“Gate of the Sun” is a Palestinian odyssey, the Palestinian narrative as told by refugees. 

Between heroism and martyrdom, hope and despair, there is a picture of the Virgin Mary lying under the pillow, two pairs of identical pyjamas, a Japanese car and the villages of Ain al Zeitoun, Deir al Assad, Shahab and al Birwa. History is told by their keepers and their inhabitants, by the child who grew up without his father and the father who dared to see his family on the other side of the border. History is told by people like Nahilah, Younes, Umm Hassan or Doctor Khalil through their experiences, their emotions and their choices. Nevertheless, history is written differently: it is a commonplace that it is narrated by the strong and not the weak, by the victors and not the losers, by the relevant and not the irrelevant; and yet are these written “symbols and signs, cold and bereft of life” that perpetually abide (Khoury 1998: 207). Consequently, history is doomed to ossify into a single version, one of friends and enemies, victors and losers; a history that is displayed as a mirror, expecting everyone to concur with what it tells. 

In this narrative, a single line dictates whether you are in or out of history, whether you deserve to be remembered or not. “[History] drags you to two contradictory places: where you’re everything and where you’re nothing. You’re both a monster and an angel; you kill with the feeling that you’re the one dying, you seek gratification and fear it, and then you become your own god” (Khoury 1998: 150). History made Ali a monster. He, seeking to be on the victorious side of history by unmasking a spy contrary to his cause, having looked at himself in that cluster of mirrors that dragged him down as a victim, decided to beat Abu George to death, just for the sake of being part of a history that, otherwise, would have deemed him on eternal irrelevance. History extracted from his inner self, from people he did not know, people whose presence he did not dare to acknowledge, because he lost “[his] ability to see, as the monster of history [made him] its prey” (Khoury 1998: 150). History is a trick to make people believe that they have been alive since the beginning, and that they are the heirs of the dead, “an illusion” (Khoury 1998: 26). But so is the cause for Palestine, according to Younes. The very same cause that will determine who is on the victorious side of it.

A Voice to the Voiceless

Elias Khoury’s novel is in a sense a healing reflection of the Palestinian people, an allusion that challenges, within itself, the blunt nature of history. Though written by a Lebanese and not a Palestinian, it rescues a common history out of an accumulation of individual experiences. A voice to the voiceless, albeit fictional, the “Gate of the Sun” emerges as a cave not just for love and compassion, but as “a shelter [made] out of words” to question the notions of heroism and martyrdom, drawing a venue for the painful honesty of humiliation and defeat (Khoury 1998: 474). The cave, itself, is the novel: a swap between personal and individual stories, experiences and lessons. 

Khoury repeatedly concedes the inconsistencies of prevailing historical narratives. Though contained in the conversations between Khalil and Younes, the narration of historical events is laced with the stories of those who witnessed and experienced them, of those who struggled with their consequences and outcomes. By incorporating them, Khoury acknowledges the ambiguity of narration, too: “stories are like wine: they mature in the telling” (Khoury 1998: 15). Yet the story of the man who died on the threshold of his house, the story of Abu George who “wasn’t important enough to be mentioned in the history books” (Khoury 1998: 151), the story of Dr. Amjad, Zainab, Adnan, Afifa and all other people who cross onto the lines of this novel are not precisely the story of conventional heroes, but rather that of people under specific circumstances against which they are unable to fight. 

History accounts for everyday life

Elias Khoury proves how history is not just written through big ideas; memories, emotions and aspirations take part in the making of historical change and its telling. History accounts for the accommodation of everyday life, both individual and collective experiences, kept into the “jar” of storytelling, a collective effort in which we “organise what to forget” (Khoury 1998: 18, 156). Khoury’s characters strive to survive oblivion, they struggle to tell their story, to be known and remembered. Dr. Khalil, its narrator, expresses them carefully and in detail, in a sequence in which a single event has “dozens of versions”, with none of them having any more significance than the others. The sheer transparency of the juxtaposition of accounts, contrary or not, holds an imperative wisdom for historians who venture to write history: it is not only the use of those “symbols and signs” that will abide on paper, but also the way in which the details, the accounts and the versions of a story that deserves to be rescued from oblivion are told, narrated and contrasted.

Thus, in Khoury’s novel, Palestinian identity remembers in order to forget. In the hope of returning to the land that was lost, remembering those that died in the process, “we can’t just toss off memories like that, we don’t have the right to remember any which way” (Khoury 1998: 33). Between compassion and remembrance, the painful and realist resemblances of “Gate of the Sun“ constitute an epic to the Palestinian identity, which in spite of its dispersal and fragmentation, will continue to hold on to the land where it belongs. “Why would we fight and die? Doesn’t Palestine deserve our deaths? You’re the one who taught me history, and now you tell me history is a ruse to evade death!” (Khoury 1998: 26).