Revolution or Familial War: Revolutionary Failures in Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work

Abstract

 In Death is Hard Work, Khaled Khalifa attempts to understand what it means to have a حرب أهلية, ḥarb ahlīyah, a civil war. Khalifa’s novel partially describes the war as a family or familial war, as the word أهل, ahl, is commonly used in spoken Arabic to refer to immediate family members and relatives. Khalifa elaborates on this notion through the Arabic metaphor and draws a comparison between Abdel Latif Al Salim’s family crisis and dysfunctions, on the one hand, and the ongoing war in Syria, on the other one. As he does that, he observes that in both cases a “revolutionary” mentality underlies the conflictual scene in the country. As such, the strenuous journey Abdel Latif’s children take to bury their father is an attempt to bury the very “revolutionary” mindset he stands to signify; for “revolutionary” masks incompetence, escapism and cowardice. Abdel Latif is a revolutionary figure inasmuch as he wants to effect major changes in Syrian society and win the larger war without fighting and winning the smaller battles in his family and immediate circles. Abdel Latif’s son Bolbol, the protagonist of the novel, represents an attempt to break away from his father’s legacy of sloganeering and big but failed causes. Bolbol’s actions advocate a humanist commitment to family as a potential way forward and away from a defeatist, destructive family, cultural, and political ideological heritage that goes back to the 1950s and 1960s. Outdated revolutions of this type are obsolete, leading to backward looking conflicts that double down on nationalist and nativist ideologies.