Elias Khoury\u2019s As Though She Were Sleeping<\/i> (Archipelago, 2012) is a love story, a family tragedy, and a journey through Levantine cultural history. Considering the radical stance of Khoury\u2019s other works – notably, Gate of the Sun<\/i>, the first \u201cmagnum opus\u201d of the Palestinian people – this novel is a more conservative project. The year is 1946. Milia, an apolitical Beiruti dreamer, leads a \u201cdouble life\u201d: by inhabiting her dreams as fully as her waking life, she can speak with the dead and prophesy the future. Mansour, her wayward Palestinian husband, flees the harsh reality of his country by burying himself in sensual pleasures: ancient poetry, Milia\u2019s beauty, and Levantine cuisine. As political turmoil in the region escalates, Milia finds herself increasingly trapped by impending catastrophe and fears for her newly-conceived child. To cope, she turns to the dream world for insight, trekking backward and forward in time to converse with deceased family members and saints. <\/p>\n
As Khoury explores Milia\u2019s life and dreams, he points to the many paradoxes of living in the \u201choly land.\u201d After all, this is the same soil where Cain murdered Abel. Its inhabitants inherit not just a rich cultural tradition, but also a dark and complicated legacy of madness. Mansour discovers that \u201c. . . he had begun to loathe this land in which he lived. Can anyone truly live in a country saturated with legends and miracles and prophets? This is a country that drives anyone who lives here insane, he would think\u201d (241). And Milia becomes increasingly obsessed with the fantastic tradition of fathers killing sons. Abraham planned to slaughter Isaac; God sacrificed Jesus; Milia\u2019s grandfather Salim nearly murdered his only son with a thrown rock. Will Milia\u2019s son be next? <\/p>\n
Khoury definitely sounds notes of sincere frustration, bitterness, and disenchantment in this novel. However, that doesn\u2019t stop him from luxuriating in the depictions of the region\u2019s poetry, dress, and cookery. He describes kibbeh arnabiyyeh<\/i>, a Levantine specialty, in rich detail: \u201cOne needed serious training to appreciate [the dish] fully. Tahini was cooked with seven different citrus fruits, onions were cut to resemble wings, the chick peas all but melted in the tahini mixture with its swirling colors from pale to brown. . . \u201c (118). This tonal ambiguity allows readers to experience at the linguistic level the same mental dilemma that Mansour, Milia, and many Levant-dwellers experience every day. Theirs is a land steeped in sanctity, but also in violence; a region consecrated by divine power, but defiled by human madness; in short, a land both loved and feared.<\/p>\n
Before long, this same madness invades Mansour and Milia\u2019s once-happy marriage. (Toward the beginning, it\u2019s clear that Khoury is a true romantic: \u201cBut look at me – I love you without knowing you. I feel you, who you are, from inside, and that\u2019s enough,\u201d (24) Mansour waxes, wooing Milia.) But when his brother Amin is murdered in a border skirmish, Mansour insists on returning to Jaffa to take over the family business. Milia intuitively objects, sensing her child will be born into a maelstrom of bloodshed: \u201cMilia\u2019s nights now filled with oranges that looked like bombs,\u201d Khoury tells us. \u201c- the color red everywhere, covering faces and objects\u201d (223).<\/p>\n
Ostensibly apolitical, Milia doesn\u2019t have the power of rational logic on her side. \u201cTayyib, tayyib<\/i>,\u201d Mansour chides, dismissing dreams as fickle excuses that give her \u201cthe freedom to interpret matters however she liked\u201d (80). True, Milia lives her life \u201cas though she were sleeping,\u201d but isn\u2019t it the prerogative of the dreamer to interpret the dream? And Milia undeniably discerns the truth through her visions, correctly predicting her Aunt Salma\u2019s death and her ex-lover Najib\u2019s infidelity. <\/p>\n
Throughout the book Khoury treats narratives with extreme suspicion. By sympathizing with dreamers like Milia, he cautions against dominant, rational interpretations of reality. This becomes especially clear when Khoury re-narrates sections of the Bible, provocatively throwing its authoritative status into question. At one point Khoury even goes so far as to implicate a comparison between Milia and Christ:<\/p>\n
\n\u201c[Milia] wanted to say, None of this has anything to do with me. . . Lord, how different people become mixed inside me. I don\u2019t know who I am anymore.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n\tHe was like that, too, said Tanyous the monk. As he went to the cross he did not feel that he was himself. He felt everyone becoming a part of him. He tried to keep his memories apart but he saw everything together. He became mother and father, the Sitt and the Sayyid, Lady and Lord and lamb. Because he was everything he could say nothing. If he could have talked, what would he have said? And if he did have things to say, who would have understood him? And if he found someone who did understand, who would believe?\u201d (305).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Though far-fetched, the comparison is moving: what if prophets really did live this way, in a perpetual state of self-doubt that Biblical authors conveniently edited out? Milia certainly has much in common with the version of Jesus that Khoury imagines: like him, she frequently feels that she \u201ccan say nothing,\u201d struggling to translate her dreams into language. To her, words are like \u201cwraps that hid things. . . As if the bodies of the words veiled the meanings\u201d (111). Through Milia\u2019s struggle, Khoury implicates an ironic, frustrating linguistic paradox. Though words possess great potential to express beauty and meaning, they can also be used equally well to lie, inhibiting the truth instead of freeing it. In Milia\u2019s experience, language is cloying, artificial, and useless. She knows calamity is coming, but what can she do? Putting her dreams into words seems to trap them and obscure their true meaning. And if she could tell about them, who would believe her? <\/p>\n
In a nightmare come true, the book closes with a cathartic extended dream-sequence. Milia graphically envisions a dark future ahead: \u201c. . . the smell of blood. Blood in the streets. Mansour stands before his workshop, which lies in ruins, the machinery soaked in blood and wet with severed limbs\u201d (366). This is just one example of the hundreds of eerie dream-spectacles crowding the novel\u2019s pages. Clearly, something<\/i> is haunting this book – whether it\u2019s the imminent 1948 Nakba, the general tragedy of the Levant, or the death of smaller stories in the face of predominating interpretations. <\/p>\n
Fascinating, chimerical, and complex, Khoury\u2019s As Though She Were Sleeping<\/i> is a hymn to the Levant and its war-ravaged people. By re-envisioning Biblical events and testifying to the truth of dreams, Khoury questions the power of authoritative, \u2018rational\u2019 versions of events. His is an ode not just to Mansour and Milia, but to all people whose lives have been forgotten, and to all the small stories obliterated from history by larger, ruling narratives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Elias Khoury\u2019s As Though She Were Sleeping (Archipelago, 2012) is a love story, a family tragedy, and a journey through Levantine cultural history. Considering the radical stance of Khoury\u2019s other works – notably, Gate of the Sun, the first \u201cmagnum opus\u201d of the Palestinian people – this novel is a more conservative project. The year […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[336,2176,2526,48246,47426],"class_list":["post-291416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-arabic-literature","tag-archipelago-books","tag-elias-khoury","tag-marilyn-booth","tag-quantum-sarah"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291416"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":340776,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291416\/revisions\/340776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}