[Set against the tumultuous backdrop of modern Syria’s birth
pangs, this saga of friendship, freedom and tragedy celebrates
Aleppo’s lost past.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

A SYRIAN EPIC  
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Marcel Theroux
July 26, 2023
The Guardian
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_ Set against the tumultuous backdrop of modern Syria’s birth
pangs, this saga of friendship, freedom and tragedy celebrates
Aleppo’s lost past. _

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No One Prayed Over Their Graves
Khaled Khalifa
Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN:9780374601935

During the twilight years of the Ottoman empire at the end of the 19th
century, as ethnic tensions flare between the groups that inhabit its
vast territories, a young boy flees a massacre and finds shelter in
Aleppo with a wealthy Muslim family. Like his hosts, Hanna is part of
the empire’s wealthy elite. Unlike them, he’s a Christian. Almost
immediately, he becomes best friends with Zakariya, the son of his
protectors. Over the next 70 years, Hanna and Zakariya’s friendship
will be tested by every conceivable challenge: war, flood, ethnic
conflict, intolerance, extremism, famine and the tensions between
their religious faiths.

Hanna and Zakariya’s youth and early manhood are spent entirely in
pursuit of pleasure. They carouse in the red light district of Aleppo,
have a memorable encounter with one of the city’s most notable
courtesans, run away to Europe and spend time in Venice. On their
return, they commission a friend, a Jewish architect, to build them a
pleasure palace on the outskirts of the city. They call this the
“citadel”. It’s part brothel and part casino – a kind of
Ottoman Animal House_ _where anything goes and they can drink, gamble
and sleep with prostitutes. There’s even a special room set aside in
which gamblers who have lost everything can kill themselves. (Luckily
or not, it never appears to be used.)

 
Marriage barely dents Hanna and Zakariya’s playboy lifestyles.
Instead of being repelled by their husbands’ licentiousness, their
wives find the men’s single-minded pursuit of personal freedom
commendable. Zakariya spends his time as a breeder of pedigree horses;
Hanna earns a good living from his family estates. But this phase of
their lives – carefree, thoughtless, somewhat exploitative – comes
to an abrupt end when a cataclysmic flood sweeps away a village,
drowning dozens of people, including Hanna’s wife and young child.
Hanna and Zakariya’s response to this tragedy is what will shape the
second half of their lives. Hedonism gives way to grief, a religious
awakening, and an increasingly tragic understanding of the world.

No One Prayed Over Their Graves_ _is a vast, sprawling saga that
depicts, among other things, the birth pangs of modern Syria. By and
large, the action unfolds in its second city, Aleppo. Born in the
outskirts of the city himself, Khaled Khalifa enthusiastically
portrays Aleppo’s beauty, chaos, cosmopolitanism and licentiousness.
The city he presents to the reader is ripe with possibilities for
freedom, reinvention, friendship and illicit love. Few of his
characters are bound by a single identity: they’re complex,
contradictory and changeable. The novel’s humanist credo is summed
up by Zakariya’s sister, Souad: “What she was doing harmed no one,
it was merely another way of understanding life.”

It will escape few readers that, since the beginning of the Syrian
civil war in 2011, the millennia-old city that Khalifa describes so
lovingly has been bombed out of all recognition. The events the novel
covers – from roughly 1880 to around 1950 – are a mirror of
Syria’s more recent calamities. Ultimately, it feels like a
desperate act of remembrance, an attempt to retrieve and celebrate
Aleppo’s lost past.
 

While the flood is the midpoint of Hanna and Zakariya’s lives,
dividing their world into before and after, it’s actually described
on the first page of the novel. Khalifa eschews a chronological
telling of his story in favour of one that flits between different
periods. One of the challenges of the book – and something that is
characteristic of his other fiction – is the density of the
exposition, the sheer number of minor characters, and the reluctance
to settle within any single character’s point of view for more than
a paragraph. To make things even more complicated, the largely
third-person, omniscient narrative is broken up with other fictional
forms: first-person reflections by Hanna, and a section about a doomed
love affair between a Christian man and a young Muslim woman that is
presented as a self-contained short novel by a man called Junaid
Khalifa. Leri Price, who translated three of Khalifa’s previous
novels, does a fine job reflecting these different modes.

However, there’s no doubt that the complexity of the book’s form,
the restlessness of its narrative voice and welter of detail are
taxing. The reader has to work pretty hard to make out the larger
shape and purpose of the novel. Oddly, given that Khalifa is also a
screenwriter, there are relatively few scenes in the book and almost
no dialogue. Much of the book is pure chronicle, told in a diegetic
prose that is as unstintingly curious about the details of such minor
figures as say, Teodor, a Dutch photographer who’s enthusiastic
about the Russian Revolution, as it is about the characters who are
more central to the narrative.
 

One of the controlling ideas of the book is the importance of living
one’s own life and refusing to conform to any expectations, whether
they’re imposed by family, or religion; societal or aesthetic norms.
This attitude is reflected in the life of the author himself, who
chose a career as a writer at 15 and has continued to reside in
Damascus throughout the current war, when there are doubtless safer
and more comfortable havens available to him.

It’s commendable, I think, that the book is also clear-eyed about
the tragic price of such choices. Readers who persist will be rewarded
by a series of moving revelations. A love affair that has twinkled on
the margins of the story suddenly reveals itself; Hanna recognises
that his friendship with Zakariya has itself come at a terrible price;
and an almost unbearably sad act of commemoration takes place over the
book’s final pages. As the title implies, the novel sets out to be a
vast act of remembrance. Steeped in more recent tragedies, superbly
even-handed in its sympathies, it takes on the burden of granting all
of its characters the blessing of a final prayer.

* Fiction
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* the novel
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* Syria
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* Ottoman Empire
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* Aleppo
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* Arabic Literature in Translation
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* Contemporary Literature
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