2023-10-02 15:00:43
by VIVIANA MAZZA, our correspondent in New York
The writer who passed away in Damascus at the age of 59. Disliked by the regime, he had never wanted to leave the country. In 2013 he won the Naguib Mahfouz Prize from the American University in Cairo
One evening ten years ago Khaled Khalifa had a heart attack, like the one that killed him on Saturday 30 September at the age of 59. Ten years ago, hospitalized in intensive care in Damascus, he had imagined what would have happened if he had died at that moment, in war-torn Syria. In the space of 5 minutes, the novel that would be born passed before his eyes, Dying a difficult profession, published in Italy by Bompiani. My loved ones would carry my body to the family grave in our village north of Aleppo, he told us. They were terrible days, you couldn’t reach the city center without passing through several checkpoints. And he added: I felt that this novel would kill me if I didn’t narrate it. I wrote it so I wouldn’t die.
Nobody mourns the protagonist of that book, who died of natural causes in the war. But today the world mourns the loss of a great international writer, who decided to stay in Syria and refused to give up pleasure, joy, imagination and hope, during these years of brutal repression by the regime against the population.
In 2012, at a procession for his musician friend Rabi Ghazzy, who was found dead with a blow to the head in a car, his left hand was broken. He wrote that his people had been subjected to genocide by the regime. In the darkest moments, during massacres, arrests, the use of chemical weapons on the population, the words did not come but then returned. He wrote for TV and cinema, as well as novels such as the masterpieces The Praise of Hate and There are no more knives in the kitchens of this city (both Bompiani). In the evenings, even during the repression, she gathered with friends at the bar or at someone’s house (after a while not at her house, because she was under surveillance), she drank arak, white as mother’s milk. When his neighborhood of Barzeh was under siege by the regime, he stayed at home for days, sometimes without electricity or internet. He loved cooking as much as writing. He made pickles, thinking back to his childhood, under the gaze of the portrait of his mother, identical to him. The regime was afraid to arrest him, he feared the uproar he would cause. The secret police periodically prohibited him from leaving the country. a Syrian problem, he would reply if you asked him if you could help. Eventually he resumed his travels: Beirut, Cairo, London, Italy, the United States, but he always returned home. Once they lost his luggage at the airport in Rome. The important thing is my laptop, the rest doesn’t matter, he wrote to me asking us to get it back. Inside him was the only copy of an unpublished novel by him.
In recent years he had moved to Latakia, on the coast: he wrote and painted. He rejected the idea that hatred will win: he was convinced that, if there is justice, the Syrians will put aside revenge and rebuild, for their children.
October 2, 2023 (modified October 2, 2023 | 2:53 pm)
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