LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

gender and the palestinian narrative of returnit is discovered that the customary habits of manly behaviour are not necessarilyuseful guides to resurrecting a national identity and that gender identity is notautomatically a function of national identity. Without appearing to intend it,the novel proposes that gender identity must be constructed in relation tonational identity. Moreover, it suggests that the relationship between genderand national identity must be constructed anew on the post-1948 landscape.With this map in hand, the schema of a particularly male journey becomesevident. The narrative operation of the text implies the masculine theme: thelinear trajectory, the sudden interruption, the unproductive and despondentend. Metaphorical relations are established between the castrated male bodyand the forestalled national story. The land of Palestine, an always presentbackdrop to the men’s movement away from it, is predominantly represented inthe novel as a castrated space whose productive population – the men who farmedthe land and supported their women and children – has been literally cut offfrom it, and forcibly compelled to seek productive connections to other lands.The Palestine-as-castrated-man image finds its parallel in the man-as-nationembodied by Abul Khaizuran. The only Palestinian character to survive theevents of the narrative, his body disfigured as the result of a lost war, AbulKhaizuran is a map in miniature of the nation itself at a formative juncture,marked with loss, shame and impotence.When the writer’s society arrives at a historical crossroads as it gropes for aviable definition of its identity and destination, the serious writer can ill affordto remain uninvolved and merely watch history march by from his aestheticivory tower (Siddiq 1984: xi). Writing with specific reference to Kanafani,Muhammad Siddiq remarks on the impulse to political commitment that inspireswriters at moments of historical transition. In the process, he also comments onthe retrospective fiction that history marches on its own independent path. Butin the moment of Men in the Sun’s publication, the author does not appear to bestepping down to join an inevitable march, but rather to be actively shapinghistory’s direction. Kanafani’s incision into history seemed so prescient to somereaders that they perceived Men in the Sun as having spliced reality and representationinto a borderless continuity, as if the symbolic language of fiction werea word-for-word translation of the historical moment. Many were thereforequick to identify allegorical overtones in Abul Khaizuran’s impotence and tointerpret its function in determining the events of the novel.Fadl Naqib noted in 1972 that the plot in which ‘the truck driver who issuspected of sexual hijinks even though he’s sexually impotent symbolizes theArab armies suspected of a passion for war and ravishing Israel even though theywere militarily impotent’, was so much like reality that it verged on being artless,for ‘this vulgar symbolism didn’t surprise anyone. Facts that everyone knew didn’tarouse interest when they appeared newly veiled in symbolism’ (Naqib 1972:— 53 —www.taq.ir