LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

13Gender and the Palestinian Narrative ofReturn in Two Novels by Ghassan Kanafani*Amy ZalmanLate twentieth-century Palestinian literature is generally divided into twoperiods, that between 1948 and 1967, and that after 1967. Within these twomajor divisions, however, the period of the early 1960s stands out. It is in thisextended moment that the idea of returning to Palestine is given narrative form:in the first visible stirrings of broad political organisation and armed struggle,through the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and inliterature. The exemplary literary expression of this narrative may be found intwo novels by Ghassan Kanafani, Rijal fi al-Shams (Men in the Sun), published in1962, and Ma Tabaqqa Lakum (All That’s Left to You), which appeared in 1966.Kanafani was arguably the key Palestinian literary intellectual of the 1960s andhis literature played a significant role in shaping how the post-1948 Palestinianexperience has been understood. This chapter argues that gender is intrinsic tothe narratives established in these novels, and that in them new forms ofmasculinity are constructed in relation to national loss and national restoration.Moreover, a fuller analysis of the mutual construction of masculine and nationalidentity reveals a dynamic and historically specific symbolism at work in thewell-known association between land and woman.Born in Acre in 1936, Kanafani left with his family for Lebanon in 1948.Following his attendance at Damascus University, he went to teach in Kuwait.He returned to Lebanon in 1960 and worked for several newspapers. WhenGeorge Habash founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinefollowing the 1967 war, Kanafani became its spokesman and the editor of itsnewspaper, al-Hadaf. Despite Kanafani’s lifelong activity as a journalist, he wasequally prominent if not more so as a novelist, short story writer and literarycritic. In all of these endeavours, he considered his literary effort indissolublefrom his political goals; indeed, when asked of their relative priority in his life,he stated that literature had shaped his politics (as quoted in Wild 1975: 13). In1972, he was killed in Beirut by a car bomb for which Mossad claimedresponsibility.* This chapter is reprinted with the permission of Arab Studies Journal 10/11 (2002/2003): 17–43, in which it first appeared.— 48 —www.taq.ir