Beirut Mirroring Palestine: Ethnographic Mapping of Two Novels by Elias Khoury (The Little Mountain, 1977 and The Journey of Little Gandhi, 1989)

Abstract

This thesis falls under the literary anthropology research methodology after my personal experience on how certain literary works by Elias Khoury helped me create an imagination about a lot of spaces especially in Beirut and Palestine before starting my academic path in anthropology years ago. Thus, when I moved to Beirut I decided to focus my research on the connections between anthropology and literature and how texts in these two disciplines write about place and cities. In my research, I explore representations of Beirut and the relationship between the city and these representations. These representations are divided into three levels. The first level consists of present representations, where I try to explore certain neighborhoods by note taking, first hand observations, unstructured interviews, and visiting the sites that were mentioned in the novels with the novelist himself. Elias Khoury and my interlocutors joined me in Achrafieh, Place Sassine, Sioufi Park, Mar Mitr Cemetery, Capuchin Church in Downtwon, Ras Beirut, and Ain-Mreisse. This fieldwork was done based on how I experienced these neighborhoods as an outsider anthropologist and as a reader of literary works referring to these neighborhoods. The second level, is the representations of Beirut in literature, where I study how the narrator in two of Elias Khoury’s novels, The Little Mountain1977 and The Journey of Little Gandhi1989, represents these neighborhoods and how s/he maps them in fiction. In the last level, I try to show how the literary representation of Beirut meets in a way the anthropological representation of it, despite the fact that each “period” represents a specific “time/space” in all different levels and “complexities”. I argue that literature in addition to other kinds of stories can be a reliable and valid ethnographic record about societies, cultures, and cites with all of their contradictions, ambiguities and silences. Also, I shed light on how the novels of Elias Khoury have dimensional literary and anthropological techniques in approaching reality and imagination along with his fascinating ability in creating parallel worlds of reality.