I think that the last book of The Book of Khalid was my favorite, just because so much happened in this book. We’ve seen him grow so much from star-crossed lover (no pun intended) and his struggle with his religion, his stay in jail, being excommunicated and his experiment with solitude in which he contemplates suicide. This poor guy has had it tough. I think it is ironic that the final book is dedicated “To God” since for the better part of his life he is struggling with his idea of God and his religion. This tends to get him in trouble a lot and so you wouldn’t think that would be one of the last things in his mind to be dedicating to but he thinks just the opposite. No matter how he praises, whether he consults the Bible, or the Koran, or the other things that he mentioned, and no matter how confused he is, in the end, he realizes that he will never really find all the answers out and is able to be at peace, for once, with that.

As mentioned in class, there are three parts to an Arabic poem(?); the Naseeb, Rahil, and the Fakhr. The three chapters almost fall into these categories, except the last chapter, especially the ending. In the first book, Khalid gives a nostalgic description of his homeland after residing briefly in New York. In the next book he describes his journey in search of his beloved, Najma, on his return with Shakib to Lebanon. The third and final book doesn't easily fit into praising himself or his country.
I find it rather interesting that Khalid tries to induce a "revolution" in his people when he says,"We are doomed to be drudges of neurasthenic, psychopathic, egoistic masters, if we do not open our minds to the light of science and truth." In other words, he is saying his people could be better off than the Europeans or Americans if only they will apply themselves and open their hearts to the truth -for which he almost got himself killed.
Khalid is fascinated by cousin Najib, who has a very kin interest in imitating people around him, and dare i say he opens Khalid's eyes and mind further to life around him. When the boy keeps on "accidentally" pointing to what lay under his navel, Khalid ponders what the child means by doing that everytime and in the same manner to which Khalid says that an "accident" fails to be an accident if it occurs in the same manner and under the same conditions. Khalid teaches the child to dance the dance of the dervish and die but the question is, die to what? to cares of the world?

I agree with Kip in that Khalid idolizes childhood-ness and the child's ability to more directly interact with the world, with the phenomena of the world, and the with the rest Kip's overall analysis of this later chapter. I was also struck by the East- West evils theme but wonder if some of the narrator's scarcasm and loving contempt(?) for Khalid dosen't still show up in this chapter. The naarator talks of Najib's ability to mimic and respond to adult behavoir in a way that almost, to me, references the spirtual fads that Khalid was engaged in in the the American parts of the novel( looking for morality, or "rightness" in politics, religon and ethinic identity)in a condensed way. Khalid serching for identity, Khalid rejecting identity...in a way Najib follows this path at an accelerated pace. And where dose it go? death. It's complicated, the novel becomes much more complicated for me here. Where the story really should be just begining ( in a traditional sense of story), or just at its meat, the author, the narrator, and Khalid desert us. I don't know... this is interesting to me, i'm not certian what is being said here.

as for the poem , there is alot going on here. There is alot of historical and cultural and references included that i have an , at best, remeidal understanding of. Nasser seems to have been a figure head for a larger "Arab" socialist movement in the sixties and seventies and it is intriging that he shows up in this poem that seems to ground itself in Beruit( I understand him to be an more, although not exclusivly, Egyption leader.) and California geographically. Then again, Dostoevsky shows up to play a similar role in the poem:a revolutionary who is concerned for the working class and is punsihed for it. This poem seems to opperate on many levels of idenity: ethinic, class, national, gender , generational.. I'm certian that I'm missing alot. anyway....I'm working on about four hours of sleep for the past three days so much of this probably isn't making any sense. sorry

I guess I’ll comment on the closing chapters of The Book of Khalid because I’m still thinking about how to approach the poets. So, I think my favorite thing Khalid has said so far is ‘“there is a deeper understanding between man and child than between man and man.”’ You can easily think about this time in “The Desert” with Khalid as a clean slate and the reader doesn’t have to wonder “what does Khalid mean?” or “who is the voice of the narrator?” All you have to do is take in the innocent qualities of Najib and feel that this is the truth in the world; it doesn’t get better than that. I get reminded of that quote by Pablo Picasso where he says that every child is an artist but that the problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. And definitely part of an artist would be to ask questions and experience the world vividly. Khalid idolizes the child because Najib is everything Khalid wants the world to be- that he wants himself to be in some ways. Because Najib questions things without questioning why he asks a certain question. And Najib watches nature with a joy that an adult would have to tell themselves “I’m going to go experience nature because it will make me joyful.” The child doesn’t have to consider it- the child appreciates it for what it is and doesn’t go into the mazes of rhetoric and egotism that adults might take it to.

In the end, I think the author’s point in Najib’s death is to clearly show what Khalid has been fighting. Khalid has had so many ideas and thoughts- sometimes just for the sake of thought, but his ultimate goal, as declared by the Damascene editor, is to combine‘“the soul of the East and the mind of the West, the builder of a great Asiatic Empire.” Through the death of this innocent child, especially with the images of the incompetent doctors (Western evils) and Khalid teaching Najib how to dance like a dervish and land in a grave (Eastern evils), the reader can identify this evil that Khalid has so devoted his energy to defeating throughout the novel. Nothing is more traumatic than the death of a child- the death of love and dreams.

Here is an example of an hypertext-annotated poem, Eliot's The Waste Land.

Ours will be more simple. We're only going to use hyperlinks to outside articles and alt text with your interpretative notes on the passages you'll work on in class.