LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

gender and the palestinian narrative of returnshare a set of terms, the passage across the border of the novel, from inside tooutside, and vice versa, can seem effortless. With respect to Men in the Sun, thebridge term that makes Abul Khaizuran so ‘obvious’ as an allegorical referenceto political and historical failure is a presumption that the exemplary expressionof masculinity is the virile male body, and that the castrated male body signals acompromised self. These views extend across the border between the novel andthe world in an apparently seamless way, making physical castration a naturalsign of political impotence.In order to function, allegory must be obvious in another way, which relatesto the ‘narrative basis’ on which it rests. Of the two narratives bound by sharedassumptions that together produce an allegorical text, one is always presumablyfixed, or ‘obvious’. Allegory functions for a community of readers because thecommunity can agree that the event to which the fictional text affixes inallegorical relationship is a stable one. 7 This is a situation that does not entirelyobtain with respect to Men in the Sun, for the very situation of national identitythat Kanafani allegorises is in the process of becoming in a new way. Siddiq’simage of the writer stepping into a moment of national uncertainty fruitfullyillustrates the writer’s role in projecting, as well as reflecting, the terms of nationalidentity in the realm of culture. Another way of saying this is that Kanafaniinverts common sense about the relationship that is supposed to obtain betweenthe inside and outside of a novel: in the case of Men in the Sun, the more stablenarrative exists inside the novel. At the moment of its writing, the extra-literaryground (that accurate-looking map of the region), the ground beneath thePalestinian reader in Lebanon, or Jordan or Syria, or on his way to Kuwait, musthave felt literally in flux.It is into this murky moment that Kanafani inserted his narrative. Thehistorian Rashid Khalidi has depicted these as the ‘lost years’ of twentiethcenturyPalestinian identity, sandwiched between a discrete period of expressionduring the British Mandate that ended with the loss of the first Israeli–Arabwar, and its visible re-emergence with the establishment of the Palestine LiberationOrganisation (PLO) in 1964. In the period in between, from 1948 to 1964,‘the Palestinians seemed to many to have disappeared from the map as anindependent actor, and indeed as a people’ (Khalidi 1997: 178). Men in the Sunwas of course conceived without the benefit of hindsight. In hindsight, nationalidentity could be viewed as momentarily submerged, and predating a renewednational consciousness primarily focused through the PLO, which promoted aunified national identity both to Palestinians and to others. Khalidi lists some ofthe problems that contributed to the view from outside, and the sense frominside, that Palestinian identity was on an uncertain path. By 1948, the Palestinianeffort to resist Zionism had failed; the attempt of the combined forces ofthe Syrian, Egyptian and Iraqi armies to launch a war against Israel had also— 55 —www.taq.ir