LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

gender and the palestinian narrative of returnmasculinity and the signs of nationalism do not all point in the same direction.The narrative implodes at the crossroads.The paradoxical situation in which the men find themselves can be describedby way of Benedict Anderson’s well-known diction. While the signs of the ‘deep,horizontal comradeship’ (1991: 7) that characterises nationalism are immanentin them, they are more immediately attuned to recently lost affiliations on ahierarchical matrix of categories. They calibrated their status and their directionwith regard to class, generation, membership in a trans-national Arab community,and gender. Their physical move away from Palestine testifies to the tensionthat obtains. The men are literally driven in contradictory directions, suspendedtemporally between disappeared and impendent forms of affiliation. Whatdrives them from behind – from unemployment, from the land – are knownsigns which gave their lives not simply existential or communal, but specificallymasculine meaning. The men move with nearly bodily instinct to fulfil duty,even though behind each lies ‘broken or disrupted family tradition’ (Harlow1996: 51). Their urge to support and protect family is charged with an idea thatis national, in the basic sense that their families constitute the nation, but it isnot ideologically nationalist. Abu Qais, frail and old, goes to Kuwait as adesperate measure of his male duty to care for his wife and their children, andonly then after prodding by his wife, perpetually pregnant and tired by hisnostalgic dream of his former dominion of olive trees. For the younger Assad,the trip to Kuwait and the 50 dinars he accepts from his uncle to fund itconstitute a reluctant acceptance of his father’s promise to marry him to a cousinto whom he’s been betrothed since birth. Marwan, the youngest of the three men,inherits masculine duty prematurely after his older brother already in Kuwaitmarries and stops sending money, and his father abandons the family for ayounger, wealthier woman in order to leave the refugee camp. 11 Abul Khaizuran,estranged from the familial order (but not from the masculine order, as assertedby his fury that he can’t sleep with a woman), pursues status by way of money.For all of the men, implicit notions of masculine honour infuse their beliefsabout what their bodies mean and should do. Their attempt to fulfil obligationpropels them into movement, even though masculine privilege within thefamily, and the tacit ideals of honour that bound Arab men across nation andclass lines have fallen away. (You could question whether these ideals were everfulfilled in reality, but they are primarily presented in the novel as formerlyfunctioning social mechanisms now broken.) In this new world, the signpoststhat tell them how to act as men no longer correspond to what their bodies areable to achieve. Thus they move. Abul Khaizuran, if he signals the extreme limitof male loss, also indicates potential, the possibility of moving forward into anew history, as a man, in a body that does not signify in conventional terms asmale.— 59 —www.taq.ir