LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

gender and the palestinian narrative of returnKanafani’s first novel established the idea that national loss is a particularlymale trial, his second that return to the land is a male endeavour. The masculinequalities of loss and return are underlined in a well-noted trope within Palestinianliterary expressions of nationalism in which women are associated withan enduring and feminine land, and fused in expressions of yearning for afeminine beloved. Images that feminise the land of Palestine establish the ideathat women, like the land itself, have never left but await male return. One ofthe first chroniclers of the beloved’s role in nationalist literature was Kanafani.As a journalist and a literary critic he was active in bringing Palestinianliterature to the attention of the rest of the Arab world in the late 1960s. At theThird Conference of Afro-Asian Writers in 1967, speaking on the topic of‘Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine’, he observed that the apparentlycontradictory themes of romantic love and political resistance are mutuallyconsistent. Using Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry as an example, Kanafani tracedthe increasing incorporation of national themes in love poetry of the late 1950sand early 1960s. 1 Spoken in a romantic lexicon, Darwish’s lyric return narrativesmanipulated feminine objects to achieve masculine return. Such manipulationis visible, for example, in the eponymous poem of Darwish’s third collection ALover from Palestine, published in 1966. In it, the speaker’s return to Palestine isenabled by a dynamic to which the beloved is crucial, but from which she isincreasingly distant and finally absent. As the speaker narrates his pursuit of abeloved first experienced as a thorn in his heart, then a song on his lips, then atraveller in a port, the distance of the beloved also comes to signify the vastnessof her presence. He sees her everywhere, ‘in the stones and the streets’(Elmessiri 1982: 121–7) and ‘in the salt of the sea and in the sand’ (ibid.). Thespeaker admits the beloved’s presence by naming her ‘Palestine’ (ibid.). Buthaving named her, his own presence becomes more tenuous. Finally, he acknowledgeshis own absence: ‘I am the exiled one behind wall and door’ (ibid.). Atthe moment of his admission of absence, an exchange of their positions occurs.By the end of the lyric narrative, the speaker has taken on not only thebeloved’s power, but her beauty – ‘I know/that I am the flower of youth andknight of knights’ (ibid.) – while mention of the beloved named Palestine hasdisappeared. While the political theme of return can be expressed in the voiceof a lover yearning for his beloved, the terms of this return appear to require thedismissal of the feminine beloved herself.In recent feminist analyses, the role of femininity as a passive symbol of land,or active only as a redeemer or mother of men, has been contrasted with theactive, public roles of actual women in the struggle to achieve national selfdetermination.2 Clearly, the image of women as passive land or as a willingmother attempts to construct femininity in a particular way with respect to apolitical order. Just as clearly, the ideals of femininity put forward in such— 49 —www.taq.ir