A few days back, I quoted Susannah Tarbush in saying that Elias Khoury was working on a “sequel” to Gate of the Sun.
I didn’t realize, until this morning, that Tarbush had posted a clarification on her website, The Tanjara. She posts a part of the transcript of the talk between Jeremy Harding and Elias Khoury, where he calls his new project a “requestioning” of Bab el Shams, or Gate of the Sun.
“A rephrasing?” Jeremy Harding asks. No, Khoury says:
No – a total requestioning of the Bab El Shams approach, and it is from the approach of the Palestinians who stayed behind, the Palestinians who stayed in Israel and their experience and then their experience mingled with the experience of the West Bank…
The book is thus not only about Palestinians daily lives, and about the occupation, but, Khoury said:
– but also it’s a questioning of the literature related to the question of Palestine – that is a requestioning of Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, Emile Habibi’s Pessoptimist, and requestioning the literature of our Israeli cousins where the Palestinian character is a shadow and trying to put these elements together in the real experience of the Palestinians…
