Mario Cossali, art critic, will lead the discussion.
Historians, what date will they attribute to the beginning of this war? Did the war start in 1975, 1973, 1967, 1958, or 1860? I have no idea. All these dates could be considered the eve of a long war that led to the destruction of the country.
Elias Khuri
The Gate of the Sun - A young doctor stands at the bedside of his dying spiritual father. Outside the hospital windows stretches the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. The old militant in a coma dreams of writing a story without beginning or end, the story of the Palestinian people. This story, in a sort of therapy, is recounted to him by his disciple: the Lebanese civil war, significant episodes of his life, and the journeys of a handful of men and women surrounded by history, starting with the expulsion from Galilee in 1948.
In The Gate of the Sun, the narrator brings an entire people to life, their exodus, fifty years of wars with the spellbinding fervor used to revive a vegetative body.
