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Tales of Palestine, Past, Present and Future
Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and other stories and Men in the Sun and other Palestinian Stories by Ghassan Kanafani, translated by Barbara Harlow, Karen E. Riley and Hillary Kilpatrick. Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 1998 and 2000; pp. 160 and 117; pbk. US$14 and US$12, respectively.
By Rahhalah Haqq
The short stories, novels, and plays of Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani still ring true with a note of sad irony decades after they were first written. Kanafani was born in Haifa, lived in exile for most of his life, and was assassinated in Beirut in 1972. Along the way, he was spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and his prolific writing gained him many friends and enemies on every side of the ‘Palestine problem’. To truly appreciate Kanafani, his stories should be read in their original Arabic editions, although many of his works are presently available in various translated collections, such as the two volumes of stories reviewed here.
Kanafani’s writings tell the stories of many dispossessed Palestinians, and for that reason they have enjoyed wide appeal. Palestine’s Children includes fourteen related stories, and typically of Kanafani’s work, they have an autobiographical dimension. Kanafani tells the tale of a Palestinian teenager, Mansur, and his Turkish rifle, which he got from his uncle, Abul Hassan, who once used it against the British. Armed with this rifle, Mansur engages in ‘sharpshooting contests’ with the invading Zionists in and around old Palestinian towns as events unfold before and after 1948.
Other stories tell the tales of children living in refugee camps, such as ‘The Child Goes To the Camp,’ in which the narrator tries to survive grinding poverty and hunger by using a five-pound note that he finds in the street as a kind of a magically protective charm. Palestine’s Children also includes the novella ‘Returning to Haifa,’ which is perhaps one of the most captivating in the collection. In this story, a man named Said and his wife Safiyya, who were evicted by the Zionists in 1948 and forced to abandon their infant son Khaldun, return to their apartment in 1967. As it turns out, Khaldun was adopted by the Zionist family who took over the couple’s apartment, and he is now a soldier in the Israeli army. The events that ensue call into question family ties in the cause for the liberation of Palestine, and foretell subsequent struggles.
In Men in the Sun, Kanafani develops similar themes, always searching for the cruel ironies evident in the Zionist occupation of Palestine and the responses of the Arab and Islamic world to this challenge. The story from which this collection takes it name begins with Abu Qais, a refugee from Haifa, trying to make his way to Kuwait to find work. In a series of flashbacks, Abu Qais recalls Ustaz Selim, a new teacher who came to his town before the Zionists, and who decided to stay and fight, becoming a martyr for the national cause. Abu Qais struggles with his decision to leave, but eventually justifies it by the desire to care for his poor family.
Along the way, he meets two other men with different stories but a common goal, to make their way to Kuwait and find work. They end up having to hire smugglers, since without passports they cannot legally enter Kuwait or find work. Thousands of Palestinian men must have taken journeys similar to the one Kanafani describes in painful detail. In the end, the story of these three men is an allegory for the treachery and betrayal that the Palestinians suffered at the hands of their fellow Arabs, including other Palestinians who sold out the national cause for self-interest, and ranging from greedy Iraqi smugglers to corrupt Kuwaiti technocrats.
‘Men in the Sun’ begins and ends with excerpts from a poem entitled ‘My Father’ by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, including the telling lines: ‘My father warned me, "a man without a homeland will have no grave in the earth," and he forbade me to leave.’ So, like many of Kanafani’s stories, Men in the Sun struggles with the dilemma of diaspora, to stay and fight like Ustaz Selim, or to leave and try to make another life, like the story’s three protagonists. Weaving past, present and future into a masterful and evocative narrative, Kanafani has a flair for the complexities and ironies of life in exile, and his stories can teach much beyond their years.
Originally written in 1962, ‘Men in the Sun’ was made into a film entitled The Deceived or The Duped (al-makhdu’oon in Arabic, with English subtitles) in Syria in the late 1960s. It was immediately banned in most Arab countries, itself a telling postscript to this most powerful and enduring of Kanafani’s stories. History may or may not repeat itself, but Kanafani knew almost half a century ago that the solution to the Palestine problem is not simply to defeat and evict the Zionists, and that perhaps a bigger problem is the talkative complacency of the Arab and Muslim regimes.
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