LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

gender and the palestinian narrative of returnbrings its readers to the edge of this space at a particular historical momentwhen so many of the terms of national identity are abraded that no seamlessborder is possible. Here, masculinity and national identity should meet up tomutually constitute each other and create a seamless stretch on the contours ofPalestinian identity, but they do not. Each falls away from the other leaving, forthe reader, the revealed gap between them. National identity and masculineidentity, both under reconstruction as they are portrayed in Men in the Sun,intertwine in the character of Abul Khaizuran, whose failure comes of self-doubtthat he can perform a masculinity to which he feels his body does not attest, andfor whom that identity is more primary than a national affiliation. This characterliteralises the simultaneous instability of national and masculine identity, andthe drastic effects of such instability. 9Abul Khaizuran’s difficulty performing normative masculinity is always‘explained’ in critical rewriting in allegorical terms. Abul Khaizuran’s difficulty,in the allegorical retelling, is really a political problem, not a gender problem.Castration is transformed into a symbolic rather than a historical event in thenarrative. At the core of these readings is the belief that masculinity’s exemplaryexpression is virility, a belief so self-evident, apparently, that it completelyunderwrites the construction of Men in the Sun as a national allegory, whileremaining invisible itself. However, as a reading strategy, allegorical commentaryis not a neutral lens helping magnify the nature of the text in question, but aprosthetic device that may help minimise a collective sense of injury to thecollective (masculine) national body. R. W. Connell points out with respect tophysical disability and gender that ‘the construction of masculinity throughbodily performance means that gender is vulnerable when the performancecannot be sustained, for instance, as a result of physical disability’ (2000: 54).Citing a study in which physically disabled men attempted to accommodatetheir compromised sense of masculinity in a range of ways, Connell observesthat despite the different routes of accommodation men took, they were consistentin their inability to ignore the insult to their bodily sense of masculinity.One might conclude that there is an analogy to be made to this process ofaccommodation in collective cultural expression; in this instance it is a criticalmove that allows the absorption (and thus disappearance) of Abul Khaizuran’scastration into allegory in critical texts.With a now retrospective glance at Kanafani’s next novel, All That’s Left toYou (1965), it would appear that in the period between the first and secondnovel Kanafani recognised the centrality of masculine identity to the constructionof national identity, as well as the irreversibility of the national castrationhe posited in Men in the Sun. All That’s Left to You takes place in Gaza and theNegev Desert. In it, Kanafani not only offers his characters a return to the landof Palestine, but adjusts the problematic split between masculinity and national— 57 —www.taq.ir