We started discussing things we knew by heart, fighting as though we’d fought before and dying as though we were mimicking our own deaths.

God, what times!

I speak of those times as though they were over, but actually that’s both true and false. We’re “caught,” as Major Mamdouh used to say. We’re caught and have no alternatives. We get out of one tight place only to crawl into another. “All that’s wrought is caught,” as they say. That’s how history works: When you have no alternatives, you get caught and twist in the breeze in spite of yourself.

I sit before you with Major Mamdouh’s words resonating in my ears. I’m stuck here, so are you, and so is Dr. Amjad, and everyone else. And Mamdouh? I believe he got out of his tight spot because he managed to get a visa for Paris. But what became of him? Did he become a millionaire and live an easy life? Of course not. Mamdouh got to France, married for the sake of getting married (as he said in the only letter he sent his mother), and died of a heart attack. No soul knows in what land it shall die.

We were talking about history and I don’t want to upset you with Major Mamdouh’s tragic end — even though it wasn’t a tragedy — tragedy calls for tears while Mamdouh’s death made me laugh. Imagine, a man who spent all his time searching for a way out of the trap and then, when he gets out, dies! Mamdouh died in ’81, so one year before the Israeli incursion into Lebanon — a year before his appointment with death. If Mamdouh had remained stuck with us in Beirut, he would have died in ’82 as thousands did, but he postponed his appointment.

I go back to China to say that history bewitched me during those two weeks of intensive military training. I discovered how it was possible to open the book of history, enter it, and be the reader and the read at the same time. This is the illusion that revolution creates for us. It makes us believe we’re both the individual and the mirror, and it leads to terrible things.

I’d fallen under the spell, until the day the doctor said I was unfit to continue training and told me to pack my bags to go back to my country. But instead of taking me back to Beirut, they took me to another camp and pronounced me a doctor.

I won’t bother you with the ins and outs of Chinese medicine, which I never learned — I remember almost nothing of it, particularly not the names of herbs, which our teacher knew only in Chinese. But I discovered the human body. I discovered the existence of an interconnecting natural logic with a precise regime that controls our bodies. Through the body I discovered the soul of things, the links between our bodies and nature, and the limitlessness of man.

You’ll say these philosophical theories I’m repeating are an attempt to cover up my ignorance of medicine. Not true. I’m convinced of these things and that’s why I’m treating you according to my own methods. Of course, you’re not the issue; Dr. Amjad was right when he pronounced you a vegetable. But I’m convinced that the soul has its own laws and that the body is a vessel for the soul. I’m trying to rouse you with my stories because I’m certain that the soul can, if it wants, wake a sleeping body.

In China, in spite of everything, and in spite of the madness of history raging in my head, I learned the most valuable thing in my life. I learned that each of our bodies holds the entire history of the human race; your body is your history. I’m the living proof. Look at me. Can’t you see the pain tearing at me? The Chinese doctor was right. The break in my spinal column, dormant for many years, has suddenly come back to life. The pain is everywhere, and painkillers are useless.

Our body is our history, dear friend. Take a look at your history in your wasting body and tell me, wouldn’t it be better if you got up and shook off death?

I learned medicine in China and returned to Lebanon, a doctor, understanding nothing of medicine beyond its general principles, but speaking English!

After I transferred out of the training course, I was taken to a field hospital belonging to the Chinese People’s Army, where a tall man — the Chinese are not all short, as we have a tendency to think — asked me if I spoke English. He asked me in English, so I answered, “Yes.” I used to think I knew English, which we studied in the UNWRA schools^*. So they put me with a group of trainees, most of them Africans. The training doctor taught the course in English. I didn’t understand a thing. Well, actually, I understood a little bit, so I decided to pretend I was following everything. I learned to parrot everything that was said in front of me and ended up learning the language. I discovered I was no worse than the others. To speak English, you don’t really have to know it; this is the source of its power. With amazing speed I retained the doctor’s lectures and came back from China rattling on in English, tossing in a few medical terms to convince people that I was a real doctor. Everything was fine.

What I can’t forget is that, when I spoke English in China, I felt I wasn’t myself. Sometimes I’d be my Chinese professor or my African colleague, or I’d imitate the Pakistani. Oh, our group was composed of ten students, eight from Nigeria, me, and a Pakistani. The Pakistani knew more than we did; he said he’d been a student at the medical school in Karachi, had been thrown out because of his political activism and had come to China to study the science of revolution. He didn’t want to study medicine, but they’d forced him to join this course before training him for guerrilla warfare.

I’d imitate him and feel myself becoming another person inside the English language. I’d react as they did — especially like the Pakistani, who would change totally when he got excited, stretching his mouth so that he looked like the heroes in American films when they scream, Fuck!

I figured out something very important. I realized that when I spoke, I was imitating others. Every word I spoke in English had to pass through the image of another person, as if the person speaking weren’t me. And when I returned to Beirut and started speaking Arabic again, I found myself again, I found the Khalil I’d left behind.

In China I discovered that when I spoke the language of others I became like them. This isn’t true, of course. But what if it were? What if, even in Arabic, I was imitating others? And that the only difference was that here I no longer knew who it was I was imitating? We learn our mother tongues from our mothers, imitating them, but we forget that. As we forget, we become ourselves; we speak and believe that we’re the ones who are speaking.

Now I’ve begun to understand your feelings about your father’s voice. You told me that sometimes you felt that the voice emerging from your throat was that of the blind sheikh: “It’s amazing, but I began to look like him, and when I spoke I started to feel it was he who was using my tongue.”

No, no, I don’t agree with that theory. It’s true we imitate, but we shape our own language as we shape our own lives. I don’t know my father. All I remember is a shadow, and I can’t tell you now — or in twenty years — that it’s that shadow’s voice that emerges from my throat.

Of course we imitate, but we forget, and forgetting is a blessing. Without forgetting we would all die of fright and abuse. Memory is the process of organizing what to forget, and what we’re doing now, you and me, is organizing our forgetting. We talk about things and forget other things. We remember in order to forget, this is the essence of the game. But don’t you dare die now! You have to finish organizing your forgetting first, so that I can remember afterwards.

Even now, when I say the word fuck, I see the Pakistani with his distended mouth, white teeth, and fine oblong jaw like the beak of a bird; I feel his voice in my throat, and I can smell China.