LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

amy zalmanimages are often at odds with the roles that women actually play. Given thisdissonance between literature and reality, produced by a predominantly maleliterary establishment, against the background of a preponderantly male-lednationalist movement, it seems worth asking how these idealised images ofwomen serve to construct a particular conception of masculinity. If a dominantimage of women has outlasted, or never reflected, a truth about women’s lives ordesires, then why has it remained such a preoccupation among male Palestinianwriters?Fantasies of femininity (as well as masculinity) mediate desire. Projected intothe realm of symbol, they instruct people not only whom to want, but how towant by directing desire towards its object through circumscribed routes. As thedominant image of woman-as-land suggests, these images exist firmly in thepublic domain as aspects of what R. W. Connell has called ‘the gender order’(2000: 24–5). Like other institutions that shape and are shaped by gender, suchas relations of production, emotional relations can also be investigated for theirpolitical content. In the context of Palestine after 1948, collective rituals thatformerly organised desire, as well as conventional relations of power andproduction, were in disarray. In such periods, the circuits through whichemotional relations flow, and which in part structure gender, may flood with anintensified political meaning. It is these circuits that most interested Kanafanias a fiction writer, and through which he articulated a return in terms at onceerotic and political.A map precedes the 1995 Three Continents Press English edition of Kanafani’s1962 novel Men in the Sun. There, drawn accurately to scale above the caption,‘the route traveled by the men in the sun’, is the wriggly black line of the H4highway. It extends eastwards from Amman across a wide expanse of desert toIraq, then winds southwards beside the Tigris river to Basra before finallylooping slightly westwards again to its endpoint in Kuwait. By this route, thenovel’s Palestinian characters hope to travel from their respective homes inJaffa, Ramleh and a refugee camp to Kuwait, and thus from displacement andpoverty to new status and employment. Presumably, the map has been put inthe English-language edition to help the reader unfamiliar with the regionorient him or herself to the geographical context of the tale. The route depictedon it, however, does not strictly correspond to the tale that follows; it is not theroute travelled by the men in the sun, who never reach the highway’s markedendpoint in Kuwait but die trapped in a water-transport truck’s empty tank atthe Iraq–Kuwait border. The scene in which this takes place is a famous one inmodern Palestinian letters. The novel as a whole sealed Kanafani’s reputation asa talented fiction writer, and was given renewed life when it was made into afilm by Egyptian director Tawfiq Salih in 1972. Today the novel is a canonicalwork in the Palestinian oeuvre.— 50 —www.taq.ir