Memory and Trauma in Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun
Author : Mohd. Irfan Habib Shaikh and Dr. Shaikh Kalimoddin Rashid
Abstract :
This paper examines how Elias Khoury turns the Nakba and its aftermath story into a polyphonic testimonial narrative where memory serves as both an archive and a wound. The novel, Gate of the Sun acknowledges the fragmented, delayed, and frequently inexpressible nature of traumatic experience while resisting the erasure of Palestinian identity by fusing together bits and pieces of memory, silences, and oral histories. According to the research, Gate of the Sun transforms personal memories into a collective storehouse of meaning by positioning storytelling as an act of cultural resistance and recovery. Khoury's work demonstrates that memory is a generative force that may reshape identity and create new conceptions of justice in the future, rather than being static or exclusively retrospective. By doing this, the novel adds to the recording of the Palestinian experience as well as to the field of global trauma studies, illustrating the ways in which literature may act as a site of cultural renewal, co-witness, and testifying.
Keywords :
Trauma, postmemory, storytelling, memory, narrative.