LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

amy zalmanhide in the empty metal water tank of his truck, which at midday is so hot thata man inside it can only survive for six or seven minutes before suffocating.Desperate, the men agree to the offer. The first checkpoint is passed withoutcomplication. At the second, a bored Iraqi official detains Abul Khaizuran withribald joking about an alleged affair with a prostitute. Flustered by the impossiblestory of his own racy antics, Abul Khaizuran hedges. Finally, trapped in theweb of the official’s elaborate joking, he pretends that he has been having anaffair, asserting a virility that he, and we, know he cannot enact. Nevertheless,by the time he does, he has been detained so long that the men have died in theairless tank.In the years since its publication, Men in the Sun has gained its status as aclassic of modern Palestinian literature for having lyrically dramatised thenational mood of failure in and following the war of 1948. 4 The stark story andliterary quality of Men in the Sun struck a forceful chord among readers when thenovel was published. The narrative itself was given an extended life whenSalih’s filmed production, The Betrayed (al-Makhdu’un), was released in Syria in1972. The tragic end at which the novel arrives has often been seen as anillustration of ‘the futility of the effort by the uprooted Palestinian refugees tolook for a new home, a new future, and ultimately a new identity by movingaway from Palestine’ (Siddiq 1984: xiv) after 1948. The characters appear to belost as they travel the route of an uncertain national identity in an extendedmoment of displacement and despair. It is unsurprising that along this routetheir effort culminates in failure. (A contemporary reader of the novel, FadlNaqib, noted as much when he remarked that readers knew from the openingpages that the characters’ attempt to flee would fail, and that the outcome of thetale surprised no one.) 5I would like to suggest that the journey taken by the men in the sun isstructured by a crisis related to prevailing notions of manliness in the samedegree that it is by the sense of national crisis. The men are guided by two maps,not one; their failure to reach their predicted endpoint occurs when thedirections of these two maps diverge. The tragic outcome of the tale results notonly from the general problem of Palestinian refugees, as they are represented inKanafani’s prose, but from the specific attempt of Palestinian men, disorientedon the post-1948 landscape, to rely on cultural conventions of masculinebehaviour to guide their actions. As they set forth uncertainly on a new geopoliticallandscape, the characters rely on habits of masculine behaviour toguide their movements. The narrative is flooded with commentary aboutdisruptions in the travellers’ sexual, familial and work lives – those places wheregender makes itself most visible. In Kanafani’s hands, these disruptions in theirpersonal lives are rendered as functions of the national crisis that do not havetheir own trajectory. Nevertheless, the narrative journey grinds to a halt when— 52 —www.taq.ir