal about our society, our history, our behavior, and it taught us about human behavior. when I travelled to Europe during the civil war, I was often asked, "What is this chaotic war and why don't you stop it?" I tried to explain that when war begins it becomes a huge machine. Nobody understood me; that is until last year when I was in Poitiers. There, I discussed what was the human condition, and that the Lebanese war was not simply the result of the stupidity of the Lebanese. When a country is surrounded by small superpowers and there is an attack on it, then it can go through a very long period of disintegration which nobody can stop.

On a literary level also, the war was a very important school for me. During war everything is timeless: you live the present, the past, and future in the same second; you live and die in the same second; you are everywhere and nowhere in the same second. This is very special. There is no time, and yet time is a big teacher of everything. It teaches us how to be modest as writers. When you are writing death you must be very modest. Time teaches you to be very careful and, so, it teaches you to be more and more profound. If you read my works you will see how they developed to tackle more and more important issues. In this sense I cannot separate my literary development from the history of the civil war. In the past in Lebanon, the writing of novels was marginal, unlike in Egypt, for example. Nowadays we find that Lebanese are writing novels, and are trying, through them, to express their real lives. The main lesson from the civil war is that literature is an expression of one's own life. We lost many friends, our youth, and many other things; but we didn't lose a subject.

BR: A number of well-known Lebanese writers prefer to write in French, and to a lesser extent, in English. For someone who writes in Arabic do you have problems with this? Do you feel that the Lebanese reality can be depicted only in Arabic?

EK: Any experience can be reflected in any language. But I think the Francophone phenomenon in Lebanon is finished. Today, we still have people writing in French or in English but they are very marginal. If you take the mainstream in Lebanese literature, it is all in Arabic. There is no longer the colonial influence to sustain it. Lebanon as a producer of Francophone culture is no more.

BR: In the Mulhaq you deal with a variety of cultural, political, and social topics. Is there an editorial policy you follow in your choice of subject matter?

EK: We have three main objectives at the Mulhaq: First to publish new and good literature from Lebanon and the Arab world. Second, to deal with Lebanese social problems in a new way. For example we have had articles on prisons, asylums, prostitution, etc., and we have tried to deal with them in a critical way. Third, to try to deal with popular culture in a critical way, and to analyze it, criticize it, and re-understand it. The principle behind the Mulhaq is to put forward a new cultural policy which deals with all the aspects of our social life after the war, and which tries to analyze and understand. The Mulhaq is probably the only publication to have a policy of opposition in a well studied way, and which pursues a policy of re-introducing literary writing to daily life.

BR: But such a policy is undermined by the dramatic expansion in Lebanon, since the end of the war, of a mass media culture. More important, the values of this culture, which tend to be international in their appeal - wealth, status, power, etc. - are accepted uncritically, with no sense of how it affects society at large. For someone like yourself who is pushing for a "critical" examination of cultural and social issues, how do you assess the impact of this mass media culture on Lebanese society?

EK: The first people who began this were the Lebanese Forces (LF) with the LBC (Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation) television station. The new generation of the war was very successful in this venture, in the same way that the LF as a political force was not. There is something new in the world: we are shifting towards the 'Civilization of the picture.' Take the example of the Gulf War; it was a television war. This is very serious. There is a new alliance which is governing the world: at the beginning of capitalism it was an alliance of capitalism and militarism; now it is an alliance of mass media and militarism. We have to fight this because it is totally undemocratic.

Going back to what I mentioned early on, what is taking place in Lebanon today can be placed in the context of Lebanon's role as a mirror for the Arab world. What is not done in the Arab world is done here as an experiment to find out how it could be done in the Arab world. What frightens me about this 'civilization of the picture' is that, like a great deal of technology in the Third World, it is leading to underdevelopment. In America, a boy will go to school, but because he watches television he knows how to write or read. Here, instead, the cassette has replaced writing. Television is a kind of magic. In the Third World, this 'civilization of the picture' is not part of a natural development of knowledge which will end in a comprehension of what is being viewed. Rather, it is part of an oppressive, imported knowledge which is destroying social knowledge. Once, when I was teaching a novel by Naguib Mahfouz at University, I realized that students thought that the novel ended differently than it actually did. Then I discovered that this novel had been made into a film and that it was available on video. Instead of reading the book, the students watched the film, which ended differently, and that is why all the papers they gave me were wrong.

The problem is how to deal with this mass media culture; how to have access to it in a way that it can serve knowledge. In the Third World, it is used as part of the hegemonic machine of the state to destroy the political will of the people. You have the same picture of the same man, and you see it twenty-five times a minute. During the civil war when the militias had their own television stations, it was the same thing. You opened state television and you had Amin Gemayel; on the LBC you had Samir Ja`ja'; you turned to al-Mashriq and you had Nabih Birri. It was very Arab, very classical. Now it's becoming much more complicated. Huge amounts of money -which nobody has except the people who became very rich during the civil war, the nouveaux riches and those with petrodollar money are being spent to buy up all the television stations. I think there must be a real policy of opposition to find ways, not of stopping this media culture, but of interfering in it to allow a little margin for knowledge, to prevent it from being used solely in the service of magic.

BR: What are the effects of the mass media culture on Lebanese youth, particularly at a time when they are having trouble defining a national identity?

EK: It is not only the young Lebanese who are affected by this. If you go to North Africa you can watch all the television stations of Europe also. This is part of the New World Order, which is based upon a combination of pictures and militarism. This is how America is governing the whole world. We cannot avoid it. Since America is governing the whole world it is governing us also. I'm not afraid of the problem of identity. For example, the Mexican soap operas which are so popular in Lebanon are also very popular in Russia. I think the contradiction of such programs is that they don't have a real spirit of their own, they are only based upon the values of money and being rich. Yet people who see them are not rich. There is an interior contradiction in this dominant ideology. It does not have any spirit. This is why we are going through fundamentalism, in Lebanon, Egypt, Algeria, and in all the Arab world. You have this 'television' ideology and you have fundamentalism which are two sides of the same coin. People want something more spiritual. By spiritual I don't mean more religious but something to deal with the spirit and the intellect. I think this vacuum we are feeling now in Lebanon and the Arab world is part of the defeat of 1967. The Arab nationalist movement was destroyed in 1967, and nothing had replaced it. The Palestinian movement was the last reflection of the Arab nationalist movement. At the beginning it was not only Palestinian, but pan-Arab as well. Now it is only Palestinian. There is a vacuum now everywhere in the Arab world and this vacuum is replaced either by this 'television' ideology or by fundamentalism. I think that these contradictions will lead to something new. I hope so.

BR: Does your work as editor leave you much time for writing fiction?

EK: I am very disciplined in the way I manage my time. I get up very early in the morning and write until eleven o'clock. Even if I don't write anything I just sit and think of my subject. Then afterwards I come work at the Mulhaq.

BR: Has the computer affected your way of writing?

EK: I write by hand; I cannot write any other way. I'm very archaic. I am trying to learn to use a computer, but I am very classical in my writing habits. For example, I have to write on the same kind of paper. It's very ritualistic, very stupid.