Ghassan Kanafani

Though prominent as a political thinker, militant, and journalist, Kanafani is on record as stating that literature was the shaping spirit behind his politics.[17] Kanafani's literary style has been described as "lucid and straightforward";^[13] his modernist narrative technnique—using flashback effects and a wide range of narrative voices—represents a distinct advance in Arabic fiction.^[18] Ihab Shalback and Faisal Darraj sees a trajectory in Kanafani's writings from the simplistic dualism depicting an evil Zionist aggressor to a good Palestinian victim, to a moral affirmation of the justness of the Palestinian cause where however good and evil are not absolutes, until, dissatisfied by both, he began to appreciate that self-knowledge required understanding of the Other, and that only by unifying both distinct narratives could one grasp the deeper dynamics of the conflict.^[19][20]

In many of his fictions, he portrays the complex dilemmas Palestinians of various backgrounds must face. Kanafani was the first to deploy the notion of resistance literature ("adab al-muqawama") with regard to Palestinian writing;^[5][16] in two works, published respectively in 1966 and 1968,^[5] one critic, Orit Bashkin, has noted that his novels repeat a certain fetishistic worship of arms, and that he appears to depict military means as the only way to resolve the Palestinian tragedy.^[10][5] Ghassan Kanafani began writing short stories when he was working in the refugee camps. Often told as seen through the eyes of children, the stories manifested out of his political views and belief that his students' education had to relate to their immediate surroundings. While in Kuwait, he spent much time reading Russian literature and socialist theory, refining many of the short stories he wrote, winning a Kuwaiti prize.^[13]

Men in the Sun (1962)

In 1962, his novel, Men in the Sun (Rijal fi-a-shams), reputed to be "one of the most admired and quoted works in modern Arabic fiction,"^[21] was published to great critical acclaim.^[10] Rashid Khalidi considers it "prescient".^[22] The story is an allegory of Palestinian calamity in the wake of the nakba in its description of the defeatist despair, passivity, and political corruption infesting the lives of Palestinians in refugee camps.^[18] The central character is an embittered ex-soldier, Abul Khaizuran, disfigured and rendered impotent by his wounds, whose cynical pursuit of money often damages his fellow countrymen.^[13][23] Three Palestinians, the elderly Abu Qais, Assad, and the youth Marwan, hide in the empty water tank of a lorry in order to cross the border into Kuwait. They have managed to get through as Basra and drew up to the last checkpoint. Abul Khaizuran, the truck driver, tries to be brisk but is dragged into defending his honor as the Iraqi checkpoint officer teases him by suggesting he had been dallying with prostitutes. The intensity of heat within the water carrier is such that no one could survive more than several minutes, and indeed they expire inside as Khaizuran is drawn into trading anecdotes that play up a non-existent virility—they address him as though he were effeminized, with the garrulous Abu Baqir outside in an office. Their deaths are to be blamed, not on the effect of the stifling effect of the sun's heat, but on their maintaining silence as they suffer.^[21][24] The ending has often been read as a trope for the futility of Palestinian attempts to try and build a new identity far away from their native Palestine, and the figure of Abul Khaizuran a symbol of the impotence of the Palestinian leadership. Amy Zalman has detected a covert leitmotif embedded in the tale, in which Palestine is figured as the beloved female body, while the male figures are castrated from being productive in their attempts to seek another country. In this reading, a real national identity for Palestinians can only be reconstituted by marrying awareness of gender to aspirations to return.^[25] A film based on the story, Al-Makhdu'un (The Betrayed or The Dupes), was produced by Tewfik Saleh in 1972.^[26]

All That's Left to You (1966)

All That's Left to You (Ma Tabaqqah Lakum) (1966) is set in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.^[21] It deals with a woman, Maryam, and her brother, Hamid, both orphaned in the 1948 war, their father dying in combat—his last words being a demand that they abstain from marriage until the national cause has been won—and their mother separated from them in the flight from Jaffa. She turns up in Jordan, they end up with an aunt in Gaza, and live united in a set of Oedipal displacements; Hamid seeks a mother-substitute in his sister, while Maryam entertains a quasi incestuous love for her brother. Maryam eventually breaks the paternal prohibition to marry a two-time traitor, Zakaria, since he is bigamous, and because he gave the Israelis information to capture an underground fighter, resulting in the latter's death. Hamid, outraged, tramps off through the Negev, aspiring to reach their mother in Jordan. The two episodes of Hamid in the desert, and Maryam in the throes of her relationship with Zakaria, are interwoven into a simultaneous cross-narrative: the young man encounters a wandering Israeli soldier who has lost contact with his unit, and wrestles his armaments from him, and ends up undergoing a kind of rebirth as he struggles with the desert. Maryam, challenged by her husband to abort their child, whom she will call Hamid, decides to save the child by killing Zakaria.^[27][28] This story won the Lebanese Literary prize in that year.^[5][29]

Umm Sa'ad (1969)

In Umm Sa'ad (1969), the impact of his new revolutionary outlook is explicit as he creates the portrait of a mother who encourages her son to take up arms as a resistance fedayeen in full awareness that the choice of life might eventuate in his death.^[13]

Return to Haifa (1970)

His article on Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, published in the PLO's Research Centre Magazine, Shu'un Filistiniyya (Palestinian Affairs), was influential in diffusing the image of the former as a forerunner of the Palestinian armed struggle, and, according to Rashid Khalidi, consolidated the Palestinian narrative that tends to depict failure as a triumph.^[40]

Assassination

On 8 July 1972, Kanafani, was assassinated in Beirut by the Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service. When Kanafani turned on the ignition of his Austin 1100, a grenade connected to the ignition switch detonated and in turn detonated a 3 kilo plastic bomb planted behind the bumper bar.^[41] Both Kanafani and his 17-year old niece Lamees Najim, who had been accompanying him, were killed.^[42][17][8]

Israel stated the assassination was in response for the group's role in the Lod Airport massacre carried out by three members of the Japanese Red Army, but Kanafani's assassination may have been planned long before.^[6] At the time, Kanafani was the spokesperson of the PFLP, and the group claimed responsibility for the attack.^{[citation needed]} Kanafani also appeared in photographs together with the three Japanese Red Army members shortly before they carried out the attack.^[43][44][45] According to Mark Ensalaco, Kanafani had justified tactics used by the attackers in July.^[46] Kameel Nasr states that Kanafani, together with his deputy, Bassam Abu Sharif, had demanded in press conferences dealing with Palestinian hijackings common at the time, that Israel release prisoners; however, Nasr states, Kanafani and Abu Sharif had mellowed and had started speaking against indiscriminate violence.^[47] Several days after the Lod massacre, a picture of Kanafani together with one of the Japanese terrorists was circulated. Rumours circulated suggesting Lebanese Security forces had been complicit.^[48] Bassam Abu Sharif, who survived an attempt on his life two weeks later, suspected that the attempts on Kanafani and later himself were ordered by Israel but had employed an Arab intermediary, perhaps Abu Ahmed Yunis; Yunis was executed by the PFLP in 1981.^[49]

Kanafani's obituary in Lebanon's The Daily Star wrote that: "He was a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and his arena the newspaper pages."^[16][50]

On his death, several uncompleted novels were found among his Nachlass, one dating back as early as 1966.^[51]

Commemoration

A collection of Palestinian Resistance poems, The Palestinian Wedding, which took its title from the eponymous poem by Mahmoud Darwish, was published in his honor. He was the posthumous recipient of the Afro-Asia Writers' Conference 's Lotus Prize for Literature in 1975.^[52][53] Ghassan Kanafani's memory was upheld through the creation of the Ghassan Kanafani Cultural Foundation, which has since established eight kindergartens for the children of Palestinian refugees.^[54] His legacy lives on among the Palestinians, and he is considered to be a leading novelist of his generation and one of the Arab world's leading Palestinian writers.^[1]

Translations into English

• Kanafani, Ghassan (2022). On Zionist Literature. Mahmoud Najib (translator) (1st ed.). Ebb Books.
  ISBN 978-1739985233
  .
• Kanafani, Ghassan (1998). Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories. Hilary Kilpatrick (translator) (2nd ed.). Three Continents Press.
  ISBN 9780894108570
  .
• Kanafani, Ghassan (2000). Palestine's Children: Returning to Haifa & Other Stories. Barbara Harlow (contributor), Karen E. Riley (contributor). Three Continents Press.
  ISBN 9780894108907
  .
• Kanafani, Ghassan (2004). All That's Left to You. Roger Allen (contributor), May Jayyusi (translator) and Jeremy Reed (translator).
  ISBN 9781566565486
  .
• Halliday, Fred (May–June 1971). "Ghassan Kannafani: On the PFLP and the September crisis (interview)". New Left Review. I (67).

Books, short stories and other publications

Note: Some names are roughly translated

• Mawt Sarir Raqam 12 (1961) (موت سرير رقم 12, The Death of Bed Number 12) (Short story)
• Ard al-Burtuqal al-Hazin, (1963) (أرض البرتقال الحزين,
  ISBN 978-9963610808
• Rijal fi ash-Shams, (1963) (رجال في الشمس,
  ISBN 978-0894108570
• Al-bab, (1964) (الباب, The Door)
  ISBN 978-9963610839
• 'Aalam Laysa Lana, (1965) (عالمٌ ليس لنا,
  ISBN 978-9963610952
• 'Adab al-Muqawamah fi Filastin al-Muhtalla 1948–1966, (1966) (أدب المقاومة في فلسطين المحتلة 1948–1966, Literature of Resistance in Occupied Palestine)
  ISBN 978-9963610907
• Ma Tabaqqa Lakum, (1966) (ما تبقّى لكم, All That's Left to You)
  ISBN 978-1566565486
• Fi al-Adab al-Sahyuni, (1967) (في الأدب الصهيوني, On Zionist Literature)
  ISBN 978-1739985233
• 'An ar-Rijal wa-l-Banadiq, (1968) (عن الرجال والبنادق, On Men and Rifles)
  ISBN 978-9963610877
• Umm Sa'd, (1969) (أم سعد, Umm Sa'd)
  ISBN 9788440427588
• A'id ila Hayfa, (1970) (عائد إلى حيفا, Return to Haifa)
  ISBN 978-0894108907
• A 'ma wal-Atrash, (1972) (الأعمى والأطرش, The Blind Man and The Deaf Man)
• Barquq Naysan, (1972) (برقوق نيسان, The Apricots of April)
• Al-Qubba'ah wa-l-Nabi, (1973) (القبعة والنبي, The Hat and the Prophet) incomplete
• Thawra 1936-39 fi Filastin, (1974) (ثورة 1936-39 في فلسطين, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine) (45–page Pamphlet)
• Jisr ila-al-Abad, (1978) (جسر إلى الأبد, A Bridge to Eternity)
  ISBN 978-9963610815
• Al-Gamis al-Masruq wa-Qisas Ukhra, (1982) (القميص المسروق وقصص أخرى, The Stolen Shirt and Other Stories)
  ISBN 978-9963610921
• Arabic Short Stories, (1983) (transl. by Denys Johnson-Davies)
  ISBN 9780520089440
• Faris Faris, (1996) (فارس فارس, Knight Knight)