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.

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His close involvement in the struggle for the recognition and restitution of Palestinian rights might lead us to expect that Kanafani’s novels and short stories would be no more than vehicles for the preaching of those principles, albeit in an indirect form. Part of his achievement, however, lies in the fact that he avoided this pitfall—for rather than transfer experience directly from reality to the printed page, he reworked it to give it a more profound, universal meaning. “The Land of Sad Oranges” reveals the way in which he did this: the flight of Palestinians from their country is woven together with the themes of the reduction of a family to destitution and its children’s loss of innocence, and the scene in which the narrator’s uncle tries to shoot his children and himself provides the culminating point of all three strands. Concentrating on the day-today tragedy of one family, Kanafani avoided theorizing about wider historical issues. By refusing both to analyze the causes of the flight of this family and to indulge in accusations against specific groups, he gave his characters, passive victims of events, a universal quality that is reinforced by the symbol of their banishment.
Men in the Sun reveals an equal commitment to the Palestinian cause, but also a development on both the political and the artistic levels. The novella tells of four Palestinians in exile struggling to build, or rebuild, a future. On one level it can be read as an exposé of their weakness in preferring the search for material security over the fight to regain their land, and also as an attack on the corruption of the Arab regimes that allowed them to suffocate in an airless, marginal world of refugee camps. In fact, at the time the book was published, many readers took the ending literally, and Kanafani was accused by enraged compatriots of “throwing Palestinians on the garbage heap.”* But there is more to it than that. Abu Qais’s memories of the land he left behind and of his daughter’s birth a month after the family left its village could be matched by the stories of thousands of displaced persons who have been uprooted in Europe and elsewhere. The naive, barely educated Marwan, setting off into the unknown in order to support his family, is a brother of the economic refugees from the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and the Indian subcontinent who throng London, Paris, and Munich. The desert, often used as a symbol by Kanafani, here represents the ordeal of fire that the Palestinians must pass through, and it is depicted in its starkest guise; its presence contributes to the suspense that is built up as the lorry races along under the broiling August sun. Moreover, Kanafani’s interest in technique is clearly revealed, as he skillfully blends present and past in the consciousness of his four characters, thereby enabling the reader to perceive their motives for undertaking the hazardous journey. The careful construction and controlled economy of the writing contribute to the total effect of a short novel that is among the best in Arabic literature.
“Umm Saad,” one of a collection of stories built around a middle-aged refugee peasant woman, reveals a further stage in ideological development.

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.

One of these concerns superstition, foretelling

the future, and the extent to which a supposed knowledge of what will happen can influence the course of events. The son who has respected his father’s superstitious belief fears that he may thus have brought about the disaster he sought to avoid. Kanafani set a puzzle for the reader, and by not supplying an answer he avoided committing himself on whether there might be anything in the idea that the future can be foretold or impending disasters averted by warnings. But aside from the metaphysical question, there is the level of practical action, and there Kanafani’s criticism of Arab society can be seen at work. Superstitions that provide a justification for passivity are to be condemned; through the false sense of security that they engender, they pave the way for tragedies that need not be inevitable, given a realistic appreciation of the situation.
The horse that appears in this story is more than a mechanical device to assist the flow of the plot. Kanafani liked to paint horses, and they play an important role in others of his stories and novels. His wife describes the meaning that they had for him: “The horse to us Arabs, he said, symbolizes beauty, courage, honesty, intelligence, truth, and freedom.” That Barq, the heartbreakingly beautiful horse, should have killed the wife whom Abu Ibrahim passionately loved reveals the connection that often exists in Kanafani’s work between ideal qualities and death, especially when these ideal qualities wake a great love.
A similar combination of motifs—beauty, mysterious tenderness, love, and death—is to be found in “The Falcon,” a haunting interweaving of symbol and reality. The setting, a nameless town being developed on the edge of the desert, and the engineers and guards working at the construction site could be duplicated all over the Gulf area. The use of this milieu by a Palestinian writer is particularly apposite, since its desolate but financially rewarding conditions have attracted many Palestinian professionals who have been unable to find work elsewhere. The figure of Jadaan provides a stark contrast with this world. As a bedouin, he represents an alien way of life, which in other circumstances may have been perceived as hostile and threatening; here, though, paradoxically, it is their contact with the bedouin guards that prevents the engineers from feeling completely isolated. Jadaan himself is a symbol of pride, of grandeur, and of devotion to an ideal so great that he sacrifices his life for it. Having given up all for a love that was doomed to tragedy, he waits, calm and unmoved, for death; only his pride remains to him.
In some of Kanafani’s stories, the hero chooses death not for individualistic reasons, but in order to further the struggle of his people, thus illustrating the attitude toward death that Kanafani himself came to hold. Anni Kanafani relates her husband’s response when a Western correspondent asked him, shortly before he was killed, whether death had a meaning to him:

Of course death means a lot. The important thing is to know why. Self-sacrifice, within the context of revolutionary action, is an expression of the very highest understanding of life, and of the struggle to make life worthy of a human being. The love of life for a person becomes a love for the life of his people’s masses, and his rejection that their life persists in being full of continuous misery, suffering, and hardship. Hence, his understanding of life becomes a social virtue, capable of convincing the militant fighter that self-sacrifice is a redemption of his people’s life. This is a maximum expression of attachment to life.

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Kanafani lived and died according to his ideals. Yet, unlike many committed writers, he refused to impose an ideological scheme on his fiction in any but the most general terms. He believed that the role of literature in the transformation of society was different from that of other forms of writing, and it should therefore not be subjected to rigid rules applicable elsewhere. Thus, although his plays, novels, and short stories were written to serve the cause of Palestine, they have a universal appeal, thanks to his literary talents and his tenacity in preserving that freedom without which art is stifled.

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* Those who have seen the filmed version of the novella, Al-Makhdûcûn (The Deceived, 1972), will realize that the plot has been altered, so that the three Palestinians who in the book die in silence are shown in the film beating on the walls of their hiding place as they suffocate, to attract the attention of those outside. A film similar to the novella in its dénouement would have appeared glaringly incongruous at a time when the resistance movements were established.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE TRANSLATOR WOULD LIKE TO THANK ROGER Hardy and Muhammad Tarbush for the trouble they took in reading through the translation and suggesting improvements.
“Letter from Gaza” was published originally in Arabic in 1956; “The Land of Sad Oranges” in 1958; “‘If You Were a Horse …’” and “The Falcon” in 1961; Men in the Sun and “A Hand in the Grave” in 1962; and Umm Saad in 1969.
“The Falcon” and an extract from Umm Saad appeared in English in Middle East International.

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MEN IN THE SUN

ABU QAIS

Abu Qais rested on the damp ground, and the earth began to throb under him with tired heartbeats, which trembled through the grains of sand and penetrated the cells of his body. Every time he threw himself down with his chest to the ground he sensed that throbbing, as though the heart of the earth had been pushing its difficult way towards the light from the utmost depths of hell, ever since the first time he had lain there. Once when he said that to his neighbor, with whom he shared the field in the land he left ten years ago, the man answered mockingly:
“It’s the sound of your own heart. You can hear it when you lay your chest close to the ground.”
What wicked nonsense! And the smell, then? The smell that, when he sniffed it, surged into his head and then poured down into his veins. Every time he breathed the scent of the earth, as he lay on it, he imagined that he was sniffing his wife’s hair when she had just walked out of the bathroom, after washing with cold water. The very same smell, the smell of a woman who had washed with cold water and covered his face with her hair while it was still damp. The same throbbing, like carrying a small bird tenderly in your hands.
The damp earth, he thought, was no doubt the remains of yesterday’s rain. No, yesterday it had not rained. The sky now could rain nothing but scorching heat and dust. Have you forgotten where you are? Have you forgotten?
He turned himself over and lay on his back, cradling his head in his hands. He started to stare at the sky. It was blazing white, and there was one black bird circling high up, alone and aimless. He did not know why, but he was suddenly filled with a bitter feeling of being a stranger, and for a moment he thought he was on the point of weeping. No, yesterday it didn’t rain. We are in August now. Have you forgotten? Those miles of road speeding through a void, like black eternity. Have you forgotten it? The bird was still circling around alone like a black spot in that blaze spread out above him. We are in August. Then why this dampness in the ground? It’s the Shatt. Can’t you see it stretching out beside you as far as the eye can see?
“When the two great rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, meet, they form one river called the Shatt al-Arab, which extends from just above Basra to …”
Ustaz Selim, a thin, gray-haired old man, said it a dozen times in his loud voice to a small child standing beside the blackboard, when he was walking past the school in his village. So he stood on a stone and began to eavesdrop through the window. Ustaz Selim was standing in front of the young pupil, shouting at the top of his voice as he shook his thin stick:
“When the two great rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, meet …”
The child was trembling with anxiety, while the laughter of the other children in the class could be heard.