Elias KhouryChildren of the Ghetto: My Name Is Adam

Abstract

an endless stream of garbage. The adults, aloof, smoke cigarettes, throw soirees, drink espresso, and traipse the rocky terrain in impractical yet glamorous shoes. Johanna Stoberock’s Pigs comes in the wake of an increase in climate fiction, or cli-fi, where the Anthropocene and humanity ’s relationship to a changing climate are dramatized. While the climate is not necessarily dramatized, the environment in Pigs can certainly be menacing. The ocean, as the children experience, changes its mood. It will suddenly burn, leaving welts and scars. One has to suspect the ocean’s hostile demeanor is a possible response to chemical waste and garbage infecting the water, but it might also be a reflection of the children’s relationship to their environment, a work of imagination and psychology. Or fantasy. Stoberock isn’t clear. The children are harmed. The irresponsible adults, rendered grotesque by Stoberock, do nothing. Yet it is the world’s garbage, rather than the natural environment, that relentlessly encroaches. Pigs strays from a strict cli-fi categorization. Instead, the book takes on a mystical quality with elements of fable, allegory, and fantasy. Comparisons to the work of postmodern fabulist Italo Calvino are well placed. While the narrative is clear in its critique of systemic modern excess and the burden placed on future generations, Pigs is rarely didactic and never condescending. Stoberock ’s straightforward prose is filled with energy that advances the linear plot. With its sincere, omniscient narrator, the reader is privy to the children’s distinct thought processes , their search for memories from before their life of feeding trash to pigs, and their dreams of escape from the island and, worse, its cruel and careless adults. Pigs is effective and engaging; the reader wants, more than anything, the children to find freedom and escape. While Stoberock explores themes of nostalgia, innocence, and of returning home, we come to understand the potential impossibility of that return. The possibility of nowhere to turn. Although the majority of Pigs is told linearly, the children’s tale is interjected with short, fragmentary chapters where the narrator considers how the island looks from a distance from various points of view. “Always,” the narrator muses, “from a distance, the island was far away. Always, it was just out Books in Review ELIAS KHOURY Elias Khoury Children of the Ghetto: My Name Is Adam Trans. Humphrey Davies. Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2019. 428 pages. Adam Dannoun, a melancholic Palestinian self-exiled in New York and the protagonist-narrator of Children of the Ghetto, suffers from literary issues. “I’m not based on any model,” Dannoun insists in his notebook. “My story sums up nothing but itself, and I don’t want to be a symbol.” Nevertheless, the story of his life as he recounts it is a patchwork of allusions to canonical works by Palestinian and Israeli writers, and his death restages that of exiled Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein, who fell asleep with a burning cigarette in his New York apartment in 1977. While Dannoun is a literary-insider joke, he is also a complex narrator trying to confront his past. This is not the first time Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury tackles the “Palestinian story” as a narrative problem. His epic Gate of the Sun (also translated by Humphrey Davies) collected countless stories of the Palestinian Nakba —the defeat and expulsion of Palestine’s inhabitants with the establishment of Israel in 1948—demonstrating the collective force of storytelling and oral history. In My Name Is Adam, the first title from the trilogy Children of the Ghetto, Khoury explores a similar constellation linking historical trauma, silenced memory, and narrative form—yet this novel’s stance on the possibilities and ethics of narrative is much darker. The notebooks that make up this novel, Khoury tells us, were saved from the fire that killed Adam Dannoun: these are his notes for two novels, never completed, which Khoury presents in unedited form. The first, which suggests that Dannoun would not have made a great writer, is an attempt to write the forgotten story of a minor Abbasid108 WLT AUTUMN 2019 of focus.” Using repetitious phrasing, these fragmented chapters build in intensity. Moreover , they reveal how Stoberock plays with...