LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

introductiona way that, ‘when [irony] ignites, all meanings are present, and the one that wasabsent before may acquire the greater significance’ (p. 40). In addition, irony inPalestinian literature accentuates both the sense of national failure and thepossibility of repair through ‘negating negation’ and the therapy that humour sopoignantly generates in the audience.Allegory offers another mode of narration in which the national as a categoryof the social world can come into being through the fictional in its capacity as acultural artefact. Investigating the role of gender, particularly masculinity, intwo canonical texts by Ghassan Kanafani, Amy Zalman emphasises theconstructed nature of national and masculine identity in relation to the twopreoccupations of national loss and national return. In Palestinian nationalism,the two tropes of loss and return are linked to the female figure as the symbol ofa feminised land. This connection between nation and the land through thefemale figure reconciles male love to political resistance, thus allowing the studentof nationalism to investigate the political content of emotional relations. InMen in the Sun, Ghassan Kanafani expresses in allegorical form the military,political and historical failure of the masculine figure through the protagonistAbul Khaizaran whose ‘body has been castrated’. However, what makes GhassanKanafani’s use of allegory so interesting in this novel is that he undermines thefoundations upon which allegory is based: its presumption of ‘obviousness’owing to the ‘shared set of terms’ holding the writer and reader, and the beliefamong readers that the reality ‘to which the fictional text affixes is a stable one’(p. 55). Ghassan Kanafani challenges this assumption of stability by suggestingthat, contrary to the traditional poetics of loss and return, national identity inthe Palestinian context is not isomorphic with masculinity. This rupture impliesa view of Palestinian national identity and destiny that is ‘always shifting,always-in-the-process’ (p. 56). In All That’s Left to You, Ghassan Kanafani doesnot disrupt the structure of male virility he so perceptively depicts in Men in theSun, but offers a vision of the national Self that ‘shifts the focus to the femalebody’ in a new poetics of return (p. 7). In this poetics, women shed theirconstructed negative uni-dimensionality and are characterised as being both‘aggressive and passive, sexually voracious and sexually submissive, redemptiveand shameful, threateningly present and positively absent’ (p. 72).In its most neutral form as an activity in inter-cultural communication,translation acts as a bridge between cultures by making the literature of onenation available to another. In situations of conflict and nation building,literature can create empathy in a secondary audience by locking into its mythsand motifs in ways that make this audience uncomfortable and, consequently,more amenable to explore itself as other or to construct the other as Self.Through translation, literature can creatively blur the boundaries betweennations by creating a space for understanding and empathy that may be absent— 9 —www.taq.ir