Reality and its multiple truths are mirrored in “Bab Al-Shams” (Gate of the Sun) and its weaving of storytelling, translation and film adaption, argued the artists involved as they poetically reflected on the current state of affairs.
On Monday evening, the American University of Cairo students and professors squeezed into the Oriental Hall at the Tahrir campus to listen to a discussion given by Elias Khoury, Humphrey Davies, and Yousry Nasrallah, the novelist, translator, and filmmaker, of “Bab Al-Shams” (Gate of the Sun).
Originally published in 1998, “Gate of the Sun” is a sprawling epic recounting the stories of Palestinians forced to flee their land, moving between and through the history prior to 1948 and the developments in the 1980s. Within webs of digressions and tangents, the stories are told by Khalil, a doctor, to his dying friend Yunes. Inverting the narrative of the 1001 Nights, Khalil hopes the stories may keep Yunes alive, and the central story becomes Yunes’ love story with his wife and their secret meetings in a cave, called the Gate of the Sun.
Introducing the three widely acclaimed figures in the ornate room, AUC professor Samia Mehrez stumbled through each man’s endless stream of accomplishments before mentioning the coincidental timing of this talk with Palestine’s bid at the United Nations.
Khoury was first to speak, stating that though none of the men sitting on the dais were themselves Palestinian, he believes that “we can choose where to identify with.” As a young man, he explained, he left Beirut to fight with Fatah in Jordan and extensively interviewed Palestinians in Lebanese refugee camps. “Palestine,” he told the crowd, eliciting a rising murmur in the room, “is our feeling of justice.”
He argued that all storytelling is an interpretation, a translation, of real experiences. “When we speak at all, we are translating ourselves.”
He then described “Gate of the Sun” in a series of poetic contradictions: “It is my personal love story to the Palestinian people,” but then, “it is a story of individuals, not a people.”
These individuals, for Khoury, developed a shared narrative through suffering, and in the novel, he hoped to remove his own voice, leaving the voice of Palestinians in its place.
“The writer is only an agent of the human experience,” and the greatest authors disappear. At a reading in one of the refugee camps, a man accused Khoury of taking his uncle’s story. Khoury had never heard of the uncle, but felt that the man had put his own story into the novel, which was the greatest complement of all.
Explaining the parallels to the “Arabian Nights”, he described how that story represents a struggle between storytelling and official power. The story and history inform the Palestinian experience. “The story,” he declared, and hence the Palestinian people, “will prevail.”
Davies, who translated “Gate of the Sun” into English, kept his remarks short, and continued the poetic, wandering tone set in motion by Khoury. “Gate of the Sun” reflected real life, he said, in that it was a “universe of stories,” where in each is told “intermittently,” and is “maybe or maybe not true.”
“In a discourse about Palestine” that usually revolves around “absolute truths,” he said, “It is this questioning and self-doubt that paradoxically creates authority.”
Nasrallah brought in politics more explicitly. The Egyptian filmmaker explained that he felt compelled to translate the novel into a film because the “Arab regimes had used Palestine to repress us.” He recounted a conversation with a man working for the Egyptian Ministry of Culture who asked him, “Why make a film about people who sold their land?” Making the film was a concrete, political act of public education as much as it was a creative project.
Khoury read the final pages of the novel in Arabic. Davies followed with the same portion in English. Nasrallah showed the final scene of the film.
Khalil, probably in a dream, is seduced by a woman he describes as “out of a photograph” while Yunes dies in the hospital. The audience sat spellbound as they witnessed this mystifying but tragic set of moments in its original form and then two translations. The power of all three men’s work is how they suggest allegory and symbolism, while allowing the audience to interpret the meaning.
But the moment that really seemed to move the audience came as Khoury reflected on the Nakba, the catastrophe of Palestinians’ original exile. “1948 is not the real date of the Nakba,” he told us, “The Nakba is not a past. The Nakba is taking place now in the Arab world.” He paused, and then married poetry to politics in a way that had been suggested all evening. “It is an unfinished book. I feel like I have to write it again.” The crowd murmured approval.
