Elias Khoury - Little Mountain

I left him and ran for the metro. I didn’t turn to look back, just ran fast. She may still be waiting for me.

* A reference to the culmination of two years of intermittent clashes, from 1968 to 1970, between the Jordanian army and the PLO in Jordan, when thousands of civilians were killed.

* A famous hill on the edge of Damascus.

* Originally a popular term, the word fahlawi was used by the Syrian thinker Sadeq Jalal al-Athm in his book Self-Criticism after the Defeat (al-naqd al-d-hati ba’d al-hazimah) to portray the Arab personality which substitutes words for action, in other words, an unproductive personality.

** A kind of formulaic poetry which is typical of the oral traditions of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine.

* The start of a seven-month-long cabinet crisis in Lebanon when there was only a caretaker government. This followed a period of mounting tension between the Lebanese state and the PLO.

** Originally a Turkish word meaning “mister,” still used today in its slightly modified form to address officers, especially in the police force.

* The name of the largest confectionary manufacturers in Lebanon whose workers were in the vanguard of the worker protest movement of the early ’70s. During a peaceful demonstration in 1972, several of them were killed when the army opened fire on the demonstrators.

* An allusion to the unity of Egypt under the Pharaohs, the double crown referring to Lower Egypt and Upper Egypt.

* Jamal Pasha, nicknamed the killer’, was the Ottoman military governor of Lebanon who ordered the hanging of 33 nationalists in 1915-16.