Karim Kattan, Imagining Eden

By Olivia Snaije

Since October 7, 2023, Palestinian author and poet Karim Kattan, along with Lebanese writer Dominique Eddé, has been among the few literary voices on France’s intellectual horizon speaking up for Gaza and Palestine.

Kattan recently called out his colleagues for their silence on Gaza in an op-ed in Le Monde: “Where are your minds, you who are so proud of your thoughts? Where are your pens, you who have poured out your words everywhere this fall publishing season? You were everywhere, but you’re not here. Where are you?”

Both Kattan and Eddé have new novels out this year, but they are more often invited to radio and television studios to comment on politics rather than on their books. They both write in French, which is not uncommon for Lebanese writers, although it is for Palestinians. Kattan’s grandfather spent time in France, where he trained as a doctor, but he returned to practice in his home in Bethlehem, where Kattan grew up. As a child, Kattan would cross the checkpoint each day to travel to nearby Jerusalem, where he attended the French Lycée. He now lives in Paris.

Kattan’s second novel, l’Éden à l’aube (Eden at Daybreak), on several French literary prize lists including the Renaudot, is a love story between two Palestinians, Isaac and Gabriel. Written well before October 7, Kattan said that his initial idea had been to “explore the inner lives of two young men in Jerusalem through the prism of literature.”

Indeed, Kattan’s characters examine the phenomenon of love via internal dialogues. His language is sensory and punctuated by literary and biblical references, as well as fables that Isaac delights in telling Gabriel, while Gabriel sketches in a notebook. But, as Kattan writes, “They were born in this land obstructed by concrete, history, tanks, blood, and fear in the night. Deep in his heart, Isaac sometimes feels like a nonentity. Sometimes. Gabriel does, too.”

The reality of British colonialism, the Israeli occupation, and Israel’s apartheid system invades Isaac and Gabriel’s love story, creating a fascinating contradiction: although the occupation is inescapable, Kattan also creates a Palestine which is not restricted to everyday life under occupation.

Isaac and Gabriel decide to take a road trip together—there’s an absurdity and something wondrous about the couple setting out in a confined space that is constantly changing, with land literally disappearing. Geography is crucial to him, Kattan says. It was also evident in his first novel, Le Palais des deux collines (2021), where shapeshifting landscapes and history swirl around the main character, Faysal; a poetic and literary prequel of sorts to artist Larissa Sansour’s futuristic short film, Nation Estate, in which each Palestinian city is now housed on a different floor in a skyscraper.

In Eden à l’aube, Kattan blurs topographical lines; he wants to “complicate what we imagine is Palestine’s geography. There are castles, and references to Rome, and multiple layers of geography. It’s a way of keeping Palestine from becoming a province of empires on which people project their fantasies. I wanted all the landscapes to be from Palestine but emancipated from real time and real seasons. Time is out of joint, and the land reflects this.”

In both books, he tries to “explore and examine all the things that Palestine is to me.” But since October 7, presenting his work has become complicated. While he used to worry that he would be enclosed in a box labeled “Palestinian writer,” now he is careful to state that he is a Palestinian writer “because there’s erasure.”

He has also spoken about how he feels indecent promoting his book while his fellow writers and poets in Gaza are being killed. Kattan wrote an afterword entitled “I wish I were a magician” for a recently published poetry collection by Gazans from before and after October 7, which includes work by Refaat Alareer, Hiba Abu Nada, and Hiba Sabri. “If only I were a magician and could create for them all a shelter of water and light, a big, full, verdant living planet that breathes clean air, fresh water and peaceful evenings, a planet that is Gaza…,” Kattan writes.

Far from his metaphysical approach to Palestine, Kattan has been navigating a French media landscape in which even the notion of a ceasefire can be controversial. Last April, on a panel entitled “Gaza, where our humanity dies” —held with Mediapart, one of the only news outlets where the Israeli onslaught on Palestine is discussed openly—Kattan addressed the audience:  “My humanity is fine and well, I have no doubt about it, even if it is being denied…I’m sorry, but it’s your humanity that is in question.” Moreover, he added, when one defends human rights and justice, it shouldn’t be solely for Palestinians.

On another television panel, he echoed his character Isaac’s sentiment on being a nonentity. As the statistics of the number of dead in Gaza are pronounced at length by the media, as a Palestinian, Kattan said, “when you hear that, you’re saying my life isn’t worth much. It’s not something that’s easy to hear.”

Kattan is also in the odd situation of writing what he thinks of as Palestinian literature—that is, what he has experienced, and knows—yet the fact that he writes in French means that most Palestinians can’t read him. Kattan also enjoys writing in English—mostly political articles or sci-fi—yet in his French, he says, the repetitions and phrasings echo his Arabic. He is also proud to be published by Elyzad, a French-language Tunisian publisher based in Tunis and Paris, where the founder, Elisabeth Daldoul, recently said on a panel that for her, Paris is not the only French-language publishing center: Tunis is, too. “It encourages people to reconsider what they think is a ‘proper’ French-language publisher,” Kattan says.

Kattan has a poetry collection launching shortly and has started to work on a novel that will explore Palestinian emigration to Asia. His work has not yet been translated into Arabic, although, this spring, his first novel will be published in English as The Palace on the Higher Hill, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman for Foundry Editions.

Kattan says that Eden à l’aube was “informed by a planet of books,” and he kindly lists them below:

Sahar Khalifa’s باب الساحة,  Impasse de Bab Essaha (available in English here)

Colette, La naissance du jour

Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma

Assia Djebar’s Loin de Médine

Hussein Al Barghouti’s سأكون بين اللوز, Je serai parmi les amandiers (available in English here)

Le Lancelot en Prose

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Olivia Snaije (oliviasnaije.com) is a journalist and editor based in Paris. She translated Lamia Ziadé’s Bye Bye Babylon (Jonathan Cape), and has written several books on Paris published by Dorling Kindersley and Flammarion. Editions Textuel (Paris) and Saqi Books (London) published Keep Your Eye on the Wall: Palestinian Landscapes, which she co-edited with Mitch Albert.