The story takes place following the defeat of 1967, when, amidst a flood of accusation and self-criticism, the Palestinians have taken upon themselves the struggle to regain their land. The choice of such a central character, instead of the young, articulate fighter who might have been expected to be cast in that role, is consistent with Kanafani’s preferred method of analyzing a situation through his characters’ emotional reactions to it. To him, writes Anni Kanafani, “Umm Saad was a symbol of the Palestinian women in the camp and of the worker class, and the book about her speaks directly to the people whom she represents. In the dialogue between him and Umm Saad, it is the illiterate woman who speaks and the intellectual who listens and puts the questions.” Umm Saad is the most memorable in a gallery of peasant characters who appear in Kanafani’s novels and short stories. However cruel the blows life deals her, in the end she will recover; in her fundamental goodness, generosity, and willingness to stand out against the system, she is a cousin to Solzhenitsyn’s Matriona. Yet, this is scarcely an idealized portrayal; Umm Saad is credible in her simplicity, and in writing about her Kanafani maintained an understated realism.
The choice of peasant characters in general, and Umm Saad in particular, is not without a political motive. The nature of Zionist colonization, with its stress on acquiring land, struck at the existence of the peasants, the largest section of Palestinian society. But Kanafani clearly felt an affinity with the peasants that went far beyond the dictates of a political stand, and this accounts for the insight with which he portrayed them. The figure of the farmer attached to his land has seldom been sympathetically portrayed in Arabic literature before this century, and characters such as Umm Saad and Abu Qais represent an enrichment of the Arabic literary tradition. Indeed, some would say that Kanafani’s greatest achievement lay in his portrayal of the Palestinian peasant, both before and after 1948.
That Kanafani was not so concerned with politics that all his writing was invaded by it can be seen from such stories as “A Hand in the Grave.” Because of the series of false positions in which the characters are placed, or place themselves, what might have been a harmless dare turns out to have a tragic consequence. The matter-of-fact style of narration and realistic portrayal of scenes from the narrator’s family life foreshadow his own hardheaded reaction to the incident; by contrast, the more suggestible Suhail is the victim of a limited but nonetheless genuine tragedy, which is not lessened by the consideration that it was caused by cowardice, meanness, and dishonesty.
The theme of tragedy brought about by human weakness and petty vices repeats itself in many of Kanafani’s stories, whether or not the setting is Palestinian. It is one of the strands running through “If You Were a Horse …,” in which other motifs that recur in Kanafani’s work also can be discerned.