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INTERVIEWER

What did you study in Paris?

KHOURY

I studied social history with Alain Touraine at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. I wrote my thesis on the Mount Lebanon civil war, the conflict ­between the Maronites and the Druze from 1840 to 1860.

INTERVIEWER

What led you to that subject?

KHOURY

I discovered, to my surprise, that there were basically no written accounts of the war. There was no archive to consult, there were only the whispers you might hear at home—the Druze killed your grandfather, the Christians murdered your uncle, that kind of thing. To me, this lack of a specifically written past meant that we Lebanese had no present, either. I’m not interested in memory as such, I’m interested in the present. But to have a present, you have to know which things to forget and which things to remember. Our lack of written history made me feel that I didn’t even know the country I grew up in. I didn’t know my place in it. I don’t think I made any great discoveries as a historian, but when I began writing novels, a few years later, I found that I wanted to write the present—the present of our own civil war.

INTERVIEWER

What does that mean, “to write the present”? 

KHOURY

It means you have to name things as they really are. I remember Emile Habibi, the great Palestinian novelist, once said to me, How dare you give the characters of your novels Christian or Muslim names? Habibi was a Christian like me, of course. I said to him, But that’s the way our society is. You know that we can often tell a person by their name. And he said, You should give them neutral names. It’s what I do. So I said, Your own name isn’t neutral, it’s Emile! Are you going to change that?

INTERVIEWER

The early seventies must have been an interesting time to be a student in Paris. 

KHOURY

I remember going to some of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France. They were very popular. The Collège had to open several auditoriums just to fit the crowds. We’d arrive three or four hours early with our ­sandwiches and get a good seat. Foucault was like a wizard, so erudite. No one dared to ask him a question after he finished lecturing. At that time, I was also writing theater criticism for Mawaqif in Beirut. The poet Adonis, who was the editor in chief of the magazine, asked me to float the idea of collaborating with the Tel Quel group. So I met Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva and the whole gang, but I thought they were bourgeois Maoist phonies. Nothing came of it.

INTERVIEWER

At university you studied history and sociology, so what gave you the idea of writing a novel?

KHOURY

To be honest, I started to think of myself as a writer when I read Albert Camus’s The Stranger as a schoolboy and discovered that I knew the book by heart. I read it in Arabic first, French later. I used to memorize huge amounts of modern poetry in Arabic—Adonis, al-Sayyab, Khalil Hawi. I didn’t study them, I memorized them. And after I memorized The Stranger, I felt like I was actually the author. The book became a part of me, it was inside me. This happened every time I read a book I really loved. My sense wasn’t that I wanted to write something similar to what I’d read—no, my sense was that the book had entered me and that I was its author. I became obsessed with literature. Even when I was training in Syria, I brought novels with me to read.