LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

amy zalmanfailed, and was riddled by complex objectives related to the regional balance ofpower; in the process of these losses and as their result, half of the Palestinianpopulation had left their homes and landed in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt andGaza, where they were assigned new nationalities 8 or given refugee status;although underground resistance movements existed, they were small andscattered; finally, the ideology of pan-Arabism promoted with great success byEgyptian president Gamal ÆAbd al-Nasir muffled the articulation of aspecifically Palestinian identity until the mass disillusionment of the 1967 war.Men in the Sun appeared in the midst of these ‘lost years’, although Kanafanihimself had already arrived at the belief that Palestinian nationalism wouldhave to be a crucial component of anti-colonial struggle, and more specificallyat the ‘unshakeable conviction … that the only way for the humiliated andexploited Palestinians in the camps to achieve dignity and a life worth livingwas a return to their homeland, Palestine’ (Wild 1975: 16). The tragic force ofan inevitable failure that limns the events in Men in the Sun emerges from thisauthorial stance: Kanafani appears to stand not so much behind his characters,or to hover omnipotently above them, as to be in front of them, pulling themalong a narrative he unfurls before them, but on which they will inevitablyfumble. Kanafani’s work appeared prophetic because he wrote into it not onlythe content but the terms of national allegory. In order to fix one narrative, theimagined one, in an obvious relation to a second in transition, an identity cominginto being, Kanafani’s novel projects virility and masculine self-conception ascrucial and stable aspects not only of male, but national character. When AbulKhaizuran affirms his masculinity instead of his national loyalty, the choiceappears less as a frivolous preoccupation than as a grasping to assert selfhood ina public context, before the Iraqi border officials (and, it could be said, beforethe implied reader of the text).The precise failure in the narrative is the failure of masculine and nationalidentity to cohere. In order to make his national identity a priority, AbulKhaizuran would have to abandon his masculine identity, a move that he is notprepared to make. Abul Khaizuran’s moment of hesitation seems to reflect asimilar hesitation on the part of his author, who is not yet prepared to establishnew terms of masculinity (but will be in his next novel). Men in the Sun marksthe fact that the old terms will no longer do. This breach between gender andnational identity makes visible an instance of what Homi Bhabha calls ‘theambivalent margin of the nation-space,’(1990: 4), an always shifting, always inprocess,border at which the terms of national identity are negotiated, andwhere it is determined what kinds of bodies will be permitted into the nationalenclosure. Cultural discourse plays a part in policing this border, sometimes inaccordance with dominant political discourse, often in opposition to thedominant terms that establish the boundaries of ‘nation-space’. Men in the Sun— 56 —www.taq.ir