Introducing Vénus Khoury-Ghata (2001)

1 6 Women in French Studies Introducing Vénus Khoury-Ghata Marilyn Hacker Vénus Khoury-Ghata was born in Lebanon in December, 1937. She has lived in France since 1972. Not the child of the intelligentsia or the diplomatic world like many literary émigrés, she was born to a Maronite Christian family, one of four children of a village policeman and a housewife she's described as "illiterate in two languages." It was the poet's younger brother who first aspired to a literary career; it was also her brother who was the tyrannical father's scapegoat, who turned to drugs in his teens and was paternally immured in a rudimentary mental hospital. This marking story was recounted lyrically by Khoury-Ghata in 1998 in Une Maison au borddes larmes— -the only one of her fourteen novels which eschews fictional invention for autobiographical material. This novel shares the counterpoint present in all of Khoury-Ghata's poetry, between the immediate lyric or narrative and the backdrop of contemporary history—the history of war-torn Lebanon. In the construction of the poet's personal myth of origins, it was the silencing of the gifted, vulnerable brother which gave his sister access to the written word. (In the same year that Khoury-Ghata published Une Maison au bord des larmes, her sister, the journalist May Ménassa, who stayed in Lebanon and writes in Arabic, published a novel on the same subject—neither sister knew of the other's project before the books appeared.) Khoury-Ghata's work bridges the anti-lyrical surrealist tradition which has informed modern French poetry since Baudelaire and the parabolic and communal narrative with its (we might say Homeric) repetitions of metaphors and semi-mythic tropes of Arabic poetry. Though there are many Francophone poets of Arab origin, including women poets such as Andrée Chedid, Joyce Mansour and Nadia Tueni, Khoury-Ghata's work is unique in its synthesis ofthe quotidian and the fantastic, its conciliation ofthe narrative and the lyric. Most ofher poems have for implicit backdrop the language and landscape ofthe poet's mother country. Though she was raised bilingual, her mother tongue was Arabic, and her earliest writings were in that language. She writes: "Nourished by the two languages, I write in Arabic through the French language." As she oscillates between French and Arabic, Khoury-Ghata moves with equal fluidity between poetry and fiction, and, in her poems especially, between life and death. Death becomes another mode of life, an ironic one carried on six feet below our surfaces, where the dead, according to the poet's own mythology, and once more not unlike Homeric shades, "nourish themselves on the smell ofour bread, drink the steam rising from our water, live on our noises." Death itself has a double register: as experienced on a personal Hacker1 7 level, but with the collective specter of200,000 people dead in Lebanon during the war that marked the poet's youth serving as a chorus in the intimate tragedy. According to Khoury-Ghata, the word "death" is a cornerstone of her work, making its way into several titles. This began for her "in 1975 with the unbearable images ofLebanon drowned in its own blood. Cadavers were laid out on wooden planks to be shoved into ditches for common burial with the same movement as a baker putting bread into the oven." Death: daily bread for the Lebanese. "I felt guilty about transforming the dead into words, lining them up like lead soldiers on my pages, but I was incapable of turning to another subject. Five years later, this collective death gave way to an individual death, that ofmy husband, the father ofmy daughter. Death which I'd picked up and examined barehanded blew up in my face." Much ofKhoury-Ghata's poetry, as well as Une Maison au borddes larmes, could be described by Audre Lorde's term "biomythography," which Lorde coined for her own narrative Zami. Lorde's book resembles the classical mem- ?'?t/bildungsroman more closely than does anything in Khoury-Ghata's work. What they have in common is at once their ex-centricity: the West Indian child in the Bronx...