Khaled Khalifa… Novel is hard work
Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa has died. I know him from stories, his written stories, which are truly distinctive in the Syrian narrative, and the stories of lovers that have not changed, alive or dead, and nothing more than being told in the past tense with real “sorrow” and deep sadness. I imagined that Khaled lived his last years in Egypt from the many pictures of him in Cairo, in its cafés, and with its intellectuals. Circumstances prevented, more than once, a meeting, but the impact of his novels and the stories of his fans about him was sufficient.
I do not read an Arabic novel, now, except after closely following what is written about it from those whose pens I trust, because there is very much what is written as a novel, while the novel with an Alif and Lam definition is much less. There are many people who are described as a novelist, but very, very few who deserve the title of “novelist.” This is how Khaled Khalifa was. The novel is the poetry of this time, and its most expressive and most difficult art. The novelist needs everything… elegant language, enjoyable narrative and descriptive abilities, diverse knowledge of reality and history, and an accurate and careful reading of those who came before him, Arab and international, and the responsibility of the Arab novelist increases, more than… Other than that, in addition to all of that, if he wants to be a true novelist, he needs “acrobatic” abilities to evade the censor, or pay high prices in exchange for preoccupation with his real issues, even if they are not religious or political, as the artistic issue alone will not pass without Huge losses and costs.
The beginning of knowledge was with the novel “Praise of Hatred.” To this day, I have not read what preceded it, “The Deception Keeper” and “The Qurbat Notebooks.” Many wrote about the novel in which a Syrian novelist recalled the battle of Hafez al-Assad’s regime with the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama. The “topic” alone was tempting, and this is a trap into which many readers and creators fall. Equally, the subject dominates its treatment, the path over the method, so the novel becomes a political publication rather than a creative work. However, Khaled was where the “novelist” was supposed to be, and it was the novel/mark that reached the short list for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (Booker). In 2008, it deserved to win, and its owner expressed, with rare nobility, his happiness at the victory of the novel by one of the masters of the Arabic novel, Bahaa Taher. But “Praise of Hatred” remained a reward, in itself, for the reader, and an incentive to follow his few works, like his age, and the wonderful ones like his personality and biography.
The obsession with tyranny has not left Khaled Khalifa, like any “true intellectual” living in our afflicted country in this bitter era. In his novel “No Knives in the Kitchens of This City,” Khaled Khalifa re-walks over the mines of political tyranny and its effects on the individual and society, and takes us to the lettuce fields in Aleppo, telling their story and legends, through the story of an Aleppo family, whose father abandoned it with an American woman thirty years older than him. The family faces a bitter life full of loss, migration, and personal defeats, before returning again to Aleppo, the center of the story, in place and time. It is the novel that Khaled published in Egypt, for which he won the Naguib Mahfouz Prize for the Novel, and with it a distinguished position among the Egyptian reader.
As for “Death is Hard Work” (what a title), it is the novel of our generation, the generation of the Arab Spring, with the symbolism that the Syrian revolution represents in terms of its more condensed and condensed symbolism of its pain and defeats. The novel does not talk about the revolution itself, but rather about its victims… the cruelty of the experience, its bitterness, the story of a family trying to survive, whether through escape or death, which in turn turned into a way of salvation, but the authorities of the tyrannical, political and religious, refuse to grant our family a normal death. And naturally. The father dies, the authorities arrest his body, and refuse to let it pass through the security checkpoint, because its owner is wanted by intelligence services, and his death does not mean his survival, and the events take place amid the ruins of war. In his latest novel, the epic “No One Blessed Them,” Khaled returns to the roots of the Arab tragedy, which does not leave him, artistically and humanly, recalling the end of the Ottoman era, in a period extending from the nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century, not to address it, but to approach our reality. With it.
A thousand mercy and light upon Khaled, the Arabic novel.
