It is Gandhi’s journey in the sense that it tells and retells his life from his birth in Mashta Hasan to his death when the Israelis reach Beirut on September 15, 1982, however this journey is also a way to tell other’s stories as well as the historical events happening around them. The journey is an obvious metaphor for writing as exploration and discovery. Instead of you traveling, the city travels,”(46) and he comes to the conclusion that, far from being the Switzerland of the East-as Beirut used to be called-Beirut today is like any other Third World city. The narrator deduces that, although Gandhi did not travel, the city did: “You stay where you are and it travels.
I find words that dangle like a rope, I climb the rope and I slip and when I tumble to the ground, I see the walls collapse and the city migrate 191Īs Samira Aghacy notes in her article on this novel: I tell about it and I don’t quench my thirst and I go on my journey to it and don’t find it. “Alice said he died” becomes a recurring phrase through the book, the starting off point for Gandhi’s story to be recounted to the narrator-author by an old woman who has seen many things in her life and embeds those stories, most of which could stand as stories by themselves, within the frame of Gandhi’s journey, which the life story of Abd Al-Karim, a shoe shine in a Beirut ravaged by civil war, a city that is itself on a journey: Elias Khoury’s The Journey of Little Gandhi begins with the death of the hero in the first chapter, following which the storyteller, Alice, opens each of her stories in the remaining five chapters with a lament for his death.Īlice said he died…Alice said she took him to the cemetry and she saw the people without faces…she spoke to them and didn’t get any response then she left them and went on her way.
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