Hope of the Silent

Silence. Silence weighs on on the life and memory of Adam Dannoun, the narrator of Elias Khoury’s novel Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam. Tired of metaphor, tired of the oblique, Adam can only ask why the Palestinians are silent before their slaughterers, and grapple with the magnitude of the answers. Reading the novel I was reminded of the Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishugiro. Both reflect on memory and national tragedy, asking why remember, if memory only brings pain. Ishugiro demands that we remember no matter the cost, Khoury asks if it makes any difference at all.

Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam is written as a compilation of notes that Khoury inherited through a long chain after Adam, their author, died, either by accident or suicide. The Khoury of the novel makes no effort to edit or clarify the notes, rather he presents them as they are, messy and meandering. The first section of the novel is Adam’s notes for a novel he plans to write about the death of pre-Islamic poet Waddah al-Yaman. Waddah is trapped in a coffer by his lover’s husband, the king. The king suspects that Waddah is in the coffer but is not certain that his wife has been unfaithful to him. Rather than know for sure, the king decides to bury the coffer. In the long hours while the hole is being dug, Waddah is silent. While the coffer is being lowered into the hole, Waddah is silent. While dirt covers the coffer forever, Waddah is silent. Is Waddah silent out of love, to save his lover’s life, or is he silent because love is lost, and there is nothing more to do but die?

The Buried Giant is the type of novel Adam wants to write but can’t: indirect and hazy, full of metaphor. King Arthur is dead, but the peace he wrought between the Britons and Saxons still limps on. But it lives only off of lies. Axl and Beatrice, elderly Britons search for their son who they cannot quite seem to remember. Along the way they encounter Sir Gawain, old and bumbling on a quixotic quest to slay the dragon Querig. Likewise, Saxon warrior Wistan has come to slay the dragon because he knows the truth. Sir Gawain is protecting the dragon, not hunting it. Peace only exists because Querig’s fog erases the memories of the atrocities committed by King Arthur against the Saxons. Wistan knows that killing Querig will start the wars afresh, but believes it is better to remember the pain and forge true peace, than live where peace is merely the absence of war.

Just as Ishiguro reflects on the colonial history of Great Britain and the national tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki through the Buried Giant, Adam wants the story of Waddah’s death to be emblematic of the silence of the Palistinian people. But Adam finds that he can’t use metaphor, he can’t even use words. Words will never mean quite what he wants them to, but he must write because words are all we have to communicate.

The rest of the novel is Adam discovering and laying out the stories of Lydda, his city turned ghetto. Stories of his mother, Manal, his friend and father figure, Ma’moun, and conscripted gravedigger, Murad. Adam learns that he’s not who he thinks he is. Manal is not his mother. Ma’moun found him abandoned under an olive tree, at the breast of his dead biological mother and gave him to Manal. The war hero he thought was his father is not. He has no father but the olive tree. And he excruciatingly draws out Murad’s stories of burying those killed in the streets of Lydda by the Israeli army, and when they could no longer bury the corpses, burning them. Murad still smells burning flesh to this day.  

For Ishigiro, it is always better to remember. Even if remembering reignites war, it is better than forgetting. Healing can only come once pains are acknowledged. Khoury is skeptical. Why remember when it only brings agony? Why speak if nothing will change? Adam writes: 

“Maybe the tragedy has to remain enveloped in silence, because any discussion of its details would disfigure the nobility of that silence

Murad was right to be silent

Murad’s silence resembles that of Waddah al-Yaman. Now I understand why Murad severed all ties with me and why Waddah al-Yaman rejected my attempt to identify with his story. 

It’s the story of the sheep that was driven to slaughter and never opened its mouth. 

That is the story of the children of the ghetto.”

Why are Manal, Ma’moun, and Murad silent? Why are the Palistinians silent? Why was Jesus the Nazarene? Through the story of Waddah al-Yaman, Adam gives us two options. The first, that there is still hope for those they leave behind, and they are silent so to save them. The second believes that all hope is lost and speaking will only do further harm to those left behind. Adam’s answer is perhaps the second. He doesn’t want his notes to be read, and dies with the expectation that no one will. He takes the lesson of Murad and Waddah and Manul to heart and leaves only silence. 

Khoury, however, may believe the first. He may believe that there is still hope, and that the silence of the Palistinias will lead to their redemption. In the end, Adam, whatever his desire, is not silent. The novel exists, the novel’s Khoury publishes his notes. We are able to read his twisting, rambling, painful notes and stories. We are able to see those suffering in silence.

So too, we see the hope for redemption in Adam’s Christological nature. Adam, like Jesus, is a young Palastinian man. He has no earthly father. His mother was a virgin when she adopted him. And when Adam can see no reason for why the Jews, subjected to the ghettos of Europe, would create ghettos for the children of Lydda he is “sorrowful unto death, as Jesus the Nazarene.” In the above quote, Adam links the suffering of Lydda to the suffering of Christ: “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.” (Isaiah 53:7 KJV)

As we ask why the Palistinias are silent, we are forced to ask why Jesus is silent before his accusers. Christ’s silence is not in resignation. Jesus is not silent because speaking would be a hopeless act. His silence is in the hope of redemption. Christ’s silence is of selfless love. Like the hopeful interpretation of Waddah, Jesus did not speak so that his beloved will be saved. It is only through the silence silence and sacrifice of Christ that we can be saved. The articulated silence of Adam comes with the same hope of salvation, that through these flawed and incomplete words those that hear can vindicate the hope of the silent.