LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

amy zalmanidentity that plagued his characters in Men in the Sun by wholesale transformationof the male deficiency (castration) that was associated with the land, andits men, in his first novel, into female potential (fertility). Fertility isemphatically yoked to both land and the female protagonist of the novel. Thatnovel emerged shortly after the issuance of the PLO’s founding documents, theNational Charter and the Nationalist Charter. In his analysis of these documentsand PLO communiqués, Joseph Massad demonstrated the degree to which preexistingvalues of masculinity and the emergent articulation of national identitywere fused by declaring Palestinian identity in terms of paternity. 10 Thesedocuments rhetorically displace the evidence of national virility onto the fertilefemale body, while leaving the relationship between national and male identityintact. The National Charter included the rhetorical flourish that Zionistvictory constituted a rape of the land, and thus emphatically affixed nationalistintentions to the male prerogative and duty to protect female honour. InMassad’s terminology, these documents establish the way in which ‘masculinityis nationalized’ (Massad 1995: 469), a process that courses in the same timeperiod through Kanafani’s literary works.To expose the fugitive moment in Men in the Sun in which gender andnational identity do not cohere need not mean the important history of thebook as a political allegory must be abandoned, but rather that gender should beincorporated as a political term into the allegorical reading. Xeuping Dongusefully suggests with respect to recent Chinese literature that this meansputting ‘men as gendered individuals back into the scheme of allegory, thusexpanding an allegorical reading of … literature by including, rather thandisplacing, such an equally important (and political) approach as a genderedone’ (2000: 9). To this end, Kanafani’s novel must also be read as a tale of menwho must forge new understandings of what their bodies signify and do whentheir privileges and duties as men are in flux.The actors that Kanafani animates in fiction exemplify the dilemma of asociety at a crossroads: for the men in the sun, there is no discernable futurepath. The terrain of ‘hard patches of brown rocks like splinters’ and ‘low hillswith flattened tops of soft yellow earth like flour’ become landmarks on a roadonly by the travellers’ own ‘firm decision to go forward, doggedly’ (Kanafani1995/1994: 18/59). The past has left arrows and signs, and patterns of behaviourso ingrained that the body follows them instinctively. But formerly understoodsigns do not function, as Abu Qais’s hands do not, left idle without his grove often olive trees. Other signs are disappeared entirely; Abul Khaizuran’s bodymarks just such a loss. In 1958, the year of the events in Men in the Sun, asKanafani writes it, incipient signs marked ‘nation’ begin to appear. The men intheir dogged forward motion try to follow the directions that would lead themto conscious self-determination. The problem in the novel is that the signs of— 58 —www.taq.ir