الجبل الصغير
The Little Mountain
Elias Khoury

The Little Mountain, published in 1977, touches from various perspectives on the chaos that colonial rule left in Lebanon—the rifts between Christians and Muslims, the Palestinian refugee camps and the battles between the military factions—a country in which everyone had a hand in the pot, everything was fluid, and alliances shifted in a moment.

Khoury described this disintegration with a new poetics, a fragmentary and heterogeneous literature that renounced all obligations to a stable form. This “alloy”—as Edward Said termed it in the book’s afterword—created the tool necessary for “giving a voice to uprooted diasporas and trapped refugees, the dismantling of borders and the shifting of identities, the demands of radicalism and of new languages.”

In The Little Mountain one can find all the characteristics that eventually became the hallmarks of Khoury’s writing: shreds of autobiography, perhaps true, perhaps imaginary, a mix of times, a disruption of syntax, and sheer violence.

Translation: Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabany | Translation editor: Kifah Abd Elhalim | Literary editing: Dafna Rosenblit | Afterword: Edward Said | Farewell: Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabany