Introduction: Cousins and Their Stories

The 1994 novel Majmaʿ al-asrār (The Collection of Secrets) by renowned Lebanese author Ilyās Khūrī (Elias Khoury; b. 1948) tells the story of two cousins. But only the younger of the two, Ibrāhīm Naṣṣār, was first created by Khūrī. The other cousin, older by about 10 years, is Santiago Nasar, who was given textual life by the Nobel prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez.¹ García Márquez’s 1981 novella Crónica de una muerte anunciada (published in English as Chronicle of a Death Foretold) is the pre-text that presents the older cousin’s tragic end and opens the door to questions about the Naṣṣār family. The two cousins, although they never meet, are brought together textually. García Márquez offers the premise; Khūrī offers his novel, in which the narrator compares the destiny of the two cousins, each a stranger in his own way. And finally there is another text, one which exists only within Majmaʿ al-asrār’s fictional world, a mysterious letter that makes the destiny of one cousin affect that of the other. Khūrī uses the letter to establish intertextuality: according to Khūrī’s narrator, the letter is sent in the Colombian novel and arrives in the Lebanese one.

In what follows, I trace the web of relations between these cousins and these texts to demonstrate what they reveal about migration, estrangement, and storytelling—within and across languages and cultures. By placing Majmaʿ al-asrār within migration studies, I aim to show that this field should not only examine the effects of immigration on migrants and their host cultures, but also the effects of emigration on the “sending” culture, including the experience of not emigrating in a cultural context of frequent migration. Ultimately, I find that Khūrī’s novel offers a conception of identity that leads to, among other things, a revision of traditional narratives of the mahjar or émigré experience. In this essay, I argue that Khūrī’s text questions how and where one is different, a stranger, and thus unsettles the nostalgic conception of loss that is a central underpinning of Arabic cultural tropes, among them al-ḥanīn ilā al-waṭan—or the longing for homeland—of the émigré experience.

Diaspora and Migration Literature

Since the 1990s, an abundance of academic studies have emerged that focus on diaspora, and the term “diaspora” has been used to describe many social realities far afield from its traditional associations with the Jewish and Black African diasporas. This has led critics to define and categorize different manifestations of the concept. Other critics have gone beyond this and question whether diaspora is even a useful descriptive or analytic category.² By way of the term itself, vastly different experiences of diaspora are sometimes lumped together under one ethnic, racial, or national rubric, and at the same time, diaspora as a concept aims to consider the relationship of people to specific locations and communities. I use the term “diaspora” to designate perceived connections between a community and a distant place—a community that is often constructed on the basis of this perception. For these reasons, the usefulness of the term lies in its ability to direct critics and other readers to an interrogation of the ideas that we take for granted regarding community and identity. What makes the term a productive category of analysis is what it reveals about conceptions of home, ethnicity, nationality, and belonging. As Virinder S. Kalra, Raminder Kaur, and John Hutnyk suggest in Diaspora and Hybridity, building on the work of theorists such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and James Clifford, diaspora should be understood “not in terms of homogeneous groups of people, but rather as a process which has an impact on the way people live and upon the society in which they are living.”³ This leads to a conception of identity not as singular belonging, but rather as connections that are multiple and dynamic.

Diaspora or migrant literature is typically defined as literature written by authors living in diaspora and sometimes, more strictly, as literature by such authors that depicts a diasporic setting. Additionally, the category “migrant literature” generally denotes works in which the language of writing is the dominant language of the immigrant’s new home. However, some diasporic writers, rather than write about an immigrant community, write in their first language about the impact of migration on the communities left behind. Faraḥ Anṭūn’s novels al-Ḥubb ḥattā al-mawt (Love Till Death, 1898) and al-Waḥsh, al-waḥsh, al-waḥsh (The Beast, the Beast, the Beast, 1903); Mīkhāʾīl Nuʿaymah’s (Naimy’s) “Sāʿat al-kūkū” (The Cuckoo Clock, 1927); and various mid-20th-century short stories by Saʿīd Taqī al-Dīn are examples of such works. Moreover, there is also a corpus of works within Arab/Arabic literature written by writers living in the “homeland” or as transnationals—rather than in the mahjar—but that depict an émigré community, return migration, and/or the community left behind that lives with the phantom of the émigrés. There is a particularly high number of Lebanese texts within this group, among them Imīlī Naṣr Allāh’s Ṭuyūr aylūl (The Birds of September, 1962), al-Iqlāʿ ʿaks al-zamān (Flight Against Time, 1981; translation 1998), and al-Jamr al-ghāfī (Sleeping Ember, 1995); Rabīʿ Jābir’s novel Amrīkā (America, 2010); and Rashīd al-Ḍaʿīf’s Tablīṭ al-baḥr (The Paving of the Sea, 2011), as well as Khūrī’s Majmaʿ al-asrār.

In observing the various manifestations of diaspora in Arab/Arabic literature that I have outlined above, and the limitations of the categories of diasporic and migrant literature vis-à-vis these manifestations, I went through a process similar to that of Lebanese-Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage, whose fieldwork led him to observe that the diaspora is part of the Arab village:

[J]ust as the village as a “home” was present in the diaspora all over the world, the world of the diaspora was equally present in the village. It is such reality that drew me to try and find an understanding of diasporic culture that differed from the common definition which saw diaspora as a dispersed population united by their real or imaginary relation to an original home, though excluding that home from the diasporic space itself. At least in the Lebanese case, I found it more useful to think of a definition that emphasised what immigrants and non-immigrants shared and made them both part and parcel of the same transnational culture. I wanted a conception of diasporic culture that included both the person dreaming of leaving and the person yearning to return. I wanted a conception that highlighted a sense of “spatial haunting” as a unifying diasporic mechanism: both the fact of being haunted by the spaces one could go to and the spaces that one has left behind.⁴

When the literary works that I referred to above depict émigré communities, they demonstrate how the diaspora community functions as an imagined community for those who do not emigrate. Similarly, when they depict the impact of migration on the “sending” country they demonstrate the repercussions of migration on the point of departure. These works, which are not usually considered to be a part of diaspora literature, represent the view from “the inside” or, better yet, the view from beyond the geographic space of the mahjar. They offer important perspectives on the effects of migration from the vantage point of those who have not (yet) left or have not left permanently. In order to move toward “a conception of diasporic culture that include[s] both the person dreaming of leaving and the person yearning to return,”⁵ I propose that this corpus of texts should be understood as part of the broader category of “migration literature,” a category defined by the themes of the texts rather than the geographic location or language of expression of the author. A reading of Majmaʿ al-asrār within this category of migration literature suggests that the text can offer not only new perspectives on migration and the full range of its effects, but also new outlooks on the links between migration and nation.

Intertextuality

In Majmaʿ al-asrār, Khūrī’s narrator tries to find meaning in, to decode, García Márquez’s novella. Crónica raises questions for this narrator about not only Santiago Nasar and other characters, but also about storytelling and cultural metanarratives.⁶ The Lebanese text responds to these questions by telling a story through multiple other stories, many of which are drawn from world literature, Arab cultural heritage, and Lebanese popular culture.⁷ In her study on intertextuality, Mary Orr notes that Julia Kristeva compares intertextuality to translation in an effort to move away from the fear of the loss of the author figure, to which intertextuality often gives rise, and toward a conception of intertextuality as permutation.⁸ As Orr suggests, instead of considering intertextuality and translation as two processes connoting scattering and loss (including loss of originality and the author figure, and loss of a transcendental, pre-Babel language), they can be understood as conditions of “plethora.”⁹ In Khūrī’s novel the single, original author, transcendental truth, and single origins are displaced, but this loss is experienced precisely as “plethora,” as a multitude of tales to be enjoyed. In the same way, rather than see migration and diaspora as the loss of a place of belonging, the novel suggests that they be viewed as the possibility of abundant connections.

While Khūrī’s Majmaʿ al-asrār explores in a parallel fashion the relationship between an émigré cousin, born and raised in Colombia, and a cousin who never leaves Beirut, on the level of form the novel proposes and explores connections between the narratives of the Naṣṣār family and other “cousin” texts. In addition to referring to a variety of figures from Lebanese popular culture and local news, Majmaʿ al-asrār invokes many religious, expository, and literary texts.¹⁰ The religious texts that Khūrī interweaves in various ways into his novel include: the Torah and other parts of the Hebrew Bible, the Gospel of John from the Christian Bible, the Qurʾān, Qiṣṣas al-anbiyāʾ (Stories of the Prophets), the Ḥadīth, early Sufi poetry, and a lament attributed to a 7th-century Shīʿī imam.¹¹ On the level of stylistics, these sacred, folkloric, and mystical texts help to create a contemplative, lyrical prose that supports the mood of the narrator’s philosophical reflections and that at times stands in creative tension with the elements of popular culture and the descriptions of violence that also run through Khūrī’s novel. Thematically, many of these texts are doubly associated with origins given that they are among the first written narratives for many of the peoples and religious traditions of the world. In this way, the presence of elements from these texts in the novel contributes to the process of highlighting the constructed nature of common conceptions of origins. The Biblical figure Adam, in particular, has an important role in the novel’s discussion of the origins of poetry, estrangement, and nostalgia.

Khūrī’s novel also cites more contemporary works such as the autobiography of a Lebanese ophthalmologist entitled Majmaʿ al-masarrāt (Shākir Khūrī, 1908), the dictionary of Lebanese place names Muʿjam asmāʾ al-mudun wa-al-qurā al-lubnāniyyah wa-tafsīr maʿānīhā (Anīs Furayḥah, 1956), and an etymological study by the title of al-Yaman hiya al-aṣl (Faraj Allāh Ṣāliḥ Dīb, 1988). In addition to allowing for the injection of humor into the narrative through word play among the titles and other aspects of the works, these more expository works are part of the questioning of narratives of national identity and ascertainable origins that takes place in Majmaʿ al-asrār.

Foremost among the novel’s intertextual references are those to Albert Camus’s 1942 novel L’Étranger (The Stranger), to pre-Islamic poet Imrūʾ al-Qays’s muʿallaqah,¹² and, in particular, to the novella by García Márquez. Khūrī enriches his meditation on the concept of strangeness by addressing and incorporating elements of L’Étranger. Khūrī puzzles over violence, and the desires that motivate and guide it, by invoking Camus’s focus on detached violence against a near-stranger in a large Algerian city.¹³ Like Camus’s work, Khūrī’s considers the meaning of life in the face of death and contemplates the different ways in which one can be a stranger and what it means to live in a state of alienation. Although most of Khūrī’s characters, in contrast with Camus’s Meursault, strive to escape alienation, the narrator together with the character Ḥannā also point to alienation as part of the human condition. Engaging most with García Márquez’s text, Khūrī reworks the novella’s focus on violence against an immigrant who is a long-time resident of a small Colombian town—that is, violence against someone with whom there is a personal connection, someone who is not, strictly speaking, a stranger.

Based on an actual event, García Márquez’s Crónica centers on an honor killing that comes to pass with the violent murder of the character Santiago Nasar. Santiago, a member of the Levantine Arab immigrant community in a Colombian town, is accused by a local woman of having taken her virginity out of wedlock. Crónica features elements of the detective novel and a reiterative, multi-perspective narrative structure, as well as an ambiguous relationship with people and things from “the East.” Crónica’s Orientalism as well as the ways in which Majmaʿ al-asrār critiques it are worthy of a separate study. What concerns me here is the ways in which Majmaʿ al-asrār uses its relationship with Crónica—through aspects of narrative structure and thematic affinities—to put forth ideas regarding the links between narrative and truth, and between diaspora and homeland.

Storytelling and the Construction of “Truth”

Although in Majmaʿ al-asrār the narrator is uninvolved, unnamed, and partially omniscient, the structure of the text is reminiscent of that of Crónica in that both texts investigate a knot of mysterious relationships and crimes through various temporal jumps and changes in focalization. Khūrī’s novel focuses on a group of three Lebanese Christians in Beirut: Ibrāhīm Naṣṣār, a grocery store owner haunted by a family history of emigration; his best friend Ḥannā; and Nūrmā, the woman with whom they are both sexually involved. Ibrāhīm’s life is marked by an event that took place when he was ten years old: the murder of his cousin Santiago in Columbia, which caused Ibrāhīm’s father, Yaʿqūb, to call off their own plans to emigrate there. Ibrāhīm’s friend Ḥannā al-Salmān is accused of a heinous crime and tortured by the police in an effort to obtain his confession.

Both Ibrāhīm and Ḥannā are involved with Nūrmā, who is a contradictory mix of submissive—accepting Ibrāhīm’s detached ambivalence and Ḥannā’s sexual violence—and assertive of her independent choices. The story of the three main characters and their love triangle primarily spans from the 1940s to 1976—that is, up until the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War—but the narrator also takes the reader much further back into Lebanese history. Stefan Meyer, in his study of experimental Arabic novels, notes that “[t]he lack of stability inherent in this triangular relationship, as well as its continuity over a span of thirty years, is ultimately meant to represent the lack of stability in Lebanese society as a whole.”¹⁴ Fayyaḍ Haybī, in his study of otherness in Lebanese literature about the Civil War, takes this link between Khūrī’s novel and Lebanese reality further. Haybī refers to the novel as “this box that is heavy with the secrets of war that Ilyās Khūrī tries to explore through history” and suggests that the novel, by harkening back to 19th-century Lebanese history in the way that it does, seeks to confirm that the roots of the Civil War lie not only in the immediate past and external forces, but rather in Lebanon’s history.¹⁵ Counter to Meyer’s statement that in Majmaʿ al-asrār fiction is not used “as a means of reinterpreting history,”¹⁶ I argue that this novel in fact depicts the Civil War as part of an ongoing, pre-existing conflict.

Building on Haybī’s analysis, I propose that the way it threads together different moments in Lebanese history—including regional migrations hundreds of years back and turn-of-the-century emigration to the Americas—also enables Majmaʿ al-asrār to utilize metafiction to undo metanarratives. Metafiction is a literary device that, through a variety of self-referential techniques, draws attention to a work’s status as fiction, as an artifact. By self-consciously highlighting the narrative process, this device raises questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. Metanarratives, also known as master or grand narratives, are comprehensive accounts of historical and social meaning that serve to propagate and legitimate social and political ideals and actions. The term was developed by Jean-François Lyotard to refer to a totalizing narrative that is built upon a notion of universal truth, a type of schema that is presented as universal. Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition (1979), characterized postmodernity as a stance of increasing skepticism toward metanarratives. Metafiction, by leading readers to question perceptions of reality and commonly accepted truths, destabilizes metanarratives.

By addressing various historical periods while regularly employing techniques of metafiction, Majmaʿ al-asrār participates in the turn toward exploring the historical record as a collection of imaginative narratives that Muhsin al-Musawi points to in The Postcolonial Arabic Novel:

Although strongly committed to social realism, Arab novelists have recently developed a new outlook that leans heavily on historical accounts and popular lore. Reconstruction of past turmoil and conflict is so close at times to contemporary realities that it calls attention to itself, provoking the reader to question that very past as well as its identical present. History itself is read as narrative, with its gaps and omissions that invite some active imagination to recreate. . . . Through intertextuality, enchassement and reenactment of the past, some Arab novelists have been able to shake the complacent view of history as too sacred to be questioned.¹⁷

This turn toward the textual nature of history, which coincides with Foucauldian and New Historicist conceptions of history, enables Majmaʿ al-asrār to undo received notions of individual and community identity. By presenting history as part of storytelling, and focusing on the act of storytelling itself, Khūrī’s novel destabilizes totalizing cultural narratives, and particularly narratives about origins and belonging.

One of the near constants in Khūrī’s novelistic oeuvre is metafictionality. In Majmaʿ al-asrār this self-conscious concern with storytelling is paired with intertextuality to draw attention to Lebanon’s diasporic condition. Majmaʿ al-asrār is composed of fifteen short, untitled, and unnumbered chapters, and almost all of these sections begin with the self-referential phrase “Badaʾat al-ḥikāyah hākadhā”—“The story began like this.”¹⁸ The critic Muḥammad al-Bāridī notes that these short chapters, each of which starts by announcing the beginning of the story, create “a story with multiple entry points.”¹⁹ Like Crónica, Khūrī’s novel presents the relationship of the main characters, and the mysteries to which each one is linked, through multiple entry points and perspectives. This narrative structure is not an attempt to produce a more accurate or complete portrayal of the event; rather, it calls into question the very idea that there can be a single correct, comprehensive account. This is reflected in a question that the narrator of Majmaʿ al-asrār asks when considering what Nūrmā might have said about her relationships with Ibrāhīm and Ḥannā: “Do words inform or conceal?”²⁰ Through its structure and its repeated metafictional opening phrase, as well as various other references to storytelling, the novel highlights the hazy border between story and reality, and the way that words shape both.²¹

A central example of the status of storytelling in the novel is Ibrāhīm’s relationship to the family stories that his father Yaʿqūb passed down to him. Yaʿqūb has told his son about the massacre of Christians in 1860 that affected their forbearers in the family village, but the narrator raises questions about what exactly happened and about the truth-value of oral narratives about the events: “So the story is a massacre. And here there are no documents or texts. All there is are words that are said and forgotten. Words that are said in order to be forgotten, but they are not forgotten because they have been said, and added to, and taken from, and nobody knows.”²² The narrator then alludes to different versions of the motives behind one particular forefather’s departure from the village and of the events leading to his execution by the authorities in Beirut. What were the circumstances under which he left—was he a saint or a sinner? Finally, the narrator asks:

“أين الحكاية؟ وأين الحقيقة؟”

“Where is the tale? Where is the truth?”²³

How can he and the reader distinguish between them?

One of the mid-19th-century events that Ibrāhīm’s father recounts is the violent murder of one of their ancestors. With the multiple knife wounds involved and the victim’s ability to keep walking for a long time before finally succumbing to death, this murder is very similar to that of Santiago Nasar in Crónica.²⁴ Indeed, Khūrī adds to Crónica by having Santiago Nasar remember, at the moment of his murder and prior to it, the same stories, as told to him by his father, of the massacres in their Lebanese village.²⁵ I will return to one of these passages in the discussion of estrangement, but it is important to note here Santiago’s perception of these family stories: “When [Santiago] would listen to his father as he told the story of the massacre, and how ʿAbd al-Jalīl stood in the middle of the village square and the knives slashed him, he felt like he was listening to a story that wasn’t true. ‘All stories are imaginary,’ he said to his bride-to-be, Flora Miguel.”²⁶ This particular story, fantastic as it may seem, becomes real (again) in Santiago’s murder, further underscoring the difficulty of distinguishing between truth and fiction, al-ḥaqīqah and al-ḥikāyah.

Like the narrator and Santiago, Ibrāhīm also doubts these tales when he hears his father’s versions of them. He doesn’t know whether he should believe these stories, or those about family treasure: gold buried in the village cemetery. Although he is inclined to believe that the stories are only legends, he attempts to go to the village to investigate, but his plans are thwarted by the outbreak of the Civil War.²⁷ Similarly, he has vague, doubt-filled recollections of the arrival of a letter announcing Santiago’s death in Colombia. The letter made a particularly strong impression on the family and on neighbors in Beirut because Santiago is the Spanish form of Yaʿqūb, and Ibrāhīm’s father Yaʿqūb was sometimes called Santiago [Sāntiyāghū].²⁸ The letter put an end to Yaʿqūb’s plans to move the family to Colombia because he interpreted it as a warning that one of them might also be murdered there.²⁹ As an adult, Ibrāhīm dreams of emigrating and decides that he must see the letter, and find out the truth, before leaving. His interest in the family stories about buried gold and in the letter itself lead him to his father’s box of old documents—the collection of secrets from which we might imagine the novel takes its title. However, all he finds in the box are documents made illegible by the passage of time.³⁰ Even in the case of the letter in Spanish, it is not only language but blurred ink that makes it inaccessible.³¹

Through this illegibility, Khūrī’s novel reworks the topos of the found manuscript. This ancient topos presents the reader with a text that must be translated, and as François Delpech asserts, serves to make the text that is in the hands of the reader more authentic and prestigious.³² Khūrī’s novel departs from that model in that the found text here is only vaguely remembered and never fully reclaimed. Translation is not enough to make it accessible and, moreover, the secret that it stands to reveal remains unreachable. Thus, Khūrī’s found text, which bears very limited authenticity and prestige, serves to highlight the questionable nature of foundational stories. The letter, in its verisimilitude as a mode of communication for an immigrant family, makes the impact of Santiago upon Ibrāhīm seem plausible and links Khūrī’s novel to the oeuvre of García Márquez. But the letter remains mangled and undecipherable, a metaphor for all stories about the past—the Naṣṣār family stories as well as Lebanese stories in general. They are part of a multiplicity of fragmented, barely accessible tales and there is no way to know anything with certainty, to establish Truth.

Majmaʿ al-asrār is made up of secrets about which conjectures are drawn, but which are never actually disclosed. One of the main secrets among these—the contents of the letter from Colombia—is touched upon but never clearly revealed. The narrator, implicitly and at times explicitly, refers the reader who would seek the revelation of the secret to García Márquez’s Crónica. The novel’s first reference to Crónica is an indirect one that arises at the beginning of the narrator’s reflections on the duality of secrets: “A secret is a thing and its opposite, what is concealed and what is revealed [foretold]. For, it is only concealed from some when it is revealed to some.”³³ The Arabic text reads “al-makhfī wa-al-muʿlan” and thus evokes the Arabic title of García Márquez’s novella: Qiṣṣat mawt muʿlan. Building on this, several pages later the narrator uses the verbal form of this same adjective, aʿlana, and pairs it with the direct object wafāh, or demise, to describe the letter that Yaʿqūb received and that put an end to their plans to emigrate: “Yaʿqūb, who was also preparing to emigrate to Colombia, before the arrival of that damned letter that announced and foretold his demise [tuʿlinu wafātahu].”³⁴ In this way, Khūrī invokes García Márquez’s text while pointing to central tensions in Majmaʿ al-asrār: for a secret to be a secret it must consist of both hiding and announcing, not telling along with telling, just like the letter from Colombia, which Khūrī creates as a bridge between the two fictional worlds. The letter, upon its arrival, prevents a departure because it conceals the issues of stained honor and class tensions surrounding Santiago’s murder. Paradoxically, then, this textual link that connects the two branches of the Naṣṣār family (that reveals them to each other) also keeps them separated (secreted) because the interpretation of the letter that simultaneously announces and conceals the murder puts a stop to the migration of Ibrāhīm’s family from Lebanon to Colombia. Additionally, when Ibrāhīm looks for the letter years later to read it himself, he finds that it is unreadable. It tells through its existence, but not its illegibility. After these early, indirect references to García Márquez’s text, at various points later in Majmaʿ al-asrār the narrator points to Crónica directly by mentioning its complete title, the name of its author, and its main character and central conflicts, and by giving quotes from the Arabic translation of the novel.

However, García Márquez’s text also conceals as much as it reveals. Both narratives demonstrate Nietzschean perspectivism, and Derrida’s related concept of différance finds a literal manifestation in the tattered, stained letter that Khūrī’s protagonist tries to read.³⁵ A common interpretation of Nietzsche’s concept of perspectivism is that each person interprets the world from his or her particular circumstances (his or her own vantage point, understood metaphorically) and thus there is no single truth which humans can access. There has been much debate about the apparent paradox of perspectivism: the concept seems to be self-refuting in that it claims as truth that there is no absolute or objective truth. Rolf-Peter Horstmann proposes a more nuanced way of understanding Nietzsche’s perspectivism that mitigates the paradox: there are no truths that are not enmeshed in context (subjective conditions), and those who utter or judge truths are never able to fully comprehend the contexts that circumscribe them. Ultimately, “every truth is defined by this necessarily incomplete context. Thus every truth is a partial truth or a perspectival fiction.”³⁶

Both Nietzsche and Derrida critique the metaphysical tradition in philosophy which holds that there are objective facts and epistemological absolutes. Derrida’s deconstructive approach in particular asserts that the metaphysical tendency is built on the claim that full access to meaning (absolute or clear-cut presence) can be reached. That is, metaphysical philosophy privileges presence (unmediated, unmitigated access to experience and meaning) over absence. Yet signs themselves contain traces of what they do not mean. In opposition to the metaphysics of presence, Derrida presents the term différance to refer to both the role of difference in signification and the deferral of full signification. In Khūrī’s Majmaʿ al-asrār, secrets and mysteries remain unresolved because the narrator presents a series of “partial truths” or, literally and figuratively, “perspectival fictions.” Furthermore, the plurality of meaning stands unresolved because the letter that would reveal all is an unintelligible text. Through its multi-perspective narrative structure and its deferral of truth, Khūrī’s novel points to futile human attempts at uncovering supposed secrets—that is, at establishing ultimate truths—when there is no stable truth to be found. Any form of truth—albeit partial, contingent, and ever-evolving—that may exist can only be approximated by seeking to understand multiple, and often elusive, perspectives.

The letter from the family members who emigrated to Latin America is both present and—in its illegibility—absent. It is a symbol, then, of the place of migration in the “home” country: for those who stayed within the physical space of the nation, migration and diaspora are both present, and distant and undecipherable. The letter, and the migration for which it stands, makes diaspora present even if only as a trace of that which is absent, an awareness of absence that generates desire (according to a Lacanian reading) and multiple meanings (according to a Derridean one). Majmaʿ al-asrār is replete with the desire to emigrate and with the desire to explore, through multiple, contradictory stories, the concepts of origin and belonging that pervade both nation and diaspora.

Migration and Estrangement

The tales told about and by Ibrāhīm and his family, friends, and neighbors highlight the constructed nature of narrative and the multiple truths created by it. The main narrative of truth that Majmaʿ al-asrār exposes as a construction concerns stable, self-evident origins. The stories within the novel and the narrator’s reflections upon them lead readers to reconsider what it means to be a stranger. Khūrī’s narrative suggests that by keeping secrets we become strangers to ourselves, each other, our communities, and also our histories. In tandem with this, the novel addresses conceptions of home and origins. The novel tells us that migration, conflict, alienation, and diaspora were already there—you were already a stranger before you left home.

On one level, Majmaʿ al-asrār points to the ways in which the migrant has a significant effect on the lives of those who stay. For better or for worse, events abroad can have consequences at the point of departure. As Ottmar Ette explains it:

Elias Khoury [shifts] the focus to the multifarious and complex movements between the two countries. Lebanon and Colombia are not simply the clearly distinct countries of origin and destination in a typical emigration history, but also stand in an intimate relation of exchange due to a multitude of indirectly and directly networked communications: What happens in one country has repercussions for the other.³⁷

On another level, the connection created via García Márquez’s representation of Levantine immigrants and Khūrī’s reworking of it reveals human connections—issues of alienation, death, and the search for truth—that are shared regardless of location. On both levels, Majmaʿ al-asrār points to the ways in which the diaspora is still connected to “home,” and “home” to the diaspora.

Furthermore, Majmaʿ al-asrār suggests a multiple and dynamic conception of home and identity by addressing both the idealized home constructed after the fact by those who leave and the idealization of the life of the émigré abroad created by those who stay.³⁸ The novel, through the experiences of the Naṣṣār family as well as those of their neighbor Julia, points to the monetary as well as emotional impact of those who leave upon those who stay. In addition, it points to the enduring nature of the desire to leave—one that persists in the present of the characters, but started long before in the furthest reaches of their family history. Ibrāhīm, like his father before him and his friend Ḥannā’s son after him, is obsessed with the desire to emigrate, but his fears stop him from leaving Lebanon. On the one hand, Ibrāhīm fears a death like that of his cousin Santiago, which his father interpreted as the result of anti-Arab sentiment, and on the other hand, he fears leaving his family, his friends, and his neighborhood in Beirut.³⁹ Migration remains, however, as a dream that makes him feel young and full of life even as he fails to bring it to pass.⁴⁰

Ibrāhīm’s dreams of emigration are linked to the concept of the stranger and his status as one.⁴¹ Throughout the text Khūrī takes advantage of the intersection of meanings in words from the Arabic root ghayn-rāʾ-bāʾ: ghurbah—separation from one’s place of origin, homesickness and alienation, life or a place away from home; ightirāb—estrangement and alienation; and gharīb—strange or odd, foreign, a stranger or a foreigner, an émigré. Although Ibrāhīm is not a foreigner in Beirut, in many ways he feels like one: he is lonely and alienated and in that sense is a stranger.⁴² Haybī notes that as Ibrāhīm enters further into interior spaces (the family home, his father’s room, and his father’s box of documents) his estrangement increases.⁴³ Thus, contrary to the idealized family and home country environment that is part of the archetypal émigré narrative, Ibrāhīm’s estrangement is only exacerbated by attempts to connect with and delve into his family life and family history.

The novel not only portrays Ibrāhīm as at times a stranger, but also shows how the other main characters are strangers too, each in his or her own way: Ḥannā is alienated from those around him as a result of his experiences in jail and during the Civil War; and Nūrmā, upon Ibrāhīm’s death, no longer has a connection to the Naṣṣār family, though she still yearns to be a part of Beirut, to talk and feel like a Beiruti.

The narrator also develops the concept of the stranger in relation to Santiago Nasar and the Biblical Adam who is referenced not only as “father of us all,” but also as the first to migrate by way of forced exile in his fall from paradise. The novel’s narrator, building on what García Márquez suggests in Crónica, wonders whether Santiago was killed because he was an Arab, that is, because to his fellow townspeople he was a stranger.⁴⁴ Alternately, the narrator wonders if Santiago’s estrangement arose from the surreal realization that death was near, and that this estrangement entailed the repetition of stories that were thought to be pure fiction. This confusion between reality, remembered stories, and dreams at the moment of death produces another form of alienation.⁴⁵ Elsewhere the narrator explicitly ties these forms of estrangement to migration as well as to the general feeling of longing: “Is the estrangement of emigration the same as longing? Does it mean that for you to be a stranger is for you to carry a mysterious longing for a distant memory?”⁴⁶

The narrator’s meditations lead to the figure of Adam and his loss of paradise as well as of the primordial, pre-Babelian language. The narrator declares that Adam was “the first stranger” and explains that he was “in a constant state of longing [ḥanīn] for a past that would not return to him and of crying for a place that had become distant.”⁴⁷ The narrator then builds on this image of the nostalgic, weeping Adam to offer a direct statement about estrangement: “We humans don’t need our great-grandfather Adam, peace be upon him, nor his poems, in order to discover that estrangement [al-ghurbah] does not require emigration or banishment from paradise. A person can be a stranger in his own house and among his neighbors.”⁴⁸ This message is expressed explicitly once again toward the end of the novel, but this time through the words of Ḥannā, whose prison and near-execution experiences have turned him into something of a hardened sage. Ibrāhīm tries to explain to Ḥannā that he looked inside his late father’s box of documents because he wanted to know his family stories and to learn about those family members who had emigrated in the 19th century to Latin America and “were strangers [foreigners; ghurabāʾ].” Ḥannā replies: “ ‘We are all strangers . . . here or there, what’s the difference. Humans are always strangers.’ ”⁴⁹

These statements echo the psychoanalytic conception of estrangement found in Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves in which difference is already present in the self.⁵⁰ The Lacanian split subject stands in opposition to the Freudian ego-based notion of self in which the subject can achieve a sense of coherent stability and mastery over the self. On the communal level, idealized conceptualizations of home and homeland are analogous to the illusion of the coherent, stable, “true” self. As Avtar Brah states in her work on the South Asian diaspora, “ ‘home’ is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination.”⁵¹ The idealized home is a stable origin that never quite existed as such. As Brah points out, “The question of home, therefore, is intrinsically linked with the way in which processes of inclusion or exclusion operate and are subjectively experienced under given circumstances. It is centrally about our political and personal struggles over the social regulation of ‘belonging.’ ”⁵² To be a stranger, then, is to not belong, to not feel at home. But the fact that this can occur without ever leaving the place called home indicates that “home” exists more as a desire than as a reality.

To make this message clear and take it into the realm of homeland or community identity, Khūrī’s novel goes back further than the 19th century to the supposed origins of the Naṣṣār family—and of many Lebanese families. In addition to the story of the branches of the Naṣṣār family that went to Colombia, the family’s history contains migration stories that took place centuries back and include conflict and uncertainty.⁵³ The Naṣṣār family history is actually composed of a long series of migrations that included a name change and religious conversion. Thus, migration and shifts in identity—that is, movement and change—are itself the origin. There is difference at home. Although the family, “like all the Christian families in Lebanon,” claims to descend from the noble tribe of Ghassān (Ghasāsinah), Ibrāhīm and his father, as well as the narrator, doubt the veracity of this.⁵⁴ Thus the narrator closes this set of stories by asking, “Or is it that the story of the Naṣṣār family isn’t true and the al-Ghassānī lineage is nothing other than a small legend that entered this country whose name is Lebanon and which is full of legends?”⁵⁵ In this way, the narrator suggests that other Lebanese families have similar histories of change and reminds the reader of the role of narrative in the creation of identity and other “truths.”

Further dismantling conceptions of stable, singular, or glorified origins, the Arabic term aṣl (origin) seldom appears in the novel, and when it does it is associated either with storytelling or death—or both together. The term aṣl is connected to doubt and to the production of multiple etymologies, or narratives of origin, when it appears with regard to the “origins [uṣūl] and meaning” of the name of the Naṣṣār family’s village.⁵⁶ In the same discussion of the uncertain etymology of the village’s name, the title of a book that the narrator mentions, al-Yaman hiya al-aṣl (Yemen Is the Origin),⁵⁷ links aṣl to the laughable desire to claim that one place is the source of everything. Another two instances of the word aṣl connect the term to storytelling. The narrator refers to Ibrāhīm remembering “his father’s stories about the origins [aṣl] of their family”⁵⁸ and mentions that “all the Christian families in Lebanon claim that their family’s origins [uṣūl] lie in Izraʿ in the Hawrān area and that they belong to the tribe of Ghassān, who are part of Arab nobility.”⁵⁹ These passages point to illustrious origins as the product of storytelling.

Elsewhere, the term aṣl is connected to death as a form of loss that is part of creation. When the narrator refers to the Naṣṣār family’s tomb in the village from which the family hails most recently, twice he refers to it as “their original crypt” (“maqbarathum al-aṣliyyah” and “maqābir āl Naṣṣār al-aṣliyyah”).⁶⁰ In one sense, these passages connect the concept of fixed origins to the sterility of the tomb. However, a leitmotif in the novel ties death to narratives of creation through the Biblical concept of logos.⁶¹ Khūrī’s novel makes allusions to the Biblical phrase “and in the beginning was the Word” from the Gospel according to John, which itself alludes to the first phrase of the creation story in Genesis: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”⁶² In the creation story, God creates light and life from darkness. Similarly, in John’s Gospel, the Word, which stands for Jesus Christ as the divine logos, brings light and life: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . In him was life, and the life was the light of men.”⁶³ The third time the allusive phrase appears in Majmaʿ al-asrār, it is part of a conversation that Ḥannā imagines between himself and Ibrāhīm. In the conversation, Ḥannā quotes the first line of the Gospel of John but then rephrases it such that the Word is death: “The beginning is death. The Word is the death of the Word. You flee death in order to reach it.”⁶⁴ In this recodification of “the Word,” it is death as the ultimate loss that is present from the beginning. In the same way that migration, difference, and change have been there since the beginning of Lebanese family history, the Word itself—loss—has been there since the beginning, creating all that is known.

This awareness of human life as one marked by ongoing change and the mourning of loss is part of a shift in the trajectory of Khūrī’s oeuvre itself. More than one commentator has noted the element of nostalgia in Khūrī’s famous 1977 novel al-Jabal al-ṣaghīr (Little Mountain);⁶⁵ this nostalgia for a pre-Civil War Beirut is undone in Majmaʿ al-asrār as it highlights the chain of conflicts and wars that preceded the 1975–1990 war. Just as the novel’s commentary on nostalgia or longing for the past is applied to diasporic homeland and Lebanese genealogies, it can be applied to the loss of pre-Civil War Beirut, as well as to the broader motif of loss in Arabic cultural history, whether the poet’s loss of the beloved and her desert encampment, or the loss of al-Andalus, or the loss of Palestine. Indeed, in Majmaʿ al-asrār the narrator invokes the mourning over the aṭlāl, the remains of the desert encampment that is the archetypal image of the nasīb or opening section in classical Arabic poetry, during his meditation on Adam. The narrator claims that not only was Adam the first stranger, but trumping the famous Imrūʾ al-Qays,⁶⁶ that he was actually “the first Arab poet.”⁶⁷ The passage continues as follows:

His Holiness Adam’s longing [ḥanīn] for the past was a blending of truth with vision and this is the foundation of the longing before the remains of an abandoned encampment that we see in ancient Arabic poetry. For the first one to come to a stop and to bring to a stop, to cry and to make cry, was Adam, who was then succeeded by Imrūʾ al-Qays when he recited saying:

Stop, both of you, [qifā nabki . . . ] and let us weep over the remembrance of a beloved and her campsite.

Here on the edge of the winding sand dunes between Dakhūl and Ḥawmal.⁶⁸

By invoking this quintessential, canonical expression of nostalgia for a lost love within a narrative of estranged, mobile origins, Khūrī critiques the nostalgia of many Arab discourses. However, Khūrī does not take the approach of the late ʿAbbāsid poets who ridiculed the melancholic relationship to the lost beloved that had become canonized in Arabic literature. Rather, he carries out a critical, though compassionate, commentary on nostalgic discourses that result in perpetual mourning for something that was never quite what the stories said it had been like.

In Closing: Intertextual Identities

Majmaʿ al-asrār is an example of the confluence of postmodernity (aesthetics) and postcoloniality (politics) noted by al-Musawi in The Postcolonial Arabic Novel.⁶⁹ This novel uses the aesthetic techniques of metafiction and intertextuality to deconstruct an ideology that is part of both diaspora and nationalist identities. Khūrī’s intertextual and metatextual narrative about migration constitutes a commentary on truth, alienation, and identity: people can be strangers without ever leaving home; and migration and change were there from the beginning. For this reason, the yearning for a stable place of belonging, or origin, if indulged uncritically, produces only dubious stories. This message has particular implications for representations of Arab migration and diaspora, which traditionally have centered on the longing for the homeland. The novel’s structure creates shifts in intertext and in narrative focalization which in turn create a shift in perspective on the émigré experience. I have argued that through these shifts, Khūrī destabilizes one of the cornerstones of traditional representations of the mahjar experience. By telling the émigré story from the other side and through intertextual relationships with García Márquez’s Crónica and Imrūʾ al-Qays’s muʿallaqah, among other texts, Khūrī’s novel deconstructs the concept of pure, stable origins that is central to discourses of immigrant nostalgia.

Once the idealized home community that proffers an innate sense of belonging is recognized as an illusion created by narratives, the constructs underlying al-ḥanīn ilā al-waṭan—nostalgia for the homeland—come undone. Dovetailing with recent works within Arab American literature,⁷⁰ Majmaʿ al-asrār reveals that the cornerstone of traditional Arab migration discourses is itself a story, a fiction that can be rewritten. In the process of re-writing this fiction, Khūrī brings in narratives from near and far to construct intertextual identities—identities that exist as the confluence of various, sometimes contradictory, tales.

The set of tales in Majmaʿ al-asrār should be understood as part of Arab migration literature. The broader category of migration literature encourages readers and scholars to consider the perspectives of the “sending” country, of the point of émigré departure and possible return, within migration studies. Khūrī’s Majmaʿ al-asrār offers a view from beyond, beyond a perspective limited to a mahjar locale and beyond essentialized origins. In Majmaʿ al-asrār storytelling is the only actual origin.