Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories

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INTRODUCTION
Hilary Kilpatrick

GHASSAN KANAFANI WAS KNOWN IN THE WEST AS THE spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and as the editor of its weekly, Al-Hadaf. But in the Arab world, he was also considered a leading novelist and one of the foremost Palestinian prose writers.
He was born in 1936 in Acre, northern Palestine, from which his family fled in 1948, settling finally in Damascus. After completing his studies, he worked as a teacher and journalist, first in the Syrian capital and then in Kuwait. Later he moved to Beirut, where he wrote for several newspapers before starting Al-Hadaf in 1969. The magazine soon established itself and was widely quoted in the foreign press. Kanafani was for a time an active member of the Arab Nationalist Movement, but as his political ideas developed he moved toward Marxism, and eventually he came to share George Habash’s belief that the solution to the Palestine problem could not be achieved without a social revolution throughout the Arab world.
Kanafani and his niece were killed in the explosion of his booby-trapped car in July 1972. He left a widow and two children.
His published works include five novels, two of them unfinished, five collections of short stories, two plays, and two studies of Palestinian literature. In the memoir that she published after his death, Kanafani’s wife, Anni, wrote:

His inspiration for writing and working unceasingly was the Palestinian-Arab struggle…. He was one of those who fought sincerely for the development of the resistance movement from a nationalist Palestinian liberation movement into a pan-Arab revolutionary socialist movement of which the liberation of Palestine would be a vital component. He always stressed that the Palestine problem could not be solved in isolation from the Arab world’s whole social and political situation.

This attitude developed naturally out of his own experiences. At the age of twelve, Kanafani went through the trauma of becoming a refugee, and thereafter he lived in exile in various Arab countries, not always with official approval. Men in the Sun, for example, was written “when the political situation [in Lebanon] was particularly unstable and [Ghassan] had to remain hidden at home for more than a month because of his lack of official papers.” His people were scattered, many of them living in camps or struggling to make a living doing the most menial work; their only hope lay in the future, and in their children, for whose education they made enormous sacrifices. In a letter to his son, Kanafani wrote:

I heard you in the other room asking your mother: “Mama, am I a Palestinian?” When she answered “Yes,” a heavy silence fell on the whole house. It was as if something hanging over our heads had fallen, its noise exploding, then—silence.
Afterwards … I heard you crying. I could not move. There was something bigger than my awareness being born in the other room through your bewildered sobbing. It was as if a blessed scalpel was cutting up your chest and putting there the heart that belongs to you…. I was unable to move to see what was happening in the other room. I knew, however, that a distant homeland was being born again; hills, plains, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child…. Do not believe that man grows. No; he is born suddenly—a word, in a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb. One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood on to the ruggedness of the road.