All that we've built, from the roads to the towers, from the places of learning to the places of worship, the entire edifice of civilization, would not be possible without communication. It is the means by which we not only understand one another, but the means by which we cooperate, pooling our talents and our efforts in the realization of a single goal we could not have achieved individually. But what is the best form of communication?
Language stakes a compelling claim. After all, we can speak it swiftly and dynamically, allowing for complex ideas to be reduced to fairly simple verbal codes. But language is also fragmentary, subject to a kind of geographic drift that causes its codes to mutate until they mean different things to different people. Symbols, meanwhile, are equally potent but also equally challenging. For as much as they benefit from a simplicity of form, allowing the mind to ruminate on their essences without needing linguistics to parse their meanings, this makes them even more malleable. For symbols might end up meaning entirely different things to siblings, let alone to strangers. Which leaves us with dreams, those ephemeral voyages through the armed and dangerous subconscious, a place where truth is rife if it can only be properly interpreted. Perhaps we require all of these methods to communicate, or perhaps life is a battle to see which will be dominant. Mr. Khoury has, here, much to say on this question.
In a rapidly changing Middle East, where borders are literally being redrawn in response to the political tornados kicked up by World War II, life is evolving far too quickly for the millions impacted by such swiftly changing realities. Out of the sands of British-controlled Palestine has erupted the Jewish state, an event which has sent out turbulent shockwaves throughout the region. In the years to come, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine will gain and lose territory, acquire and discard western masters, and adhere to or reject kings, the chaos of which will see them plunged into a modern world that bears chillingly few similarities with the reassuringly familiar past.
Dropped into this uncertainty are Meelya and mansour, a young Lebanese couple who straddle two very different generations. Married in 1946, their parents were subjects of the ottoman empire and their children will be governed by Hezzbollah, placing them at the heart of events that will transform the 20th century for the Middle East. How Meelya and Mansour will navigate both these changes and their own lives, though, will test their love and their sanity. For whereas mansour believes in the power of poetry to create unity, and even victory, out of division and tumult, Meelya, rejects this view. To her, words mean almost nothing next to the power of the vivid and jumbled dreams that have characterized her entire life. These vivid experiences are so powerful that they draw Meelya out of the real world, painting for her a continuum of past, present and future that is subject to nothing more than the laws of the imagination.
Their battle of competing views revolves around Meelya's painful pregnancy which appears, at times, to mirror that of Christ's birth. As Meelya slips deeper into her dreamworld, Mansour tries to reach down and pull her to what he considers safety. But for Meelya, the world of dreams is a world of knowledge and power, a place where she can walk with giants.
Originally published in Arabic in 2007, As Though She Were Sleeping is a challenging novel. Mr. Khoury uses Meelya's dreams to toy with time in a way that demands the reader relinquish his conventional notions of reality so that he might be drawn down into a transient world seething with non-linear events. This dreamscape, if embraced, becomes a rewarding place, a canvas upon which the author can express his lyrical notions of language and politics for which the physical world has proven to be too rigid. Such is Mr. Khoury's talent that, though this world is anathema to the structured manner in which many of us think, he succeeds in conveying both its power and its danger. For as much as we come to understand the ways in which Meelya gains wisdom from her dreaming, we also see the extent to which it drives her husband mad. Meelya is inaccessible to him, a creature whose mind might as well be located on the moon for as much as he can engage with it. This clearly results in a less than ideal partnership.
There's a kind of insanity in Meelya, a dreamy drifting from moment to moment, event to event, that has permanently unmoored her from reality. While she walks with monks and saints, gods and their crucified children, the rest of us live in a world ruled by physical laws that are as well-understood as they are unbreakable. What's more, Meelya's dreaming robs those around her from knowing her in any meaningful way. For she has withdrawn to a world that, though ti is dynamic, cannot be shared. In this, despite the shortcomings of his own preferred poetry, Mansour's means of expressing himself has much more potential for personal reward and lasting, cultural change. But then, we get the sense that Meelya could not care less. For she is content in her knowing in a way the rest of us will never be.
As Though She Were Sleeping was banned throughout much of the Middle East for some of its steamier passages. Though all such bans are ridiculous, Mr. Khoury's case is particularly so. For this is infinitely more a contemplation of knowledge and expression than it is an attempt at erotica. But then try explaining this to the narrowminded censors to whom the literary page is nothing more than a collection of inked words, some of which have the distinction of being taboo to the ignorant.
A surrealist's dream... For the rest of us, an interesting exercise, but one that requires perhaps too much effort on the part of the reader to temporarily abandon his conceptions of reality. (3/5 Stars)
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